One thing that should be remembered is that US intelligence agencies like the NSA spy on the Internet, which whichincludescommercialespionage. The Echelon system is used for much of this.
Then there are things that are less known...the NSA used to "grep" for certain 800 numbers from machines it had "sniffing" the Internet, that were in very good locations to do such a thing. Once I myself was reading a web site in Australia about CIA involvement in a sort-of coup d'etat they had there (the prime minister, who wanted to get Australia out of the Vietnam war, and who was beginning to establish relations with "Red" China was thrown out by an antiquated dominion law by a man who had CIA conenctions). Shortly after doing so I received an odd SNMP query to my IP address requesting information about my machine. If I didn't have my machine especially set up to log everything coming in, I never would have seen it (my machine did not respond witht he asked for information). The requesting machine was some US army information intelligence outfit in Quantico, Virginia, I suppose it was the Army equivalent of the Air Force OSI or something. One odd aspect was I was doing this from the US, so the Army would have been spying on me, as a US citizen, which it shouldn't be doing, although there are loopholes out of this I guess. It's unfortunate I have to go to other countries web sites to read about stuff like this, but that's how it is, the USSR had it's samizdat as well, and its KGB trying to track down who was distributing and reading it.
He wrote a worm and released it on the Internet, but it was just "research"? It's amazing what people will buy into when someone is born white, well-connected and wealthy.
Plus he crashed the Internet. MOD just skulked around machines, doing nothing. So in your mind his crashing of the Internet is "manslaughter" while they're peeks into machines were "1st degree murder". Whatever. No justice, no peace.
In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris released a worm on the Internet which pretty much such the whole Internet down. He is white, has a well-to-do, well-connected father, and did no jail time.
Members of the Masters of Deception never crashed or disrupted computers (although one was falsely accused of crashing the Learning Link), yet their arrests in 1990 led to months or years of jail time. Many of them were not white, and all of them come from working class backgrounds.
This is how the soi disant justice system works. Ken Lay stole millions, and lives in a mansion and is a free man, but he is wealthy and let George W. Bush use his private plane. Someone who walks into a store and steals gets sent to prison. That is because the government, like all governments, exists so that one class can rule over another one, in the case of the US, the idle class over the working class.
That he puts out an application server which is "mission critical" while free software web servers and file servers are not mission critical. I can assure you, there are many free software web servers and file servers that are mission critical. Apache has about 70% of the web server market while Microsoft has about 20% of it, and other web servers have 10% of it. That 70% contains many billion dollar corporations for whom the file server is mission critical. I also know of free software file servers on internal networks which are mission critical, be they NFS or SAMBA, at Fortune 500 companies. I don't know why he thinks application servers are mission-critical but web servers aren't, most application servers I have worked with worked in conjunction with web servers, often Apache web servers.
Even though I've used Linux since the early 1990s, I have always had Windows as my desktop at home - until last year. Microsoft had major trouble doing my wireless adapter, to where the Microsoft OS broke - then I tried to reinstall and it's new stupid OEM "recover" CDs (which are much worse than the old Microsoft Windows 95 install CDs) erased not only my C drive (which I expected), but my D drive (which I didn't expect - and it was erased to put only 3-4 files which were about 10 KB). I finally got tired of it and installed Debian Linux with GNOME. Have been very happy since. Am typing this on my Mozilla browser, which I prefer to IE for many reasons - tabs, no popups, remembering passwords, choice about cookies etc.
Nowadays Linux, GNOME and other free software projects are a mix - some of the contributions were free labor time, and some get paid to work by OSDL, Red Hat, IBM and so forth. I look at free software as a sort of socialist thing, and I see Linux deciding to work with IBM and companies like that in order to capture the high end market in the same way a member of the Communist Party of China might be a little worried about befriending the US and allowing foreign companies into the country as a method to achieve a betetr socialism. Well, even Lenin did a right turn with the New Economic Policy. Plenty of people who think like me are sort of trusting Linus and other people with this long march through the institutions, and comments like Mr. Fleury's heighten the worry. I for one will fight tooth and nail against the Fleury's, the Eric Raymonds and company coming and trying to begin, what in my mind is a setup for an enclosure of the commons. But in a sense Mr. Fleury is right, I am just a small little free software peon, this industry has always been meritocratic, and what the top programmers on important projects think is important as well. Which is probably why those who wish to do harm to the free software movement will target them. It's kind of like how big business targeted union leaders to destroy the labor movement, which worked pretty well in the USA, unionization of private business has gone from 35.7% in the 1950s to 7.9% nowadays. Engineers may always think of things as practicality, but people like Eric Raymond do not, and you must navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of practicality of politics. And sometimes it is necessary to slow down or halt progress on something due to the license being no good and whatnot. Neither Java not C# has a decent free software licensed product yet, although both are being worked on. I for one am cognizant that every time I run a non-free Java on my Debian, I am making a compromise. And I hope I will have a free Java soon, and I prefer using non-Java products until then unless absolutely necesssary. My refusal to use non-free products, my contribution to free software helps the rfee software movement, and stifles the non-free movement. Plus, I am not fanatical about it, I make exceptions, so I am not really effected negatively by it.
I've worked as a sysadmin for many years, and have seen data centers from New York City to San Francisco, from "tier one" co-location facilities to Fortune 100 server rooms. The one problem I've seen in virtually all of them: heat. The server rooms are too hot - if the servers are stacked on top of each other, especially in a cabinet, that makes them hotter, and if you consider what the temperature is on the surface of the CPU itself - that's hot. No matter who it is, or how much money the company has, it seems they all have heat problems, I only remember a few large data centers that had decent heat.
While the norm in my view is "too hot", I've noticed that when things get too hot, which can mean in the high 20's Celsius (80's Fahrenheit), low 30's C. (90's F.), or even high 30's C. (100's C.), machines start breaking down. And usually they begin to break down one after another. I've worked at some Fortune 100 companies that could probably trim their sysadmin staff by a couple of people if they just kept their server rooms a little cooler. I've also had situations where when a room reached a certain temperature, quantity turned to quality and machines began breaking down one after another.
In terms of me telling people whose rooms are too hot, I always do. Usually the smaller the company, which means the smaller the room, the more they listen to me. Big companies, big rooms usually just ignore my protests that 30 degrees C. for a machine is too hot.
Jobs are really disappearing in two ways - one is, yes, a job can move from the US or Europe to India (or China). When you turn on GE's television channel (NBC) or whatnot, this is what is always talked about.
What is not talked about which is obvious is mechanization. It has not been talked about for centuries, really. When workers in England began to lose their jobs due to looms replacing them, Ned Ludd went into his workplace and smashed up his machine, and others followed them. Nowadays, those who own the machines we workers work on say that Ned Ludd was apocryphal, and say the people who smashed up those machines were Luddites, which means people who have an irrational fear of technology. But was it irrational? They lost their jobs after all, although that is never brought up, that aspect of the word Luddite has gone down the memory hole and the word is remembered from a boss's point of view now only, Luddites are crazy workers who have an irrational fear of machines for some reason.
Doug Henwood wrote a good (and short) article on this not long ago. With all those manufacturing jobs moving to China, there must be a lot more manufacturing jobs in China now, right? Henwood notes that actually, according to a study of twenty major economies done last fall by Joseph Carson, the chief economist at Alliance Capital, between 1995 and 2002 China lost 15 percent of it's manufacturing jobs.
Of course, if workers owned and had control over the machines they work with, mechanization would be a great thing, it would mean a choice of either shorter hours or a higher standard of living. But four out of five workers do not own or control the machines they work with, thus mechanization means higher unemployment, lower wages and so forth. Mechanization is only harmful due to the current socio-economic environment.
"Let's not forget that they're the ones doing this to us. They're the ones who are annoying an entire planet. They're the ones who are costing us billions of dollars a year to secure our systems against them. They're the ones who place their desire for fun ahead of everyone on earth's desire for peace and the right to privacy."
Yaa, right....us, us, our? Our systems? Our systems? I guess if I go in to the Fortune 100 financial company I work for, I can just start taking "my" Sun Enterprise 4900s out the door and back to my house. After all they're "our systems", aren't they? What a load of crap.
I know people like Marcus Ranum, who I personally think is an ass, and my employers try to encourgae me to think that the systems I work with are "my" systems so I'll take care of them more. Sometimes I even buy into that on some unconscious level, as I'm protecting them from users pushing the load average up to ridiculous levels and so forth. But ultimately they're NOT my systems, they belong to the majority shareholders of the corporation I work for. A Federal Reserve survey says 42.2% of the outstanding stock in this country belongs to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, and with the Gini coefficient being high, I know the control over the machines I work for rests with a small elite, not with the people who work on them, who create wealth from them.
Everything else Ranum says is BS as well...I'm not paying to secure my corporation, the corporation is. I have a lot of friends who are employed by the computer security business. And he can make all the convoluted "what's bad for Peter is bad for Paul" arguments he wants, the main effect of need to post sentinels to protect from hackers at the cost of billions a year is to keep many of my friends employed. Those billions of dollars are not coming out of my pocket, no matter what kind of convoluted argument he wants to make. They're going into my friends pockets (and Ranum's pocket).
As far as peace and privacy, I'm not the one who decided to put up SOCKS for my company and log everyone going to Playboy.com and whatnot. I'm not the one who decided to read through people's e-mail. I'm not the one using the Patriot Act to see what library books people are checking out. What privacy?
As far as peace, I never wanted war with Iraq. I don't want the US sending billions in weapons to Colombia and other countries. That's real war and peace. As far as peace for systems, I'll go back to what I said before. Most hackers (hackers, not script kiddies) attack corporate systems. Corporation owners, meaning the majority shareholders of corporations (not people who have 100 shares and whose proxies have ultimately no say) are a small elite who have control of these systems, who own these systems, who use these systems for their profit. These systems are not even owned and controlled by the people who work on them! They're controlled ultimately by this small elite. So put away your lies that the machine I need my manager's signature on a slip to take out of the building is "our" machine. There will be no peace until the means of production are owned and controlled by the people who work on them and create wealth with them.
More serious was the bombing of Cambodia beginning in February 1973 (a month after the Paris Peace Accords). The US Air Force was not flying any more bombing missions over Vietnam, so it began to lay waste to Cambodia over the next few months, and not just the eastern provinces.
Some of the nuclear missiles in Cuba at the time were armed and operational, which was not known in the US at the time. If Kennedy had had the "guts" to invade Cuba, the invading force would have probably been greeted with a few tactical nuclear missiles, which no one doubts would have resulted in a full-scale nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
As far as LBJ's "half-assed effort", LBJ never vetoed a military target, ever. LeMay wanted to bomb dikes so as to starve to death millions of civilians (like he did in Korea) and also carpet bomb Hanoi and kill the civilian population there (like he did to Pyongyang, and ever major city in North Korea, and every major city in Japan in the war before that). So if you mean an intentional massacre of civilians on the scale that the US did in Korea or Japan, yes, LBJ vetoed that because the powers-that-be in the US felt it would be politically harmful to US interests outside of Vietnam.
The Ohio National Guard shot bullets out of their guns, they hit a number of students, four of whom died, facts which you do not dispute. To me that makes "the Ohio National Guard shot four students dead" a reality, not a "lie".
As far as treatment of prisoners, we can turn on US corporate television and hear about how John McCain was treated and the Hanoi Hilton and whatnot. You never hear about how NLF prisoners were treated on Con Sen Island though, which was as bad or worse.
John Plummer was a captain in the US armed forces who was in Vietnam, and he says he took an active part in the incident. I know some people dispute the details, but the fact remains that a former US captain claims that the US air force WAS involved.
John Plummer was a captain in the US armed forces who was in Vietnam, and he says he took an active part in the incident. I know some people dispute the details, but the fact remains that a former US captain claims that the US air force WAS involved.
Catastrophic environmental changes can kill many animals off, but it doesn't create a helpful genetic mutation. It might kill off almost everyone who doesn't have a certain helpful genetic mutation though.
I should note the picture of the Vietnamese man summarily executing a Vietnamese prisoner is an RVN (US puppet government) official shooting an suspected NLF prisoner, polls show young Americans often think it's the reverse.
The pictures of the dead villagers and child are the My Lai massacre, when US troops walked into a hamlet and massacred everyone
The naked girl running was just napalmed by the US air force
The monk who is burning did that to himself, he is protesting the US puppet government's treatment of Buddhists.
The girl screaming over the dead body is a picture of an American over an American. College students protested Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, and the Ohio National Guard shot four students dead (and two students protesting were killed at Jackson state as well).
Then there's other things not pictured, the US bombing of Vietnam dikes, the prison on Con Sen Island (which was as bad, or worse, than the Hanoi Hilton and treatment of John McCain etc. that you always hear about on US TV, but which never gets mentioned), the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, strategic hamlets, the US dropping 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia (which probably killed people in the hundreds of thousands) and so on and so forth. It's not pretty...by the way, I'm an American, but I don't support the US"s rich man's wars, poor man 's fights...
It's fitting that this was called politically incorrect because this paper is both political and incorrect. People act as if it is something new for papers such as these to be submitted, these types of papers are submitted all of the time, but I think one look at the name of this obscure journal, "Journal of Biosocial Science" would give a real scientist a whiff of the "scientific" value of this. I mean, really, any journal with the word social in it is usually BS, forget about "biosocial" or "biosocial science".
As others have said here, evolution does not take place over decades or centuries, but over millions of years. Thus, human variation is minor, as is well known, variation among say the Han Chinese is much larger than individual variation between say a random Han Chinese and a random Native American in South America. There's not much difference among human population - different skin color based on climate, immunity to certain diseases, plus things like narrower Asian eyes, curlier African hair.
I won't even go into the nurture not nature points about how Jews and Christians in Europe were raised differently. Or how "interbreeding" would have brought this gene out into the gentile population. That Jews in such a short period of time changed their brains profoundly and that this has been detected by scientists is just utterly absurd. Scientists understand next to NOTHING about the brain. As Noam Chomsky points out, a Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worm has only 302 neurons, and scientists who have been studying its brain for decades understand next-to-nothing about its brain. Thus, if you expand this scientific understanding of a species with 302 neurons to humans, which have 100 billion neurons, this shows you the vast expanse of lack of knowledge scientists have of how the human brain functions.
Economic and political systems spit out all kinds of output, including "scientific" papers like these which of course get highly publicized (I read about this on mailing lists before seeing it here). This paper is from England, if one goes back over the years, there have been many "scientific" papers showing how the Anglo-Saxon race was superior to those genetically dumb, drink-prone, criminal Irish on the next island, as well as most of the other races. The Cold Spring Harbor Lab, which Nobel Prize DNA co-discoverer James Watson came back from England years ago to preside over, was called the Eugenics Record Office right up until we went into World War II and Hitler's boosterism of eugenics made it seem less cool or patriotic.
Of course the other side of this coin, is that while the powers-that-be are always trying to bring out material like this - the Bell Curve, this and whatnot, they also actively work to sabotage, discredit and so forth research on things like climate change. I know less about this subject than I do about biology, but I do know of cases where oil companies have donated money to congressmen who went after funding for studies into this, among other things. I also know oil companies have set up their own labs to try to disprove the theory, the scientific value of which I would hold in as high regard as scientists working for Greenpeace. Also, some people can't handle the fact we evolved from a common ancestor with monkeys, so they fund intelligent design research to try to get evolution out of the schools. Thus, there's bad science all around. As I said, different political-economic systems spit his stuff out - the Soviet Union did not have these specific problems but it had its own set of problems with so-called scientific studies by Lysenko and so forth. The same principle, although different fields, political and economic factors dictating science.
Yoda does not counsel Luke to break his bonds with Padme. He tells him to accept the fact that she will die. It is a Buddhist type idea - to break connections with material things, ultimately, even our own body. This is different from him being told relationships with other people is a negative thing.
The propaganda system
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Paul Graham on PR
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I investigate where news stories come from and who is used as a source, and I'd say the same thing. A good web site that helps track this down is the wiki Sourcewatch.
Anyhow, it is a kind of tautological system, wealthy people fund politicians, PR firms, lobbyists, think tanks and whatnot. They also own most of the major media, and even PBS is starting to look like it has commercials between shows.
The majority shareholders of finance companies pay some think tanks to make the case for eliminating bankruptcy protections (unless you're wealthy) or to privatize social security. Then they pay lobbyists, and finance campaigns of candidates they support, the politicians start talking about this. Their employees - editorialists for the newspapers, magazine and TV networks they hand out the party line like the commissars of the USSR used to.
Perhaps a better example for us was the supposed shortage of high-tech labor in the late 1990s. Only one senator voted not to lift the number of H1-Bs coming into the country. I believe the "shortage" was manufactured, but now that there is a glut of foreign IT workers in the country where is the movement to correct it? There isn't much of one - the big money likes a labor glut, and as far as IT workers, there's a variety of tools to wield against them doing anything about it - all that money, various laws to prevent worker organizing, IT workers who think they're brilliant and everyone else is beneath them and only losers worry about things like this.
The scariest thing for me is when I sit at a table and hear someone repeat word-for-word - word-for-word (!) something said on TV to get them to think a certain way. I have been in focus groups and know that they are just saying those exact phrases to make people think a certain way. This entire propaganda system doesn't disturb me as much as when I hear the people around me repeating the propaganda message, word-for-word like it was said on TV, back to me. It's like their brain hasn't done any processing except acceptance of the message that came from the TV, via the PR firm, via the focus group, via the company, via the wealthy majority shareholders of that company. That is what I find scarier than the whole propaganda system.
If I hadn't paid close attention to it, I'd probably be as against the use of Bitkeeper as anybody. If one looks at the situation at the time though, Linux development was in a rut at just the time Linux companies were taking off in the stock market. Bitkeeper allowed Linus to work faster and delegate more authority. Some key features of Bitkeeper will probably be in the SCM Linus uses to replace it. I'm very happy to see Linux come back to a free software model of development.
I am not a zealot, so I do not think it was a sin to temporarily use non-free software, especially when there were a lot of circumstances at the time leading to this at the time - we didn't want a Linux fork or Linus having a nervous breakdown, or so on. You have to look at things like a war - there is an objective, there is strategy and there is tactics. Bitkeeper was a necessary tactical retreat, but now that Linux is moving beyond Bitkeeper, we can see it fit in with the overall good objective and strategy behind Linux. The thing people like me worried about was the fortitude of the Linus core team as they began using Bitkeeper - is this a tactical retreat, or are they going over to the dark side? With recent events, we can see they did the right thing.
I think people should have sympathy with the situation at the time that led to Bitkeeper. It's alright for Richard Stallman to be pure and a zealot - that's his job. But it was a tactical necessity. On the other side of the coin are the little worms who whine how some developer floating around out there tried to reverse engineer Bitkeeper and offended the tender sensibilities of Bitmover and Larry McVoy, and how Linus doesn't crawl in subjugation before Bitmover and by implication other short-term corporate concerns. I don't think these people really understand even corporate America, never mind industrial or information production in general. Corporate America doesn't respect little worms that crawl around and do whatever are ordered, they just get used up until they're of no use any more and are then thrown away. And who ever said Linux was for corporate America anyway? I always thought of Linux as by engineers, for engineers. Which is not the same things as by engineers, for corporate America. That's what most of us do for our day jobs.
Considering the world economy from textile workers in Asia to European professionals, there is the obvious physiological barrier of the need for sleep and the 24 hour day. As far as actual work time, I would look at the relation between productivity and stress as a sliding scale, with a point where an increase in speed will not increase (and may even decrease) productivity. I think most business are smart enough to stop at that point. However, that level certainly might have health consequences and so forth - for example, my hands have some degree of repetitive stress injuries (not carpal tunnel syndrome though) and some of my friends in IT have it as well - marathon sessions on a computer with no attention paid to ergonomics (one example: every hour switching the mouse from one hand to another, or switching from a normal PS/2 to a trackball mouse so as to use different muscles) can lead to long-term health consequences. While it is more likely for people to be put physically out of commission in the third world, one can mentally burn out in more professional work - people working at financial companies for instance. While work can cause physical or mental damage which allows you to still work, I would classify serious damage as that which prevents you from working. While this may be a problem for the individual, it may not be a problem for the companies if they get a fresh crop of young workers every few years. There are studies on this going back to the time of the Chartist movement in England in the mid 19th century.
I don't think misplaced resources is a natural consequence of economics, but more of a economic system operating inefficiently. Our economy is based on the production of commodities for others. In the early days of this there was no inefficiency - people would agree on exchanges *before* doing any work - you sow my clothes and I will harvest my field and give you food. Nowadays, corporations produce commodities without knowing whether or not people will buy them - they are just hoping that people out there will do work and exchange what they produce for what the company is producing. Eventually they begin over-producing (for example, building real estate in Thailand no one will want, laying fiber optic cables no one will want) and a financial crisis ensues - the Asian financial crisis, the dot coms becoming dot bombs and whatnot. The less certain one is a commodity they produce will be bought by someone else, the more apt the chances for misplaced resources and overproduction.
Prior to the dot-com crash, I was mostly interested in fundamental equity analysis, or stock pricing. Since the crash I have become more interested in what used to be called political economy, or economics. In fundamental stock analysis, the intrusion of economics into basic equities analysis is mostly through the p/e ratio or price/earnings ratio. The common wisdom is that riskier stocks had a higher p/e ratio than safer stocks like utilities, but also had more potential for earnings growth. Of course, by March 11th, 2005, many companies were not only within the risk range of high p/e ratios, but had no earnings at all. I was expecting a crash, so I broke even on the stock market, selling half of my stocks when my stocks went down to double what they had been when I bought them, pulling out my original investment. Of course, the other half went to zero, or near it anyway. What I did not predict is how long IT would enter a doldrums, which made me more interested in economics.
It is often said that people who risk money by buying a stock deserve the dividends they get by the risk they taking buying the stock. This is kind of tautological within the economic system however. The economic system consists of corporations producing commodities (PCs, bread, a colocation rack) and exchanging them for other commodities - a few decades ago money backed by gold, nowadays money which is theoretically worth something because one can pay taxes with it. Corporations often produce commodities which no one wants, which is the main risk of capital investment, it's a loss. Virtually everyone recognizes this as true, from former GE CEO Jack Welch to socialists like Paul Sweezy. Thus, the economic system commits the error of misplacing resources. This error produces capital risk, and this capital risk is the common explanation of why people deserve dividends from capital investment, instead of, say, the workers at the corporation who created that wealth.
As far as the US economy, productivity was extremely poor throughout the 1930's, then from the mid 1940's to the mid 1960's were 20 years of enormous productivity. It began slowing down in the mid 1960's, and by the early 1970's everyone realized there was an enormous problem. Nixon went off the gold standard, imposed wage and price controls, and dismantled the Bretton Woods system. Productivity has been pretty poor since the mid-1960s, there have been arguments of whether it had a decent bump in the late 1990s or not. The late 1990s bump is obviously from the Internet, an R&D project the US government poured billions of dollars into from the 1960s until the mid 1990s, it was a state project (DARPAnet/NSFnet) handed over the corporations when it had been developed after 25 years of taxpayer funding. Anyhow, this long slowdown in economic productivity in the US has resulted in the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US being below what it was 30 years before. Asia seems to be the only area with decent productivity growth in thw world, but that creates another problem of who is going to buy all of the commodities China is pumping out since the market is already saturated.
I was working for dot-com's until the Sprng 2000 crash when I figured the dot com boom was over and I better get some experience in some other sector. So I went to Wall Street. Wall Street seemed like a miserable place, and with the awareness that they could squeeze people due to the economy, it was worse. Within a year lots of BS happened - benefit cuts, a round of layoffs, and then finally a salary cut for everyone. The salary cut is what did it for me. I quit. It was something I was able to do, but woud be harder for people with families, or on visas from India and so forth to do. I guess they just have to sit there and take whatever gets dished out to them.
Improving your skill set moves you higher up on the food chain but doesn't solve the overall problem. Even engineering could get crappy bonuses while the company sent out dividends that year in the billions range. The only solution is to organize - if you're doing white collar work, join the nascent engineering professional associations of the kind doctors and lawyers have (although some of them like the IEEE are far worse than the AMA or ABA), if it's not professional but just skilled work than talk to the CWA and their efforts. Or whatever, only organization and its accompanying education and self-education makes these things better in the face of the ITAA's of the world.
And as far as myself - I relaxed and learned some technical skills I didn't have the time to study indepth during my downtime, which was good, and all is good now. But I had the ability to do it, visa workers and people with families did not.
I found the whole tone of the article a lot of nonsense, especially with regard to the relationships around control and money.
Part of the title of this article is "Will Larry and Sergey ever grow up?" If one reads the article "growing up" according to the author of the piece means handing control of the company from the people working at the company over to people who don't work at the company, and whose main long-term interest is expropriating profit (dividends) from the wealth created by the people who work at the company. So let's impose that idea on all companies and society: immaturity is when workers have control over their own work, maturity is when control of the workers work is handed over to people concerned with expropriating dividends for themselves from said worker.
One sentence of the article says "Corporate-governance mavens pilloried the dual-share structure, which seemed starkly at odds with the populist tone of Larry's letter." Thus populism is not control of the company being in the hands of those who work at it, but being in the hands of the controlling investors. Controlling investors being a group in the US who, according to the Federal Reserve's SCF reports, is totally within the richest 1% of Americans. "Populism" is when control is in the hands of the richest 1% of Americans, who, like Paris Hilton and the Hiltons of the Hilton Hotels Corporation, do not have to work at said company, or have to work period. They just get hefty dividend checks due to what I assume would be their "maturity".
"When crisis eventually comes to Google-- and it will--the company's fate will depend on whether they have absorbed a handful of lessons that apply as much to life as they do to business: Adulthood happens. You can't make all your own rules." The tone of this whole article is numbing. Don't rock the boat. Give control over your company, your work and your life over to rich people so they can start demanding you hand over large piles of wealth you create to them. And so on and so forth. This whole thing is a depressing load of bullshit.
Just like when I walk into Barnes and Noble, when I walk into a bookstore and look at the Russia section, *every* book is a negative book, at least for the period 1917-1991. Actually, that's not entirely true, sometimes I come across "Ten Days that shook the world" - so the Bolshevik revolution is portrayed sympathetically by one book, for the first ten days of its existence. It's obvious to me that I am being blasted by propaganda - why not let me read 20 books by anti-communists, and one book by someone sympathetic to the USSR and let me make up my own mind? But I'm not allowed to make up my own mind. I live in what in the US is a very liberal city too, I can imagine what libraries in the red states are like, if the public libraries themselves aren't considered some socialist project that could be better done by private charity or the marketplace.
I don't really fault all librarians for this, some of them try to have a diversity to choose from, but the system is stacked against them. Thank goodness there's the Internet. Right now I am helping a group (who have some contacts with Project Gutenberg, and might send them material, but are operating autonomously for now) putting material on the Internet. I am scanning and OCR'ing material that is legally public domain, so that people all over the world can read it. In another window, I am writing an article for a wiki encyclopedia which I am sure is a lot different than the Encarta entry on the topic - and which goes into more detail as well because these encyclopedias pay a lot of attention to kings and wealthy people but very little to workers, peasants and so forth.
I also work at a local infoshop (bookstore) run by volunteers which has a free lending library (with a $5 refundable deposit) containing books hard to find in corporate chain bookstores. We get a lot of customers even though we only have ONE bookshelf while there are thousands of public library bookshelves within a mile of our store, that should tell people about the narrowness of material on certain topics.
It's all about empowering the reader. Libraries and traditional encyclopedias don't do that, and now they are railing against what is replacing them. The smart ones will get witht he program and start empowering their readers.
I often see a tendency towards a Pollyannaish view of such things. The Monthly Review has an article this month called "India, a Great Power?" which questions whether India can even get on the same track China is on, never mind grow into an industrial power like Japan or Germany or the US. The article makes sense to me, although some might find it offbeat - then again, people who would find it offbeat probably didn't find articles during the Internet boom praising the bubble offbeat.
If you look at history from the mid to late 19th century on, one thing in common is all countries which industrialized were demonized and attacked by the industrial world - from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century that would be Germany and Japan. Japan is really the last country to become an industrial nation, although South Korea is on the way. Industrial nations always try to smother industrializing nations on the edge of joining them in the cradle. Every nation since the beginning of the 20th century to push itself towards industrialization has had a socialist revolution, namely, Russia and China. Both were backwards, feudal countries - not how Marx envisioned things turning out certainly. They seem not to have been able to sweep capitalism out of their houses, but they did get rid of all the existent feudal structures. As the article says, India still has a lot of the colonial, feudal structures in place. China always resisted colonialism on some level, and was not under it too long, while India, like Ireland, was under colonialism for many centuries. And Ireland only got going with a large injection of money from the EU.
India will not be a China unless it has some radical changes, and not the kind Wall Street, the World Bank, WTO and IMF proscribe.
One thing I have found on Wikipedia is it is politically biased. Ultimately, the control is held by Jimbo Wales, and he has great sway over how things go, and he's made it clear where his political leanings are, and they influence Wikipedia. It is subtle, so people will not be aware of it in the first weeks of being on Wikipedia, and would thing one (or more) people are "picking on them". But it is there, and people who have been around for a while are aware of it, and have written about it. Jimbo Wales even personally drove off an admin from London who he disagreed with, usually he leaves it to his admins.
Wikipedia is a decent resource for information on Quantum Mechanics or other scientific information, but as far as political and historical information, forget it. Actually, the mainstream press even wrote about this during the 2004 US election. People should face up to it - there needs to be more than one wiki page out there for controversial people like Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and whatnot. The idea that there can be one supposedly "neutral" page has not worked out in practice. If you are of a conservative bent, I suggest a wiki like
Wikinfo, if you are more left wing, I suggest somewhere like Infoshop's Open Wiki.
I find the Wikipedia's cabal commissar role over such things disturbing, and this sort of thing makes me feel even more so. Democratic Underground is testing a wiki, and perhaps Free Republic will follow. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Slashdot Mirror
Then there are things that are less known...the NSA used to "grep" for certain 800 numbers from machines it had "sniffing" the Internet, that were in very good locations to do such a thing. Once I myself was reading a web site in Australia about CIA involvement in a sort-of coup d'etat they had there (the prime minister, who wanted to get Australia out of the Vietnam war, and who was beginning to establish relations with "Red" China was thrown out by an antiquated dominion law by a man who had CIA conenctions). Shortly after doing so I received an odd SNMP query to my IP address requesting information about my machine. If I didn't have my machine especially set up to log everything coming in, I never would have seen it (my machine did not respond witht he asked for information). The requesting machine was some US army information intelligence outfit in Quantico, Virginia, I suppose it was the Army equivalent of the Air Force OSI or something. One odd aspect was I was doing this from the US, so the Army would have been spying on me, as a US citizen, which it shouldn't be doing, although there are loopholes out of this I guess. It's unfortunate I have to go to other countries web sites to read about stuff like this, but that's how it is, the USSR had it's samizdat as well, and its KGB trying to track down who was distributing and reading it.
Plus he crashed the Internet. MOD just skulked around machines, doing nothing. So in your mind his crashing of the Internet is "manslaughter" while they're peeks into machines were "1st degree murder". Whatever. No justice, no peace.
Members of the Masters of Deception never crashed or disrupted computers (although one was falsely accused of crashing the Learning Link), yet their arrests in 1990 led to months or years of jail time. Many of them were not white, and all of them come from working class backgrounds.
This is how the soi disant justice system works. Ken Lay stole millions, and lives in a mansion and is a free man, but he is wealthy and let George W. Bush use his private plane. Someone who walks into a store and steals gets sent to prison. That is because the government, like all governments, exists so that one class can rule over another one, in the case of the US, the idle class over the working class.
Even though I've used Linux since the early 1990s, I have always had Windows as my desktop at home - until last year. Microsoft had major trouble doing my wireless adapter, to where the Microsoft OS broke - then I tried to reinstall and it's new stupid OEM "recover" CDs (which are much worse than the old Microsoft Windows 95 install CDs) erased not only my C drive (which I expected), but my D drive (which I didn't expect - and it was erased to put only 3-4 files which were about 10 KB). I finally got tired of it and installed Debian Linux with GNOME. Have been very happy since. Am typing this on my Mozilla browser, which I prefer to IE for many reasons - tabs, no popups, remembering passwords, choice about cookies etc.
Nowadays Linux, GNOME and other free software projects are a mix - some of the contributions were free labor time, and some get paid to work by OSDL, Red Hat, IBM and so forth. I look at free software as a sort of socialist thing, and I see Linux deciding to work with IBM and companies like that in order to capture the high end market in the same way a member of the Communist Party of China might be a little worried about befriending the US and allowing foreign companies into the country as a method to achieve a betetr socialism. Well, even Lenin did a right turn with the New Economic Policy. Plenty of people who think like me are sort of trusting Linus and other people with this long march through the institutions, and comments like Mr. Fleury's heighten the worry. I for one will fight tooth and nail against the Fleury's, the Eric Raymonds and company coming and trying to begin, what in my mind is a setup for an enclosure of the commons. But in a sense Mr. Fleury is right, I am just a small little free software peon, this industry has always been meritocratic, and what the top programmers on important projects think is important as well. Which is probably why those who wish to do harm to the free software movement will target them. It's kind of like how big business targeted union leaders to destroy the labor movement, which worked pretty well in the USA, unionization of private business has gone from 35.7% in the 1950s to 7.9% nowadays. Engineers may always think of things as practicality, but people like Eric Raymond do not, and you must navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of practicality of politics. And sometimes it is necessary to slow down or halt progress on something due to the license being no good and whatnot. Neither Java not C# has a decent free software licensed product yet, although both are being worked on. I for one am cognizant that every time I run a non-free Java on my Debian, I am making a compromise. And I hope I will have a free Java soon, and I prefer using non-Java products until then unless absolutely necesssary. My refusal to use non-free products, my contribution to free software helps the rfee software movement, and stifles the non-free movement. Plus, I am not fanatical about it, I make exceptions, so I am not really effected negatively by it.
While the norm in my view is "too hot", I've noticed that when things get too hot, which can mean in the high 20's Celsius (80's Fahrenheit), low 30's C. (90's F.), or even high 30's C. (100's C.), machines start breaking down. And usually they begin to break down one after another. I've worked at some Fortune 100 companies that could probably trim their sysadmin staff by a couple of people if they just kept their server rooms a little cooler. I've also had situations where when a room reached a certain temperature, quantity turned to quality and machines began breaking down one after another.
In terms of me telling people whose rooms are too hot, I always do. Usually the smaller the company, which means the smaller the room, the more they listen to me. Big companies, big rooms usually just ignore my protests that 30 degrees C. for a machine is too hot.
What is not talked about which is obvious is mechanization. It has not been talked about for centuries, really. When workers in England began to lose their jobs due to looms replacing them, Ned Ludd went into his workplace and smashed up his machine, and others followed them. Nowadays, those who own the machines we workers work on say that Ned Ludd was apocryphal, and say the people who smashed up those machines were Luddites, which means people who have an irrational fear of technology. But was it irrational? They lost their jobs after all, although that is never brought up, that aspect of the word Luddite has gone down the memory hole and the word is remembered from a boss's point of view now only, Luddites are crazy workers who have an irrational fear of machines for some reason.
Doug Henwood wrote a good (and short) article on this not long ago. With all those manufacturing jobs moving to China, there must be a lot more manufacturing jobs in China now, right? Henwood notes that actually, according to a study of twenty major economies done last fall by Joseph Carson, the chief economist at Alliance Capital, between 1995 and 2002 China lost 15 percent of it's manufacturing jobs.
Of course, if workers owned and had control over the machines they work with, mechanization would be a great thing, it would mean a choice of either shorter hours or a higher standard of living. But four out of five workers do not own or control the machines they work with, thus mechanization means higher unemployment, lower wages and so forth. Mechanization is only harmful due to the current socio-economic environment.
Yaa, right....us, us, our? Our systems? Our systems? I guess if I go in to the Fortune 100 financial company I work for, I can just start taking "my" Sun Enterprise 4900s out the door and back to my house. After all they're "our systems", aren't they? What a load of crap.
I know people like Marcus Ranum, who I personally think is an ass, and my employers try to encourgae me to think that the systems I work with are "my" systems so I'll take care of them more. Sometimes I even buy into that on some unconscious level, as I'm protecting them from users pushing the load average up to ridiculous levels and so forth. But ultimately they're NOT my systems, they belong to the majority shareholders of the corporation I work for. A Federal Reserve survey says 42.2% of the outstanding stock in this country belongs to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, and with the Gini coefficient being high, I know the control over the machines I work for rests with a small elite, not with the people who work on them, who create wealth from them.
Everything else Ranum says is BS as well...I'm not paying to secure my corporation, the corporation is. I have a lot of friends who are employed by the computer security business. And he can make all the convoluted "what's bad for Peter is bad for Paul" arguments he wants, the main effect of need to post sentinels to protect from hackers at the cost of billions a year is to keep many of my friends employed. Those billions of dollars are not coming out of my pocket, no matter what kind of convoluted argument he wants to make. They're going into my friends pockets (and Ranum's pocket).
As far as peace and privacy, I'm not the one who decided to put up SOCKS for my company and log everyone going to Playboy.com and whatnot. I'm not the one who decided to read through people's e-mail. I'm not the one using the Patriot Act to see what library books people are checking out. What privacy?
As far as peace, I never wanted war with Iraq. I don't want the US sending billions in weapons to Colombia and other countries. That's real war and peace. As far as peace for systems, I'll go back to what I said before. Most hackers (hackers, not script kiddies) attack corporate systems. Corporation owners, meaning the majority shareholders of corporations (not people who have 100 shares and whose proxies have ultimately no say) are a small elite who have control of these systems, who own these systems, who use these systems for their profit. These systems are not even owned and controlled by the people who work on them! They're controlled ultimately by this small elite. So put away your lies that the machine I need my manager's signature on a slip to take out of the building is "our" machine. There will be no peace until the means of production are owned and controlled by the people who work on them and create wealth with them.
More serious was the bombing of Cambodia beginning in February 1973 (a month after the Paris Peace Accords). The US Air Force was not flying any more bombing missions over Vietnam, so it began to lay waste to Cambodia over the next few months, and not just the eastern provinces.
As far as LBJ's "half-assed effort", LBJ never vetoed a military target, ever. LeMay wanted to bomb dikes so as to starve to death millions of civilians (like he did in Korea) and also carpet bomb Hanoi and kill the civilian population there (like he did to Pyongyang, and ever major city in North Korea, and every major city in Japan in the war before that). So if you mean an intentional massacre of civilians on the scale that the US did in Korea or Japan, yes, LBJ vetoed that because the powers-that-be in the US felt it would be politically harmful to US interests outside of Vietnam.
As far as treatment of prisoners, we can turn on US corporate television and hear about how John McCain was treated and the Hanoi Hilton and whatnot. You never hear about how NLF prisoners were treated on Con Sen Island though, which was as bad or worse.
John Plummer was a captain in the US armed forces who was in Vietnam, and he says he took an active part in the incident. I know some people dispute the details, but the fact remains that a former US captain claims that the US air force WAS involved.
John Plummer was a captain in the US armed forces who was in Vietnam, and he says he took an active part in the incident. I know some people dispute the details, but the fact remains that a former US captain claims that the US air force WAS involved.
Catastrophic environmental changes can kill many animals off, but it doesn't create a helpful genetic mutation. It might kill off almost everyone who doesn't have a certain helpful genetic mutation though.
I should note the picture of the Vietnamese man summarily executing a Vietnamese prisoner is an RVN (US puppet government) official shooting an suspected NLF prisoner, polls show young Americans often think it's the reverse.
The pictures of the dead villagers and child are the My Lai massacre, when US troops walked into a hamlet and massacred everyone
The naked girl running was just napalmed by the US air force
The monk who is burning did that to himself, he is protesting the US puppet government's treatment of Buddhists.
The girl screaming over the dead body is a picture of an American over an American. College students protested Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, and the Ohio National Guard shot four students dead (and two students protesting were killed at Jackson state as well).
Then there's other things not pictured, the US bombing of Vietnam dikes, the prison on Con Sen Island (which was as bad, or worse, than the Hanoi Hilton and treatment of John McCain etc. that you always hear about on US TV, but which never gets mentioned), the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, strategic hamlets, the US dropping 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia (which probably killed people in the hundreds of thousands) and so on and so forth. It's not pretty...by the way, I'm an American, but I don't support the US"s rich man's wars, poor man 's fights...
As others have said here, evolution does not take place over decades or centuries, but over millions of years. Thus, human variation is minor, as is well known, variation among say the Han Chinese is much larger than individual variation between say a random Han Chinese and a random Native American in South America. There's not much difference among human population - different skin color based on climate, immunity to certain diseases, plus things like narrower Asian eyes, curlier African hair.
I won't even go into the nurture not nature points about how Jews and Christians in Europe were raised differently. Or how "interbreeding" would have brought this gene out into the gentile population. That Jews in such a short period of time changed their brains profoundly and that this has been detected by scientists is just utterly absurd. Scientists understand next to NOTHING about the brain. As Noam Chomsky points out, a Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worm has only 302 neurons, and scientists who have been studying its brain for decades understand next-to-nothing about its brain. Thus, if you expand this scientific understanding of a species with 302 neurons to humans, which have 100 billion neurons, this shows you the vast expanse of lack of knowledge scientists have of how the human brain functions.
Economic and political systems spit out all kinds of output, including "scientific" papers like these which of course get highly publicized (I read about this on mailing lists before seeing it here). This paper is from England, if one goes back over the years, there have been many "scientific" papers showing how the Anglo-Saxon race was superior to those genetically dumb, drink-prone, criminal Irish on the next island, as well as most of the other races. The Cold Spring Harbor Lab, which Nobel Prize DNA co-discoverer James Watson came back from England years ago to preside over, was called the Eugenics Record Office right up until we went into World War II and Hitler's boosterism of eugenics made it seem less cool or patriotic.
Of course the other side of this coin, is that while the powers-that-be are always trying to bring out material like this - the Bell Curve, this and whatnot, they also actively work to sabotage, discredit and so forth research on things like climate change. I know less about this subject than I do about biology, but I do know of cases where oil companies have donated money to congressmen who went after funding for studies into this, among other things. I also know oil companies have set up their own labs to try to disprove the theory, the scientific value of which I would hold in as high regard as scientists working for Greenpeace. Also, some people can't handle the fact we evolved from a common ancestor with monkeys, so they fund intelligent design research to try to get evolution out of the schools. Thus, there's bad science all around. As I said, different political-economic systems spit his stuff out - the Soviet Union did not have these specific problems but it had its own set of problems with so-called scientific studies by Lysenko and so forth. The same principle, although different fields, political and economic factors dictating science.
Yoda does not counsel Luke to break his bonds with Padme. He tells him to accept the fact that she will die. It is a Buddhist type idea - to break connections with material things, ultimately, even our own body. This is different from him being told relationships with other people is a negative thing.
Anyhow, it is a kind of tautological system, wealthy people fund politicians, PR firms, lobbyists, think tanks and whatnot. They also own most of the major media, and even PBS is starting to look like it has commercials between shows.
The majority shareholders of finance companies pay some think tanks to make the case for eliminating bankruptcy protections (unless you're wealthy) or to privatize social security. Then they pay lobbyists, and finance campaigns of candidates they support, the politicians start talking about this. Their employees - editorialists for the newspapers, magazine and TV networks they hand out the party line like the commissars of the USSR used to.
Perhaps a better example for us was the supposed shortage of high-tech labor in the late 1990s. Only one senator voted not to lift the number of H1-Bs coming into the country. I believe the "shortage" was manufactured, but now that there is a glut of foreign IT workers in the country where is the movement to correct it? There isn't much of one - the big money likes a labor glut, and as far as IT workers, there's a variety of tools to wield against them doing anything about it - all that money, various laws to prevent worker organizing, IT workers who think they're brilliant and everyone else is beneath them and only losers worry about things like this.
The scariest thing for me is when I sit at a table and hear someone repeat word-for-word - word-for-word (!) something said on TV to get them to think a certain way. I have been in focus groups and know that they are just saying those exact phrases to make people think a certain way. This entire propaganda system doesn't disturb me as much as when I hear the people around me repeating the propaganda message, word-for-word like it was said on TV, back to me. It's like their brain hasn't done any processing except acceptance of the message that came from the TV, via the PR firm, via the focus group, via the company, via the wealthy majority shareholders of that company. That is what I find scarier than the whole propaganda system.
I am not a zealot, so I do not think it was a sin to temporarily use non-free software, especially when there were a lot of circumstances at the time leading to this at the time - we didn't want a Linux fork or Linus having a nervous breakdown, or so on. You have to look at things like a war - there is an objective, there is strategy and there is tactics. Bitkeeper was a necessary tactical retreat, but now that Linux is moving beyond Bitkeeper, we can see it fit in with the overall good objective and strategy behind Linux. The thing people like me worried about was the fortitude of the Linus core team as they began using Bitkeeper - is this a tactical retreat, or are they going over to the dark side? With recent events, we can see they did the right thing.
I think people should have sympathy with the situation at the time that led to Bitkeeper. It's alright for Richard Stallman to be pure and a zealot - that's his job. But it was a tactical necessity. On the other side of the coin are the little worms who whine how some developer floating around out there tried to reverse engineer Bitkeeper and offended the tender sensibilities of Bitmover and Larry McVoy, and how Linus doesn't crawl in subjugation before Bitmover and by implication other short-term corporate concerns. I don't think these people really understand even corporate America, never mind industrial or information production in general. Corporate America doesn't respect little worms that crawl around and do whatever are ordered, they just get used up until they're of no use any more and are then thrown away. And who ever said Linux was for corporate America anyway? I always thought of Linux as by engineers, for engineers. Which is not the same things as by engineers, for corporate America. That's what most of us do for our day jobs.
I don't think misplaced resources is a natural consequence of economics, but more of a economic system operating inefficiently. Our economy is based on the production of commodities for others. In the early days of this there was no inefficiency - people would agree on exchanges *before* doing any work - you sow my clothes and I will harvest my field and give you food. Nowadays, corporations produce commodities without knowing whether or not people will buy them - they are just hoping that people out there will do work and exchange what they produce for what the company is producing. Eventually they begin over-producing (for example, building real estate in Thailand no one will want, laying fiber optic cables no one will want) and a financial crisis ensues - the Asian financial crisis, the dot coms becoming dot bombs and whatnot. The less certain one is a commodity they produce will be bought by someone else, the more apt the chances for misplaced resources and overproduction.
It is often said that people who risk money by buying a stock deserve the dividends they get by the risk they taking buying the stock. This is kind of tautological within the economic system however. The economic system consists of corporations producing commodities (PCs, bread, a colocation rack) and exchanging them for other commodities - a few decades ago money backed by gold, nowadays money which is theoretically worth something because one can pay taxes with it. Corporations often produce commodities which no one wants, which is the main risk of capital investment, it's a loss. Virtually everyone recognizes this as true, from former GE CEO Jack Welch to socialists like Paul Sweezy. Thus, the economic system commits the error of misplacing resources. This error produces capital risk, and this capital risk is the common explanation of why people deserve dividends from capital investment, instead of, say, the workers at the corporation who created that wealth.
As far as the US economy, productivity was extremely poor throughout the 1930's, then from the mid 1940's to the mid 1960's were 20 years of enormous productivity. It began slowing down in the mid 1960's, and by the early 1970's everyone realized there was an enormous problem. Nixon went off the gold standard, imposed wage and price controls, and dismantled the Bretton Woods system. Productivity has been pretty poor since the mid-1960s, there have been arguments of whether it had a decent bump in the late 1990s or not. The late 1990s bump is obviously from the Internet, an R&D project the US government poured billions of dollars into from the 1960s until the mid 1990s, it was a state project (DARPAnet/NSFnet) handed over the corporations when it had been developed after 25 years of taxpayer funding. Anyhow, this long slowdown in economic productivity in the US has resulted in the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US being below what it was 30 years before. Asia seems to be the only area with decent productivity growth in thw world, but that creates another problem of who is going to buy all of the commodities China is pumping out since the market is already saturated.
Improving your skill set moves you higher up on the food chain but doesn't solve the overall problem. Even engineering could get crappy bonuses while the company sent out dividends that year in the billions range. The only solution is to organize - if you're doing white collar work, join the nascent engineering professional associations of the kind doctors and lawyers have (although some of them like the IEEE are far worse than the AMA or ABA), if it's not professional but just skilled work than talk to the CWA and their efforts. Or whatever, only organization and its accompanying education and self-education makes these things better in the face of the ITAA's of the world.
And as far as myself - I relaxed and learned some technical skills I didn't have the time to study indepth during my downtime, which was good, and all is good now. But I had the ability to do it, visa workers and people with families did not.
Part of the title of this article is "Will Larry and Sergey ever grow up?" If one reads the article "growing up" according to the author of the piece means handing control of the company from the people working at the company over to people who don't work at the company, and whose main long-term interest is expropriating profit (dividends) from the wealth created by the people who work at the company. So let's impose that idea on all companies and society: immaturity is when workers have control over their own work, maturity is when control of the workers work is handed over to people concerned with expropriating dividends for themselves from said worker.
One sentence of the article says "Corporate-governance mavens pilloried the dual-share structure, which seemed starkly at odds with the populist tone of Larry's letter." Thus populism is not control of the company being in the hands of those who work at it, but being in the hands of the controlling investors. Controlling investors being a group in the US who, according to the Federal Reserve's SCF reports, is totally within the richest 1% of Americans. "Populism" is when control is in the hands of the richest 1% of Americans, who, like Paris Hilton and the Hiltons of the Hilton Hotels Corporation, do not have to work at said company, or have to work period. They just get hefty dividend checks due to what I assume would be their "maturity".
"When crisis eventually comes to Google-- and it will--the company's fate will depend on whether they have absorbed a handful of lessons that apply as much to life as they do to business: Adulthood happens. You can't make all your own rules." The tone of this whole article is numbing. Don't rock the boat. Give control over your company, your work and your life over to rich people so they can start demanding you hand over large piles of wealth you create to them. And so on and so forth. This whole thing is a depressing load of bullshit.
I don't really fault all librarians for this, some of them try to have a diversity to choose from, but the system is stacked against them. Thank goodness there's the Internet. Right now I am helping a group (who have some contacts with Project Gutenberg, and might send them material, but are operating autonomously for now) putting material on the Internet. I am scanning and OCR'ing material that is legally public domain, so that people all over the world can read it. In another window, I am writing an article for a wiki encyclopedia which I am sure is a lot different than the Encarta entry on the topic - and which goes into more detail as well because these encyclopedias pay a lot of attention to kings and wealthy people but very little to workers, peasants and so forth.
I also work at a local infoshop (bookstore) run by volunteers which has a free lending library (with a $5 refundable deposit) containing books hard to find in corporate chain bookstores. We get a lot of customers even though we only have ONE bookshelf while there are thousands of public library bookshelves within a mile of our store, that should tell people about the narrowness of material on certain topics.
It's all about empowering the reader. Libraries and traditional encyclopedias don't do that, and now they are railing against what is replacing them. The smart ones will get witht he program and start empowering their readers.
If you look at history from the mid to late 19th century on, one thing in common is all countries which industrialized were demonized and attacked by the industrial world - from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century that would be Germany and Japan. Japan is really the last country to become an industrial nation, although South Korea is on the way. Industrial nations always try to smother industrializing nations on the edge of joining them in the cradle. Every nation since the beginning of the 20th century to push itself towards industrialization has had a socialist revolution, namely, Russia and China. Both were backwards, feudal countries - not how Marx envisioned things turning out certainly. They seem not to have been able to sweep capitalism out of their houses, but they did get rid of all the existent feudal structures. As the article says, India still has a lot of the colonial, feudal structures in place. China always resisted colonialism on some level, and was not under it too long, while India, like Ireland, was under colonialism for many centuries. And Ireland only got going with a large injection of money from the EU.
India will not be a China unless it has some radical changes, and not the kind Wall Street, the World Bank, WTO and IMF proscribe.
Wikipedia is a decent resource for information on Quantum Mechanics or other scientific information, but as far as political and historical information, forget it. Actually, the mainstream press even wrote about this during the 2004 US election. People should face up to it - there needs to be more than one wiki page out there for controversial people like Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and whatnot. The idea that there can be one supposedly "neutral" page has not worked out in practice. If you are of a conservative bent, I suggest a wiki like Wikinfo, if you are more left wing, I suggest somewhere like Infoshop's Open Wiki.
I find the Wikipedia's cabal commissar role over such things disturbing, and this sort of thing makes me feel even more so. Democratic Underground is testing a wiki, and perhaps Free Republic will follow. Let a thousand flowers bloom!