A simple (and somewhat snarky) analysis, but basically sound - as the poster upthread mentions, any eco-wisdom held by aboriginal societies is the hard won product of trial and error and there are a number of interesting examples in the worldwide archaeological record of societies running head-on into environmental crises.
It wasn't just horses mind, there were a number of large mammal and avian species that went extinct around the time we think humans first made it to the Americas.
These species had one critical weakness - they had no instinctive fear of bipedal hairless apes. Failing to co-evolve for several million years with humans and proto-humans has proven to be a fatal evolutionary flaw for a huge number of prey species. The poster child of this phenomenon is the Dodo - people reported being able to walk up to these large, flightless pigeons and brain them with clubs - they literally had no idea what hit them.
I take your point about famous people sounding off for the sake of it.
However Card is a writer who depends upon is more significant (especially if he is arguing against what 'conventional thinking' might expect him to argue).
Ditto for the various musicians quoted in the other article.
As you say your points are specific to your experience and shouldn't be taken as a sweeping generalisation. I work for an SI consultancy and have had experience working with staff from our Bangalore/Chennai off-shoring subsidiary and I certainly recognise some of the issues you touch upon; however in my experience these factors weren't as acute as the situation you describe but that may well be down to my company being able to cherry-pick better quality staff in India. There's also the possibility that the cultural/linguistic fit between British and Indian staff makes your second point less of a problem for us (certainly we are better placed to manage the timezone problem in Britain).
Nevertheless you put your finger on some of the key risks when you opt for outsourcing as a solution to project costs. Certainly you can resource a project at a fraction of the price (my company's staff from Bangalore, Chennai or Kuala Lumpur are about a quarter the price of their European or NAmerican colleagues) - but you immediately add in various 'frictions' to the project which have to be managed around or ammeliorated and, unless running complex IT projects is part of your core business, there's a serious question about whether you should be doing this stuff yourself rather than employing specialists (like my company...) to do it for you.
To a certain extent this sort of thing will sort itself out over the next few years. Outsourcing to India is a child of the Y2k fracas and the dotcom bubble - a lot of the problems you allude to will only become apparent to the less clueful PHBs once they've had their fingers burned, at which point the garderene rush to Bangalore and points east will ease off somewhat. Having said that the phenomenon isn't going to disappear. The Indian software business is maturing fast, with the international SI consultancies already hip-deep in the sector and the sort of knowledge, skillsets and culture required to pull this sort of thing off effectively starting to spread to second and third tier players. Expect to see a lot of the cultural and professional problems you allude to becoming less significant, along with an ongoing erosion of Bangalore's price advantage wrt other regions of India (this is already happening) and the Far East.
I think you meant that IT workers require a degree level education right? Or is your workplace hiring 10 year olds for their entry level coding positions?
Actually IT as a mandatory degree level occupation (in the UK at least) is a relatively recent phenomenon. I went to school in the 80s and had classmates who were looking at getting into Systems Analysis with just A-levels (the UK equivalent of a HS diploma near enough) and during the 90s I have worked in IT with a number of people who didn't have a degree. Generally these are older colleagues who came into the business when it was (much more realistically) regarded as more 'skilled-trade/technical' than 'managerial/professional'. Clearly there is nothing magical about a university education when it comes to the skillsets, attitudes and mentalities required to do IT work at a reasonable level of competence.
I agree with the earlier poster that IT workers have largely duped themselves into believing they are 'owning class' as a virtue of their occupation (rather than as a side benefit of being able to salt away some of their wage surplus into capital should they so choose) and are in for a series of rude shocks as this mis-categorisation corrects itself. Look at what happened to frame-loom weavers in the UK during the industrial revolution to get an idea of the sort of structural adjustments to the IT labour market that are likely in store over the next couple of decades.
Outsourcing is by no means a universal panacea but the days of codemonkeys being able to command professional/managerial style salaries without bringing at least some of the interpersonal, cultural or domain expertise skillsets that professional/managerial types are selling are fading fast. The message for the future is to upskill or crosstrain - I'd suggest something like plumbing as a fallback trade. I don't know what its like stateside but good plumbers are like gold-dust in London; they pull down 60-80k pa if they work for themselves and can't be outsourced to SE Asia.
Williams has gone on record as saying that he has no problem with people filesharing his stuff. PR flacks from his label (he recently signed an $80 million deal with EMI) were somewhat tight-lipped in response but didn't upbraid him (publicly at least).
Of course RW hasn't broken the US market so the RIAA probably regard him as some kind of granola throwing hippie independant rather than a proper artist like Lars Ulrich.
IMO it shows that Bowie saw the straws in the wind, decided to get out while the getting was good and was happy to stick it to those who bought his bond. You could argue that this was ethically a bit iffy on Bowie's part but personally I'm not too bothered by this particular bit of sharp business practise. Anyone able to come up with the $55 million for this deal should have done their DD.
I'm too lazy to look it up - does anyone know who the buyers of the Bowie bond were? Double points to the Slim White Duke if he managed to get a thick wedge of RIAA-member moolah for the revenue stream on his back catalogue.
The HG lifestyle can be better (for certain values of better) but it doesn't support the sort of population densities achievable with neolithic revolution technologies, so we can't go back without a 95+% die off - even though the survivors might be less stressed, have a better diet etc.
Yeah, but the article wasn't proposing a man-rated system either. He was outlining a system for cheap, dumb and frequent cargo lifters.
The underlying question - why are our current rockets two to three orders of magnitude more expensive than what the Nazi V-rocketry programme achieved - is a very interesting one. As he says towards the end of the article, half a billion per year to found a mass cargo LEO industry seems like chump change for an industrialised nation (or even a large corporate). It makes me wonder why someone out of the 20 or so potential actors with sufficient scale hasn't tried to do this already. Presumably its because there are some gotchas that were smoothed over or ignored in the article, but I don't know enough about aerospace engineering to critique it. Is there anyone out there who can?
Robert, with respect, you aren't helping the cause with these missives. Misuse of capitalisation and sloppy email-speak are the internet age equivalent of writing a letter in green ink; whilst making vague threats and ranting about LAWYERS and BIG SOFTWARE CORPORATIONS plants you firmly in McCarthy's 'kooks and cranks' mental box.
People if you are going to contact a legislator on this issue you've got to make it count! Use short, punchy sentences written in grammatically correct, properly spelled English (or French or whatever). Explain what you are opposed to and why you are opposed. Outline what you want the legislator to do about it. Use simple examples to support your arguments and avoid rambling, off-topic digressions. Do not pepper your letter with dark mutterings about the Gnomes of Zurich, UN black helicopters, corrupt politicians or sleazy lawyers. Be polite and thank them for their time. Remember to include a return address.
Once you've finished save the file and then go and do something else for bit - walk the dog, go for a run, relax with friends in the pub - whatever. Once you've cooled off come back, read your draft and correct the spelling mistakes that leap off the screen at you. Try and get someone (preferably a non-geek) to look at the letter. Listen to their comments. Perhaps redraft a couple of sections in response to what they say.
Finally, when you are happy with your final version, print it off onto a decent weight of paper, sign it and send it to your intended recipient via snail-mail.
I've met Glenys Kinnock a couple of times and she is, personally, a pretty sharp cookie but technology issues aren't her primary focus as a legislator and this reply has all the hallmarks of a formula reply - chances are she has a bundle of these handed to her for signature by a staffer once a week or so.
Its probably worthwhile trying again with a reasoned rebuttal to the points in the letter - provided its understood that at this point you are hoping to catch the ear of whichever member of her staff is fielding letters on this issue.
The realities of life as an MEP are such that she can't be fully up to speed on all issues that come up to vote and so will trust to parliament's division of labour and accept the rapporteur's position unless given a reason to take an interest. The objective here is to get the issue onto her radar screen so that she engages with the arguments herself and one of the ways to do that is to create a noticeable trend of cogently argued letters in her postbag. Once you have her attention, I think you have a solid chance of persuading her of the merits of the anti case - as I said before she's a bright woman.
There's a protest and lobbying meeting being organised at the European Parliament next Wednesday in order to get an anti software patents message across in advance of the vote scheduled for Monday week.
The antis have been slow getting themsleves organised and sending a message more sophisticated than "Stop being a tool of capitalist imperialist pigs!" - but something is happening.
We aren't stunting our evolution, evolution continues to grind away in its blind fashion - what we're doing is changing the environment within which evolution is occurring. Eventually this will result in humans being more adapted for a 'civilised' environment.
This assumes of course that we can maintain ourselves in this 'civilised' state long enough for it to register in evolutionary time - the ~400 generations since the neolithic revolution isn't really long enough for significant evolutionary changes to occur.
As a practical matter, turnover in people is essential to clean out the social arteries.
That's stupid. Just off the top of my head - look at the natural tendency of the labour turnover to increase. People work just for a few years at one place and when they move to another occupation, they bring the fresh blood you are talking about.
Why is it stupid? There are a whole raft of societal, political, scientific and artistic changes we can point to in our history which achieved acceptance through a demographic shift as the older generation died off. It is possible that stabilising people's biological age in their late 20s or so will mean that they retain a youthful flexibility, energy and inventiveness but I don't think that's something that can just be blithely assumed - even if they retain much of their youthful vigour I suspect that many of their attitudes, preferences and opinions will tend to get fixed fairly early in life and remain unchanged unless shaken up. Something like the pattern of working several careers through life that you describe might be one way to prod people out of comfortable ruts. Its unlikely to be sufficient however and, even with a bunch of legal, fiscal and professional changes in place my gut feel is that post-senescent societies would be far slower moving than we are used to. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it would be a different thing.
A large population of old, conservative property owners will smother the young
That's stupid. Let's just say that today youngsters can catch up in just a decade and start challenging the elders.
Yeah but that's in today's world which, as you said at the top of your post, isn't likely to be how things work. In a world where professional certifications take 25 years, 200 year mortgages are the norm and newcomers to a field have competitors with several decades or centuries of tacit knowledge and industry contacts how will youngsters catch up in a decade?
Space colonization would be essential.
That's stupid. Obviously, virtual reality and uploading are the way to go.
While a move into space may not be essential, I don't think its a stupid prediction. You accept that birth rates will need to radically decline to align with the mortality rates of a post-senescent society and this is not going to happen straight away. This means that there will be a population explosion akin to that which accompanied the collapse in infant mortality at the turn of the C19th/20th. My wild-ass stab in the dark is that the global human population doubles within 100 years of anti-senescent technologies becoming available before a second demographic shift kicks in which leads to a gradual reduction in population over several centuries as accidents and violence abrade the bulge away. Virtual reality isn't going to help us meet the resource needs of ~15 billion humans over several centuries and the technology required to move into cyberspace (assuming people would want to go) is a hell of a lot more hypothetical than those required for a move into space.
Wealth inequities will inevitably create a class of wealthy near-immortals in the short term.
That's stupid. With AI, robotisation and nanotech the treatments will drop in price very quickly.
This is not stupid. The prices will certainly drop (I don't need to share your faith in magitech to agree with this) but the treatments will go to the rich preferentially for the same reasons that medical treatments go to the rich today - their control of societal resources drives research and distribution priorities. This is a fact of human nature and social organisation that won't go away any time soon.
Actually I am more pessimistic than the original poster, as I suspect that the availability of anti-senescent treatments will confer an 'immortality advantage' upon t
I'm not a lawyer either, but I think the anonymous licensee is in the clear. By selling a license SCO has breached the terms of the GPL which gets its (so far untested) legal muscle from copyright law.
My understanding is that provided the licensee doesn't onwardly distribute their 'licensed' code or anything that could be classed as a derived work, then they aren't guilty of an infringement. SCO are guilty of an infringement of course and so could be sued by anyone who holds copyright to any part of the kernel for breaching the terms laid out in the GPL under which SCO was given permission to distribute, modify and create derived works from the kernel. But we knew this already.
Don't forget the Vultus acquisition. This was a Canopy group 'sibling' of SCO that they bought using their pumped up stock price. Quite a neat way to transfer funds from SCO to their Canopy Group masters without triggering as many 'insider selling' alarms.
Yeah, but the bond would cost money. Given the lack of case we stongly suspect that they have, it would cost a lot of money - and for what? It might give slashdotters pause for thought ("Uh-oh... maybe they actually have a case!") but it wouldn't improve the effectiveness of the FUD amongst the general public by much.
The life expectancy was so low because the infant mortality was high. As a hunter-gatherer if you make it out of childhood you have a pretty good chance of making it into old age (50s plus).
IMO the key fact behind Atkins, which the earlier poster was alluding to, is that humans evolved on a diet which was carbohydrate poor in comparison with agricultural societies and, barring occasional honey strikes, had no access to refined carbohydrates.
Any criticism of a regime which replicates our low carb past has to explain how it was that humans managed to survive on such a dangerous diet throughout the bulk of our evolutionary history and this is a point that I haven't seen the anti-Atkins people address adequately.
A job I did a few years back was based on a prototype made up of a bunch of excel spreadsheets that someone had knocked together, then got a couple of contractors in for a few weeks to do some macros and such.
We were brought in to turn it in to something a bit more useful using (try not to laugh) VB and Access.
At the time this project gave me all sorts of grief, what with the inadequate specs, ridiculous schedule, clueless client (not stupid, just ignorant) and the consequential time and budget overruns - in the end we took eight months rather than three, it cost nearly twice as much (£150k vs £90k) and we had to kludge around crappy Msoft tools and a stupid design approach in ways that made me very unhappy.
But... that silly little, non-scaleable app is legendary at the client. Its been deployed all over the place and has made them millions in efficiency gains over the last four years. I just wish we'd been a bit more canny when we negotiated the contract on that sucker and inserted an ongoing profit share or something.
Preach it brother....
Not that its much different on the private side of the fence. I mostly do systems integration work for banks and insurance companies and I've seen exactly the same sort of insanity.
I worked on an outsourcing tender for a couple of months last year (no names, but the client was a *big* multinational bank - we were subbing to a prime contractor who were as blue as the bank's livery).
These guys (the bank) had fifteen different payment and clearing systems in operation, each one the early phase deployment of a 'strategic project to consolidate and rationalise our payment systems' that ran into the sand before achieving its objectives and each one subtly (or not so subtly) different from all the others.
They had a cost-centre accounting methodology that created incentives so peverse they were wearing scarlet PVC jump suits at the bid review meetings and a political culture that would give Catbert a grey coat.
I could go on but the bids got canned before contractors were selected - it turned out the whole thing was a byeproduct of sundry board level political shenanigans and wasn't ever a serious ITT. We burned over a hundred man-days (the Blue Boys much more) on something that was mostly a dodge to get some senior managers within the client fired.
Regards
Luke
I'm sure that there is a lot of speculative froth on the stock price (and I'd like to think that there are plenty of people shorting the stock as well...:)) but this article is a glimpse into the mind of those who disagree.
Selected quotes:
"In other words, like many religious folk, the Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement are a) convinced of their own righteousness, and b) sure the whole world, including judges, will agree.
They should wake up. SCO may not be very good at making a profit by selling software... [but] it is very good at getting what it wants from other companies."
...
"Yarro [CEO of Canopy Group who are pulling SCO's strings on this] won't apologize for the IBM lawsuit. "I'm not a guy who goes away quietly in the night. I fight," he says. "If you take something from me, if you break a promise, I'm going to come after you.""
...
"The IBM lawsuit could bring a windfall to Canopy, which owns 46% of SCO. Another beneficiary could be John Wall, chief executive of Vista.com, a Redmond, Wash., company that last August struck a licensing arrangement with SCO. Wall got 800,000 shares of SCO stock in the deal and still holds 600,000, making him SCO's biggest individual shareholder after Canopy. Those shares, which were worth about $1 each when Wall made the deal, now trade above $10." [my emphasis]
...
"These guys in Utah are no dummies. The crunchies in the Linux community should be paying more attention."
OK, there have been any number of posts saying how this lawsuit is some kind of scam by SCO insiders.
Initially the strategy was probably to get bought out by IBM. Plan B seems to be hype the lawsuit, ride shareprice up and sell-out at a healthy profit, although this seems to carry a pretty hefty regulatory risk for the principals unless they can spin out their death spiral long enough for their recent transactions to pass beyond the 9-month window for an SEC investigation once they declare bankruptcy (maybe there's a deep, dark Plan C - acquisition by Somebody Else to forestall an SEC investigation).
Now my thinking is that if there was enough money in the market shorting SCOX, this would undercut the lawsuit hype and crash the company price faster than the the SCO board were anticipating, forcing them to bail early and exposing them to the SEC investigation (or fall back to Plan C if such a thing exists). A nice side-effect being that the holders of the short contracts on SCOX would make a profit on the deal.
So the question is: what kind of money would move the market against SCOX's pump'n'dump operation and could the serried ranks of/.ers mobilise it?
"I need put options... lots of put options."
Or is the garderine herd of day-traders too large a stampede to turn in this way? Looking at SCOX's history the volumes have gone gangbusters in the last four weeks or so. In which case we fall back to our Plan B and which is to short the stock for fun (and profit!!!!) and watch them bleed out - anyone care to opine what kind of timeframe would make sense for a put contract if this thing is actually going to court?
Second; The features you mention are (I think) quite well explained be Dessmond Morris's 'Aquatic Ape' hypothesis.
Actually it was Alister Hardy who first coined the hypothesis. Desmond Morris mentions it in passing in 'The Naked Ape' and it was picked up by Elaine Morgan as an alternative to what she called 'The Mighty Hunter' narrative of human origins in her 1972 pop feminism book 'The Descent Of Woman'. It is Morgan who is the published writer most identified with Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.
Pro/anti flamefests are a regular occurence on various human origins fora which is probably why the earlier post got moderated as flamebait.
Because MSoft only has two money making product sets (Windows and Office) - every other venture they have launched in order to open up a new revenue stream has (so far) proven to be a dud. Lets break these profit centres down a bit...
Windows makes money because it is the default OS solution for the desktop, a position which it inherited from DOS and which arose because it was in the right place at the right time for the personal computing boom. This lock on the desktop has been leveraged to make a creditable showing in the workstation, servers and enteprise solutions space.
Office is a money maker because MSoft were able to leverage their lock on the desktop OS in order to torpedo their competition and/or use the massive pile of money they had accumulated from the desktop OS to aquire niche application products (Visio for diagrams, FoxPro for databases etc).
The pattern is clear. MSoft is extremely bad at bringing products to market or recognising and breaking into new spaces in the competitive landscape. In the near 30 years of their existence they have only managed to pull it off successfully four times (desktop OS, high end OS, Office, the browser wars). Other than the first (which was luck) each time this has been because they were able to leverage their OS lock in order to sharpen their product's edge and/or kneecap the competition.
The consequence of this is that the OS lock is the third rail for MSoft - anything that threatens this lock is a 'kill the company' issue and, more immediately, is a 'kill the shareprice' issue (this is important because MSoft's steroidal shareprice has allowed them to do some extremely aggressive financial engineering around their options in order to massage their after-tax profits stream, the warchest that the OS cash cow provides has been extremely useful as well of course).
Offering Office on their rising competitor in the desktop OS space (something they haven't had to deal with since the late 80s) would be a priceless endorsement of (and remove a significant barrier to adoption for) that competitor. It would be a significant blow to the cornerstone and foundation of every strategic success they have achieved in their history, knock the bottom out of one half of their current revenue stream and poison their shareprice. From Steve Ballmer's perspective these considerations make it far from a no brainer.
I'm not the original poster but I'm guessing that they would say nope. As would I. If they haven't paid for my work then they don't get the deliverable.
Once payment has been made they receive the code (along with binaries, support documentation, config files whatever was agreed) and at that point its theirs to do with as they please - if they want to give away copies of what they've just paid for then that's their affair.
Slashdot Mirror
A simple (and somewhat snarky) analysis, but basically sound - as the poster upthread mentions, any eco-wisdom held by aboriginal societies is the hard won product of trial and error and there are a number of interesting examples in the worldwide archaeological record of societies running head-on into environmental crises.
It wasn't just horses mind, there were a number of large mammal and avian species that went extinct around the time we think humans first made it to the Americas.
These species had one critical weakness - they had no instinctive fear of bipedal hairless apes. Failing to co-evolve for several million years with humans and proto-humans has proven to be a fatal evolutionary flaw for a huge number of prey species. The poster child of this phenomenon is the Dodo - people reported being able to walk up to these large, flightless pigeons and brain them with clubs - they literally had no idea what hit them.
Regards
Luke
I take your point about famous people sounding off for the sake of it.
However Card is a writer who depends upon is more significant (especially if he is arguing against what 'conventional thinking' might expect him to argue).
Ditto for the various musicians quoted in the other article.
Regards
Luke
As you say your points are specific to your experience and shouldn't be taken as a sweeping generalisation. I work for an SI consultancy and have had experience working with staff from our Bangalore/Chennai off-shoring subsidiary and I certainly recognise some of the issues you touch upon; however in my experience these factors weren't as acute as the situation you describe but that may well be down to my company being able to cherry-pick better quality staff in India. There's also the possibility that the cultural/linguistic fit between British and Indian staff makes your second point less of a problem for us (certainly we are better placed to manage the timezone problem in Britain).
Nevertheless you put your finger on some of the key risks when you opt for outsourcing as a solution to project costs. Certainly you can resource a project at a fraction of the price (my company's staff from Bangalore, Chennai or Kuala Lumpur are about a quarter the price of their European or NAmerican colleagues) - but you immediately add in various 'frictions' to the project which have to be managed around or ammeliorated and, unless running complex IT projects is part of your core business, there's a serious question about whether you should be doing this stuff yourself rather than employing specialists (like my company...) to do it for you.
To a certain extent this sort of thing will sort itself out over the next few years. Outsourcing to India is a child of the Y2k fracas and the dotcom bubble - a lot of the problems you allude to will only become apparent to the less clueful PHBs once they've had their fingers burned, at which point the garderene rush to Bangalore and points east will ease off somewhat. Having said that the phenomenon isn't going to disappear. The Indian software business is maturing fast, with the international SI consultancies already hip-deep in the sector and the sort of knowledge, skillsets and culture required to pull this sort of thing off effectively starting to spread to second and third tier players. Expect to see a lot of the cultural and professional problems you allude to becoming less significant, along with an ongoing erosion of Bangalore's price advantage wrt other regions of India (this is already happening) and the Far East.
Regards
Luke
I think you meant that IT workers require a degree level education right? Or is your workplace hiring 10 year olds for their entry level coding positions?
Actually IT as a mandatory degree level occupation (in the UK at least) is a relatively recent phenomenon. I went to school in the 80s and had classmates who were looking at getting into Systems Analysis with just A-levels (the UK equivalent of a HS diploma near enough) and during the 90s I have worked in IT with a number of people who didn't have a degree. Generally these are older colleagues who came into the business when it was (much more realistically) regarded as more 'skilled-trade/technical' than 'managerial/professional'. Clearly there is nothing magical about a university education when it comes to the skillsets, attitudes and mentalities required to do IT work at a reasonable level of competence.
I agree with the earlier poster that IT workers have largely duped themselves into believing they are 'owning class' as a virtue of their occupation (rather than as a side benefit of being able to salt away some of their wage surplus into capital should they so choose) and are in for a series of rude shocks as this mis-categorisation corrects itself. Look at what happened to frame-loom weavers in the UK during the industrial revolution to get an idea of the sort of structural adjustments to the IT labour market that are likely in store over the next couple of decades.
Outsourcing is by no means a universal panacea but the days of codemonkeys being able to command professional/managerial style salaries without bringing at least some of the interpersonal, cultural or domain expertise skillsets that professional/managerial types are selling are fading fast. The message for the future is to upskill or crosstrain - I'd suggest something like plumbing as a fallback trade. I don't know what its like stateside but good plumbers are like gold-dust in London; they pull down 60-80k pa if they work for themselves and can't be outsourced to SE Asia.
Regards
Luke
Williams has gone on record as saying that he has no problem with people filesharing his stuff. PR flacks from his label (he recently signed an $80 million deal with EMI) were somewhat tight-lipped in response but didn't upbraid him (publicly at least).
Of course RW hasn't broken the US market so the RIAA probably regard him as some kind of granola throwing hippie independant rather than a proper artist like Lars Ulrich.
Regards
Luke
IMO it shows that Bowie saw the straws in the wind, decided to get out while the getting was good and was happy to stick it to those who bought his bond. You could argue that this was ethically a bit iffy on Bowie's part but personally I'm not too bothered by this particular bit of sharp business practise. Anyone able to come up with the $55 million for this deal should have done their DD.
I'm too lazy to look it up - does anyone know who the buyers of the Bowie bond were? Double points to the Slim White Duke if he managed to get a thick wedge of RIAA-member moolah for the revenue stream on his back catalogue.
Regards
Luke
You're right, but so is the other guy.
The HG lifestyle can be better (for certain values of better) but it doesn't support the sort of population densities achievable with neolithic revolution technologies, so we can't go back without a 95+% die off - even though the survivors might be less stressed, have a better diet etc.
Regards
Luke
Yeah, but the article wasn't proposing a man-rated system either. He was outlining a system for cheap, dumb and frequent cargo lifters.
The underlying question - why are our current rockets two to three orders of magnitude more expensive than what the Nazi V-rocketry programme achieved - is a very interesting one. As he says towards the end of the article, half a billion per year to found a mass cargo LEO industry seems like chump change for an industrialised nation (or even a large corporate). It makes me wonder why someone out of the 20 or so potential actors with sufficient scale hasn't tried to do this already. Presumably its because there are some gotchas that were smoothed over or ignored in the article, but I don't know enough about aerospace engineering to critique it. Is there anyone out there who can?
Regards
Luke
Robert, with respect, you aren't helping the cause with these missives. Misuse of capitalisation and sloppy email-speak are the internet age equivalent of writing a letter in green ink; whilst making vague threats and ranting about LAWYERS and BIG SOFTWARE CORPORATIONS plants you firmly in McCarthy's 'kooks and cranks' mental box.
People if you are going to contact a legislator on this issue you've got to make it count! Use short, punchy sentences written in grammatically correct, properly spelled English (or French or whatever). Explain what you are opposed to and why you are opposed. Outline what you want the legislator to do about it. Use simple examples to support your arguments and avoid rambling, off-topic digressions. Do not pepper your letter with dark mutterings about the Gnomes of Zurich, UN black helicopters, corrupt politicians or sleazy lawyers. Be polite and thank them for their time. Remember to include a return address.
Once you've finished save the file and then go and do something else for bit - walk the dog, go for a run, relax with friends in the pub - whatever. Once you've cooled off come back, read your draft and correct the spelling mistakes that leap off the screen at you. Try and get someone (preferably a non-geek) to look at the letter. Listen to their comments. Perhaps redraft a couple of sections in response to what they say.
Finally, when you are happy with your final version, print it off onto a decent weight of paper, sign it and send it to your intended recipient via snail-mail.
Regards
Luke
As the AC mentioned, he is actually a she.
I've met Glenys Kinnock a couple of times and she is, personally, a pretty sharp cookie but technology issues aren't her primary focus as a legislator and this reply has all the hallmarks of a formula reply - chances are she has a bundle of these handed to her for signature by a staffer once a week or so.
Its probably worthwhile trying again with a reasoned rebuttal to the points in the letter - provided its understood that at this point you are hoping to catch the ear of whichever member of her staff is fielding letters on this issue.
The realities of life as an MEP are such that she can't be fully up to speed on all issues that come up to vote and so will trust to parliament's division of labour and accept the rapporteur's position unless given a reason to take an interest. The objective here is to get the issue onto her radar screen so that she engages with the arguments herself and one of the ways to do that is to create a noticeable trend of cogently argued letters in her postbag. Once you have her attention, I think you have a solid chance of persuading her of the merits of the anti case - as I said before she's a bright woman.
Regards
Luke
There's a protest and lobbying meeting being organised at the European Parliament next Wednesday in order to get an anti software patents message across in advance of the vote scheduled for Monday week.
The antis have been slow getting themsleves organised and sending a message more sophisticated than "Stop being a tool of capitalist imperialist pigs!" - but something is happening.
Regards
Luke
We aren't stunting our evolution, evolution continues to grind away in its blind fashion - what we're doing is changing the environment within which evolution is occurring. Eventually this will result in humans being more adapted for a 'civilised' environment.
This assumes of course that we can maintain ourselves in this 'civilised' state long enough for it to register in evolutionary time - the ~400 generations since the neolithic revolution isn't really long enough for significant evolutionary changes to occur.
Regards
Luke
Why is it stupid? There are a whole raft of societal, political, scientific and artistic changes we can point to in our history which achieved acceptance through a demographic shift as the older generation died off. It is possible that stabilising people's biological age in their late 20s or so will mean that they retain a youthful flexibility, energy and inventiveness but I don't think that's something that can just be blithely assumed - even if they retain much of their youthful vigour I suspect that many of their attitudes, preferences and opinions will tend to get fixed fairly early in life and remain unchanged unless shaken up. Something like the pattern of working several careers through life that you describe might be one way to prod people out of comfortable ruts. Its unlikely to be sufficient however and, even with a bunch of legal, fiscal and professional changes in place my gut feel is that post-senescent societies would be far slower moving than we are used to. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it would be a different thing.
Yeah but that's in today's world which, as you said at the top of your post, isn't likely to be how things work. In a world where professional certifications take 25 years, 200 year mortgages are the norm and newcomers to a field have competitors with several decades or centuries of tacit knowledge and industry contacts how will youngsters catch up in a decade?
While a move into space may not be essential, I don't think its a stupid prediction. You accept that birth rates will need to radically decline to align with the mortality rates of a post-senescent society and this is not going to happen straight away. This means that there will be a population explosion akin to that which accompanied the collapse in infant mortality at the turn of the C19th/20th. My wild-ass stab in the dark is that the global human population doubles within 100 years of anti-senescent technologies becoming available before a second demographic shift kicks in which leads to a gradual reduction in population over several centuries as accidents and violence abrade the bulge away. Virtual reality isn't going to help us meet the resource needs of ~15 billion humans over several centuries and the technology required to move into cyberspace (assuming people would want to go) is a hell of a lot more hypothetical than those required for a move into space.
This is not stupid. The prices will certainly drop (I don't need to share your faith in magitech to agree with this) but the treatments will go to the rich preferentially for the same reasons that medical treatments go to the rich today - their control of societal resources drives research and distribution priorities. This is a fact of human nature and social organisation that won't go away any time soon.
Actually I am more pessimistic than the original poster, as I suspect that the availability of anti-senescent treatments will confer an 'immortality advantage' upon t
There's also the Vultus takeover - that's moved about $3 million of stock backed insta-money out of SCO and into the Canopy Group.
Its still small potatoes when compared to the Boeskys of this world but $4+ mill (so far) isn't a bad little score for six months work.
Regards
Luke
I'm not a lawyer either, but I think the anonymous licensee is in the clear. By selling a license SCO has breached the terms of the GPL which gets its (so far untested) legal muscle from copyright law.
My understanding is that provided the licensee doesn't onwardly distribute their 'licensed' code or anything that could be classed as a derived work, then they aren't guilty of an infringement. SCO are guilty of an infringement of course and so could be sued by anyone who holds copyright to any part of the kernel for breaching the terms laid out in the GPL under which SCO was given permission to distribute, modify and create derived works from the kernel. But we knew this already.
Regards
Luke
Don't forget the Vultus acquisition. This was a Canopy group 'sibling' of SCO that they bought using their pumped up stock price. Quite a neat way to transfer funds from SCO to their Canopy Group masters without triggering as many 'insider selling' alarms.
Regards
Luke
Yeah, but the bond would cost money. Given the lack of case we stongly suspect that they have, it would cost a lot of money - and for what? It might give slashdotters pause for thought ("Uh-oh... maybe they actually have a case!") but it wouldn't improve the effectiveness of the FUD amongst the general public by much.
Regards
Luke
The life expectancy was so low because the infant mortality was high. As a hunter-gatherer if you make it out of childhood you have a pretty good chance of making it into old age (50s plus).
IMO the key fact behind Atkins, which the earlier poster was alluding to, is that humans evolved on a diet which was carbohydrate poor in comparison with agricultural societies and, barring occasional honey strikes, had no access to refined carbohydrates.
Any criticism of a regime which replicates our low carb past has to explain how it was that humans managed to survive on such a dangerous diet throughout the bulk of our evolutionary history and this is a point that I haven't seen the anti-Atkins people address adequately.
Regards
Luke
And yet sometimes this actually works.
A job I did a few years back was based on a prototype made up of a bunch of excel spreadsheets that someone had knocked together, then got a couple of contractors in for a few weeks to do some macros and such.
We were brought in to turn it in to something a bit more useful using (try not to laugh) VB and Access.
At the time this project gave me all sorts of grief, what with the inadequate specs, ridiculous schedule, clueless client (not stupid, just ignorant) and the consequential time and budget overruns - in the end we took eight months rather than three, it cost nearly twice as much (£150k vs £90k) and we had to kludge around crappy Msoft tools and a stupid design approach in ways that made me very unhappy.
But... that silly little, non-scaleable app is legendary at the client. Its been deployed all over the place and has made them millions in efficiency gains over the last four years. I just wish we'd been a bit more canny when we negotiated the contract on that sucker and inserted an ongoing profit share or something.
Regards
Luke
Preach it brother.... Not that its much different on the private side of the fence. I mostly do systems integration work for banks and insurance companies and I've seen exactly the same sort of insanity. I worked on an outsourcing tender for a couple of months last year (no names, but the client was a *big* multinational bank - we were subbing to a prime contractor who were as blue as the bank's livery). These guys (the bank) had fifteen different payment and clearing systems in operation, each one the early phase deployment of a 'strategic project to consolidate and rationalise our payment systems' that ran into the sand before achieving its objectives and each one subtly (or not so subtly) different from all the others. They had a cost-centre accounting methodology that created incentives so peverse they were wearing scarlet PVC jump suits at the bid review meetings and a political culture that would give Catbert a grey coat. I could go on but the bids got canned before contractors were selected - it turned out the whole thing was a byeproduct of sundry board level political shenanigans and wasn't ever a serious ITT. We burned over a hundred man-days (the Blue Boys much more) on something that was mostly a dodge to get some senior managers within the client fired. Regards Luke
Selected quotes:
"In other words, like many religious folk, the Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement are a) convinced of their own righteousness, and b) sure the whole world, including judges, will agree.
They should wake up. SCO may not be very good at making a profit by selling software... [but] it is very good at getting what it wants from other companies."
"Yarro [CEO of Canopy Group who are pulling SCO's strings on this] won't apologize for the IBM lawsuit. "I'm not a guy who goes away quietly in the night. I fight," he says. "If you take something from me, if you break a promise, I'm going to come after you.""
"The IBM lawsuit could bring a windfall to Canopy, which owns 46% of SCO. Another beneficiary could be John Wall, chief executive of Vista.com, a Redmond, Wash., company that last August struck a licensing arrangement with SCO. Wall got 800,000 shares of SCO stock in the deal and still holds 600,000, making him SCO's biggest individual shareholder after Canopy. Those shares, which were worth about $1 each when Wall made the deal, now trade above $10." [my emphasis]
"These guys in Utah are no dummies. The crunchies in the Linux community should be paying more attention."
Regards
Luke
OK, there have been any number of posts saying how this lawsuit is some kind of scam by SCO insiders.
/.ers mobilise it?
Initially the strategy was probably to get bought out by IBM. Plan B seems to be hype the lawsuit, ride shareprice up and sell-out at a healthy profit, although this seems to carry a pretty hefty regulatory risk for the principals unless they can spin out their death spiral long enough for their recent transactions to pass beyond the 9-month window for an SEC investigation once they declare bankruptcy (maybe there's a deep, dark Plan C - acquisition by Somebody Else to forestall an SEC investigation).
Now my thinking is that if there was enough money in the market shorting SCOX, this would undercut the lawsuit hype and crash the company price faster than the the SCO board were anticipating, forcing them to bail early and exposing them to the SEC investigation (or fall back to Plan C if such a thing exists). A nice side-effect being that the holders of the short contracts on SCOX would make a profit on the deal.
So the question is: what kind of money would move the market against SCOX's pump'n'dump operation and could the serried ranks of
"I need put options... lots of put options."
Or is the garderine herd of day-traders too large a stampede to turn in this way? Looking at SCOX's history the volumes have gone gangbusters in the last four weeks or so. In which case we fall back to our Plan B and which is to short the stock for fun (and profit!!!!) and watch them bleed out - anyone care to opine what kind of timeframe would make sense for a put contract if this thing is actually going to court?
Regards
Luke
Actually it was Alister Hardy who first coined the hypothesis. Desmond Morris mentions it in passing in 'The Naked Ape' and it was picked up by Elaine Morgan as an alternative to what she called 'The Mighty Hunter' narrative of human origins in her 1972 pop feminism book 'The Descent Of Woman'. It is Morgan who is the published writer most identified with Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.
Pro/anti flamefests are a regular occurence on various human origins fora which is probably why the earlier post got moderated as flamebait.
Regards
Luke
Because MSoft only has two money making product sets (Windows and Office) - every other venture they have launched in order to open up a new revenue stream has (so far) proven to be a dud. Lets break these profit centres down a bit...
Windows makes money because it is the default OS solution for the desktop, a position which it inherited from DOS and which arose because it was in the right place at the right time for the personal computing boom. This lock on the desktop has been leveraged to make a creditable showing in the workstation, servers and enteprise solutions space.
Office is a money maker because MSoft were able to leverage their lock on the desktop OS in order to torpedo their competition and/or use the massive pile of money they had accumulated from the desktop OS to aquire niche application products (Visio for diagrams, FoxPro for databases etc).
The pattern is clear. MSoft is extremely bad at bringing products to market or recognising and breaking into new spaces in the competitive landscape. In the near 30 years of their existence they have only managed to pull it off successfully four times (desktop OS, high end OS, Office, the browser wars). Other than the first (which was luck) each time this has been because they were able to leverage their OS lock in order to sharpen their product's edge and/or kneecap the competition.
The consequence of this is that the OS lock is the third rail for MSoft - anything that threatens this lock is a 'kill the company' issue and, more immediately, is a 'kill the shareprice' issue (this is important because MSoft's steroidal shareprice has allowed them to do some extremely aggressive financial engineering around their options in order to massage their after-tax profits stream, the warchest that the OS cash cow provides has been extremely useful as well of course).
Offering Office on their rising competitor in the desktop OS space (something they haven't had to deal with since the late 80s) would be a priceless endorsement of (and remove a significant barrier to adoption for) that competitor. It would be a significant blow to the cornerstone and foundation of every strategic success they have achieved in their history, knock the bottom out of one half of their current revenue stream and poison their shareprice. From Steve Ballmer's perspective these considerations make it far from a no brainer.
Regards
Luke
I'm not the original poster but I'm guessing that they would say nope. As would I. If they haven't paid for my work then they don't get the deliverable.
Once payment has been made they receive the code (along with binaries, support documentation, config files whatever was agreed) and at that point its theirs to do with as they please - if they want to give away copies of what they've just paid for then that's their affair.
Regards
Luke