This story throws a very interesting light on the usual perception of corporations from the perspective of libertarians and particularly Randites. It's said, over and over, that corporations cannot use force because only governments can use force because force comes from the barrel of a gun and it's governments which have the guns... right? (we'll leave Pinkertons out of this one for now...)
Yet what do we have here but corporations, an artificial entity that lives by specific rules, presenting entire _continents_ with this dilemma: pay up, more money than you could _ever_ possibly pay- or die. Die, Africa- Die, India- no hard feelings, it's just a business matter, now DIE! because your continent cannot pay sixty, six hundred, times the cost of producing the medicines that might save it!
Honestly, it is hard to see any way to justify this point of view. In a human, this personality would be seen as sociopathic, dangerous. I would question what _right_ does a corporation have to slay a _continent_ for non-payment of very arbitrary fees? To my mind there is a big difference between this and, say, Viagra. They are welcome (encouraged) to set whatever price they like for the latter, but with the survival of the human race at stake, the species that corporations are _made_ of, it is quite inappropriate to apply the same rules. It's a case of 'tough luck, Merck- we'll call the wonder drug Merck's Golden Savior if you like and you better make what you can from that name recognition, because we are _going_ to rescue as many people as we can from their medical problem, and you're gonna make it at cost, as will everybody else.' That would be social justice.
Failing that, I can only see a prospect of war- like WWII, except that this time, us Americans, WE are the Nazis. WE are the ones sentencing entire continents to death... except that in a very real sense, we have no more power over our legal fictions, our corporations (multinationals all) than does a Brazilian. We cannot stop them by working within the system anymore. When a corporate scientist discovers a permanent cure for AIDS, that cure will be _thrown_ _away_ and covered up so effectively that nobody will ever know, because death is more profitable and cures, you only sell one of... and the decision will be made by various well-insulated corporate drones trained to think only of the corporate bottom line (or be fired for violation of fiduciary duty) who cannot be held personally responsible for their decisions- or so we currently believe.
I daresay it will be a very nasty war, because with all other options lost, the people sentenced to this death may as well turn to terrorist acts- not against the US, but against the corporations which are mobilising governmental military and trade forces as weapons. And given that it will _be_ a war, peacetime law may no longer be adequate. What possible punishment would match up to the sentencing of entire continents to death?
I know this much- I've served on a jury in the USA. Knowing what I know, if I was on a jury passing judgement on a terrorist who had premeditatedly killed a corporate executive who, beyond a reasonable doubt, had made the decision to deny AIDS drugs to a dying _continent_, entire _countries_... I would die myself before I brought a guilty verdict against the terrorist. I would call it self-defense.
So would most of the world... we might begin thinking of them as 'the Allies', and our corporate entities as 'the Axis', to get some idea of how all this really looks to the outside world- whether that is in countries with HALF the population carrying AIDS, or the countries which aren't there yet. And we might begin thinking of our young wealthy libertarian corporate supporters as 'Quislings', while we're at it, for more of a perspective. And there isn't the figurehead there was in WWII, because history doesn't repeat _identically_... you can't show a picture of a corporation, the only thing that will be reviled by history are simple names. Merck. Monsanto. Possibly Microsoft- though it would have to pull off some monumental feats of global information control to rank anywhere near the agriculture and medicine entities currently putting the screws to the rest of the world.
It looks very much like corporations are like a social cancer- legal fictions constructed specifically to bear no responsibility and produce uncontrolled growth with no bearing on the health of the organism. The full impact of this situation only becomes obvious when you look at these pharmaceutical corporations placing their profits ahead of, literally, _humanity_... sticking to the bottom line and rule #1 (get yours) even when faced with emergencies on the scale of _continents_. We lock up humans who react in that manner, but _all_ corporations are programmed to act that way by the laws that create them. It's not good enough. One way or another, the plug's gotta be pulled, and new programming written.
Nah- here's how it works. The rice is sold at a loss, like game consoles. Then the company bleeds the farmer dry on fertilizer, pesticides etc. without which the new crop won't grow. The old crop grew fine, just not at USA agribusiness efficiencies, but the new crop needs a USA-type support structure to grow, which is not cheap.
It's hardly hypothetical. Loads of farmers in places like India have gone from being subsistence-level (not 'hungry', just 'poor') to being bankrupt with a pile of fancy seed and unable to make the payments on the infrastructure. At first they tended to commit suicide but apparently selling off kidneys has become a more popular option, at least to start with- death is probably still the end result.
It's not the food, not at all- it's the freaking process! You can't convert subsistence farmers to USA-style agribusiness. They can't afford crop dusters...
Masses _already_ feed themselves. That is why they are masses. The thing to be careful of is that you don't introduce new more efficient forms of, say, rice- that require a well to be drilled, that require fertilizer and herbicides and the whole agribusiness infrastructure of the _American_ industrial farming system.
And these GE variations on rice DO require these things.
Just because masses in the third world subsist feeding themselves on indigenous crops does not mean they can afford to buy five pounds of Monsanto herbicide and drill a well to water the hungrier crops. The evidence is, you tell the farmers very persuasively that they will have 100X the rice, they buy into it, are given the rice to start off with, can't afford to maintain an industrial farm, go several lakhs in debt and die.
The idea that this is a good or benevolent thing is, to say the least, curious.
Put it this way: I daresay a lot of intelligent, educated, professional slashdotters are continually on their guard, aware of the various instances in which vast companies try to outwit them and put them in a dependent position- whether that's with software APIs, license agreements, terms of service for services, whatever. Most slashdotters are probably aware that it is necessary to be at least mildly vigilant, or you get hosed and other slashdotters laugh at you and call you a sucker.
What justification is there for requiring poor subsistence farmers in India and other countries to be comparably well educated, wary, and informed on agricultural technology? What justification is there for expecting _them_ to 'know better'?
And again, masses feed themselves. That is _why_ they are masses. Places like Somalia become hells of starvation for _political_ reasons, such as freemarket gangs with guns seizing all the food. These are not agricultural problems...
Re:But... Monsanto gave away the rice genome
on
Rice Genome Mapped
·
· Score: 3
Seems this wonderful technology is causing farmers to go bankrupt, commit suicide, sell off their kidneys to survive, not to mention the idea is to make a Wonderful Perfect Monoculture. Can we say 'incredibly, criminally stupid'? I would love to think that people can learn to associate focus-group tested spiffy names like 'golden rice' with the reality that this is a straight-out power grab that will _wreck_ large portions of the world, sabotage their economies and make them slaves to Monsanto, the 'benevolent provider' of the wonderful 'golden rice'. Read the article, "assistance" means video trucks sent into villages to convince farmers to switch over wholesale to the new crop- first one's free kid! and this spells the death of the farmer. Read the article!
I'm sorry, in many ways I think this is more genuinely evil than anything that (for instance) Microsoft has done. MS tries to leech off rich yuppies and control what you think and how you communicate. Monsanto is _killing_ poor farmers by conning and lying to them.
Now moderate me down, because I chose not to 'moderate' my opinion this time and say 'but gee, I'm sure they're all good people'. There's a limit.
Which is a pretty funny claim anyhow- seen the POVbench scores for the PS2? (I was impressed they could even _compile_ POV to run on the 'emotion engine'). You have to continually remember that Microsoft may be and probably is lying outright to you. It's like continually remembering that spammers lie as you continue to be slammed by their claims day after day after day. Just because MS has claimed for the Nth time that 'XBox will be more powerful than anything in the world!' doesn't mean it's not a midrange PC with nice NVidia graphics acceleration and midrange CPU and HD.
How can you say this? Every industry is different. Is it me or are IP rights the MOST likely area for collective bargaining to force some improvements in conditions? Do you really, really think the primary concerns of tech IT workers are pizzas and getting to sit around and not code and still get paid? I really don't think the collective concerns of _IT_ _workers_ would add up to that. IP rights are consistently part of IT worker concerns, along with privacy and the ability to pick a technically superior solution rather than *coughMSFTahem* the PHB-oriented concern that is a nightmare but for political reasons you have to use it...
If you're part of a union and it's NOT backing you on issues as important to a tech as IP is, then YOU ARE USING IT WRONG. What, you figure the idea is to import some grizzled old Teamsters or UAW guys who will make everybody be little slaves to two bosses instead of just one? You've got some funny ideas about who is running the hypothetical tech union show. YOU ARE. Unless you're going to make it work like you describe, in which case who needs you?
Also note there's a parallel- Japan's 'economic miracle', which was very much driven off the same sort of energy. Unfortunately Japan's economic miracle fizzled and they ended up having to suck down serious economic 'readjustment' and settle for having an economy like a normal country- we're next.
It's possible that unions serve as a vital part of the economy, in the manner of a governor, holding back periods of economic overexcitement and limiting the inevitable corrections after the excitement runs out of steam. Naturally you don't want the union holding _all_ power, that'd be like shutting off the engine entirely and there are plenty of cases of unions that ended up this powerful and totally out of balance. But throwing away the 'governor' is a good recipe for revving until you blow up your engine, and that's no better.
And there is _always_ someone who will do your job for half the price.
No, let me rephrase that:
There is always someone who will convince your PHB that he can do your job for half the price.
All you merry little libertarians- you're awfully confident in how smart your _boss_ is *g* it's one thing if _you_ are genuinely so smart and brilliant and productive that you can outwork any six cheap MCSEs, but how much confidence do you really have that you won't be replaced by someone who sucks because your boss is having a bad brain day?
Sorry: you're replaceable. (Maybe that will lead to the death of the company and you know it: one word- 'oops') The more you fight and sweat and bleed to do six times the work at half the price, the more people will be out there bullshitting that they can do what you do at a _quarter_ the price. This is not logical, it's a load of rubbish. Now convince the pointy-haired one of that...
Sounds like you're hosed, and FAI is hosed. That's your problem- better develop what you need yourself, or get it from BSD-licensed stuff. You obviously can't use GPLed code. I've written some GPLed code (not that you'd find it useful, you wouldn't) and I wouldn't want you using it under those conditions. If I wanted people to just _use_ what I did, I'd have made it public domain...
"Feudalism", and yeah, absolutely. Return to? What would you call the technology industry at this point, but raw feudalism? We're already there. Dark Ages. Wonder how long we'll be stuck there.
Note that the record companies have, in fact, tried and so far failed to change the format of CD audio to an copy protected format that you would _not_ have access to create. BMG quietly tried to begin doing this, in Germany, using 'Cactus Data Shield' on the bands "Philip Boa & the Voodoo Club" and "Him". The discs refused to play on many normal audio CD players, and BMG quickly reissued the CDs without Cactus. They have vowed to try again.
So, even though CD audio is not great, I would personally suggest clinging to it with the tenacity of the damned, because Red Book audio _is_ in fact a mass media format we have legal access to and permission to produce. It looks like any replacement is likely to have massive barriers to entry preventing us from authoring on that media. Note John Gilmore's pointing out that no, you can't 'write your own DVDs' with even Apple's DVD-R... you're not allowed to author that format...
I'm building hardware so I can tell you what the problem is here.
I'm building pro audio hardware and trying to place orders for the parts I need. They are about as unlike what you'll find in a hardware store as the parts in a DVD-R drive would be. Output transformers, order of 100, check. 5-bit grey code rotary encoders, phew- lucked out! Found a source, order of 100, check. Re'an uber phone jacks, thought they were discontinued, thankfully not- order of 10, check. Triple-ganged audio taper pots... WHOOAAAAA OUTTA THE POOL! No soup for YOU! 1000 piece minimum order on that puppy!
Do we see the problem? There isn't a mass market for these things. The future may lead to increased and more fine-grained availability on these things (20 years ago I daresay it'd be 10,000 piece minimum order before they'd even talk to you) but that would require some changes from the industrial manufacturers- and I don't believe that is going to happen. For one- why would Sony want its supplier to be selling the individual parts of DVD-Rs to hobbyists? Again it's the power relationships.
There is a place for open hardware- I contribute to it when I can- but the existence of it does not imply an industrial infrastructure. On the contrary, there's the very real risk that if, for instance, some startup began making a one-chip, solder-it-yourself DVD-R, the electronics companies would see to it that you couldn't get the lasers, the servos, the parts to make it actually work.
Doing open hardware and getting a genuine market for the parts are separate problems. They require separate solutions. The first, requires committment, dedication and talent, and a recognition of the merits (it places hardware in the same context as the traditional Scientific Method, permitting rapid progress). The second requires trustbusting. Period.
Depends on how you look at it. If you made one to encode into mp3, and figured out some way to hold an audio file up to it and let each processor do a block, you'd decide to encode the mp3 and bip! it'd be done already:)
I could see similar uses in things like scanning, where you're dealing with a lot of parallel data anyhow. You could print some sort of processor that gets rolled up and stuck to the scanner's sensor bar, that interpolates and sharpens and does all sorts of nice image enhancements very cheaply- and have the scan go much faster than current models do. Output bandwidth would be the bottleneck- unless the rolled-up processor also encoded the result into JPEG for you:)
Absolutely. 300 dot _line_ _screen_ is high for mass printing: maybe that's what Shotgun's thinking. Besides, I bet a lot of the action's going to be in large format- doing stuff with wall-sized screens, or medium-res displays that are 2' tall and 6' wide and curve all around the back of your desk. With surface area like that who needs super high resolution? Big screens are cool:)
Why do you need 1 CPU clocked at 1 GHz... if you can have 1000 CPUs clocked at 1 megahertz?
Think about it. Ever heard of the 'connection machine'? Web printing of CPUs at unprecedentedly low costs is a situation that _begs_ for massively parallel computing.
Suppose you could print up a big screen and behind every pixel is a 1 megahertz computer? Let's see- let's imagine the screen is three feet high and... well, any length, right? Make it as wide as your room. Call it 30 dpi and assume you're viewing it from a fair distance. That's 1080x4320 pixels (or so) for 3x12 feet. If each pixel's running a computer at about 1 megahertz that's more than four thousand gigahertz of CPU;) _and_ you can paper your wall with it.
Yes, getting _information_ to those clever pixels would be the trick, but it's not an insuperable problem. The CPUs can be pretty smart at one megahertz. Give them a few K of ram too, think of them as like a peculiar sort of 'accelerator card' only massively parallel. It's absolutely trivial to do hacks like Asimov's 'Prime Radiant': you'd just have each 'pixel' an alphanumeric generator able to consult an overall RAM location, a pointer to where in RAM to look, and with a brightness control connected to some gaze direction sensor. Presto, wall full of text that scrolls and becomes clearer and follows your gaze- and that is one of the _easiest_ things to do with this stuff.
Better to ask whether you could have a suitcase-sized block with several terabytes of _really_ _slow_ RAM (read: way faster than a HD, and impact proof!), for the cost of a floppy drive- after all, it's only a matter of printing more pages, right? Just keep piling up the 'slow RAM' pages. The same thing could be done as read-only: if you're OK with text, you could have a 'book' (i.e. an object with a screen on it) that is ANY book you like, with terabytes of data in it, printed so cheaply as to be virtually disposable. Look around at your books and ask yourself how much it'd cost you to have a _scribe_ write those out for you;)
Ask whether the massively parallel 'screen' concept could be used for video game systems (imagine unrolling a wall-sized Quake, or flight sim- even if the quality is not ultra refined, some aspects of it would be as advanced over the current state of the art as the current state of the art is over software rendering- for instance, perhaps you'd have only solid colored triangles BUT the system would build them itself, being fed only very high level object information- and you'd get 100X or 100,000X the model geometric detail you can have today, because each pixel only 'sees' a couple triangles directly behind it and decides only what color it's going to be. So you wouldn't get 3Dfx motion blur but you'd get every leaf on every tree in the forest, as each pixel handles its own (emergent) geometry. Even if you only had Atari 2600 level pixel sophistication- think of the resolution! You could have new games designed to take advantage of that- like, I dunno, a Pac-Man that has just the one maze but it's the size of the wall:)
Or, each pixel knows how to do MPEG transforms- so you unroll a videophone or movie screen the size of your wall. Power's an issue, but if you can get wide enough traces... like a foot wide... a lot of power dissipation issues become less of a problem:) really, the idea has loads of possibilities that don't require heavy centralised processing.
It makes sense that they should take that side on spam. I just don't think they have a _case_ there. They can back the 'spam == speech' side all they like and still be wrong, and still lose. Just because they are sometimes right doesn't require them to _always_ be right. It's good to see them getting involved in situations where they _DO_ have a case, because they're a terrific opponent for ICANN. In that area, their concerns are exactly addressing the problem, and there's no gaping hole in their argument.
The management _needs_ to be competent. This doesn't mean they need to be _nice_, just competent. They could go through personnel with an axe and still be in the right if they are saddled with a lot of genuinely useless people. They could also be way in the wrong if they do this more or less at random, or get in the way a lot.
That said, their loyalty to their employees is quite another question. That is more to do with _how_ they handle things. So the resulting combinations could be:
competent and loyal: can tell good work from bad, will expend _great_ effort to deal with employees who are having problems and for that reason can work with some of the more difficult personalities who might be capable of great things but are also tough to manage
incompetent and loyal: expect a lot of guilt, but don't expect the company to actually make money. This is a 'go out of business holding hands' situation. How important is that loyalty to you? Does the person have contacts or is there some other reason you'd want to go down with the ship but not breaking faith with that key person? It may also be possible to use this loyalty to you by trying to offer reality checks- they might be taken, at least temporarily. This isn't the most common situation.
competent and disloyal: think corporation. You are a cog in a machine. When you wear out you're discarded. You may be able to get paid well as long as you're around- though there's going to be a limit, don't expect 'reward', expect to be chiseled for every penny and possibly have to fight to be paid, because this type of person is not on your side. They are your enemy but you gotta deal with them. If you can't tolerate continual treachery you might want to bail EVEN THOUGH the company is likely to be reasonably successful: you'll get ulcers because your worst fears are true and you know it. How much are you getting to tolerate this? Also, only certain types of work thrive under this sort of management. Creative work or inventive work gets distorted: think 'microsoft bob' as what happens to it. You can't really do great creative work if you are constantly watching your back: the paranoia will severely limit what you're willing to attempt, because failure is a sign of weakness and signs of weakness will get you 'culled'.
incompetent and disloyal: blech. Leave, already: this organisation is doomed. You have to have at least one or the other. If you have both incompetent _and_ disloyal there's a good chance 'criminal' is mixed up in there too, and you could be overlooking embezzling or pricefixing or a whole host of other behaviors that really are no indication of a successful company- they can be like the coat of paint slapped onto the undercarriage of a car to hide the rust. If you stick around with a place that is managed by 'incompetent and disloyal' expect to be surprised by the sudden catastrophic failure of the business, because you're probably not seeing the whole picture- everything is 'spun' to make it look right.
I've worked for pretty much all of the above. In some cases I've seen combinations- I worked at a pizza joint when I was younger that contained the extremes- main management was competent and loyal, but at times they had assistant managers who were worse, including one who was incompetent _and_ disloyal (and as a result continually paranoid). I've worked with semicompetent and loyal, and semicompetent and disloyal. The former was when a business was taking on too much- I walked and remained on good terms with the people- the latter was when I bailed out a business by putting a lot of work in, and they ended up replicating the same situation that'd got them in trouble before, setting up one person to entirely depend on and cutting loose all the loyal people who had bailed them out. In that case I walked and keep an element of reserve- waiting for if I need to bail them out again, only my prices have gone up:)
The spectrum across those two variables should tell you everything you need to know:)
Doh! Teach _me_ to make assumptions. Clearly anything about Abrash being a 'symbol of Id-like coolishness' was nonsense, and I was quite wrong there.
Everything else I stand by. Abrash _is_ sunk in a deeply adversarial corporate culture that will get in the way of his work. Microsoft _doesn't_ know what they're doing with XBox and _won't_ resist the temptation to try to drive revenue with upgrades. It is not a technical issue. It is a marketing issue. And Abrash is far from the only absolutely brilliant developer marking time at Microsoft without accomplishing much. If he is getting stuff actually done that's more than most of their trophy coders, and speaks volumes about Abrash's savvy and capacity to work within the system. I applaud that, it is the mark of a well-rounded and rather tough personality- though yeesh, some employer he picked.
I'm sure _my_ opinion of Abrash's employer doesn't concern him one iota. Maybe he is enough of a pragmatist to happily concede that much of what I say is true, like the.NET chief architects and developers who recently bailed out of MS to try and compete against it as a startup, and were MS-lawyered into submission. _Those_ guys did not have an exaggerated opinion of the ability to get things done within Microsoft- why should you or I consider Abrash to be stupider than them? Maybe Abrash just is a 'big company type' and happy at MS regardless.
And it's very possible that he won't get to do that optimisation. Do a little research: XBox is an _idea_ that has been very successfully sold. The reality will be more of a letdown than PS2. Microsoft is an extremely inefficient, adversarial corporate culture and some of Abrash's assumptions ("XBox will not change. Ever") are doomed because in the constant infighting someone's going to change the rules. His attitude would be great at a startup- or working with OSS hackers. He's not doing that, and if he cannot form political alliances and scheme he's going to accomplish squat at Microsoft.
I think it's safe to say that it _is_ sad that a guy who clearly enjoys the pure act of programming will be forced to either spend most of his time politicking or be steamrollered: it's like subjecting an artist to Dilbert hell. To MS, the guy is more of a symbol than a functional team member: Microsoft is 'team' backwards with the guts ripped out (and replaced with 'fosorci'). There are much better things Abrash could be doing. He is wasted in that place.
Do the noncompetes specifically outline.NET? If they aren't really specific (like 'thou shalt not exactly duplicate what WE have you working on' and _specifics_ on what that is _and_ a shortish time limit) then it becomes Microsoft's problem to keep these people, not the contract's.
I think the underlying question is, why did the chief architects and half the developers for.NET feel they had a better chance with a rickety little startup competing directly with Microsoft- than staying with Microsoft? In a way this is one hell of a warning siren, and not about noncompetes. MS is _that_ bad off that the insiders are beginning to flee in organised groups to _compete_ with Redmond? Isn't that against the conventional wisdom? What do they know that emboldens them this way?
Slashdot Mirror
Yet what do we have here but corporations, an artificial entity that lives by specific rules, presenting entire _continents_ with this dilemma: pay up, more money than you could _ever_ possibly pay- or die. Die, Africa- Die, India- no hard feelings, it's just a business matter, now DIE! because your continent cannot pay sixty, six hundred, times the cost of producing the medicines that might save it!
Honestly, it is hard to see any way to justify this point of view. In a human, this personality would be seen as sociopathic, dangerous. I would question what _right_ does a corporation have to slay a _continent_ for non-payment of very arbitrary fees? To my mind there is a big difference between this and, say, Viagra. They are welcome (encouraged) to set whatever price they like for the latter, but with the survival of the human race at stake, the species that corporations are _made_ of, it is quite inappropriate to apply the same rules. It's a case of 'tough luck, Merck- we'll call the wonder drug Merck's Golden Savior if you like and you better make what you can from that name recognition, because we are _going_ to rescue as many people as we can from their medical problem, and you're gonna make it at cost, as will everybody else.' That would be social justice.
Failing that, I can only see a prospect of war- like WWII, except that this time, us Americans, WE are the Nazis. WE are the ones sentencing entire continents to death... except that in a very real sense, we have no more power over our legal fictions, our corporations (multinationals all) than does a Brazilian. We cannot stop them by working within the system anymore. When a corporate scientist discovers a permanent cure for AIDS, that cure will be _thrown_ _away_ and covered up so effectively that nobody will ever know, because death is more profitable and cures, you only sell one of... and the decision will be made by various well-insulated corporate drones trained to think only of the corporate bottom line (or be fired for violation of fiduciary duty) who cannot be held personally responsible for their decisions- or so we currently believe.
I daresay it will be a very nasty war, because with all other options lost, the people sentenced to this death may as well turn to terrorist acts- not against the US, but against the corporations which are mobilising governmental military and trade forces as weapons. And given that it will _be_ a war, peacetime law may no longer be adequate. What possible punishment would match up to the sentencing of entire continents to death?
I know this much- I've served on a jury in the USA. Knowing what I know, if I was on a jury passing judgement on a terrorist who had premeditatedly killed a corporate executive who, beyond a reasonable doubt, had made the decision to deny AIDS drugs to a dying _continent_, entire _countries_... I would die myself before I brought a guilty verdict against the terrorist. I would call it self-defense.
So would most of the world... we might begin thinking of them as 'the Allies', and our corporate entities as 'the Axis', to get some idea of how all this really looks to the outside world- whether that is in countries with HALF the population carrying AIDS, or the countries which aren't there yet. And we might begin thinking of our young wealthy libertarian corporate supporters as 'Quislings', while we're at it, for more of a perspective. And there isn't the figurehead there was in WWII, because history doesn't repeat _identically_... you can't show a picture of a corporation, the only thing that will be reviled by history are simple names. Merck. Monsanto. Possibly Microsoft- though it would have to pull off some monumental feats of global information control to rank anywhere near the agriculture and medicine entities currently putting the screws to the rest of the world.
It looks very much like corporations are like a social cancer- legal fictions constructed specifically to bear no responsibility and produce uncontrolled growth with no bearing on the health of the organism. The full impact of this situation only becomes obvious when you look at these pharmaceutical corporations placing their profits ahead of, literally, _humanity_... sticking to the bottom line and rule #1 (get yours) even when faced with emergencies on the scale of _continents_. We lock up humans who react in that manner, but _all_ corporations are programmed to act that way by the laws that create them. It's not good enough. One way or another, the plug's gotta be pulled, and new programming written.
It's hardly hypothetical. Loads of farmers in places like India have gone from being subsistence-level (not 'hungry', just 'poor') to being bankrupt with a pile of fancy seed and unable to make the payments on the infrastructure. At first they tended to commit suicide but apparently selling off kidneys has become a more popular option, at least to start with- death is probably still the end result.
It's not the food, not at all- it's the freaking process! You can't convert subsistence farmers to USA-style agribusiness. They can't afford crop dusters...
Masses _already_ feed themselves. That is why they are masses. The thing to be careful of is that you don't introduce new more efficient forms of, say, rice- that require a well to be drilled, that require fertilizer and herbicides and the whole agribusiness infrastructure of the _American_ industrial farming system.
And these GE variations on rice DO require these things.
Just because masses in the third world subsist feeding themselves on indigenous crops does not mean they can afford to buy five pounds of Monsanto herbicide and drill a well to water the hungrier crops. The evidence is, you tell the farmers very persuasively that they will have 100X the rice, they buy into it, are given the rice to start off with, can't afford to maintain an industrial farm, go several lakhs in debt and die.
The idea that this is a good or benevolent thing is, to say the least, curious.
Put it this way: I daresay a lot of intelligent, educated, professional slashdotters are continually on their guard, aware of the various instances in which vast companies try to outwit them and put them in a dependent position- whether that's with software APIs, license agreements, terms of service for services, whatever. Most slashdotters are probably aware that it is necessary to be at least mildly vigilant, or you get hosed and other slashdotters laugh at you and call you a sucker.
What justification is there for requiring poor subsistence farmers in India and other countries to be comparably well educated, wary, and informed on agricultural technology? What justification is there for expecting _them_ to 'know better'?
And again, masses feed themselves. That is _why_ they are masses. Places like Somalia become hells of starvation for _political_ reasons, such as freemarket gangs with guns seizing all the food. These are not agricultural problems...
Seems this wonderful technology is causing farmers to go bankrupt, commit suicide, sell off their kidneys to survive, not to mention the idea is to make a Wonderful Perfect Monoculture. Can we say 'incredibly, criminally stupid'? I would love to think that people can learn to associate focus-group tested spiffy names like 'golden rice' with the reality that this is a straight-out power grab that will _wreck_ large portions of the world, sabotage their economies and make them slaves to Monsanto, the 'benevolent provider' of the wonderful 'golden rice'. Read the article, "assistance" means video trucks sent into villages to convince farmers to switch over wholesale to the new crop- first one's free kid! and this spells the death of the farmer. Read the article!
I'm sorry, in many ways I think this is more genuinely evil than anything that (for instance) Microsoft has done. MS tries to leech off rich yuppies and control what you think and how you communicate. Monsanto is _killing_ poor farmers by conning and lying to them.
Now moderate me down, because I chose not to 'moderate' my opinion this time and say 'but gee, I'm sure they're all good people'. There's a limit.
Which is a pretty funny claim anyhow- seen the POVbench scores for the PS2? (I was impressed they could even _compile_ POV to run on the 'emotion engine'). You have to continually remember that Microsoft may be and probably is lying outright to you. It's like continually remembering that spammers lie as you continue to be slammed by their claims day after day after day. Just because MS has claimed for the Nth time that 'XBox will be more powerful than anything in the world!' doesn't mean it's not a midrange PC with nice NVidia graphics acceleration and midrange CPU and HD.
If you're part of a union and it's NOT backing you on issues as important to a tech as IP is, then YOU ARE USING IT WRONG. What, you figure the idea is to import some grizzled old Teamsters or UAW guys who will make everybody be little slaves to two bosses instead of just one? You've got some funny ideas about who is running the hypothetical tech union show. YOU ARE. Unless you're going to make it work like you describe, in which case who needs you?
It's possible that unions serve as a vital part of the economy, in the manner of a governor, holding back periods of economic overexcitement and limiting the inevitable corrections after the excitement runs out of steam. Naturally you don't want the union holding _all_ power, that'd be like shutting off the engine entirely and there are plenty of cases of unions that ended up this powerful and totally out of balance. But throwing away the 'governor' is a good recipe for revving until you blow up your engine, and that's no better.
No, let me rephrase that:
There is always someone who will convince your PHB that he can do your job for half the price.
All you merry little libertarians- you're awfully confident in how smart your _boss_ is *g* it's one thing if _you_ are genuinely so smart and brilliant and productive that you can outwork any six cheap MCSEs, but how much confidence do you really have that you won't be replaced by someone who sucks because your boss is having a bad brain day?
Sorry: you're replaceable. (Maybe that will lead to the death of the company and you know it: one word- 'oops') The more you fight and sweat and bleed to do six times the work at half the price, the more people will be out there bullshitting that they can do what you do at a _quarter_ the price. This is not logical, it's a load of rubbish. Now convince the pointy-haired one of that...
Riiiiiiight....
As long as Farenheit? ;)
It's a pity there isn't someone more persuasive doing this for a publication more mainstream than /....
Sounds like you're hosed, and FAI is hosed. That's your problem- better develop what you need yourself, or get it from BSD-licensed stuff. You obviously can't use GPLed code. I've written some GPLed code (not that you'd find it useful, you wouldn't) and I wouldn't want you using it under those conditions. If I wanted people to just _use_ what I did, I'd have made it public domain...
"Feudalism", and yeah, absolutely. Return to? What would you call the technology industry at this point, but raw feudalism? We're already there. Dark Ages. Wonder how long we'll be stuck there.
So, even though CD audio is not great, I would personally suggest clinging to it with the tenacity of the damned, because Red Book audio _is_ in fact a mass media format we have legal access to and permission to produce. It looks like any replacement is likely to have massive barriers to entry preventing us from authoring on that media. Note John Gilmore's pointing out that no, you can't 'write your own DVDs' with even Apple's DVD-R... you're not allowed to author that format...
I'm building pro audio hardware and trying to place orders for the parts I need. They are about as unlike what you'll find in a hardware store as the parts in a DVD-R drive would be. Output transformers, order of 100, check. 5-bit grey code rotary encoders, phew- lucked out! Found a source, order of 100, check. Re'an uber phone jacks, thought they were discontinued, thankfully not- order of 10, check. Triple-ganged audio taper pots... WHOOAAAAA OUTTA THE POOL! No soup for YOU! 1000 piece minimum order on that puppy!
Do we see the problem? There isn't a mass market for these things. The future may lead to increased and more fine-grained availability on these things (20 years ago I daresay it'd be 10,000 piece minimum order before they'd even talk to you) but that would require some changes from the industrial manufacturers- and I don't believe that is going to happen. For one- why would Sony want its supplier to be selling the individual parts of DVD-Rs to hobbyists? Again it's the power relationships.
There is a place for open hardware- I contribute to it when I can- but the existence of it does not imply an industrial infrastructure. On the contrary, there's the very real risk that if, for instance, some startup began making a one-chip, solder-it-yourself DVD-R, the electronics companies would see to it that you couldn't get the lasers, the servos, the parts to make it actually work.
Doing open hardware and getting a genuine market for the parts are separate problems. They require separate solutions. The first, requires committment, dedication and talent, and a recognition of the merits (it places hardware in the same context as the traditional Scientific Method, permitting rapid progress). The second requires trustbusting. Period.
I could see similar uses in things like scanning, where you're dealing with a lot of parallel data anyhow. You could print some sort of processor that gets rolled up and stuck to the scanner's sensor bar, that interpolates and sharpens and does all sorts of nice image enhancements very cheaply- and have the scan go much faster than current models do. Output bandwidth would be the bottleneck- unless the rolled-up processor also encoded the result into JPEG for you :)
Absolutely. 300 dot _line_ _screen_ is high for mass printing: maybe that's what Shotgun's thinking. Besides, I bet a lot of the action's going to be in large format- doing stuff with wall-sized screens, or medium-res displays that are 2' tall and 6' wide and curve all around the back of your desk. With surface area like that who needs super high resolution? Big screens are cool :)
Why do you need 1 CPU clocked at 1 GHz... if you can have 1000 CPUs clocked at 1 megahertz?
Think about it. Ever heard of the 'connection machine'? Web printing of CPUs at unprecedentedly low costs is a situation that _begs_ for massively parallel computing.
Suppose you could print up a big screen and behind every pixel is a 1 megahertz computer? Let's see- let's imagine the screen is three feet high and... well, any length, right? Make it as wide as your room. Call it 30 dpi and assume you're viewing it from a fair distance. That's 1080x4320 pixels (or so) for 3x12 feet. If each pixel's running a computer at about 1 megahertz that's more than four thousand gigahertz of CPU ;) _and_ you can paper your wall with it.
Yes, getting _information_ to those clever pixels would be the trick, but it's not an insuperable problem. The CPUs can be pretty smart at one megahertz. Give them a few K of ram too, think of them as like a peculiar sort of 'accelerator card' only massively parallel. It's absolutely trivial to do hacks like Asimov's 'Prime Radiant': you'd just have each 'pixel' an alphanumeric generator able to consult an overall RAM location, a pointer to where in RAM to look, and with a brightness control connected to some gaze direction sensor. Presto, wall full of text that scrolls and becomes clearer and follows your gaze- and that is one of the _easiest_ things to do with this stuff.
Better to ask whether you could have a suitcase-sized block with several terabytes of _really_ _slow_ RAM (read: way faster than a HD, and impact proof!), for the cost of a floppy drive- after all, it's only a matter of printing more pages, right? Just keep piling up the 'slow RAM' pages. The same thing could be done as read-only: if you're OK with text, you could have a 'book' (i.e. an object with a screen on it) that is ANY book you like, with terabytes of data in it, printed so cheaply as to be virtually disposable. Look around at your books and ask yourself how much it'd cost you to have a _scribe_ write those out for you ;)
Ask whether the massively parallel 'screen' concept could be used for video game systems (imagine unrolling a wall-sized Quake, or flight sim- even if the quality is not ultra refined, some aspects of it would be as advanced over the current state of the art as the current state of the art is over software rendering- for instance, perhaps you'd have only solid colored triangles BUT the system would build them itself, being fed only very high level object information- and you'd get 100X or 100,000X the model geometric detail you can have today, because each pixel only 'sees' a couple triangles directly behind it and decides only what color it's going to be. So you wouldn't get 3Dfx motion blur but you'd get every leaf on every tree in the forest, as each pixel handles its own (emergent) geometry. Even if you only had Atari 2600 level pixel sophistication- think of the resolution! You could have new games designed to take advantage of that- like, I dunno, a Pac-Man that has just the one maze but it's the size of the wall :)
Or, each pixel knows how to do MPEG transforms- so you unroll a videophone or movie screen the size of your wall. Power's an issue, but if you can get wide enough traces... like a foot wide... a lot of power dissipation issues become less of a problem :) really, the idea has loads of possibilities that don't require heavy centralised processing.
This was flamebait? Maybe (-1, Obvious Already). Hardly flamebait.
It makes sense that they should take that side on spam. I just don't think they have a _case_ there. They can back the 'spam == speech' side all they like and still be wrong, and still lose. Just because they are sometimes right doesn't require them to _always_ be right. It's good to see them getting involved in situations where they _DO_ have a case, because they're a terrific opponent for ICANN. In that area, their concerns are exactly addressing the problem, and there's no gaping hole in their argument.
That said, their loyalty to their employees is quite another question. That is more to do with _how_ they handle things. So the resulting combinations could be:
I've worked for pretty much all of the above. In some cases I've seen combinations- I worked at a pizza joint when I was younger that contained the extremes- main management was competent and loyal, but at times they had assistant managers who were worse, including one who was incompetent _and_ disloyal (and as a result continually paranoid). I've worked with semicompetent and loyal, and semicompetent and disloyal. The former was when a business was taking on too much- I walked and remained on good terms with the people- the latter was when I bailed out a business by putting a lot of work in, and they ended up replicating the same situation that'd got them in trouble before, setting up one person to entirely depend on and cutting loose all the loyal people who had bailed them out. In that case I walked and keep an element of reserve- waiting for if I need to bail them out again, only my prices have gone up
The spectrum across those two variables should tell you everything you need to know :)
No, not that UUNET fell over- the fact that it got back up :(
Everything else I stand by. Abrash _is_ sunk in a deeply adversarial corporate culture that will get in the way of his work. Microsoft _doesn't_ know what they're doing with XBox and _won't_ resist the temptation to try to drive revenue with upgrades. It is not a technical issue. It is a marketing issue. And Abrash is far from the only absolutely brilliant developer marking time at Microsoft without accomplishing much. If he is getting stuff actually done that's more than most of their trophy coders, and speaks volumes about Abrash's savvy and capacity to work within the system. I applaud that, it is the mark of a well-rounded and rather tough personality- though yeesh, some employer he picked.
I'm sure _my_ opinion of Abrash's employer doesn't concern him one iota. Maybe he is enough of a pragmatist to happily concede that much of what I say is true, like the .NET chief architects and developers who recently bailed out of MS to try and compete against it as a startup, and were MS-lawyered into submission. _Those_ guys did not have an exaggerated opinion of the ability to get things done within Microsoft- why should you or I consider Abrash to be stupider than them? Maybe Abrash just is a 'big company type' and happy at MS regardless.
I think it's safe to say that it _is_ sad that a guy who clearly enjoys the pure act of programming will be forced to either spend most of his time politicking or be steamrollered: it's like subjecting an artist to Dilbert hell. To MS, the guy is more of a symbol than a functional team member: Microsoft is 'team' backwards with the guts ripped out (and replaced with 'fosorci'). There are much better things Abrash could be doing. He is wasted in that place.
I think the underlying question is, why did the chief architects and half the developers for .NET feel they had a better chance with a rickety little startup competing directly with Microsoft- than staying with Microsoft? In a way this is one hell of a warning siren, and not about noncompetes. MS is _that_ bad off that the insiders are beginning to flee in organised groups to _compete_ with Redmond? Isn't that against the conventional wisdom? What do they know that emboldens them this way?