The notion of an "intrinsically safe" reactor is naive in the extreme.
Not true. Although precisely what "intrinsically safe" means is somewhat a matter of definition, it is achievable to a large degree. In the case of nuclear reactors, "intrinsically safe" generally means that if anything malfunctions that the reaction shuts down by itself, without the need for human intervention, and without the need for engineered systems to make it shut down. In the case of the city wide district heating reactor, the whole thing was even built in an underground rock chamber below the water table level. Ground water, or river water, or even sea water could be allowed to flood the cavern to make sure it stays cooled.
Consider an example that you might find easier to understand. Electric lamps used in mines where there is an explosion hazard because of methane. Intrinsically safe electric lamps can be used if they have so little energy stored that they are incapable of generating a spark, even if short circuited. Intrinsic safety is not naive, it is an important engineering concept.
Irradiated reactor fuel would be a poor choice of targets for terrorists to hijack. It is not enriched nearly enough to make weapons grade material. When it is freshly irradiated in the reactor, it is so radioactive that a would-be thief would be dead within a few dozen paces after picking it up. Elaborate machinery is necessary to handle it in a way that doesn't immediately kill the handlers, thus creating difficult hurdles for hijackers to overcome.
Apartment building sized reactors (especially) would have to be protected from attempts to blow them up in place using conventional explosives. That terrorist threat, much more than malfunctions, I would guess to be the biggest risk.
Even a terrorist's bluff is a substantial risk. They might seize the building and threaten to cause a nuclear explosion, or a dirty bomb explosion; even if they really couldn't. Remember, for example, the psychological harm caused by the bogus claim by the feds (AEC) that a hydrogen bubble in the Three Mile Island reactor could make it explode. That bit of misinformation caused almost all of the actual damage to public health in that incident.
There were a number of building size reactor designs proposed in the 1980s.
I once worked for a company that designed an intrinsically safe urban reactor designed to make hot water. We had convinced the city of Helsinki to buy it and were within hours of signing the contract when the Chernobyl Reactor accident occurred. Helsinki would have used it as a district heating plant big enough to heat all the buildings in the city.
Nuclear reactors are much better at making hot water than they are at making electricity. Heating is a major consumer of energy in many locations. Therefore, replacing a fossil fuel heat source with a nuclear heat source is more beneficial to the environment than replacing an electric power generator. There are other applications, aluminum smelting for example, that need copious quantities of heat, not electricity per se.
Not to date myself, but boy that brings back memories. I started in this business in the mid 1960s a decade after this IBM disk. We used magnetic drums and head-per-track disks for storage. That makes the IBM unit with moving heads truly advanced for 1956. But what a dog it was at 600 ms seek time! Thats milliseconds guys, not microseconds. Six tenths of a second just to move the head.
The drum memories I used had one head per track, as did the head-per-track disks. In that case, seek time is zero (for head movement.) One need only wait for the latency time for the bytes you want to rotate under the head. Depending on rotation speed, latency could be as much as 5 to 15 milliseconds.
The amusing part, when I think back on it, was the way that the hardware design influenced the programming. Suppose you had a clause that looked like: IF X THEN A ELSE B ENDIF. To make your program run as fast as possible, you would arrange it so that the instructions for A and for B would reside on two different tracks at the same azimuthal angle, (right behind the instructions to evaluate IF X.) That way, no matter whether the branch evaluated true or false, one didn't have to wait for additional memory latency to read the next instruction.
We also didn't have room in RAM (core memory or registers at that time) to store data or calculated results. We had as few as 24 bytes of RAM. Thus, each data value also had to be assigned an address on the drum or disk. The location of that address relative to the code which accessed the value had a dramatic impact on program speed.
Therefore, to optimize programs for running speed, we spent more time devising optimum ways to store the code and data fragments on the drum or disk, than we did designing the functionality of the code. What language and OS did we use? No language, just program the instructions one bit at a time. No OS.
So what fancy apps did we do with this spaghetti software? We did real time control of power plants, both conventional and nuclear. We made flight simulators. We supported the Apollo project to send a man to the moon.
Despite the fact that the computers of those days were as much as 10,000 to 100,000 times slower than today's hardware, the real time applications were only 10 to 100 times slower and/or of lesser scope compared to today's apps. It was because of the extreme squeeze-blood-out-of-a-stone coding methods we used in those days.
For a really good story, get someone to write about how they streamed instructions sequences from earth to the Lunar Excursion Module for Apollo 11. Not streaming video, not music but streaming the code to execute. Buy the time one machine instruction would finish, the next one would be received and read to go. It was just-in-time delivery of the next instruction. That way, they needed no onboard mass storage of any kind. In my book, that was programming heroics that any slashdotter should appreciate.
Remember those computer fairs that used to come around? They suffered from the same problem that eventually got Comp-USA but they dropped out earlier.
I remember being amazed at the dramatic changes that the fairs and the computer stores had to make to stay alive. At first it was pretty much desktop PC hardware and accessories that was their bread and butter. Later, most of the shelf space for hardware was turned over to boxed software. Then, as people started buying software online, the boxed software offerings disappeared. Then, they had to turn to selling media, and finally, things like TV and audio systems to stay alive.
Today, there's little action in desktop machines. Everyone wants laptops and the laptop era seems about to roll over to the mobile device era.
What an amazing series of sea changes in the public buying preferences within a time span of 15 years or less. Each one of those changes would have seemed astounding in any other field. In high tech consumer digital stuff, it just keeps coming and coming.
Most businesses never survive even a single cycle of having to reinvent their business model. In the case of consumer electronics, it seems that if you can't reinvent yourself over and over again, you're toast. Like I said, I sure wouldn't want to be in their business.
I think that you forget that the whole point of encryption is paranoia. So PGP and GPG have been extensively audited; that only helps if I have reason to trust those auditors.
I repeat my point. Unless you have the time and the qualifications to personally audit, validate and verify any security claims, you have to trust someone else. It's not about technology, it's about trust.
It is impractical for just about any of us to audit the claimed security of any provider, public or private. You can't be sure that they really provide the safeguards they claim. Unless you're an encryption genius, you can't even examine open source code to verify that it is secure and doesn't have weaknesses.
I don't personally know the principle employees of Hushmail or of any other security service providers, nor do I personally know Phil Zimmerman or any other authors of the encryption software. For all I know, these companies and individuals could all be fronts for the NSA.
I also fail to see how other posters to this topic can claim that the technology is rock solid? How do they know? How do I know if they too are fronts for NSA?
So what am I left with. Nothing but trust. If I trust the provider, then their technology is irrelevant. If I don't trust them, then their technology is irrelevant. In this instance, Hushmail has proved that they are unworthy of trust.
There is no such thing as an "operating cycle" to change for a generator.
The generator pictured in the video is not the kind used in large power plants. It appears to be a diesel generator similar to the kind that is used for backup power in many buildings. Backup generators are typically 1 MW or lesss, whereas big power plant generators are 1000 MW or more. It is like comparing a RC controlled model airplane with a 747. Besides being bigger, the 747 and the power plant will have much more elaborate systems to protect things from damage and destruction caused by malfunctioning equipment and/or misbehaving control systems. When there are billions of dollars and/or human lives at stake, one invests more in safeguards such as electromechanical relays, breakers and other non digital gadgets.
The thing that could cause the generator to jump and destroy itself like in the video is to attempt to synchronize it with the grid out of phase or at the wrong speed. Another post in this thread, "This has happened before computer controls" by Maximum Prophet hit on the correct answer. In small, unattended, backup generators synchronization may be automated by computer, but in large power plants nobody trusts the computer enough to allow this critical operation to be automated. It is still typically done by hand with the aid of old fashioned non-digital equipment. Even if one did mis-synchronize a generator (and it does happen) other protective devices shut things down quickly to limit the scope of damage. And yes, mis-synchronization does happen in real life every once in a while, usually in a brand new installation and usually because the instruments are wired up wrong. The result can be damage sometimes, but I never heard of it destroying a whole plant.
That is not to say that cyberwar is not a threat, nor to say that it is not good policy to isolate all critical control computer from the net. Again its a matter of money. If you are running a $5 billion power plant, your budget is big enough to hire real people to come and maintain systems rather than using remote diagnostics. Or, if you do want remote diagnostics, you can afford to use leased private lines rather than the internet. Power plants and the power grid can afford gold standard security and they should be required to do it. I don't oppose the security thrust, but I do oppose the hyped up scare tactics designed to panic us into unwise government spending.
I spent most of my life modeling power plants and their control systems to build operator training simulators. As part of training, we inject myriads of simulated malfunctions. As part of debugging of the models, we get to see just about every detail of the plant and its control and its safeguards working incorrectly before we debug them and make them correct. That gave me and others experiences up to our chinny chin chins about what can go wrong and what the consequences might be.
I'm afraid that what this is about is another naked grab for government money and using scare tactics to get it. Mr. Joe Weiss in the video works for EPRI. He, and the government committee on critical infrastructure protection, were both singing the song in 1999 that no matter what Y2K bugs might exist, they couldn't do any real harm. Get it? Not that the Y2K bugs didn't exist or would be fixed (at proved to be the case) but that they couldn't do any substantial harm no matter what. Now these same people are saying that a few hacks can cause widespread and catastrophic damage. One can not argue both sides of this issue and keep credibility. If a control system misbehaves, it matters not whether the problem is inadvertent or malevolent. Yet these people pooh pooh the risk of inadvertent bugs yet hype the danger of malevolent ones. It's bunk.
EPRI wants $100 billion to automate everything in the power grid as a massive research project. Next they'll want another $250 billion to secure it from cyberwar threats. DOE wants a national DOE control center for the
Good thoughtful posts on this subject. Because libertarians tend to think for themselves, there are numerous individual principled rationales. Here's mine.
I sympathize with the minority, especially the minority of one. Truly original thinkers are likely to find themselves in the minority almost all the time. Yet they are never asked for their consent to be governed. Small wonder then that they become embittered and think of the government as their enemy.
We enforce the will of the majority by violence or the threat of violence. If the majority votes for an initiative that costs money, taxes must be collected. A minority voter must pay those taxes or face arrest. If he resists arrests the law is enforced by violence. The problem is long recognized. It is called the tyranny of the majority. It was discussed extensively in the Federalist Papers.
I believe that respect for the rights of the minority should compel us to use governance by the will of the majority only when it can not be avoided. National security (i.e. war) and personal security (i.e. protection from thieves and murders) are to often cited examples of governance that can not be avoided. However, the vast majority of our laws are justified on the basis of general welfare. As a libertarian, I reject general welfare as sufficient justification for imposing the will of the majority by violence.
I can't help to note that it is easy to imagine systems of government that respect the minority more than majority rules. Suppose we took a vote on some issue and the result is 99% aye and 1% nay. In a modified democracy, we would then roll the dice in a game rigged so that the aye side has a 99% chance of winning. That way the minority would get to have their way at least some of the time. I suspect that such a modified democracy would tend to dampen extremes and promote more moderate positions on issues because the majority could never be sure of the outcome.
I also note that countries with parliamentary governments and numerous parties also give more influence to minorities. After an election the plurality party is forced to form a coalition with one or more minority parties to form a government. To form the alliance, they have to promise to allow the minority parties to have their way some of the time.
I fail to see why physics versus chemistry is relevant to the question. Simple mutations are not the only mechanism to resistance.
If I wash down the counter and kill 99% of the bacteria, then come back the next day, the counter is repopulated with new bacteria, most of which are descendants of the surviving 1%. It matters not to me whether the survivors survived via mutation, or resistance to the agent, or via hiding better in the micro pores of the surface. They don't even have to adapt at all. They just have to be able to expand into the void vacated by the 99% killed.
If I repeat this day after day, I'll amplify the selective breeding.
On the other hand, if I do a traditional wash down of the counter with just water or ordinary soap, I might remove 90% of the bacteria but the remaining 10% will be a random sampling who happen to survive only because my wash down was imperfect. Because I kill randomly rather than selectively, there will be no selective breeding.
Privacy advocates will, of course, hate the idea of more CCTV surveillance. I too am a privacy advocate and I hate the inevitable slide down the slippery slope to total loss of privacy. However, I also try to be a realist.
TV cameras cost $50 or less retail, and probably $10 or less wholesale from the factory today. In 10 years they'll ost a penny and be much smaller than a penny. 10 years after that, they'll be the size of a gain of rice and sell for $1 per 10,000. 10 years after that, they'll be smaller than grains of pollen, powered by ambient light or RF energy, and $1 will buy 10 billion of them. They will be able to be released into the atmosphere and drift with air currents in to every room of every building on the planet. They will be as hard to keep out as real pollen particles. I first heard of the concept of dust particle CCTV surveillance in a sci fi story in Analog Magazine. Then, when I applied Moore's law to calculate how far in the future this fantastic scenario will occur, I was shocked to come up with a number less of than 30 years.
No law will be able to stop the widespread use of this technology. Trying to restrict use of TV cameras is like prohibition or like laws against fireworks. However, there may be a silver lining to this dark cloud. It won't be just government who exploits these things, journalists can bug the offices of every government employee from the president on down. More, individuals will be able to tap into the CCTV image of the quadrillions of cameras floating in the atmosphere. Everyone can watch the CCTV surveillance of everybody else. Nobody will be able to control it or restrict it any better than they manage to control the Internet today.
Time and time again science fiction has understated the rate of real life progress. It is hard for any of us to imagine the consequences of Moore's Law within the relatively short period of our own lifetimes.
We can't say for sure that GW is the biggest critical problem facing the world, but we can say with certainty that eliminating greenhouse gasses is insufficient to save the world.
Consider this abbreviated list of problems capable of bringing the world to it's knees.
Global warming.
Insufficient energy.
Trash disposal.
Death of marine animals and plants due to overfishing.
Deforestation to provide crops for starving peasants.
Insufficient water.
The ozone layer.
Illegal immigration.
Drug resistant bacteria.
Religious fundamentalists resisting modern culture.
Pollution.
Mass extinctions (even without GW).
The common thread underlying all these problems is the footprint of six billion people. If we had only one billion people or if the world population lived with the footprint of only one billion people, then every problem listed above (including GW) would shrink to manageable levels.
It is grossly irresponsible to suggest that all we need to do is drive more efficient cars and make minor tweaks without really changing life stlyes to solve the world's problems.
Either we have to find a way to reduce the footprint of the word's populatino to roughly the equivalent of one billion, or nature will step in and impose some combination of war pestilence and famine that will do the job for us.
Why aren't we promoting massive global population control as a higher priority than global warming?
In the 1980's I remember an article in Computer World about Digital Equipment Corp CEO Ken Olsen. The article said that to demonstrate how robust the media was, Mr. Olsen took a handful of recorded CDs, and shot a hole through the stack with a pistol. After that, the CD's were still readable with no data loss.
Obviously, that kind of robustness never materialized. Does anybody know the story behind DEC's claims?
Quite true. The upper limit for how long we can stay on earth is about 1 billion years. After that the sun turns red giant and the earth is engulfed below the sun's surface.
One should point out that survival and colinization by our species does not require transport of any individuals. We need merely to transport DNA of our species (plus whatever companion plant and animal species desired). A space probe loaded with DNA might weigh only a gram or so.
If one hypothesizes that other intelligent species exist, then we need only to transmit our DNA code via radio. A receiving species could then directly sythesize humans from the code plus the easy-to-follow instructions included. If they did so however, I might question the quality of their intelligence. We need to fool them somehow by sending messages that entice them to "click here" despite better judgement. That's it! The future of mankind rests in the hands of spammers.
The content of this proposed bill may provide a small marginal improvement, but it does have a few gems.
The simple and direct way to combat financial identity theft is to forbid banks and others from extending credit or opening new accounts without seeing the applicant face to face and seeing photo ID. If that were true, your SSN and all your account numbers could be completely public, but of no use to the ID thieves. It is the banks who profit from easy credit that oppose meaningful identity theft legislation.
When I lived in Sweden years ago I was surprised to get letters in the mail for each request for information about my credit record together with a copy of the information provided. That very simple, almost trivial, requirement actually provided me with a great deal of protection.
Another different approach I learned in Sweden. They required companies to obtain a license from the government to keep a register (on paper or digitally) of information on private citizens. It applied all the way down to a desktop Rolodex with customer names and addresses. If you didn't have a license, you couldn't keep that information.
To get a license, the company had to declare all uses that it intended to make of the information. The government had the right to audit the company at any time to see if they had complied with the terms of their license. That's a very powerful lever to keep the companies on their toes. If they lost their data license they would be out of business instantly.
Still, the proposed bill does have a few gems. Notably, giving individuals access to, and the opportunity to correct, any personal information held by commercial data brokers. That would be a major change. Today, these brokers do not deal with individual consumers. If citizens by the millions started demanding copies of their files and asking for corrections, it could cost those brokers much more for customer service than their current gross income. I suppose the big loophole is that it would apply only to data brokers. Just watch for all the database owners to scramble to avoid that definition so that the law doesn't apply to them.
If the senators wanted to make a really tough bill, they should just adopt the OECD privacy guidelines and make them apply to all companies and nonprofits and government agencies. Ha -- don't hold your breath, the lobbies pay off both Reps and Dems.
I haven't heard of a single case where the lone programmer (inventor?) gets a patent for some smart code he invented and the big companies will pay him for his efforts. All that I heard of is big companies (or maybe small companies that invent nothing but has made it their business to file patents for things that already exist) that have asked money from another big company because of these patents.
What planet have you been on? One of the major news stories of 2006 was the case of the lone inventor, Thomas Campana Jr., and his successful claim against Research In Motion (Blackberry) regarding a wireless email invention. Unfortunately the lone and persistent inventor died, but his survivors successfully brought it to settlement http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/03/AR2006030301489.html.
I recall reading in 1976 an article about the bicentenial. The article mentioned that every year since the first congress in 1789 that congress had passed a motion resolving that this is the year that the USA would convert to metric. Assuming that they haven't missed any year since, we must have 218 consecutive metric conversion resolutions. If metric conversion is not the oldest debate in the country, it must be close.
The stupidity of resistance is not just embedded in our laws. How many places in the statues of the federal government and the states must we have feet, pounds, and miles per hour embedded in the law. It would take another 218 years to get them all revised.
I remember the history of one such law. In 1979, during the oil crisis, the price of gasoline threatened to go over one dollar per gallon for the first time. That caused a crisis in gas stations because all the gas pumps had only two digits for the price per gallon. An obvious solution would be to start selling gas by the liter, but the Democrats in New York State declared that to be a fraud on the consumer and passed a law forbidding gas to be sold by any unit other than gallons.
Given the intensity of partisan rancor in this country, I think it entirely possible that domestic employees might try wreck DOD software to gain political revenge.
We should disallow hiring of anyone who has ever expressed antiwar sentiments.
We should also disqualify Democrats from working on DOD projects or having anything to do with critical infrastructure.
What's so great about an economist telling us how much to spend to fix the problem? What does he know about what is needed to fix it? Nobody knows that, not even the scientists.
There is no evidence to support the belief that any counter measures we take now will be more than "a step in the right direction." We may need a hundred more such steps to reverse the trends. Even if we instantly wiped out all human life, global warming might continue because of the defrosting permafrost in Siberia plus other sources.
The public naively believes that if we just meet the Kyoto protocol goals, then global warming will go away. I think it supremely deceptive to let them go on believing that.
Stainless steel cladding? I thought that zirconium was the only suitable cladding material. Steel, and most other metals other than zirconium loses much of its strength under the intense radiation bombardment that claddings experience.
The Chernobyl accident was exposed the next morning when a lab in Sweden detected zirconium in the atmophere. The only plausible way that could happen was a reactor accident somewhere.
I also thought that most MOX fuel manufactured in real life used plutonium recycled from decommissioned nuclear weapons. If we don't burn up the weapons grade PU239 and U235 in reactors, what else is one supposed to do with the warhead materials? Call it waste while simultaneously trying to breed new PU in power reacors? That would make no sense.
It depends on how much we are willing to pay, and on how much energy we want to use.
For example, in Sweden there is an entire mountain of (low grade) uranium ore claimed to have enough to supply the world's demand for 100 years, by itself. Only trouble is that today's uranium prices are too low to make it interesting.
Also in Sweden, they are careful to store spent fuel waste in a place where they can retrieve it easily. The thinking is that within a hundred years, the isotopes in that waste will become valuable for medical and industrial purposed not yet invented (not to mention recycling of the heavy elements for fuel.)
The biggest challenge is to think out of the box. Copious electric power can be used to suck greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere and entrain them in mines or under the sea. We could use nuclear energy to undo the greenhouse effect. But it will take lots and lots of electric power, much too much for renewable energy sources. For that application renewable energy sources would produce far too little; nuclear power is the only technology that seems to fit the bill.
What a remarkable law it is. For thirty years I've been reading that development will soon hit a brick wall and Moore's Law will end. A corollary to the nay saying is that silicon technology will have to give way to something new; everything from silicon on sapphire, to organic molecules. Hasn't happened yet. Moore's Law and silicon still rule in this world.
Even more remarkable than Moore's prediction that growth would be exponential, is the fact that he nailed the actual value of the exponent. He only had to make one adjustment in the exponent's value since the beginning.
I read an article that says that it's not entirely an accident. The chip fabricators also believe in Moore's law and they make their business plans and their R&D plans based on it. They fear that they can't stay competitive if they fall behind Moore's law. When they succeed in their goals, they cause Moore's Law to be fulfilled almost exactly. Thus, Moore's Law is partially self-fulfilling and Mr. Moore not only foretold the future, he shaped it.
My hat goes off to Gordon E. Moore. He should be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution.
In the early 80s the military rebeled against the chaos in their software procurements. They claimed that in the history of procured software projects that more than 250 langauages had been used, only one of which was used in more than one project (I think that one was Jovial which was used in two projects.) They commissioned Ada to be the single language to end all languages. They tried to be as heads up and up front as possible in designing Ada, and solicited input from anyone and everyone. As you know, Ada made a major dent in military circles but it never got far in becoming the one and only language. There were (and are) compelling reasons to also use other languages.
So what's the point? We have to allow some chaos and experimentation even within projects. Otherwise, our thinking gets too rigid and we lose the ability to stimulate new ideas and to let the best ideas percolate to the top via real life experience.
If every project optimizes only itself, and doesn't consider growth of the industry and the profession, the result is stagnation. We would be becalmed in a sea of localized suboptimizations. R&D does not belong exclusively in ivory towers. Software R&D works best when allowed to grow from real life's hard lessons.
The best advice I heard was that large projects should budget the new technology and risks that they allow. In no circumstances should a project include more than 25% new (or risky) technology. On the other hand, I would argue that a large project should budget 10% (certainly no less than 5%) for undirected experimentation. Management should not get involved in the nature of the experiments, but it must manage the quantity of experimentation.
What a trashy paper. The author starts out with predjudices and conclusions, and goes from there. He never even tries to provide a basis for his conclusions. He compounds it with stupid statements.
"This is a result of the fact that IPR protection leads to unnecessary duplication, as developers have substantial incentive to produce software that simply replicates the function of existing software." He talks about innovation, yet he views efficiency as leading to exactly one (G.I.) version of everything. He should apply his IPR theories to Hollywood's type of software. One book, one movie, one song, and one TV show should be enough for everyone, and priced at the marginal cost of production. Any more would be unnecessary duplication.
"One of the most basic principles in economics is that efficiency is maximized when products sell at their marginal cost of production." Since when? The principle of free market economies is that prices move to their free market levels, duh. If those prices match costs, the producers soon go bankrupt and sources of investment for new products dry up.
I've worked my whole career in software, and made a lot of innovations. Many times I wanted to contribute to open software, but I didn't work for an institution or on the public dole. I had to keep my nose to the grindstone doing the things that benefited my employer, not the world. My employment contracts further restricted me from doing open software on my own time in the evenings. The fairness of that sounds dubious at first, but when one thinks of the conflicts of interest that might arise it seems wise.
I've always thought that the greatest weakness in the open software movement is that only a tiny fraction of the software savy people in the world can contribute. The rest need to feed their families by working for ordinary for-profit entities.
There's more to it than senior versus junior IT workers. The following clips from the article help illustrate.
"Precisely when the organization is trying to gain a return on investment, software operating costs may start to climb.... At this point, support costs can start to consume a larger and larger part of the IT budget, severely limiting new investments."
The company often feels that software maintainers are extorting money from them. That's especially true when the application is not an external package continuously upgraded with new features. Managers expect that a paid-up static application should cost zero to maintain. This was made very plain when Y2K remediation work was complete and the Y2K workers, young and old, were booted out the door with parting greetings that sounded like "good riddance."
As a senior (now retired) software type I wrestled with the software maintenance dilemma for decades. I saw that old code was designed for the CPU and memory limitations of its day. As time marched on Moore's Law rendered old code useless faster than poor documentation or obscure programming languages.
At one point I resolved to put an upper limit of 10 years on the life of any code. After that it would have to be discarded and replaced. Then I realized that if everyone followed that policy future generations would be doomed to reinventing the wheels (i.e. the logic) invented in earlier versions. Actual progress would approach zero asymptotically. Consider for example code to control a nuclear plant. The plant has a 45 year lifetime, and the laws of physics and principles of control don't change in that time. If we had to reinvent all the control software four or five times in the life of the plant, it would be a terrible waste. The most modern implementation might be more efficient and superior in quality, but there is no assurance that it does a better or as good a job at controlling the plant as the first version.
Both extremes are wrong. Maintaining old static applications indefinitely is wrong. Periodic discard and replacement is wrong. My final conclusion was that old applications need to be rewritten and re-implemented and expanded and modernized gradually. If we re-write or re-implement 10% of the code every year, then none of the parts get to be more than 10 years old. We also deliberately blur the boundaries between old and new applications and the boundaries between developers and maintainers.
In my experience developers resist this notion more than management. Developers love reinventing wheels. I bet every open source developer worth his salt would love nothing more than his/her own chance to invent Unix from scratch, and along the way every application and algorithm that went with it. In any case, they really hate the idea of re-implementing some predecessor's cleverness embodied as code. They would much rather create their own fresh version confident that they can be cleverer than anyone else. It goes with the territory when we seek creative people to program. They like to create -- duh.
One other thing, when our gradual rewrites of old code reach the point where everything is fully expressed as objects, then the burden of rewrites and maintenance should be drastically reduced forever after. Isn't that the promise of objects? Expandability? Adaptability? Any large application well founded on objects should be able to morph itself into any future application one little bit at a time.
The single personal data item that can do the most damage if stolen is your SSN. With your name and SSN, a crook can establish credit. The SSN is not secure, never was secure and never will be secure.
Establishing a secure national ID is a politically loaded issue and not likely to happen soon. I'm not proposing that. It seems that we could substantially limit the danger of identity theft, and the motivation to steal IDs, if we merely gave up the convenience of being able to establish accounts and/or credit by phone or mail using nothing more than name and SSN.
I'm not proposing that you can't use your credit card to purchase by phone or by net, but rather that one shouldn't be able to use only a name and SSN to get a new credit card.
Legally, the only change needed would be a regulation establishing minimum ID requirements for banks and creditors required to establish new accounts. The minimum requirement must include a face-to-face meeting and one or more corroborations of identity.
I suspect that creditors may be the only ones opposed to the idea because they profit from easy credit, despite fraud and ID theft.
Note that my proposal does not prohibit businesses from using SSN as a database key to locate your record. Abhorrent as that practice is, it's too embedded to ever eliminate now.
Granted, this proposal doesn't eliminate all the risks of identity theft, nor eliminate all the harm of SSN theft. I believe however that it would eliminate the most harmful component of risk.
This must have been proposed before but I never see it discussed. What does the Slashdot community say?
Slashdot Mirror
The notion of an "intrinsically safe" reactor is naive in the extreme.
Not true. Although precisely what "intrinsically safe" means is somewhat a matter of definition, it is achievable to a large degree. In the case of nuclear reactors, "intrinsically safe" generally means that if anything malfunctions that the reaction shuts down by itself, without the need for human intervention, and without the need for engineered systems to make it shut down. In the case of the city wide district heating reactor, the whole thing was even built in an underground rock chamber below the water table level. Ground water, or river water, or even sea water could be allowed to flood the cavern to make sure it stays cooled.
Consider an example that you might find easier to understand. Electric lamps used in mines where there is an explosion hazard because of methane. Intrinsically safe electric lamps can be used if they have so little energy stored that they are incapable of generating a spark, even if short circuited. Intrinsic safety is not naive, it is an important engineering concept.
Irradiated reactor fuel would be a poor choice of targets for terrorists to hijack. It is not enriched nearly enough to make weapons grade material. When it is freshly irradiated in the reactor, it is so radioactive that a would-be thief would be dead within a few dozen paces after picking it up. Elaborate machinery is necessary to handle it in a way that doesn't immediately kill the handlers, thus creating difficult hurdles for hijackers to overcome.
Apartment building sized reactors (especially) would have to be protected from attempts to blow them up in place using conventional explosives. That terrorist threat, much more than malfunctions, I would guess to be the biggest risk.
Even a terrorist's bluff is a substantial risk. They might seize the building and threaten to cause a nuclear explosion, or a dirty bomb explosion; even if they really couldn't. Remember, for example, the psychological harm caused by the bogus claim by the feds (AEC) that a hydrogen bubble in the Three Mile Island reactor could make it explode. That bit of misinformation caused almost all of the actual damage to public health in that incident.
There were a number of building size reactor designs proposed in the 1980s.
I once worked for a company that designed an intrinsically safe urban reactor designed to make hot water. We had convinced the city of Helsinki to buy it and were within hours of signing the contract when the Chernobyl Reactor accident occurred. Helsinki would have used it as a district heating plant big enough to heat all the buildings in the city.
Nuclear reactors are much better at making hot water than they are at making electricity. Heating is a major consumer of energy in many locations. Therefore, replacing a fossil fuel heat source with a nuclear heat source is more beneficial to the environment than replacing an electric power generator. There are other applications, aluminum smelting for example, that need copious quantities of heat, not electricity per se.
Not to date myself, but boy that brings back memories. I started in this business in the mid 1960s a decade after this IBM disk. We used magnetic drums and head-per-track disks for storage. That makes the IBM unit with moving heads truly advanced for 1956. But what a dog it was at 600 ms seek time! Thats milliseconds guys, not microseconds. Six tenths of a second just to move the head.
The drum memories I used had one head per track, as did the head-per-track disks. In that case, seek time is zero (for head movement.) One need only wait for the latency time for the bytes you want to rotate under the head. Depending on rotation speed, latency could be as much as 5 to 15 milliseconds.
The amusing part, when I think back on it, was the way that the hardware design influenced the programming. Suppose you had a clause that looked like: IF X THEN A ELSE B ENDIF. To make your program run as fast as possible, you would arrange it so that the instructions for A and for B would reside on two different tracks at the same azimuthal angle, (right behind the instructions to evaluate IF X.) That way, no matter whether the branch evaluated true or false, one didn't have to wait for additional memory latency to read the next instruction.
We also didn't have room in RAM (core memory or registers at that time) to store data or calculated results. We had as few as 24 bytes of RAM. Thus, each data value also had to be assigned an address on the drum or disk. The location of that address relative to the code which accessed the value had a dramatic impact on program speed.
Therefore, to optimize programs for running speed, we spent more time devising optimum ways to store the code and data fragments on the drum or disk, than we did designing the functionality of the code. What language and OS did we use? No language, just program the instructions one bit at a time. No OS.
So what fancy apps did we do with this spaghetti software? We did real time control of power plants, both conventional and nuclear. We made flight simulators. We supported the Apollo project to send a man to the moon.
Despite the fact that the computers of those days were as much as 10,000 to 100,000 times slower than today's hardware, the real time applications were only 10 to 100 times slower and/or of lesser scope compared to today's apps. It was because of the extreme squeeze-blood-out-of-a-stone coding methods we used in those days.
For a really good story, get someone to write about how they streamed instructions sequences from earth to the Lunar Excursion Module for Apollo 11. Not streaming video, not music but streaming the code to execute. Buy the time one machine instruction would finish, the next one would be received and read to go. It was just-in-time delivery of the next instruction. That way, they needed no onboard mass storage of any kind. In my book, that was programming heroics that any slashdotter should appreciate.
Remember those computer fairs that used to come around? They suffered from the same problem that eventually got Comp-USA but they dropped out earlier.
I remember being amazed at the dramatic changes that the fairs and the computer stores had to make to stay alive. At first it was pretty much desktop PC hardware and accessories that was their bread and butter. Later, most of the shelf space for hardware was turned over to boxed software. Then, as people started buying software online, the boxed software offerings disappeared. Then, they had to turn to selling media, and finally, things like TV and audio systems to stay alive.
Today, there's little action in desktop machines. Everyone wants laptops and the laptop era seems about to roll over to the mobile device era.
What an amazing series of sea changes in the public buying preferences within a time span of 15 years or less. Each one of those changes would have seemed astounding in any other field. In high tech consumer digital stuff, it just keeps coming and coming.
Most businesses never survive even a single cycle of having to reinvent their business model. In the case of consumer electronics, it seems that if you can't reinvent yourself over and over again, you're toast. Like I said, I sure wouldn't want to be in their business.
I think that you forget that the whole point of encryption is paranoia. So PGP and GPG have been extensively audited; that only helps if I have reason to trust those auditors.
I repeat my point. Unless you have the time and the qualifications to personally audit, validate and verify any security claims, you have to trust someone else. It's not about technology, it's about trust.
It is impractical for just about any of us to audit the claimed security of any provider, public or private. You can't be sure that they really provide the safeguards they claim. Unless you're an encryption genius, you can't even examine open source code to verify that it is secure and doesn't have weaknesses.
I don't personally know the principle employees of Hushmail or of any other security service providers, nor do I personally know Phil Zimmerman or any other authors of the encryption software. For all I know, these companies and individuals could all be fronts for the NSA.
I also fail to see how other posters to this topic can claim that the technology is rock solid? How do they know? How do I know if they too are fronts for NSA?
So what am I left with. Nothing but trust. If I trust the provider, then their technology is irrelevant. If I don't trust them, then their technology is irrelevant. In this instance, Hushmail has proved that they are unworthy of trust.
There is no such thing as an "operating cycle" to change for a generator.
/or human lives at stake, one invests more in safeguards such as electromechanical relays, breakers and other non digital gadgets.
The generator pictured in the video is not the kind used in large power plants. It appears to be a diesel generator similar to the kind that is used for backup power in many buildings. Backup generators are typically 1 MW or lesss, whereas big power plant generators are 1000 MW or more. It is like comparing a RC controlled model airplane with a 747. Besides being bigger, the 747 and the power plant will have much more elaborate systems to protect things from damage and destruction caused by malfunctioning equipment and/or misbehaving control systems. When there are billions of dollars and
The thing that could cause the generator to jump and destroy itself like in the video is to attempt to synchronize it with the grid out of phase or at the wrong speed. Another post in this thread, "This has happened before computer controls" by Maximum Prophet hit on the correct answer. In small, unattended, backup generators synchronization may be automated by computer, but in large power plants nobody trusts the computer enough to allow this critical operation to be automated. It is still typically done by hand with the aid of old fashioned non-digital equipment. Even if one did mis-synchronize a generator (and it does happen) other protective devices shut things down quickly to limit the scope of damage. And yes, mis-synchronization does happen in real life every once in a while, usually in a brand new installation and usually because the instruments are wired up wrong. The result can be damage sometimes, but I never heard of it destroying a whole plant.
That is not to say that cyberwar is not a threat, nor to say that it is not good policy to isolate all critical control computer from the net. Again its a matter of money. If you are running a $5 billion power plant, your budget is big enough to hire real people to come and maintain systems rather than using remote diagnostics. Or, if you do want remote diagnostics, you can afford to use leased private lines rather than the internet. Power plants and the power grid can afford gold standard security and they should be required to do it. I don't oppose the security thrust, but I do oppose the hyped up scare tactics designed to panic us into unwise government spending.
I spent most of my life modeling power plants and their control systems to build operator training simulators. As part of training, we inject myriads of simulated malfunctions. As part of debugging of the models, we get to see just about every detail of the plant and its control and its safeguards working incorrectly before we debug them and make them correct. That gave me and others experiences up to our chinny chin chins about what can go wrong and what the consequences might be.
I'm afraid that what this is about is another naked grab for government money and using scare tactics to get it. Mr. Joe Weiss in the video works for EPRI. He, and the government committee on critical infrastructure protection, were both singing the song in 1999 that no matter what Y2K bugs might exist, they couldn't do any real harm. Get it? Not that the Y2K bugs didn't exist or would be fixed (at proved to be the case) but that they couldn't do any substantial harm no matter what. Now these same people are saying that a few hacks can cause widespread and catastrophic damage. One can not argue both sides of this issue and keep credibility. If a control system misbehaves, it matters not whether the problem is inadvertent or malevolent. Yet these people pooh pooh the risk of inadvertent bugs yet hype the danger of malevolent ones. It's bunk.
EPRI wants $100 billion to automate everything in the power grid as a massive research project. Next they'll want another $250 billion to secure it from cyberwar threats. DOE wants a national DOE control center for the
Good thoughtful posts on this subject. Because libertarians tend to think for themselves, there are numerous individual principled rationales. Here's mine.
I sympathize with the minority, especially the minority of one. Truly original thinkers are likely to find themselves in the minority almost all the time. Yet they are never asked for their consent to be governed. Small wonder then that they become embittered and think of the government as their enemy.
We enforce the will of the majority by violence or the threat of violence. If the majority votes for an initiative that costs money, taxes must be collected. A minority voter must pay those taxes or face arrest. If he resists arrests the law is enforced by violence. The problem is long recognized. It is called the tyranny of the majority. It was discussed extensively in the Federalist Papers.
I believe that respect for the rights of the minority should compel us to use governance by the will of the majority only when it can not be avoided. National security (i.e. war) and personal security (i.e. protection from thieves and murders) are to often cited examples of governance that can not be avoided. However, the vast majority of our laws are justified on the basis of general welfare. As a libertarian, I reject general welfare as sufficient justification for imposing the will of the majority by violence.
I can't help to note that it is easy to imagine systems of government that respect the minority more than majority rules. Suppose we took a vote on some issue and the result is 99% aye and 1% nay. In a modified democracy, we would then roll the dice in a game rigged so that the aye side has a 99% chance of winning. That way the minority would get to have their way at least some of the time. I suspect that such a modified democracy would tend to dampen extremes and promote more moderate positions on issues because the majority could never be sure of the outcome.
I also note that countries with parliamentary governments and numerous parties also give more influence to minorities. After an election the plurality party is forced to form a coalition with one or more minority parties to form a government. To form the alliance, they have to promise to allow the minority parties to have their way some of the time.
I fail to see why physics versus chemistry is relevant to the question. Simple mutations are not the only mechanism to resistance.
If I wash down the counter and kill 99% of the bacteria, then come back the next day, the counter is repopulated with new bacteria, most of which are descendants of the surviving 1%. It matters not to me whether the survivors survived via mutation, or resistance to the agent, or via hiding better in the micro pores of the surface. They don't even have to adapt at all. They just have to be able to expand into the void vacated by the 99% killed.
If I repeat this day after day, I'll amplify the selective breeding.
On the other hand, if I do a traditional wash down of the counter with just water or ordinary soap, I might remove 90% of the bacteria but the remaining 10% will be a random sampling who happen to survive only because my wash down was imperfect. Because I kill randomly rather than selectively, there will be no selective breeding.
Privacy advocates will, of course, hate the idea of more CCTV surveillance. I too am a privacy advocate and I hate the inevitable slide down the slippery slope to total loss of privacy. However, I also try to be a realist.
TV cameras cost $50 or less retail, and probably $10 or less wholesale from the factory today. In 10 years they'll ost a penny and be much smaller than a penny. 10 years after that, they'll be the size of a gain of rice and sell for $1 per 10,000. 10 years after that, they'll be smaller than grains of pollen, powered by ambient light or RF energy, and $1 will buy 10 billion of them. They will be able to be released into the atmosphere and drift with air currents in to every room of every building on the planet. They will be as hard to keep out as real pollen particles. I first heard of the concept of dust particle CCTV surveillance in a sci fi story in Analog Magazine. Then, when I applied Moore's law to calculate how far in the future this fantastic scenario will occur, I was shocked to come up with a number less of than 30 years.
No law will be able to stop the widespread use of this technology. Trying to restrict use of TV cameras is like prohibition or like laws against fireworks. However, there may be a silver lining to this dark cloud. It won't be just government who exploits these things, journalists can bug the offices of every government employee from the president on down. More, individuals will be able to tap into the CCTV image of the quadrillions of cameras floating in the atmosphere. Everyone can watch the CCTV surveillance of everybody else. Nobody will be able to control it or restrict it any better than they manage to control the Internet today.
Time and time again science fiction has understated the rate of real life progress. It is hard for any of us to imagine the consequences of Moore's Law within the relatively short period of our own lifetimes.
Consider this abbreviated list of problems capable of bringing the world to it's knees.
The common thread underlying all these problems is the footprint of six billion people.
If we had only one billion people or if the world population lived with the footprint of only one billion people, then every problem listed above (including GW) would shrink to manageable levels.
It is grossly irresponsible to suggest that all we need to do is drive more efficient cars and make minor tweaks without really changing life stlyes to solve the world's problems.
Either we have to find a way to reduce the footprint of the word's populatino to roughly the equivalent of one billion, or nature will step in and impose some combination of war pestilence and famine that will do the job for us.
Why aren't we promoting massive global population control as a higher priority than global warming?
I'll reveal my age with this one.
In the 1980's I remember an article in Computer World about Digital Equipment Corp CEO Ken Olsen. The article said that to demonstrate how robust the media was, Mr. Olsen took a handful of recorded CDs, and shot a hole through the stack with a pistol. After that, the CD's were still readable with no data loss.
Obviously, that kind of robustness never materialized. Does anybody know the story behind DEC's claims?
Quite true. The upper limit for how long we can stay on earth is about 1 billion years. After that the sun turns red giant and the earth is engulfed below the sun's surface.
One should point out that survival and colinization by our species does not require transport of any individuals. We need merely to transport DNA of our species (plus whatever companion plant and animal species desired). A space probe loaded with DNA might weigh only a gram or so.
If one hypothesizes that other intelligent species exist, then we need only to transmit our DNA code via radio. A receiving species could then directly sythesize humans from the code plus the easy-to-follow instructions included. If they did so however, I might question the quality of their intelligence. We need to fool them somehow by sending messages that entice them to "click here" despite better judgement. That's it! The future of mankind rests in the hands of spammers.
The simple and direct way to combat financial identity theft is to forbid banks and others from extending credit or opening new accounts without seeing the applicant face to face and seeing photo ID. If that were true, your SSN and all your account numbers could be completely public, but of no use to the ID thieves. It is the banks who profit from easy credit that oppose meaningful identity theft legislation.
When I lived in Sweden years ago I was surprised to get letters in the mail for each request for information about my credit record together with a copy of the information provided. That very simple, almost trivial, requirement actually provided me with a great deal of protection.
Another different approach I learned in Sweden. They required companies to obtain a license from the government to keep a register (on paper or digitally) of information on private citizens. It applied all the way down to a desktop Rolodex with customer names and addresses. If you didn't have a license, you couldn't keep that information.
To get a license, the company had to declare all uses that it intended to make of the information. The government had the right to audit the company at any time to see if they had complied with the terms of their license. That's a very powerful lever to keep the companies on their toes. If they lost their data license they would be out of business instantly.
Still, the proposed bill does have a few gems. Notably, giving individuals access to, and the opportunity to correct, any personal information held by commercial data brokers. That would be a major change. Today, these brokers do not deal with individual consumers. If citizens by the millions started demanding copies of their files and asking for corrections, it could cost those brokers much more for customer service than their current gross income. I suppose the big loophole is that it would apply only to data brokers. Just watch for all the database owners to scramble to avoid that definition so that the law doesn't apply to them.
If the senators wanted to make a really tough bill, they should just adopt the OECD privacy guidelines and make them apply to all companies and nonprofits and government agencies. Ha -- don't hold your breath, the lobbies pay off both Reps and Dems.
I haven't heard of a single case where the lone programmer (inventor?) gets a patent for some smart code he invented and the big companies will pay him for his efforts. All that I heard of is big companies (or maybe small companies that invent nothing but has made it their business to file patents for things that already exist) that have asked money from another big company because of these patents.
c le/2006/03/03/AR2006030301489.html.
What planet have you been on? One of the major news stories of 2006 was the case of the lone inventor, Thomas Campana Jr., and his successful claim against Research In Motion (Blackberry) regarding a wireless email invention. Unfortunately the lone and persistent inventor died, but his survivors successfully brought it to settlement http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
I recall reading in 1976 an article about the bicentenial. The article mentioned that every year since the first congress in 1789 that congress had passed a motion resolving that this is the year that the USA would convert to metric. Assuming that they haven't missed any year since, we must have 218 consecutive metric conversion resolutions. If metric conversion is not the oldest debate in the country, it must be close.
The stupidity of resistance is not just embedded in our laws. How many places in the statues of the federal government and the states must we have feet, pounds, and miles per hour embedded in the law. It would take another 218 years to get them all revised.
I remember the history of one such law. In 1979, during the oil crisis, the price of gasoline threatened to go over one dollar per gallon for the first time. That caused a crisis in gas stations because all the gas pumps had only two digits for the price per gallon. An obvious solution would be to start selling gas by the liter, but the Democrats in New York State declared that to be a fraud on the consumer and passed a law forbidding gas to be sold by any unit other than gallons.
Given the intensity of partisan rancor in this country, I think it entirely possible that domestic employees might try wreck DOD software to gain political revenge.
We should disallow hiring of anyone who has ever expressed antiwar sentiments.
We should also disqualify Democrats from working on DOD projects or having anything to do with critical infrastructure.
Just kidding (or am I?)
What's so great about an economist telling us how much to spend to fix the problem? What does he know about what is needed to fix it? Nobody knows that, not even the scientists.
There is no evidence to support the belief that any counter measures we take now will be more than "a step in the right direction." We may need a hundred more such steps to reverse the trends. Even if we instantly wiped out all human life, global warming might continue because of the defrosting permafrost in Siberia plus other sources.
The public naively believes that if we just meet the Kyoto protocol goals, then global warming will go away. I think it supremely deceptive to let them go on believing that.
Stainless steel cladding? I thought that zirconium was the only suitable cladding material. Steel, and most other metals other than zirconium loses much of its strength under the intense radiation bombardment that claddings experience.
The Chernobyl accident was exposed the next morning when a lab in Sweden detected zirconium in the atmophere. The only plausible way that could happen was a reactor accident somewhere.
I also thought that most MOX fuel manufactured in real life used plutonium recycled from decommissioned nuclear weapons. If we don't burn up the weapons grade PU239 and U235 in reactors, what else is one supposed to do with the warhead materials? Call it waste while simultaneously trying to breed new PU in power reacors? That would make no sense.
For example, in Sweden there is an entire mountain of (low grade) uranium ore claimed to have enough to supply the world's demand for 100 years, by itself. Only trouble is that today's uranium prices are too low to make it interesting.
Also in Sweden, they are careful to store spent fuel waste in a place where they can retrieve it easily. The thinking is that within a hundred years, the isotopes in that waste will become valuable for medical and industrial purposed not yet invented (not to mention recycling of the heavy elements for fuel.)
The biggest challenge is to think out of the box. Copious electric power can be used to suck greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere and entrain them in mines or under the sea. We could use nuclear energy to undo the greenhouse effect. But it will take lots and lots of electric power, much too much for renewable energy sources. For that application renewable energy sources would produce far too little; nuclear power is the only technology that seems to fit the bill.
What a remarkable law it is. For thirty years I've been reading that development will soon hit a brick wall and Moore's Law will end. A corollary to the nay saying is that silicon technology will have to give way to something new; everything from silicon on sapphire, to organic molecules. Hasn't happened yet. Moore's Law and silicon still rule in this world.
Even more remarkable than Moore's prediction that growth would be exponential, is the fact that he nailed the actual value of the exponent. He only had to make one adjustment in the exponent's value since the beginning.
I read an article that says that it's not entirely an accident. The chip fabricators also believe in Moore's law and they make their business plans and their R&D plans based on it. They fear that they can't stay competitive if they fall behind Moore's law.
When they succeed in their goals, they cause Moore's Law to be fulfilled almost exactly. Thus, Moore's Law is partially self-fulfilling and Mr. Moore not only foretold the future, he shaped it.
My hat goes off to Gordon E. Moore. He should be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution.
In the early 80s the military rebeled against the chaos in their software procurements. They claimed that in the history of procured software projects that more than 250 langauages had been used, only one of which was used in more than one project (I think that one was Jovial which was used in two projects.) They commissioned Ada to be the single language to end all languages. They tried to be as heads up and up front as possible in designing Ada, and solicited input from anyone and everyone. As you know, Ada made a major dent in military circles but it never got far in becoming the one and only language. There were (and are) compelling reasons to also use other languages.
So what's the point? We have to allow some chaos and experimentation even within projects. Otherwise, our thinking gets too rigid and we lose the ability to stimulate new ideas and to let the best ideas percolate to the top via real life experience.
If every project optimizes only itself, and doesn't consider growth of the industry and the profession, the result is stagnation. We would be becalmed in a sea of localized suboptimizations. R&D does not belong exclusively in ivory towers. Software R&D works best when allowed to grow from real life's hard lessons.
The best advice I heard was that large projects should budget the new technology and risks that they allow. In no circumstances should a project include more than 25% new (or risky) technology. On the other hand, I would argue that a large project should budget 10% (certainly no less than 5%) for undirected experimentation. Management should not get involved in the nature of the experiments, but it must manage the quantity of experimentation.
What a trashy paper. The author starts out with predjudices and conclusions, and goes from there. He never even tries to provide a basis for his conclusions. He compounds it with stupid statements.
"This is a result of the fact that IPR protection leads to unnecessary duplication, as developers have substantial incentive to produce software that simply replicates the function of existing software." He talks about innovation, yet he views efficiency as leading to exactly one (G.I.) version of everything. He should apply his IPR theories to Hollywood's type of software. One book, one movie, one song, and one TV show should be enough for everyone, and priced at the marginal cost of production. Any more would be unnecessary duplication.
"One of the most basic principles in economics is that efficiency is maximized when products sell at their marginal cost of production." Since when? The principle of free market economies is that prices move to their free market levels, duh. If those prices match costs, the producers soon go bankrupt and sources of investment for new products dry up.
I've worked my whole career in software, and made a lot of innovations. Many times I wanted to contribute to open software, but I didn't work for an institution or on the public dole. I had to keep my nose to the grindstone doing the things that benefited my employer, not the world. My employment contracts further restricted me from doing open software on my own time in the evenings. The fairness of that sounds dubious at first, but when one thinks of the conflicts of interest that might arise it seems wise.
I've always thought that the greatest weakness in the open software movement is that only a tiny fraction of the software savy people in the world can contribute. The rest need to feed their families by working for ordinary for-profit entities.
"Precisely when the organization is trying to gain a return on investment, software operating costs may start to climb. ... At this point, support costs can start to consume a larger and larger part of the IT budget, severely limiting new investments."
The company often feels that software maintainers are extorting money from them. That's especially true when the application is not an external package continuously upgraded with new features. Managers expect that a paid-up static application should cost zero to maintain. This was made very plain when Y2K remediation work was complete and the Y2K workers, young and old, were booted out the door with parting greetings that sounded like "good riddance."
As a senior (now retired) software type I wrestled with the software maintenance dilemma for decades. I saw that old code was designed for the CPU and memory limitations of its day. As time marched on Moore's Law rendered old code useless faster than poor documentation or obscure programming languages.
At one point I resolved to put an upper limit of 10 years on the life of any code. After that it would have to be discarded and replaced. Then I realized that if everyone followed that policy future generations would be doomed to reinventing the wheels (i.e. the logic) invented in earlier versions. Actual progress would approach zero asymptotically. Consider for example code to control a nuclear plant. The plant has a 45 year lifetime, and the laws of physics and principles of control don't change in that time. If we had to reinvent all the control software four or five times in the life of the plant, it would be a terrible waste. The most modern implementation might be more efficient and superior in quality, but there is no assurance that it does a better or as good a job at controlling the plant as the first version.
Both extremes are wrong. Maintaining old static applications indefinitely is wrong. Periodic discard and replacement is wrong. My final conclusion was that old applications need to be rewritten and re-implemented and expanded and modernized gradually. If we re-write or re-implement 10% of the code every year, then none of the parts get to be more than 10 years old. We also deliberately blur the boundaries between old and new applications and the boundaries between developers and maintainers.
In my experience developers resist this notion more than management. Developers love reinventing wheels. I bet every open source developer worth his salt would love nothing more than his/her own chance to invent Unix from scratch, and along the way every application and algorithm that went with it. In any case, they really hate the idea of re-implementing some predecessor's cleverness embodied as code. They would much rather create their own fresh version confident that they can be cleverer than anyone else. It goes with the territory when we seek creative people to program. They like to create -- duh.
One other thing, when our gradual rewrites of old code reach the point where everything is fully expressed as objects, then the burden of rewrites and maintenance should be drastically reduced forever after. Isn't that the promise of objects? Expandability? Adaptability? Any large application well founded on objects should be able to morph itself into any future application one little bit at a time.
Establishing a secure national ID is a politically loaded issue and not likely to happen soon. I'm not proposing that. It seems that we could substantially limit the danger of identity theft, and the motivation to steal IDs, if we merely gave up the convenience of being able to establish accounts and/or credit by phone or mail using nothing more than name and SSN.
I'm not proposing that you can't use your credit card to purchase by phone or by net, but rather that one shouldn't be able to use only a name and SSN to get a new credit card.
Legally, the only change needed would be a regulation establishing minimum ID requirements for banks and creditors required to establish new accounts. The minimum requirement must include a face-to-face meeting and one or more corroborations of identity.
I suspect that creditors may be the only ones opposed to the idea because they profit from easy credit, despite fraud and ID theft.
Note that my proposal does not prohibit businesses from using SSN as a database key to locate your record. Abhorrent as that practice is, it's too embedded to ever eliminate now.
Granted, this proposal doesn't eliminate all the risks of identity theft, nor eliminate all the harm of SSN theft. I believe however that it would eliminate the most harmful component of risk.
This must have been proposed before but I never see it discussed. What does the Slashdot community say?