your job is a fashion trend
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
UML, EJBs, SOAP, XML, all fashion trends, you say? This may be true, but take a look at job advertisements in the software development field... a lot of them require that you know wonderful things like UML, EJBs, SOAP, XML, etc. This is why I quit my very well paying software development job and went back to school to pursue graduate studies. I realized my job was based on nothing more than fashion trends. It was just the same old stuff being rehashed and remarketed in a different way. In grad school, on the other hand, I get to explore problems from the perspective of real research and development, instead of being constrained by a bunch of marketing drones insisting that we include every latest piece of technology possible to make our product seem "cutting edge."
What is being described is similar to what happened during the second world war and the race create the nuclear bomb. Scientists working for Allied countries were quite concscious about what they did and didn't publish so as not to give too much information to the Germans about the direction they were taking in nuclear fission research. This was even before the Manhattan project was established. Of course, the difference is, back then, Hitler was a clear and present danger. In the present day a lot of the danger is manufactured in order to justify the huge expenditures that go to the American military industrial complex.
now they can make the docu-drama
on
SARS Contained
·
· Score: 1
I can just see the movie based on the SARS outbreak:
Dustin Hoffman argues with his superior officer: "But, sir, we cannot bomb Toronto! The conservative government has finally taken its head out of its ass and is doing something about the problem!"
"In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It's easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers."
Actually, no. A paper is much more than a formality. It is intended to summarize the achievement made by building the software in order to communicate that achievement to others. Without being able to communicate your achievement, few people are going to see your "beautiful" software. (Unless, of course, your Microsoft, and you force people to purchase computers with your software pre-installed).
"Number two, research must be substantial-- and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done."
Hogwash! Mr. Graham obviously has never heard of Ockham's Razor.
"Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions. "
The whole point of research is to determine whether certain assumptions are reasonable or not. If you knew you were starting with the wrong assumptions, then you would throw them away to begin with!
This essay goes on and on like this. Mr. Graham might be a very intelligent business man (I hear he made loads of money on some internet company), but I don't think he has much that's intelligent to say with regards to science and its relation to art. His opinions are anything but objective, and seem to be based on his negativity towards science and mathematics in academia. In fact, I suspect Mr. Graham used the ideas he described in the essay to write the essay itself. He started with a wrong assumption, and then wrote an extremely long essay to defend that assumption. "Nothing yields meaty essays like starting with wrong assumptions."
There are really two major arguments against the patenting madness that this story is about. But before looking at that, lets consider the argument FOR patenting:
Basically, research costs money. If a company is going to invest money in research to develop a new product, it requires profit incentive. Unless it were for patents, that profit incentive would be in doubt, because other companies can come along and potentially eat into the profit margin of the original company.
Patenting silly things like one-click shopping aside, the idea of giving a company exclusive rights to a particular technology for having developed that technology is a good one. It encourages the development of new products and technologies that enrich our lives. This is where the catch lies, however. Our lives are enriched by these new technologies, but do they really need to be? Are we all that much better off having, say, High Definition television, versus what its predecessor was? I don't deny the fact that there's a market for new technologies like that; people will pay money for it, and they will enjoy having access to those new "cool and shiny" toys. In fact, I'd probably pay money for that type of stuff too (once I'm out of graduate school). But do we really *need* it to survive as a human species? Is there a chance of me dying if I don't have access to the latest Sony plasma TV? No. Creating new technologies that improve the "leisure" sector, or even ones that improve "business efficiency", are not things that we need to survive as a human race.
However, when a pharmaceutical company patents a gene (or a drug), and limits people, or entire third world countries, from having access to certain treatments, there's more than just profit margins at stake here. There are human lives at stake. This is my first argument against the patenting that goes on by pharmaceuticals. There is something funadmentally flawed about the patenting process when it starts placing a dollar value on human life and health. Why is this bad? Lets put the morality and ethics arguments aside, because a lot of die-hard capitalists reading this probably have none to begin with. It's bad because poor health in your neighbour might mean poor health in you one day. SARS is the perfect example of this. Look at how easily it spreads. It's true that it only has about a 6% mortality rate, but its virulence illustrates what amount of death another equally virulent but more lethal virus can cause. If pharmaceuticals let a segment of the world's population health deteriorate because they don't have the money to buy its treatments, eventually conditions will develop in that part of the population that will be ripe for such a deadly virus or antibiotic-resistant bacteria to come into existence. Do you think such a bug is going to determine who it infects based on the dollar amount in the person's bank account? I doubt it. It's true that if such a scenario should occur, the pharmaceuticals would mobilize themselves to develop another super drug or vaccine to protect themselves (and those with enough $$$) from said disease. But the fact is, if they had had a little foresight, instead of being concerned with the profit margins of the next quarter, such a virus might have not even had the opportunity to develop in the first place. Essentially, the good health of your neighbour, even if he isn't as well off monetarily as you, also contributes to your own good health in the future.
The second argument against the patenting madness goes like this: The genome of a virus is a naturally occuring thing. Even though it costs money to research and decode the genome, the genome was not created by the pharmaceutical companies. It was there for anyone to find. Allowing a company to patent something they didn't even create is ridiculous. What are we going to allow to be patented next? Air? "I'm sorry, sir, you cannot breathe unless you pay HyperGlobalMegaPharmaNet a royalty fee of several million dollars. If you choose to breathe without compensating the company for said amount, we will see you in court. In the meantime, we will get a court order preventing you from breathing until such a time that the matter is resolved."
Slashdot Mirror
UML, EJBs, SOAP, XML, all fashion trends, you say? This may be true, but take a look at job advertisements in the software development field... a lot of them require that you know wonderful things like UML, EJBs, SOAP, XML, etc. This is why I quit my very well paying software development job and went back to school to pursue graduate studies. I realized my job was based on nothing more than fashion trends. It was just the same old stuff being rehashed and remarketed in a different way. In grad school, on the other hand, I get to explore problems from the perspective of real research and development, instead of being constrained by a bunch of marketing drones insisting that we include every latest piece of technology possible to make our product seem "cutting edge."
What is being described is similar to what happened during the second world war and the race create the nuclear bomb. Scientists working for Allied countries were quite concscious about what they did and didn't publish so as not to give too much information to the Germans about the direction they were taking in nuclear fission research. This was even before the Manhattan project was established. Of course, the difference is, back then, Hitler was a clear and present danger. In the present day a lot of the danger is manufactured in order to justify the huge expenditures that go to the American military industrial complex.
I can just see the movie based on the SARS outbreak: Dustin Hoffman argues with his superior officer: "But, sir, we cannot bomb Toronto! The conservative government has finally taken its head out of its ass and is doing something about the problem!"
This essay goes on and on like this. Mr. Graham might be a very intelligent business man (I hear he made loads of money on some internet company), but I don't think he has much that's intelligent to say with regards to science and its relation to art. His opinions are anything but objective, and seem to be based on his negativity towards science and mathematics in academia. In fact, I suspect Mr. Graham used the ideas he described in the essay to write the essay itself. He started with a wrong assumption, and then wrote an extremely long essay to defend that assumption. "Nothing yields meaty essays like starting with wrong assumptions."
jl
Basically, research costs money. If a company is going to invest money in research to develop a new product, it requires profit incentive. Unless it were for patents, that profit incentive would be in doubt, because other companies can come along and potentially eat into the profit margin of the original company.
Patenting silly things like one-click shopping aside, the idea of giving a company exclusive rights to a particular technology for having developed that technology is a good one. It encourages the development of new products and technologies that enrich our lives. This is where the catch lies, however. Our lives are enriched by these new technologies, but do they really need to be? Are we all that much better off having, say, High Definition television, versus what its predecessor was? I don't deny the fact that there's a market for new technologies like that; people will pay money for it, and they will enjoy having access to those new "cool and shiny" toys. In fact, I'd probably pay money for that type of stuff too (once I'm out of graduate school). But do we really *need* it to survive as a human species? Is there a chance of me dying if I don't have access to the latest Sony plasma TV? No. Creating new technologies that improve the "leisure" sector, or even ones that improve "business efficiency", are not things that we need to survive as a human race.
However, when a pharmaceutical company patents a gene (or a drug), and limits people, or entire third world countries, from having access to certain treatments, there's more than just profit margins at stake here. There are human lives at stake. This is my first argument against the patenting that goes on by pharmaceuticals. There is something funadmentally flawed about the patenting process when it starts placing a dollar value on human life and health. Why is this bad? Lets put the morality and ethics arguments aside, because a lot of die-hard capitalists reading this probably have none to begin with. It's bad because poor health in your neighbour might mean poor health in you one day. SARS is the perfect example of this. Look at how easily it spreads. It's true that it only has about a 6% mortality rate, but its virulence illustrates what amount of death another equally virulent but more lethal virus can cause. If pharmaceuticals let a segment of the world's population health deteriorate because they don't have the money to buy its treatments, eventually conditions will develop in that part of the population that will be ripe for such a deadly virus or antibiotic-resistant bacteria to come into existence. Do you think such a bug is going to determine who it infects based on the dollar amount in the person's bank account? I doubt it. It's true that if such a scenario should occur, the pharmaceuticals would mobilize themselves to develop another super drug or vaccine to protect themselves (and those with enough $$$) from said disease. But the fact is, if they had had a little foresight, instead of being concerned with the profit margins of the next quarter, such a virus might have not even had the opportunity to develop in the first place. Essentially, the good health of your neighbour, even if he isn't as well off monetarily as you, also contributes to your own good health in the future.
The second argument against the patenting madness goes like this: The genome of a virus is a naturally occuring thing. Even though it costs money to research and decode the genome, the genome was not created by the pharmaceutical companies. It was there for anyone to find. Allowing a company to patent something they didn't even create is ridiculous. What are we going to allow to be patented next? Air? "I'm sorry, sir, you cannot breathe unless you pay HyperGlobalMegaPharmaNet a royalty fee of several million dollars. If you choose to breathe without compensating the company for said amount, we will see you in court. In the meantime, we will get a court order preventing you from breathing until such a time that the matter is resolved."