Such optimism and belief in the capitalist system.
You should be living down here in the lower
48.
My view paraphrases something that Churchill said:
Capitalism is the worst possible system.
Except for all of the others. Yes
I believe in the power of markets and their
ability in many cases to effiently allocate
resources and generate wealth. But capitalism
also has its "red claw" side as well.
Basicly wealth follows a power law distribution
called the Pareto distribution. The result of
this for as long as capitalism has existed is
that a few percent of the population control
most of the wealth. In republics there is a
constant struggle to shift this curve so that
there is more distribution to more people.
Right now the wealthy, at least in the US
are winning the distribution struggle.
The US has been living off of debut. This
is true of individuals and of the country
as a whole. The vaunted standard of living
in the US is not really much better than
Europe or Canada. And income has largely
stagnated in the last decade or so as
well paying manufacturing jobs are moving
offshore.
Perhaps average income has increased, but not
the median income. The wealthy are doing well
and until 2000 technology workers were doing
well. Now may professions are threatened by
offshoring. For more on this see my
essay
An Economics Question.
Do they just get sucked out of the economy to disappear, or do they eventually go back in? I think they would go back in eventually, when those rich fat cats pay their gardeners and maids and buy their new cars and all that stuff.
I'm assuming that this comment is meant
seriously and that I did not miss the drips
of irony (if I'm wrong, mod this post funny, or
maybe mod it funny anyway).
Basicly you're saying that you're willing
to reduce your privacy further for the "promise"
of what is, in effect, trickle down economics
(e.g., its fine for the fat cats to be rich,
they'll spend their money and it will trickle
down to the "little people").
If trickle down economics really worked then
those tax cuts for the rich and offshoring of
US jobs really would be great for the US.
We'd get lots of cheap stuff and lots of
high paying jobs. This is not the world
I see around me.
The only problem is that trickle down economics
is a long discredited theory. What actually
happens in that wealth becomes even more
concentrated in the hands of a few.
Let us assume that we have a magic proof system
that will prove that our software matches our
specification.
So what do we use to define the specification?
Certainly not a natural language like english.
Natural languages are full of ambiguity. So
we'll use a formal specification language.
However, such a language is basicly like a
programming language, perhaps supporting more
mathematical formalism (maybe single assignment).
While our formal proof system can prove that
the specification is equal to our executable
software, we still can't show that the
specification is what we intended (e.g., the
specification may have bugs).
Even if our specification is magically guaranteed
to be exactly what we intended, properly specifying
the design as we understand it, this does not
address the problem that systems fail because
of the unexpected.
There are language systems that allow
some level of proof. For example, in logic
synthesis, where binary logic networks for
VLSI can be generated from the subsets of
Verilog and VHDL languages, it is possible to prove that
two designs are or are not the same by using
logical reduction. This can be useful in
verification and testing. But it does not change
the fact that VLSI designs, just like software
designs, have bugs (also known as design errors).
Even leaving the concerns about the notation to specify a problem,
software perfection could only be theoretically
achieved when the
problem can be completely specified. Many
of the critical systems where there is a lot
of interest in software correctness are very
complicated (e.g., modern fighter jets).
The exact requirements for these systems cannot
be specified since their behavior under all
conditions cannot be known. So the software will always be
imperfect. What we hope is that the software
is not imperfect in ways that cause death.
Yes, I admit it! It's true that I have not kept up with developments in
Ada. I'm still scared by horror inflicted by
the original version. And the trauma produced
by the Ada design philosophy which produced
languages like VHDL.
OK, so they added objects, interfaces and other
wonders of modern languages. But it still does
not change the fact that Ada is not exactly in
the main stream. To continue my walk out
on the limbs of issues with which I am only shallowly
familiar, I'll speculate that very few
people would use Ada if it was not mandated by
their sponsors (e.g., the Dept. of Defense).
And what they did in Ada would have been impossible in C++. It's significant that SPARK code will run EXACTLY the same on all compliant Ada compilers. No platform dependancies, no ambiguities, no undefined behavior... ALWAYS the same. You simply can't possibly define a subset of C++ which would be able to make those promises. I don't know if it would be possible with Java; since there's no formal specification of Java, probably not.
I'm not sure what you meant by formal
specification here. As I recall someone
did a huge denotational semantic specification
of Ada. In theory this massive specification
defined exactly what Ada's semantics are.
The only problem is that such a specification
is, in practice, useless. For even simple
constructs, the denotational semantic
description is huge. And as with any formalism,
there is always the opportunity for error.
Given the complexity of denotational semantics
I suspect that few people other than the author
ever read the whole thing.
So that fact that
Ada had DoD funding for a denotational semantic
specification
and Java does not does have such a specification does not make Ada more portable
and reliable (in the sense that a piece of code
will produce the same result on different
platforms).
The idea of adding assertions and other formal
descriptions of the intended semantics has
some merit. But the realization is SPARC is
unfortunate.
As I recall, the gang at Sun who did Java
mentioned that they used C/C++ as the basis for
Java because they wanted the language to be
used. Choosing Ada as the basis for anything
guarantees that few people will use it. The
module paradigm for languages (used by Ada
and Modula-2) is not as powerful
as the object model. This is one reason that
C++/Java have caught on and Ada/Modula-2 are
consigned to history.
Finally, just because you have a specification
and code that exactly implements this specification
does not mean that the application will not
result in unintended results (e.g., the death
of users or others). Frequently the problems
encountered with software are a result of
conditions that the designers did not forsee.
That is, things that were not defined in the
specification.
George Gilder seems to have succeeded solely on
the basis of his belief in his own power as
a prophet of the future. As those who subscribed
to his stock market newsletter found, he was a
legend in his own mind, not in reality.
George Gilder was a largely unknown hack author of
little read books that many would regard as sexist
before he wrote Wealth and Poverty which
caught on with the Reagan administration
believers in "supply side" economics (we know this
today as the economics of tax cuts and massive
federal budget deficts). Although "supply side"
economics has returned, it was largely out of
favor with the administration of Bush Sr. and
the balanced budget faction of the Clinton
administration. So Gilder reinvented himself
as a technology guru. The fact that he has no
background what-so-ever in science or technology
did not stop him. He interviewed those who did
and wrote up his impressions in breathless terms.
The peak of Gilder's trajectory was his stock
market newsletter which had thousands of subscribers
who were willing to pay thousands of dollars for
the privilege of reading the thoughts of the
master. This and the opportunity to get early
access to Gilder's hype which was moving the market
in many cases.
Then there was the fall. As the 2000 stock market
crash erased the value of many of the stocks that
Gilder touted, his subscribers deserted him in
droves, much poorer for the experience.
Gilder had invested in the stocks that he
hyped and his investments were largely
wiped out. Gilder
was also making money holding conferences and was
left with conference committements and no attendees.
In the end he was heavily in debt, his bubble
wealth wiped out.
But true ego maniacs and pundits never die. They
just continue the process of reinvention, whether
as Governor of California or as an expert in
telecommunications. So here we see Gilder again
blowing hot air on topics that he has a shallow
understanding of. And, as always, coloring his
presentation with the usual Republican freemarket
ideology (regulation bad, taxes bad, poor people weak and shiftless, unrestained
free market good, rich people good).
Re:Boiled clean of syphilis
on
The Confusion
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have not read The Confusion, so I can't
comment on the context of boiled clean of
syphilis. But I seem to recall that along
with mercury, one of the treatments for syphilis
was to infect the person who had syhpilis with
a non-human targeted malaria parasite (something
like horse malaria). The body would eventually
wipe out the malaria infection since it could
not properly reproduce in human red blood cells.
The malaria infection would cause
high fever (104 F.) which would harm (kill?) the
syphilis bacillus. Of course racking fever was
no picnic. But neither was heavy metal poisoning
caused by mercury (mercury just got rid of the
symptoms, not the syphilis infection).
I also have a vague recollection that the malaria
treatment may have continued after antibiotics
were discovered as a treatment for third stage
syphilis (which infects the brain). The early
antibiotics did not cross the blood/brain
barrier and I'm not sure they could be injected
into the spine. (Obviously I'm not a medical
doctor, nor do I play one on television).
The problem with boiling is that it would raise
the temperature on the outside more than the
inside unless it were done very slowly. But
the malaria "treatment" was not known until the
1800s, after the time in which the book is set.
What is "blatantly obvious" is not always obvious.
Also, some of the things that we are sure are
obvious and clearly true turn out to be false.
Human history is so full of examples that I
will not attempt to list them here.
Rational inquiry is a framework for trying to
show that what we "know" is actually true.
Economics as a broad topic has many faults.
Economists adopt theories as a matter of faith
or simply because the math works out. But there
are good economists who do not fall prey to these
faults. In my opinion, Brian Arthur is one of
them.
The theory of "path dependence" is actually
controversal. This was argued out in the
US governments anti-trust case. Brian Arthur
was one of the people who argued for the
Government. Other economists, like Paul
Krugman, have been rather scathing in their
rebuttal of Arthur's theories. So this is
certainly not an area that everyone things
is obvious.
And I don't know if Brian Arthur makes "good
money" off his thories. I think that he is
a full professor, so he probably makes
a salary in the low six figures. And so far
I have not read that they are offshore outsourcing
jobs for economists. So yeah, perhaps a
career change would be a good thing.
The economist Brian Arthur is one of the
proponents of the theory of
path dependence. In path dependence something
is adopted for reasons that might be determined by
chance (e.g., the adoption of MS/DOS) or by
some related feature (C became popular in part
because of UNIX's popularity).
The widespread use of C and C++, languages without
bounds checking in a world where we can afford
bounds checking, is not so much a matter of
logical decision as history. C became popular,
C++ evolved from C and provided a some really
useful features (objects, expressed as classes).
Once C++ started to catch on, people used C++
because others used it and an infrastructure
developed (e.g., compilers, libraries, books).
In sort, the use of C++ is, to a degree, a
result of path dependence. Once path dependent
characteristics start to appear, choices are not
necessarily made on technical virtue. In fact, one could
probably say that the times when we make purely
rational, engineering based decisions (feature
X is important so I'll use language Y) are
outweighed by the times when we decide on other
criteria (my boss say's we're gonna use language
Z).
Someone mentioned that we over estimate the
value of our data. That's probably true.
While I acknowledge this, I've thought of the
archiving issue too.
I've been working on my web site www.bearcave.com since
1995. The material published on this web site
represents the largest work I've completed that
does not belong to someone else. I intend to
keep adding to it. In the long run it may
represent the largest work I've accomplished in
my life.
Egotist that I am,
I'd like it to survive me. I have searched
and I did not find any web repository except
for the Internet Archive, which attempts to archive the
Internet. The Internet Archive has archived
bearcave.com, so there is some chance that
my work will be around when I'm not. The way things are
going there will probably come a time when
you can carry around the current Internet
Archive in your pocket, so the costs of
archiving should drop, which also provides
some hope that the Internet Archive data itself
will survive.
Unfortunately, the Internet Archive is not
an ideal solution.
Given bandwidth issues, they cannot
afford to update too frequently. Also, while the Internet
Archive is locally searchable,
I don't think that is is searchable by search
engines like Google. So material on the Internet
Archive is not as accessible as other material
on the Web.
There appears to be a possible business here
(perhaps at the non-profit level). I'd
be willing to pay money into an escrow account
and a monthly fee to have my web site scanned
weekly. The when I die my web site would no
longer be scanned and my data be available to
the web on the new site.
The problem with such a business is that it
would probably have to be set up as a non-profit.
The concentration of an archiving business is
to pay its bills and survive in the long term,
not make lots of money for its founders or
shareholders.
There are some technical complexities as well.
Internal links between web site pages would have to be changed so that they worked at the
new location. But it should
not be too difficult to write conversion
software.
Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty tired of hearing this
argument about how Indian's are kicking American
butt because you're all so good.
Indian has not innovated anything in hundreds or
thousands of years. Indians had to come to the
US become innovators. Every piece of technology
you're using was invented and developed in the
West (in some cases by Indian's living here). From the base process of semicondustors
to the routers you use for your Internet
connection.
Lets look at publications: even the excellent
schools like the Indian Institute of Technology
do not have the output of Stanford, MIT
Carniegie Mellon and the University of
California. So why is this?
Next time you get on your high horse about how
great India is think about the cast system.
The fact that even today some widows in India
still feel that they have to
burn themselve
to death. Or how about the religious
riots? Or the fact that the US only just
pulled back India and Pakistan from the brink
of nuclear war.
The only reason that Indian software engineers
can compete with software engineers in the
United States is that the Indian cost of living
is a tiny fraction of that in California and
Indian software engineers are cheap labor.
We're no smarter than you are, nor are you any
smarter than we are. There are excellent people
in both countries. But Indians are cheap
and accessible because of the Internet that
has been provided by the West.
And then there is agriculture.
Even without the massive farm price supports
India's agriculture could not compete with the
US which uses massive amounts of automation and
has access to capital that India does not.
This allows the US to produce a vast qunatity
of agricultural products with only a small
fraction of its population.
Well, what can we expect from a poster who uses
"u" for "you" and does not properly captialize
the start of their sentences.
This weak argument about the productivity of the
rest of the world entirely ignores a number of
factors, one of the most important of which is
the US trade deficit. The US trade deficit allows
people in the US to keep buying cheap good
from foreign countries without the dollar rising
against those currencies. The deficit subsidizes
US consumption. This deficit is currently being
financed by China and Japan. It cannot continue
forever.
Finally, the argument assumes that conditions
are static. The economics of 200 years ago is
like the economics of today. That US trade
with Europe is like US trade with China and
India. All untrue.
Re:Is Ironport a black hat? MOD up parent please!
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A very interesting post. I would be interested
in reading other slashdotter's information and
views on Ironport.
If Ironport is involved
in supporting spammers, then other spammers have some
reason to sue perhaps. After all, if they are using
false pretenses (SpamCop is an anti-spam site)
to hurt their competition this might be reason
for a legal action. And the case would not
necessarily be decided on issues involving spam
but rather fraud and illegal competition.
(Standard disclaimer: I'm Not A Lawyer and
I don't play one on television).
I have to wonder how Ironport can justify
"bulk email" support. There was a Wall Street
Journal article about a clown who actually
opted in for spam. But the number of people
who do this is way too small to support
any business model that I can think of. So
Ironport claiming to support opt-in lists seems
like a shallow way to justify
supporting spammers.
Nor does it seem reasonable that they would
support valid commercial email lists.
Groups that someone already have a relationship with
(for example, the IEEE) send email from their
own addresses. They don't need Ironport.
This also allows a group to handle their own
email list removal.
An interesting post on the differences between
Indian and US development. Thanks for posting
manavendra. Like many US software
engineers, I have more than a passing
interest
in our competition in India.
There is an odd dynamic here. The view with
some people who outsource work from the US to
low wage countries like India seems to be that
if the people who are doing the outsourced
work are not as efficient, it doesn't matter
because they are so cheap. These same people
are either unable to analyze or ignorant of
software lifecycle cost.
I'm sure that there are development groups in
India that are as good and efficient as those
in the US. But for the sake of argument even
if it were true that all Indian groups
were mired in paperwork and ISO-standardization
it would not matter, since they are viewed as
cheap labor. Outsourcing now seems to have
reached the level of management fad, where
the sole justification is short term cost.
If you
run a corporate IT department you probably
have to justify to your masters why you are
not outsourcing.
Well, if you've got math, statistics, experience
with experimental work and perhaps some background
in statistical physics, I'd think of quantitative
finance. It is admittedly a small area and frequently
you have to live in the New York area, which is not
for everyone. But third world countries like India
and China are a long way from developing financial
markets like those in the US. So these jobs
are not likely to go overseas.
Or apply for a job
at a National Lab, where security clearances
are required. These jobs are not going overseas
either. The combination of physics, chemistry
and computer science would be a big assent in
getting such a job. And the National Labs
tend to pay better than government agencies.
The story of Daniel Robbins and Gentoo Linux seems
to me to be an example of software as art and
Daniel as a starving artist. And yes, I realize
that many other people were involved in the
Gentoo project. But one of the leading forces
behind Gentoo seems to be leaving because he can't afford
to take part in the project anymore.
The world does not owe artists, writers or
software engineers working on open source/
Free Software a living. But what is interesting
to me is that if, for the sake of argument, some
commercial entity, like Red Hat, were to come
along and start selling Gentoo at some point in
the future, Daniel Robbins and the rest of the
Gentoo developers would get as much as the
Linux developers got from Red Hat going public
(e.g., very little).
If software engineering jobs were not moving
overseas and our income was not under constant
downward pressure this might not be such a big
deal. There is a lot to be said for doing
something you love. For many people money
can't replace this. But when it gets to the
point where you can't pay your bills or are
unemplyed, survival becomes the important
issue.
Speaking for myself, the current state of
our industry throws into
question any open source project that can
be picked up by slick marketeers and resold to
end users. Since I'm not independently
wealthy, why should I work for free?
I have to wonder if Daniel Robbins is not asking
himself similar questions as he looks at the
state of his finances.
I've been reading the discussion about how you need
a degree. I suspect that this is probably true.
I have a degree from a University of California
school. My official job title is "computer
scientist" (as a friend of mine says, "yeah, I'm
a big fucking scientist").
I did not particularly enjoy my college experience.
One of the things that got me through it was
an understanding that this bias towards
degrees exists. But it's not clear to me that
this bias has any relation to reality. Especially
in computer science.
When I was in school, Pascal was the lingua
franca of computer science. C was just
starting to make its appearance. UNIX run on a PDP-11. Relational
databases existed only in research. Computer
science was so small that you could learn most
of what there was to know.
Computer science is so huge that one can hope
to master only a few areas in a lifetime.
Of the topics I learned in school, only the
math and algorithms and data structures are
unchanged. The vast majority of what I know,
I learned after graduation. The difference
between the self-taught and those who have
degrees is not very great ten years after
graduation. After all, in the end, we're all
self-taught.
I suspect that most hiring managers know this
on some level. But the possession of a degree
serves as a kind of barrier: those with a degree
make it to the next stage. Like some kind of career "bootcamp"
or hazing process.
So yes, a degree is useful. If this makes no
sense just remember, the world is illogical
and not of our making. In general you have
to accept the world as it is, even when
it does not make sense.
For example, why does a Harvard degree
carry more weight with some employers than, say, a degree from the
California State Polytechnical College at
San Louis Obispo (Cal Poly) which many would
argue has a better engineering department than
Harvard?
I agree that the patent system is broken. It is
difficult to do any work in compression or
image processing and not run into a patent.
Apparently this has hampered the JPEG 2000 work.
It seems to have taken them a long time to
settle on the wavelet function for the standard.
I've been told that this was due to patent concerns.
Lest you think this is idle thought, let me tell you that I worked on things in the late 70's and early '80's that will invalidate whatever patents that many other people have already patented to exclude others from making money on them. Watch closely, you'll recognize them when you see them.
I have to say that your post
comes across as pretty egotistical. You did
all this seminal work and its going to invalidate
lots of patents? First off, you're posting
as an Anonymous Coward. We'll never know.
And did you actually
publish this work so that it can be shown that
"all those patents" run into prior art? If you
did not publish, then you're simple a legend
in your own mind.
An excellent post. Thanks for putting in the
time to write it.
Since Hong Kong is no longer the unregulated
capitalist bastion it once was I think that the
United States may stand alone in its ideological
dedication to the idea of free trade (an ideology
which, handily enough, also increases corporate
profits). Most industrialized countries have
some kind of industrial policy. This policy
frequently includes protections.
As the parent post points out, there is no reason
that we should just blindly accept that
unrestricted trade is a good thing. Especially
when the same people who are assuring us of this
"fact" (e.g., economists) have argued for years
that the stock market is "efficient".
From what I can see, however, most people
don't understand that anything is happening to
them at all. The government says that the
ecomomy is growing. So I think that many people
believe that their experiece is isolated.
Yeah their income is not growing, or perhaps
even declining. They have no job security. They
are lucky to have health insurance. But they
don't connect this to the larger force of
globalization and fiscal policy (e.g., tax
cuts for the rich). I fear that things
will have to get really bad before enough people
wake up and start to push on politicians for
change.
I'm all for organizing. I'm a member of a
union that is associated with the Communication
Workers of America.
I would like to point out, however, that unfortunately
there was a difference between the Japanese
auto invasion and offshoring of US jobs.
In the case of Japanese imports, workers and
the companies where on the same side. While
workers were losing their jobs, the
US auto companies were losing money and market
share. The
politicians listened to the combination of
labor and corporations.
In this case labor (in our case, engineers
and IT folk) are not on the same side as the
companies. The companies profit by lowering
the wages they have to pay. They get lower
turnover among those they still employ in the
US (since there are fewer jobs to skip to).
So the employees lose, while the companies
gain. And so far it is companies that
are making political donations.
This does not mean that labor can't have an
effect. But it is important to realize that
it may not be as easy as it was for the United
Auto Workers working to put tarrifs in place
to protect the industry from the Japanese.
It is also worth remembering that
the United Auto Workers were well established when
the Japanese imports appeared. But it was not
always that way. Ford, I think it was, tried
to break
strikes by hiring Pinkerton thugs, armed with
ax handles. The unions are there because people
worked to put them there. While it's true that
many unions became corrupt and bureacratic
many of them did not start out that way. They
were built by their workers.
Organizing takes a lot of time. Many union
groups are small. That means that there is
no money to hire a professional staff. The
work is done by union members who also work
a full time job and have families. And while
they are working in the union, they may face
the danger of job retaliation.
So don't think that
some union is going to come along and fix it
for you. It can take a long time and it
starts with you.
You act like the victims of the system are
responsible for it. Would you say that the
victims of the Great Cultural Revolution got
what they deserved because they supported
Mao? Or would you say that Stalin's
victims also got what was coming to them
because they supported the Bolsheviks?
Obviously the effects of globalization and
offshoring are nothing like the excesses of
communism. But offshoring and globalization
do produce their share of misery. Just because
people live in a capitalist society does not
mean that they agree to a race to the bottom
with people in India and China.
The United States is a diverse place. Over half
of the voters voted against G.W. Bush
(remember, we have a strange electoral system
and an arguably corrupt Supreme Court, so the majority did not win the election).
An increasing number of people don't believe
that invading Iraq was a good idea. A majority
of people in the US finally understand that
there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Most people don't understand what is happening
to them. Their incomes are not going up.
If they are lucky enough to have a job, there
is no job stability. But they are just trying
to get by. Between the stress of making a
living and numbing their mind with television
there is not a whole lot of reflection. So
most people just believe what they are told.
And right now all the corporate and government
economists are telling that that offshoring
is good for them. "Yes you are losing your
job, but you'll get a better, higher paying
job to replace it". It takes people time
and sometimes serious misfortune to understand
that the system is not working for them. In
the Great Depression it took 25% unemployment.
Capitalism
and trade protection when it comes to moving
jobs to low wage countries is not incompatible.
If things keep going as they are, there is
no question that there will be protectionist
laws. Just as there have been with auto
imports. People in the West are not going to quietly sit
there while etheir income is averaged with
the incomes of the huge populations of India and China.
At least in the US there is still a lot of
print media that provides different perspectives
on reality. With the exception of India,
which has a more or less free press, this is
not true in most of Asia. At at least here
if enough voters make a fuss, change will
happen.
I've written a long, and perhaps turgid
essay that touches on many of these issues.
See
An Economics Question. This essay includes
a growing list of web published references.
We start with the homeless, then chip anyone who collects unemployment, then anyone who wants to get a job, and it works its way up.
Actually, I think that the article got it wrong.
The government actually wants to tattoo barcodes
on our foreheads. This will happen once the black
helecopters cross the Mexican border.
Then they'll take our guns. I've seen it all in
this movie Red Dawn.
OK, sorry. I'm having an attack of cynical
bitterness. Its a problem of our times.
On a more serious note...
Just remember: the government is not particularly
competent. Especially when it comes to
technology. This can be a problem but it can
also be a benefit. Most of the powerful tools
that government uses come from the private
sector. The government is not very good at
developing custom solutions. The US casino
industry has better surveillance technology
than many government agencies (although these
agencies are starting to buy from the companies
that supply the casino industry).
A recent article in the Dublin Times, by
Jonathan Swift, added another dimension to this
story.
Every state government in the United States is
struggling with deficits and social program
cutbacks. Once the RFIDs are implanted and
the software tracking is in place the second
phase of the program will be implemented.
Republicans in state and federal government
have proposed an expansion of the program to
harvest the homeless. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex)
noted "For too long have the homeless had
a free ride on the backs of taxpayers. This
program will be self-supporting without
additional government money". The product of this
second phase will be served in resturants
catering to wealthy clientele. A percentage of
the profits will be used to support social
services for those who are not harvested.
The Eudaemonic Pie was reissued
as Newtonian Casino (both titles
by Thomas Bass). These books recount the efforts
by Norman Packard, Doyne Farmer and others to
build a computer that could predict roulette.
Thomas Bass is also the author of the book
The Predictors. Packard and Farmer
when on to found Prediction Company which
builds models that attempt to do short term
stock market prediction. My review of
The Predictors can he found
here. I don't find Thomas Bass the most
reliable of reporters. My retrospective on
his book The Predictors
book can be found
here
As a number of posters have noted, EV1 has a
CEO that actually admits that, knowing what he
knows now, he would do something differently.
But one of the motivating factors developing
this understanding is the disapproval of the
technology community.
I've been wondering if public disapproval, which
has been so effective in this case, could work
when it comes to moving technology jobs to
low wage countries like India and China.
There was a big union movement that came out
of the Great Depression. A lot of people would
do their best to buy union made goods. Certainly
HP must have felt some heat from their CEOs
rather ill advised comments (something like
"Hey no one said you have any right to a job").
If US corporations felt that their sales were
being hurt by a "Buy American" campaign they would
change their behavior.
Of course there is an obvious problem with this
argument: in the case of EV1 there are many
hosting providers to choose from who have not
signed up with the evil SCO. But when it comes
to "Buying American" it is difficult to find
any multinational that is not moving
technology jobs overseas. So who are you
going to buy from?
Still, I think that public shame might have
some effect. John Kerry's remarks about
"Benedict Arnold CEOs" who take advantage of
what the United States provides while giving
little back, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Such optimism and belief in the capitalist system. You should be living down here in the lower 48.
My view paraphrases something that Churchill said: Capitalism is the worst possible system. Except for all of the others. Yes I believe in the power of markets and their ability in many cases to effiently allocate resources and generate wealth. But capitalism also has its "red claw" side as well.
Basicly wealth follows a power law distribution called the Pareto distribution. The result of this for as long as capitalism has existed is that a few percent of the population control most of the wealth. In republics there is a constant struggle to shift this curve so that there is more distribution to more people. Right now the wealthy, at least in the US are winning the distribution struggle.
The US has been living off of debut. This is true of individuals and of the country as a whole. The vaunted standard of living in the US is not really much better than Europe or Canada. And income has largely stagnated in the last decade or so as well paying manufacturing jobs are moving offshore.
Perhaps average income has increased, but not the median income. The wealthy are doing well and until 2000 technology workers were doing well. Now may professions are threatened by offshoring. For more on this see my essay An Economics Question.
Do they just get sucked out of the economy to disappear, or do they eventually go back in? I think they would go back in eventually, when those rich fat cats pay their gardeners and maids and buy their new cars and all that stuff.
I'm assuming that this comment is meant seriously and that I did not miss the drips of irony (if I'm wrong, mod this post funny, or maybe mod it funny anyway).
Basicly you're saying that you're willing to reduce your privacy further for the "promise" of what is, in effect, trickle down economics (e.g., its fine for the fat cats to be rich, they'll spend their money and it will trickle down to the "little people").
If trickle down economics really worked then those tax cuts for the rich and offshoring of US jobs really would be great for the US. We'd get lots of cheap stuff and lots of high paying jobs. This is not the world I see around me.
The only problem is that trickle down economics is a long discredited theory. What actually happens in that wealth becomes even more concentrated in the hands of a few.
To expand on the point made above...
Let us assume that we have a magic proof system that will prove that our software matches our specification.
So what do we use to define the specification? Certainly not a natural language like english. Natural languages are full of ambiguity. So we'll use a formal specification language. However, such a language is basicly like a programming language, perhaps supporting more mathematical formalism (maybe single assignment). While our formal proof system can prove that the specification is equal to our executable software, we still can't show that the specification is what we intended (e.g., the specification may have bugs).
Even if our specification is magically guaranteed to be exactly what we intended, properly specifying the design as we understand it, this does not address the problem that systems fail because of the unexpected.
There are language systems that allow some level of proof. For example, in logic synthesis, where binary logic networks for VLSI can be generated from the subsets of Verilog and VHDL languages, it is possible to prove that two designs are or are not the same by using logical reduction. This can be useful in verification and testing. But it does not change the fact that VLSI designs, just like software designs, have bugs (also known as design errors).
Even leaving the concerns about the notation to specify a problem, software perfection could only be theoretically achieved when the problem can be completely specified. Many of the critical systems where there is a lot of interest in software correctness are very complicated (e.g., modern fighter jets). The exact requirements for these systems cannot be specified since their behavior under all conditions cannot be known. So the software will always be imperfect. What we hope is that the software is not imperfect in ways that cause death.
Yes, I admit it! It's true that I have not kept up with developments in Ada. I'm still scared by horror inflicted by the original version. And the trauma produced by the Ada design philosophy which produced languages like VHDL.
OK, so they added objects, interfaces and other wonders of modern languages. But it still does not change the fact that Ada is not exactly in the main stream. To continue my walk out on the limbs of issues with which I am only shallowly familiar, I'll speculate that very few people would use Ada if it was not mandated by their sponsors (e.g., the Dept. of Defense).
And what they did in Ada would have been impossible in C++. It's significant that SPARK code will run EXACTLY the same on all compliant Ada compilers. No platform dependancies, no ambiguities, no undefined behavior... ALWAYS the same. You simply can't possibly define a subset of C++ which would be able to make those promises. I don't know if it would be possible with Java; since there's no formal specification of Java, probably not.
I'm not sure what you meant by formal specification here. As I recall someone did a huge denotational semantic specification of Ada. In theory this massive specification defined exactly what Ada's semantics are. The only problem is that such a specification is, in practice, useless. For even simple constructs, the denotational semantic description is huge. And as with any formalism, there is always the opportunity for error. Given the complexity of denotational semantics I suspect that few people other than the author ever read the whole thing.
So that fact that Ada had DoD funding for a denotational semantic specification and Java does not does have such a specification does not make Ada more portable and reliable (in the sense that a piece of code will produce the same result on different platforms).
The idea of adding assertions and other formal descriptions of the intended semantics has some merit. But the realization is SPARC is unfortunate.
As I recall, the gang at Sun who did Java mentioned that they used C/C++ as the basis for Java because they wanted the language to be used. Choosing Ada as the basis for anything guarantees that few people will use it. The module paradigm for languages (used by Ada and Modula-2) is not as powerful as the object model. This is one reason that C++/Java have caught on and Ada/Modula-2 are consigned to history.
Finally, just because you have a specification and code that exactly implements this specification does not mean that the application will not result in unintended results (e.g., the death of users or others). Frequently the problems encountered with software are a result of conditions that the designers did not forsee. That is, things that were not defined in the specification.
George Gilder seems to have succeeded solely on the basis of his belief in his own power as a prophet of the future. As those who subscribed to his stock market newsletter found, he was a legend in his own mind, not in reality.
George Gilder was a largely unknown hack author of little read books that many would regard as sexist before he wrote Wealth and Poverty which caught on with the Reagan administration believers in "supply side" economics (we know this today as the economics of tax cuts and massive federal budget deficts). Although "supply side" economics has returned, it was largely out of favor with the administration of Bush Sr. and the balanced budget faction of the Clinton administration. So Gilder reinvented himself as a technology guru. The fact that he has no background what-so-ever in science or technology did not stop him. He interviewed those who did and wrote up his impressions in breathless terms.
The peak of Gilder's trajectory was his stock market newsletter which had thousands of subscribers who were willing to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of reading the thoughts of the master. This and the opportunity to get early access to Gilder's hype which was moving the market in many cases.
Then there was the fall. As the 2000 stock market crash erased the value of many of the stocks that Gilder touted, his subscribers deserted him in droves, much poorer for the experience. Gilder had invested in the stocks that he hyped and his investments were largely wiped out. Gilder was also making money holding conferences and was left with conference committements and no attendees. In the end he was heavily in debt, his bubble wealth wiped out.
But true ego maniacs and pundits never die. They just continue the process of reinvention, whether as Governor of California or as an expert in telecommunications. So here we see Gilder again blowing hot air on topics that he has a shallow understanding of. And, as always, coloring his presentation with the usual Republican freemarket ideology (regulation bad, taxes bad, poor people weak and shiftless, unrestained free market good, rich people good).
I have not read The Confusion, so I can't comment on the context of boiled clean of syphilis. But I seem to recall that along with mercury, one of the treatments for syphilis was to infect the person who had syhpilis with a non-human targeted malaria parasite (something like horse malaria). The body would eventually wipe out the malaria infection since it could not properly reproduce in human red blood cells. The malaria infection would cause high fever (104 F.) which would harm (kill?) the syphilis bacillus. Of course racking fever was no picnic. But neither was heavy metal poisoning caused by mercury (mercury just got rid of the symptoms, not the syphilis infection).
I also have a vague recollection that the malaria treatment may have continued after antibiotics were discovered as a treatment for third stage syphilis (which infects the brain). The early antibiotics did not cross the blood/brain barrier and I'm not sure they could be injected into the spine. (Obviously I'm not a medical doctor, nor do I play one on television).
The problem with boiling is that it would raise the temperature on the outside more than the inside unless it were done very slowly. But the malaria "treatment" was not known until the 1800s, after the time in which the book is set.
What is "blatantly obvious" is not always obvious. Also, some of the things that we are sure are obvious and clearly true turn out to be false. Human history is so full of examples that I will not attempt to list them here. Rational inquiry is a framework for trying to show that what we "know" is actually true. Economics as a broad topic has many faults. Economists adopt theories as a matter of faith or simply because the math works out. But there are good economists who do not fall prey to these faults. In my opinion, Brian Arthur is one of them.
The theory of "path dependence" is actually controversal. This was argued out in the US governments anti-trust case. Brian Arthur was one of the people who argued for the Government. Other economists, like Paul Krugman, have been rather scathing in their rebuttal of Arthur's theories. So this is certainly not an area that everyone things is obvious.
And I don't know if Brian Arthur makes "good money" off his thories. I think that he is a full professor, so he probably makes a salary in the low six figures. And so far I have not read that they are offshore outsourcing jobs for economists. So yeah, perhaps a career change would be a good thing.
The economist Brian Arthur is one of the proponents of the theory of path dependence. In path dependence something is adopted for reasons that might be determined by chance (e.g., the adoption of MS/DOS) or by some related feature (C became popular in part because of UNIX's popularity).
The widespread use of C and C++, languages without bounds checking in a world where we can afford bounds checking, is not so much a matter of logical decision as history. C became popular, C++ evolved from C and provided a some really useful features (objects, expressed as classes). Once C++ started to catch on, people used C++ because others used it and an infrastructure developed (e.g., compilers, libraries, books). In sort, the use of C++ is, to a degree, a result of path dependence. Once path dependent characteristics start to appear, choices are not necessarily made on technical virtue. In fact, one could probably say that the times when we make purely rational, engineering based decisions (feature X is important so I'll use language Y) are outweighed by the times when we decide on other criteria (my boss say's we're gonna use language Z).
Someone mentioned that we over estimate the value of our data. That's probably true.
While I acknowledge this, I've thought of the archiving issue too. I've been working on my web site www.bearcave.com since 1995. The material published on this web site represents the largest work I've completed that does not belong to someone else. I intend to keep adding to it. In the long run it may represent the largest work I've accomplished in my life.
Egotist that I am, I'd like it to survive me. I have searched and I did not find any web repository except for the Internet Archive, which attempts to archive the Internet. The Internet Archive has archived bearcave.com, so there is some chance that my work will be around when I'm not. The way things are going there will probably come a time when you can carry around the current Internet Archive in your pocket, so the costs of archiving should drop, which also provides some hope that the Internet Archive data itself will survive.
Unfortunately, the Internet Archive is not an ideal solution. Given bandwidth issues, they cannot afford to update too frequently. Also, while the Internet Archive is locally searchable, I don't think that is is searchable by search engines like Google. So material on the Internet Archive is not as accessible as other material on the Web.
There appears to be a possible business here (perhaps at the non-profit level). I'd be willing to pay money into an escrow account and a monthly fee to have my web site scanned weekly. The when I die my web site would no longer be scanned and my data be available to the web on the new site.
The problem with such a business is that it would probably have to be set up as a non-profit. The concentration of an archiving business is to pay its bills and survive in the long term, not make lots of money for its founders or shareholders.
There are some technical complexities as well. Internal links between web site pages would have to be changed so that they worked at the new location. But it should not be too difficult to write conversion software.
Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty tired of hearing this argument about how Indian's are kicking American butt because you're all so good.
Indian has not innovated anything in hundreds or thousands of years. Indians had to come to the US become innovators. Every piece of technology you're using was invented and developed in the West (in some cases by Indian's living here). From the base process of semicondustors to the routers you use for your Internet connection.
Lets look at publications: even the excellent schools like the Indian Institute of Technology do not have the output of Stanford, MIT Carniegie Mellon and the University of California. So why is this?
Next time you get on your high horse about how great India is think about the cast system. The fact that even today some widows in India still feel that they have to burn themselve to death. Or how about the religious riots? Or the fact that the US only just pulled back India and Pakistan from the brink of nuclear war.
The only reason that Indian software engineers can compete with software engineers in the United States is that the Indian cost of living is a tiny fraction of that in California and Indian software engineers are cheap labor. We're no smarter than you are, nor are you any smarter than we are. There are excellent people in both countries. But Indians are cheap and accessible because of the Internet that has been provided by the West.
And then there is agriculture. Even without the massive farm price supports India's agriculture could not compete with the US which uses massive amounts of automation and has access to capital that India does not. This allows the US to produce a vast qunatity of agricultural products with only a small fraction of its population.
Well, what can we expect from a poster who uses "u" for "you" and does not properly captialize the start of their sentences.
This weak argument about the productivity of the rest of the world entirely ignores a number of factors, one of the most important of which is the US trade deficit. The US trade deficit allows people in the US to keep buying cheap good from foreign countries without the dollar rising against those currencies. The deficit subsidizes US consumption. This deficit is currently being financed by China and Japan. It cannot continue forever.
Finally, the argument assumes that conditions are static. The economics of 200 years ago is like the economics of today. That US trade with Europe is like US trade with China and India. All untrue.
A very interesting post. I would be interested in reading other slashdotter's information and views on Ironport.
If Ironport is involved in supporting spammers, then other spammers have some reason to sue perhaps. After all, if they are using false pretenses (SpamCop is an anti-spam site) to hurt their competition this might be reason for a legal action. And the case would not necessarily be decided on issues involving spam but rather fraud and illegal competition. (Standard disclaimer: I'm Not A Lawyer and I don't play one on television).
I have to wonder how Ironport can justify "bulk email" support. There was a Wall Street Journal article about a clown who actually opted in for spam. But the number of people who do this is way too small to support any business model that I can think of. So Ironport claiming to support opt-in lists seems like a shallow way to justify supporting spammers.
Nor does it seem reasonable that they would support valid commercial email lists. Groups that someone already have a relationship with (for example, the IEEE) send email from their own addresses. They don't need Ironport. This also allows a group to handle their own email list removal.
An interesting post on the differences between Indian and US development. Thanks for posting manavendra. Like many US software engineers, I have more than a passing interest in our competition in India.
There is an odd dynamic here. The view with some people who outsource work from the US to low wage countries like India seems to be that if the people who are doing the outsourced work are not as efficient, it doesn't matter because they are so cheap. These same people are either unable to analyze or ignorant of software lifecycle cost.
I'm sure that there are development groups in India that are as good and efficient as those in the US. But for the sake of argument even if it were true that all Indian groups were mired in paperwork and ISO-standardization it would not matter, since they are viewed as cheap labor. Outsourcing now seems to have reached the level of management fad, where the sole justification is short term cost. If you run a corporate IT department you probably have to justify to your masters why you are not outsourcing.
Well, if you've got math, statistics, experience with experimental work and perhaps some background in statistical physics, I'd think of quantitative finance. It is admittedly a small area and frequently you have to live in the New York area, which is not for everyone. But third world countries like India and China are a long way from developing financial markets like those in the US. So these jobs are not likely to go overseas.
Or apply for a job at a National Lab, where security clearances are required. These jobs are not going overseas either. The combination of physics, chemistry and computer science would be a big assent in getting such a job. And the National Labs tend to pay better than government agencies.
The story of Daniel Robbins and Gentoo Linux seems to me to be an example of software as art and Daniel as a starving artist. And yes, I realize that many other people were involved in the Gentoo project. But one of the leading forces behind Gentoo seems to be leaving because he can't afford to take part in the project anymore.
The world does not owe artists, writers or software engineers working on open source/ Free Software a living. But what is interesting to me is that if, for the sake of argument, some commercial entity, like Red Hat, were to come along and start selling Gentoo at some point in the future, Daniel Robbins and the rest of the Gentoo developers would get as much as the Linux developers got from Red Hat going public (e.g., very little).
If software engineering jobs were not moving overseas and our income was not under constant downward pressure this might not be such a big deal. There is a lot to be said for doing something you love. For many people money can't replace this. But when it gets to the point where you can't pay your bills or are unemplyed, survival becomes the important issue.
Speaking for myself, the current state of our industry throws into question any open source project that can be picked up by slick marketeers and resold to end users. Since I'm not independently wealthy, why should I work for free? I have to wonder if Daniel Robbins is not asking himself similar questions as he looks at the state of his finances.
For more on this see my essay Freedom Can be Slavery
I've been reading the discussion about how you need a degree. I suspect that this is probably true. I have a degree from a University of California school. My official job title is "computer scientist" (as a friend of mine says, "yeah, I'm a big fucking scientist").
I did not particularly enjoy my college experience. One of the things that got me through it was an understanding that this bias towards degrees exists. But it's not clear to me that this bias has any relation to reality. Especially in computer science.
When I was in school, Pascal was the lingua franca of computer science. C was just starting to make its appearance. UNIX run on a PDP-11. Relational databases existed only in research. Computer science was so small that you could learn most of what there was to know.
Computer science is so huge that one can hope to master only a few areas in a lifetime. Of the topics I learned in school, only the math and algorithms and data structures are unchanged. The vast majority of what I know, I learned after graduation. The difference between the self-taught and those who have degrees is not very great ten years after graduation. After all, in the end, we're all self-taught.
I suspect that most hiring managers know this on some level. But the possession of a degree serves as a kind of barrier: those with a degree make it to the next stage. Like some kind of career "bootcamp" or hazing process.
So yes, a degree is useful. If this makes no sense just remember, the world is illogical and not of our making. In general you have to accept the world as it is, even when it does not make sense.
For example, why does a Harvard degree carry more weight with some employers than, say, a degree from the California State Polytechnical College at San Louis Obispo (Cal Poly) which many would argue has a better engineering department than Harvard?
I agree that the patent system is broken. It is difficult to do any work in compression or image processing and not run into a patent. Apparently this has hampered the JPEG 2000 work. It seems to have taken them a long time to settle on the wavelet function for the standard. I've been told that this was due to patent concerns.
Lest you think this is idle thought, let me tell you that I worked on things in the late 70's and early '80's that will invalidate whatever patents that many other people have already patented to exclude others from making money on them. Watch closely, you'll recognize them when you see them.
I have to say that your post comes across as pretty egotistical. You did all this seminal work and its going to invalidate lots of patents? First off, you're posting as an Anonymous Coward. We'll never know. And did you actually publish this work so that it can be shown that "all those patents" run into prior art? If you did not publish, then you're simple a legend in your own mind.
An excellent post. Thanks for putting in the time to write it.
Since Hong Kong is no longer the unregulated capitalist bastion it once was I think that the United States may stand alone in its ideological dedication to the idea of free trade (an ideology which, handily enough, also increases corporate profits). Most industrialized countries have some kind of industrial policy. This policy frequently includes protections.
As the parent post points out, there is no reason that we should just blindly accept that unrestricted trade is a good thing. Especially when the same people who are assuring us of this "fact" (e.g., economists) have argued for years that the stock market is "efficient".
From what I can see, however, most people don't understand that anything is happening to them at all. The government says that the ecomomy is growing. So I think that many people believe that their experiece is isolated. Yeah their income is not growing, or perhaps even declining. They have no job security. They are lucky to have health insurance. But they don't connect this to the larger force of globalization and fiscal policy (e.g., tax cuts for the rich). I fear that things will have to get really bad before enough people wake up and start to push on politicians for change.
I'm all for organizing. I'm a member of a union that is associated with the Communication Workers of America.
I would like to point out, however, that unfortunately there was a difference between the Japanese auto invasion and offshoring of US jobs.
In the case of Japanese imports, workers and the companies where on the same side. While workers were losing their jobs, the US auto companies were losing money and market share. The politicians listened to the combination of labor and corporations.
In this case labor (in our case, engineers and IT folk) are not on the same side as the companies. The companies profit by lowering the wages they have to pay. They get lower turnover among those they still employ in the US (since there are fewer jobs to skip to). So the employees lose, while the companies gain. And so far it is companies that are making political donations.
This does not mean that labor can't have an effect. But it is important to realize that it may not be as easy as it was for the United Auto Workers working to put tarrifs in place to protect the industry from the Japanese.
It is also worth remembering that the United Auto Workers were well established when the Japanese imports appeared. But it was not always that way. Ford, I think it was, tried to break strikes by hiring Pinkerton thugs, armed with ax handles. The unions are there because people worked to put them there. While it's true that many unions became corrupt and bureacratic many of them did not start out that way. They were built by their workers.
Organizing takes a lot of time. Many union groups are small. That means that there is no money to hire a professional staff. The work is done by union members who also work a full time job and have families. And while they are working in the union, they may face the danger of job retaliation.
So don't think that some union is going to come along and fix it for you. It can take a long time and it starts with you.
You act like the victims of the system are responsible for it. Would you say that the victims of the Great Cultural Revolution got what they deserved because they supported Mao? Or would you say that Stalin's victims also got what was coming to them because they supported the Bolsheviks?
Obviously the effects of globalization and offshoring are nothing like the excesses of communism. But offshoring and globalization do produce their share of misery. Just because people live in a capitalist society does not mean that they agree to a race to the bottom with people in India and China.
The United States is a diverse place. Over half of the voters voted against G.W. Bush (remember, we have a strange electoral system and an arguably corrupt Supreme Court, so the majority did not win the election). An increasing number of people don't believe that invading Iraq was a good idea. A majority of people in the US finally understand that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Most people don't understand what is happening to them. Their incomes are not going up. If they are lucky enough to have a job, there is no job stability. But they are just trying to get by. Between the stress of making a living and numbing their mind with television there is not a whole lot of reflection. So most people just believe what they are told. And right now all the corporate and government economists are telling that that offshoring is good for them. "Yes you are losing your job, but you'll get a better, higher paying job to replace it". It takes people time and sometimes serious misfortune to understand that the system is not working for them. In the Great Depression it took 25% unemployment.
Capitalism and trade protection when it comes to moving jobs to low wage countries is not incompatible. If things keep going as they are, there is no question that there will be protectionist laws. Just as there have been with auto imports. People in the West are not going to quietly sit there while etheir income is averaged with the incomes of the huge populations of India and China.
At least in the US there is still a lot of print media that provides different perspectives on reality. With the exception of India, which has a more or less free press, this is not true in most of Asia. At at least here if enough voters make a fuss, change will happen.
I've written a long, and perhaps turgid essay that touches on many of these issues. See An Economics Question. This essay includes a growing list of web published references.
We start with the homeless, then chip anyone who collects unemployment, then anyone who wants to get a job, and it works its way up.
Actually, I think that the article got it wrong. The government actually wants to tattoo barcodes on our foreheads. This will happen once the black helecopters cross the Mexican border. Then they'll take our guns. I've seen it all in this movie Red Dawn.
OK, sorry. I'm having an attack of cynical bitterness. Its a problem of our times. On a more serious note...
Just remember: the government is not particularly competent. Especially when it comes to technology. This can be a problem but it can also be a benefit. Most of the powerful tools that government uses come from the private sector. The government is not very good at developing custom solutions. The US casino industry has better surveillance technology than many government agencies (although these agencies are starting to buy from the companies that supply the casino industry).
A recent article in the Dublin Times, by Jonathan Swift, added another dimension to this story.
Every state government in the United States is struggling with deficits and social program cutbacks. Once the RFIDs are implanted and the software tracking is in place the second phase of the program will be implemented. Republicans in state and federal government have proposed an expansion of the program to harvest the homeless. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex) noted "For too long have the homeless had a free ride on the backs of taxpayers. This program will be self-supporting without additional government money". The product of this second phase will be served in resturants catering to wealthy clientele. A percentage of the profits will be used to support social services for those who are not harvested.
The Eudaemonic Pie was reissued as Newtonian Casino (both titles by Thomas Bass). These books recount the efforts by Norman Packard, Doyne Farmer and others to build a computer that could predict roulette.
Thomas Bass is also the author of the book The Predictors. Packard and Farmer when on to found Prediction Company which builds models that attempt to do short term stock market prediction. My review of The Predictors can he found here. I don't find Thomas Bass the most reliable of reporters. My retrospective on his book The Predictors book can be found here
As a number of posters have noted, EV1 has a CEO that actually admits that, knowing what he knows now, he would do something differently. But one of the motivating factors developing this understanding is the disapproval of the technology community.
I've been wondering if public disapproval, which has been so effective in this case, could work when it comes to moving technology jobs to low wage countries like India and China.
There was a big union movement that came out of the Great Depression. A lot of people would do their best to buy union made goods. Certainly HP must have felt some heat from their CEOs rather ill advised comments (something like "Hey no one said you have any right to a job"). If US corporations felt that their sales were being hurt by a "Buy American" campaign they would change their behavior.
Of course there is an obvious problem with this argument: in the case of EV1 there are many hosting providers to choose from who have not signed up with the evil SCO. But when it comes to "Buying American" it is difficult to find any multinational that is not moving technology jobs overseas. So who are you going to buy from?
Still, I think that public shame might have some effect. John Kerry's remarks about "Benedict Arnold CEOs" who take advantage of what the United States provides while giving little back, for example.