One bizarre thing I've run into as a 34 year old consultant who is starting to run into this very sort of 'ageism' is that if I cowtow to the stereotypes that most young folks in their early 20's expect from a guru, I'm more likely to be accepted than if I simply walk in and act myself.
What I mean by this is that if I walk into the office with all the latest gadgets hanging from my belt, hair up in a ponytail, and invite the young 'whippersnappers' over to my house or show off a two-seater sports car, they are more likely to say "wow, he must be a really frood programmer" than they are to say "obsolete fossil."
I've tried both: leave the Handspring Visor and the web-enabled cell phone and iBook running PowerPC Linux at home, and I don't have a shit chance in hell of landing a contract. Walk in with all these gadgets, and I'm worshipped as a guru and a as a programming God.
It's a damned good thing I know how to code, otherwise, it'd be very easy to snow the 20-something managers.
My advise is to keep up with the latest gadgets and be willing to show them off at parties^H^H^H^H^H^H meetings--it makes you seem like a hip older guru than some over the hill lamer.
Come to think of it, I suspect we'll see the following:
1) An "Internet" tap coming into every home more or less like television cable does now: $20/month allows you to turn the Internet spiggot on. Ubiquitous "Internet" machines (similar to the iOpener or WebTV) will probably become the way many households who don't have home computers will get onto the Internet, and I suspect you'll see more and more of these machines in places such as schools and libraries.
2) While things like Napster and music (and eventually, movie) piracy will still be fairly popular, because the Internet spiggot is fairly large, I suspect you'll see more and more well-encrypted content delivery systems which permit the MPAA and RIAA to deliver content across that spiggot with strong copyright protection. And I suspect that piracy will become a smaller percentage of on-line content transfer than it is now.
Actually, I would hope that people here would help design these content delivery systems, as I suspect we would be able to come up with something that would simultaneously address (a) our right to "home copying" of content (say, from the home stereo to the car stereo), while (b) preventing wholesale rebroadcasting of content to millions of others. (Perhaps by embedding some sort of "number of copies" field into the encrypted data stream?) Of course there are some out there who would disagree with me--but then, I suspect they would also come down on me like a ton of bricks if I were to advocate their argument in GNU-licensed space: that is, if I were to advocate using GNU licensed software in a proprietary system without making source code available.
3) Eventually, someone will figure out that having just one wire make the "last mile", and delivering all content across that wire, makes the most economic sense. In fact, I suspect the only reason why we don't have just one twisted pair handle all phone and cable service right now is more regulatory than it is technological. But eventually I suspect more and more people will have something like a "DSL signal splitter" device that's sitting underneath my house, with outputs providing cable, Internet, and phone lines for up to a half-dozen differnet phone numbers. Turning on each service then becomes a matter of hooking up a jack to the external box, and phoning the appropriate company and establishing service.
4) Movies on demand. Once the bandwidth gets large enough to allow broadcasting a movie digitally across the Internet, it seems inevitable that someone would set up a "movie on demand" service which would broadcast a movie to your television across the wire. And if everything comes across the same twisted pair, it makes sense to me that your cable company would figure out a way to handle this service.
I hope that this trademark trend discourages companies from using artificial scents on various products.
That's because I'm highly allergic to the various base chemicals that are used as a scent fixer, and I'd hate to be constantly sneezing and on the verge of nausia every time I try to play tennis or darts in a local bar...
You know, I've read both sides of the argument about distribution of intellectual property across the Internet. On the side of applications like "Napster" are people who basically say two things: (1) I should be able to download stuff for free because it's overpriced at the store, and (2) we're a movement, and so we don't fuckin' have to follow the existing rules of the established order.
The first one sounds like a justification for theft.
And the second one reminds me of the riots here in Los Angeles a few years back, with hoards of people in Watts running around, breaking into stores and stealing home stereos and TVs. The police couldn't stop them because there were just too many rioters. And when interviewed on TV, many of the rioters basically gave the same justification: "there is just too many of us for the police to stop, and all this stuff is too expensive, so we're going to get ours and stick it to the established order."
When pressed on the second point, the reply is often about things like DeCSS and encryption technology and distributed information distribution: that is, you think it's hard now to track and prevent the virtual riot in progress, just wait until we apply technology to make the virtual rioters anonymous.
Well, the folks in Watts who rioted a few years back after the Rodney King trials could have also applied technology to make their riots even more effective: masks to hide their faces from the cameras, radio jammers to prevent cops from effectively communicating, rocks to help break into stores. But does the addition of technology justify the riots?
I think there is a time and a place for all this anonymous information exchange technology, and there are unsigned bands who would love to have the free publicity and are willing to work with technologies like Napster to distribute their music. But there needs to be a way for people to opt-out. We get pissy when we aren't allowed to opt-out of on-line advertisers gathering information on us, and we get pissy when a company steals rms's code and distributes GNU licensed software as if it were proprietary, so why should we get pissy when a band like Metallica wants to opt out of Napster?
This mob rule mentality that has been adopted by many here is complete bullshit.
I found that, as your standard of living increases, your desired standard of living increases along with it. Soon, you need ever more money before you drop out of the corporate world and thus never do.
In my experience there comes a point when you are happy. Or at least, for me, I'm happy now. I figure it shouldn't take that much more for me to be able to "retire" to the life of writing free software.
Of course I was born to parents who started off dirt poor--and whose attitude, now that they have money, is that "the bigger your house, the more junk you have to dust." Same with cars: there does come a point where the stress of worrying if someone will side-swipe your car outweighs your enjoyment of having a nice car.
So I figure the point where I should be able to cover my expenses for the rest of my life is comming up relatively quick. But of course there is that AS-400 running Linux that I wouldn't mind buying...:-)
so that I can afford to spend my time writing free software, while keeping a roof over my head and a car in my garage and food on my table.
Ultimately I want to spend my time providing cross-platform tools so that the same bit of code can be compiled on the Mac, Windows and Linux and run correctly. But at the moment, the project has to languish so that I can write a web-based appointment scheduling system for a fellow whose having fantasies of getting rich in the New Economy...
Re:Use of the words "Universal Access"
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Universal access is the telephone company. They must give you telephone if you can pay the bill.
Actually, phone universal access is provided to people who cannot afford to pay the bill, if they pass an income test. That is, universal access is a subsidity, paid for out of a "universal access tax", to subsidize phone service to those who would otherwise not be able to afford one.
Pacific Bell's access service is called "Universal Lifeline", and is available to anyone in Southern California making less than $17,400/year (for singles).
Is this universal access as in phones? Or TV?
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Universal Access is that rarest of social phenomena, the win-win issue. Except for moral guardians clucking about pornography and violent video games, who could really oppose it?
Actually there are a number of very good counterarguments to universal access, though most of the people who are pushing universal access ignore them as if they were trivial or non-existant.
1) Where are we going to get the money to provide universal access?
In Katz's essay, he says "Universal Access, if it really catches, means staggeringly huge sales of computers, software and bandwidth...". Well, money isn't created in a vaccuum; it has to come from somewhere, from some program which perhaps is arguably more needful of the money, such as research into AIDS or from retirement funds or health care. The "staggeringly huge sales" has to come at a price, and that price is going to be less money somewhere else.
(And don't say "it's going to come from the bottom line of corporations"--as Katz has argued in the past, corporations protect their bottom lines very well.)
2) Are we talking universal access as in telephones? Or as in television?
My point here is this: universal access as in universal access to telephones is a worthy goal. The ability to communicate to the outside world in the event of an emergency, the ability to keep in touch with people who have traveled abroad, the ability to "reach out and touch somebody" is mostly accepted as a good thing. (Phone sex lines aside, of course.) Of course universal access has yet to be accomplished in the United States, as evidenced by a Navaho woman, who upon receiving a computer to help her bridge the "digital divide" pointed out she had no electricity or phone to plug the computer into.
Universal access as in television, on the other hand, is not always accepted as a good thing. In fact, there are many who argue that television is the source of a number of social ills which could best be repaired by turning the boob tube off. Of course I don't necessarly agree with the findings of people who argue television causes rape or violence by children, any more than the Columbine shootings were caused by playing Quake. But it is clear that universal access to television isn't universally accepted as a good thing.
3) Are we talking about using this new-found "universal access" to "bridge the digital divide" in schools?
It's arguable that there is in fact a "digital divide" between wealthy school districts and poor ones that is causing a difference in the educational quality of our students. It's more likely that rich school districts produce better students than poor ones because they have money to spend on textbooks and better teachers. It's also possible that the socio-economic dispare caused by being poor counts as a strike against students in poor schools in the first place.
The fact that there is even a "digital divide" in the first place is questionable: it seems pretty clear to me that rich people have computers because they can afford them, not because having a computer made them rich. Yet those who argue a "digital divide" are in essence arguing this very fact--that having a computer makes someone rich, not the other way around. And unless you are a programmer making a living using a computer, this strikes me as so much bullshit.
So now that we're talking about putting computers into junior high schools and high schools, what are we going to do with them? Use them in place of slide shows and movie strips that many teachers use in lew of creating a teaching plan? Use them in place of memorization of addition tables and multiplication tables (as calculators are being used now), which will cause more and more people to be so "numerically challenged" that they will take as gospil the results of a cash register where they accidently pressed "7" instead of "4"? (I've had this happen, where I've actually had to call out the manager, because some kid was offering me $3 in change on a $4 purchase, because he hit "7" instead of "4". And as everyone knows, 3 + 4 = 10.)
And if we're going to put computers into every classroom, where are we going to get the money to put them in, pay the electricity, maintain them? From the textbook budget? From the facilities budget? From the teacher's salaries? Going back to point 1, what will suffer so we can give students high tech toys which will be obsolete in 3 years, and need to be replaced?
It's fairly clear to me that some degree in computer proficiency is a reasonable requirement, just as typing classes were pretty much required of secretarial types. But given how quickly things are changing, should this computer proficiency be provided by our high schools at tremendous expense, for students who may wind up as an automechanic or a doctor, or should those skills be provided "on the job" by the corporations who decide to use Lotus Notes intead of Microsoft Outlook Express.
Personally I think our rush to "universal access" by governments and corporations and schools is a mistake, and a rather serious one. While I for one wouldn't mind more sources of revenue for Apple, Microsoft, Compaq and others, I don't know if I really want this in place of properly funding retirement plans, or properly funding textbooks in schools, just so that people can experience a "cyberspace" whose pipe dreams are backed by financials which are even now collapsing at warp factor speed.
The problem with arguments from these extremes is that they leave no room for moral progress. The Aztecs may have cut people's heart out in a critical ritualistic ceremony, but that doesn't mean that all morality is relativistic, just that it's a bad idea to tell an Aztec priest you need open-heart surgery.
Actually, the Aztec justified this through religion--in fact, it was a great honor to be sacrificed, and one story goes that a general of their army after winning a major war on behalf of the Aztec demanded that he be sacrificed so he could take his rightful place beside the Gods.
The argument they used is not dissimilar to Christian morality: as there is an afterlife, fearing death is like fearing jumping into cold water--the fear is in the transition, not in the swimming. They just had an honorable way to bypass the cycle of rebirth to find a holy place in Aztec "heaven".
From the Aztec perspective, the fact that we do not provide an honorable or righteous way for someone to sit to the left hand of God could be seen as a terrible, amoral thing to do, just as the ancient Japanese may find our denying them the right to ritual suicide as a way of saving face as amoral.
Morality, as well as ethics, are relative to one's social and religious framework.
We may consider our modern society as having morally and ethically progressed towards an abstract ideal--after all, some would argue that killing people and suicide are both bad things, and that we deny these to people makes us morally superior to the ancient Japanese and Aztec. But to do this is simply the hidden arrogance of a culture who believes we know the face of God, and are in fact with our technology superior to the ancient gods of old.
It forces competition, not cooperation. Even between KDE and Gnome, there's a lot of code and idea-sharing. With proprietary software, that's a no-no.
It's interesting when I read this, because I've often seen this reason given as to why propriety software is better than open source--because competition breeds better software because it forces the people working on the software to try harder.
That leaves us with the problem how to sustain a healthy software industry without proprietary software.
Or, to boil this down to nuts and bolts, just as soon as someone can show me a viable way that I can make enough money writing open source software than I can continue making the strokes on my car and my house and continue taking one week vacations in Europe, without a substantial "hiccup" in my current salary (read: I can't live on my savings for 5 years while an open source project of mine reaches some degree of penetration), then I'll do it in a heartbeat.
There are a number of ethics that are a fixed aspect of human cultures. The family. Preservation of life. Do you know of a culture that does not value the family structure in some sense? Do you know of a culture that encourages random killing of its own?
"Random" killing is rather difficult to define, if only because "random" often equates to "senseless," and "senseless" is a relative term. What we would consider "senseless", such as the Aztec human sacrifices or the wars of the Jivaro head hunters of Equador are meaningful rituals to the Gods for these people.
To elaborate, the Aztec would sacrifice people to the Gods by getting them seriously liquored up, and then in front of a great croud, cut their still living heart out of their chest with one or two expertly given strokes of a ritual knife. Those who were thus sacrificed were believed to sit for eternity beside their Gods. Rather than sacrificing the losers of various battles with their enemies as a form of grisly "punishment", they sacrificed the "winners" as a "reward" to guarentee their place in "heaven".
The Jivaro are head hunters who used to fight wars in South America and shrink their heads and eat the enemey bodies did this as a sort of ritual apeasement of their Gods. One purpose of these wars was as a right of passage: a small boy of 14 would be considered a man only if he successfully went out on his own and murdered someone in an opposing tribe. They would often slaughter neighboring villages and eat the dead's brains, as a form of ritual "nurishment."
Are these random and senseless? To them, no. To us, perhaps we would consider them senseless, or not.
On the other hand, does it prove the point that there are no ethical absolutes, but only "perceived" absolutes which actually vary from culture to culture? Or is this simply a demonstration that no matter what absolute ethical systems that God has ordained to mankind, there are those cultures who deny God's wisdom?
The answer you give often depends on how hard you must cling to the notion that there are ethical absolutes in a world where all sorts of wierd shit is justified in the name of religion. 'Cause from what I have learned about the history of various cultures around the world, there are no absolute ethical standards at all.
Yes, we can. We have orbital superiority right now. Our spy satellites and communications satellites allow us to watch the ground and know what's going on. Our AWACs and other air based tactical planes allow the same capability.
And they do such a wonderful job finding all those camaflauged tanks in Iraq and drug farms in Columbia.
Sorry, but a determined enemey can screw with aerial recon by covering up stuff they don't want us to see, and making us see more things by using cardboard cutouts. It isn't rocket science to create 10,000 tank cutouts (for example) and place them in one location, while covering the real 10,000 tank invasion force with netting. And it has been done--if you follow Desert Storm, one of the problems we were having is in getting a relatively accurate picture of what the hell is going on in Iraq.
The point is that when a ground unit moves in against another ground unit, the ground unit with air support wins.
I said that in my original post--that air support gives you an edge. But you still have to put ground pounders on the ground if you want to establish ground superiority. You cannot win a ground war with airplanes alone--and that was always my point.
Microsoft, like caltech, hasn't paid a dime in dividends to a shareholder.
And Caltech's shareholders are...? You know, I can't find Caltech's ticker on the Nasdaq...
In a sense, Microsoft is a non-profit organization.
And $6.5 billion US profit isn't really profit for Microsoft because...?
Microsoft trains / educates an order of magnitude more people per year than caltech does - the only difference is the breadth of subject matter.
So do other corporations, but training people in the corporate policies and giving them on-the-job work experience does not constitute a college education. I'm sorry if you cannot see the difference.
Why shouldn't Microsoft start handing out computer science degrees?
As soon as they offer a comprehensive 4 year acredited degree, I'd say they should. Of course that would require them to provide a rounded, comprehensive program, instead of on-the-job experience, as does any corporation who hires people.
Of course following your logic, the furnature shop on the edge of town which provides on-the-job training making custom pine furnature should also provide 4-year degrees. After all, they do train on-the-job, don't they?
A great deal has changed in the 12 years you've been gone from caltech; your vanity email doesn't mean you have a clue about what's happening now. One could go into specific examples - but then names would have to be named. And what's the point?
Actually, the "vanity e-mail" comes from being a life member of the Alumni association, and in keeping some tabs as to what's going on with the alma mater. Frankly, aside from a slight increase by a small minority of students in getting rich over doing research--minor in that any student bright enough to get into Caltech can bypass the educational process entirely and strike out on their own--nothing has changed much. Caltech's policies manual (posted on-line, I checked) has not changed in it's wording one iota from the time I was a junior. And aside from Caltech trying to capitalize on a small (approximately 80) patent portfolio, the makeup of Caltech's financials has not changed one whit.
"Um, once someone has orbit superiority, they can blow up any of our air planes. Then they have air superiority and they can blow up any of our ground troops. Then they have ground superiority and they won. Why do you think the US works so hard to obtain air superiority in modern warfare? It is the KEY to ground superiority."
It's not.
The problem with air superiority is that it cannot translate into ground superiority for the very reason that you cannot monitor everything that's going on on the ground when you're a thousand feet up going 500 miles per hour.
Even in Desert Storm, we still had to land a million people over seas in order to establish ground superiority.
The best air superiority will buy you is an edge. That is, it will help you with recon, and it will help you harass the hell out of supply lines. But true ground superiority can only be achieved by putting grunts on the ground. And to win a ground war, you have to fight a ground war.
Nothing in this post said that the class was bad or evil - in fact, the class is excellent and does a great job of explaining entrepreneurship. Your facts are wrong about the number of people attending the class - it regularly fills the big lecture hall in Noyes, well over 100 seats. Certainly only a fraction sitting in are enrolled, but that's not the point.
Really? It only had about 30 when I took it. But this was a dozen years ago.
The point being made is that caltech is a business incubator and v.c. fund - a fund with billions in assets, research grants, and i.p. royalty streams, and a growing predilection for keeping information out of the public domain - until its demonstrated to be worthless or unexploitable.
A point with which I strongly disagree. One of the functions of any university, public or private (Caltech is private) is to educate. That some students may find a class whereby they are connected to folks at a VC fund educational no more makes Caltech a business than running a class on algaebraic systems makes Caltech an arm of the NSA.
That Caltech derives revenue from various IP royaltee streams does not mean Caltech has scraped it's roots as a university and research facility--Universities have historically derived a portion of their continuing funding through licensing IP, amongst other things. Hell, Caltech also derives a portion of it's operating revenue through it's contract with NASA where it provides the administrative overview of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Does that make Caltech the government as well?
Fact: Caltech faculty and students are required to pass all possibly patentable ideas through the caltech IP office before an attempt is made to publish.
Actually, no. The Office of Technology Transfer only requires notification when the facility or student believes an invention was created and wishes to have it patented. That is, OTT doesn't force all research which may contain possibly patentable ideas through it first in order to screen for possible patents--the OTT simply doesn't have the manpower to review all that research.
Evidentally you agree that caltech is a business; all we are discussing now are the details of the deal the employees get.
No, I do not. From Caltech's policies manual:
The Institute's policy generally is to reserve to itself rights in inventions and computer software made by faculty and staff members with the use of Institute facilities or in the normal course of their Institute duties. The student's position is different, however, and students generally retain all rights except in inventions or computer software made under circumstances such that rights clearly belong to the Institute or to the sponsor of the research.
That is, employees of Caltech (facility and staff members) assign their rights as is normal for any employer, including not-for-profit organizations and others. Students assign their rights only in those circumstances where the rights clearly shoudl belong to Caltech--such as they were performing research for a research group or as part of classwork where the student used Caltech equipment and performed the work under Caltech guidance.
I was at Caltech when they decided to revise their IP policy, and was one of the students who raised a stink with the initial draft that didn't make what Caltech got the rights to clear enough.
How high do you think the student's interests are on the priority list of the i.p. office?
You clearly aren't a Caltech student or at least aren't a happy one. When I was there, Caltech's administration bent over backwards for the students--even going out of their way to help students who are financially strapped or otherwise having problems. Me, I was on the 5 year plan because I burnt out for personal reasons--and Caltech was more than happy to help.
Are students priority one in Caltech's IP office? I'm quite sure of it.
But now that you agree that caltech is in the intellectual property business, the question remains: why does it have tax free status?
Well, I actually don't agree, so your question is moot.
Why is caltech a tax sink rather than a tax source? Why can't microsoft relabel its employees as "students" or "postdocs", stop paying taxes and start applying for grants?
Because the majority of Caltech's day to day operations are in education and research. Caltech has constantly ranked as one of the highest universities in the United States in terms of educational value for the dollar in undergraduate studies. Caltech also performs cutting edge research, as all universities with gradudate programs do, much of that research published without regards to protecting IP rights.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a for-profit corporation, which issues stock and pays dividends. Further, Microsoft provides no educational studies programs, nor does it provide any opportunities for undergraduate study or research. Microsoft is in the business of writing software, period. That they fund some research through providing grants and by hiring researchers to perform abstract research does not distract from the fact that they write software--these grants only serve the purpose of influencing the course of research done by various colleges and universities.
Caltech and other research schools are not putting publically funded research into the public domain.
And I guess all those papers that got published in a range of scholarly journals ranging from computer graphics to chemistry, nor any of the stuff done by JPL apparently counts, as it isn't real IP, as it doesn't generate revenue.
Is that your point? That it doesn't count as IP unless it was potentially a direct revenue source, at which point, it counts? And of course it counts only if the university makes money off it?
Isn't this a bit, ah, circular?
You may argue that this isn't all bad --- but to deny it is to ignore reality.
I guess I don't live in your reality, because I'm saying that you're flat out wrong. I'm sorry you don't see it.
The real question is, why are these "schools" --- when viewed as v.c. funds / incubators that book profits from investment and royalty income --- why is that these "schools" are not only tax-exempt, but they actually have easy and preferred access to federal handouts in the form of NIH / NSF funds?
Because the students who actually participate in this V/C prep stuff is in the extreme minority. You're describing a class that enrolls perhaps 20 to 30 students a year (I took the class's predecessor, which didn't include writing a business plan) out of a graduating class of about 250. The majority of the students at Caltech could care less about going out and starting a business; they're more concerned with cutting edge research.
Further, having been to Caltech, it's pretty clear Dr. Hood was the exception to the rule around there--while being at Caltech, you get pretty used to being in a rather rarified research atmosphere, it's about the science, and not about making bazillions of dollars.
Caltech's undergraduates have a rather long history of counter-culture thinking, and in opposing anything that prevents the free exchange of ideas and research from taking place. "Know Ye The Truth And The Truth Shall Set Ye Free" happens to be the school motto, and most folks there swear by it.
As to skimming 75% of the royaltees--this is actually the exception of many universities who take 100% of the royaltees of any inventions that you create there as part of your student career. This is akin to a company taking 100% of the research work you create when you work there, on research they fund and they provide the facilities for. That Caltech is willing to cut you in on a percentage of the profits of an invention that was created entirely on their dime and with their facilities is actually one of the more generous deals out there.
The United States has used the Atom Bomb once on Hiroshima and most do not agree that It should have been used.
Most?
The reason why we nuked two towns in Japan (you forgot Nagasaki) is for two reasons: one, to demonstrate a new technology to the emerior of Japan to convince him to finally surrender. Two, while the number of lives lost in Heroshima and Nagasaki was astronomical, the projected loss of life from a Japanese invasion (which was our only other alternative) was projected to be between 5 and 10 times larger.
Actually, Einstein first proposed that instead of either invading or nuking Japan, we should instead invite observers from Japan to witness a nuclear warhead being ignited in the Navada desert. Nuking the moon is a safer alternative to nuking Navada--less environmentally destructive, and less threat of a bunch of small towns being exposed to fallout.
When put into perspective that way, it actually makes some degree of sense.
If an entire Nation goes bonkers over a 6 year old Cuban Boy who is taken from his home by a Government acting against the public opinion.
Actually, we didn't invade Cuba to grab that boy. Or are you refering to taking him from his grandparents to reunite him with his father, in accord to court rulings which the grandparents where ignoring in violation of US law? Sometimes things aren't as cut and dry as the public relations people would have you think, you know.
I'm sure there's even a 'plan' for alien invasion, and you may not like what it entails, but it's probably there, waiting to be exposed so everyone can be shocked at what they were planning to do.
Um, in fact there is, just as there is a plan for what to do in case of alien contact. I believe our plan for alien contact is to keep quiet, play stupid and lay low: that way, we appear to post no thread to the aliens. JMS alluded to our first contact plans in one Babylon 5 episode.
I don't know what our plan is for alien invasion, though I suspect it involves nuking them in orbit if at all possible. One problem with aliens invading us is that never has air superiority ever translated to ground superiority--which means they eventually have to land on the ground. And that means nuking them when they arrive.
It's interesting that you mention that, as I had a friend who was doing work in writing a tactical simulation system for the DoD. He was trying to convince me to transfer to working in his group.
The upshot of it was that they were trying to figure out how to crack the very nut you described--how they could defend themselves in West Germany without having to set up a 100km border, and without resorting to nukes or other weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical) during the first invasion wave. (According to him, it was felt by the higher-ups in the army that resorting to nuclear weapons was such a big no-no that we were considering allowing part Germany to fall rather than lose the public relations war at home and abroad.)
The answer was that they couldn't. That is, they couldn't crack the nut of holding all of Germany without resorting to dropping a nuke or two on any East German invasion force.
Today, it sounds rediculous to us the idea of nuking the moon. However, it's a far cry from what we felt was the real possibility of having to start a nuclear war in order to protect our geopolitical interests.
Of course the answer was for everyone to come off their testosterone high and paranoid delusions and talk to their soviet counterparts. And one way that was started was (so I was told) was to show the Soviets the simulations my friend worked on to explain why we had an invasion force lined up along the East German border, along with the other tactical simulations we had created showing alternate strategies we had explored and rejected.
And I guess you must have missed your "Philosophy of Science" classes.
I'm quite aware that Logical Positivism has been abandoned by most philosophers since about the 1950's, for two reasons: one, it doesn't explain itself. Two, as a philosophy which attempts to explain "why", logical positivism falls flat on it's face. It's really quite unsatisfying as a unified system of philosophical thought, given how many questions it leaves totally unanswered, and how much of the very nature of our existance it leaves totally unexplained.
However, shadows of logical positivism lives on in the scientific method.
Unlike philosophy, science (and any good scientist) is quite content to side-step "why" and concentrate on "how". And science is quite content to leave a lot of questions unanswered, and leave that to the theists and the philosophers. The very limitations which made philosophers abandon logical positivism as a philosophical system cause scientists to implicitly embrase it's methodology.
And that goes right back to my point that science has nothing to say about the nature of God.
God by definition (or at least by most definitions of God given by Christians) is infinite, all powerful, all knowing, and all encompasing. By definition God is also "supernatural", or rather, beyond nature.
By definition, therefore, God cannot be measured, quantified, or otherwise observed scientifically. As God is God, He can change the rules, alter reality, change the very structure of the universe at his will. Or, if you are a deist, at the very least he set the wheels of the universe rolling before the Big Bang, and set a perfect universe in motion.
Either way, you cannot describe the nature of God scientifically. Therefore, science has nothing to say about God (at least, good scientists will say this), and so being both a theist and a scientist is not inherently incompatable. Actually, science and theology are orthogonal--so one can be both a scientist and a theist (or not) without consequence.
Well, without most consequence, as one's morality may alter one's behavior. So your morality towards little mice may affect your willingness to kill and dissect the little fuzzy things in the name of scientific research.
Oh, and I'm native american.
Beyond that, I've spent quite a bit of time asking people what they believe. And what people have said is that "God is infinite." One consequence of the infinity of God is that God is unknowable--as it is impossible for the finite to encompass the infinite.
The problem is, both these tactics are not science in good faith, because they seem to operate separately within the movement. In order to replace a theory, you must produce another theory that explains properly more than the original theory; in other words, you must find places where the old theory gave bad predictions and your new theory must improve these predictions (as well as predicting accurately everything the old theory did). So "creation scientists" are not acting in good faith when their new theory and their criticisms of the old theory have nothing to do with one another.
Well, the creationism "scientists" are also acting in bad faith because what they propose is not science per se. That is, what they have produced is not observable nor testable in any reasonable fashion; instead they say "because God (defined as a supernatural, superpowerful being which is beyond the relm of observation or measurement) made it happen, and because God told us so (in the Bible)."
Well, God (as so defined) cannot be quantified nor measured. So it is impossible to perform any observations or experiments on creationist science as this would require us to measure or quantify God.
Perhaps Creationism is good theology, but it's crappy science. And like oil and water, theology and science cannot mix: theology (such as creationism) deals in things that cannot be observed or measured by it's very definition, while science deals exclusively in observable and measurable things.
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One bizarre thing I've run into as a 34 year old consultant who is starting to run into this very sort of 'ageism' is that if I cowtow to the stereotypes that most young folks in their early 20's expect from a guru, I'm more likely to be accepted than if I simply walk in and act myself.
What I mean by this is that if I walk into the office with all the latest gadgets hanging from my belt, hair up in a ponytail, and invite the young 'whippersnappers' over to my house or show off a two-seater sports car, they are more likely to say "wow, he must be a really frood programmer" than they are to say "obsolete fossil."
I've tried both: leave the Handspring Visor and the web-enabled cell phone and iBook running PowerPC Linux at home, and I don't have a shit chance in hell of landing a contract. Walk in with all these gadgets, and I'm worshipped as a guru and a as a programming God.
It's a damned good thing I know how to code, otherwise, it'd be very easy to snow the 20-something managers.
My advise is to keep up with the latest gadgets and be willing to show them off at parties^H^H^H^H^H^H meetings--it makes you seem like a hip older guru than some over the hill lamer.
It's stupid, but it works.
You program algorithms.
You use heuristics to figure out what algorithms you wish to program.
Whippersnapper.
Come to think of it, I suspect we'll see the following:
1) An "Internet" tap coming into every home more or less like television cable does now: $20/month allows you to turn the Internet spiggot on. Ubiquitous "Internet" machines (similar to the iOpener or WebTV) will probably become the way many households who don't have home computers will get onto the Internet, and I suspect you'll see more and more of these machines in places such as schools and libraries.
2) While things like Napster and music (and eventually, movie) piracy will still be fairly popular, because the Internet spiggot is fairly large, I suspect you'll see more and more well-encrypted content delivery systems which permit the MPAA and RIAA to deliver content across that spiggot with strong copyright protection. And I suspect that piracy will become a smaller percentage of on-line content transfer than it is now.
Actually, I would hope that people here would help design these content delivery systems, as I suspect we would be able to come up with something that would simultaneously address (a) our right to "home copying" of content (say, from the home stereo to the car stereo), while (b) preventing wholesale rebroadcasting of content to millions of others. (Perhaps by embedding some sort of "number of copies" field into the encrypted data stream?) Of course there are some out there who would disagree with me--but then, I suspect they would also come down on me like a ton of bricks if I were to advocate their argument in GNU-licensed space: that is, if I were to advocate using GNU licensed software in a proprietary system without making source code available.
3) Eventually, someone will figure out that having just one wire make the "last mile", and delivering all content across that wire, makes the most economic sense. In fact, I suspect the only reason why we don't have just one twisted pair handle all phone and cable service right now is more regulatory than it is technological. But eventually I suspect more and more people will have something like a "DSL signal splitter" device that's sitting underneath my house, with outputs providing cable, Internet, and phone lines for up to a half-dozen differnet phone numbers. Turning on each service then becomes a matter of hooking up a jack to the external box, and phoning the appropriate company and establishing service.
4) Movies on demand. Once the bandwidth gets large enough to allow broadcasting a movie digitally across the Internet, it seems inevitable that someone would set up a "movie on demand" service which would broadcast a movie to your television across the wire. And if everything comes across the same twisted pair, it makes sense to me that your cable company would figure out a way to handle this service.
I hope that this trademark trend discourages companies from using artificial scents on various products.
That's because I'm highly allergic to the various base chemicals that are used as a scent fixer, and I'd hate to be constantly sneezing and on the verge of nausia every time I try to play tennis or darts in a local bar...
You know, I've read both sides of the argument about distribution of intellectual property across the Internet. On the side of applications like "Napster" are people who basically say two things: (1) I should be able to download stuff for free because it's overpriced at the store, and (2) we're a movement, and so we don't fuckin' have to follow the existing rules of the established order.
The first one sounds like a justification for theft.
And the second one reminds me of the riots here in Los Angeles a few years back, with hoards of people in Watts running around, breaking into stores and stealing home stereos and TVs. The police couldn't stop them because there were just too many rioters. And when interviewed on TV, many of the rioters basically gave the same justification: "there is just too many of us for the police to stop, and all this stuff is too expensive, so we're going to get ours and stick it to the established order."
When pressed on the second point, the reply is often about things like DeCSS and encryption technology and distributed information distribution: that is, you think it's hard now to track and prevent the virtual riot in progress, just wait until we apply technology to make the virtual rioters anonymous.
Well, the folks in Watts who rioted a few years back after the Rodney King trials could have also applied technology to make their riots even more effective: masks to hide their faces from the cameras, radio jammers to prevent cops from effectively communicating, rocks to help break into stores. But does the addition of technology justify the riots?
I think there is a time and a place for all this anonymous information exchange technology, and there are unsigned bands who would love to have the free publicity and are willing to work with technologies like Napster to distribute their music. But there needs to be a way for people to opt-out. We get pissy when we aren't allowed to opt-out of on-line advertisers gathering information on us, and we get pissy when a company steals rms's code and distributes GNU licensed software as if it were proprietary, so why should we get pissy when a band like Metallica wants to opt out of Napster?
This mob rule mentality that has been adopted by many here is complete bullshit.
I found that, as your standard of living increases, your desired standard of living increases along with it. Soon, you need ever more money before you drop out of the corporate world and thus never do.
:-)
In my experience there comes a point when you are happy. Or at least, for me, I'm happy now. I figure it shouldn't take that much more for me to be able to "retire" to the life of writing free software.
Of course I was born to parents who started off dirt poor--and whose attitude, now that they have money, is that "the bigger your house, the more junk you have to dust." Same with cars: there does come a point where the stress of worrying if someone will side-swipe your car outweighs your enjoyment of having a nice car.
So I figure the point where I should be able to cover my expenses for the rest of my life is comming up relatively quick. But of course there is that AS-400 running Linux that I wouldn't mind buying...
How can they do a Mac vs. Linux article and not mention BSD-based Mac OS X?
It was mentioned.
I don't follow Apple very closely, so I don't know if OS X is officially released yet,...
It's not out yet.
so that I can afford to spend my time writing free software, while keeping a roof over my head and a car in my garage and food on my table.
Ultimately I want to spend my time providing cross-platform tools so that the same bit of code can be compiled on the Mac, Windows and Linux and run correctly. But at the moment, the project has to languish so that I can write a web-based appointment scheduling system for a fellow whose having fantasies of getting rich in the New Economy...
Universal access is the telephone company. They must give you telephone if you can pay the bill.
Actually, phone universal access is provided to people who cannot afford to pay the bill, if they pass an income test. That is, universal access is a subsidity, paid for out of a "universal access tax", to subsidize phone service to those who would otherwise not be able to afford one.
Pacific Bell's access service is called "Universal Lifeline", and is available to anyone in Southern California making less than $17,400/year (for singles).
Universal Access is that rarest of social phenomena, the win-win issue. Except for moral guardians clucking about pornography and violent video games, who could really oppose it?
Actually there are a number of very good counterarguments to universal access, though most of the people who are pushing universal access ignore them as if they were trivial or non-existant.
1) Where are we going to get the money to provide universal access?
In Katz's essay, he says "Universal Access, if it really catches, means staggeringly huge sales of computers, software and bandwidth...". Well, money isn't created in a vaccuum; it has to come from somewhere, from some program which perhaps is arguably more needful of the money, such as research into AIDS or from retirement funds or health care. The "staggeringly huge sales" has to come at a price, and that price is going to be less money somewhere else.
(And don't say "it's going to come from the bottom line of corporations"--as Katz has argued in the past, corporations protect their bottom lines very well.)
2) Are we talking universal access as in telephones? Or as in television?
My point here is this: universal access as in universal access to telephones is a worthy goal. The ability to communicate to the outside world in the event of an emergency, the ability to keep in touch with people who have traveled abroad, the ability to "reach out and touch somebody" is mostly accepted as a good thing. (Phone sex lines aside, of course.) Of course universal access has yet to be accomplished in the United States, as evidenced by a Navaho woman, who upon receiving a computer to help her bridge the "digital divide" pointed out she had no electricity or phone to plug the computer into.
Universal access as in television, on the other hand, is not always accepted as a good thing. In fact, there are many who argue that television is the source of a number of social ills which could best be repaired by turning the boob tube off. Of course I don't necessarly agree with the findings of people who argue television causes rape or violence by children, any more than the Columbine shootings were caused by playing Quake. But it is clear that universal access to television isn't universally accepted as a good thing.
3) Are we talking about using this new-found "universal access" to "bridge the digital divide" in schools?
It's arguable that there is in fact a "digital divide" between wealthy school districts and poor ones that is causing a difference in the educational quality of our students. It's more likely that rich school districts produce better students than poor ones because they have money to spend on textbooks and better teachers. It's also possible that the socio-economic dispare caused by being poor counts as a strike against students in poor schools in the first place.
The fact that there is even a "digital divide" in the first place is questionable: it seems pretty clear to me that rich people have computers because they can afford them, not because having a computer made them rich. Yet those who argue a "digital divide" are in essence arguing this very fact--that having a computer makes someone rich, not the other way around. And unless you are a programmer making a living using a computer, this strikes me as so much bullshit.
So now that we're talking about putting computers into junior high schools and high schools, what are we going to do with them? Use them in place of slide shows and movie strips that many teachers use in lew of creating a teaching plan? Use them in place of memorization of addition tables and multiplication tables (as calculators are being used now), which will cause more and more people to be so "numerically challenged" that they will take as gospil the results of a cash register where they accidently pressed "7" instead of "4"? (I've had this happen, where I've actually had to call out the manager, because some kid was offering me $3 in change on a $4 purchase, because he hit "7" instead of "4". And as everyone knows, 3 + 4 = 10.)
And if we're going to put computers into every classroom, where are we going to get the money to put them in, pay the electricity, maintain them? From the textbook budget? From the facilities budget? From the teacher's salaries? Going back to point 1, what will suffer so we can give students high tech toys which will be obsolete in 3 years, and need to be replaced?
It's fairly clear to me that some degree in computer proficiency is a reasonable requirement, just as typing classes were pretty much required of secretarial types. But given how quickly things are changing, should this computer proficiency be provided by our high schools at tremendous expense, for students who may wind up as an automechanic or a doctor, or should those skills be provided "on the job" by the corporations who decide to use Lotus Notes intead of Microsoft Outlook Express.
Personally I think our rush to "universal access" by governments and corporations and schools is a mistake, and a rather serious one. While I for one wouldn't mind more sources of revenue for Apple, Microsoft, Compaq and others, I don't know if I really want this in place of properly funding retirement plans, or properly funding textbooks in schools, just so that people can experience a "cyberspace" whose pipe dreams are backed by financials which are even now collapsing at warp factor speed.
The problem with arguments from these extremes is that they leave no room for moral progress. The Aztecs may have cut people's heart out in a critical ritualistic ceremony, but that doesn't mean that all morality is relativistic, just that it's a bad idea to tell an Aztec priest you need open-heart surgery.
Actually, the Aztec justified this through religion--in fact, it was a great honor to be sacrificed, and one story goes that a general of their army after winning a major war on behalf of the Aztec demanded that he be sacrificed so he could take his rightful place beside the Gods.
The argument they used is not dissimilar to Christian morality: as there is an afterlife, fearing death is like fearing jumping into cold water--the fear is in the transition, not in the swimming. They just had an honorable way to bypass the cycle of rebirth to find a holy place in Aztec "heaven".
From the Aztec perspective, the fact that we do not provide an honorable or righteous way for someone to sit to the left hand of God could be seen as a terrible, amoral thing to do, just as the ancient Japanese may find our denying them the right to ritual suicide as a way of saving face as amoral.
Morality, as well as ethics, are relative to one's social and religious framework.
We may consider our modern society as having morally and ethically progressed towards an abstract ideal--after all, some would argue that killing people and suicide are both bad things, and that we deny these to people makes us morally superior to the ancient Japanese and Aztec. But to do this is simply the hidden arrogance of a culture who believes we know the face of God, and are in fact with our technology superior to the ancient gods of old.
It forces competition, not cooperation. Even between KDE and Gnome, there's a lot of code and idea-sharing. With proprietary software, that's a no-no.
It's interesting when I read this, because I've often seen this reason given as to why propriety software is better than open source--because competition breeds better software because it forces the people working on the software to try harder.
That leaves us with the problem how to sustain a healthy software industry without proprietary software.
Or, to boil this down to nuts and bolts, just as soon as someone can show me a viable way that I can make enough money writing open source software than I can continue making the strokes on my car and my house and continue taking one week vacations in Europe, without a substantial "hiccup" in my current salary (read: I can't live on my savings for 5 years while an open source project of mine reaches some degree of penetration), then I'll do it in a heartbeat.
There are a number of ethics that are a fixed aspect of human cultures. The family. Preservation of life. Do you know of a culture that does not value the family structure in some sense? Do you know of a culture that encourages random killing of its own?
"Random" killing is rather difficult to define, if only because "random" often equates to "senseless," and "senseless" is a relative term. What we would consider "senseless", such as the Aztec human sacrifices or the wars of the Jivaro head hunters of Equador are meaningful rituals to the Gods for these people.
To elaborate, the Aztec would sacrifice people to the Gods by getting them seriously liquored up, and then in front of a great croud, cut their still living heart out of their chest with one or two expertly given strokes of a ritual knife. Those who were thus sacrificed were believed to sit for eternity beside their Gods. Rather than sacrificing the losers of various battles with their enemies as a form of grisly "punishment", they sacrificed the "winners" as a "reward" to guarentee their place in "heaven".
The Jivaro are head hunters who used to fight wars in South America and shrink their heads and eat the enemey bodies did this as a sort of ritual apeasement of their Gods. One purpose of these wars was as a right of passage: a small boy of 14 would be considered a man only if he successfully went out on his own and murdered someone in an opposing tribe. They would often slaughter neighboring villages and eat the dead's brains, as a form of ritual "nurishment."
Are these random and senseless? To them, no. To us, perhaps we would consider them senseless, or not.
On the other hand, does it prove the point that there are no ethical absolutes, but only "perceived" absolutes which actually vary from culture to culture? Or is this simply a demonstration that no matter what absolute ethical systems that God has ordained to mankind, there are those cultures who deny God's wisdom?
The answer you give often depends on how hard you must cling to the notion that there are ethical absolutes in a world where all sorts of wierd shit is justified in the name of religion. 'Cause from what I have learned about the history of various cultures around the world, there are no absolute ethical standards at all.
Yes, we can. We have orbital superiority right now. Our spy satellites and communications satellites allow us to watch the ground and know what's going on. Our AWACs and other air based tactical planes allow the same capability.
And they do such a wonderful job finding all those camaflauged tanks in Iraq and drug farms in Columbia.
Sorry, but a determined enemey can screw with aerial recon by covering up stuff they don't want us to see, and making us see more things by using cardboard cutouts. It isn't rocket science to create 10,000 tank cutouts (for example) and place them in one location, while covering the real 10,000 tank invasion force with netting. And it has been done--if you follow Desert Storm, one of the problems we were having is in getting a relatively accurate picture of what the hell is going on in Iraq.
The point is that when a ground unit moves in against another ground unit, the ground unit with air support wins.
I said that in my original post--that air support gives you an edge. But you still have to put ground pounders on the ground if you want to establish ground superiority. You cannot win a ground war with airplanes alone--and that was always my point.
Microsoft, like caltech, hasn't paid a dime in dividends to a shareholder.
And Caltech's shareholders are...? You know, I can't find Caltech's ticker on the Nasdaq...
In a sense, Microsoft is a non-profit organization.
And $6.5 billion US profit isn't really profit for Microsoft because...?
Microsoft trains / educates an order of magnitude more people per year than caltech does - the only difference is the breadth of subject matter.
So do other corporations, but training people in the corporate policies and giving them on-the-job work experience does not constitute a college education. I'm sorry if you cannot see the difference.
Why shouldn't Microsoft start handing out computer science degrees?
As soon as they offer a comprehensive 4 year acredited degree, I'd say they should. Of course that would require them to provide a rounded, comprehensive program, instead of on-the-job experience, as does any corporation who hires people.
Of course following your logic, the furnature shop on the edge of town which provides on-the-job training making custom pine furnature should also provide 4-year degrees. After all, they do train on-the-job, don't they?
A great deal has changed in the 12 years you've been gone from caltech; your vanity email doesn't mean you have a clue about what's happening now. One could go into specific examples - but then names would have to be named. And what's the point?
Actually, the "vanity e-mail" comes from being a life member of the Alumni association, and in keeping some tabs as to what's going on with the alma mater. Frankly, aside from a slight increase by a small minority of students in getting rich over doing research--minor in that any student bright enough to get into Caltech can bypass the educational process entirely and strike out on their own--nothing has changed much. Caltech's policies manual (posted on-line, I checked) has not changed in it's wording one iota from the time I was a junior. And aside from Caltech trying to capitalize on a small (approximately 80) patent portfolio, the makeup of Caltech's financials has not changed one whit.
Posting as an a.c. for a reason, einstein.
'Cause you're a trid? dei
"Um, once someone has orbit superiority, they can blow up any of our air planes. Then they have air superiority and they can blow up any of our ground troops. Then they have ground superiority and they won. Why do you think the US works so hard to obtain air superiority in modern warfare? It is the KEY to ground superiority."
It's not.
The problem with air superiority is that it cannot translate into ground superiority for the very reason that you cannot monitor everything that's going on on the ground when you're a thousand feet up going 500 miles per hour.
Even in Desert Storm, we still had to land a million people over seas in order to establish ground superiority.
The best air superiority will buy you is an edge. That is, it will help you with recon, and it will help you harass the hell out of supply lines. But true ground superiority can only be achieved by putting grunts on the ground. And to win a ground war, you have to fight a ground war.
Really? It only had about 30 when I took it. But this was a dozen years ago.
The point being made is that caltech is a business incubator and v.c. fund - a fund with billions in assets, research grants, and i.p. royalty streams, and a growing predilection for keeping information out of the public domain - until its demonstrated to be worthless or unexploitable.
A point with which I strongly disagree. One of the functions of any university, public or private (Caltech is private) is to educate. That some students may find a class whereby they are connected to folks at a VC fund educational no more makes Caltech a business than running a class on algaebraic systems makes Caltech an arm of the NSA.
That Caltech derives revenue from various IP royaltee streams does not mean Caltech has scraped it's roots as a university and research facility--Universities have historically derived a portion of their continuing funding through licensing IP, amongst other things. Hell, Caltech also derives a portion of it's operating revenue through it's contract with NASA where it provides the administrative overview of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Does that make Caltech the government as well?
Fact: Caltech faculty and students are required to pass all possibly patentable ideas through the caltech IP office before an attempt is made to publish.
Actually, no. The Office of Technology Transfer only requires notification when the facility or student believes an invention was created and wishes to have it patented. That is, OTT doesn't force all research which may contain possibly patentable ideas through it first in order to screen for possible patents--the OTT simply doesn't have the manpower to review all that research.
Evidentally you agree that caltech is a business; all we are discussing now are the details of the deal the employees get.
No, I do not. From Caltech's policies manual:
That is, employees of Caltech (facility and staff members) assign their rights as is normal for any employer, including not-for-profit organizations and others. Students assign their rights only in those circumstances where the rights clearly shoudl belong to Caltech--such as they were performing research for a research group or as part of classwork where the student used Caltech equipment and performed the work under Caltech guidance.
I was at Caltech when they decided to revise their IP policy, and was one of the students who raised a stink with the initial draft that didn't make what Caltech got the rights to clear enough.
How high do you think the student's interests are on the priority list of the i.p. office?
You clearly aren't a Caltech student or at least aren't a happy one. When I was there, Caltech's administration bent over backwards for the students--even going out of their way to help students who are financially strapped or otherwise having problems. Me, I was on the 5 year plan because I burnt out for personal reasons--and Caltech was more than happy to help.
Are students priority one in Caltech's IP office? I'm quite sure of it.
But now that you agree that caltech is in the intellectual property business, the question remains: why does it have tax free status?
Well, I actually don't agree, so your question is moot.
Why is caltech a tax sink rather than a tax source? Why can't microsoft relabel its employees as "students" or "postdocs", stop paying taxes and start applying for grants?
Because the majority of Caltech's day to day operations are in education and research. Caltech has constantly ranked as one of the highest universities in the United States in terms of educational value for the dollar in undergraduate studies. Caltech also performs cutting edge research, as all universities with gradudate programs do, much of that research published without regards to protecting IP rights.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a for-profit corporation, which issues stock and pays dividends. Further, Microsoft provides no educational studies programs, nor does it provide any opportunities for undergraduate study or research. Microsoft is in the business of writing software, period. That they fund some research through providing grants and by hiring researchers to perform abstract research does not distract from the fact that they write software--these grants only serve the purpose of influencing the course of research done by various colleges and universities.
Caltech and other research schools are not putting publically funded research into the public domain.
And I guess all those papers that got published in a range of scholarly journals ranging from computer graphics to chemistry, nor any of the stuff done by JPL apparently counts, as it isn't real IP, as it doesn't generate revenue.
Is that your point? That it doesn't count as IP unless it was potentially a direct revenue source, at which point, it counts? And of course it counts only if the university makes money off it?
Isn't this a bit, ah, circular?
You may argue that this isn't all bad --- but to deny it is to ignore reality.
I guess I don't live in your reality, because I'm saying that you're flat out wrong. I'm sorry you don't see it.
The real question is, why are these "schools" --- when viewed as v.c. funds / incubators that book profits from investment and royalty income --- why is that these "schools" are not only tax-exempt, but they actually have easy and preferred access to federal handouts in the form of NIH / NSF funds?
Because the students who actually participate in this V/C prep stuff is in the extreme minority. You're describing a class that enrolls perhaps 20 to 30 students a year (I took the class's predecessor, which didn't include writing a business plan) out of a graduating class of about 250. The majority of the students at Caltech could care less about going out and starting a business; they're more concerned with cutting edge research.
Further, having been to Caltech, it's pretty clear Dr. Hood was the exception to the rule around there--while being at Caltech, you get pretty used to being in a rather rarified research atmosphere, it's about the science, and not about making bazillions of dollars.
Caltech's undergraduates have a rather long history of counter-culture thinking, and in opposing anything that prevents the free exchange of ideas and research from taking place. "Know Ye The Truth And The Truth Shall Set Ye Free" happens to be the school motto, and most folks there swear by it.
As to skimming 75% of the royaltees--this is actually the exception of many universities who take 100% of the royaltees of any inventions that you create there as part of your student career. This is akin to a company taking 100% of the research work you create when you work there, on research they fund and they provide the facilities for. That Caltech is willing to cut you in on a percentage of the profits of an invention that was created entirely on their dime and with their facilities is actually one of the more generous deals out there.
Excuse me if I nitpick, but it was closer to 800g + 800ug--making his cut of the pie that much bigger.
The United States has used the Atom Bomb once on Hiroshima and most do not agree that It should have been used.
Most?
The reason why we nuked two towns in Japan (you forgot Nagasaki) is for two reasons: one, to demonstrate a new technology to the emerior of Japan to convince him to finally surrender. Two, while the number of lives lost in Heroshima and Nagasaki was astronomical, the projected loss of life from a Japanese invasion (which was our only other alternative) was projected to be between 5 and 10 times larger.
Actually, Einstein first proposed that instead of either invading or nuking Japan, we should instead invite observers from Japan to witness a nuclear warhead being ignited in the Navada desert. Nuking the moon is a safer alternative to nuking Navada--less environmentally destructive, and less threat of a bunch of small towns being exposed to fallout.
When put into perspective that way, it actually makes some degree of sense.
If an entire Nation goes bonkers over a 6 year old Cuban Boy who is taken from his home by a Government acting against the public opinion.
Actually, we didn't invade Cuba to grab that boy. Or are you refering to taking him from his grandparents to reunite him with his father, in accord to court rulings which the grandparents where ignoring in violation of US law? Sometimes things aren't as cut and dry as the public relations people would have you think, you know.
I'm sure there's even a 'plan' for alien invasion, and you may not like what it entails, but it's probably there, waiting to be exposed so everyone can be shocked at what they were planning to do.
Um, in fact there is, just as there is a plan for what to do in case of alien contact. I believe our plan for alien contact is to keep quiet, play stupid and lay low: that way, we appear to post no thread to the aliens. JMS alluded to our first contact plans in one Babylon 5 episode.
I don't know what our plan is for alien invasion, though I suspect it involves nuking them in orbit if at all possible. One problem with aliens invading us is that never has air superiority ever translated to ground superiority--which means they eventually have to land on the ground. And that means nuking them when they arrive.
It's interesting that you mention that, as I had a friend who was doing work in writing a tactical simulation system for the DoD. He was trying to convince me to transfer to working in his group.
The upshot of it was that they were trying to figure out how to crack the very nut you described--how they could defend themselves in West Germany without having to set up a 100km border, and without resorting to nukes or other weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical) during the first invasion wave. (According to him, it was felt by the higher-ups in the army that resorting to nuclear weapons was such a big no-no that we were considering allowing part Germany to fall rather than lose the public relations war at home and abroad.)
The answer was that they couldn't. That is, they couldn't crack the nut of holding all of Germany without resorting to dropping a nuke or two on any East German invasion force.
Today, it sounds rediculous to us the idea of nuking the moon. However, it's a far cry from what we felt was the real possibility of having to start a nuclear war in order to protect our geopolitical interests.
Of course the answer was for everyone to come off their testosterone high and paranoid delusions and talk to their soviet counterparts. And one way that was started was (so I was told) was to show the Soviets the simulations my friend worked on to explain why we had an invasion force lined up along the East German border, along with the other tactical simulations we had created showing alternate strategies we had explored and rejected.
And I guess you must have missed your "Philosophy of Science" classes.
I'm quite aware that Logical Positivism has been abandoned by most philosophers since about the 1950's, for two reasons: one, it doesn't explain itself. Two, as a philosophy which attempts to explain "why", logical positivism falls flat on it's face. It's really quite unsatisfying as a unified system of philosophical thought, given how many questions it leaves totally unanswered, and how much of the very nature of our existance it leaves totally unexplained.
However, shadows of logical positivism lives on in the scientific method.
Unlike philosophy, science (and any good scientist) is quite content to side-step "why" and concentrate on "how". And science is quite content to leave a lot of questions unanswered, and leave that to the theists and the philosophers. The very limitations which made philosophers abandon logical positivism as a philosophical system cause scientists to implicitly embrase it's methodology.
And that goes right back to my point that science has nothing to say about the nature of God.
God by definition (or at least by most definitions of God given by Christians) is infinite, all powerful, all knowing, and all encompasing. By definition God is also "supernatural", or rather, beyond nature.
By definition, therefore, God cannot be measured, quantified, or otherwise observed scientifically. As God is God, He can change the rules, alter reality, change the very structure of the universe at his will. Or, if you are a deist, at the very least he set the wheels of the universe rolling before the Big Bang, and set a perfect universe in motion.
Either way, you cannot describe the nature of God scientifically. Therefore, science has nothing to say about God (at least, good scientists will say this), and so being both a theist and a scientist is not inherently incompatable. Actually, science and theology are orthogonal--so one can be both a scientist and a theist (or not) without consequence.
Well, without most consequence, as one's morality may alter one's behavior. So your morality towards little mice may affect your willingness to kill and dissect the little fuzzy things in the name of scientific research.
Oh, and I'm native american.
Beyond that, I've spent quite a bit of time asking people what they believe. And what people have said is that "God is infinite." One consequence of the infinity of God is that God is unknowable--as it is impossible for the finite to encompass the infinite.
Well, the creationism "scientists" are also acting in bad faith because what they propose is not science per se. That is, what they have produced is not observable nor testable in any reasonable fashion; instead they say "because God (defined as a supernatural, superpowerful being which is beyond the relm of observation or measurement) made it happen, and because God told us so (in the Bible)."
Well, God (as so defined) cannot be quantified nor measured. So it is impossible to perform any observations or experiments on creationist science as this would require us to measure or quantify God.
Perhaps Creationism is good theology, but it's crappy science. And like oil and water, theology and science cannot mix: theology (such as creationism) deals in things that cannot be observed or measured by it's very definition, while science deals exclusively in observable and measurable things.