That's right. I didn't go bust. But the company I worked for came close. I survived the layoffs and thus didn't have to go job hunting in the midst of the crash.
Which is interesting, since they cloned it from Pullman (maker of railroad cars). The color is actually named "Pullman brown".
It was chosen by Pullman (after a lot of research) because it can get dirtier than any other color before it LOOKS dirty and needs to be washed. So using that color lets you increase the intervals between washings and thus lower your costs.
UPS, like Lego, is using trademark to assert a monopoly on a technical innovation (somebody else's, to boot), long past the point where a patent would have expired.
Is it just me or am I the only one the sees the irony in having a company a court battle over trademarks on a site that "violates the companys trademarks" (according to the company not me);)
Of COURSE a news site that is willing to mark stories about a company with the company's trademarked logo, regardless of the company's wishes, and does stories about both so-called "intellectual property" disputes (especially attempts to use copyright or trademark as patent and trademark to make trouble for technical competition) and other things interesting to nerds, will run a story about developments a trademark dispte where a company making a toy nerds like is using trademark to extend their monopoly beyond the expiration of the patent on their functional features and hang the company's trademarked logo on it. Nothing ironic about it.
Suicide from situational depression (alone) is almost unheard of. It normally requires an affective disorder (a biochemical problem, typically endogenous depression, sometimes bipolar disorder) to get to that stage.
Situational depression might be a last straw. But a person with an affective disorder of suicidal levels will encounter plenty of depressing situations in their lifetime.
Further, affective disorders and creativity seem strongly connected. So an inventor having an affective disorder is hardly a surprise.
It's no excuse for illegally peredatory competition. But I wouldn't lay Hillary's death at Lego's door.
Fortunately, depression is a lot better understood than it was when "psychology" was dominated by a horde of people who believed Freud's cocaine halucinations were a valid description of the inner workings of the (undrugged) human mind. Effective (and non-debilitating) chemical treatments are now available (and usually correctly prescribed) to pull most suicidally or cripplingly depressed people out into much more normal function - or at least enough better that they don't do themselves in when things get tough at the same time they're down.
(Unfortunately, such drugs sometimes get a bad rep due to another phenomenon: Some people crapped out twice, ending up with both psychopathy and debilitating depression. Treat the depression and you get a fully functional and energetic psychopath - and often one who has never had an opportunity to learn a compensation. B-( )
I probably WOULD have played with Lego if I'd had any.
So I made do with tinkertoy and erector set.
(But I DID monopolize a small amount of a slide-together brick system in Kindergarten. Much competition for it so I'd snag enough to make a portable toy to play with while the bullies monopolized the rest of the pile.)
The need for data to feed the chip requires external signals, and at multi-Gbps speeds that means big transistors with much more heat dissipation than the little ones shoving signals around the chip. Heat dissipation in a practical package is one of the limits on chip size. So the need for these drivers is one of the limits to how many transistors can go on a chip. Replacing them with lower-heat lasers would allow you to have more of the little ones, and more total. Thus is another roadblock to following Moore's Law (the true formulation) pushed back.
There are also several other exponential formulations that get lumped with Moore's Law (even if they're not the original and official formulation). One of them is a similar doubling time for price-performance.
Only down thing lately was not cashing out a couple million before the bubble burst. I could have been retired, have more toys to play with (like another 75 acres behind the paid-for house) and time to enjoy it all more, rather than working away through the lean years for a company that didn't have enough resources to do some of the interesting projects.
Re:Anyone care to explain the significance of this
on
First Silicon Laser
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Currently, putting a practical laser on a chip means using a semiconductor other than silicon, such as gallium arsenide. But silicon has better properties for making large complex circuits - and the technology of doing so is more advanced on silicon than on other semiconductor materials.
This means that when you want to hook up a laser to a logic circuit you end up with two separate chips and interconnections between them (or maybe with a separate layer of the lasing semiconductor grown onto a silicon chip.) This is a major hassle and expensive. It also costs a surprising amount of power to drive high-speed signals through the connection between the two chips.
If it were possible to build the lasers on, and out of, the silicon chip itself it would drastically decrease the cost and power consumption of the resulting devices.
Beyond this, it would be an enabling technology: It costs even more power to push signals between one silicon chip and another across a board or backplane. It would be nice to use a laser and optic fiber to make the connection. But why bother if you still have to spend the power to get the signal through the wiring from the silicon to a separate laser that generates the light? If you could put the laser on the silicon chip and save the power you could replace (at least) the critical high-speed wiring between chips with fibers, drastically increasing speed and cutting power.
Up to now it hasn't been possible to get silicon to lase directly (although there has been some recent work with nanoscale laser structures grown on its surface.) Now they've found a way to do it.
It isn't ready for prime time yet, by a long shot. But it's the initial crack in the wall, and breaking down this wall is a BIG DEAL. So researchers will be jumping on this. You might see additional breakthroughs and practical applications in shorter order than with other new technology breakthroughs.
If they get it working efficiently in the region between room temperature and near boiling point where silicon chips normally operate you'll get another increment in processor speed/power/size tradeoffs.
It's a way to sidestep yet another of the long string of roadblocks that have threatened to knock us off the Moore's Law curve.
The particular refactoring I was doing was regenerating the source of an OS from a distant predecessor's listing plus the object, in order to resurrect a broken piece of its functionality (the batch processor).
During that I "ironed" the later patches into consistency with the overall structure, then augmented the API in roughly the same style (creating a larger overall consistency) to support replacements for subroutines written during the no-source period that had modified OS code in fixed locations. Once that was done I had a source I could modify without breaking things, and could fix or add functionality at will.
Back in those days an OS was small enough that one research assistant COULD do something like that in just a couple months.
I can't think of a single occasion where someone was kept because of fears of maintaining their code, nor where someone was brought back to maintain their 'unmaintainable' code.
I can.
My very first programming job - which went on for years and where I did a bunch of stuff - but was quite underpaid. There were two of us programming when the institution in question had a financial crisis and could only keep one. My code was maintainable, the other guy's wasn't. So I got the boot.
And had a new job at higher pay in a better situation 25 minutes after letting it be known that I was available.
Before it was a matter of writing code that *I* could maintain. After it was a matter, not just of principle, but of practicality. By making myself NOT indispensible I made myself valuable.
I went on to a long carreer of mixed consulting and salaried positions, doing software for 35 years, and now hardware and system architecture. (And I once got the layoff because my code was the only stuff that worked, if you can imagine that. From another doomed company.)
The potential value-added in software and computer hardware has been so extreme that management can be AMAZINGLY pathological and still keep a company afloat for a couple years - and then find another job after it crashes. (Investors prefer someone with management experience crashing companies to someone with talent but no management experience. B-( Meanwhile the ones with management experience NOT crashing companies are too expensive or too busy.)
I'm now at six figures, stock options, one house paid for and another in progress, three cars, yacht, putting non-working (at the moment) wife with four degrees so far through more school (so she can do something she LIKES professionally), and held on to the current position through the slump, chapter 14, and out into the recovery. A big part of that was achieved by religiously making myself dispensible.
(But I also figure that disease won't be entirely cured. They keep evolving and it takes a few deaths to figure out and deploy a defense against each new one.)
Interestingly there was a simulation not long ago of how long people would live if they woudn't age past a biological age of about 20-25 years.
Not aging doesn't mean people don't get sick or don't die by accident. IIRC This simulation showed people would live longer but not typically more than 120 years.
There was another that (if I recall it correctly) assumed the accidental death rate of an 18 year old (high) but also assumed that both aging and disease would be cured, so accidents were all that killed. (I think it included crime, too.) That one came out to something like 850 years mean time to death.
But that was a while back, before "trauma centers" supplemented emergency rooms and some major safety improvements on automobiles. Also: Part of the reason for the high rate of death in the late teens is inexperience - especially with driving. (And it think it included traumatic injury from crime, which HAS dropped drastically despite what the media would have you think.) I figure a millenium easy.
i know exactly when these amazing age-related breakthroughs will come to fruition for humanity
exactly at the age at which i am too old to partake of any of it
That's not really a joke.
People in government see anti-aging research and treatments in terms of the financial load on the retirement and medical infrastructure relative to the tax base of still-working young, and view improved treatments as extending the life of the infirm aged rather than extending productive, vigorous youth. As a result they tend to be opposed to such research, or in favor of rationing its fruits if it ever has any.
(I recall back in the early days of CNN, when the head of one of the government agencies was being live-interviewed on future solvency issues as the boomers retired, and he slipped and said "We have to get the death rate up to meet the birthrate." Guess what part got clipped from the replay a few hours later...)
Life-extension advocates, of course, point out that real breakthroughs will extend healthy, vigorous life rather than simply stretching senility - and might eventually eliminate the latter entirely. Thus an effective attack on aging would reduce, rather than increase, the load on the systems (once they were adjusted for the increased lifespan).
You'll notice that a significant fraction of The Fine Article is dedicated to heading off such short-sightedness on the part of the portion of the ruling class that will be dispensing grant money and regulating availability of any treatments.
At least Swisher is phasing out the "say no to drugs" drain covers. (Now it's "say no to germs".)
Those always made me wonder if there'd be a market (say to government agencies) for a drug tester with a loud alarm (or silent radio-linked alarm) that would fit in the drain cover where the deodorizer cake usually goes.
Actually, that is not just the case in the UK. Copyright infringement is a criminal offence in all countries that signed the TRIPs agreement, includeing the US, FR, DE and NL, for example.
Note that, in general, signing a treaty does NOT, by itself, make anything illegal in the US. It DOES put pressure on the congress to pass laws to implement the treaty's terms but doesn't require it.
Many people misread the "supremacy clause" and think that treaties have the force of the constitution. What it actually says is that the consitution, laws passed under its authority, and treaties signed and ratified under its authority, all trump state laws where the state laws conflict with any of these three federal level constructs.
Laws and treaties are peers. But only laws regulate behavior of people and corporations within the US' jurisdiction. Treaties are just contracts between the US and other governments, are binding only on the US and the State government, and there only so far as the US congress, executive branch, and courts apply them.
Whats interesting is that the plugin for firefox is an ActiveX application. WMP installs some kind of ActiveX functionality into firefox (on the sly).
Just a moment ago I posted a reply elsewhere in this item. I suggested that installing Microsoft's media player plugin might open a backdoor {BARNdoor} in Mozilla/Firefox (like the one that APPLYING for Sony's rootkit uninstaller opens in IE). This would eliminate the big driver of migration from IE to Mozilla/Firefox: improved security.
Perhaps the monopolist is starting to get the point.
1) Embrace 2) Extend 3) Extinguish
Steps 1 and 2 are now in place. In this case it's Mozilla/Firefox that gets embraced and extended, but what gets extinguished is open-source media formats.
By making a Mozilla plugin for their media product they reduce the pressure on content providers to supply content in other formats.
Meanwhile, any bets on whether / when use of the plugin starts "accidentally" introducing vulnerabilities into Mozilla that are exploitable during ordinary browsing? (Something like the backdoor {BARNdoor} you install in IE when you APPLY to obtain the full removal tool for Sony's rootkit?) And there goes security, the main driver of migration from IE to Mozilla.
If this guy has a special, extremely rare, ability that can save millions of lives, why are people trying to shame him into volunteering or talking about kidnapping and enslaving him?
HIRE him. Pay him some BIG BUCKS.
You don't expect doctors to work for free.
You don't expect drug researchers to work for free.
You don't expect drug company executives to work for free.
Why should you expect this guy to work for free?
Which is worth more to a drug company trying to come up with an AIDS cure? A better-than-average CEO? Or the guy with the immune system that apparently enabled him to recover from a HIV infection?
If he's worth more, PAY him more. Offer him 110% of the CEO's salary, including an equivalent bonus package: Say, stock options. A big bonus and a cut if they develop one or more successful and profitable drugs or treatments. A couple years guaranteed minimum employment and a golden parachute if they decide after that to lay him off.
In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a single entity. I guess that people (myself included) also tend to think of it as a single entity. Maybe I should think of it as having "multiple personality disorder."
Think of it as a tribe - composed of a number of related individuals with different (though often similar) moral codes and behavior.
Or think of it as a school - with different sports teams under different coaches and different service clubs, where one team might be rife with bullying and steroid use and another squeaky clean, and one club might do environmental cleanups while another holds beer bashes around bonfires that occasionally get away into the woods.
Or think of it as a country - with different branches of its military, different political parties, different corporations (going fractal here - which IS appropriate since a large corporation is itself fractal and a conglomerate moreso), different religions, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
That's right. I didn't go bust. But the company I worked for came close. I survived the layoffs and thus didn't have to go job hunting in the midst of the crash.
UPS has a trade mark on the color brown.
Which is interesting, since they cloned it from Pullman (maker of railroad cars). The color is actually named "Pullman brown".
It was chosen by Pullman (after a lot of research) because it can get dirtier than any other color before it LOOKS dirty and needs to be washed. So using that color lets you increase the intervals between washings and thus lower your costs.
UPS, like Lego, is using trademark to assert a monopoly on a technical innovation (somebody else's, to boot), long past the point where a patent would have expired.
So now they can compete solely on technical merits and price.
Make that: "It's just you(tm)."
Is it just me or am I the only one the sees the irony in having a company a court battle over trademarks on a site that "violates the companys trademarks" (according to the company not me) ;)
Of COURSE a news site that is willing to mark stories about a company with the company's trademarked logo, regardless of the company's wishes, and does stories about both so-called "intellectual property" disputes (especially attempts to use copyright or trademark as patent and trademark to make trouble for technical competition) and other things interesting to nerds, will run a story about developments a trademark dispte where a company making a toy nerds like is using trademark to extend their monopoly beyond the expiration of the patent on their functional features and hang the company's trademarked logo on it. Nothing ironic about it.
So it's just you. B-)
IANAS (... shrink) but as I understand it:
Suicide from situational depression (alone) is almost unheard of. It normally requires an affective disorder (a biochemical problem, typically endogenous depression, sometimes bipolar disorder) to get to that stage.
Situational depression might be a last straw. But a person with an affective disorder of suicidal levels will encounter plenty of depressing situations in their lifetime.
Further, affective disorders and creativity seem strongly connected. So an inventor having an affective disorder is hardly a surprise.
It's no excuse for illegally peredatory competition. But I wouldn't lay Hillary's death at Lego's door.
Fortunately, depression is a lot better understood than it was when "psychology" was dominated by a horde of people who believed Freud's cocaine halucinations were a valid description of the inner workings of the (undrugged) human mind. Effective (and non-debilitating) chemical treatments are now available (and usually correctly prescribed) to pull most suicidally or cripplingly depressed people out into much more normal function - or at least enough better that they don't do themselves in when things get tough at the same time they're down.
(Unfortunately, such drugs sometimes get a bad rep due to another phenomenon: Some people crapped out twice, ending up with both psychopathy and debilitating depression. Treat the depression and you get a fully functional and energetic psychopath - and often one who has never had an opportunity to learn a compensation. B-( )
I probably WOULD have played with Lego if I'd had any.
So I made do with tinkertoy and erector set.
(But I DID monopolize a small amount of a slide-together brick system in Kindergarten. Much competition for it so I'd snag enough to make a portable toy to play with while the bullies monopolized the rest of the pile.)
Which chapter 14?
Were you age discriminated?
Or were you a whaler?
Oops. Meant chapter 11.
(Mixing up the bankruptcy chapter numbers: Yet another reason I'm not a CEO. B-) )
The need for data to feed the chip requires external signals, and at multi-Gbps speeds that means big transistors with much more heat dissipation than the little ones shoving signals around the chip. Heat dissipation in a practical package is one of the limits on chip size. So the need for these drivers is one of the limits to how many transistors can go on a chip. Replacing them with lower-heat lasers would allow you to have more of the little ones, and more total. Thus is another roadblock to following Moore's Law (the true formulation) pushed back.
There are also several other exponential formulations that get lumped with Moore's Law (even if they're not the original and official formulation). One of them is a similar doubling time for price-performance.
Does any of that stuff actually make you HAPPY?
Hell, yeah!
Only down thing lately was not cashing out a couple million before the bubble burst. I could have been retired, have more toys to play with (like another 75 acres behind the paid-for house) and time to enjoy it all more, rather than working away through the lean years for a company that didn't have enough resources to do some of the interesting projects.
Currently, putting a practical laser on a chip means using a semiconductor other than silicon, such as gallium arsenide. But silicon has better properties for making large complex circuits - and the technology of doing so is more advanced on silicon than on other semiconductor materials.
This means that when you want to hook up a laser to a logic circuit you end up with two separate chips and interconnections between them (or maybe with a separate layer of the lasing semiconductor grown onto a silicon chip.) This is a major hassle and expensive. It also costs a surprising amount of power to drive high-speed signals through the connection between the two chips.
If it were possible to build the lasers on, and out of, the silicon chip itself it would drastically decrease the cost and power consumption of the resulting devices.
Beyond this, it would be an enabling technology: It costs even more power to push signals between one silicon chip and another across a board or backplane. It would be nice to use a laser and optic fiber to make the connection. But why bother if you still have to spend the power to get the signal through the wiring from the silicon to a separate laser that generates the light? If you could put the laser on the silicon chip and save the power you could replace (at least) the critical high-speed wiring between chips with fibers, drastically increasing speed and cutting power.
Up to now it hasn't been possible to get silicon to lase directly (although there has been some recent work with nanoscale laser structures grown on its surface.) Now they've found a way to do it.
It isn't ready for prime time yet, by a long shot. But it's the initial crack in the wall, and breaking down this wall is a BIG DEAL. So researchers will be jumping on this. You might see additional breakthroughs and practical applications in shorter order than with other new technology breakthroughs.
If they get it working efficiently in the region between room temperature and near boiling point where silicon chips normally operate you'll get another increment in processor speed/power/size tradeoffs.
It's a way to sidestep yet another of the long string of roadblocks that have threatened to knock us off the Moore's Law curve.
Back in 1969 I called it "ironing".
The particular refactoring I was doing was regenerating the source of an OS from a distant predecessor's listing plus the object, in order to resurrect a broken piece of its functionality (the batch processor).
During that I "ironed" the later patches into consistency with the overall structure, then augmented the API in roughly the same style (creating a larger overall consistency) to support replacements for subroutines written during the no-source period that had modified OS code in fixed locations. Once that was done I had a source I could modify without breaking things, and could fix or add functionality at will.
Back in those days an OS was small enough that one research assistant COULD do something like that in just a couple months.
I can't think of a single occasion where someone was kept because of fears of maintaining their code, nor where someone was brought back to maintain their 'unmaintainable' code.
I can.
My very first programming job - which went on for years and where I did a bunch of stuff - but was quite underpaid. There were two of us programming when the institution in question had a financial crisis and could only keep one. My code was maintainable, the other guy's wasn't. So I got the boot.
And had a new job at higher pay in a better situation 25 minutes after letting it be known that I was available.
Before it was a matter of writing code that *I* could maintain. After it was a matter, not just of principle, but of practicality. By making myself NOT indispensible I made myself valuable.
I went on to a long carreer of mixed consulting and salaried positions, doing software for 35 years, and now hardware and system architecture. (And I once got the layoff because my code was the only stuff that worked, if you can imagine that. From another doomed company.)
The potential value-added in software and computer hardware has been so extreme that management can be AMAZINGLY pathological and still keep a company afloat for a couple years - and then find another job after it crashes. (Investors prefer someone with management experience crashing companies to someone with talent but no management experience. B-( Meanwhile the ones with management experience NOT crashing companies are too expensive or too busy.)
I'm now at six figures, stock options, one house paid for and another in progress, three cars, yacht, putting non-working (at the moment) wife with four degrees so far through more school (so she can do something she LIKES professionally), and held on to the current position through the slump, chapter 14, and out into the recovery. A big part of that was achieved by religiously making myself dispensible.
(But I also figure that disease won't be entirely cured. They keep evolving and it takes a few deaths to figure out and deploy a defense against each new one.)
Interestingly there was a simulation not long ago of how long people would live if they woudn't age past a biological age of about 20-25 years.
Not aging doesn't mean people don't get sick or don't die by accident. IIRC This simulation showed people would live longer but not typically more than 120 years.
There was another that (if I recall it correctly) assumed the accidental death rate of an 18 year old (high) but also assumed that both aging and disease would be cured, so accidents were all that killed. (I think it included crime, too.) That one came out to something like 850 years mean time to death.
But that was a while back, before "trauma centers" supplemented emergency rooms and some major safety improvements on automobiles. Also: Part of the reason for the high rate of death in the late teens is inexperience - especially with driving. (And it think it included traumatic injury from crime, which HAS dropped drastically despite what the media would have you think.) I figure a millenium easy.
i know exactly when these amazing age-related breakthroughs will come to fruition for humanity
exactly at the age at which i am too old to partake of any of it
That's not really a joke.
People in government see anti-aging research and treatments in terms of the financial load on the retirement and medical infrastructure relative to the tax base of still-working young, and view improved treatments as extending the life of the infirm aged rather than extending productive, vigorous youth. As a result they tend to be opposed to such research, or in favor of rationing its fruits if it ever has any.
(I recall back in the early days of CNN, when the head of one of the government agencies was being live-interviewed on future solvency issues as the boomers retired, and he slipped and said "We have to get the death rate up to meet the birthrate." Guess what part got clipped from the replay a few hours later...)
Life-extension advocates, of course, point out that real breakthroughs will extend healthy, vigorous life rather than simply stretching senility - and might eventually eliminate the latter entirely. Thus an effective attack on aging would reduce, rather than increase, the load on the systems (once they were adjusted for the increased lifespan).
You'll notice that a significant fraction of The Fine Article is dedicated to heading off such short-sightedness on the part of the portion of the ruling class that will be dispensing grant money and regulating availability of any treatments.
At least Swisher is phasing out the "say no to drugs" drain covers. (Now it's "say no to germs".)
Those always made me wonder if there'd be a market (say to government agencies) for a drug tester with a loud alarm (or silent radio-linked alarm) that would fit in the drain cover where the deodorizer cake usually goes.
1: Stick an amazon referral in every review post.
2: Some people buy the book through the link.
3: PROFIT!
Sounds like a business model to me.
Actually, that is not just the case in the UK. Copyright infringement is a criminal offence in all countries that signed the TRIPs agreement, includeing the US, FR, DE and NL, for example.
Note that, in general, signing a treaty does NOT, by itself, make anything illegal in the US. It DOES put pressure on the congress to pass laws to implement the treaty's terms but doesn't require it.
Many people misread the "supremacy clause" and think that treaties have the force of the constitution. What it actually says is that the consitution, laws passed under its authority, and treaties signed and ratified under its authority, all trump state laws where the state laws conflict with any of these three federal level constructs.
Laws and treaties are peers. But only laws regulate behavior of people and corporations within the US' jurisdiction. Treaties are just contracts between the US and other governments, are binding only on the US and the State government, and there only so far as the US congress, executive branch, and courts apply them.
I'm suprised that the execs at Sony ... still have feet after shooting themselves in the foot so often.
If they were Yakuza somebody would be down a finger joint by now. B-)
Whats interesting is that the plugin for firefox is an ActiveX application. WMP installs some kind of ActiveX functionality into firefox (on the sly).
Just a moment ago I posted a reply elsewhere in this item. I suggested that installing Microsoft's media player plugin might open a backdoor {BARNdoor} in Mozilla/Firefox (like the one that APPLYING for Sony's rootkit uninstaller opens in IE). This would eliminate the big driver of migration from IE to Mozilla/Firefox: improved security.
I do believe you've found it.
Counting the hours to the first exploit...
Perhaps the monopolist is starting to get the point.
1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish
Steps 1 and 2 are now in place. In this case it's Mozilla/Firefox that gets embraced and extended, but what gets extinguished is open-source media formats.
By making a Mozilla plugin for their media product they reduce the pressure on content providers to supply content in other formats.
Meanwhile, any bets on whether / when use of the plugin starts "accidentally" introducing vulnerabilities into Mozilla that are exploitable during ordinary browsing? (Something like the backdoor {BARNdoor} you install in IE when you APPLY to obtain the full removal tool for Sony's rootkit?) And there goes security, the main driver of migration from IE to Mozilla.
I haven't set it up yet because I didn't hear from you. Follow up this post and I'll do it.
If this guy has a special, extremely rare, ability that can save millions of lives, why are people trying to shame him into volunteering or talking about kidnapping and enslaving him?
HIRE him. Pay him some BIG BUCKS.
You don't expect doctors to work for free.
You don't expect drug researchers to work for free.
You don't expect drug company executives to work for free.
Why should you expect this guy to work for free?
Which is worth more to a drug company trying to come up with an AIDS cure? A better-than-average CEO? Or the guy with the immune system that apparently enabled him to recover from a HIV infection?
If he's worth more, PAY him more. Offer him 110% of the CEO's salary, including an equivalent bonus package: Say, stock options. A big bonus and a cut if they develop one or more successful and profitable drugs or treatments. A couple years guaranteed minimum employment and a golden parachute if they decide after that to lay him off.
THEN see if he says no.
In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a single entity. I guess that people (myself included) also tend to think of it as a single entity. Maybe I should think of it as having "multiple personality disorder."
Think of it as a tribe - composed of a number of related individuals with different (though often similar) moral codes and behavior.
Or think of it as a school - with different sports teams under different coaches and different service clubs, where one team might be rife with bullying and steroid use and another squeaky clean, and one club might do environmental cleanups while another holds beer bashes around bonfires that occasionally get away into the woods.
Or think of it as a country - with different branches of its military, different political parties, different corporations (going fractal here - which IS appropriate since a large corporation is itself fractal and a conglomerate moreso), different religions, and so on.