Law tries to regulate (in the sense of "make regular", i.e. predictable) human social interactions. Since when were human social interactions simple? Law has to take into account many different scenarios of different interests competing, and try and produce a solution for each scenario. To do this involves a mix of actual laws (in my country called acts of parliament), common law principles, and precedent, which takes years to develop.
The key point here, especially from a business point of view, is regular. A key principle of legal thought is that law should operate the same for two sets of "the same" circumstances - two people in the same situation situation should have equivalent treatment. This would make life predictable (as opposed to the arbitrary nature of life under previous (i.e. before liberal-democratic) systems). Of course, interpreting exactly what this means in a particular circumstances is no simple task - after all, as was pointed out, how do we treat new technologies like Web Services? Is this static or dynamic linking?
The only practical way to make law "predictable" for the average user (by user I mean non-lawyer) is to understand what the precedents thus far are, to lay out the current "state of play". This means taking a set of principles worked out in different places (contracts, court cases, etc) over a period of time and summarising them in one place for easy reference.
As I said before, expecting law to be simple is like expecting human interactions, or history, to be simple. Its just not going to happen.:)
p.s. another analogy: programs become complex because of the interaction between many rules of action - each might in itself be simple (click this button to run this function), but the result sure as hell isn't. Same thing - programs are defined by humans, and while there are ways to make it simpler, it inevitably gets complex over time. (And remember, legal systems are very rarely refactored - to do so too often would be to introduce arbitrariness, and remove the quality that two people in the same circumstance are treated the same way)
I agree, PG text format is not good for reproducing the features of a printed book. Much better to use something like TEI. However, marking up in a semantic format raises a hairy issue: the proofreader needs to interpret the meaning of textual elements (such as italics which are used for a foreign language term - that's different from italics used as emphasis). That requires more training than simple PG markup. And of course there is the issue of a decent user interface...
Having said this, maybe these problems can be overcome. Any suggestions?
A funny thing that no-one seems to have mentioned is that most nuclear plants are built close to the sea shore. This is due to them being water cooled (only the latest designs are not water cooled), which in turn, I understand, is due to their history as marine reactors (in nuclear powered subs).
So... what happens to the nuclear plants when the sea level rises?:)
While I am no fan of GWB, I think that, historically, fascism has meant something other than what you're now seeing in the US.
Let's start with Mussolini's comment: corporatism, in Mussolini's sense of the word, wasn't related to corporations in the current sense of the term, but rather was an enforced arrangement where the state stepped in to enforce 'national consensus', where all players - business, labour and the state - act in unison for the 'national interest'. Thus the symbolism of the fascis (bundle of sticks bound together around an axe).
While business interests in practice supported Hitler's fascist government, that kind of fascism belonged to an era of economic transition... broadly the period from the 1890s to the 1940s, when free wheeling, monopoly capitalism controlled by powerful individuals was, through the intervention of the state, being transformed into a much more managerial capitalism. Things like the US Federal Reserve were invented, the Keynesian idea of state investment into infrastructure and training for an increasingly skilled workforce, the rising role of science and technology in production (and thus all sorts of innovations, from Taylor's scientific management of the work process, to Ford's production line, to the welfare state that guaranteed a reasonably healthy, reasonably educated workforce).
The neocon authoritarianism of GWB et al. is a different animal. Yes, we're in an era of economic transition again, if not of deep crisis. But in contrast to Hitler / Mussolini / Franco / Salazar style fascism, the state has withdrawn from much of society, and 'merely' polices at the margins, at the border between the acceptable and the unacceptable. Yes, the state gets involved in the policing of everyday life (gay marriage, abortion law), but it is hardly the key player - at least as important are things like MTV, talk radio, Fox News, etc. Just because two systems are authoritarian, doesn't mean that they are the same, or operate on the same logic.
I work from home as a computer programmer. I've got a lowly 512K ADSL (with bloody Telkom 3gb/month bandwidth cap). What exactly do a need a video feed for? I get my email, can ssh into the company's machines (or run an OpenVPN tunnel if I really want to), and go into the office once a week, max.
My partner also works from home, also keeps in touch via email.
And both of us can attest to the 'work is an activity' trend. My partner works 2 days a week for one employer, 3 days for the other. Yet she gets email 7 days a week... if your email inbox is your workplace, then when exactly aren't you at work?
In my case, I simplify matters by having multiple emails... a work email and a personal email. But some of the clients I do occasional freelance work for mail to my personal email. And the natural thing to do is, respond to the email when it gets in. Its like Michael Hardt says, immaterial labour (labour which is at least as much about creating relationships, etc. as it is about creating things) doesn't keep office hours.
Of course, there are many advantages to working from home - comfort, time flexibility (I've got a 9-month-old baby I like being close to, even if she is looked after by the nanny), lack of boss breathing over your shoulder, etc. But there is a tendency to 'internalise the workplace' as well....
Its 19:00 UTC, and all the teams are disabled, with the longest distance reached being 7 miles (by Red Team and SciAutonics II) followed by Team DAD (6 miles) and The Golem Group (5 miles). All the rest
are on 1 mile or less.
Kinda dissapointing, I guess, although 7 miles
through the desert with no driver is already fairly impressive.
Apologies to the CMU broadcast folks, but this has to be about the most boring broadcast that could have been done for this event. Instead of updates on the progress of the teams, they are simply training a camera on the start area, and not saying anything most of the time.
Meanwhile the status board shows the Red Team and SciAutonics II neck on neck at 7 miles along the course each. Seems Team Caltech isn't doing too well , since they're still stuck on 1 mile from the start. Would love to know the story behind those distances....
I've done quite abit of research on this PBMR design, and specifically the economics of it.
The latest cost estimates for building a 'demo model' is about R10 billion, and will be completed in 2008. That's about 5 years over schedule, if my memory serves me. The PBMR company ltd., not Eskom directly, is building this thing. That company's shareholders are currently Eskom and BNFL. Since BNFL is currently being restructured, as the cleanup costs for Sellafield have forced it into bankruptcy, Eskom is the only real player. (US company Exelon was involved, but now they've pulled out)
R10 billion is way more than Eskom can afford. Therefore they are looking for external partners to invest in the project, and that depends on selling PBMRs being commercially viable. Now, nuclear electricity is very expensive - one of the reasons that the world nuclear industry is in the doldrums. There was a paper in the South African Journal of Science about this some time back, which examined the economic models Eskom was using for PBMR, and found them to be wildly optimistic.
So if the economics are so screwy, why is Eskom pursuing this project? No one really knows, but I'm sure the fact that the chairperson of Eskom, Reuel Khoza, effectively controls one of the main contractors (IST), through a holding company has got something to do with it. Even if the PBMR project fails, Khoza and buddies will end up much richer. IST got handed a R260 million (?) contract, which is about as much as its previous annual turnover. Their shareprice went through the roof, making Khoza and co's share options worth a lot more.
Besides the Reuel Khoza link, there is an argument to be made that difficult-to-manage technologies like PBMR will be an incentive for the government to keep a much more centralised and powerful Eskom around for much longer. Eskom is currently facing deregulation and restructuring, and this Apartheid-legacy parastatal needs to justify why it still needs to exist. Experience in other companies has shown that deregulating nuclear power is very hard, so PBMR might be a bargaining chip in the complicated game around Eskom's future.
Funnily enough, the Wired article and the Slashdot responses have all the hallmarks of engineers - in love with 'sexy technology' while pretty much ignoring the bigger political/economic picture.
"At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer."
No, this is a clear misstatement of what's going on here. Clean Films, etc, are not removing anything from "the popular media". They're producing an alternative version of the popular media, for consumption by their customers.
In the past, the US-based religious right has launched verbal attacks on Hollywood. The response of many people to the religious right's arguments has been that if you don't like it, don't go and see it. Now, Clean Films are providing a third way: you can now see a version without the bits you don't like (a bit like the "Phantom Edit" does for Jar Jar Binks haters).
What Clean Films is doing is in fact an example of the classic liberal remedy for "bad speech": more speech. For myself, Clean Films' products, like "Christian Rock", will no doubt be aesthetically unpleasant. But I applaud their creativity in finding another way forward besides the bigoted "Clean Up Hollywood" crusades of the past.
The Director's Guild's actions here are plain and simple attempts at control, in an era when the technology has opened up new avenues for participation in popular culture. They're trying to maintain a simple "push" model of production, and a extremely simplistic and philosophically untenable notion of the director as solitary "creative genius". I REALLY hope they lose this one.
Monsanto is not a person, just a group of people (some good, some bad). Its a long argument, but I think that the fact that corporations over the world are counted as legal persons recognises an important fact: they exhibit a collective purpose. Management within a company plays the role of trying to get everyone to line up behind a common mission. Management sets a corporate culture, a climate where certain behaviours are acceptable, other unacceptable. If you work for a company, you can't fail but notice this, and if you see that your company's culture is unethical, its YOUR responsibility to do something - leave, object, whatever.
Secondly, GM crops feed the starving of the third world. Prove it! At the moment the vast majority of GM planting is not in the third world. And the traits which would make a crop interesting to third world farmers - e.g. drought resistance - do not exist in GM strains. The trend in GM is to engineer things which are useful in a very first world context - e.g. the ability to withstand a higher dose of herbicide (Roundup). GM crops fit well within the existing first world agribusiness paradigm, which involves industrialisation and high inputs, large farms and monoculture. In the third world, where most farmers lack the cash to engage in the first world style of agriculture, GM crops will have a much harder time taking off. Specifically, existing small and subsistence farmers will have to be dispossessed to make way for the kind of farming where GM is workable. They will have to be replaced by larger, cash cropping, export oriented farmers, and the main problem that the poor of the third world face - being seperated from the means of their own survival - will be further, not closer, to being solved.
Thus GM fits in well with the global agribusiness scenario - the consolidation of worldwide agricultural production within networks oriented around the large agribusiness multinationals - but has bugger all to do with solving third world hunger.
Jon Katz seems to be a necessary feature of Slashdot. It doesn't really matter what he says, he always spins the story into a terrain which is fundamentally American, rooted squarely in the logic of post-WWII America: whether it be high schools (prototypical image of US life and community if there ever was one) or hi-tech.
Unfortunately, the reality is that while bin Laden might know some spin (a debatable point - bin Laden's broadcasts are hardly slick, and have more in common with the broadcasts of various turgid national leaders than they do with Alaister Campbell-style spinning), he is not spinning a message out to the world via satellite. He's sending simple video tapes (pretty low-tech these days) to news agency people in Kabul (yes, they're there - they're just not CNN).
Robert Fisk of the UK's Independent has an interesting commentary
on how the message is going out, via Qatar (remember: the site of the next WTO meeting, moved there to avoid anti-capitalist demos) and the Al-Jazeera network. A bit more detailed than Katzism.
This war should be approached as more than simply another opportunity to put the American Psyche on the couch. The logic of bin Laden might be tightly interwoven with the logic of US foreign policy (in ways obscure to many Americans because of their ignorance of said foreign policy), but it also powerfully follows its own logic: the logic of expansionist Islamism, a particular logic which advocates the capture of the Middle East under the rule of the self-proclaimed god-fearing leaders.
That's a logic just as rooted in capitalism (not a medieval return, not seemless hi-tech) as is the expansion of 'US interests'. Analysing this war (or war in general) in technocratic terms, as Katz, does, is ludicrous. It fails to explain Vietnam (leaving out the fraggings, the mass refusal to fight on the part of the US army, etc), it fails to explain Iraq (again leaving out the mass desertions of the Iraqi army). And it fails again here.
I'm writing from Cape Town, South Africa. Currently
I work as a self-employed IT consultant, specialising in web-based solutions.
My background, however, is as a student, and then volunteer involved in learning about, experimenting with, and deploying solutions using Internet related technologies. I first used the Internet in 1992, when I was a student at the University of Cape Town, on a VAX. When I first got access to Unix, it was PS2/AIX on an IBM PS/2 - hardly the most standard of platforms! An experience I still appreciate was being able to get help from the Internet at no cost, either in the form of conversations, or by referring to standards.
Soon after becoming familiar with Internet technologies, I got involved in building networks in schools, often 'scavenging' resources from existing school resources, and re-directing them towards fledgling networks, at a time when the utility of these networks was by no means established to the general public. I.e. no budget.
Now, I'm a consultant, I've got all the gadgets including Palm Pilot and credit cards. If necessary, I can pay a small fee to access something online - although the cost of things in US dollars generally stops me from doing this ($1 US = about R 9 right now). So there's discrimination already.
But in those days, I had (almost) no money and I had no credit card. My first decent modem was bought using an elaborate, and expensive, direct transfer of money to Canada, and shipped due to the good intentions of a friend of mine's Canadian prof. It took quite a while to organise, of course.
The reality for Internet developers is that they often want access to the standards, for reference purposes. The reality of developers in Africa is that they often face significant barriers in interaction with the US economy - lack of funds, difficulty in transferring funds, etc.
So, my question: Given the realities of the situation in Africa, and other parts of the world, how can any licensing fee ever be considered 'non-discriminatory'?
Well, hello, guess what's the # 1 occupation injury? I'm 28, and I first started showing symptoms of a repetitive stress injury (RSI) about 5 years ago - my forearms ached, and my hands felt limp to the extent that I couldn't work for a week. A bit of research suggested that the problem was that my chair / desk combination (low chair, wrists stretched over edge of desk) was at fault.
I've managed to deal with that by correcting my posture, and religiously taking breaks every 45 minutes. If I don't, it comes back. And last month, I had another problem - my mouse hand seized up, to the extent that I could barely move 3 of my fingers. I seem to have that under control now with anti-inflammatories, a trackball, and a program to replace my mouse buttons with keys.
But there's a reason that another term for RSI is cumulative trauma syndrome - this stuff builds up, and it doesn't go away. The equipment to deal with it (ergonomic keyboard, fancy trackball, better chairs) is expensive, and your productivity level drops (pain kinda does that to you).
Now, apart from the fact that I'm kinda worried about the prospect of losing effective use of my hands, I'm in a situation in this small, non-union company where I have to raise my problems as an individual. It's ok here, but in other circumstances, I can well see that I might be judged to be too much of a burden on the company, first in line for downsizing, etc. A workers collective - i.e. a union - could be rather useful here.
(Note: in South Africa, unions emphasise mass involvement much more than in e.g. the UK and no doubt the US. I've been a union member in both countries, and the South African model emphasises member control and involvement, and union democracy, much more. Not to say that everything's perfect in SA unions - it isn't. But the contrast is worth keeping in mind as an alternative to the 'business unionism' prevalent in the US)
And remember, in the US Bush has just cancelled the OSHA ergonomics standard - a collective, co-ordinated voice, from the workplace all the way to Washington - could have stopped that.
Oh, and another thing - remember the early to mid 1990s, when the hype was that programming in the future was going to be pulling together components (ala. VB, Delphi, etc). It didn't pan out like that (and Open Source is in part a way of programmers fighting back), but that kind of stuff was a management wet dream - reducing programming to a much less arcane, much more manageable, Taylorised thing.
We already know that many IT workers - e.g. support staff, helpdesk workers - are deployed in cookie-cutter jobs. Programmers who believe that it would never happen to them need to look back at the history of skilled trades - e.g. typographers c. 1980. Programming's status as a profession might not last forever - we're already familiar with the split between a small number of high end, high paid programmers, and a grow army of lower paid 'grunts'. I know many C++ heads don't consider e.g. a VB programmer as a real programmer - i.e. VB coders are beyond the 'professional' pale. So then ultimately maybe 10% or less of IT workers end up in the stereotype of 6 digit salary ubergeeks, and the rest end up as frustrated, undercompensated grunts.
And you're still going to tell me that IT workers don't need to unionize?
Peter
P.S. Someone should mod-up the AC who also replied to the previous post. They said good stuff.
I'm really rather surprised that this is being treated like a special case. After all, in astronomy, the work of amateurs has always been, and continues to be, a source of scientifically relevant data.
Consider, for instance, the work of the AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers) and similar organisations worldwide. AAVSO co-ordinates the observation of thousands of variable stars, and relies very heavily on the labour of amateurs. Observers' data is checked against that of other observers, and over time observers get to do a better job, and also get to know how much they generally misjudge the magnitude of the stars they are observing.
Other examples in astronomy abound - from the observation of sunspots to the timing of grazing occultations (when a star is occulted by the edge of the moon).
This NASA project is simply using the Internet to set up something similar.
This argument has been raging over on LBO-talk,
where the political spectrum generally ranges from liberal to those to the left of liberalism (various kinds of Marxists, radicals, anarchists, etc) (with a couple of libertarians who look out of place most of the time). The general argument of the pro-Naderites is that:
Gore and Bush are so similar that it doesn't make any difference. One pays lip service to family values and the Christian right, the other to community organising and progressive values. When in power, they both serve the Party of the Fortune 500.
Change within the DP is nearly impossible. (ref: Jesse Jackson)
Only one of two things will change this - either the new non-Democratic left (now under the Green / Nader banner, but not irrevocably attached to the Greens) smashes the Democratic Party, or they get splittered and smashed, and the DP remains the only electoral hope of the left. Obviously this process will be painful, but it is a price worth paying.
Personally, as a non-American, I can stand at some remove from all of this. In general, I tend to think that real change will come from the streets, anyway. In a world where ever fewer people are voting, I don't think that's too bad a bet to make.
So, given that there's no air to speak of, what are the options for stabilising? I assume spacecraft do this with small (gas?) boosters. Are there any other options?
Well, in Apartheid-era South Africa, we
actually had a guy who was sent to jail (I
think he got 3 years) for having a tattoo
reading "ANC" (the name of the then-banned
African National Congress). Supposedly
he was promoting subversion or something...
> Is there something like a press association that > could pay for his legal counsel ?
This is why a journalists' union is a good thing! The British journalists union, the NUJ, has often taken up cases of press freedom. When they're doing that, they protecting the ability of their members to do a good job, rather than pump out sanitised dreck.
(I know all about sanitised dreck, having lived with the Apartheid censorship of the media in South Africa. The result of enforced sanitised dreck is a poor quality of journalism, even after censorship is lifted - just compare TV interviews in Britain vs. South Africa)
Sometimes when a craft stands together, it can protect its members' interests - the interests its members share in being able to do a good job without interference from their bosses (programmers want to program without some PHB interfering, journalists want to write without fear of being censorsered by editors). Solidifying those structures of standing together (into something like a professional association, or (in my mind preferably) an industrial union) is a good thing.
Peter
Re:Unstable Implementation
on
Java 2 For BSD
·
· Score: 5
If I'm not mistaken, the John Dyson message referred to was this one, from comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc. It isn't quite as apocalyptic as the original AC post made it out to be...
Subject: Re: FreeBSD and SMP From: "John S. Dyson" Date: 2000/06/01 Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Bruce Burden wrote: > > XuYifeng wrote: > > : I am newbie of FreeBSD, I heard rumor that Linux 2.2 has better SMP support > : than FreeBSD 4.0? >: > I understand the latest Linux kernels have a multi-threaded > SMP kernel, while FreeBSD still uses the big lock model for SMP. > > From what little I have seen on the -current mailing list, > this is something the developers are going to have to "bite the > bullet" on, it seems, because the change isn't going to be easy > or compatible. >
About the time that I left FreeBSD, my biggest TECHNICAL argument was that FreeBSD needed an official project to re-design the kernel so as to support multi-processors correctly. In NO WAY does FreeBSD do multi-processing correctly (and that isn't an insult, but is a result of the monolithic kernel legacy -- FreeBSD is an excellent kernel otherwise!!!:-)). However, Linux supports SMP only marginally better than FreeBSD in the grand scheme of things.
A significant and well thought out redesign is in order. This is NOT an easy project and would require a serious committment on the part of the kernel developers. Hack solutions shouldn't even be considered for the shortest amount of time (the time involved in looking at expedient work-around type efforts is totally wasted.)
IMO, the Linux approach so far appears to be an iterative improvement on the same basic design: TRADITIONAL monolithic kernel. Given a traditional monolithic design, once the kernel is fine grained enough, and provides correct internal structure, the kernel maintenance people will have to be MUCH more intelligent than the original developers themselves. The complications in an adequate monolithic design are enormous.
The reason for my work being aborted on the FreeBSD SMP MONOLITHIC kernel wasn't that I couldn't make a FreeBSD SMP monolithic kernel work very, very well. The resulting kernel design would have been unmaintainable. I decided (when it was my place to decide a LONG time ago) that a monolthic SMP kernel (other than the current stopgap) didn't provide the quality that the FreeBSD name demands.
I am currently making really good and effective progress on my video compression (data reduction) software, and I might be able to do kernel hacking (actually redesign) in the near future. I have no need for employment anymore to make money, so my time is fully my own.
The last few years has been frustrating, but at least I worked with some tremendously nice people. I now have a situation that is very close to what it used to be when I first started working on FreeBSD!!! (I doubt that I'll be directly involved in the project because of disagreements that I had about the technical direction of the kernel, and marketing disagreements (with the associated burnt bridges:-(()).
I am going to be lurking much more than I have in the last 2yrs anyway:-). I just looked that the FreeBSD mailing lists a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a few years!!!
-- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid | and it irritates the pig.
Slashdot Mirror
The key point here, especially from a business point of view, is regular. A key principle of legal thought is that law should operate the same for two sets of "the same" circumstances - two people in the same situation situation should have equivalent treatment. This would make life predictable (as opposed to the arbitrary nature of life under previous (i.e. before liberal-democratic) systems). Of course, interpreting exactly what this means in a particular circumstances is no simple task - after all, as was pointed out, how do we treat new technologies like Web Services? Is this static or dynamic linking?
The only practical way to make law "predictable" for the average user (by user I mean non-lawyer) is to understand what the precedents thus far are, to lay out the current "state of play". This means taking a set of principles worked out in different places (contracts, court cases, etc) over a period of time and summarising them in one place for easy reference.
As I said before, expecting law to be simple is like expecting human interactions, or history, to be simple. Its just not going to happen. :)
p.s. another analogy: programs become complex because of the interaction between many rules of action - each might in itself be simple (click this button to run this function), but the result sure as hell isn't. Same thing - programs are defined by humans, and while there are ways to make it simpler, it inevitably gets complex over time. (And remember, legal systems are very rarely refactored - to do so too often would be to introduce arbitrariness, and remove the quality that two people in the same circumstance are treated the same way)
I agree, PG text format is not good for reproducing the features of a printed book. Much better to use something like TEI. However, marking up in a semantic format raises a hairy issue: the proofreader needs to interpret the meaning of textual elements (such as italics which are used for a foreign language term - that's different from italics used as emphasis). That requires more training than simple PG markup. And of course there is the issue of a decent user interface...
Having said this, maybe these problems can be overcome. Any suggestions?
A funny thing that no-one seems to have mentioned is that most nuclear plants are built close to the sea shore. This is due to them being water cooled (only the latest designs are not water cooled), which in turn, I understand, is due to their history as marine reactors (in nuclear powered subs).
:)
So... what happens to the nuclear plants when the sea level rises?
Let's start with Mussolini's comment: corporatism, in Mussolini's sense of the word, wasn't related to corporations in the current sense of the term, but rather was an enforced arrangement where the state stepped in to enforce 'national consensus', where all players - business, labour and the state - act in unison for the 'national interest'. Thus the symbolism of the fascis (bundle of sticks bound together around an axe).
While business interests in practice supported Hitler's fascist government, that kind of fascism belonged to an era of economic transition... broadly the period from the 1890s to the 1940s, when free wheeling, monopoly capitalism controlled by powerful individuals was, through the intervention of the state, being transformed into a much more managerial capitalism. Things like the US Federal Reserve were invented, the Keynesian idea of state investment into infrastructure and training for an increasingly skilled workforce, the rising role of science and technology in production (and thus all sorts of innovations, from Taylor's scientific management of the work process, to Ford's production line, to the welfare state that guaranteed a reasonably healthy, reasonably educated workforce).
The neocon authoritarianism of GWB et al. is a different animal. Yes, we're in an era of economic transition again, if not of deep crisis. But in contrast to Hitler / Mussolini / Franco / Salazar style fascism, the state has withdrawn from much of society, and 'merely' polices at the margins, at the border between the acceptable and the unacceptable. Yes, the state gets involved in the policing of everyday life (gay marriage, abortion law), but it is hardly the key player - at least as important are things like MTV, talk radio, Fox News, etc. Just because two systems are authoritarian, doesn't mean that they are the same, or operate on the same logic.
I work from home as a computer programmer. I've got a lowly 512K ADSL (with bloody Telkom 3gb/month bandwidth cap). What exactly do a need a video feed for? I get my email, can ssh into the company's machines (or run an OpenVPN tunnel if I really want to), and go into the office once a week, max.
My partner also works from home, also keeps in touch via email.
And both of us can attest to the 'work is an activity' trend. My partner works 2 days a week for one employer, 3 days for the other. Yet she gets email 7 days a week... if your email inbox is your workplace, then when exactly aren't you at work?
In my case, I simplify matters by having multiple emails... a work email and a personal email. But some of the clients I do occasional freelance work for mail to my personal email. And the natural thing to do is, respond to the email when it gets in. Its like Michael Hardt says, immaterial labour (labour which is at least as much about creating relationships, etc. as it is about creating things) doesn't keep office hours.
Of course, there are many advantages to working from home - comfort, time flexibility (I've got a 9-month-old baby I like being close to, even if she is looked after by the nanny), lack of boss breathing over your shoulder, etc. But there is a tendency to 'internalise the workplace' as well....
Kinda dissapointing, I guess, although 7 miles through the desert with no driver is already fairly impressive.
peter
Apologies to the CMU broadcast folks, but this has to be about the most boring broadcast that could have been done for this event. Instead of updates on the progress of the teams, they are simply training a camera on the start area, and not saying anything most of the time.
Meanwhile the status board shows the Red Team and SciAutonics II neck on neck at 7 miles along the course each. Seems Team Caltech isn't doing too well , since they're still stuck on 1 mile from the start. Would love to know the story behind those distances....
peter
The latest cost estimates for building a 'demo model' is about R10 billion, and will be completed in 2008. That's about 5 years over schedule, if my memory serves me. The PBMR company ltd., not Eskom directly, is building this thing. That company's shareholders are currently Eskom and BNFL. Since BNFL is currently being restructured, as the cleanup costs for Sellafield have forced it into bankruptcy, Eskom is the only real player. (US company Exelon was involved, but now they've pulled out)
R10 billion is way more than Eskom can afford. Therefore they are looking for external partners to invest in the project, and that depends on selling PBMRs being commercially viable. Now, nuclear electricity is very expensive - one of the reasons that the world nuclear industry is in the doldrums. There was a paper in the South African Journal of Science about this some time back, which examined the economic models Eskom was using for PBMR, and found them to be wildly optimistic.
So if the economics are so screwy, why is Eskom pursuing this project? No one really knows, but I'm sure the fact that the chairperson of Eskom, Reuel Khoza, effectively controls one of the main contractors (IST), through a holding company has got something to do with it. Even if the PBMR project fails, Khoza and buddies will end up much richer. IST got handed a R260 million (?) contract, which is about as much as its previous annual turnover. Their shareprice went through the roof, making Khoza and co's share options worth a lot more.
Besides the Reuel Khoza link, there is an argument to be made that difficult-to-manage technologies like PBMR will be an incentive for the government to keep a much more centralised and powerful Eskom around for much longer. Eskom is currently facing deregulation and restructuring, and this Apartheid-legacy parastatal needs to justify why it still needs to exist. Experience in other companies has shown that deregulating nuclear power is very hard, so PBMR might be a bargaining chip in the complicated game around Eskom's future.
Funnily enough, the Wired article and the Slashdot responses have all the hallmarks of engineers - in love with 'sexy technology' while pretty much ignoring the bigger political/economic picture.
Peter
No, this is a clear misstatement of what's going on here. Clean Films, etc, are not removing anything from "the popular media". They're producing an alternative version of the popular media, for consumption by their customers.
In the past, the US-based religious right has launched verbal attacks on Hollywood. The response of many people to the religious right's arguments has been that if you don't like it, don't go and see it. Now, Clean Films are providing a third way: you can now see a version without the bits you don't like (a bit like the "Phantom Edit" does for Jar Jar Binks haters).
What Clean Films is doing is in fact an example of the classic liberal remedy for "bad speech": more speech. For myself, Clean Films' products, like "Christian Rock", will no doubt be aesthetically unpleasant. But I applaud their creativity in finding another way forward besides the bigoted "Clean Up Hollywood" crusades of the past.
The Director's Guild's actions here are plain and simple attempts at control, in an era when the technology has opened up new avenues for participation in popular culture. They're trying to maintain a simple "push" model of production, and a extremely simplistic and philosophically untenable notion of the director as solitary "creative genius". I REALLY hope they lose this one.
P
Two claims I want to tackle here:
- Monsanto is not a person, just a group of people (some good, some bad). Its a long argument, but I think that the fact that corporations over the world are counted as legal persons recognises an important fact: they exhibit a collective purpose. Management within a company plays the role of trying to get everyone to line up behind a common mission. Management sets a corporate culture, a climate where certain behaviours are acceptable, other unacceptable. If you work for a company, you can't fail but notice this, and if you see that your company's culture is unethical, its YOUR responsibility to do something - leave, object, whatever.
- Secondly, GM crops feed the starving of the third world. Prove it! At the moment the vast majority of GM planting is not in the third world. And the traits which would make a crop interesting to third world farmers - e.g. drought resistance - do not exist in GM strains. The trend in GM is to engineer things which are useful in a very first world context - e.g. the ability to withstand a higher dose of herbicide (Roundup). GM crops fit well within the existing first world agribusiness paradigm, which involves industrialisation and high inputs, large farms and monoculture. In the third world, where most farmers lack the cash to engage in the first world style of agriculture, GM crops will have a much harder time taking off. Specifically, existing small and subsistence farmers will have to be dispossessed to make way for the kind of farming where GM is workable. They will have to be replaced by larger, cash cropping, export oriented farmers, and the main problem that the poor of the third world face - being seperated from the means of their own survival - will be further, not closer, to being solved.
PeterThus GM fits in well with the global agribusiness scenario - the consolidation of worldwide agricultural production within networks oriented around the large agribusiness multinationals - but has bugger all to do with solving third world hunger.
Unfortunately, the reality is that while bin Laden might know some spin (a debatable point - bin Laden's broadcasts are hardly slick, and have more in common with the broadcasts of various turgid national leaders than they do with Alaister Campbell-style spinning), he is not spinning a message out to the world via satellite. He's sending simple video tapes (pretty low-tech these days) to news agency people in Kabul (yes, they're there - they're just not CNN).
Robert Fisk of the UK's Independent has an interesting commentary on how the message is going out, via Qatar (remember: the site of the next WTO meeting, moved there to avoid anti-capitalist demos) and the Al-Jazeera network. A bit more detailed than Katzism.
This war should be approached as more than simply another opportunity to put the American Psyche on the couch. The logic of bin Laden might be tightly interwoven with the logic of US foreign policy (in ways obscure to many Americans because of their ignorance of said foreign policy), but it also powerfully follows its own logic: the logic of expansionist Islamism, a particular logic which advocates the capture of the Middle East under the rule of the self-proclaimed god-fearing leaders.
That's a logic just as rooted in capitalism (not a medieval return, not seemless hi-tech) as is the expansion of 'US interests'. Analysing this war (or war in general) in technocratic terms, as Katz, does, is ludicrous. It fails to explain Vietnam (leaving out the fraggings, the mass refusal to fight on the part of the US army, etc), it fails to explain Iraq (again leaving out the mass desertions of the Iraqi army). And it fails again here.
Peter
My background, however, is as a student, and then volunteer involved in learning about, experimenting with, and deploying solutions using Internet related technologies. I first used the Internet in 1992, when I was a student at the University of Cape Town, on a VAX. When I first got access to Unix, it was PS2/AIX on an IBM PS/2 - hardly the most standard of platforms! An experience I still appreciate was being able to get help from the Internet at no cost, either in the form of conversations, or by referring to standards.
Soon after becoming familiar with Internet technologies, I got involved in building networks in schools, often 'scavenging' resources from existing school resources, and re-directing them towards fledgling networks, at a time when the utility of these networks was by no means established to the general public. I.e. no budget.
Now, I'm a consultant, I've got all the gadgets including Palm Pilot and credit cards. If necessary, I can pay a small fee to access something online - although the cost of things in US dollars generally stops me from doing this ($1 US = about R 9 right now). So there's discrimination already.
But in those days, I had (almost) no money and I had no credit card. My first decent modem was bought using an elaborate, and expensive, direct transfer of money to Canada, and shipped due to the good intentions of a friend of mine's Canadian prof. It took quite a while to organise, of course.
The reality for Internet developers is that they often want access to the standards, for reference purposes. The reality of developers in Africa is that they often face significant barriers in interaction with the US economy - lack of funds, difficulty in transferring funds, etc.
So, my question: Given the realities of the situation in Africa, and other parts of the world, how can any licensing fee ever be considered 'non-discriminatory'?
Peter
Well, hello, guess what's the # 1 occupation injury? I'm 28, and I first started showing symptoms of a repetitive stress injury (RSI) about 5 years ago - my forearms ached, and my hands felt limp to the extent that I couldn't work for a week. A bit of research suggested that the problem was that my chair / desk combination (low chair, wrists stretched over edge of desk) was at fault.
I've managed to deal with that by correcting my posture, and religiously taking breaks every 45 minutes. If I don't, it comes back. And last month, I had another problem - my mouse hand seized up, to the extent that I could barely move 3 of my fingers. I seem to have that under control now with anti-inflammatories, a trackball, and a program to replace my mouse buttons with keys.
But there's a reason that another term for RSI is cumulative trauma syndrome - this stuff builds up, and it doesn't go away. The equipment to deal with it (ergonomic keyboard, fancy trackball, better chairs) is expensive, and your productivity level drops (pain kinda does that to you).
Now, apart from the fact that I'm kinda worried about the prospect of losing effective use of my hands, I'm in a situation in this small, non-union company where I have to raise my problems as an individual. It's ok here, but in other circumstances, I can well see that I might be judged to be too much of a burden on the company, first in line for downsizing, etc. A workers collective - i.e. a union - could be rather useful here.
(Note: in South Africa, unions emphasise mass involvement much more than in e.g. the UK and no doubt the US. I've been a union member in both countries, and the South African model emphasises member control and involvement, and union democracy, much more. Not to say that everything's perfect in SA unions - it isn't. But the contrast is worth keeping in mind as an alternative to the 'business unionism' prevalent in the US)
And remember, in the US Bush has just cancelled the OSHA ergonomics standard - a collective, co-ordinated voice, from the workplace all the way to Washington - could have stopped that.
Oh, and another thing - remember the early to mid 1990s, when the hype was that programming in the future was going to be pulling together components (ala. VB, Delphi, etc). It didn't pan out like that (and Open Source is in part a way of programmers fighting back), but that kind of stuff was a management wet dream - reducing programming to a much less arcane, much more manageable, Taylorised thing.
We already know that many IT workers - e.g. support staff, helpdesk workers - are deployed in cookie-cutter jobs. Programmers who believe that it would never happen to them need to look back at the history of skilled trades - e.g. typographers c. 1980. Programming's status as a profession might not last forever - we're already familiar with the split between a small number of high end, high paid programmers, and a grow army of lower paid 'grunts'. I know many C++ heads don't consider e.g. a VB programmer as a real programmer - i.e. VB coders are beyond the 'professional' pale. So then ultimately maybe 10% or less of IT workers end up in the stereotype of 6 digit salary ubergeeks, and the rest end up as frustrated, undercompensated grunts.
And you're still going to tell me that IT workers don't need to unionize?
Peter
P.S. Someone should mod-up the AC who also replied to the previous post. They said good stuff.
Consider, for instance, the work of the AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers) and similar organisations worldwide. AAVSO co-ordinates the observation of thousands of variable stars, and relies very heavily on the labour of amateurs. Observers' data is checked against that of other observers, and over time observers get to do a better job, and also get to know how much they generally misjudge the magnitude of the stars they are observing.
Other examples in astronomy abound - from the observation of sunspots to the timing of grazing occultations (when a star is occulted by the edge of the moon).
This NASA project is simply using the Internet to set up something similar.
Peter
- Gore and Bush are so similar that it doesn't make any difference. One pays lip service to family values and the Christian right, the other to community organising and progressive values. When in power, they both serve the Party of the Fortune 500.
- Change within the DP is nearly impossible. (ref: Jesse Jackson)
- Only one of two things will change this - either the new non-Democratic left (now under the Green / Nader banner, but not irrevocably attached to the Greens) smashes the Democratic Party, or they get splittered and smashed, and the DP remains the only electoral hope of the left. Obviously this process will be painful, but it is a price worth paying.
Personally, as a non-American, I can stand at some remove from all of this. In general, I tend to think that real change will come from the streets, anyway. In a world where ever fewer people are voting, I don't think that's too bad a bet to make.Peter
Peter
Peter
> could pay for his legal counsel ?
This is why a journalists' union is a good thing! The British journalists union, the NUJ, has often taken up cases of press freedom. When they're doing that, they protecting the ability of their members to do a good job, rather than pump out sanitised dreck.
(I know all about sanitised dreck, having lived with the Apartheid censorship of the media in South Africa. The result of enforced sanitised dreck is a poor quality of journalism, even after censorship is lifted - just compare TV interviews in Britain vs. South Africa)
Sometimes when a craft stands together, it can protect its members' interests - the interests its members share in being able to do a good job without interference from their bosses (programmers want to program without some PHB interfering, journalists want to write without fear of being censorsered by editors). Solidifying those structures of standing together (into something like a professional association, or (in my mind preferably) an industrial union) is a good thing.
Peter
Subject: Re: FreeBSD and SMP :
:-)). However, Linux supports SMP only marginally better than FreeBSD in the grand scheme of things.
From: "John S. Dyson"
Date: 2000/06/01
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Bruce Burden wrote:
>
> XuYifeng wrote:
>
> : I am newbie of FreeBSD, I heard rumor that Linux 2.2 has better SMP support
> : than FreeBSD 4.0?
>
> I understand the latest Linux kernels have a multi-threaded
> SMP kernel, while FreeBSD still uses the big lock model for SMP.
>
> From what little I have seen on the
-current mailing list,
> this is something the developers are going to have to "bite the
> bullet" on, it seems, because the change isn't going to be easy
> or compatible.
>
About the time that I left FreeBSD, my biggest TECHNICAL argument was that FreeBSD needed an official project to re-design the kernel so as to support multi-processors correctly. In NO WAY does FreeBSD do multi-processing correctly (and that isn't an insult, but is a result of the monolithic kernel legacy -- FreeBSD is an excellent kernel otherwise!!!
A significant and well thought out redesign is in order. This is NOT an easy project and would require a serious committment on the part of the kernel developers. Hack solutions shouldn't even be considered for the shortest amount of time (the time involved in looking at expedient work-around type efforts is totally wasted.)
IMO, the Linux approach so far appears to be an iterative improvement on the same basic design: TRADITIONAL monolithic kernel. Given a traditional monolithic design, once the kernel is fine grained enough, and provides correct internal structure, the kernel maintenance people will have to be MUCH more intelligent than the original developers themselves. The complications in an adequate monolithic design are enormous.
The reason for my work being aborted on the FreeBSD SMP MONOLITHIC kernel wasn't that I couldn't make a FreeBSD SMP monolithic kernel work very, very well. The resulting kernel design would have been unmaintainable. I decided (when it was my place to decide a LONG time ago) that a monolthic SMP kernel (other than the current stopgap) didn't provide the quality that the FreeBSD name demands.
I am currently making really good and effective progress on my video compression (data reduction) software, and I might be able to do kernel hacking (actually redesign) in the near future. I have no need for employment anymore to make money, so my time is fully my own.
The last few years has been frustrating, but at least I worked with some tremendously nice people. I now have a situation that is very close to what it used to be when I first started working on FreeBSD!!! (I doubt that I'll be directly involved in the project because of disagreements that I had about the technical direction of the kernel, and marketing disagreements (with the associated burnt bridges :-(()).
I am going to be lurking much more than I have in the last 2yrs anyway :-). I just looked that the FreeBSD mailing lists a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a few years!!!
--
John | Never try to teach a pig to sing,
dyson@iquest.net | it makes one look stupid
| and it irritates the pig.