A U.S. federal judge ruled Friday that Microsoft Corp. wields monopoly power in personal computer operating systems and has issued a decision highly favorable to the government. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's decision on the facts of the case, due to be officially released shortly, set the stage for a later ruling on whether the Redmond, Wash., software firm's actions violated antitrust law.
As with Standard Oil and the interdiction of owning both oil wells and gas stations, I suspect such a ruling would end up only apply to those with large market shares. Still forcing those two to divest wouldn't especially bother me.
The URL points to the annual report, but I can't find figures for operating income by product type or division. The page at http://www.microsoft.com/msft/ar99/mdna.htm has revenue by division, but it shows Apps and Dev Tools as earning consistently higher income than Platforms.
Now, perhaps using the word "much" twice in my original posting was excessive, but platforms do earn less than apps for Microsoft, and have done so consistently.
I can't find a page breaking out expenses by division either, but I'll bet the platforms division costs quite a bit more to operate than the apps division. Microsoft's advertising expenses alone totalled $3.2 billion in FY99, and the most expensive part of that is likely to be TV ads. It's been a long time since I saw a TV ad for MS Office or other applications - it's all Windows and IE. This leads me to suspect the bulk of ad expenses belong to the platforms division.
"Cost of Revenue" is another big minus on the MS balance sheet ($2.8 billion). This is distribution, unpaid tech support, shipping and packaging, and I suspect also a major cost with Windows and a smaller one for other products.
I also suspect R&D ($2.9 billion) is tilted towards the OS and not the applications.
This has the effect of making the gap between net income from platforms and net income from apps even greater.
The OS is profitable, but less so than applications and development tools - at least that's what the information I can find in their annual report suggests. I can't find a URL with the figures you name at all.
I'd love to see Microsoft either broken up or forced to divest either the apps or the OS. I'd love to see MS divest from Windows by releasing the source for the OS and keeping the apps. It would be the most just and most effective way to end monopoly practices in software. It would set a precedent as effective as the Standard Oil decision decades ago: Thou shalt not possess both an OS and the software to run on it, at least, not if you're big. It makes sense, MS Office is a major cash cow for MS, Windows is a much, much less profitable business.
It won't happen. Few judges in this day and age have the nads to take on big business, even if they have the knowledge to adequately judge the computer industry. Any substantial reorganisation of Microsoft will fail on appeal.
At best, Microsoft will be forbidden from entering into certain businesses or forced to more widely license the Windows source. Anything beyond that is unlikely. If Microsoft is hit with more than a slap on the hand, you can be sure MS will appeal the decision and leave it unenforced for years, maybe decades to come.
But, if the Finding of Fact is sufficiently embarrasing to Microsoft, it might be possible to start a genuine public campaign against them. Nike, Monsanto and all the big car companies, among a long list of others, have suffered from well publicised discoveries of guilt, sometimes even when they haven't broken the law. I'd like to see something along those lines done to Microsoft.
If a truck driver is convicted of drunk driving, it seems to me that it is in the public interest for the court to ban him from working as a trucker. That has nothing to do with whether a trucking company can keep him from quitting if a competitor offers him more money.
A conflict in an employment contract falls under civil law, and the court system is somewhat different than the criminal system. The two haven't that much to do with each other. A criminal court can order a great many things that a private contract can't.
This doesn't mean that I agree with Mitnick's punishment (actually, let me take this opportunity to explicitly not express any opinion either way on that matter) but it does mean that I don't think the anything is coming out of the one case that could affect the other.
Right-to-work laws are laws that make closed union shops (where one must belong to the union to work) illegal.
That's news to me. I've heard anti-non-competition rules called "right-to-work laws" on any number of occaisions. I suppose that's what I deserve for learning law from human resource people.:^)
Although courts in common law jurisdictions have long taken a dim view of contracts that have the effect of restraining competition, non-competition wording has been standard and enforced in employment contracts for high-paid workers and in high-demand sectors for some time. As I understand it, it is only in relatively recent years that legislation and courts have begun dismantling them. Employment has not always been considered a market in which the courts should insure free competition.
At least, that's how I thought it had worked. Courts have long overturned contracts between businesses that reduce competition and contracts that undermine someone's right to enter into a competing business, but the right to seek employment per se has not always been so secure. Once again, I have to admit that much of the fairly little legal training I had was not in a common law environment. The country where I originally studied legal affairs was in part a Code Napoléan jurisdiction, where none of this would necessarily apply.
Sounds like your present company is run by people who are in it for "the love of the game" as it were... More motivated by developing cool stuff than by profit motive?
I work for a very large computer hardware and OS company that is frequently discussed (and often maligned - sometimes rightly so) here on/. and certainly nearly every poster here would recognise it. They are in it for the money. It's a good company, where lots of people do care about their work and about doing cool stuff. But make no mistake, the lawyers who run this shop do not work for the joy of building cool programs - they expect cold hard cash.
The reason we don't have a non-competition clause is, I suspect, that we also poach many employees from our competitors. Imagine if someone sued us because we hired somebody in violation of their non-competition agreement? (I imagine we must hire such people all the time.) We would look pretty stupid in court claiming that what we were doing was legal while trying to convince employees to sign away to us those same rights.
No, we would just look dumb and opportunistic. Looking dumb is very bad in the technology business, far worse than in other sectors.
At least that's my guess. I'm a small cog here and at least five layers of management are between me and the CEO, so I can only guess at our hidden motives.
I work in Silicon Valley too. My last employer, a small start-up, had me sign one of these non-competition clauses too. The clause still wasn't valid. I actually turned down an offer from one of their competitors - but it certainly wasn't due to any terms in my contract.
I guess companies figure that if you don't know the clause is worthless, you might obey it. One invalid clause doesn't invalidate the whole contract (it usually says so in the fine print somewhere, at least it always has on mine) so they have nothing to loose.
My current company actually doesn't have a non-competition clause, even though they loose a lot of people to competitors.
Non-competion clauses are already illegal in many places. Right-to-work laws are pretty widespread in the US. This New York decision, assuming it isn't appealed, applies only to NY and states with court agreements with them (if any - I don't know which states have such agreements.)
A good quote from the judge:
Read collectively, the effect of these provisions is to indenture the employee to EarthWeb. This court will not allow EarthWeb to expand the agreement's confidentiality provision so that it potentially has that result, (...) nor can EarthWeb make an end-run around the agreement by asserting the doctrine of inevitable disclosure as an independent basis for relief.
I always thought non-competion clauses were a barbaric, anti-labour practice. In California, they are already considered against public policy and have no force.
Using the speed of technological change as an argument against them is novel, and I'm not sure how happy I am with that. It would be far better to strike down non-competion clauses completely.
The business community will, of course, complain that this prevents them from securing their intellectual property and acts to undermine business. However, since the computer industry is more concentrated in Calfornia than anywhere else, and California hasn't allowed such contracts for years, I doubt businesses can make a good case that it harms innovation.
Workers should own their own skills and should be free to seek employment wherever they choose. To me, this ought to be a basic human right.
Tuvalu currently makes a lot of its foreign exchange selling phone numbers (they have their own international phone code) to international phone sex lines. They expect to make a bit more when the global freephone number system is in place.
I didn't look closely enough to realise you had made the orignal submission whan I made my posting. My mistake. I hope I have correctly translated your sentiments.
I'll take a shot at translating the law (I used to get paid for this sort of work.)
_______________________
Article I
Communications between national government offices and local governments will take place using electronic means. The conditions and requirements for the transitory period between current procedures (circulars, letters, physical meetings, etc.) and electronic messaging will be determined by future decrees on the subject.
Article 2
In order to insure transparency and rapid access to information by businesses, public offers for tender and their document annexes will be available by electronic means.
Responses will also be accepted in electronic form.
During the transition period, electronic communication will be accompanied by paper communication. A future decree will determine the length of the transitory period as well as any fees for paper communication when requested.
Article 3
State offices, local governments and administrative services, except for cases described in article 4, can use only software which is free of legal encumberment (libre de droit) and for which the source code is available.
A future decree will determine the conditions under which the transition from the current situation will be made.
Article 4
Some software may be acquired and used by those offices and services described in article 3 with the authorisation of a service charged with this task. A future decree will determine the geographic repartition of such services as well as the conditions for obtaining such authorisations.
Article 5
In order to facilitate the implementation of this law, electronic information services will be instituted in each prefecture (local government centres) for the public and local governments, as well as consultaive services for businesses affected by this law.
____________________
N.B. Feel free to use this translation. It does not however constitute a certified legal translation. I am not a certified translator in any jurisdiction at this time.
The salient points: (translated materials in italics, all else my comments)
It seems to me there are some errors in the wording of the law... The first (..) is the use of the phrase libre en droit.
Libre de droit is associated with the notion of public domain in French law - free software is not necessarily public domain.
The second error is (...) in the principle of requiring the use of free software even though it isn't necessary. This complicates the law and its application. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed to resolve the problem. (...) I think most people would take a dim view of any requirement to use free software. (...) Even the most ardent defenders of free software recognise that free software can't do everything at the present time.
In my experience there is no adequate free solution for SGML editing. There are decent commercial ones, but even those are few. There are certainly other domains in which this is true. As an SGML advocate, I have to agree with M Rousseau, and have second thoughts about this type of project.
A solution has already been proposed by several people on the Senate forum: require the use of open data formats rather than mandating particular software.
I am in full agreement here. I think with XML we're making some progress on this count, and a government mandate would certainly help.
M Rousseau goes on to other matters as well. For those of you who are French-compatible, I'd advise you to take a good look at his posting.
Another posting - an earlier one, before that of Senator Lafitte - by a user named Phillipe raises an interesting issue. (It's here)
He rasies the point that if an institution is to be required to use free software, they will have to support the free software community, since the institution's requirements are not likely to be spontaneously met by the developers. This is not an insignificant consideration. If an institution is to use only free software, it must either become a software development shop or contract other individuals and companies to write or modify free software for its needs.
This lends itself to two questions. One: is it cheaper to pay for the development of free software than to deal contractually with non-free vendors? And two: does the free software community want to find itself dependent on government subsidy?
Another poster, Lucille Fievet, suggests here, that before this bill (Law 495) is passed
We need to start thinking about law 495's little brother and create a French Public Interest License, which would permit:
1- the recognition of (...) the first author (...) as artistic licenses do.
2- the copying, recopying, sales (and) use for commercial purposes (of software under this license).
3- the modification of free software, on the condition of sending the original owner or some sort of national repository a copy of the modified code.
4- obviously, the publication of the source.
5- (and) forbid reserving the right to convert the free program to a proprietary license.
I disagree here. I do think a rigourous legal definition of what constitutes free software has to happen first, before any other free software related law is passed. That legal definition should allow GPL and Berkeley license software to be seen as free, as well as public domain offerings like the nsgmls package. It should be relatively liberal.
I disagree however, with all the additional requirement the author of this posting asks for. The requirements of the GPL license seem sufficient to me.
A national repository of free software doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. I have some questions as to how it would be run, but that is a different issue.
Personally, it does not concern me (je ne suis pas français - il y a d'autres pays francophones dans le monde), however, it suggests a second interesting notion:
All cryptographic systems used by a government or mandated by one should be free software, available to all. This is the only protection against encryption systems with hidden key recovery schemes. Recently, it was revealed that a Swiss cryptography outfit was, in fact, secretly owned by the NSA and had been selling compromised equipment to Iran and other governments. Accessible source and public algorithms strike me as the only sure way to prevent this kind of thing. I feel it would be quite appropriate to mandate free software in this context.
...using an early model super-computer. Yup, the whole moonshot is CGI. Naturally computers, even super-computers, weren't real good in those days, so to make up for the lack of detail, they made all the footage look grainy. You've seen films from the late 1960's, they don't look grainy! Don't you think if they had really gone to the moon they wouldn't have brought a better camera?
And they got a young George Lucas to direct it. He was recruted by the CIA during his film school years. That's how he got all the cool ideas for shooting Star Wars.
This was all proven by the Weekly World News years ago. Get with the programme, dude!
The Outer Space treaty was almost a decade before the Law of the Sea (which the US still hasn't ratified) and was mostly modelled on the terms of the Antarctic treaty, with one exception. The Antarctic treaty does not annul national claims in Antarctica (a number of nations claim parts of it and the claims overlap), it simply postpones their enforcement and resolution indefinitely. The Outer Space treaty very definitely forbids claims to any object in space.
"TREATY ON PRINCIPLES GOVERNING THE ACTIVITIES OF STATES IN THE EXPLORATION AND USE OF OUTER SPACE, INCLUDING THE MOON AND OTHER CELESTIAL BODIES" from http://www.acda.gov/treaties/outspace.htm .
The United States signed this treaty on the 27th of January, 1967 and deposited an instrument of ratification on the 10th of October, 1967 - making this treaty US law. As far as I can tell, all the countries with a reasonable chance of having a space programme have signed and ratified it, including China, which agreed to the treaty in 1983.
What does this treaty have to say about property on the moon?
Article I, para 2
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.
This means you can't keep anyone off of your lunar claim. You can't keep them from building or prospecting or from exercising any other right you have to some strip of land either. Under those conditions, what good does a deed do you?
Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
This means that no nation can claim exclusive jurisdiction over the moon or any part of it, and that makes it basically impossible to obtain a deed that other countries would consider binding.
Article VI
States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty. When activities are carried on in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, by an international organization, responsibility for compliance with this Treaty shall be borne both by the international organization and by the States Parties to the Treaty participating in such organization.
This means you can't claim the treaty doesn't apply to you because you aren't affiliated with a national government. Anything you do in space falls under the jurisdiciton of some country.
In short, a deed to the moon, an asteroid, or anything else in space is completely worthless so long as this treaty is in force.
The name allocation rules for AFNIC (the NIC for *.fr) are located in English here (in PDF format). The naming convention starts on page 13. The original French is here.
In short, there are certain manditory subdomains in.fr: asso.fr, presse.fr, prd.fr, nom.fr, tm.fr and the names of certain professions have been blocked for registration (e.g. barreau.fr, notaire.fr.) AFNIC rejects names that correspond to common first names, trades or commercial domains, names of towns and regions, any domain that starts with the letter 'd' followed by a number (because that's how departments are frequently abbreviated.) Also, they will reject domains like net.fr, internet.fr, http.fr and other common net abbreviations. There is a com.fr domain, which requires no justifying documents at all to register - but it seems to be a recent development.
Anyone registring directly under.fr can only obtain a maximum of 3 domains, and those names have to appear on the organisation's Kbis (an official registration document required to do business in France). All associations have to register under asso.fr, and only companies with French trademarks can register under tm.fr.
The rules are really fairly straight forward (although much longer than the.com,.org,.net rules) and for the most part make sense. It results in fewer domain registrations, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing, certainly it keeps the top level domain from getting cluttered. It does makes domain squatting nearly impossible.
I know, a lot of/.'er prefer the free-for-all of the current system, but as someone currently trying to obtain a decent domain for a business venture under.com, I would certainly prefer the French rules.
Unfortunately, nothing will change so long as.com is seen as the only respectable way to go. The system for three-letter domains has been bad for a long time, and I wonder if the only way to fix it would be to either phase out or eliminate altogether the.com,.net and.org domains.
That was Ehrlich's big mistake, betting money that a trend would just go on. It's just like the statement that comes with a mutual fund prospectus - past performance is never a guarantee of future income. I wouldn't dare make a long term prediction of commodity prices - too many outside factors exist.
ITT was a major stockholder in Chile's mines at the time of the coup - the company that used to lay all the undersea cables - because they were a major consumer of copper. The pressure they placed on the Nixon administration to do something about a pro-worker government in Chile is frequently credited with America's support of Pinochet.
My point remains, technology might save us, and Ehrlich was stupid to bet money that prices would go up, but betting that they can go down forever (as Simon did) is much worse, and even though we can replace copper with sand in wires, we can't be sure that we can find a substitute for everthing that runs dry.
Gambling that future technology can solve specific problems isn't very sound, and our lives may depend on the bet.
The supply of this is close enough to infinite for an economist.
This sentence disturbs me. An economist during the Irish potatoe famine once lamented that he was afraid the famine wouldn't kill enough Irishmen to do any good.
The amount of petroleum in the world is not something economists are qualified to predict - that is the domain of geology. Good enough for an economist counts for nothing. Hubbert, who was a geologist suggested that sometime around 2005 oil supplies would peak, and then fall from there. His reasoning strikes me as sound, although I will admit not to being a geologist. He does have one advantage over nay economist: he accurately predicted when oil wells in the USA would start coming up dry. I don't know how much oil there is in the world, but I do not that it is not infinite in any sense of the word.
Over the course of recorded human history? I would argue they have been true as well. The development of substitutes and innovations like scientific farming requires PEOPLE. Over most of human history, there have only been a few million people, so of course the rate of innovation has been much slower.
No, scientific farming requires scientific knowledge. Larger populations may improve the ability to do science, it is hard to say. However, innovation doesn't always save the day. The dust bowl in the 1930's was caused in large part by a transition from cattle grazing to sheep herding in the plains in the US. Sheep graze differently from cattle, and tend to destroy grass in arid areas. The result was a loss of grass cover and the collapse of farming across a large swath of the United States. No one found a solution to this problem, American agriculture simply had to take a step backwards.
Although the development of coal mining and rail transportation saved Europe after it started running out of wood, that solution didn't come for centuries after the problem started. In the mean time, large populations suffered. Irrigation didn't save the middle east from soil depletion in the middle ages - whole populations were displaced and wealth simply disappeared, even though those middle eastern societies were, at the time, the most technologically advanced on the planet.
Maybe technology will save us, but counting on it seems pretty dumb.
As for the Ehrlich-Simon bet, Ehrlich fell to the same mistake Simon did, thinking that a trend was the same thing as a prediction. Why did Simon win? Let's take a look at the circumstances:
The bet was made during the Vietnam War. At the time prices for many commodities were artificially high, due to the US military purchasing very large quantities. (There was a brief period when a penny was worth more than $0.01 for the copper in it.) What happened afterwards? A lot of commoditiies come from underdeveloped countries, many of whom went deep into debt during the 1970's and 80's. Today, many of them export commodities at below cost in order to gain the foreign exchange necessary to make payments on those debts.
Also, a number of countries started to have military dictatorships during that period, like the world's number one copper producer, Chile. After Pinochet took over the government, he brutally suppressed the unions, then lower wages in the mines. The same thing happened in many other countries. The result: lower commodity prices.
The future is inherently unpredictable and only fools and economists try it. I don't know if or when shortages in any commodity will appear, but I do know that there is cause for concern, and Julian Simon's preference for burying his head in strawmen and bad math won't make anything better.
I would argue that one reason for overpopulation in poor countries has more to do with poor information about the availability of future resources.
Death isn't all that random, even in the third world. Disease is less likely to strike those who can afford food and medical treatment and the likelihood of escaping poverty conditions grows with better educated children. War will tend to avoid those with the money to flee. Having more children only makes sense when food and other necessary resources are plentiful and you can feed all your children. Otherwise, it tends to reduce, rather than enhance, the survival of your genes.
After many years of relative plenty, people are not changing their behaviour quickly enough in shortage.
However, humans are not merely the products of biology. Culture and conditions dictate counterproductive behaviours at times. That too is part of what is killing the underdeveloped countries.
In practical terms the energy supply is non-finite.
There are a number of poorly defined terms in that sentence. The sun will continue to burn for a very long time, and we are not likely to consume all the energy the planet takes in for quite some time. However, if practical is taken to mean cost-effective with reasonable technological assumptions the amount of energy we can easily extract from this relationship with the sun is quite finite. The bulk of the energy extracted for industrial use comes from fossil fuels. Even if fossil fuels represent a significant portion of the earth's crust (which in all likelihood they do not) it does not take much exponential growth before it's all gone.
The energy supply in the thermodynamic sense is unlikely to run dry so long as the sun shines, but the type of energy used to power factories and homes, and to raise human standards of living is an entirely differnet thing.
What do you mean by non-finite? We have no complete inventory of how much coal, oil and natural gas is present in the crust, but we do know that the figure is not infinite. We do know that oil fields can run dry - many have in the last century. Pennsylvania no longer produces a significant amount of oil. Neither does Bavaria or Romania.
We can also look at the trends for the discovery of new oil fields. New fields are not being discovered as frequently as they were 30 years ago, and the ones that are being uncovered are increasingly expensive to work. They are much deeper, at lower pressure or in worse environments like off-shore.
There is quite a lot of coal in the world, but still, known reserves are limited. One reason they may seem like a lot is that the industrialised countres burn petroleum instead. If petroleum resources run short, coal may not last as long. Furthermore, the varieties of coal that burn the most cleanly are the ones in the shortest supply. Coal pollution is not a trivial issue.
Much of the world's natural gas is associated with oil fields. When an oil field starts to drop in pressure, natural gas is pumped in to make the field more productive. Natural gas availability is closely linked to petroleum availability.
Under these conditions, non-finite seems to mean any resource that hasn't run dry yet.
Standards of living have not improved for everyone. In sub-saharan Africa, conditions are worse than they were in 1950. Not all of this can be blamed on bad government - the ratio of mouths to acres of arable land has a lot to do with it. In Asia, access to food has improved, access to water, fuel, education and housing have not in all cases.
Even in the USA, income has fallen for nearly 40% of the population since 1970, and access to housing and medical care is worse for much of the American population, although I would hesitate to credit overpopulation with those failings.
No one knows whether standards of living will continue to rise. They do not always rise, history has its fair share of reversals. Extrapolating a trend is not the same as predicting the future, otherwise Malthus would have been right. My critique of Simon is the same as my critique of Malthus, a trend is not the same as a prediction. But Simon has an addition killing error against him - the planet is finite, and it's the height of sophistry to claim that a resource is infinite just because its availability is unknown.
While this is true, if you take it literally, I don't think anyone (certainly not Simon) has ever claimed it literally.
Actually, I suspect Simon did take it literally. But that is neither here nor there. Technology can do amazing things, but it can't create resources that don't exist. Even uranium exists only in finite amounts. My point is to ask if you want to bet on discovering a new source of energy before the last one runs out? Fusion may save us all, or not. Counting on a resource that doesn't exist yet strikes me as very foolish.
Yes, population crashes have occurred, but only in severely limited areas. Easter Island is a very small place (only 45 square miles) and the inhabitants had little technology and little contact with other people. None of those conditions applies to the world at large.
Untrue. China has repeatedly suffered population crashes in its history. Scale is not the most relevant issue - the earth is much larger than Easter Island, but it also has a lot more people.
Do you have any evidence at all for this? Look at the introduction of rabbits into Australia: did they voluntarily limit their own numbers?
Wolves, whales, most primates, cats, and yes, even rabbits. Rabbits spread all over Australia because they could. If and when they reach the limits of Australia's ability to support them, they will start having smaller litters and their population will stabilise. This may happen with a large crash when resources run out, or they may begin to lower litter size as they approach the limit. It depends (in part) on whether resource scarcity becomes apparent before the resource runs out or whether it appears (to the rabbits) that there is still plenty of food right up until the limit is reached. I am not anthropomorphising rabbit behaviour. Their biology responds to their circumstances, as does ours.
And even if 9/10 of the next generation dies of starvation - so what? All the more reason to have more offspring than anyone else, so that your genes are more likely to survive.
Not true. Living on the edge of starvation means there is a higher risk that 100% of your offspring will fail to reproduce. Remember a parent animal is already a mature adult and has to feed all its offspring. Which strategy will give it the largest number of offspring: split a small amount of food among a large number of offspring, who will all be unhealthy until some starve off and will have some permanent disability because of early starvation, or to have only as many offspring as your ability to find food enables you to feed, and all (or nearly all) of your offspring will be healthy?
I'm afraid you need to have a better understanding of neodarwinism. The Selfish Gene by Dawkins is a good place to start.
Frankly, your version of events sounds like a fairy tale for Greens, opposing the "natural wisdom" of the animals, wisely limiting their numbers, against the foolish "growth-at-all-costs" ideology of Man, doomed to starvation because he wouldn't listen...
Don't ascribe to me an ideology I haven't expressed. I have no such belief in any "natural wisdom." Animals do what they are programmed to do, and if they survive, it was probably the right thing. No more, no less. Most animals employ some kind of strategy to control offspring. Not all, yeast for example doesn't. Strategies vary in the natural world, but larger animals don't usually have populations that grow to starvation.
Again, with all due respect, I'd really like to know where you're getting your information from. Resources appear to be plentiful until they're gone? So people just wake up one morning to discover there's no more wood, or coal, or what-have-you? History provides no evidence for this.
On Easter Island, the amount of time it took to go from plenty of trees and fruit to very little was probably shorter than one generation. China's frequent starvation usually happened when a natural condition (like climate cycles) reduced the fertility of land that was at or near its carrying capacity. Humans, like most animals, do not inherently plan for variations in their natural situation.
As for a paper resource, I'll have to look around in my library - I'm afraid I have little in the way of bibliographic resources in my office. Recent literature on the Easter Islands should tell much of this story. As long as I can't provide a citation, I do understand your suspicion.
Historically, resources get more expensive as they become harder to find, which encourages research into alternate resources, and eventually the rising price of the original resource (and/or falling prices of new ones) make it cheaper and/or easier to switch to a new resource...without the old one ever having been entirely depleted.
Sometimes, it works that way, sometimes it doesn't. The island of Nauru was mined for phosphates until nearly all of the island was destroyed in the 1970's. People there lived the good life - their GDP per capita was comparable to that of an oil-rich middle eastern country. Then, the island was depleted. This happened pretty much all at once - full steam ahead, then nothing. On Easter Island, the same phenomena appears to have occured with regard to food resources. The decline in fertility in the middle-east and the collapse of access to wood in many parts of Europe in the late middle ages also happened all at once in many places. Historically, it has gone both ways. Replacements often were not easily available, or the replacement cost more than the original to use. In the middle east, very expensive irrigation projects raised the cost of farming, and the region has never fully recovered. In Europe, the transition to coal was terribly expensive at first, and industry suffered badly in many places until organised methods of mining and distribution were in place. The solution doesn't always come before the exhaustion of a resource, and you can't count on it working that way in the future.
"Our energy supply is non-finite, and oil is an important example . . . the number of oil wells that will eventually produce oil, and in what quantities, is not known or measurable at present and probably never will be, and hence is not meaningfully finite."
I leave the demonstration of why this is false to everyone who has ever studied logic.
Simon's argument rests largely on one assumption: any past trend will continue uninhibited. If the amount of oil extracted from the ground is growing, then it will keep growing forever. If in the past, agricultural efficiency has grown, it can continue to grow indefinitely. If in the past any shortage has resulted in the development of a substitute, we can continue to substitute forever.
Over the last century these things have been mostly true. Over the course of recorded human history, they have not. Which is more likely to hold true in the long run? Simon sold a pipe dream of infinite capacity by redefining infinite to any unknown quantity.
There are a number of problems in the Malthusian prediction of overpopulation that were not evident to Malthus or even to later commentators like Ehrlich. Julian Simon's work, however should be disregarded as the piece of crap that it is - technology can no more make something out of nothing than religion can. Population crashes have occured in the past - the Easter Island case is a good example - and Simon's reasons why it can't happen to us are no more than wishful thinking and abuse of statistics.
Most animal populations, even those without predators, manage to limit their population before they reach the starvation and disease point. The reason for this is easy to see from a neodarwinist perspective: the odds of having any surviving offspring drop dramatically if the population is at the limit of its resources. For millenia primitive human societies were stable without predators, famine or disease as major problems. This was not entirely clear until fairly recently, and some of the reasons are still a little mysterious.
Nonetheless, human populations have crashed in the past. The reason in most cases is that resources appear to be plentiful until they are completely spent. That is what happened on Easter Island and it has happened repeatedly in China. It doesn't seem that unlikely that it's true for us too. Petroleum will seem plentiful until it's gone. The oil fields in Pennsylvania seemed plentiful until they dissappeared. New fields were found, but one by one they are emptying too. There can not be an infinte amount of oil in the world. Technology may bring us new energy sources in the mean time, and it may not - but do you want to bet your life on it? There are fairly important reasons to think the end of oil isn't too far off.
These days in industrialised countries, the best chance you can give your children is to have fairly few and not strech your resources too much in raising them. The odds of survival of a single upper or middle class child are far greater than that of a child from a large, lower class family. Neodarwinism simply favours the smaller family. Birth control and abortion makes this possible.
Another major trend in population is the social empowerment of women. Women, having invested generally far more in a child than men, tend logically to raising fewer of them and devoting more of their resources to each child. The correlation between the education and empowerment of women and low population growth is very, very strong.
So, the decline in the birth rate is good news, but not necessarily a cure-all for population problems. A continuing decline in the birth rate depends on continuing industrialisation of the underdeveloped world - by no means a sure thing these days - and a growth in the education and empowerment of women. The general catastrophy of global overpopulation may be avoided by lower birth rates in some countries, but Malthusian collapses are already going on in some parts of the world, and that seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
Also, it's worth noting that not everyone gains in a low or zero growth population. By the time population stabilises, median age in many countries will be very high, and most of those societies will only be able to function if they allow a lot of immigration. The future is not very rosy for culturally isolating ethnic nation states. How will the Japanese or the Germans feel about the possibility of a nation where they are not a majority? How will Americans feel when most of the young come from another culture? There is already one country that looks like this: the USA's northern neighbour.
Not everyone will be very happy about it, but the future looks more and more like Canada.
Eichmann's kidnapping was most certainly illegal under most notions of what constitutes international law. Isreal simply didn't care, and no one was likely to go out on a limb for scum like Eichmann, but if I recall correctly, the Argentine government was not exactly happy about the kidnapping at the time. As long as Isreal had US backing, no one was likely to make a fuss for him.
However, the 1988 convention under which Pinochet is being prosecuted does make the crimes he committed, even in Chile, illegal in any state that signed the convention. Chile signed it, so did the UK and Spain. Spain wanted originally to prosecute Pinochet for crimes committed against Spanish nationals in Chile. The US uses the same logic to persue terrorists in other countries, even when their acts were not committed on US soil.
I'm not sure Iraq is party to the same treaties, but yes, in principle if George Bush visited a country allied with Iraq without a diplomatic passport, he could be extradited to Baghdad to stand trial. I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing.
However, Iraq has few allies, and Bush is unlikely to visit any of them. Besides, it's too risky politically. Remember, although international law is, to some extent, codified, it's mostly aout what you can get away with. The rules are not applied equally. Pinochet, having lost all his friends in Washington now that the Cold War is over, can be easily prosecuted.
Slashdot Mirror
CNNFN news blurb:
A U.S. federal judge ruled Friday that Microsoft Corp. wields monopoly power in personal computer operating systems and has issued a decision highly favorable to the government. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's decision on the facts of the case, due to be officially released shortly, set the stage for a later ruling on whether the Redmond, Wash., software firm's actions violated antitrust law.
As with Standard Oil and the interdiction of owning both oil wells and gas stations, I suspect such a ruling would end up only apply to those with large market shares. Still forcing those two to divest wouldn't especially bother me.
I doubt it'll happen anyway.
1999 Platforms: 8.50 Apps & Devtools: 8.82
1998 Platforms: 6.28 Apps & Devtools: 7.02
1997 Platforms: 4.92 Apps & Devtools: 5.62
(Sums are in billions of dollars)
Now, perhaps using the word "much" twice in my original posting was excessive, but platforms do earn less than apps for Microsoft, and have done so consistently.
I can't find a page breaking out expenses by division either, but I'll bet the platforms division costs quite a bit more to operate than the apps division. Microsoft's advertising expenses alone totalled $3.2 billion in FY99, and the most expensive part of that is likely to be TV ads. It's been a long time since I saw a TV ad for MS Office or other applications - it's all Windows and IE. This leads me to suspect the bulk of ad expenses belong to the platforms division.
"Cost of Revenue" is another big minus on the MS balance sheet ($2.8 billion). This is distribution, unpaid tech support, shipping and packaging, and I suspect also a major cost with Windows and a smaller one for other products.
I also suspect R&D ($2.9 billion) is tilted towards the OS and not the applications.
This has the effect of making the gap between net income from platforms and net income from apps even greater.
The OS is profitable, but less so than applications and development tools - at least that's what the information I can find in their annual report suggests. I can't find a URL with the figures you name at all.
I'd love to see Microsoft either broken up or forced to divest either the apps or the OS. I'd love to see MS divest from Windows by releasing the source for the OS and keeping the apps. It would be the most just and most effective way to end monopoly practices in software. It would set a precedent as effective as the Standard Oil decision decades ago: Thou shalt not possess both an OS and the software to run on it, at least, not if you're big. It makes sense, MS Office is a major cash cow for MS, Windows is a much, much less profitable business.
It won't happen. Few judges in this day and age have the nads to take on big business, even if they have the knowledge to adequately judge the computer industry. Any substantial reorganisation of Microsoft will fail on appeal.
At best, Microsoft will be forbidden from entering into certain businesses or forced to more widely license the Windows source. Anything beyond that is unlikely. If Microsoft is hit with more than a slap on the hand, you can be sure MS will appeal the decision and leave it unenforced for years, maybe decades to come.
But, if the Finding of Fact is sufficiently embarrasing to Microsoft, it might be possible to start a genuine public campaign against them. Nike, Monsanto and all the big car companies, among a long list of others, have suffered from well publicised discoveries of guilt, sometimes even when they haven't broken the law. I'd like to see something along those lines done to Microsoft.
But I'm not holding my breath.
Again, I'm not a lawyer but:
If a truck driver is convicted of drunk driving, it seems to me that it is in the public interest for the court to ban him from working as a trucker. That has nothing to do with whether a trucking company can keep him from quitting if a competitor offers him more money.
A conflict in an employment contract falls under civil law, and the court system is somewhat different than the criminal system. The two haven't that much to do with each other. A criminal court can order a great many things that a private contract can't.
This doesn't mean that I agree with Mitnick's punishment (actually, let me take this opportunity to explicitly not express any opinion either way on that matter) but it does mean that I don't think the anything is coming out of the one case that could affect the other.
Right-to-work laws are laws that make closed union shops (where one must belong to the union to work) illegal.
:^)
That's news to me. I've heard anti-non-competition rules called "right-to-work laws" on any number of occaisions. I suppose that's what I deserve for learning law from human resource people.
Although courts in common law jurisdictions have long taken a dim view of contracts that have the effect of restraining competition, non-competition wording has been standard and enforced in employment contracts for high-paid workers and in high-demand sectors for some time. As I understand it, it is only in relatively recent years that legislation and courts have begun dismantling them. Employment has not always been considered a market in which the courts should insure free competition.
At least, that's how I thought it had worked. Courts have long overturned contracts between businesses that reduce competition and contracts that undermine someone's right to enter into a competing business, but the right to seek employment per se has not always been so secure. Once again, I have to admit that much of the fairly little legal training I had was not in a common law environment. The country where I originally studied legal affairs was in part a Code Napoléan jurisdiction, where none of this would necessarily apply.
Sounds like your present company is run by people who are in it for "the love of the game" as it were... More motivated by developing cool stuff than by profit motive?
/. and certainly nearly every poster here would recognise it. They are in it for the money. It's a good company, where lots of people do care about their work and about doing cool stuff. But make no mistake, the lawyers who run this shop do not work for the joy of building cool programs - they expect cold hard cash.
I work for a very large computer hardware and OS company that is frequently discussed (and often maligned - sometimes rightly so) here on
The reason we don't have a non-competition clause is, I suspect, that we also poach many employees from our competitors. Imagine if someone sued us because we hired somebody in violation of their non-competition agreement? (I imagine we must hire such people all the time.) We would look pretty stupid in court claiming that what we were doing was legal while trying to convince employees to sign away to us those same rights.
No, we would just look dumb and opportunistic. Looking dumb is very bad in the technology business, far worse than in other sectors.
At least that's my guess. I'm a small cog here and at least five layers of management are between me and the CEO, so I can only guess at our hidden motives.
I work in Silicon Valley too. My last employer, a small start-up, had me sign one of these non-competition clauses too. The clause still wasn't valid. I actually turned down an offer from one of their competitors - but it certainly wasn't due to any terms in my contract.
I guess companies figure that if you don't know the clause is worthless, you might obey it. One invalid clause doesn't invalidate the whole contract (it usually says so in the fine print somewhere, at least it always has on mine) so they have nothing to loose.
My current company actually doesn't have a non-competition clause, even though they loose a lot of people to competitors.
Non-competion clauses are already illegal in many places. Right-to-work laws are pretty widespread in the US. This New York decision, assuming it isn't appealed, applies only to NY and states with court agreements with them (if any - I don't know which states have such agreements.)
A good quote from the judge:
Read collectively, the effect of these provisions is to indenture the employee to EarthWeb. This court will not allow EarthWeb to expand the agreement's confidentiality provision so that it potentially has that result, (...) nor can EarthWeb make an end-run around the agreement by asserting the doctrine of inevitable disclosure as an independent basis for relief.
I always thought non-competion clauses were a barbaric, anti-labour practice. In California, they are already considered against public policy and have no force.
Using the speed of technological change as an argument against them is novel, and I'm not sure how happy I am with that. It would be far better to strike down non-competion clauses completely.
The business community will, of course, complain that this prevents them from securing their intellectual property and acts to undermine business. However, since the computer industry is more concentrated in Calfornia than anywhere else, and California hasn't allowed such contracts for years, I doubt businesses can make a good case that it harms innovation.
Workers should own their own skills and should be free to seek employment wherever they choose. To me, this ought to be a basic human right.
Tuvalu currently makes a lot of its foreign exchange selling phone numbers (they have their own international phone code) to international phone sex lines. They expect to make a bit more when the global freephone number system is in place.
They already do.
I didn't look closely enough to realise you had made the orignal submission whan I made my posting. My mistake. I hope I have correctly translated your sentiments.
I'll take a shot at translating the law (I used to get paid for this sort of work.)
_______________________
Article I
Communications between national government offices and local governments will take place using electronic means. The conditions and requirements for the transitory period between current procedures (circulars, letters, physical meetings, etc.) and electronic messaging will be determined by future decrees on the subject.
Article 2
In order to insure transparency and rapid access to information by businesses, public offers for tender and their document annexes will be available by electronic means.
Responses will also be accepted in electronic form.
During the transition period, electronic communication will be accompanied by paper communication. A future decree will determine the length of the transitory period as well as any fees for paper communication when requested.
Article 3
State offices, local governments and administrative services, except for cases described in article 4, can use only software which is free of legal encumberment (libre de droit) and for which the source code is available.
A future decree will determine the conditions under which the transition from the current situation will be made.
Article 4
Some software may be acquired and used by those offices and services described in article 3 with the authorisation of a service charged with this task. A future decree will determine the geographic repartition of such services as well as the conditions for obtaining such authorisations.
Article 5
In order to facilitate the implementation of this law, electronic information services will be instituted in each prefecture (local government centres) for the public and local governments, as well as consultaive services for businesses affected by this law.
____________________
N.B. Feel free to use this translation. It does not however constitute a certified legal translation. I am not a certified translator in any jurisdiction at this time.
Reading on in the discussion on http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/5/forum.html , there is a useful posting from one Julien Rousseau just below the posting from Senator Lafitte. (Click here to see it)
? action=lire&page=1&id=489&forum_num =5) also raises the issue of how free software can be certain to comply with French law regarding cryptology. For the French nationals out there, this is quite interesting.
;^)
The salient points: (translated materials in italics, all else my comments)
It seems to me there are some errors in the wording of the law... The first (..) is the use of the phrase libre en droit.
Libre de droit is associated with the notion of public domain in French law - free software is not necessarily public domain.
The second error is (...) in the principle of requiring the use of free software even though it isn't necessary. This complicates the law and its application. Furthermore, it is not guaranteed to resolve the problem. (...) I think most people would take a dim view of any requirement to use free software. (...) Even the most ardent defenders of free software recognise that free software can't do everything at the present time.
In my experience there is no adequate free solution for SGML editing. There are decent commercial ones, but even those are few. There are certainly other domains in which this is true. As an SGML advocate, I have to agree with M Rousseau, and have second thoughts about this type of project.
A solution has already been proposed by several people on the Senate forum: require the use of open data formats rather than mandating particular software.
I am in full agreement here. I think with XML we're making some progress on this count, and a government mandate would certainly help.
M Rousseau goes on to other matters as well. For those of you who are French-compatible, I'd advise you to take a good look at his posting.
Another posting - an earlier one, before that of Senator Lafitte - by a user named Phillipe raises an interesting issue. (It's here)
He rasies the point that if an institution is to be required to use free software, they will have to support the free software community, since the institution's requirements are not likely to be spontaneously met by the developers. This is not an insignificant consideration. If an institution is to use only free software, it must either become a software development shop or contract other individuals and companies to write or modify free software for its needs.
This lends itself to two questions. One: is it cheaper to pay for the development of free software than to deal contractually with non-free vendors? And two: does the free software community want to find itself dependent on government subsidy?
Another poster, Lucille Fievet, suggests here, that before this bill (Law 495) is passed
We need to start thinking about law 495's little brother and create a French Public Interest License, which would permit:
1- the recognition of (...) the first author (...) as artistic licenses do.
2- the copying, recopying, sales (and) use for commercial purposes (of software under this license).
3- the modification of free software, on the condition of sending the original owner or some sort of national repository a copy of the modified code.
4- obviously, the publication of the source.
5- (and) forbid reserving the right to convert the free program to a proprietary license.
I disagree here. I do think a rigourous legal definition of what constitutes free software has to happen first, before any other free software related law is passed. That legal definition should allow GPL and Berkeley license software to be seen as free, as well as public domain offerings like the nsgmls package. It should be relatively liberal.
I disagree however, with all the additional requirement the author of this posting asks for. The requirements of the GPL license seem sufficient to me.
A national repository of free software doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. I have some questions as to how it would be run, but that is a different issue.
Serge Oudet (posting at http://www.senat.fr/Vforum/cgi-bin/Vforum-1.6.cgi
Personally, it does not concern me (je ne suis pas français - il y a d'autres pays francophones dans le monde), however, it suggests a second interesting notion:
All cryptographic systems used by a government or mandated by one should be free software, available to all. This is the only protection against encryption systems with hidden key recovery schemes. Recently, it was revealed that a Swiss cryptography outfit was, in fact, secretly owned by the NSA and had been selling compromised equipment to Iran and other governments. Accessible source and public algorithms strike me as the only sure way to prevent this kind of thing. I feel it would be quite appropriate to mandate free software in this context.
______________________________________
Ce n'est que mes deux sous
...using an early model super-computer. Yup, the whole moonshot is CGI. Naturally computers, even super-computers, weren't real good in those days, so to make up for the lack of detail, they made all the footage look grainy. You've seen films from the late 1960's, they don't look grainy! Don't you think if they had really gone to the moon they wouldn't have brought a better camera?
And they got a young George Lucas to direct it. He was recruted by the CIA during his film school years. That's how he got all the cool ideas for shooting Star Wars.
This was all proven by the Weekly World News years ago. Get with the programme, dude!
(For the humour impared, yes, I'm kidding.)
The Outer Space treaty was almost a decade before the Law of the Sea (which the US still hasn't ratified) and was mostly modelled on the terms of the Antarctic treaty, with one exception. The Antarctic treaty does not annul national claims in Antarctica (a number of nations claim parts of it and the claims overlap), it simply postpones their enforcement and resolution indefinitely. The Outer Space treaty very definitely forbids claims to any object in space.
"TREATY ON PRINCIPLES GOVERNING THE ACTIVITIES OF STATES IN THE EXPLORATION AND USE OF OUTER SPACE, INCLUDING THE MOON AND OTHER CELESTIAL BODIES" from http://www.acda.gov/treaties/outspace.htm .
The United States signed this treaty on the 27th of January, 1967 and deposited an instrument of ratification on the 10th of October, 1967 - making this treaty US law. As far as I can tell, all the countries with a reasonable chance of having a space programme have signed and ratified it, including China, which agreed to the treaty in 1983.
What does this treaty have to say about property on the moon?
Article I, para 2
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.
This means you can't keep anyone off of your lunar claim. You can't keep them from building or prospecting or from exercising any other right you have to some strip of land either. Under those conditions, what good does a deed do you?
Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
This means that no nation can claim exclusive jurisdiction over the moon or any part of it, and that makes it basically impossible to obtain a deed that other countries would consider binding.
Article VI
States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty. When activities are carried on in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, by an international organization, responsibility for compliance with this Treaty shall be borne both by the international organization and by the States Parties to the Treaty participating in such organization.
This means you can't claim the treaty doesn't apply to you because you aren't affiliated with a national government. Anything you do in space falls under the jurisdiciton of some country.
In short, a deed to the moon, an asteroid, or anything else in space is completely worthless so long as this treaty is in force.
The name allocation rules for AFNIC (the NIC for *.fr) are located in English here (in PDF format). The naming convention starts on page 13. The original French is here.
.fr: asso.fr, presse.fr, prd.fr, nom.fr, tm.fr and the names of certain professions have been blocked for registration (e.g. barreau.fr, notaire.fr.) AFNIC rejects names that correspond to common first names, trades or commercial domains, names of towns and regions, any domain that starts with the letter 'd' followed by a number (because that's how departments are frequently abbreviated.) Also, they will reject domains like net.fr, internet.fr, http.fr and other common net abbreviations. There is a com.fr domain, which requires no justifying documents at all to register - but it seems to be a recent development.
.fr can only obtain a maximum of 3 domains, and those names have to appear on the organisation's Kbis (an official registration document required to do business in France). All associations have to register under asso.fr, and only companies with French trademarks can register under tm.fr.
.com, .org, .net rules) and for the most part make sense. It results in fewer domain registrations, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing, certainly it keeps the top level domain from getting cluttered. It does makes domain squatting nearly impossible.
/.'er prefer the free-for-all of the current system, but as someone currently trying to obtain a decent domain for a business venture under .com, I would certainly prefer the French rules.
.com is seen as the only respectable way to go. The system for three-letter domains has been bad for a long time, and I wonder if the only way to fix it would be to either phase out or eliminate altogether the .com, .net and .org domains.
In short, there are certain manditory subdomains in
Anyone registring directly under
The rules are really fairly straight forward (although much longer than the
I know, a lot of
Unfortunately, nothing will change so long as
That was Ehrlich's big mistake, betting money that a trend would just go on. It's just like the statement that comes with a mutual fund prospectus - past performance is never a guarantee of future income. I wouldn't dare make a long term prediction of commodity prices - too many outside factors exist.
ITT was a major stockholder in Chile's mines at the time of the coup - the company that used to lay all the undersea cables - because they were a major consumer of copper. The pressure they placed on the Nixon administration to do something about a pro-worker government in Chile is frequently credited with America's support of Pinochet.
My point remains, technology might save us, and Ehrlich was stupid to bet money that prices would go up, but betting that they can go down forever (as Simon did) is much worse, and even though we can replace copper with sand in wires, we can't be sure that we can find a substitute for everthing that runs dry.
Gambling that future technology can solve specific problems isn't very sound, and our lives may depend on the bet.
The supply of this is close enough to infinite for an economist.
This sentence disturbs me. An economist during the Irish potatoe famine once lamented that he was afraid the famine wouldn't kill enough Irishmen to do any good.
The amount of petroleum in the world is not something economists are qualified to predict - that is the domain of geology. Good enough for an economist counts for nothing. Hubbert, who was a geologist suggested that sometime around 2005 oil supplies would peak, and then fall from there. His reasoning strikes me as sound, although I will admit not to being a geologist. He does have one advantage over nay economist: he accurately predicted when oil wells in the USA would start coming up dry. I don't know how much oil there is in the world, but I do not that it is not infinite in any sense of the word.
Over the course of recorded human history? I would argue they have been true as well. The development of substitutes and innovations like scientific farming requires PEOPLE. Over most of human history, there have only been a few million people, so of course the rate of innovation has been much slower.
No, scientific farming requires scientific knowledge. Larger populations may improve the ability to do science, it is hard to say. However, innovation doesn't always save the day. The dust bowl in the 1930's was caused in large part by a transition from cattle grazing to sheep herding in the plains in the US. Sheep graze differently from cattle, and tend to destroy grass in arid areas. The result was a loss of grass cover and the collapse of farming across a large swath of the United States. No one found a solution to this problem, American agriculture simply had to take a step backwards.
Although the development of coal mining and rail transportation saved Europe after it started running out of wood, that solution didn't come for centuries after the problem started. In the mean time, large populations suffered. Irrigation didn't save the middle east from soil depletion in the middle ages - whole populations were displaced and wealth simply disappeared, even though those middle eastern societies were, at the time, the most technologically advanced on the planet.
Maybe technology will save us, but counting on it seems pretty dumb.
As for the Ehrlich-Simon bet, Ehrlich fell to the same mistake Simon did, thinking that a trend was the same thing as a prediction. Why did Simon win? Let's take a look at the circumstances:
The bet was made during the Vietnam War. At the time prices for many commodities were artificially high, due to the US military purchasing very large quantities. (There was a brief period when a penny was worth more than $0.01 for the copper in it.) What happened afterwards? A lot of commoditiies come from underdeveloped countries, many of whom went deep into debt during the 1970's and 80's. Today, many of them export commodities at below cost in order to gain the foreign exchange necessary to make payments on those debts.
Also, a number of countries started to have military dictatorships during that period, like the world's number one copper producer, Chile. After Pinochet took over the government, he brutally suppressed the unions, then lower wages in the mines. The same thing happened in many other countries. The result: lower commodity prices.
The future is inherently unpredictable and only fools and economists try it. I don't know if or when shortages in any commodity will appear, but I do know that there is cause for concern, and Julian Simon's preference for burying his head in strawmen and bad math won't make anything better.
I would argue that one reason for overpopulation in poor countries has more to do with poor information about the availability of future resources.
Death isn't all that random, even in the third world. Disease is less likely to strike those who can afford food and medical treatment and the likelihood of escaping poverty conditions grows with better educated children. War will tend to avoid those with the money to flee. Having more children only makes sense when food and other necessary resources are plentiful and you can feed all your children. Otherwise, it tends to reduce, rather than enhance, the survival of your genes.
After many years of relative plenty, people are not changing their behaviour quickly enough in shortage.
However, humans are not merely the products of biology. Culture and conditions dictate counterproductive behaviours at times. That too is part of what is killing the underdeveloped countries.
In practical terms the energy supply is non-finite.
There are a number of poorly defined terms in that sentence. The sun will continue to burn for a very long time, and we are not likely to consume all the energy the planet takes in for quite some time. However, if practical is taken to mean cost-effective with reasonable technological assumptions the amount of energy we can easily extract from this relationship with the sun is quite finite. The bulk of the energy extracted for industrial use comes from fossil fuels. Even if fossil fuels represent a significant portion of the earth's crust (which in all likelihood they do not) it does not take much exponential growth before it's all gone.
The energy supply in the thermodynamic sense is unlikely to run dry so long as the sun shines, but the type of energy used to power factories and homes, and to raise human standards of living is an entirely differnet thing.
What do you mean by non-finite? We have no complete inventory of how much coal, oil and natural gas is present in the crust, but we do know that the figure is not infinite. We do know that oil fields can run dry - many have in the last century. Pennsylvania no longer produces a significant amount of oil. Neither does Bavaria or Romania.
We can also look at the trends for the discovery of new oil fields. New fields are not being discovered as frequently as they were 30 years ago, and the ones that are being uncovered are increasingly expensive to work. They are much deeper, at lower pressure or in worse environments like off-shore.
There is quite a lot of coal in the world, but still, known reserves are limited. One reason they may seem like a lot is that the industrialised countres burn petroleum instead. If petroleum resources run short, coal may not last as long. Furthermore, the varieties of coal that burn the most cleanly are the ones in the shortest supply. Coal pollution is not a trivial issue.
Much of the world's natural gas is associated with oil fields. When an oil field starts to drop in pressure, natural gas is pumped in to make the field more productive. Natural gas availability is closely linked to petroleum availability.
Under these conditions, non-finite seems to mean any resource that hasn't run dry yet.
Standards of living have not improved for everyone. In sub-saharan Africa, conditions are worse than they were in 1950. Not all of this can be blamed on bad government - the ratio of mouths to acres of arable land has a lot to do with it. In Asia, access to food has improved, access to water, fuel, education and housing have not in all cases.
Even in the USA, income has fallen for nearly 40% of the population since 1970, and access to housing and medical care is worse for much of the American population, although I would hesitate to credit overpopulation with those failings.
No one knows whether standards of living will continue to rise. They do not always rise, history has its fair share of reversals. Extrapolating a trend is not the same as predicting the future, otherwise Malthus would have been right. My critique of Simon is the same as my critique of Malthus, a trend is not the same as a prediction. But Simon has an addition killing error against him - the planet is finite, and it's the height of sophistry to claim that a resource is infinite just because its availability is unknown.
While this is true, if you take it literally, I don't think anyone (certainly not Simon) has ever claimed it literally.
Actually, I suspect Simon did take it literally. But that is neither here nor there. Technology can do amazing things, but it can't create resources that don't exist. Even uranium exists only in finite amounts. My point is to ask if you want to bet on discovering a new source of energy before the last one runs out? Fusion may save us all, or not. Counting on a resource that doesn't exist yet strikes me as very foolish.
Yes, population crashes have occurred, but only in severely limited areas. Easter Island is a very small place (only 45 square miles) and the inhabitants had little technology and little contact with other people. None of those conditions applies to the world at large.
Untrue. China has repeatedly suffered population crashes in its history. Scale is not the most relevant issue - the earth is much larger than Easter Island, but it also has a lot more people.
Do you have any evidence at all for this? Look at the introduction of rabbits into Australia: did they voluntarily limit their own numbers?
Wolves, whales, most primates, cats, and yes, even rabbits. Rabbits spread all over Australia because they could. If and when they reach the limits of Australia's ability to support them, they will start having smaller litters and their population will stabilise. This may happen with a large crash when resources run out, or they may begin to lower litter size as they approach the limit. It depends (in part) on whether resource scarcity becomes apparent before the resource runs out or whether it appears (to the rabbits) that there is still plenty of food right up until the limit is reached. I am not anthropomorphising rabbit behaviour. Their biology responds to their circumstances, as does ours.
And even if 9/10 of the next generation dies of starvation - so what? All the more reason to have more offspring than anyone else, so that your genes are more likely to survive.
Not true. Living on the edge of starvation means there is a higher risk that 100% of your offspring will fail to reproduce. Remember a parent animal is already a mature adult and has to feed all its offspring. Which strategy will give it the largest number of offspring: split a small amount of food among a large number of offspring, who will all be unhealthy until some starve off and will have some permanent disability because of early starvation, or to have only as many offspring as your ability to find food enables you to feed, and all (or nearly all) of your offspring will be healthy?
I'm afraid you need to have a better understanding of neodarwinism. The Selfish Gene by Dawkins is a good place to start.
Frankly, your version of events sounds like a fairy tale for Greens, opposing the "natural wisdom" of the animals, wisely limiting their numbers, against the foolish "growth-at-all-costs" ideology of Man, doomed to starvation because he wouldn't listen...
Don't ascribe to me an ideology I haven't expressed. I have no such belief in any "natural wisdom." Animals do what they are programmed to do, and if they survive, it was probably the right thing. No more, no less. Most animals employ some kind of strategy to control offspring. Not all, yeast for example doesn't. Strategies vary in the natural world, but larger animals don't usually have populations that grow to starvation.
Again, with all due respect, I'd really like to know where you're getting your information from. Resources appear to be plentiful until they're gone? So people just wake up one morning to discover there's no more wood, or coal, or what-have-you? History provides no evidence for this.
On Easter Island, the amount of time it took to go from plenty of trees and fruit to very little was probably shorter than one generation. China's frequent starvation usually happened when a natural condition (like climate cycles) reduced the fertility of land that was at or near its carrying capacity. Humans, like most animals, do not inherently plan for variations in their natural situation.
As for a paper resource, I'll have to look around in my library - I'm afraid I have little in the way of bibliographic resources in my office. Recent literature on the Easter Islands should tell much of this story. As long as I can't provide a citation, I do understand your suspicion.
Historically, resources get more expensive as they become harder to find, which encourages research into alternate resources, and eventually the rising price of the original resource (and/or falling prices of new ones) make it cheaper and/or easier to switch to a new resource...without the old one ever having been entirely depleted.
Sometimes, it works that way, sometimes it doesn't. The island of Nauru was mined for phosphates until nearly all of the island was destroyed in the 1970's. People there lived the good life - their GDP per capita was comparable to that of an oil-rich middle eastern country. Then, the island was depleted. This happened pretty much all at once - full steam ahead, then nothing. On Easter Island, the same phenomena appears to have occured with regard to food resources. The decline in fertility in the middle-east and the collapse of access to wood in many parts of Europe in the late middle ages also happened all at once in many places. Historically, it has gone both ways. Replacements often were not easily available, or the replacement cost more than the original to use. In the middle east, very expensive irrigation projects raised the cost of farming, and the region has never fully recovered. In Europe, the transition to coal was terribly expensive at first, and industry suffered badly in many places until organised methods of mining and distribution were in place. The solution doesn't always come before the exhaustion of a resource, and you can't count on it working that way in the future.
Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource:
"Our energy supply is non-finite, and oil is an important example . . . the number of oil wells that will eventually produce oil, and in what quantities, is not known or measurable at present and probably never will be, and hence is not meaningfully finite."
I leave the demonstration of why this is false to everyone who has ever studied logic.
Simon's argument rests largely on one assumption: any past trend will continue uninhibited. If the amount of oil extracted from the ground is growing, then it will keep growing forever. If in the past, agricultural efficiency has grown, it can continue to grow indefinitely. If in the past any shortage has resulted in the development of a substitute, we can continue to substitute forever.
Over the last century these things have been mostly true. Over the course of recorded human history, they have not. Which is more likely to hold true in the long run? Simon sold a pipe dream of infinite capacity by redefining infinite to any unknown quantity.
There are a number of problems in the Malthusian prediction of overpopulation that were not evident to Malthus or even to later commentators like Ehrlich. Julian Simon's work, however should be disregarded as the piece of crap that it is - technology can no more make something out of nothing than religion can. Population crashes have occured in the past - the Easter Island case is a good example - and Simon's reasons why it can't happen to us are no more than wishful thinking and abuse of statistics.
Most animal populations, even those without predators, manage to limit their population before they reach the starvation and disease point. The reason for this is easy to see from a neodarwinist perspective: the odds of having any surviving offspring drop dramatically if the population is at the limit of its resources. For millenia primitive human societies were stable without predators, famine or disease as major problems. This was not entirely clear until fairly recently, and some of the reasons are still a little mysterious.
Nonetheless, human populations have crashed in the past. The reason in most cases is that resources appear to be plentiful until they are completely spent. That is what happened on Easter Island and it has happened repeatedly in China. It doesn't seem that unlikely that it's true for us too. Petroleum will seem plentiful until it's gone. The oil fields in Pennsylvania seemed plentiful until they dissappeared. New fields were found, but one by one they are emptying too. There can not be an infinte amount of oil in the world. Technology may bring us new energy sources in the mean time, and it may not - but do you want to bet your life on it? There are fairly important reasons to think the end of oil isn't too far off.
These days in industrialised countries, the best chance you can give your children is to have fairly few and not strech your resources too much in raising them. The odds of survival of a single upper or middle class child are far greater than that of a child from a large, lower class family. Neodarwinism simply favours the smaller family. Birth control and abortion makes this possible.
Another major trend in population is the social empowerment of women. Women, having invested generally far more in a child than men, tend logically to raising fewer of them and devoting more of their resources to each child. The correlation between the education and empowerment of women and low population growth is very, very strong.
So, the decline in the birth rate is good news, but not necessarily a cure-all for population problems. A continuing decline in the birth rate depends on continuing industrialisation of the underdeveloped world - by no means a sure thing these days - and a growth in the education and empowerment of women. The general catastrophy of global overpopulation may be avoided by lower birth rates in some countries, but Malthusian collapses are already going on in some parts of the world, and that seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
Also, it's worth noting that not everyone gains in a low or zero growth population. By the time population stabilises, median age in many countries will be very high, and most of those societies will only be able to function if they allow a lot of immigration. The future is not very rosy for culturally isolating ethnic nation states. How will the Japanese or the Germans feel about the possibility of a nation where they are not a majority? How will Americans feel when most of the young come from another culture? There is already one country that looks like this: the USA's northern neighbour.
Not everyone will be very happy about it, but the future looks more and more like Canada.
Eichmann's kidnapping was most certainly illegal under most notions of what constitutes international law. Isreal simply didn't care, and no one was likely to go out on a limb for scum like Eichmann, but if I recall correctly, the Argentine government was not exactly happy about the kidnapping at the time. As long as Isreal had US backing, no one was likely to make a fuss for him.
However, the 1988 convention under which Pinochet is being prosecuted does make the crimes he committed, even in Chile, illegal in any state that signed the convention. Chile signed it, so did the UK and Spain. Spain wanted originally to prosecute Pinochet for crimes committed against Spanish nationals in Chile. The US uses the same logic to persue terrorists in other countries, even when their acts were not committed on US soil.
I'm not sure Iraq is party to the same treaties, but yes, in principle if George Bush visited a country allied with Iraq without a diplomatic passport, he could be extradited to Baghdad to stand trial. I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing.
However, Iraq has few allies, and Bush is unlikely to visit any of them. Besides, it's too risky politically. Remember, although international law is, to some extent, codified, it's mostly aout what you can get away with. The rules are not applied equally. Pinochet, having lost all his friends in Washington now that the Cold War is over, can be easily prosecuted.
Certainly it's no more than he deserves.