"You cannot be a tax-exempt charity without being a corporation. The FSF is a corporation. "
Really? This is not true in the UK which is where I am from, so I guess that this is a localised difference in law. It is certainly not the case in the UK that a charity has shareholders, rather they have trustees who are actually legally responsible for the activities of the charity (unlike shareholders for a company).
"i think that when a company sells its assets and merges with another company, especially when it changes its name and management, that company ceases to exist."
Well of course this depends on what notion you use to define a companies individuality. At the present time there seems to be a fad for companies to change their names left right and centre, even thougth the company is the same.
I don't really have any clear idea about how you would define a company as an individual entity, any more than you can define a political party as an individual entity so ultimately I guess the question as to which is more stable is unanswerable.
To be honest I am not sure how relevant it is. If you imagine a dictatorship for instance, is an environment where the dictatorship is deposed regularly necessarily better than a single long standing dictatorship. Surely it is the dictatorship itself that is bad, not the particular incumbent. I feel pretty much the same about governments and corporations. The fact the decisions affecting the many are in the hands of the few is what is wrong. Which few is a subsidiary issue to me anyway.
"The reason that states are more stable than companies is that they keep large numbers of armed men around"
Again I can not see this. Firstly its dependant on the state. The Swiss are the best example where the population holds many of the arms rather than the state per se.
Secondly in many cases the corporations do hold powers akin to those of the state. We know for instance from the MacLibel case in Britian that MacDonalds maintain what is essentially a secret police force to spy of those opposed to their activities. Henry Ford also did the same thing in his factories.
And finally the line between the state and the corporations is (and always has been) thin. In my country for instance the printers strike 15 years ago showed the police being used directly for the good of News International. A more recent, and international example would be the activities in Somalia, and Indonesia of the US and Australian military forces, essentially to secure the positions of their oil companies. In short I think that corporations do have access to armed forces.
Don't get me wrong here. I can see the appeal of some of the libertarian view point, the notion of individual freedoms for instance, but I can not see how these notions grow into an acceptance of the free market as more important than democratic structures.
Phil
Re:Twenty Points To Whomever Finds DeCSS in DNA
on
Bioinformatics
·
· Score: 1
"what the odds are of finding one of these sequences in the billions of combinations "
Its not that hard to work out surely. The DeCSS code is about 500 bytes. Each byte could be one of 256 characters. Therefore the odds of discovering the sequence at random is 256 to the power 500. Or 2 the power 4000. Or 4 to the power 500, which is about 10 to the power 200. In other words to have a 50% chance of finding the sequence you would want 10 to the 200 base pairs of sequence. We currently have something like 10 to the 10 bps.
"Maybe because corporations have a natural lifecycle that is shorter than most polities. "
Is this really the case? They might change their names regularly. Take a company like Astra-Zeneca. The latter half can trace its routes back to ICI, which in turn can trace its routes back to Victorian times.
"The FSF's attack on Microsoft's business model using the GPL is just one variant of standard corporate warfare"
But the FSF is not a corporation though is it, so this hardly demonstrates the good working of the free market. In fact it demonstrates the limits of the free market, and the strength of the right to operate outside of this, both by protest, and by example. In short the FSF is an example of democracy in action, not the free market.
"And *that* is why libertarians tend to be more anti-government than anti-corporate. "
I still don't understand this. If states are more stable than corporations then this is probably only due to their size. Now okay in the US the government is enormous. But in most of the world the size of the corporations outstrips that of the governments. Perhaps this is the reason why libertarianism seems to be such as US phenomena? It still confuses me though, as the actions of corporations seem as much part of the problem as governments, if not more so. It seems like asking one dictator to protect you against another.
"Wrong. Corporations are ultimately accountable to the consumer. "
A totalitarian dictatorship is ultimately accountable to its population, because if the population enters into a revolution the dictator will get spitted.
Of course this is true but its not terribly helpful. Corporations are directly accountable only to their share holders, and NOT to their consumers. Their consumers may be involved in the system, but this is not the same things as accountability.
"A corporation must consider the effects on public health because they'll be held responsible for it."
Held responsible for it by whom precisely? Not the government surely? And how will we know what the effects on public health are? Surely not from government sponsered research?
Its possible that market forces have their uses, and its certain that the governments that we have are a lot less than they could, and should be, but for the life of me I can not understand the gleeful joy which libertarians show when they tell us why a corporate oligarchy is so much better than a democracy.
"Go look at the page, look at his designs, look at the consideration he's put into this and come back
and tell me its not an invention. It is. "
It is indeed an invention and a fairly cute one if you ask me.
Of course the problem is here that this is not what the patent covers. The basic idea is okay of course, but what makes his idea much better than this is the research and development that he has done on top of it. He has a working prototype.
The thing is though is that the patenting process does not reward this R&D at all. Its a completely orthogonal issue. Its possible to have a patent with little or not R&D, or even when someone else has done the R&D (take a look at the gene patents if you do not believe me!). Its also possible to patent something when you have no working prototype (or never could have as many patents have been passed on impossible technologies).
I agree with you that this guy deserves recognition for the work that he has done, which I think appears good. It may be that in this case the patent system will even enable him to get this recognition. This does not however change the essential point that the patent system is a square peg for a round hole.
Phil
"The more conventional wisdom includes noting that the interface should be visible. "
I wonder how this work when you are attempting to make GUI's accesible. Its very hard to provide this sort of utility for visually impared people, as speech synthesis only comes one bit at a time. You can not listen in parallel.
"That is one of the downsides of the otherwise efficient command line interface"
"The same must go for software piracy and other illegal activities online. When the risk of being caught is increased, crime will decline."
I think that there are three problems with this notion. The first is that of defining what should and should not be illegal. It is very easy to pass draconian laws. Laws should be there when there is an overriding reason for them, and not otherwise. Many of the drugs laws are examples of where this has not happened. And in the past the laws against homosexuality, against pregancy outside marriage and so on are good examples of unjust laws. Currently the notions that we have of software "piracy" and intellectual property theft are other examples. The law here is in rapid flux and seems to becoming more and more restrictive.
The second problem is that the powers that the police have to investigate crime need to be curtailed so that they do not limit the freedoms of the of those who are not commiting crime. I would for instance object to the police having the right of access to my house and home to check that I was not commiting a crime. They have to have reasonable evidence of a crime in the first place. Good examples of where this notion has been flouted are with the stop and search laws in Britian. The police used these regularly, with an enourmous bias towards searching people who were black. This caused so much tension and distrust that policing became harder, not easier. And eventually the sitation exploded in riots, and several deaths.
The final point is that we can not assume that the security forces are necessarily honest and trustworthy. We must be able to check that they are trustworth. Providing access to this massive amount of information would be very tempting for organised criminals. It is not unknown these organisations to buy members of the security forces.
These new powers seem very worrying to me, and I suspect bad things will come of them.
"You can bet that these organisations will be raising a stink, because it's their "freedom" that allows them to get away with such criminal activities."
Freedom is a simple enough concept. People have to be free to disagree with what you think. Simply describing someone as a terrorist does not make them so. Simply because someone disagrees with the currently prevailing neoliberal agenda does not make them a terrorist.
Its very easy for governments to pass ever more draconian laws to protect "law and order". When they do these laws will get abused (take for instance the previous article about scientologists). Organisations like statewatch are no doubt scared of seeing these abuses in the future because they have seen them again and again in the past.
"The article harps on and on about how these quotes were taken out of context, yet isn't it the job of the defendant's lawyer to give context to those quotes"
It sounds to me like he has fallen foul of some of the terrorism laws. I can't say for certain about the US, but in the UK all sorts of fairly hideous laws have been passed in the name of preventing terrorism. Indeed the last law that got passed defines a terrorist as anyone whose actions are intend to have politcal effect, and whose actions might cause violence, or finance damage. In practice this means that if you do something (like hold a peaceful protest) which is liable to result in the police baton charging you, then you are a terrorist. Similarly if you for instance campaign against industries using third world sweatshops, and you actually have an impact on the business, then you are a terrorist.
Of course all along the civil rights movements have warned that giving such large powers to the state are potentially dangerous. I think here we see an example. Any law which prevents threats of violence, but which neglects to cater for sarcasm, or humour is a deeply flawed law.
I suspect that this is the reason that the context was not allowed as defence. If humour is no defence under the law then the prosecution would simply argue that presenting context is irrelevant.
In other words those of you from the US should be ironically grateful to the Church of Scientology. Once again by their actions they have uncovered a dangerous and damaging flaw in the law, and shown how rigourously we have to be in ensuring that are fundamental freedoms are not curbed.
Curious. The problem is that there were multiple parties represented in the Soviets after the February revolution, which makes it difficult to see how "they" could have put "loyal party members". Loyal to whom?
This state pretty much lasted until the Kornilov putsch, which failed miserably. Shortly afterwards the Bolsheviks gained control of the soviets, at least in part because the Kerensky government reintroduced the death penality for those fighting on the front (Russia was still engaged in WW1 at this stage). Shortly after this the second revolution took place.
The Soviets went through a number of different changes after that time, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing in power, and eventually ending up as the Stalinist parody that they became.
I am not sure where you get the stuff about inflation of wages and benefits from. You will remember that at the time Russia had just been (and was still going through) the disaster of WW1, which had cost millions of lifes taking massive numbers of people off the land resulting in large scale starvation and famine. This was followed up afterwards with the activities of the white army. I think drawing a clear line as you seem to have done between inflation and the activities of the soviets is really somewhat nieve. What appears to have been the case both in Russia and in the Paris commune was that considering the terrible circumstances, and the presence of large hostile armies, both societies managed to function pretty well.
I accept that the history is highly complex and open to lots of interpretation of course, but my interpretation is that there were many many positive things about both of these periods, and that we have much to learn today from what happened during those times.
"you get promoted to the next level of The Business when your peers agree that they want you leading them. "
Yes very novel. Workers councils in short. Pioneered during the February and October Russian Revolutions, and before that for the two months of the Paris commune.
"While I agree that the world ain't no 6k years old, what reasons can you possibly have for the disillusionment of religious people? "
I think that there are two main problems with the creationist agenda. I agree with you that there is much in religion, including Christianity which is valuable and worth preserving. Sadly it seems to me that those bits which are worth preserving are not those bits which are typified by the creationist viewpoint.
The second problem is that christianity is by definition an evangelic religion. Now I am a professional biologist. I don't ask anyone to believe what I say. Take it or leave it is my opinion. This is sadly not reciprocated. The number of times that I have been attacked for suggesting a Darwinian explanation for some phenomena is untrue. Of course I have a choice in this matter. I can just restrict myself to non US boards (which is the only developed country with a strong creationist movement). However many of my colleagues work in the US and get rather tired of the whole thing. Under these circumstance a desire to disillusion (or disabuse) people of creationist notions seem understandable.
"but since so much down-in-the-trenches bioinformatics involves sorting, manipulating and processing text strings of DNA"
The reasons that perl is so prevelant is that by and large the bioinformatics community has screwed up their data representation. The reason for this is simple. We have the biggest legacy problem in the world. The amount of data has expanded beyond all recognition. We use techniques which were knocked together to represent hundreds of sequences to represent millions.
The end result of this is that we spend vast amounts of time chopping and changing text formats, which is an absurd way of spending time. Of course perl is great for this, which was why it got used so much. Which leads to the second problem. Many bioinformaticists are converted biologists (myself included). The end result of this is that we are often not terribly good programmers, and have a perhaps greater tendancy to stick with the langauge that we know than we might otherwise do.
The fact that we are using perl for relatively large projects is really a admission of failure on our half rather than the strength of perl!
"This would only be possible if it is demonstrated that a substantial number of errors have been duplicated (ie. spelling errors). "
I don't think that even this would suffice. The data in CDDB is submitted freely by people from outside. Gracenote would have to prove that the data has been taken directly from their database and entered into freedb. How could they distinguish between this for instance and data which had been submitted to both freedb and Gracenote?
"I wonder what grounds they have for making this a copyright case"
I believe that under US law the database itself can be considered intellectual property even when the data in the database is not. As Gracenote is unlikely to have signed copyright waivers from the original authors of their data (that is the people who submitted the data) this must be what they are pursing.
I think that this is the key to the whole thing. Gracenote are pursuing this against Roxie because the latter are in the US. I don't know where freedb is, but the mirrors are definately not all in the US. Under other legal systems I don't think that Gracenote would have a leg to stand on against freedb, even though if they have stolen data from Gracenote they would be the logical people against which to pursue a claim.
"lets face it the Apollo moon landing was a huge publicity generator."
Thats all the Apollo moon landing was. The US spent something like 5% of its GDP for 10 years simply because it was embarrassed that the USSR beat it into space unmanned, with an animal, with a man, and for a complete orbit. I'll admit that the space race was a little less insane than the arms race though.
"But, at some point, humans are going to attempt to colonize another planet, Mars being the most likely. "
Again the question why rears it's head. What is the point in going to Mars and living there? I realise that the colonisation myth is deeply embedded in the US psyche, but it does not make sense. There was a point in colonising the America's. There was lots of gold, there was lots of space, animals to eat, and land. This is just not true with Mars. It mean there are various deserts around the world, which people could choose to live in, but don't.
I think its feasible that at some stage we might open mines on Mars, although I don't know what mineral wealth we would find there. It would have to be incredibly valuable weight for weight though to make it economically worthwhile.
"Nuclear power has thousands of reactor-years of experience that provides such real world data."
The argument was though that reactors nowadays are "much safer" than they were in the past. Hence the thousands of reactor years that you suggest are not all directly relevant. Incidentally the number of reactors is also a moot point. Even given a 1 in 10^6 chance of catastrophic failure if there are thousands of reactors we at a 1% chance of failure per year.
"Fortunately, the industry has learned from it's mistakes as numerous safety improvements have been made to existing reactors."
I think that its often hard to be sure about this as the industry (like many others) is not open to public scrutiny. We know for instance from data released in the UK under the 30 year rule, that many early accidents and mistakes were not made public and whitewashed over. And of course other industries have long histories of deliberating covering up and falsifying scientific evidence where is bad for their profit lines.
Of course I suspect that it is likely that modern reactors are safer than those in the past (it would be a poor industry which made things less safe). I do wonder though if the massive investments that have been made would have been better put into other alternative forms of energy production, and better still ways of energy conservation.
"Pebble Bed reactor that has been generating so much interest is essentially incapable of melting down due to a variety of physical feedback effects"
Its clear that with any dangerous system that requires active efforts to ensure safe shut down there are serious worries. It is good to know that the nuclear industry is finally learning what the word "failsafe" actually means. Meltdown is of course the nightmare scenario, but by no means the only worry. Chernobyl if I am not mistaken did not meltdown for instance, the explosion being caused by chemical means (hydrogen I think!). And of course the standard worries about disposal of fuel, decontamination, and decommisioning will always be there.
Of course the biggest question that has not got answered here is why? Is there actually any purpose to sending a man to mars?
The usual reason for using a human is that they can react quickly on their own initiative. Now by and large there is very little reason for having this. Mars has been there for billions of years. If you choose to explore it with a robot which has a ten hour response time, then this is fine. The robot can move forward a bit. Think about things. Stop, get more orders. Nothing bad is going to happen whilst its waiting. And of course you can keep the robot going for ages, whilst humans are on a very very limited time span.
Ultimately the conclusion that I have to draw from this is that its a big public relations exercise for NASA. Fair enough, but what an expensive way to increase "national pride". Why not do something meaningful like say, free medical care for the population instead?
Phil
Re:Unions are unnecessary in IT
on
IT Unions?
·
· Score: 2
"But in most software shops, the means of production are the neurons in the head of each IT worker. "
You are confused I am afraid. In both the steel industry and the software industry the workers ARE the means of production. The Marxist point of view is that the workers should benefit from the fruits of the labour. In reality the person who owns the company benefits from other peoples labour.
The IT industry fails squarely into what in the UK we call someone mistakenly the "middle classes". I guess from a Marxist point of view you could use the term "petty bourgeoise" although its not quite the same thing. Whatever you call it its a class of people who though they are essentially working class, think that they are not. This class was created deliberately in the last century due to the demands of the increasing enfranchisment of the population.
Now what is the purpose of the union in this set up? Collective bargaining often makes a lot of sense. The problem would be however that an IT union would probably be split and confused. Is it a working class union or a professional body. This is the case with the union that I am a member of. As many of its members feel "middle class", it spends a large amount of its time pretending to be a professional body. Its pretty ineffective as a result.
"it's too bad for the union organizer that I no longer need him as a middleman. "
Of course the union organiser should generally be a part of the working class population that the union represents. The problem is that the traditional unions have been around for a long time now. They tend to have lost their original revoluationary roots, and have become incorporated as part of the capitalist system. I say a union official laying into a friend of mine because he was being "too political" during a demonstration. Rather funny to be honest. The modern day union organiser that you are talking about is as a result of the corruption of the ideal by the ruling class though, rather than being indicative of the idea of unionisation in the first place.
Actually this is country dependant. Most of my local power stations are gas powered.
"No, I mean that knowledgable people don't really worry about waste disposal anymore. "
Again I think this is incorrect. The furore in Germany recently shows this. One interesting statistic is that in the region they are trying to dump the waste 2/3 of the population have criminal convictions for trying to stop the process.
"We can demonstrate that potential disposal sites have not be breached with water for millions of years. "
Which says relatively little about the next millions years, particularly not after you have dug a big hole in the site.
"Quite untrue. It is far cheaper than photovoltaic, for example. "
Yes and it's also cheaper than powering your house from a bicycle dynamo. Photovoltaic cells are the most expensive form of solar power, so a relatively bad example.
"The "environmental" movement views a chronic shortage of power "
Large scale usage of power always has an impact on the environment. The agenda that the environmental movement has is ensuring that our children actual have a pleasant environment and do not have to swim to go down the shops. The power generation industries agenda is that we use more power for everything.
"I fully divulge that I have no formal training, but rather cite my sources of knowledge in a free and open manner. "
Your sources are impossible to verify, and therefore have very little bearing on the matter. I can only make judgements based on the quality of the argument that I see from you, and vice versa.
"I'm quite certain myself that a Chernobyl type event is not possible in the USA. "
I tend to duck when people say things are "not possible". Failure is always possible. A fast breeder reactor for instance uses tons of radioactive molten sodium. The risks if this hits the water table are clear. And there is always a risk.
"If we are not talking about a Chernobyl type event, and only the remote possibility of releasing small amounts of low-level radioactive material into the environment then I think it is a reasonable risk for society to bear."
If we are talking about releasing small amounts of low level radioactive material into the environment, then its hardly a remote possibility. We know for a fact that it happens, and does so regularly. Take a look at the safety record of Sellafield for instance, which has accidentally released radioactive material quite a few times. This is of course ignoring the radioactive material that it deliberately pumps into the Irish sea every day.
Yes I know that this is not the US, but rather the UK. I don't know about US reactors but I doubt that they are substantially better.
And of course my final point is that if catastrophic failure does occur it will be society that has to pick up the pieces, not those people who currently profit from the nuclear industry. Not a terribly fair deal really.
"The reason the Nuclear industry starts spouting off numbers like 1 in 10^6 is because that's how they designed the reactors in the first place"
Yes. And I am arguing that these figures are fairly suspect. They tend to be based on the an assessment of failures occuring that are known about. They do not cover the risk on unknown failures. In short they are fairly meaningless.
It differs from something like a computer system where you can give a uptime estimates on 99.999% for instance. You can test these things to failure, and form statistics based on actual usage. Clearly you can not do this with a nuclear power plant.
"Unions members are lazier workers who are not as bright as skilled/white collar workers."
Thats very kind of you to say so. I never felt that my membership of a union required me to be lazy or unintelligent.
"they probably got some benefit from unions in the
past."
I have got lots of benefits from unions. If you want to stretch it back in history these would include the right to vote, the right to free speech. They would include pension rights, the health and safety executive, protection against unfair dismissal, the right to representation on pay bargaining, the right to paid holidays.
"Unions are just a symptom of a desire to socialize everything "
Gods above. McCarthy did a really good job on you lot didn't he.
"These are just common examples. Sure there are exception to everything."
I don't think that you gave any examples. What you said was to my mind confused, poorly worded, and most wrong. In some cases your statements (about "lifespan" for instance) were fairly meaningless. Some were wrong. Maybe you think that pointing out that two germline cells are often required to produce one organism is picky, but I consider it to be important.
"It is just an indication that you are not very clever "
I don't think it was an indication of very much, other than my willingness to use a cheap shot. As you ended your note with a cheap shot also I conclude that you likewise willing to use cheap shots.
Its actually very hard to make this judgement, given that our knowledge of the impact of low level radiation is relatively poor.
"actually releasing less radiation than a coal plant. "
Perhaps. Coal power plants are not the greatest example of a clean technology either, and I don't think that I suggested they were.
"The problem of "what to do with the waste" is purely political."
By which you mean that you do not agree with those people who suggest that this is a real problem. You are entitled to your opinion.
"There are many solutions that put it out of harms way for thousands of years. "
How do you know? Given that we have not been able to validate these methods for anything like that length, I tend to worry about this. Something like the "1 in 10 billion" risk assessments that nuclear industry comes out with.
"Nuclear power is not one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity. [...] Once in operation, it is one of the cheaper ways"
Its expensive to start, and very expensive to finish. The total cost is very high. We can only agree to differ about this cost but all of the stats that I have seen suggest that it is the most expensive form of the power generation. And this includes the stats from the nuclear industry.
"ENIAC tells us about the capabilities of modern computers. "
ENIAC told us many things about computers which are still true today. Its very easy to place faith in new technology. But new technology does not necessarily change the fundamental problems that exist with it. Nuclear power has some of those fundamental problems. So do other forms of power generation ("what happens when the oil runs out?" for instance). To deny these problems is non sensical to my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? This is not true in the UK which is where I am from, so I guess that this is a localised difference in law. It is certainly not the case in the UK that a charity has shareholders, rather they have trustees who are actually legally responsible for the activities of the charity (unlike shareholders for a company).
"i think that when a company sells its assets and merges with another company, especially when it changes its name and management, that company ceases to exist."
Well of course this depends on what notion you use to define a companies individuality. At the present time there seems to be a fad for companies to change their names left right and centre, even thougth the company is the same.
I don't really have any clear idea about how you would define a company as an individual entity, any more than you can define a political party as an individual entity so ultimately I guess the question as to which is more stable is unanswerable.
To be honest I am not sure how relevant it is. If you imagine a dictatorship for instance, is an environment where the dictatorship is deposed regularly necessarily better than a single long standing dictatorship. Surely it is the dictatorship itself that is bad, not the particular incumbent. I feel pretty much the same about governments and corporations. The fact the decisions affecting the many are in the hands of the few is what is wrong. Which few is a subsidiary issue to me anyway.
"The reason that states are more stable than companies is that they keep large numbers of armed men around"
Again I can not see this. Firstly its dependant on the state. The Swiss are the best example where the population holds many of the arms rather than the state per se.
Secondly in many cases the corporations do hold powers akin to those of the state. We know for instance from the MacLibel case in Britian that MacDonalds maintain what is essentially a secret police force to spy of those opposed to their activities. Henry Ford also did the same thing in his factories.
And finally the line between the state and the corporations is (and always has been) thin. In my country for instance the printers strike 15 years ago showed the police being used directly for the good of News International. A more recent, and international example would be the activities in Somalia, and Indonesia of the US and Australian military forces, essentially to secure the positions of their oil companies. In short I think that corporations do have access to armed forces.
Don't get me wrong here. I can see the appeal of some of the libertarian view point, the notion of individual freedoms for instance, but I can not see how these notions grow into an acceptance of the free market as more important than democratic structures.
Phil
Its not that hard to work out surely. The DeCSS code is about 500 bytes. Each byte could be one of 256 characters. Therefore the odds of discovering the sequence at random is 256 to the power 500. Or 2 the power 4000. Or 4 to the power 500, which is about 10 to the power 200. In other words to have a 50% chance of finding the sequence you would want 10 to the 200 base pairs of sequence. We currently have something like 10 to the 10 bps.
In summary. I wouldn't bet on it.
Phil
Is this really the case? They might change their names regularly. Take a company like Astra-Zeneca. The latter half can trace its routes back to ICI, which in turn can trace its routes back to Victorian times.
"The FSF's attack on Microsoft's business model using the GPL is just one variant of standard corporate warfare"
But the FSF is not a corporation though is it, so this hardly demonstrates the good working of the free market. In fact it demonstrates the limits of the free market, and the strength of the right to operate outside of this, both by protest, and by example. In short the FSF is an example of democracy in action, not the free market.
"And *that* is why libertarians tend to be more anti-government than anti-corporate. "
I still don't understand this. If states are more stable than corporations then this is probably only due to their size. Now okay in the US the government is enormous. But in most of the world the size of the corporations outstrips that of the governments. Perhaps this is the reason why libertarianism seems to be such as US phenomena? It still confuses me though, as the actions of corporations seem as much part of the problem as governments, if not more so. It seems like asking one dictator to protect you against another.
Phil
A totalitarian dictatorship is ultimately accountable to its population, because if the population enters into a revolution the dictator will get spitted.
Of course this is true but its not terribly helpful. Corporations are directly accountable only to their share holders, and NOT to their consumers. Their consumers may be involved in the system, but this is not the same things as accountability.
"A corporation must consider the effects on public health because they'll be held responsible for it."
Held responsible for it by whom precisely? Not the government surely? And how will we know what the effects on public health are? Surely not from government sponsered research?
Its possible that market forces have their uses, and its certain that the governments that we have are a lot less than they could, and should be, but for the life of me I can not understand the gleeful joy which libertarians show when they tell us why a corporate oligarchy is so much better than a democracy.
Phil
It is indeed an invention and a fairly cute one if you ask me.
Of course the problem is here that this is not what the patent covers. The basic idea is okay of course, but what makes his idea much better than this is the research and development that he has done on top of it. He has a working prototype.
The thing is though is that the patenting process does not reward this R&D at all. Its a completely orthogonal issue. Its possible to have a patent with little or not R&D, or even when someone else has done the R&D (take a look at the gene patents if you do not believe me!). Its also possible to patent something when you have no working prototype (or never could have as many patents have been passed on impossible technologies).
I agree with you that this guy deserves recognition for the work that he has done, which I think appears good. It may be that in this case the patent system will even enable him to get this recognition. This does not however change the essential point that the patent system is a square peg for a round hole. Phil
I wonder how this work when you are attempting to make GUI's accesible. Its very hard to provide this sort of utility for visually impared people, as speech synthesis only comes one bit at a time. You can not listen in parallel.
"That is one of the downsides of the otherwise efficient command line interface"
Unless you hit tab of course.
Phil
I think that there are three problems with this notion. The first is that of defining what should and should not be illegal. It is very easy to pass draconian laws. Laws should be there when there is an overriding reason for them, and not otherwise. Many of the drugs laws are examples of where this has not happened. And in the past the laws against homosexuality, against pregancy outside marriage and so on are good examples of unjust laws. Currently the notions that we have of software "piracy" and intellectual property theft are other examples. The law here is in rapid flux and seems to becoming more and more restrictive.
The second problem is that the powers that the police have to investigate crime need to be curtailed so that they do not limit the freedoms of the of those who are not commiting crime. I would for instance object to the police having the right of access to my house and home to check that I was not commiting a crime. They have to have reasonable evidence of a crime in the first place. Good examples of where this notion has been flouted are with the stop and search laws in Britian. The police used these regularly, with an enourmous bias towards searching people who were black. This caused so much tension and distrust that policing became harder, not easier. And eventually the sitation exploded in riots, and several deaths.
The final point is that we can not assume that the security forces are necessarily honest and trustworthy. We must be able to check that they are trustworth. Providing access to this massive amount of information would be very tempting for organised criminals. It is not unknown these organisations to buy members of the security forces.
These new powers seem very worrying to me, and I suspect bad things will come of them.
Phil
Freedom is a simple enough concept. People have to be free to disagree with what you think. Simply describing someone as a terrorist does not make them so. Simply because someone disagrees with the currently prevailing neoliberal agenda does not make them a terrorist.
Its very easy for governments to pass ever more draconian laws to protect "law and order". When they do these laws will get abused (take for instance the previous article about scientologists). Organisations like statewatch are no doubt scared of seeing these abuses in the future because they have seen them again and again in the past.
Phil
It sounds to me like he has fallen foul of some of the terrorism laws. I can't say for certain about the US, but in the UK all sorts of fairly hideous laws have been passed in the name of preventing terrorism. Indeed the last law that got passed defines a terrorist as anyone whose actions are intend to have politcal effect, and whose actions might cause violence, or finance damage. In practice this means that if you do something (like hold a peaceful protest) which is liable to result in the police baton charging you, then you are a terrorist. Similarly if you for instance campaign against industries using third world sweatshops, and you actually have an impact on the business, then you are a terrorist.
Of course all along the civil rights movements have warned that giving such large powers to the state are potentially dangerous. I think here we see an example. Any law which prevents threats of violence, but which neglects to cater for sarcasm, or humour is a deeply flawed law.
I suspect that this is the reason that the context was not allowed as defence. If humour is no defence under the law then the prosecution would simply argue that presenting context is irrelevant.
In other words those of you from the US should be ironically grateful to the Church of Scientology. Once again by their actions they have uncovered a dangerous and damaging flaw in the law, and shown how rigourously we have to be in ensuring that are fundamental freedoms are not curbed.
Phil
This state pretty much lasted until the Kornilov putsch, which failed miserably. Shortly afterwards the Bolsheviks gained control of the soviets, at least in part because the Kerensky government reintroduced the death penality for those fighting on the front (Russia was still engaged in WW1 at this stage). Shortly after this the second revolution took place.
The Soviets went through a number of different changes after that time, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing in power, and eventually ending up as the Stalinist parody that they became.
I am not sure where you get the stuff about inflation of wages and benefits from. You will remember that at the time Russia had just been (and was still going through) the disaster of WW1, which had cost millions of lifes taking massive numbers of people off the land resulting in large scale starvation and famine. This was followed up afterwards with the activities of the white army. I think drawing a clear line as you seem to have done between inflation and the activities of the soviets is really somewhat nieve. What appears to have been the case both in Russia and in the Paris commune was that considering the terrible circumstances, and the presence of large hostile armies, both societies managed to function pretty well.
I accept that the history is highly complex and open to lots of interpretation of course, but my interpretation is that there were many many positive things about both of these periods, and that we have much to learn today from what happened during those times.
Phil
Inside a company hierarchy? What a truly revolutionary idea!
Phil
Yes very novel. Workers councils in short. Pioneered during the February and October Russian Revolutions, and before that for the two months of the Paris commune.
Worked pretty well by all accounts.
Phil
I think that there are two main problems with the creationist agenda. I agree with you that there is much in religion, including Christianity which is valuable and worth preserving. Sadly it seems to me that those bits which are worth preserving are not those bits which are typified by the creationist viewpoint.
The second problem is that christianity is by definition an evangelic religion. Now I am a professional biologist. I don't ask anyone to believe what I say. Take it or leave it is my opinion. This is sadly not reciprocated. The number of times that I have been attacked for suggesting a Darwinian explanation for some phenomena is untrue. Of course I have a choice in this matter. I can just restrict myself to non US boards (which is the only developed country with a strong creationist movement). However many of my colleagues work in the US and get rather tired of the whole thing. Under these circumstance a desire to disillusion (or disabuse) people of creationist notions seem understandable.
Phil
The reasons that perl is so prevelant is that by and large the bioinformatics community has screwed up their data representation. The reason for this is simple. We have the biggest legacy problem in the world. The amount of data has expanded beyond all recognition. We use techniques which were knocked together to represent hundreds of sequences to represent millions.
The end result of this is that we spend vast amounts of time chopping and changing text formats, which is an absurd way of spending time. Of course perl is great for this, which was why it got used so much. Which leads to the second problem. Many bioinformaticists are converted biologists (myself included). The end result of this is that we are often not terribly good programmers, and have a perhaps greater tendancy to stick with the langauge that we know than we might otherwise do.
The fact that we are using perl for relatively large projects is really a admission of failure on our half rather than the strength of perl!
Phil
I don't think that even this would suffice. The data in CDDB is submitted freely by people from outside. Gracenote would have to prove that the data has been taken directly from their database and entered into freedb. How could they distinguish between this for instance and data which had been submitted to both freedb and Gracenote?
"I wonder what grounds they have for making this a copyright case"
I believe that under US law the database itself can be considered intellectual property even when the data in the database is not. As Gracenote is unlikely to have signed copyright waivers from the original authors of their data (that is the people who submitted the data) this must be what they are pursing.
I think that this is the key to the whole thing. Gracenote are pursuing this against Roxie because the latter are in the US. I don't know where freedb is, but the mirrors are definately not all in the US. Under other legal systems I don't think that Gracenote would have a leg to stand on against freedb, even though if they have stolen data from Gracenote they would be the logical people against which to pursue a claim.
Phil
Thats all the Apollo moon landing was. The US spent something like 5% of its GDP for 10 years simply because it was embarrassed that the USSR beat it into space unmanned, with an animal, with a man, and for a complete orbit. I'll admit that the space race was a little less insane than the arms race though.
"But, at some point, humans are going to attempt to colonize another planet, Mars being the most likely. "
Again the question why rears it's head. What is the point in going to Mars and living there? I realise that the colonisation myth is deeply embedded in the US psyche, but it does not make sense. There was a point in colonising the America's. There was lots of gold, there was lots of space, animals to eat, and land. This is just not true with Mars. It mean there are various deserts around the world, which people could choose to live in, but don't.
I think its feasible that at some stage we might open mines on Mars, although I don't know what mineral wealth we would find there. It would have to be incredibly valuable weight for weight though to make it economically worthwhile.
I really can't see it happening.
Phil
The argument was though that reactors nowadays are "much safer" than they were in the past. Hence the thousands of reactor years that you suggest are not all directly relevant. Incidentally the number of reactors is also a moot point. Even given a 1 in 10^6 chance of catastrophic failure if there are thousands of reactors we at a 1% chance of failure per year.
"Fortunately, the industry has learned from it's mistakes as numerous safety improvements have been made to existing reactors."
I think that its often hard to be sure about this as the industry (like many others) is not open to public scrutiny. We know for instance from data released in the UK under the 30 year rule, that many early accidents and mistakes were not made public and whitewashed over. And of course other industries have long histories of deliberating covering up and falsifying scientific evidence where is bad for their profit lines.
Of course I suspect that it is likely that modern reactors are safer than those in the past (it would be a poor industry which made things less safe). I do wonder though if the massive investments that have been made would have been better put into other alternative forms of energy production, and better still ways of energy conservation.
"Pebble Bed reactor that has been generating so much interest is essentially incapable of melting down due to a variety of physical feedback effects"
Its clear that with any dangerous system that requires active efforts to ensure safe shut down there are serious worries. It is good to know that the nuclear industry is finally learning what the word "failsafe" actually means. Meltdown is of course the nightmare scenario, but by no means the only worry. Chernobyl if I am not mistaken did not meltdown for instance, the explosion being caused by chemical means (hydrogen I think!). And of course the standard worries about disposal of fuel, decontamination, and decommisioning will always be there.
Phil
The usual reason for using a human is that they can react quickly on their own initiative. Now by and large there is very little reason for having this. Mars has been there for billions of years. If you choose to explore it with a robot which has a ten hour response time, then this is fine. The robot can move forward a bit. Think about things. Stop, get more orders. Nothing bad is going to happen whilst its waiting. And of course you can keep the robot going for ages, whilst humans are on a very very limited time span.
Ultimately the conclusion that I have to draw from this is that its a big public relations exercise for NASA. Fair enough, but what an expensive way to increase "national pride". Why not do something meaningful like say, free medical care for the population instead?
Phil
You are confused I am afraid. In both the steel industry and the software industry the workers ARE the means of production. The Marxist point of view is that the workers should benefit from the fruits of the labour. In reality the person who owns the company benefits from other peoples labour.
The IT industry fails squarely into what in the UK we call someone mistakenly the "middle classes". I guess from a Marxist point of view you could use the term "petty bourgeoise" although its not quite the same thing. Whatever you call it its a class of people who though they are essentially working class, think that they are not. This class was created deliberately in the last century due to the demands of the increasing enfranchisment of the population.
Now what is the purpose of the union in this set up? Collective bargaining often makes a lot of sense. The problem would be however that an IT union would probably be split and confused. Is it a working class union or a professional body. This is the case with the union that I am a member of. As many of its members feel "middle class", it spends a large amount of its time pretending to be a professional body. Its pretty ineffective as a result.
"it's too bad for the union organizer that I no longer need him as a middleman. "
Of course the union organiser should generally be a part of the working class population that the union represents. The problem is that the traditional unions have been around for a long time now. They tend to have lost their original revoluationary roots, and have become incorporated as part of the capitalist system. I say a union official laying into a friend of mine because he was being "too political" during a demonstration. Rather funny to be honest. The modern day union organiser that you are talking about is as a result of the corruption of the ideal by the ruling class though, rather than being indicative of the idea of unionisation in the first place.
Phil
Actually this is country dependant. Most of my local power stations are gas powered.
"No, I mean that knowledgable people don't really worry about waste disposal anymore. "
Again I think this is incorrect. The furore in Germany recently shows this. One interesting statistic is that in the region they are trying to dump the waste 2/3 of the population have criminal convictions for trying to stop the process.
"We can demonstrate that potential disposal sites have not be breached with water for millions of years. "
Which says relatively little about the next millions years, particularly not after you have dug a big hole in the site.
"Quite untrue. It is far cheaper than photovoltaic, for example. "
Yes and it's also cheaper than powering your house from a bicycle dynamo. Photovoltaic cells are the most expensive form of solar power, so a relatively bad example.
"The "environmental" movement views a chronic shortage of power "
Large scale usage of power always has an impact on the environment. The agenda that the environmental movement has is ensuring that our children actual have a pleasant environment and do not have to swim to go down the shops. The power generation industries agenda is that we use more power for everything.
Phil
Your sources are impossible to verify, and therefore have very little bearing on the matter. I can only make judgements based on the quality of the argument that I see from you, and vice versa.
"I'm quite certain myself that a Chernobyl type event is not possible in the USA. "
I tend to duck when people say things are "not possible". Failure is always possible. A fast breeder reactor for instance uses tons of radioactive molten sodium. The risks if this hits the water table are clear. And there is always a risk.
"If we are not talking about a Chernobyl type event, and only the remote possibility of releasing small amounts of low-level radioactive material into the environment then I think it is a reasonable risk for society to bear."
If we are talking about releasing small amounts of low level radioactive material into the environment, then its hardly a remote possibility. We know for a fact that it happens, and does so regularly. Take a look at the safety record of Sellafield for instance, which has accidentally released radioactive material quite a few times. This is of course ignoring the radioactive material that it deliberately pumps into the Irish sea every day.
Yes I know that this is not the US, but rather the UK. I don't know about US reactors but I doubt that they are substantially better.
And of course my final point is that if catastrophic failure does occur it will be society that has to pick up the pieces, not those people who currently profit from the nuclear industry. Not a terribly fair deal really.
Phil
Yes. And I am arguing that these figures are fairly suspect. They tend to be based on the an assessment of failures occuring that are known about. They do not cover the risk on unknown failures. In short they are fairly meaningless.
It differs from something like a computer system where you can give a uptime estimates on 99.999% for instance. You can test these things to failure, and form statistics based on actual usage. Clearly you can not do this with a nuclear power plant.
Phil
Thats very kind of you to say so. I never felt that my membership of a union required me to be lazy or unintelligent.
"they probably got some benefit from unions in the past."
I have got lots of benefits from unions. If you want to stretch it back in history these would include the right to vote, the right to free speech. They would include pension rights, the health and safety executive, protection against unfair dismissal, the right to representation on pay bargaining, the right to paid holidays.
"Unions are just a symptom of a desire to socialize everything "
Gods above. McCarthy did a really good job on you lot didn't he.
Phil
I don't think that you gave any examples. What you said was to my mind confused, poorly worded, and most wrong. In some cases your statements (about "lifespan" for instance) were fairly meaningless. Some were wrong. Maybe you think that pointing out that two germline cells are often required to produce one organism is picky, but I consider it to be important.
"It is just an indication that you are not very clever "
I don't think it was an indication of very much, other than my willingness to use a cheap shot. As you ended your note with a cheap shot also I conclude that you likewise willing to use cheap shots.
Phil
Its actually very hard to make this judgement, given that our knowledge of the impact of low level radiation is relatively poor.
"actually releasing less radiation than a coal plant. "
Perhaps. Coal power plants are not the greatest example of a clean technology either, and I don't think that I suggested they were.
"The problem of "what to do with the waste" is purely political."
By which you mean that you do not agree with those people who suggest that this is a real problem. You are entitled to your opinion.
"There are many solutions that put it out of harms way for thousands of years. "
How do you know? Given that we have not been able to validate these methods for anything like that length, I tend to worry about this. Something like the "1 in 10 billion" risk assessments that nuclear industry comes out with.
"Nuclear power is not one of the most expensive ways to produce electricity. [...] Once in operation, it is one of the cheaper ways"
Its expensive to start, and very expensive to finish. The total cost is very high. We can only agree to differ about this cost but all of the stats that I have seen suggest that it is the most expensive form of the power generation. And this includes the stats from the nuclear industry.
"ENIAC tells us about the capabilities of modern computers. "
ENIAC told us many things about computers which are still true today. Its very easy to place faith in new technology. But new technology does not necessarily change the fundamental problems that exist with it. Nuclear power has some of those fundamental problems. So do other forms of power generation ("what happens when the oil runs out?" for instance). To deny these problems is non sensical to my mind.
Phil Phil