Sadly, I think I've come over time to agree with you (the sadness is that it feels more like cynicism than wisdom).
One thing to examine is that regulatory regimes have worked for various industries at various points in history. So while they seem to get captured with great regularity in the US, they do seem to exist and work to some degree in some industries in some countries. Somehow, for example, the requirement for the acoustic dead-man's switch that Norway and Brazil both enforce, and that the US MMS would have required had its employees not been doing coke and sleeping with oil reps, and the companies comply in Brazil and Norway. I happen to know a bit about Brazil, and it has both deadingly bureaucratic state and a great deal of cronyism and corruption, but somehow in this case regulate won out over don't-regulate - i.e., more or less the law asked for the right thing happened (unlike Amazon land use laws or its propped-up steel industry). So how did their regulatory body not get captured?
That seems to be a pretty key question for our time, since a balance between sustainability and prosperity requires an honest and unburdensome regulatory regime.
I know this thread is old, but it's a pleasure to see thoughtful commenters on Slashdot. Have you heard of the cap and dividend idea? I think Maria Cantwell in particular is or was pushing it. It's more akin to Alaska's oil dividend in that it focuses on the originators of the carbon (mining and fossil fuel extraction companies) and directly redistributes the proceeds of carbon taxation to families. That eliminates some of the gaming associated with figuring out who of the many, many, many (many, many, many,....) users of fossil fuels who do the actual emission can do what and how that will be monitored.
I admit there's probably a lot of ways the taxation rules can be set up to favor incumbents, but it just seems to me that by focusing on the source of the carbon that is ultimately emitted, there are far fewer entities to try to regulate and monitor. On the political side it seems like a winner because it sets up a battle with a limited number industries rather than anyone who uses energy - though in this case the industries in question are extremely powerful and connected across the political spectrum.
I'm just curious about your viewpoint because you seem to be interested in whether the system that's set up will work, more than the dogma around whether trying to set up such a system is inherently noble or inherently evil...
Absolutely agreed. If you want to promote it, you have to go find people you think MIGHT (not may, not are...) be interested and promote it to them.
I would add something else I noted just from the original post. You submitted anonymously, and didn't mention the name of your project, much less link to it's *Forge page. Very honorable in that you don't appear to be self-promoting. The reality, however, is that shameless self-promotion is both necessary and useful. Just the project name and a link would have netted you probably 10s of leads. Then as the parent said, go follow up and be friends with those people.
The question is largely irrelevant. The real problems with climate science are being highlighted by intelligent people, not by cretins.
I'll make the reasonable assumption that you are pretty intelligent, and evidently you are of skeptical disposition. Have you ever read any papers on climate science? How about earth science? If not, as would be the case for most intelligent non-climate-scientists (not just not just non-scientists), I can say without insulting your intelligence that you have no direct basis for determining what the general thrust of the literature is, much less what the camps are, who populates them and how strong the relative arguments are within those camps.
There are plenty of researchers out there, qualified, with careers, respected by their peers, who look at the IPCC stuff and say it is not working. These are researchers who know how to think about hard problems.
Unless you've read the literature, this statement, too is presumptive. What it really means is that one or more intermediaries has told you this, and you believe that intermediary more than you believe another intermediary who thinks that most climate scientists are in agreement. So in this case, this entire argument comes down to trust in intermediaries. You don't know who the camps are and who really subscribes to what camp.
I did a "terminal masters" in ocean physics, so I have some direct familiarity with the literature, though certainly not as deep as if I were practicing in this field. My experience is that the camps lean much more towards accepting general consensus about the nature of climate change (largely anthropogenic) and the magnitude of the expected effects than the perception you describe. From what I know directly and from the intermediaries I use when I don't know directly, just about everyone in the climate science community now believes that the arguments around concentrations of carbon and warming are solid. So when people say how much warming will happen in a hundred years, that considered very hard to dispute. Where people have more critiques is how we will get there, and the closer in you get the less agreement there is. However, it's also true that for most of the really wide open questions about climate change, people have been equally wrong guessing towards faster and slower warming. The rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet is a great example of this - nobody from the global climate modelers (like a friend of mine who's doing his postdoc in this now) to the ice physicists understood until a few years back that when the ice sheets began to melt that the meltwater would lubricate the rock upon which the sheets are sitting and cause them to slide more quickly into the ocean. So there's an example where change was called slower. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, there has been a greater uptake of heat by the oceans that was initially expected, which will delay warming on a scale of years to decades, but could result in acceleration once the oceans warm up and provide less capacity to capture heat. So that's a delay in warming.
Just how many people do you know would go to a homeopath instead of a doctor? Sure there are some. But there are some green nuts too. Often they are one and the same. Funny that.
This statement is also full of presumption. Look at the sales of vitamins, herbal supplements and other non-FDA-approved quasi-drugs. Those sales speak to a large body of people who do feel comfortable taking remedies that are not scientifically tested. Again I challenge you to show me your basis for concluding that they're "green nuts" - sure sounds like your impression more than any data to me.
I don't think this a question of treating the public like imbeciles. There are a vast number of books out there for those that want to learn more about climate science. This is a question of trying to understand the state of a scientific disc
Without having read TFA, I'm inclined to believe that correlations exists for a simple reason. I'd posit that more of the CRA-regulated banks were local institutions with less access to securitization schemes who consequently maintained more prudent lending standards at the same time as being regulated by CRA.
The right wing talk show hosts obsession with CRA is a truly bizarre way to object to regulation, like choosing to make your last stand in a blind canyon. There's all sorts of poorly thought out regulatory schemes (the scheme in original article seems like a good example, to be honest), but CRA does not happen to be one of them. Hell, even the banks don't claim that CRA forced them to make crappy loans. If they're pointing the finger they say "Moody's told us it was OK", or maybe "it was the models and the quants" or "our risk manager has been fired" but they never say "boy I wouldn't have made all those bad loans if that nasty Barney Frank hadn't sent his shock troops up to the top of my big skyscrapers in NYC to force me to make loans to racial minorities." That kind of cracked-out nonsense gives any New Age hoo-ha a run for its money.
I agree with your view that his work here is very thin, but not for the reasons you cite. The basic problem is that it's a big, big assumption in social sciences data to presume that something ought to have a standard distribution from natural science. As Nate acknowledges, there are all kinds of reasons why that might not be so.
Where I disagree is that I don't think he needed to do higher powered stats or simulations, which in social sciences don't necessarily provide more insight, I think he needed to do a LOT more homework on what the "natural" distribution of trailing digits is. Like doing comparisons for many firms, and potentially doing them over different times or types of elections - in other words, doing some exploration about possible hidden influences.
That kind of homework is essential both for likelihood of success in showing his contention and because of the basic obligation of someone to be fairly certain they're right before intimating, much less outright accusing that someone has committed fraud. It would not surprise me if that turned that his argument was demonstrably false - e.g., a group like Pew showed something inconsistent with his general average of polls or with Benford's law, or Strategic Vision could show something about their methodology that created that bias. Frankly the most damning case he could make would simply be to present that kind of detailed homework that itself showed Strategic Vision sticking out from other pollsters.
As it stands, I think he's put out a very thin analysis accompanied by fighting words, and he's fairly likely to get knocked down for it.
I think I agree with you generally, and I'd be interested in your take on homophones. Affect and effect are a great example of homophones that people struggle to distinguish, which has had the sad consequence of making room for that clod of a word "impact" and its boorish cousin "impact on". But to be fair to most people, you have to be something of a grammarian to recognize or care about the distinction between 4 forms of these words:
Affect as a verb
Affect as a noun
Effect as a noun
Effect as a verb
I've also noticed people struggle with "attuned" vs. "attenuate" and "intonate" vs. "intimate".
I'm no linguist, but my experience having spoken Spanish from a pretty early age is that Standard English has a lot of words, with differences in them being intended to express things very precisely. By contrast, Spanish, at least as it's spoken in most of Latin America, has fewer words, and concepts are expressed more generally, leaving more room for meaning between the words. It always seemed to me that this was at least somewhat cultural - people didn't intend to specify things that precisely, and were comfortable leaving meaning more open (which often leaves a lot of room for double entendre as well). All that makes me wonder if the US and its English aren't evolving somewhat in that direction - people just aren't trying to be as precise in their written speech.
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
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I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. Since medicine itself is more art than science, doctors need to once convey the right information about the patient, but also pass along coded messages about their judgment on the situation that are tailored to the recipient. The example I know intimately is that if you're a pathologist and you see something that looks like it's a little suspicious, but you're dealing with an oncologist and surgeon who you think are a little too hot to trot in the surgery department, you're going to pull back on the language to give them a message that they can wait. Of course you also haven't met the patient, so you don't want to take over the decision of surgery or not.
A lot that kind of thing goes into each handoff of the patient from one person to another. It's absolutely true that it scales poorly and queries ever more poorly. And it is a product of the way doctors are educated, so I'm dubious that just writing better software can fix it.
I do believe the autonomy and control thing is part of the issue, but I think it works in a different way. Doctors work by using their "medical judgment and experience" (generally matching and interpolating patterns they've seen before) and they are called upon to act very quickly. At the same time, most work for small businesses in which they are part or majority owners. So they do very little formal development of their workflows, and tend to accumulate them without ever building in mechanisms for improvement. Look at the work of Brent James. They standardized workflows and then audited those standardizations, forcing a doctor to either follow the protocol or fix it, they began to really reduce mistakes and improve quality. That kind of effort is essential to improving quality, yet it's very rarely given much attention. IT isn't going to solve these problems by itself, but a good software development process could help if the docs buy into articulating and reviewing their workflows and the information they're passing.
DBAs should be screaming about that. The data integrity requirement has very little to do with the RDBMS itself - after all you can set things up in a standard RDBMS in a way that requires little structure and integrity. It's that data integrity makes the data consistent for reporting. If you want to report on data, and particularly if you want to do anything statistical with it, you need consistency and correctness. The Fusion idea is neato, but it's not going to get you around data consistency and integrity rules if you want to do any meaningful reporting on the data.
Still, I wonder who this is targeted at (if that's even been thought about). There are a lot of tools to do pieces of this, particularly in the enterprise space. And I wonder who has large datasets that they're comfortable loading into some cloud server owned by index-everything Google and actually collaborate around it. Maybe I'm wrong, but in a business setting I'd be a whole lot more comfortable if I knew more about where the data was stored and what else the database was doing. I'd also be surprised if Oracle hadn't done some thinking about that as well. Maybe Google will push them along and they can offer it as a rampantly overpriced upgrade to their traditional database offerings.
The point you are missing is that generally when someone is "light polluting" it is for a reason.
That's a lot of faith that things are thought through with perfect foresight. I've been thinking about how baked-in light pollution is to American infrastructure, and I've come to think it's a pretty good example of how hard sustainable infrastructure really is.
Sure, it diminishes the view, but it is probably doing something else useful like lighting a room or a path.
So why exactly do we illuminate things at night? As far as I can tell it's primarily on safety grounds. That seems pretty reasonable and a good trade, right? A little extra light and voile a dark dangerous place becomes a safe lit one.
A couple crashes on a treacherous stretch of in relatively short succession, and the public demands that something be done about the dangerous road. The road authorities respond by altering the alignment and illuminating that stretch plus some before and after for good measure. Then light comes to be considered essential for safety on roads carrying a certain volume of traffic and becomes a requirement for receiving federal highway funding. This is, not entirely coincidentally, good business for both highway contractors (a strong lobby, both locally and nationally) and local electrical utility (another strong lobby locally and nationally). The question that's hard to answer is exactly how safer is the road? If traffic volume increases and there are the same number or more accidents, does that mean the lighting didn't work? But it doesn't really mean it did work, either. Try an exercise of adding up the wattage of street lamps as you drive along a highway from one city to another. Now think about all those watts being used to pump out light when there are no cars there at all, or very few.
You can repeat the exercise for people lighting their porches, then yards and driveways to secure their houses against intruders. Sure, pitch dark places have lots of dangers, and illumination does lower some dangers, but you can't eliminate the danger simply by simply illuminating more and more. Lots of crime happens during broad daylight. Clearly simple fear of the dark drives the impulse to illuminate everything, much like fear of flying drives insane and useless airport security, even though your likelihood of dying in a car crash is orders of magnitude greater than that of dying on a plane.
Finding a balance for these things requires pretty careful thought about when something actually works, and when it doesn't. In the case of infrastructure like lighting, where you have vested interests and an emotional overlay, and where public perception is that things should just work, that's very hard to do. But making our use of technology sustainable is going to require that we go back, try to dig out the real problem from the cruft and figure out when we can make things better by using less. It can be done, but I sure don't see a lot of signs that it's going to be easy.
I agree that advertising has always been the basis for the newspaper and that model is gone, likely never to come back. Beyond that we seem to disagree.
The question is how you get something with the quality of thought of an Atlantic Monthly (or your own favorite version of that) to cover events on a close-current basis. To me that necessarily means that someone has to get paid for the work. Perhaps you would take issue with my view that the existence of such a news operation is invaluable for society at large, and perhaps we're arguing over how to get the newspapers from an advertising-based model to one where direct payments support them (which, by the way, is how the WSJ works).
On the subject of the Iraq war and the misinformation, I had a number of conversations with my brother, and I think your assertion that newspapers don't want to be controversial because they fear loss of advertisers is basically right. I also think that the media was in a weak state (circulation issues, lack of senior staff, etc.), and the Bush administration was very forceful and savvy about manipulating the news. So while I think it was an egregious failure, I don't take it to mean that newspapers are henceforth going to be unable to resist such manipulation and report objectively.
As enjoyable as it is to bash the newspapers for all of their real flaws, I don't understand how people have come to find paywalls outrageous. I really don't. The difference between newspapers and random hearsay is (in the best cases) a lot of effort in developing broad and balanced sources, fact checking, having an editorial process for some degree of fairness and accuracy (as much as that's suffered in the past decade) and generally putting out a "report" on a subject (that's why we call them reporters). That's a lot of hard, often tedious work that is not going to get done well unless someone is paid to do it. And frankly we should all want to pay for that kind of good content to be made, even when we disagree with it.
It's become trendy to say that bloggers do much of the work of the media and that is simply delusion. First of all, nearly all blog entries (including a large fraction of those on this site) are built around a link of a publication which employs its writers. Bloggers do a great job adding bits, contextualize and bringing together info, but they are most often not the generators of solid base information they work with. So if we really do lose newspapers we are not going to have the People's Republic of Blogistan stand up and replace them with real reporting, we're just going to have gasbaggery in its place.
Now the newspaper industry as a whole needs plenty of creative destruction on top of that. Now that news can freely travel across the country and the world, there's no need for every paper to have Washington bureau and foreign correspondents, and consolidation is much needed there. Likewise the stupid forays of the 90s into "new media" and the debt-fueled expansions also call for some of these business to go under. But that's about restructuring companies and an industry, not replacing paid professionals with everyone's favorite opinion.
My hope is that the newspapers will force the issue on micropayments. I would gladly pay $1, maybe $2 a day for a combination of stories from the Washington Post, NYT, LA Times, my local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and on occasion some random others that I learned about from some blogger. I absolutely will not pay $20/mo to each of those. So if they can figure out a joint payment scheme that makes sense, I'm all for that. Double bonus points if they can use it to make their archives affordable and not priced for company and institutiional use.
To me the problem is not so much skepticism like yours, but skepticism of the type that say "well it's been a cold year this year, there can't possibly be a warming trend." Your skepticism strkes me as healthy and informed scientific debate. What I find galling is the number of times climate change is challenged not to try to find a better answer but to prove that it isn't happening.
Take the cosmic ray question. Now independently that's a fairly interesting issue and a good way to look at how solar forcing might be varying. But as soon as the Svensmark guy got any sense that cosmic rays might be a substantial contributor to the solar forcing, he leapt out of the gate to claim that it alone explained observed warming trends. Since others have not been able to repeat his results, I'd call that premature to say the least. On his part, I don't think it's unreasonable that he would want his theory to upend current thinking - that's pretty much the route to glory in any scientific discipline. But the "contrarians" leaped on that as conclusive proof that warming couldn't possibly be anthropogenic. That on top of dramatically misstating measurements (e.g. George Will's bit on how Arctic sea ice area isn't actually shrinking) makes it very hard to believe that contrarians are interested in finding out what IS going on.
I came out of oceanography, so I have a couple friends who are modellers, and they can in fact integrate a first-order PDE. So I think I'd respectfully disagree that all the models are quite as crude as you say.
Nonetheless, almost any assessment of the state of modeling has to concede some of the points you make: namely that the models are not at a state to provide meaningful predictions of the course climate change will take. I believe that most honest assessments of modeling understand their flaws, though individual modelers may not be willing to accept limitations of their own work (imagine that). Where the models seem useful to me is to tell a confirmatory story to the carbon sensitivity calculations, which are much more robust.
In general I also tend to agree that the government should avoid solving the problem directly but adopt approaches that constrain the market to solve the problem. And in particular, I agree with you that a cap and trade system is likely to be the most effective, since it has targets that are measurable. I don't think I'd be as cautious as you describe in government intervention, since a) the carbon problem basically boils down to infrastructure for energy and transportation, and the government is always heavily involved in building and maintain that infrastructure, and b) there really isn't much precedent for solving tragedy of the commons problems like atmospheric emissions on a global scale, and such a framework is needed if we wish to continue to, say, eat fish from the ocean. I'd also note without taking sides that you're using precautionary principle in a different sense than it's often used, i.e. that new technologies must be very deeply tested for environmental and health impacts before they are allowed into widespread use.
Which also raises the question: why is this being done by the shuttle? Couldn't this repair be done robotically, therefore allowing a much smaller, less complicated and more expendable craft?
Having also worked in IT in the developing world, under very similar physical conditions described by the OP, my reaction is that the parent's points are all excellent.
I would add this:
MANAGE EXPECTATIONS.
It is particular important in this kind of setting to manage both your own expectations and those of the people to whom you're providing service.
In my experience, people to whom you're providing service don't appreciate how much more can and does go wrong with a computer than say a phone or a dryer - let alone networked machines or trying to deal with a connection to the Internet. It is worth a lot of effort to help them understand what it takes to provide a particular kind of service. In particular it's important to them think through the cost of that service, often to clarify that the cost of will add up to more they initially can imagine, but that in spite of those costs, there's still a lot of value. Back here in the States, I find that decision-makers in the nonprofit sector often tend to see costs in this limited way and make very limited plans for the ongoing cost of IT service, pile up deferred costs, and inevitably end up struggling along with marginal service and, quite often, higher overall cost.
Since you're an IT professional, I'm guessing that like nearly all of us, you find the potential in IT very appealing. So it's pretty key to constantly remind yourself that your tradeoffs between well-engineered and practicable are profoundly different than IT folks in the developed world and keep yourself grounded in what's feasible and valuable.
Other than that, I think the parent knows way more about this subject than the rest of us, so listen to him or her.
So you visit CNN more now - that's doubtless good for you.
But unless you're bringing dollars with you somehow, it's not good for them. And since your pageviews are worth only a fraction of a penny to advertisers, your visits mean no revenue to CNN and very little to a newspaper. Since CNN is still essentially a television station, they're probably able to make their videos available online as a loss-leader to show their advertisers the interest in a particular type of content and to perhaps get you interested enough to watch, since your "pageviews" are still worth something on TV. But that loss leader model doesn't hold up well for a print newspaper, and it really doesn't hold up for a regional paper.
I believe Charles Keller at the New York Times proposed just such an idea. The government would grant newspapers exemption from anti-trust regulation (not sure what concessions would be extracted in return), basically to allow newspapers to survive as quasi-nonprofit entities.
In the long run, monetizing their popularity has to involve making people pay for the value the newspaper adds. There are two present problems with this.
One is that so many news outlets across so many types of media are chasing the same story (national politics, sports, celebrity news, etc.) that the news is overly available, so there's actually very little value being added by any given newspaper. That's a simple problem of too many competitors for the market and normal market consolidation should sort that out.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other important things to report on in a serious newslike way, and these are really going to suffer for the death of the mainstream newspaper. For example, for Dana Priest to break the story on CIA detention centers took months of work on top of a career's worth of sources and contacts. The problem is that there are precious few examples of people doing this depth of work as an independent journalist. That said, Murray Waas is a pretty interesting case in this area - he does basically seem to work for himself, and he often finds out stuff that others don't know yet. But he's a bit prone to going off on people or otherwise ranting, and a number of his assertions have not panned out.
Blogging on hearsay or newspaper articles one has read (i.e. the business model of Slashdot and nearly every politics blog on the planet) does not constitute journalism. Doing background research cultivating multiple sources on a subject, fact-checking, and editing to ensure (or at least attempt) an objective approach are journalism, and they are time-consuming, often boring efforts. As in every other kind of business, getting people to have the discipline to do the unfun stuff day after day requires paying people. Otherwise, people just do the fun stuff. So until someone can show me how independent citizen journalism deals with this problem, my own view remains that it's unproven as a business model.
Yeah, I strongly second Griffiths. A math PhD will find the development of vector calculus concepts simple, but Griffiths' segue from those concepts into physical applications is absolutely brilliant - it really shows how to flesh out physical intuition by way of mathematics. And it doesn't hurt that classical EM is one of the most coherent pieces of physics anywhere. Perhaps it can even persuade you to join the ranks of physicists in some way...;-]
For that, you need to start looking into failure scenarios and risk assessment. That's a complex piece of accounting, and it's not a job for an IT worker to be asked to do. If you're making the IT worker spend time to justify their job financially, you're not being a very efficient company.
Well, yes and no. If you're looking for a precise, quantitative answer on risk management, yes, that is in-depth and involves specific skills. On the other hand, a lot of understanding of risk can be gained by simply doing some brainstorming to gain a general understanding of the risks.
To the poster: try getting together with your boss (and maybe a "friendly" from accounting or elsewhere in the company) to brainstorm a thorough list of risks associated with non-care and non-maintenance of the company's IT systems. Then go through and write down mitigations to these risks. Many you're already doing, some you may not be. Don't bother with anything quantitative - just get down a reasonably good person-to-person understanding of these risks. That list alone ought to be a strong defense of your job - it should be very evidently that the cost of doing nothing is much greater than the cost of paying you. And the list of un-mitigated events provides clear direction for evaluating and prioritizing future sysadmin needs.
What's particularly appealing is: a) even if you capture and burn the stuff that's bubbling up, you're still reducing the overall GHG load, but even better, if you b) capture the effluent CO2, it may be possible to push it into the sediments in replacement for the methane clathrates.
The latter seems pretty far off, but if these reports of "chimneys" of rapid release are right, they could be a decent candidate for capture. You'd have to have some kind of mobile apparatus for capture, and I have no idea how hard that is. Maybe you could use it to power a small data center in a floating enclosure?
It's actually kind of an interesting question what would happen if one undertook a sustained push to make it possible for citizens to apply the law without a law degree. Certainly all the nuanced precedent that's been developed would be chucked, both for better and for worse, but I'm not convinced that that stuff wouldn't grow back rahter quickly. I guess the question is whether law is inherently complicated or is being made more complicated by the way it's used and developed.
By analogy, think about how a big application develops complexity. The needs for the system never truly fit into one bucket or another, but the developers take a stab at some paradigm. Then the requirements change, and the paradigm, which didn't fit perfectly to begin with, gets modified. Eventually the application acquires a huge amount of cruft and history, and becomes very difficult to change - even with well-designed applications and relatively good requirements and consensus-building processes. Sometimes organizations succeed in changing those kinds of applications, equally (or more) often they fail. And that kind of entrenchment is with organizations of O(1K-1M) people, with organizational re-invention timelines of less than a decade.
As an outsider unburdened by knowledge of how legal systems work in practice, what seems to be missing in law is some kind of purging process that actually rethinks whole legal frameworks and allows them to modernize and start the cruftation process anew. The entrenchment problem is at least several orders of magnitude harder as it involves more people, far more money, and issues of vastly greater complexity. But I do believe we'd be getting there a lot faster if we could drop this stupid ideological debate over "more government vs. less government" and let that be a consequence of well-designed legal and government systems rather than a driving principle.
I also work for a biotech (... this my other brother Darrell), and we're facing the prospect of FDA regulation as a device. So we're presently working our way through ramping up a formal (21CFR820) Quality System now. My boss happens to have been through this before and to be a pretty effective evangelist for the FDA's Quality System methodology, which is required for all medical devices and drugs. As he says, a Quality System is just putting to paper all the things you should be doing anyway. So one place you may want to start is by discussing the utility of complying with FDA regs with regard to software.
My boss also notes (on any occasion where there's an opening) that when the FDA introduced design controls, most companies complained they were going bankrupt (as companies are wont to do when regulation, merited or unmerited, is proposed). But when the FDA went around doing their roadshow to show that they weren't just making rules without listening to industry, people from the device companies gradually started to get up and explain how using a Quality System actually lowered their costs and decreased their time to market for revisions and product upgrades.
So as an evangelization tactic I'd look on the FDA's site for guidances relating to the introduction of the Quality System Regulation. For example, this guidance on general principles of software validation is pretty good. If you mentally translate into software industry language you can really see that they're trying to get you to do better engineering by thinking and documenting early, really getting straight what the software is trying to do, and being structured about showing that it does what it needs to do. The truth is that despite the startup effort of introducing documentation and procedures, controlled engineering methodologies work way better - they reduce requirements failure, increase code quality (and more importantly, design quality), and - though developers start out hating paperwork - even make the developers happier because more code works and sees real use. If the company plans to be in the software business for the foreseeable future, it's almost certain that the effort invested in good software practices will pay huge dividends down the road. The key is point out that quality is not an esoteric consideration, it's a driving cost and business risk consideration. Sooner or later the cost of low quality software shows itself.
One thing I will note is that the QSR is pretty waterfall oriented, both because it predates the formalization of iterative/agile methodologies, and because it's written for engineering of physical boxes that have to be released to manufacturing (which implies a fair bit of waterfallism). Part of our effort is to practice iterative development methodology while documenting to the FDA's standards.
Let's be serious here - nobody's spending money to block anything. The DNC didn't build anything themselves, nor should they - they're a political party, not a software shop. They chose a vendor to build out and operate a video infrastructure for the convention, and that vendor happens to have built on Silverlight (that's where incentives and support from MS likely came in, not directly to the DNC). Why the vendor did that, I have no idea.
I'm a pretty big believer that these things should be built on open technologies, not the least of the reasons being that it's GOOD for political parties to have their content built upon and reused (that's much of what fuels political blogs). As such I'm a little miffed that they chose a vendor that didn't support open technologies, but my guess is that someone's list of questions didn't extend past "can you run it on a Mac" (thereby showing that they're not part of the old Windows-only generation, they're part of the new Mac generation). Given the size of the Linux market, I think the use of content question is much bigger than the runs-on-a-particular-OS question.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, I think I've come over time to agree with you (the sadness is that it feels more like cynicism than wisdom).
One thing to examine is that regulatory regimes have worked for various industries at various points in history. So while they seem to get captured with great regularity in the US, they do seem to exist and work to some degree in some industries in some countries. Somehow, for example, the requirement for the acoustic dead-man's switch that Norway and Brazil both enforce, and that the US MMS would have required had its employees not been doing coke and sleeping with oil reps, and the companies comply in Brazil and Norway. I happen to know a bit about Brazil, and it has both deadingly bureaucratic state and a great deal of cronyism and corruption, but somehow in this case regulate won out over don't-regulate - i.e., more or less the law asked for the right thing happened (unlike Amazon land use laws or its propped-up steel industry). So how did their regulatory body not get captured?
That seems to be a pretty key question for our time, since a balance between sustainability and prosperity requires an honest and unburdensome regulatory regime.
I know I'm late to this party, but I'd be interested in your reaction to the cap and dividend idea:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1602354&cid=31700124
I know this thread is old, but it's a pleasure to see thoughtful commenters on Slashdot. Have you heard of the cap and dividend idea? I think Maria Cantwell in particular is or was pushing it. It's more akin to Alaska's oil dividend in that it focuses on the originators of the carbon (mining and fossil fuel extraction companies) and directly redistributes the proceeds of carbon taxation to families. That eliminates some of the gaming associated with figuring out who of the many, many, many (many, many, many, ....) users of fossil fuels who do the actual emission can do what and how that will be monitored.
I admit there's probably a lot of ways the taxation rules can be set up to favor incumbents, but it just seems to me that by focusing on the source of the carbon that is ultimately emitted, there are far fewer entities to try to regulate and monitor. On the political side it seems like a winner because it sets up a battle with a limited number industries rather than anyone who uses energy - though in this case the industries in question are extremely powerful and connected across the political spectrum.
I'm just curious about your viewpoint because you seem to be interested in whether the system that's set up will work, more than the dogma around whether trying to set up such a system is inherently noble or inherently evil...
Absolutely agreed. If you want to promote it, you have to go find people you think MIGHT (not may, not are...) be interested and promote it to them.
I would add something else I noted just from the original post. You submitted anonymously, and didn't mention the name of your project, much less link to it's *Forge page. Very honorable in that you don't appear to be self-promoting. The reality, however, is that shameless self-promotion is both necessary and useful. Just the project name and a link would have netted you probably 10s of leads. Then as the parent said, go follow up and be friends with those people.
I'll make the reasonable assumption that you are pretty intelligent, and evidently you are of skeptical disposition. Have you ever read any papers on climate science? How about earth science? If not, as would be the case for most intelligent non-climate-scientists (not just not just non-scientists), I can say without insulting your intelligence that you have no direct basis for determining what the general thrust of the literature is, much less what the camps are, who populates them and how strong the relative arguments are within those camps.
Unless you've read the literature, this statement, too is presumptive. What it really means is that one or more intermediaries has told you this, and you believe that intermediary more than you believe another intermediary who thinks that most climate scientists are in agreement. So in this case, this entire argument comes down to trust in intermediaries. You don't know who the camps are and who really subscribes to what camp.
I did a "terminal masters" in ocean physics, so I have some direct familiarity with the literature, though certainly not as deep as if I were practicing in this field. My experience is that the camps lean much more towards accepting general consensus about the nature of climate change (largely anthropogenic) and the magnitude of the expected effects than the perception you describe. From what I know directly and from the intermediaries I use when I don't know directly, just about everyone in the climate science community now believes that the arguments around concentrations of carbon and warming are solid. So when people say how much warming will happen in a hundred years, that considered very hard to dispute. Where people have more critiques is how we will get there, and the closer in you get the less agreement there is. However, it's also true that for most of the really wide open questions about climate change, people have been equally wrong guessing towards faster and slower warming. The rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet is a great example of this - nobody from the global climate modelers (like a friend of mine who's doing his postdoc in this now) to the ice physicists understood until a few years back that when the ice sheets began to melt that the meltwater would lubricate the rock upon which the sheets are sitting and cause them to slide more quickly into the ocean. So there's an example where change was called slower. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, there has been a greater uptake of heat by the oceans that was initially expected, which will delay warming on a scale of years to decades, but could result in acceleration once the oceans warm up and provide less capacity to capture heat. So that's a delay in warming.
This statement is also full of presumption. Look at the sales of vitamins, herbal supplements and other non-FDA-approved quasi-drugs. Those sales speak to a large body of people who do feel comfortable taking remedies that are not scientifically tested. Again I challenge you to show me your basis for concluding that they're "green nuts" - sure sounds like your impression more than any data to me.
I don't think this a question of treating the public like imbeciles. There are a vast number of books out there for those that want to learn more about climate science. This is a question of trying to understand the state of a scientific disc
Without having read TFA, I'm inclined to believe that correlations exists for a simple reason. I'd posit that more of the CRA-regulated banks were local institutions with less access to securitization schemes who consequently maintained more prudent lending standards at the same time as being regulated by CRA.
The right wing talk show hosts obsession with CRA is a truly bizarre way to object to regulation, like choosing to make your last stand in a blind canyon. There's all sorts of poorly thought out regulatory schemes (the scheme in original article seems like a good example, to be honest), but CRA does not happen to be one of them. Hell, even the banks don't claim that CRA forced them to make crappy loans. If they're pointing the finger they say "Moody's told us it was OK", or maybe "it was the models and the quants" or "our risk manager has been fired" but they never say "boy I wouldn't have made all those bad loans if that nasty Barney Frank hadn't sent his shock troops up to the top of my big skyscrapers in NYC to force me to make loans to racial minorities." That kind of cracked-out nonsense gives any New Age hoo-ha a run for its money.
I agree with your view that his work here is very thin, but not for the reasons you cite. The basic problem is that it's a big, big assumption in social sciences data to presume that something ought to have a standard distribution from natural science. As Nate acknowledges, there are all kinds of reasons why that might not be so. Where I disagree is that I don't think he needed to do higher powered stats or simulations, which in social sciences don't necessarily provide more insight, I think he needed to do a LOT more homework on what the "natural" distribution of trailing digits is. Like doing comparisons for many firms, and potentially doing them over different times or types of elections - in other words, doing some exploration about possible hidden influences. That kind of homework is essential both for likelihood of success in showing his contention and because of the basic obligation of someone to be fairly certain they're right before intimating, much less outright accusing that someone has committed fraud. It would not surprise me if that turned that his argument was demonstrably false - e.g., a group like Pew showed something inconsistent with his general average of polls or with Benford's law, or Strategic Vision could show something about their methodology that created that bias. Frankly the most damning case he could make would simply be to present that kind of detailed homework that itself showed Strategic Vision sticking out from other pollsters. As it stands, I think he's put out a very thin analysis accompanied by fighting words, and he's fairly likely to get knocked down for it.
I've also noticed people struggle with "attuned" vs. "attenuate" and "intonate" vs. "intimate". I'm no linguist, but my experience having spoken Spanish from a pretty early age is that Standard English has a lot of words, with differences in them being intended to express things very precisely. By contrast, Spanish, at least as it's spoken in most of Latin America, has fewer words, and concepts are expressed more generally, leaving more room for meaning between the words. It always seemed to me that this was at least somewhat cultural - people didn't intend to specify things that precisely, and were comfortable leaving meaning more open (which often leaves a lot of room for double entendre as well). All that makes me wonder if the US and its English aren't evolving somewhat in that direction - people just aren't trying to be as precise in their written speech.
I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. Since medicine itself is more art than science, doctors need to once convey the right information about the patient, but also pass along coded messages about their judgment on the situation that are tailored to the recipient. The example I know intimately is that if you're a pathologist and you see something that looks like it's a little suspicious, but you're dealing with an oncologist and surgeon who you think are a little too hot to trot in the surgery department, you're going to pull back on the language to give them a message that they can wait. Of course you also haven't met the patient, so you don't want to take over the decision of surgery or not. A lot that kind of thing goes into each handoff of the patient from one person to another. It's absolutely true that it scales poorly and queries ever more poorly. And it is a product of the way doctors are educated, so I'm dubious that just writing better software can fix it. I do believe the autonomy and control thing is part of the issue, but I think it works in a different way. Doctors work by using their "medical judgment and experience" (generally matching and interpolating patterns they've seen before) and they are called upon to act very quickly. At the same time, most work for small businesses in which they are part or majority owners. So they do very little formal development of their workflows, and tend to accumulate them without ever building in mechanisms for improvement. Look at the work of Brent James. They standardized workflows and then audited those standardizations, forcing a doctor to either follow the protocol or fix it, they began to really reduce mistakes and improve quality. That kind of effort is essential to improving quality, yet it's very rarely given much attention. IT isn't going to solve these problems by itself, but a good software development process could help if the docs buy into articulating and reviewing their workflows and the information they're passing.
DBAs should be screaming about that. The data integrity requirement has very little to do with the RDBMS itself - after all you can set things up in a standard RDBMS in a way that requires little structure and integrity. It's that data integrity makes the data consistent for reporting. If you want to report on data, and particularly if you want to do anything statistical with it, you need consistency and correctness. The Fusion idea is neato, but it's not going to get you around data consistency and integrity rules if you want to do any meaningful reporting on the data. Still, I wonder who this is targeted at (if that's even been thought about). There are a lot of tools to do pieces of this, particularly in the enterprise space. And I wonder who has large datasets that they're comfortable loading into some cloud server owned by index-everything Google and actually collaborate around it. Maybe I'm wrong, but in a business setting I'd be a whole lot more comfortable if I knew more about where the data was stored and what else the database was doing. I'd also be surprised if Oracle hadn't done some thinking about that as well. Maybe Google will push them along and they can offer it as a rampantly overpriced upgrade to their traditional database offerings.
The point you are missing is that generally when someone is "light polluting" it is for a reason.
That's a lot of faith that things are thought through with perfect foresight. I've been thinking about how baked-in light pollution is to American infrastructure, and I've come to think it's a pretty good example of how hard sustainable infrastructure really is.
Sure, it diminishes the view, but it is probably doing something else useful like lighting a room or a path.
So why exactly do we illuminate things at night? As far as I can tell it's primarily on safety grounds. That seems pretty reasonable and a good trade, right? A little extra light and voile a dark dangerous place becomes a safe lit one.
A couple crashes on a treacherous stretch of in relatively short succession, and the public demands that something be done about the dangerous road. The road authorities respond by altering the alignment and illuminating that stretch plus some before and after for good measure. Then light comes to be considered essential for safety on roads carrying a certain volume of traffic and becomes a requirement for receiving federal highway funding. This is, not entirely coincidentally, good business for both highway contractors (a strong lobby, both locally and nationally) and local electrical utility (another strong lobby locally and nationally). The question that's hard to answer is exactly how safer is the road? If traffic volume increases and there are the same number or more accidents, does that mean the lighting didn't work? But it doesn't really mean it did work, either. Try an exercise of adding up the wattage of street lamps as you drive along a highway from one city to another. Now think about all those watts being used to pump out light when there are no cars there at all, or very few.
You can repeat the exercise for people lighting their porches, then yards and driveways to secure their houses against intruders. Sure, pitch dark places have lots of dangers, and illumination does lower some dangers, but you can't eliminate the danger simply by simply illuminating more and more. Lots of crime happens during broad daylight. Clearly simple fear of the dark drives the impulse to illuminate everything, much like fear of flying drives insane and useless airport security, even though your likelihood of dying in a car crash is orders of magnitude greater than that of dying on a plane.
Finding a balance for these things requires pretty careful thought about when something actually works, and when it doesn't. In the case of infrastructure like lighting, where you have vested interests and an emotional overlay, and where public perception is that things should just work, that's very hard to do. But making our use of technology sustainable is going to require that we go back, try to dig out the real problem from the cruft and figure out when we can make things better by using less. It can be done, but I sure don't see a lot of signs that it's going to be easy.
I agree that advertising has always been the basis for the newspaper and that model is gone, likely never to come back. Beyond that we seem to disagree. The question is how you get something with the quality of thought of an Atlantic Monthly (or your own favorite version of that) to cover events on a close-current basis. To me that necessarily means that someone has to get paid for the work. Perhaps you would take issue with my view that the existence of such a news operation is invaluable for society at large, and perhaps we're arguing over how to get the newspapers from an advertising-based model to one where direct payments support them (which, by the way, is how the WSJ works). On the subject of the Iraq war and the misinformation, I had a number of conversations with my brother, and I think your assertion that newspapers don't want to be controversial because they fear loss of advertisers is basically right. I also think that the media was in a weak state (circulation issues, lack of senior staff, etc.), and the Bush administration was very forceful and savvy about manipulating the news. So while I think it was an egregious failure, I don't take it to mean that newspapers are henceforth going to be unable to resist such manipulation and report objectively.
It's become trendy to say that bloggers do much of the work of the media and that is simply delusion. First of all, nearly all blog entries (including a large fraction of those on this site) are built around a link of a publication which employs its writers. Bloggers do a great job adding bits, contextualize and bringing together info, but they are most often not the generators of solid base information they work with. So if we really do lose newspapers we are not going to have the People's Republic of Blogistan stand up and replace them with real reporting, we're just going to have gasbaggery in its place.
Now the newspaper industry as a whole needs plenty of creative destruction on top of that. Now that news can freely travel across the country and the world, there's no need for every paper to have Washington bureau and foreign correspondents, and consolidation is much needed there. Likewise the stupid forays of the 90s into "new media" and the debt-fueled expansions also call for some of these business to go under. But that's about restructuring companies and an industry, not replacing paid professionals with everyone's favorite opinion.
My hope is that the newspapers will force the issue on micropayments. I would gladly pay $1, maybe $2 a day for a combination of stories from the Washington Post, NYT, LA Times, my local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and on occasion some random others that I learned about from some blogger. I absolutely will not pay $20/mo to each of those. So if they can figure out a joint payment scheme that makes sense, I'm all for that. Double bonus points if they can use it to make their archives affordable and not priced for company and institutiional use.
To me the problem is not so much skepticism like yours, but skepticism of the type that say "well it's been a cold year this year, there can't possibly be a warming trend." Your skepticism strkes me as healthy and informed scientific debate. What I find galling is the number of times climate change is challenged not to try to find a better answer but to prove that it isn't happening.
Take the cosmic ray question. Now independently that's a fairly interesting issue and a good way to look at how solar forcing might be varying. But as soon as the Svensmark guy got any sense that cosmic rays might be a substantial contributor to the solar forcing, he leapt out of the gate to claim that it alone explained observed warming trends. Since others have not been able to repeat his results, I'd call that premature to say the least. On his part, I don't think it's unreasonable that he would want his theory to upend current thinking - that's pretty much the route to glory in any scientific discipline. But the "contrarians" leaped on that as conclusive proof that warming couldn't possibly be anthropogenic. That on top of dramatically misstating measurements (e.g. George Will's bit on how Arctic sea ice area isn't actually shrinking) makes it very hard to believe that contrarians are interested in finding out what IS going on.
I came out of oceanography, so I have a couple friends who are modellers, and they can in fact integrate a first-order PDE. So I think I'd respectfully disagree that all the models are quite as crude as you say.
Nonetheless, almost any assessment of the state of modeling has to concede some of the points you make: namely that the models are not at a state to provide meaningful predictions of the course climate change will take. I believe that most honest assessments of modeling understand their flaws, though individual modelers may not be willing to accept limitations of their own work (imagine that). Where the models seem useful to me is to tell a confirmatory story to the carbon sensitivity calculations, which are much more robust.
In general I also tend to agree that the government should avoid solving the problem directly but adopt approaches that constrain the market to solve the problem. And in particular, I agree with you that a cap and trade system is likely to be the most effective, since it has targets that are measurable. I don't think I'd be as cautious as you describe in government intervention, since a) the carbon problem basically boils down to infrastructure for energy and transportation, and the government is always heavily involved in building and maintain that infrastructure, and b) there really isn't much precedent for solving tragedy of the commons problems like atmospheric emissions on a global scale, and such a framework is needed if we wish to continue to, say, eat fish from the ocean. I'd also note without taking sides that you're using precautionary principle in a different sense than it's often used, i.e. that new technologies must be very deeply tested for environmental and health impacts before they are allowed into widespread use.
Which also raises the question: why is this being done by the shuttle? Couldn't this repair be done robotically, therefore allowing a much smaller, less complicated and more expendable craft?
Having also worked in IT in the developing world, under very similar physical conditions described by the OP, my reaction is that the parent's points are all excellent.
I would add this:
MANAGE EXPECTATIONS.
It is particular important in this kind of setting to manage both your own expectations and those of the people to whom you're providing service.
In my experience, people to whom you're providing service don't appreciate how much more can and does go wrong with a computer than say a phone or a dryer - let alone networked machines or trying to deal with a connection to the Internet. It is worth a lot of effort to help them understand what it takes to provide a particular kind of service. In particular it's important to them think through the cost of that service, often to clarify that the cost of will add up to more they initially can imagine, but that in spite of those costs, there's still a lot of value. Back here in the States, I find that decision-makers in the nonprofit sector often tend to see costs in this limited way and make very limited plans for the ongoing cost of IT service, pile up deferred costs, and inevitably end up struggling along with marginal service and, quite often, higher overall cost.
Since you're an IT professional, I'm guessing that like nearly all of us, you find the potential in IT very appealing. So it's pretty key to constantly remind yourself that your tradeoffs between well-engineered and practicable are profoundly different than IT folks in the developed world and keep yourself grounded in what's feasible and valuable.
Other than that, I think the parent knows way more about this subject than the rest of us, so listen to him or her.
So you visit CNN more now - that's doubtless good for you.
But unless you're bringing dollars with you somehow, it's not good for them. And since your pageviews are worth only a fraction of a penny to advertisers, your visits mean no revenue to CNN and very little to a newspaper. Since CNN is still essentially a television station, they're probably able to make their videos available online as a loss-leader to show their advertisers the interest in a particular type of content and to perhaps get you interested enough to watch, since your "pageviews" are still worth something on TV. But that loss leader model doesn't hold up well for a print newspaper, and it really doesn't hold up for a regional paper.
I believe Charles Keller at the New York Times proposed just such an idea. The government would grant newspapers exemption from anti-trust regulation (not sure what concessions would be extracted in return), basically to allow newspapers to survive as quasi-nonprofit entities.
In the long run, monetizing their popularity has to involve making people pay for the value the newspaper adds. There are two present problems with this.
One is that so many news outlets across so many types of media are chasing the same story (national politics, sports, celebrity news, etc.) that the news is overly available, so there's actually very little value being added by any given newspaper. That's a simple problem of too many competitors for the market and normal market consolidation should sort that out.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other important things to report on in a serious newslike way, and these are really going to suffer for the death of the mainstream newspaper. For example, for Dana Priest to break the story on CIA detention centers took months of work on top of a career's worth of sources and contacts. The problem is that there are precious few examples of people doing this depth of work as an independent journalist. That said, Murray Waas is a pretty interesting case in this area - he does basically seem to work for himself, and he often finds out stuff that others don't know yet. But he's a bit prone to going off on people or otherwise ranting, and a number of his assertions have not panned out.
Blogging on hearsay or newspaper articles one has read (i.e. the business model of Slashdot and nearly every politics blog on the planet) does not constitute journalism. Doing background research cultivating multiple sources on a subject, fact-checking, and editing to ensure (or at least attempt) an objective approach are journalism, and they are time-consuming, often boring efforts. As in every other kind of business, getting people to have the discipline to do the unfun stuff day after day requires paying people. Otherwise, people just do the fun stuff. So until someone can show me how independent citizen journalism deals with this problem, my own view remains that it's unproven as a business model.
Yeah, I strongly second Griffiths. A math PhD will find the development of vector calculus concepts simple, but Griffiths' segue from those concepts into physical applications is absolutely brilliant - it really shows how to flesh out physical intuition by way of mathematics. And it doesn't hurt that classical EM is one of the most coherent pieces of physics anywhere. Perhaps it can even persuade you to join the ranks of physicists in some way... ;-]
Well, yes and no. If you're looking for a precise, quantitative answer on risk management, yes, that is in-depth and involves specific skills. On the other hand, a lot of understanding of risk can be gained by simply doing some brainstorming to gain a general understanding of the risks.
To the poster: try getting together with your boss (and maybe a "friendly" from accounting or elsewhere in the company) to brainstorm a thorough list of risks associated with non-care and non-maintenance of the company's IT systems. Then go through and write down mitigations to these risks. Many you're already doing, some you may not be. Don't bother with anything quantitative - just get down a reasonably good person-to-person understanding of these risks. That list alone ought to be a strong defense of your job - it should be very evidently that the cost of doing nothing is much greater than the cost of paying you. And the list of un-mitigated events provides clear direction for evaluating and prioritizing future sysadmin needs.
Well said. Their product page has the three word decoder of vapor:
"we are developing".
Funny, I had the same thought, and it turns out someone is pursuing it:
http://www.eee.columbia.edu/research-projects/sustainable_energy/Hydrates/index.html
What's particularly appealing is:
a) even if you capture and burn the stuff that's bubbling up, you're still reducing the overall GHG load, but even better, if you
b) capture the effluent CO2, it may be possible to push it into the sediments in replacement for the methane clathrates.
The latter seems pretty far off, but if these reports of "chimneys" of rapid release are right, they could be a decent candidate for capture. You'd have to have some kind of mobile apparatus for capture, and I have no idea how hard that is. Maybe you could use it to power a small data center in a floating enclosure?
It's actually kind of an interesting question what would happen if one undertook a sustained push to make it possible for citizens to apply the law without a law degree. Certainly all the nuanced precedent that's been developed would be chucked, both for better and for worse, but I'm not convinced that that stuff wouldn't grow back rahter quickly. I guess the question is whether law is inherently complicated or is being made more complicated by the way it's used and developed.
By analogy, think about how a big application develops complexity. The needs for the system never truly fit into one bucket or another, but the developers take a stab at some paradigm. Then the requirements change, and the paradigm, which didn't fit perfectly to begin with, gets modified. Eventually the application acquires a huge amount of cruft and history, and becomes very difficult to change - even with well-designed applications and relatively good requirements and consensus-building processes. Sometimes organizations succeed in changing those kinds of applications, equally (or more) often they fail. And that kind of entrenchment is with organizations of O(1K-1M) people, with organizational re-invention timelines of less than a decade.
As an outsider unburdened by knowledge of how legal systems work in practice, what seems to be missing in law is some kind of purging process that actually rethinks whole legal frameworks and allows them to modernize and start the cruftation process anew. The entrenchment problem is at least several orders of magnitude harder as it involves more people, far more money, and issues of vastly greater complexity. But I do believe we'd be getting there a lot faster if we could drop this stupid ideological debate over "more government vs. less government" and let that be a consequence of well-designed legal and government systems rather than a driving principle.
I also work for a biotech (... this my other brother Darrell), and we're facing the prospect of FDA regulation as a device. So we're presently working our way through ramping up a formal (21CFR820) Quality System now. My boss happens to have been through this before and to be a pretty effective evangelist for the FDA's Quality System methodology, which is required for all medical devices and drugs. As he says, a Quality System is just putting to paper all the things you should be doing anyway. So one place you may want to start is by discussing the utility of complying with FDA regs with regard to software.
My boss also notes (on any occasion where there's an opening) that when the FDA introduced design controls, most companies complained they were going bankrupt (as companies are wont to do when regulation, merited or unmerited, is proposed). But when the FDA went around doing their roadshow to show that they weren't just making rules without listening to industry, people from the device companies gradually started to get up and explain how using a Quality System actually lowered their costs and decreased their time to market for revisions and product upgrades.
So as an evangelization tactic I'd look on the FDA's site for guidances relating to the introduction of the Quality System Regulation. For example, this guidance on general principles of software validation is pretty good. If you mentally translate into software industry language you can really see that they're trying to get you to do better engineering by thinking and documenting early, really getting straight what the software is trying to do, and being structured about showing that it does what it needs to do. The truth is that despite the startup effort of introducing documentation and procedures, controlled engineering methodologies work way better - they reduce requirements failure, increase code quality (and more importantly, design quality), and - though developers start out hating paperwork - even make the developers happier because more code works and sees real use. If the company plans to be in the software business for the foreseeable future, it's almost certain that the effort invested in good software practices will pay huge dividends down the road. The key is point out that quality is not an esoteric consideration, it's a driving cost and business risk consideration. Sooner or later the cost of low quality software shows itself.
One thing I will note is that the QSR is pretty waterfall oriented, both because it predates the formalization of iterative/agile methodologies, and because it's written for engineering of physical boxes that have to be released to manufacturing (which implies a fair bit of waterfallism). Part of our effort is to practice iterative development methodology while documenting to the FDA's standards.
Anyway, take a look at all that.
Let's be serious here - nobody's spending money to block anything. The DNC didn't build anything themselves, nor should they - they're a political party, not a software shop. They chose a vendor to build out and operate a video infrastructure for the convention, and that vendor happens to have built on Silverlight (that's where incentives and support from MS likely came in, not directly to the DNC). Why the vendor did that, I have no idea.
I'm a pretty big believer that these things should be built on open technologies, not the least of the reasons being that it's GOOD for political parties to have their content built upon and reused (that's much of what fuels political blogs). As such I'm a little miffed that they chose a vendor that didn't support open technologies, but my guess is that someone's list of questions didn't extend past "can you run it on a Mac" (thereby showing that they're not part of the old Windows-only generation, they're part of the new Mac generation). Given the size of the Linux market, I think the use of content question is much bigger than the runs-on-a-particular-OS question.