A lot of it is not chance. Yes, executives are profoundly "common" once you know them. But there is a difference.
Executives predominantly (70-80%) have two different types of personalities: narcissistic and sociopathic. Both of these allow them to "roll-up" the consequences of their actions into convenient and readily disposable form. Complex, uncertain or stressful situations that give the average person pause or pangs of conscience roll off their backs either because they are so keyed into the goal and their part of it (the former) or are so utterly dismissive of others (the latter).
In either case, their actualy knowledge and logic regarding problems and solutions are no better than most anyone else. Their psychosocial traits can even make their problem solving worse than average.
The carcinogenic properties of asbestos occur due to nanometer-scale physical features of the asbestos crystal structure. A handy counter-argument to "we've used it for ages so it must be safe" argument regarding nanotechnology.
But the problem is not if nanotechnology is safe or not. The answer to that is: sometimes it's safe, sometimes it's not. The real issue is uncertainty: the low probability that our assessment of risk probability is certain. It is the means of assessment and the assessment of risk of all the variety of nanotechnologies that is uncertain and unknown. Uncertainty is a meta-risk far more dangerous that risk itself.
This won't be resolved any time soon because nanotechnologies interact with biological systems at the level of the operational mechanisms of those biological systems themselves. There is no statistical aggregating effect like there is for micrometer or larger physical systems. Nanoparticle interaction is 3-D rather than 2-D as it is in the latter systems.
In other words, you will only know a priori if nanotechnologies are dangerous if you understand and can simulate the 3-D interactions of nanoparticles within living biological systems at the genome, proteome and metabolic levels because these particles are of the same physical size as DNA, protein and other biological structures.
As we are just starting to be able to understand (and we will need to replace a generation of biologists with a new one having working knowledge of advanced math and physics to grok anything) such simulations won't be possible until well into the late 21st or even early 22nd century. So a reliable a priori risk assessment will remain highly unlikely until that point.
This leaves a posteri risk assessment as the only practical alternative. That is: release the technology first and measure the impact to assess actual risk - in other words let everyone be a guinea pig. We already see this strategy in applied genomics and see the d posteri risk in practice as leaked DNA to wild species ("Thanks Monsanto!"). Given that there are existing examples of extremely dangerous nanoparticles, it is prudent and rational, given the extreme uncertainty to proceed with great care and safeguards which collect as much data applicable to risk assessment as possible.
I am a techie, more specifically, a hardware techie so it's not that I think nanotechnology should be "shutdown". I don't, and I even work with nanotechnology today. Rather, with what I know about physics, molecular biology and risk, I know that nanotechnology is different in its risk profile from what we have dealt with in microtechnology. That said, this shift is no larger than the shift that industrial organic synthesis of arbitrary new molecules brought in the 20th century. But it's exactly because of what we now know about that risk and what wasn't anticipated that warrant us to "be smarter" this time around.
A brand is symbolic promise of a product's utility and usefulness to a customer. That smaller brands are making inroads simply proves that existing "name" (aka market "gorilla") brands are failing their promises to their customers - they are not deliverying value.
I buy Apple because the name/logo/symbol implicitly and reliably means something about the product experience. I don't buy HP any more (despite working there for 10 years and leaving on good terms) because now their brand implicitly and reliably means something negative about the product experience which it didn't mean 10-20 years ago. I just got my first IBM/Lenovo laptop and it's everything HP used to be without the parochial BS that HP used to represent nor the overpriced/undervalued products it sells today.
The insistence of the consumer electronics industry to kow-tow to the smaller entertainment industry and not address basic customer product utility and usability is mystifying and the inevitable end-game that will result is like watching an automobile crash in slow-motion.
Re:Nope- no companies hiring that can afford to ca
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Pay vs. Happiness
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Having house servants has nothing to do with caste systems. Having servants (in India, elsewhere) is directly related to having a labor surplus against a energy/technology shortage. By contrast the USA and Europe has had a labor shortage which is (and has been historically been) compensated by technology and resource surpluses (which are efficiency tools that offset labor shortages - doing more with fewer people). This western labor shortage is tracable as far back as the Black Plagues.
My SO is from the Philippines and always had separate servants for cooking, clothes cleaning, house cleaning, car driving (chauffeur), and if needed, child care. She had all of the above (except the last) while having a monthly income of $1000 which was a princely sum a decade ago. Simultaneously she was supporting living expenses of a dozen immediate relatives and putting several through college, while still having cash for a nice apartment and glamorous night life.
It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what US life will be like without cheap energy to drive technology and resource surpluses (post-Peak Oil), combined with competition with a flat world economy resulting in new labor surpluses (post-Technology-Outsourcing).
If we had half brain among the lot in the White House, we'd be working to maintain the existing balance through innovation in energy, if for no other reason, we know how to do that, but we don't know how to live in a labor surplus and do it well - other nations have already honed that skill and have far larger labor surpluses than we can ever create.
You are falsely equating copyright violation with ad-blocking. Not even remotely similar. Ads are an information commodity being "sold" at the price of viewer attention. Unlike information commodities like music advertising is "meta information" about other commodities. Nonetheless, an economic value/decision process applies.
Advertiser have no more right to force their "product" on me any more that record companies have a right to force me to buy Britney Spears or any other talentless commodity they think I *should* buy to help their profits. Britney is, of course, an exceptionally efficient commodity given the production and marketing processes used to create her. But all the efficiency in the world doesn't matter if the buyer doesn't assess sufficient value to make the transaction hurdle.
You can claim implied contract but guess what: "free" content does not create any enforceable contract in common law legal systems. I can stand on a corner in a big city and play guitar with the case open for remuneration - if someone doesn't want to "pay up" despite benefiting from my "free content" I don't have the right or expectation to shakedown passersby for cash or reward (such as taking and reading my playbill for a paying concert or partner's product, if you want to keep the analogy going). I don't even have the right to shoo them away for repeatedly partaking in my free content!
If making content freely available proves to become economically unviable, that means one and only thing: the content you are offering simply isn't valued (by the market you serve) as highly as YOU WISH it were. In the street musician example, the musician may live in the fantasy that his music is God's Gift to Humanity, but if others don't agree he may have to get another job to make ends meet or quit playing. So be it. That's exactly how it should work.
Thus blocking ad's will only lead to the demise of businesses that not fundamentally sustainable in the first place. A business in the US only has a right to participant in the market, but never a right or guarantee to its healthy financial or organizational existence.
IT'S ONLY FREERIDERS WHO INSIST OTHERWISE! Advertiser are complaining about "freeriders" abusing them when it is they who are the freeriders if ad-blocking is somehow barred or banned. They are advocating that they should be allowed to FREERIDE. They want monopoly power to force people to buy their information commodity (advertising) at the price of viewers' scarce commodity (attention/time)!
I'm keeping my ad-blocking full-up, thank very much, and I know I'm on the ethical and legal high ground! The same can't be said for self-serving propaganda as Double-Click is pushing here.
If this guy can't "compete" against GPL it's more a matter of poor business planning on his part - pick a niche that is narrow or obscure or deep enough that competitors (yes, including open source coders) can't justify competitive effort and you can easily compete against GPL. I'd love to see his "business plan" for his agrieved company - I'm sure if it exists at all it's a piece of junk. This is business 101: have a product business plan that gives you competitive advantage - if you can't, start over with a different product or plan!
There are tons of application areas that can compete against open-source; in most cases the same ones that can compete against closed-source successfully also - my company occupies one such niche. We could have an open-source competitor (or even a closed-source competitor) in theory but there isn't mostly because it's deep technically, has a small end-user market size requiring a high-touch sales process and it requires some expensive hardware to create a useable solution - yet we charge $20K-150K per copy for our closed-source software not counting hardware.
Of course, finding a good niche (aka product/service differentiater) is what you do for any business. The fact that he hasn't figured this out simply means that capitalist Darwinism has worked properly - he was destined to fail because of his inability to adapt to market conditions. Time get a clue - maybe he believes in faith-based business - if you pray for you product to sell it will regardless of your business acumen. What do you bet he's trying to claim he can't compete with his a web server, mail server or database server product!
> Concerns like morally corrupt, ethically
> challenged, etc., only apply to flesh-based
> persons with human issues, not legal-based
> persons (corporations) with only money issues.
:-)
Except if there are to be two standards for ethics and morality dependent on being flesh-based vs. legal-based entities, then certainly there should be clear distinctions and limits on person-hood and entitlement to constitutional protections - that is, corporations should not be granted unalienable rights that are granted by the constitution and bill of rights to human beings. Yet such constitutional rights are currently granted to corporations. Thus as corporations are granted "inalienable human rights" of the US Constitution, it is reasonable to insist that corporations be required to behave morally and ethically just ashuman citizens are required to by the letter and spirit of the laws and entitlements of the US.
The underlying flaw, though, is that only flesh-based entities are actually capable of either being affected by or fulfilling the duties that come with constitutional rights. By this we include specific duties like serving in national defense and jury duty, but also broader duties like simply obeying the law, or not impinging on the rights of other citizens without risk of concommitant punishment.
The problem is punishment for misdeeds of commission and omission with regard to citizen duties: corporations are granted rights with no effective or enforceable duties. As a human citizen I know that if I violate the law (and either directly or indirectly the US constitution) I can lose my citizen rights (jail) and means for enjoying my citizen rights (money). Corporation structure fundamentally insulates owners and owner-proxies (i.e. boards and executives) from legal liability from all but the most obvious and egregious criminal acts. Civil violations are punished against only the lifeless corporate shell itself. Even when attempts are made to punish, the corporation faces orders of magnitude milder impact, as a fine-to-revenue ratio. The checks and balances of citizenship exist for humans but not for corporations.
In additional to having the enforcement of duties defanged, the additional problem is that hierarchal organization inherently amplifies, and often distorts, the morality and ethics of those at the top. If a corporation's executives are simply morally and ethically weak, or worse, borderline sociopaths themselves (we all know of such a leader and such an organization) then the organization easily becomes a full-blown sociopathic entity, perversely with citizen constitutional rights but with no enforceable duties as citizens.
Individuals with such traits (e.g. Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, et al.) can be and are removed from impinging their evil on society in perpetuity, yet sociopathic corporations are not condemnable nor constrainable by the state or society for their sociopathic behavior. The worst-case scenario is a corporation might be broken-up or liquidated, but ultimately the humans leading the corporation can trivially walk away and start another corporation, effectively "reincarnating the evil" of the dead sociopath - even Charles Manson only gets one lifetime chance to inflict his sociopathology and then society locks him up and throws away the key, losing all future opportunities. While the individual must balance their own mortality and free will against evil in their heart, corporations have no mortality to be concerned with and the wizard behind the curtain are legally insulated from their deeds of control - this radically changes the checks and balances on citizenship and behavior as citizens.
An immortal corporation can not be jailed or effectively killed thus isn't affected by any of the downsides of punishments for violating laws derived from the constitution or other citizens' constitutional rights. Further a co
Hmmm. Not "I can't screw up" but "I'm likely to screw up".
A better explanation, seems to me, is that larger working memory allows deeper and more elaborate search trees to be constructed which either 1) grow fast enough to be overwhelming due to complexity and size, thereby creating stress, or 2) allow more possible scenarios with negative consequences to be discovered and fretted about, thereby creating stress. The larger number of negative scenarios aren't accurately counted or assigned cumulative probabilties (even smart people suck at that) so the odds *seem* worse even if they aren't, but smart people can imagine more of them that less smart people.
Sometimes people who don't know things can't done or don't realize how dangerous/risky a project is are willing to push the project through to sucess. They may not have a large enough working memory to analyze, relying on the blessing of relative ignorance and simple gut feel to guide them.
For those who haven't been on a jury, this case illustrates how easily people can get tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence. This particular case is more the exception than the rule unfortunately: exonerating evidence in the form of a confession got him off the hook. Plenty more people get sent to jail for long hauls on far less evidence here in the US. Then consider the death penalty cases...
Microsoft is using pretty much the same arguments that creationists use against evolution.
As we all know, Open Source Software development is structurally similar to the scientific method and evolution in terms of how "new things" are created by the these systems. Similarly, what Microsoft is claiming is that software can't be created well "at random" through emergent means (we know that's a crock) but needs "the Hand of an intelligent Creator" to control everything (Microsoft == God, apparently). Ergo: Microsoft is claiming that only "Creationist Software" is good software - "Evolutionary Software" is evil software.
I think this could be useful angle of attack against Microsoft FUD: they are advocating creationism and faith-based solutions to computer science.
Although I'd be first to lash out at the crummy UI design of much OSS (with plenty left for MS Windows), I think he's made two mistakes: 1) chosen the wrong example to bash, and 2) he *is*, unfortunately blindly applying what are rules of thumb for UI design as if they are laws.
On the first issue, I switched to using Firefox full time about a month ago (previously using Mozilla 1.x , having abandoned even touching IE for many years). As browser UIs go, Firefox is quite excellent. There are numerous little things that are delightful and easy to use. Only of few of which include:
1. SSL URLs are highlighted in yellow - much better than the "traditional" lock icon you can never find or notice
2. Just discovered the "find text" feature - joy! the highlight button is excellent. Well implemented IMO
3. Compared to IE, it goes without saying that tabbed browsing is far quicker if you power-surf a lot - just an issue with learning it up front
Overall, based on ~30 years experience with software, I'd put Firefox up on a pedestal as an example of what to emulate when doing UI compared to most OSS or even commercial software. Yes, BTW I use Mac OS X when I want the computer to "get out of my way so I can get something useful done".
On the second issue, this paper seems like the result a university lower division computer science class assignment, or he just heard a lecture on these UI concepts for the first time and decided he was an expert now.
UI design is very much a "right brain" activity (yes, I know there isn't technically such a division - stop being so left-brained!). There is as much art as science to any type of design. Being good at it is difficult if you are either "left-brained" or are forced by professional/economic circumstances to be primarily "left-brained". Like most things, you can't do "right-brained" things well without lots of practice (or "left-brained" things either). There's also usually a switching cost/delay going from one to the other unless you are well-toned in both.
In general, design is a fuzzy business. Even when you design concrete engineering things like analog circuits or software. The best engineering designers always identify themselves as/with artists as much as they identify as/with engineers. Design is always about solving an underspecified problem, so there are always extra degrees of freedom that require making unschooled guesses, engineering judgements and/or aesthetic judgements to get things done. The word "sufficiently" shows up a lot for a reason.
If you don't have a nature affinity to being an artist or thinking of yourself as an artist, you probably won't be a good UI designer. That's perfectly OK as absolutely no one is good at everything - only don't expect much when you do UI implementations without someone who is good at it.
Sorry, no. Apparently you haven't work someplace that actually does truly significant amounts of product innovation. Dell's product innovation is tinkertoy stuff with prefab jellybeans.
Dell's primary innovations are in supply chain management and accounting innovation, definitely NOT product innovation.
Pop quiz 1: what single activity or process in Dell accounts for biggest portion of its net profit? Answer: the following accounting trick - take most of your accounts receivable "net 0 days" as mostly credit card orders, and all your accounts payable to suppliers as "net 60 days"; invest your receivables for 60 days in high yield financial instruments before you transfer the cash to payables. Pocket the profits. Dell makes more from this than from hardware profits! Check their financials.
Pop quiz 2: what is the single activity or process in Dell accounts for the second biggest portion of its net profit? Answer: force all your suppliers to hold your inventory so you pay no taxes or holding costs on inventory; combine this with shipment straight from supplier warehouse to end customer to save time and cost. That monitor you bought came straight from Sony or Hitachi, never touching a Dell loading dock or warehouse. Dell simply arranges to have those suppliers handle putting the monitors into Dell-labeled boxes. Box inventory also on supplier's dime.
HP's executive team said at the split in 1999 that HP's future was going to be in supply chain management not R&D (the exact words were something to the effect of "Microsoft will do our software R&D and Intel will do our hardware R&D". Sorry HP, Dell's going to eat your lunch on supply chain. And to boot, now you don't have the financials and corporate structure to do R&D anyway!:-p
It's true that HP has walked away from everything that made it successful between 1939 and 1999. In short they've walked away from all new technology and innovation/invention. On the other hand, nearly all of American industry is doing precisely the same thing with Amercan as a whole. The parallels to the decline of the British industrial revolution are frightening.
Where will the next generation of middle managers come from? The ranks of outsourcing engineerings in China & India. Where will the next generation after that of executives come from? The ranks of successive middle managers overseas. Where will the following generation of entrepeneurs come from? The ranks of all three overseas. Business people make a big deal about "supply chains" but apparently don't see when their own children's "job supply chain" is being destroyed by their own actions.
Strictly speaking HP was far more "money grubbing" during previous periods than they are now - now they simply are in a race to the bottom and to the end-of-life for the HP brand and corporation.
During the previous era, HP lived on mind-bogglingly large margins (as most techology companies do) which in turn funded a healthy R&D: HP essentially invented whole classes of products (R&d) or was the first to make whole classes of product finanical viable (r&D). HP "lived" on the upper leading edge of the Technology Adoption Curve usually entering markets at the inflection after the "Chasm" or 'C' and exiting markets on the trailing edge. Take the integral of the area under the curve and you get the product technology market capitalization and HP's previous strategy was to take most of it!
The "New HP" is now consciously dedicated itself to entering markets on the trailing edge of this curve and exiting on the trailing edge. Basically they are taking table scraps left by others, letting others control their destiny and limiting their own growth potential. Pretty much a recipe for death. HP is already a walking dead company and the current executive team have slandered and debased Bill's & Dave's legacy and triumph! We just waiting for the HP brand to be bled away.
Traditional semiconductor lasers (and LEDs) use carrier (electrons/holes) energy transitions to ground state to emit photons. Silicon is an indirect bandgap semiconductor so carriers falling back to ground state require a phonon (quantum lattice vibration) of the right energy/spectra to create a photon - which with regular Si has an extremely probability of showing up at the critical moment for a photon emission - so instead the energy is dissipated as heat (phonons) rather than light (photons). Direct gap III-V compounds (GaAs, InP, etc.) don't require a phonon for a photon to be emitted on any transition to the ground state so you get light readily, hence all previous lasers/LEDs using III-V compounds.
In this case, the researchers are using a different mechanism to create photons (and more specifically population inversion and stimulated emission required for a laser) using something similar to what happens with erbium-doped fiber amplifiers.
Quite true. Given the current state of these technologies, we haven't even legitimately started the classic "20 year invention-to-application clock" yet!
For those unfamiliar, it's "well established" that new technologies typically exhibit a 20 year lag between invention and economically relevent application, with the classic example being the Internet (1969->1990). Others examples include Radio, Television, Trains, Steam Engines, etc. etc. The timing varies but no significant technology ever had less than 10 years lag while most have been pretty right on 20+-5 years. My personal belief on why this occurs is that you have to promote/turn-over an entire generation of engineers to overcome the status quo, finish development and create a new crop of techies without a NIH or "that's not how its done" mindset. Too bad the USA won't have a new crop of required techies in the next generation...
As already mentioned, FPGAs, et al. probably won't give the performance needed. Fine for functional prototyping perhaps.
Some 20 years ago I was deeply involved in creating custom designed and manufactured microprocessors (MIL-STD-1750A instruction set). There were off-the-shelf varieties but none that could perform in the space environments the target system required (specifically a phase of SDI). The key factor was there was nothing available that was ultra radiation hard and met power and weight specs. So we had a 3 contractor "bake-off" to create the fab process and the processor. When we got 1st silicon from each, we had to allocate the wafers from each IC vendor to the two contractors for the systems contract - the entire project only required a dozen or so 6" wafers worth of processors. My boss decided I should take the responsibility for swapping wafers from the supplier cassettes to each system vendor cassettes. He of course cutely reminded me: "Don't drop one - those cost the government $20M each". Gee, thanks, I've worked on the project long enough to know that. He was sort of an ass that way.
At least in this case they didn't need to create the fab process itself also! For space-based stuff that isn't always the case. Hopefully they used an on-shore foundry though - not many left!
Funny you should mention that: I was visiting a customer to install a product they had just bought from us. I was requested to show a photo id (usually my driver's license) when I discovered I didn't have it in my wallet. I quickly assumed I'd lost it on a business trip I'd been on until the day before (found it later that night wrapped inside my TSA-stained boarding pass).
Anyhow, they wouldn't let me in the building even though I had spent a day a week in the building for the last 6 months and knew the security lady on sight and by first name. Her excuse was that she was "just following orders". The guy I was with for the install deadpanned that that was the same excuse used a Nuremberg but the reference was lost on her. Effectively I really had ceased to exist even though they had just dropped $200K on us the week before.
And people wonder why I'm shopping for real estate outside the USA!
The fundamental flaw in the software service/rental model is that it is being rammed down the throats of software consumers by software producers, which might have a snowball's chance iff such vendors have absolute (i.e. monopoly) market power. None truly do; not even Microsoft can say that.
The problem is service/rental is that you become beholden to the service, thus you incur a hidden cost due to risk because you could run the risk of losing access to your own data or processes if you can't make the monthly payments. In the non-rental mode, s/w to control your data and processes become sunk cost at worst with ready substitution of the status quo in lieu of new purchases (expenses). There is no compensation for this added cost for the user in the rental model, while the producer is gaining a cashflow series that was originally a single transction - software rental == higher NPV for the seller and lower NPV for the buyer, making it a simple and audacious market power grab.
Rightly, buyers will expect some compensation (I've yet to hear a single argument s/w rentals that really holds water) to justify switching. Otherwise you can expect the creation of non-rental substitutes (Open Source?) or the creation of black markets.
The 10:1 number is for gasoline rather than diesel. The number came from Saudi Aramco - a reasonably trustworthy source:-)
The ethanol number is corn/maize ethanol - other non-energy intensively farmed plants certainly could do better.
Rapeseed sounds interesting. It's weedy too so it might not take too much energy-intervention.
Hmm. Algae has the issue of either which natural water resources (lakes, estuaries, oceans) you use for it (and how to get to it for harvest/maintenance) or what type of man-controlled systems (usually energy intensive in the 1st world) you use for the algae.
Yep.
Hydrogen is a pretty poor energy carrier (not energy source!!) for several reasons, first being energy "return": oil is 100:1 for Saudi oil (100 barrels out for 1 barrel in to cover extraction, transportation and refining) to as low as 10:1 for Alaskan/Texan oil. Compare to other sources: natural gas 50:1, wind 3:1, solar 4:1 (silicon fab operations and materials), ethanol 1:1 or less (need to count inputs from fertilizer and farmer equipment fuel), hydrogen 0.5:1 (energy in for electrolysis with losses plus transportation).
And then since hydrogens's only a carrier (like a rechargeable battery - there is no such thing as a "hydrogen well") you still need a real energy source to "charge" it. Sunflower oil might be a potential source...until you do a back-of-the-envelope on how many arable acres you would have to grow it on and what percentage (most) of the US's arable acres are only so due to energy-intensive and oil-intensive farming providing water, fertilizer, pesticides, etc. and how much of the "naturally arable" land has been paved over for suburbs and cities (e.g. the entire Santa Clara valley aka Silicon Valley).
Even this sunflower one makes me wonder: what are the fertilizer and farm equipment inputs? where does the energy for the steam come from? So what's the net energy return? I'd put money on it being no better than ethanol!
An interesting post I saw else where: for good energy return on low density sources like biomass you want to have minimal energy inputs from petro or other sources. As an energy cash crop you want to have something that grows pretty much like a weed. Guess what produces good quality oil and grows like a weed?:-) Well, "weed" of course, or actually hemp. Wouldn't it be funny if we need to rely on hemp for the "Peak Oil" time.
I only last week bought a DVD writer - and only because 1) the price was throw-away cheap, and 2) because it was multi-format: both + and - formats, ergo I chose both, not one or the other.
Same will go for this format. I also have Mac, PC and Linux so give me a tent for all!
I had a Romanian girlfriend in college. She had tons of idiomatic proverbs and phrases like that. There was one about "cabbages and dinner tables" she told me when we first met. It was fascinating and part of what I liked about her.
This interesting article makes me wonder: how does English (or any other major language) create limitations of our current abilities to think abstractly? How would the language have to be different to remove those limitations? For example, are there language differences that could give people a better ability to understand Quantum Mechanics or Ill-formed sociological problems like war, etc.
> the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials
Doesn't surprise me. - the US military/intelligence specifically, and USians more generally, always project their own (American) psyche far too much onto its enemy's psyche when it does gaming an enemy. It's OK to extrapolate an enemies behavior, but you have to be careful to question all your preconceived axioms and assumptions when you try to run their thinking system - most people are perfectly logical within their own axioms and assumptions; they only seem illogical or irrational because those differences result in different logical conclusions. Further using the wrong assumptions will take your predictions for your enemy far off course from the reality of your enemy. Why did the CIA get the end of the Cold War so wrong?
90% of US military technology innovation during the Cold War (1948-1988) was well described and telegraphed by congressional testimony and news reports of what we claimed the Russians could do to us, which was being used to justify further appropriations. Almost without exception: 1) the Russian did not yet have the technology either on the drawing boards or in development at the time we claimed their having it was a threat, 2) we were mostly reacting to paranoia about the threat because we had just secretly proven feasibility and/or weaponized the technology ourselves, and 3) Ike's MIC needs a reason to exist created a group-think that didn't much reason to question #2 or realize #1 was happening. Start with the "Bomber Gap" and continue to the end. Note: the self-delusion element of this would not have been helped by adopting security-through-obscurity.
As a side note, I have a copy of one of the books ObL/AQ was looking for: "Chemical Weapons published in 1921". They got the title wrong - I won't correct them though. Interestingly it was published by the US Army! I bought it at a university library book clearance for a few dollars. The one key learning from the book is that chemical weapons are scary, nasty and all, but above all are economically and militarily ineffective and inefficient - it was cheaper per death or per casualty to invest in 1918-style conventional explosives than 1918-style chemical weapons by a factor to 10x-100x. Generally the former has improved faster since then than the latter (even including nerve agents).
That doesn't count the "terror" value, but like the article quotes ObL, since 9-11 the US has pretty much done exactly what ObL planned for and wanted. Terror has been effectively self-created and self-perpetuated by the US itself - largely by applying Well-Formed Problem Solving methodologies to an Ill-Formed Problem.
One thing to notice: what drugs affect the same dopamine receptor? Amphetamine, Methamephetamine, Ritalin, Cocaine, etc. What are the effects of these drugs? Initially anyway, they all improve concentration, focus and the ability to work, just like these monkeys seem to experience. Are there side effects? Gee, duh. This research won't result in a capitalist nirvana any more than handing out Meth to employees would.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of it is not chance. Yes, executives are profoundly "common" once you know them. But there is a difference. Executives predominantly (70-80%) have two different types of personalities: narcissistic and sociopathic. Both of these allow them to "roll-up" the consequences of their actions into convenient and readily disposable form. Complex, uncertain or stressful situations that give the average person pause or pangs of conscience roll off their backs either because they are so keyed into the goal and their part of it (the former) or are so utterly dismissive of others (the latter). In either case, their actualy knowledge and logic regarding problems and solutions are no better than most anyone else. Their psychosocial traits can even make their problem solving worse than average.
But the problem is not if nanotechnology is safe or not. The answer to that is: sometimes it's safe, sometimes it's not. The real issue is uncertainty: the low probability that our assessment of risk probability is certain. It is the means of assessment and the assessment of risk of all the variety of nanotechnologies that is uncertain and unknown. Uncertainty is a meta-risk far more dangerous that risk itself.
This won't be resolved any time soon because nanotechnologies interact with biological systems at the level of the operational mechanisms of those biological systems themselves. There is no statistical aggregating effect like there is for micrometer or larger physical systems. Nanoparticle interaction is 3-D rather than 2-D as it is in the latter systems.
In other words, you will only know a priori if nanotechnologies are dangerous if you understand and can simulate the 3-D interactions of nanoparticles within living biological systems at the genome, proteome and metabolic levels because these particles are of the same physical size as DNA, protein and other biological structures.
As we are just starting to be able to understand (and we will need to replace a generation of biologists with a new one having working knowledge of advanced math and physics to grok anything) such simulations won't be possible until well into the late 21st or even early 22nd century. So a reliable a priori risk assessment will remain highly unlikely until that point.
This leaves a posteri risk assessment as the only practical alternative. That is: release the technology first and measure the impact to assess actual risk - in other words let everyone be a guinea pig. We already see this strategy in applied genomics and see the d posteri risk in practice as leaked DNA to wild species ("Thanks Monsanto!"). Given that there are existing examples of extremely dangerous nanoparticles, it is prudent and rational, given the extreme uncertainty to proceed with great care and safeguards which collect as much data applicable to risk assessment as possible.
I am a techie, more specifically, a hardware techie so it's not that I think nanotechnology should be "shutdown". I don't, and I even work with nanotechnology today. Rather, with what I know about physics, molecular biology and risk, I know that nanotechnology is different in its risk profile from what we have dealt with in microtechnology. That said, this shift is no larger than the shift that industrial organic synthesis of arbitrary new molecules brought in the 20th century. But it's exactly because of what we now know about that risk and what wasn't anticipated that warrant us to "be smarter" this time around.
JG
I buy Apple because the name/logo/symbol implicitly and reliably means something about the product experience. I don't buy HP any more (despite working there for 10 years and leaving on good terms) because now their brand implicitly and reliably means something negative about the product experience which it didn't mean 10-20 years ago. I just got my first IBM/Lenovo laptop and it's everything HP used to be without the parochial BS that HP used to represent nor the overpriced/undervalued products it sells today.
The insistence of the consumer electronics industry to kow-tow to the smaller entertainment industry and not address basic customer product utility and usability is mystifying and the inevitable end-game that will result is like watching an automobile crash in slow-motion.
My SO is from the Philippines and always had separate servants for cooking, clothes cleaning, house cleaning, car driving (chauffeur), and if needed, child care. She had all of the above (except the last) while having a monthly income of $1000 which was a princely sum a decade ago. Simultaneously she was supporting living expenses of a dozen immediate relatives and putting several through college, while still having cash for a nice apartment and glamorous night life.
It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what US life will be like without cheap energy to drive technology and resource surpluses (post-Peak Oil), combined with competition with a flat world economy resulting in new labor surpluses (post-Technology-Outsourcing). If we had half brain among the lot in the White House, we'd be working to maintain the existing balance through innovation in energy, if for no other reason, we know how to do that, but we don't know how to live in a labor surplus and do it well - other nations have already honed that skill and have far larger labor surpluses than we can ever create.
Advertiser have no more right to force their "product" on me any more that record companies have a right to force me to buy Britney Spears or any other talentless commodity they think I *should* buy to help their profits. Britney is, of course, an exceptionally efficient commodity given the production and marketing processes used to create her. But all the efficiency in the world doesn't matter if the buyer doesn't assess sufficient value to make the transaction hurdle.
You can claim implied contract but guess what: "free" content does not create any enforceable contract in common law legal systems. I can stand on a corner in a big city and play guitar with the case open for remuneration - if someone doesn't want to "pay up" despite benefiting from my "free content" I don't have the right or expectation to shakedown passersby for cash or reward (such as taking and reading my playbill for a paying concert or partner's product, if you want to keep the analogy going). I don't even have the right to shoo them away for repeatedly partaking in my free content!
If making content freely available proves to become economically unviable, that means one and only thing: the content you are offering simply isn't valued (by the market you serve) as highly as YOU WISH it were. In the street musician example, the musician may live in the fantasy that his music is God's Gift to Humanity, but if others don't agree he may have to get another job to make ends meet or quit playing. So be it. That's exactly how it should work.
Thus blocking ad's will only lead to the demise of businesses that not fundamentally sustainable in the first place. A business in the US only has a right to participant in the market, but never a right or guarantee to its healthy financial or organizational existence.
IT'S ONLY FREERIDERS WHO INSIST OTHERWISE! Advertiser are complaining about "freeriders" abusing them when it is they who are the freeriders if ad-blocking is somehow barred or banned. They are advocating that they should be allowed to FREERIDE . They want monopoly power to force people to buy their information commodity (advertising) at the price of viewers' scarce commodity (attention/time)!
I'm keeping my ad-blocking full-up, thank very much, and I know I'm on the ethical and legal high ground! The same can't be said for self-serving propaganda as Double-Click is pushing here.
There are tons of application areas that can compete against open-source; in most cases the same ones that can compete against closed-source successfully also - my company occupies one such niche. We could have an open-source competitor (or even a closed-source competitor) in theory but there isn't mostly because it's deep technically, has a small end-user market size requiring a high-touch sales process and it requires some expensive hardware to create a useable solution - yet we charge $20K-150K per copy for our closed-source software not counting hardware.
Of course, finding a good niche (aka product/service differentiater) is what you do for any business. The fact that he hasn't figured this out simply means that capitalist Darwinism has worked properly - he was destined to fail because of his inability to adapt to market conditions. Time get a clue - maybe he believes in faith-based business - if you pray for you product to sell it will regardless of your business acumen. What do you bet he's trying to claim he can't compete with his a web server, mail server or database server product!
> challenged, etc., only apply to flesh-based
> persons with human issues, not legal-based
> persons (corporations) with only money issues.
Except if there are to be two standards for ethics and morality dependent on being flesh-based vs. legal-based entities, then certainly there should be clear distinctions and limits on person-hood and entitlement to constitutional protections - that is, corporations should not be granted unalienable rights that are granted by the constitution and bill of rights to human beings. Yet such constitutional rights are currently granted to corporations. Thus as corporations are granted "inalienable human rights" of the US Constitution, it is reasonable to insist that corporations be required to behave morally and ethically just as human citizens are required to by the letter and spirit of the laws and entitlements of the US.
The underlying flaw, though, is that only flesh-based entities are actually capable of either being affected by or fulfilling the duties that come with constitutional rights. By this we include specific duties like serving in national defense and jury duty, but also broader duties like simply obeying the law, or not impinging on the rights of other citizens without risk of concommitant punishment.
The problem is punishment for misdeeds of commission and omission with regard to citizen duties: corporations are granted rights with no effective or enforceable duties. As a human citizen I know that if I violate the law (and either directly or indirectly the US constitution) I can lose my citizen rights (jail) and means for enjoying my citizen rights (money). Corporation structure fundamentally insulates owners and owner-proxies (i.e. boards and executives) from legal liability from all but the most obvious and egregious criminal acts. Civil violations are punished against only the lifeless corporate shell itself. Even when attempts are made to punish, the corporation faces orders of magnitude milder impact, as a fine-to-revenue ratio. The checks and balances of citizenship exist for humans but not for corporations.
In additional to having the enforcement of duties defanged, the additional problem is that hierarchal organization inherently amplifies, and often distorts, the morality and ethics of those at the top. If a corporation's executives are simply morally and ethically weak, or worse, borderline sociopaths themselves (we all know of such a leader and such an organization) then the organization easily becomes a full-blown sociopathic entity, perversely with citizen constitutional rights but with no enforceable duties as citizens.
Individuals with such traits (e.g. Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, et al.) can be and are removed from impinging their evil on society in perpetuity, yet sociopathic corporations are not condemnable nor constrainable by the state or society for their sociopathic behavior. The worst-case scenario is a corporation might be broken-up or liquidated, but ultimately the humans leading the corporation can trivially walk away and start another corporation, effectively "reincarnating the evil" of the dead sociopath - even Charles Manson only gets one lifetime chance to inflict his sociopathology and then society locks him up and throws away the key, losing all future opportunities. While the individual must balance their own mortality and free will against evil in their heart, corporations have no mortality to be concerned with and the wizard behind the curtain are legally insulated from their deeds of control - this radically changes the checks and balances on citizenship and behavior as citizens.
An immortal corporation can not be jailed or effectively killed thus isn't affected by any of the downsides of punishments for violating laws derived from the constitution or other citizens' constitutional rights. Further a co
A better explanation, seems to me, is that larger working memory allows deeper and more elaborate search trees to be constructed which either 1) grow fast enough to be overwhelming due to complexity and size, thereby creating stress, or 2) allow more possible scenarios with negative consequences to be discovered and fretted about, thereby creating stress. The larger number of negative scenarios aren't accurately counted or assigned cumulative probabilties (even smart people suck at that) so the odds *seem* worse even if they aren't, but smart people can imagine more of them that less smart people.
Sometimes people who don't know things can't done or don't realize how dangerous/risky a project is are willing to push the project through to sucess. They may not have a large enough working memory to analyze, relying on the blessing of relative ignorance and simple gut feel to guide them.
For those who haven't been on a jury, this case illustrates how easily people can get tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence. This particular case is more the exception than the rule unfortunately: exonerating evidence in the form of a confession got him off the hook. Plenty more people get sent to jail for long hauls on far less evidence here in the US. Then consider the death penalty cases...
As we all know, Open Source Software development is structurally similar to the scientific method and evolution in terms of how "new things" are created by the these systems. Similarly, what Microsoft is claiming is that software can't be created well "at random" through emergent means (we know that's a crock) but needs "the Hand of an intelligent Creator" to control everything (Microsoft == God, apparently). Ergo: Microsoft is claiming that only "Creationist Software" is good software - "Evolutionary Software" is evil software.
I think this could be useful angle of attack against Microsoft FUD: they are advocating creationism and faith-based solutions to computer science.
On the first issue, I switched to using Firefox full time about a month ago (previously using Mozilla 1.x , having abandoned even touching IE for many years). As browser UIs go, Firefox is quite excellent. There are numerous little things that are delightful and easy to use. Only of few of which include:
1. SSL URLs are highlighted in yellow - much better than the "traditional" lock icon you can never find or notice
2. Just discovered the "find text" feature - joy! the highlight button is excellent. Well implemented IMO
3. Compared to IE, it goes without saying that tabbed browsing is far quicker if you power-surf a lot - just an issue with learning it up front
Overall, based on ~30 years experience with software, I'd put Firefox up on a pedestal as an example of what to emulate when doing UI compared to most OSS or even commercial software. Yes, BTW I use Mac OS X when I want the computer to "get out of my way so I can get something useful done".
On the second issue, this paper seems like the result a university lower division computer science class assignment, or he just heard a lecture on these UI concepts for the first time and decided he was an expert now.
UI design is very much a "right brain" activity (yes, I know there isn't technically such a division - stop being so left-brained!). There is as much art as science to any type of design. Being good at it is difficult if you are either "left-brained" or are forced by professional/economic circumstances to be primarily "left-brained". Like most things, you can't do "right-brained" things well without lots of practice (or "left-brained" things either). There's also usually a switching cost/delay going from one to the other unless you are well-toned in both.
In general, design is a fuzzy business. Even when you design concrete engineering things like analog circuits or software. The best engineering designers always identify themselves as/with artists as much as they identify as/with engineers. Design is always about solving an underspecified problem, so there are always extra degrees of freedom that require making unschooled guesses, engineering judgements and/or aesthetic judgements to get things done. The word "sufficiently" shows up a lot for a reason.
If you don't have a nature affinity to being an artist or thinking of yourself as an artist, you probably won't be a good UI designer. That's perfectly OK as absolutely no one is good at everything - only don't expect much when you do UI implementations without someone who is good at it.
Dell's primary innovations are in supply chain management and accounting innovation, definitely NOT product innovation.
Pop quiz 1: what single activity or process in Dell accounts for biggest portion of its net profit? Answer: the following accounting trick - take most of your accounts receivable "net 0 days" as mostly credit card orders, and all your accounts payable to suppliers as "net 60 days"; invest your receivables for 60 days in high yield financial instruments before you transfer the cash to payables. Pocket the profits. Dell makes more from this than from hardware profits! Check their financials.
Pop quiz 2: what is the single activity or process in Dell accounts for the second biggest portion of its net profit? Answer: force all your suppliers to hold your inventory so you pay no taxes or holding costs on inventory; combine this with shipment straight from supplier warehouse to end customer to save time and cost. That monitor you bought came straight from Sony or Hitachi, never touching a Dell loading dock or warehouse. Dell simply arranges to have those suppliers handle putting the monitors into Dell-labeled boxes. Box inventory also on supplier's dime.
HP's executive team said at the split in 1999 that HP's future was going to be in supply chain management not R&D (the exact words were something to the effect of "Microsoft will do our software R&D and Intel will do our hardware R&D". Sorry HP, Dell's going to eat your lunch on supply chain. And to boot, now you don't have the financials and corporate structure to do R&D anyway! :-p
Where will the next generation of middle managers come from? The ranks of outsourcing engineerings in China & India. Where will the next generation after that of executives come from? The ranks of successive middle managers overseas. Where will the following generation of entrepeneurs come from? The ranks of all three overseas. Business people make a big deal about "supply chains" but apparently don't see when their own children's "job supply chain" is being destroyed by their own actions.
Strictly speaking HP was far more "money grubbing" during previous periods than they are now - now they simply are in a race to the bottom and to the end-of-life for the HP brand and corporation.
During the previous era, HP lived on mind-bogglingly large margins (as most techology companies do) which in turn funded a healthy R&D: HP essentially invented whole classes of products (R&d) or was the first to make whole classes of product finanical viable (r&D). HP "lived" on the upper leading edge of the Technology Adoption Curve usually entering markets at the inflection after the "Chasm" or 'C' and exiting markets on the trailing edge. Take the integral of the area under the curve and you get the product technology market capitalization and HP's previous strategy was to take most of it!
The "New HP" is now consciously dedicated itself to entering markets on the trailing edge of this curve and exiting on the trailing edge. Basically they are taking table scraps left by others, letting others control their destiny and limiting their own growth potential. Pretty much a recipe for death. HP is already a walking dead company and the current executive team have slandered and debased Bill's & Dave's legacy and triumph! We just waiting for the HP brand to be bled away.
In this case, the researchers are using a different mechanism to create photons (and more specifically population inversion and stimulated emission required for a laser) using something similar to what happens with erbium-doped fiber amplifiers.
For those unfamiliar, it's "well established" that new technologies typically exhibit a 20 year lag between invention and economically relevent application, with the classic example being the Internet (1969->1990). Others examples include Radio, Television, Trains, Steam Engines, etc. etc. The timing varies but no significant technology ever had less than 10 years lag while most have been pretty right on 20+-5 years. My personal belief on why this occurs is that you have to promote/turn-over an entire generation of engineers to overcome the status quo, finish development and create a new crop of techies without a NIH or "that's not how its done" mindset. Too bad the USA won't have a new crop of required techies in the next generation...
Some 20 years ago I was deeply involved in creating custom designed and manufactured microprocessors (MIL-STD-1750A instruction set). There were off-the-shelf varieties but none that could perform in the space environments the target system required (specifically a phase of SDI). The key factor was there was nothing available that was ultra radiation hard and met power and weight specs. So we had a 3 contractor "bake-off" to create the fab process and the processor. When we got 1st silicon from each, we had to allocate the wafers from each IC vendor to the two contractors for the systems contract - the entire project only required a dozen or so 6" wafers worth of processors. My boss decided I should take the responsibility for swapping wafers from the supplier cassettes to each system vendor cassettes. He of course cutely reminded me: "Don't drop one - those cost the government $20M each". Gee, thanks, I've worked on the project long enough to know that. He was sort of an ass that way.
At least in this case they didn't need to create the fab process itself also! For space-based stuff that isn't always the case. Hopefully they used an on-shore foundry though - not many left!
Anyhow, they wouldn't let me in the building even though I had spent a day a week in the building for the last 6 months and knew the security lady on sight and by first name. Her excuse was that she was "just following orders". The guy I was with for the install deadpanned that that was the same excuse used a Nuremberg but the reference was lost on her. Effectively I really had ceased to exist even though they had just dropped $200K on us the week before.
And people wonder why I'm shopping for real estate outside the USA!
The problem is service/rental is that you become beholden to the service, thus you incur a hidden cost due to risk because you could run the risk of losing access to your own data or processes if you can't make the monthly payments. In the non-rental mode, s/w to control your data and processes become sunk cost at worst with ready substitution of the status quo in lieu of new purchases (expenses). There is no compensation for this added cost for the user in the rental model, while the producer is gaining a cashflow series that was originally a single transction - software rental == higher NPV for the seller and lower NPV for the buyer, making it a simple and audacious market power grab.
Rightly, buyers will expect some compensation (I've yet to hear a single argument s/w rentals that really holds water) to justify switching. Otherwise you can expect the creation of non-rental substitutes (Open Source?) or the creation of black markets.
JG
The ethanol number is corn/maize ethanol - other non-energy intensively farmed plants certainly could do better.
Rapeseed sounds interesting. It's weedy too so it might not take too much energy-intervention.
Hmm. Algae has the issue of either which natural water resources (lakes, estuaries, oceans) you use for it (and how to get to it for harvest/maintenance) or what type of man-controlled systems (usually energy intensive in the 1st world) you use for the algae.
And then since hydrogens's only a carrier (like a rechargeable battery - there is no such thing as a "hydrogen well") you still need a real energy source to "charge" it. Sunflower oil might be a potential source...until you do a back-of-the-envelope on how many arable acres you would have to grow it on and what percentage (most) of the US's arable acres are only so due to energy-intensive and oil-intensive farming providing water, fertilizer, pesticides, etc. and how much of the "naturally arable" land has been paved over for suburbs and cities (e.g. the entire Santa Clara valley aka Silicon Valley).
Even this sunflower one makes me wonder: what are the fertilizer and farm equipment inputs? where does the energy for the steam come from? So what's the net energy return? I'd put money on it being no better than ethanol!
An interesting post I saw else where: for good energy return on low density sources like biomass you want to have minimal energy inputs from petro or other sources. As an energy cash crop you want to have something that grows pretty much like a weed. Guess what produces good quality oil and grows like a weed? :-) Well, "weed" of course, or actually hemp. Wouldn't it be funny if we need to rely on hemp for the "Peak Oil" time.
Same will go for this format. I also have Mac, PC and Linux so give me a tent for all!
I had a Romanian girlfriend in college. She had tons of idiomatic proverbs and phrases like that. There was one about "cabbages and dinner tables" she told me when we first met. It was fascinating and part of what I liked about her.
This interesting article makes me wonder: how does English (or any other major language) create limitations of our current abilities to think abstractly? How would the language have to be different to remove those limitations? For example, are there language differences that could give people a better ability to understand Quantum Mechanics or Ill-formed sociological problems like war, etc.
Doesn't surprise me. - the US military/intelligence specifically, and USians more generally, always project their own (American) psyche far too much onto its enemy's psyche when it does gaming an enemy. It's OK to extrapolate an enemies behavior, but you have to be careful to question all your preconceived axioms and assumptions when you try to run their thinking system - most people are perfectly logical within their own axioms and assumptions; they only seem illogical or irrational because those differences result in different logical conclusions. Further using the wrong assumptions will take your predictions for your enemy far off course from the reality of your enemy. Why did the CIA get the end of the Cold War so wrong?
90% of US military technology innovation during the Cold War (1948-1988) was well described and telegraphed by congressional testimony and news reports of what we claimed the Russians could do to us, which was being used to justify further appropriations. Almost without exception: 1) the Russian did not yet have the technology either on the drawing boards or in development at the time we claimed their having it was a threat, 2) we were mostly reacting to paranoia about the threat because we had just secretly proven feasibility and/or weaponized the technology ourselves, and 3) Ike's MIC needs a reason to exist created a group-think that didn't much reason to question #2 or realize #1 was happening. Start with the "Bomber Gap" and continue to the end. Note: the self-delusion element of this would not have been helped by adopting security-through-obscurity.
As a side note, I have a copy of one of the books ObL/AQ was looking for: "Chemical Weapons published in 1921". They got the title wrong - I won't correct them though. Interestingly it was published by the US Army! I bought it at a university library book clearance for a few dollars. The one key learning from the book is that chemical weapons are scary, nasty and all, but above all are economically and militarily ineffective and inefficient - it was cheaper per death or per casualty to invest in 1918-style conventional explosives than 1918-style chemical weapons by a factor to 10x-100x. Generally the former has improved faster since then than the latter (even including nerve agents).
That doesn't count the "terror" value, but like the article quotes ObL, since 9-11 the US has pretty much done exactly what ObL planned for and wanted. Terror has been effectively self-created and self-perpetuated by the US itself - largely by applying Well-Formed Problem Solving methodologies to an Ill-Formed Problem.
JG
One thing to notice: what drugs affect the same dopamine receptor? Amphetamine, Methamephetamine, Ritalin, Cocaine, etc. What are the effects of these drugs? Initially anyway, they all improve concentration, focus and the ability to work, just like these monkeys seem to experience. Are there side effects? Gee, duh. This research won't result in a capitalist nirvana any more than handing out Meth to employees would.