Yes, I actually knew that. My sentence about "the source of the rights" didn't refer to the document that articulates them to the human-created entity (the federal government) charged with protecting them.
I was referring to the Deity. To "those of a religious bent".
The French, in their equivalent, used the phrase "The NATURAL rights of Man and the Citizen", dodging around the "Creator" term.
Those of us with other bents (ask my friends, I'm bent indeed), we still agree that there's just something special about human beings, we just believe they have a natural right to live, that somebody who takes human life away without the justification of protecting other human lives, is doing a Wrong.
A corporation, on the other hand, we'd dissolve ("kill") without shedding a tear, if it did something like running a sweatshop or defrauding old ladies, not capital crimes for the human directing them. Courts do it every day. So do the people that own them if the corp. stops making them money or doing whatever other job they had for it. Nobody charges them with murder.
And, man, if something doesn't have a right to LIFE, it sure as hell has no "natural right" to anything else.
If I get together with a thousand like-minded individuals, we all retain our rights to free speech, and indeed, we can coordinate our speech into a single consensus message, repeated a thousand times over, significantly multiplying its effect. That was the intent of the two constitutional rights.
The new "corporation is a legal person" doctrine, which the Union got along very well without for nearly 200 years, creates a thousand-and-first "person" and claims it has yet another set of the same civil rights - and a gigantic budget to push them with, a budget that only needs the approval of some fraction of the thousand people associating.
The fraction doesn't have to be 50%, much less 100%. Most corporations are in fact governed by the opinions of a few dozen people that have bonuses dependent on a variation in the corporate income a few percent per year. The million people who have invested in it (900,000 of them involuntarily, they don't control where "their" pension fund puts its money) may not even be aware that "they" have decided to lobby for exporting jobs to Mexico, ripping the tops off mountains in Virginia, or the US purchasing useless, extravagant weapons systems.
Given proper information and some real control over the corporation they "own" 0.00001% of, they would say "Hell, no, I'd rather have my pension be $1050 per month instead of $1100 if it comes at the price of sweatshops, public debt, and my favourite trout stream vanishing". But that can't possibly happen with most modern corporate governance.
Corporations are not people. People have consciences and value other things besides money. Corporations are EXACTLY like machines running a program to maximize profit margins. They only don't run wild and consume all resources because of limiting rules, The Law. (i.e. "No sweatshops or child labour") Otherwise, people would be used up like any other available resource, worked to death.
Giving corporations access to the law-making process is like giving a program supervisory access to the operating system, it introduces positive feedback loops guaranteed to run out of control.
For those of a religious bent, I'd draw your attention to the source of those constitutional rights you just quoted: "They are endowed by their creator..." So, if God created your corporation, I'm OK with it having civil rights of its own. Otherwise, all the members of it still have their freedom of speech, so let them exercise it as citizens, not go inventing a new "citizen" that was not of woman born.
I like the one suggestion above, to just go and ask. Few organizations are as mired in bureaucracy as the head offices of NGOs. It's the field offices that may be able to come up with some work on the spot.
Short of that, get a tan. Sorry, but there's no such thing as "intellectual day labour" - most jobs that use education require you to mesh in with a team, with an office environment, with a set of clients and problems. It takes a week, minimum, often a month, to be productive enough to pay back the hours spent showing you around, introducing you, briefing you.
If you want a great story about the fun of dealing with NGOs, try this 3-screen Atlantic article on the lady who had the terrific idea of a co-op of Afghan farmers that would produce essential oil from their pomegranates for use by "The Body Shop" and others for high-end soaps. It involved purchasing, at first, a single hand-cranked seed-oil press.
My favourite bit on page 2 - asked to fill in a 14-screen spreadsheet with numbers on "production coefficients", the "equipment procurement, loan-repayment summaries, sales figures, labor costs, packaging and shipping costs, and cash-flow statements. It took me two weeks, full-time, just to fill in the cells with real numbers. And I have a master's degree from a U.S. university. I began to wonder how Afghan entrepreneurs would ever be able to negotiate such requirements." Presenting it to them at the end of the two weeks, she's told, the "...agribusiness team greeted the spreadsheet with a snort. "We don't need anything like that. He just loves to cook up these spreadsheets," they remarked of their colleague."
Normally, I'm as cranky an information-should-be-free idealogue as slashdot's best. But the NYT is just different. I started reading it when it came to the web, but I've become a hapless addict. Three reasons in ascending order of importance:
1) The journalism is top-notch. These days that's not saying as much, but they have a number of Pulitzer-winners and just supporting people like Charlie Savage (formerly Boston Globe) and Jane Meyer ("The Dark Side") gives my wallet warm fuzzies right there.
2) Very good op-ed contributors, columnists and editorials. From a wide spectrum, for all its rep as a liberal rag. If you're somebody really important with a message (today, David Stockman on taxing banks; yesterday, Bush & Clinton on Haiti) you flog it to the Times.
3) Astoundingly good reader comments. I'm not sure if this is the community or ruthless editing, but the result is like slashdot surfed at "5": first-person contributions from people with decades of experience in the subject; reasoned, informed debates from both sides with very few capitals, exclamation marks or blowhard rhetoric. If you sort by number of reader recommendations and just read the first few dozen, the commentary is often more informative than the article.
Bottom line: bring it on. Charge me a hundred a year. Or more. It's worth it. Good food takes time, and good journalism takes money. I'm happy to support it. I get more entertainment hours out of the NYT every year than any two $60 video games, or ten $12 movies.
I only wish I could say this of even a second newspaper. The reader comments in even the august Washington Post are routinely yahoos shouting insults at each other. And in my own local Calgary Herald, the reader comments are seldom anything else.
It builds a strong case that Google was simply cornered into protesting by an extreme and deliberate provocation - the most recent of many that have chased out by blocking or having their buttons pushed until they walked.
After reading it, I can't help but think that this is yet another case of protectionism disguised as censorship. That sounds strange - to most at/. that's like disguising a common assault as a kidnaping. But, of course, to the money guys at the top, protectionism is by far the worse - and more actionable - sin.
Jeez...I'm not a free-market conservative because I pretty much agree with the GP: there are problems it isn't good at solving.
But now that the parent post has three replies, not one of which is "Ummm, hey, the lynching thing, that isn't part of free-market conservatism, it's pure anarchy. Free-market conservatives do support the rule of law when they lose a court case."
Please, "free-market conservatives", somebody say that.
I like a good political argument, but the lynching thing, even for Monsanto execs I think are rotten, that makes me equate "I am a free-market conservative" with "Please put me on a terrorist watch-list".
I won't bother wishing that "Starship Troopers" could be re-made correctly with the combat suits and the "Heinlein was Fascist" commentary from Paul Verhoven removed - too late now.
The movie of his other novel that made for great movie material (lots of action and icky scares), "The Puppet Masters" was made on a tight budget with unknowns (save Donald Sutherland in a supporting role) is mostly forgotten already. Among other misses, it failed to bring out the cold-war paranoia that the guy next to you on the sidewalk could be the Enemy about to enslave your brain and steal your body.
A remake today could transfer that to War On Terror paranoia: imagine scenes of everybody lining up for a TSA-type full-body scan (and random strip search)...not to get on an airplane, but to go anywhere, especially a movie theatre. Total Surveillance state justified by the War on Aliens.
One of the best-loved things about the original Star Trek, and most-praised about the BSG reboot, was the sly (or, sometimes, blunt) commentary on issues of the day.
Generally, they'll whitelist any site that a user can come defend as needed for work.
If there is abuse of "IT power", it's that IT passes judgment on their own staff's claim that tech-sites are needed for asking questions and finding tech solutions. But, frankly, even a very lame claim that "I need access to localchat.com to check on how other local accountants are handling the new sales tax" will get a pass, too. IT staff aren't exactly Sam Spade. So any extra blind-eyes they get to their favourite sites is pretty marginal.
The big difference is that IT staff aren't shy of asking. Other users imagine some omniscient IT that will just know they really want to chat about their cats.
To Andrés Monroy-Hernández (and everyone else that has asked about forking).
You can fork the GPL code, but not the business around it. This means that a lot of the current users (who brings money to the table) can never use the fork. In addition you can't fork the manual, trademark which makes it very hard for the fork to get to be known and survive. In practice, it's not that hard to slowly kill an infrastructure GPL project like MySQL. I have described this in my previous blog at:
Me, I have no skin in this game. Have enjoyed using MySQL on a few home projects running my own web server, but my job is an all-Oracle shop. I just like to see Open Source succeed on general principles.
But even a neutral observer can offer an obvious riposte: Mr. Widenius is clearly not a helpless bug about to be stepped on. Wikipedia says his capital gains hit 16M Euros in 2008, around $25M US. He has that wealth, and another wealth you can't buy with money: He's the famous and beloved Monty Widenius, and open source contributors will listen to him and rally about him in the right cause - he IS a "brand".
Younger programmers, at least, eager for the resume decoration, would probably work for him pretty cheerfully for about $50K per year. A single million bucks a year would get him a respectable programming shop of 20 people rolling. I suspect even with a large project like MySQL, that's enough to do a lot of maintenance and even some development. Then there are those free contributors, which can include whole companies, not just kids-in-parents-basements. If his Oracle-as-quicksand fears are shared, many companies not wanting to end up in quicksand will switch to "NewSQL", or "FreeSQL" or whatever he re-brands it as. Switch, not just their usage, but their code contributions.
I wouldn't allocate a dime to promotion and sales and PR - the best advertising in a move like this is word-of-mouth among server room admins and DBAs.
Needless to say, any SERIOUS challenge, like that, could quickly bring Oracle back to a bargaining table to perhaps concede all those demands he has. They might have more to gain by letting MySQL molder away than by keeping it healthy, but they don't have so much to gain that it's worth the risk of simply losing the whole purchase value if everybody starts bailing to the newer fork.
So he can probably solve this problem for a single million, just 4% of his 2008 capital gains. He's just trying to do it with a blog post, that being cheaper still.
NASA has always been used as a pork barrel, and the engineers who just want to fly birds have both used that shamelessly to get funded, and been victimized by it, in equal turns. It's hard to guess whether they would have created cheaper, simpler designs if feeding billions into the industrial complex (in all 50 states as often as possible) were not the more important goal than flying.
Bottom line, I find it hard to cheer for either side when these spats come up. You always want to take the side of the homies (fund NASA, fly something cool somewhere), but NASA is spending so many millions per kilogram flown that the whole thing will ALWAYS be for a lucky tiny few as long as their big-iron design philosophy is enabled by those who LIVE to spend tax dollars (in their state).
Silver lining though: Americans may have forgotten that their Congress has the power to tell the Executive branch "NO!". That the founders considered the legislature, NOT the executive, the first among three equals, because it directly represents the people on the most frequent election cycle.
Who knows, this "make the executive branch moves illegal" power, now revived for the first time in years, may one day be used to make torture, fake intelligence, and war itself less likely instead of perfectly acceptable.
I just wanted to say: while I normally read/. set at "Score 4", within those limits, it's really, really nice to be reading here rather than the letters column of most newspapers.
There are for and against postings, but they're all arguing the scientific procedures based on established rules for what kinds of data-reduction are acceptable and not.
It's the first place I've been in the last 3 days that isn't just people shouting "It's a fraud" and "It's nothing at all" at each other.
Metcalfe said he'd eat his words if the Internet didn't collapse in 1997 or some year near it.
When no such collapse occurred and letter writers began ragging him, he finally picked some conference where he was on a panel about bandwidth provision, filled a blender with a cup of water and his column, blended it into mush, and drank the mush. (He first did ask Infoworld what kind of ink they printed with. He was assured that it was a non-toxic vegetable compound.)
In 1995, columnist and Ethernet-inventor Bob Metcalfe was again going on about a topic that eventually had him literally eating his words (he had to chop up a column in a blender with water and chug it) - that the Internet was going to collapse from all the heavy bandwidth demands of its exponentially-expanding clientele.
So I did a "View Source" on the Infoworld page with his column on it. I've lost the E-mail now, but the stats were something like his column being 2000 bytes and the sum of all the advertising around it, mostly GIF images at the time, was over 20,000 bytes. The Ad/Content ratio even then was over 10:1.
Metcalfe, who'd been railing against irresponsible bandwidth consumption in the column, could only plead that he had no control over the magazine's decisions on what went around it.
The web has always been the reverse of TV, where the ad/content bandwidth is about 1:4 or even 1:5. It's not far different from some magazines, though, where I swear there are 3 pages of ads for every page of content. And if you digitized the magazine, the ads would mostly be images, the content mostly text, and the ratio would be at least 10:1.
This is all prologue to new web content where you are slowed down not so much by download times as the start-up times for various Flash and JavaScript programs that make the ads so much more intrusive, zipping back and forth over the text you're trying to read, or just dancing in the corner of the page.
This is all necessary: they do what they MUST to get response from the ads. If the stats don't show a response, they stop buying them and the business model fails.
Everybody says "Nobody will pay for content on the Internet". Yes, they will. The put up with all that crap rather than pull out a credit card. They just pay with their time and attention instead of actual cash.
Rod Serling, one of the great TV writers of all time, once commented that it is hard to tell a story when you must work it around being interrupted every ten minutes by dancing rolls of toilet paper. I wonder what he'd think of writing for a medium where the toilet paper literally dances all over your words until you click on it to make it go back to the lower right frame.
Landsberg's last book annoyed me enough
on
The Big Questions
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I read his "More Sex is Safer Sex" and spent about half of it muttering "but you're ignoring a relevant factor...".
I see that the reviews at the Amazon page for that book:
http://www.amazon.com/More-Sex-Safer-Unconventional-Economics/dp/1416532226/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2...agree with my assessment. Give the first couple a quick skim before buying this one. Many of his arguments read like he started off with the intention of writing somethingn entertainingly contrarian and counter-intuitive, then assembled an argument to defend it. And, of course, a book author has the advantage of only taking on arguments that he himself allows in the book, gets to decide which factors of the problem are relevant, and so on.
I did pass the test the reviewer offers here: I had specific points at which I disagreed with his argument. But I didn't find that fun; it's no fun halting all agreement with an argument at step 4 and having to go on and read steps 5-9 while holding a little asterisk in your head that says "none of this matters because 4 is clearly wrong".
As an example, the heart of his "more sex is safer sex" argument used in the title is that overall risk is reduced if *certain* *people*, those with lower odds of having disease, have more sex. Then the people they have sex with are having safer sex than if with someone else. Alas, it rests on the contention that if the "safer" people have more sex, every act *displaces* another sexual interaction - the possibility that simply more sex will occur, the added interactions being safer, but *not* displacing a less-safe one, is not allowed for. Recommending that certain prudent people have more sex, while assuming that the amount of total sex in the world will remain a constant, is not, to my mind, a safe assumption. But it wasn't slashdot; all I could do was sit there, frustrated at my inability to argue with the book.
Funny, kids at home have a tendency to make 3-hour phone calls to friends. And telecommuters do a lot more phone-calling from home as well. But notice nobody is claiming that "the telephone network will be unable to handle H1N1"?
Two reasons: 1) the network actually is better, built to be an essential service; the last 10 miles of Internet - whether cable or DSL - is built on a previous network with duct tape to save money, and has never been treated as essential.
2) Even so, it probably isn't true. What's so different about half the kids being home from school and half the office workers who can telecommute, from ALL of them being at home on every Saturday, playing games and watching YouTube? Not much. "The Internet is Falling" thing stopped being funny after we'd all had good laughs and John Dvorak and Bob Metcalfe, respectively. (At least Metcalfe had the class to put his column in a blender with some water and literally eat his words, as promised.)
It's not funny any more, especially when used as a power play. The right answer even if this WERE true is to tell them to get to work on building fiber-to-the-home... like they were supposed to with all the money they've been making and gargantuan tax breaks they were handed.
Actually, it's your sig I'm going to argue about. The Holocaust body count exceeds Jonestown by some four orders of magnitude. (918 vs nearly 9 million - or more than 9 million if you just blame them for all deaths in WW2).
Arguably, there ARE some IT projects that hold more than 918 lives in their digital fingers. But I have to admit, "drinking the kool-aid" is no more likely to come up in a discussion of aircraft or nuclear plant control systems than it is for a web development environment.
OK, I follow that three factors have to be constrained; and you can never seem to get all three. That makes fusion about 75% as hard as getting a two-year-old into a snow suit.
It was very subtle, in my defense - it was a favourite trick of Heinlein's, the above source notes, to reveal or hint that positive characters were non-white late in the game (like Juan Rico), presumably to mess with racist's heads. I vividly remember my first Heinlein (at 9), Space Cadet, in a scene where a character is defending himself from a real charge of racism - against Venusians; he asks "Does it matter to any of us that Lieutenant Peters is black as the ace of spades?" This is long after Peters has left the scene and you must suddenly adjust your image of him. The novel's year: 1946.
By the way, you didn't get the vote in Troopers for combat duty: you got it for ANY FEDERAL SERVICE. Not everybody was good enough to be allowed into the forces, but everybody had a right to earn a vote. They would still find an unpleasant job for you, like testing new vaccines. But even a blind quadrapelegic could earn voting rights, even if they had to assign him to nasty make-work like "counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch". I think only a minority of volunteers for public service were taken for combat training and didn't wash out. The rest had to wash bedpans or sweep streets or whatever.
It aggravates me that Heinlein never comes up (from the professors) in these "college course" lists; he's considered too commercial or maligned as fascist for ST or something. But over 20 years after he died, his books are still on the shelves; doesn't that prove anything to these academics.
I took an SF course in 1978; one book was "Voyage to Arcturus" by David Lindsay, which is considered all artful and deep and influential and so forth. I found it tedious and obtuse, and despite the rave reviews ("greatest novel of the 20th century"), defy you to find it anywhere but Amazon; I've never seen it on any shelf but the University bookstore in 1978.
I gather Dickens was considered a commercial hack in his time by the academics; but where are the academic superstars of his era now?
I was in grade 10 in 1972, but my brothers, 7 and 9 years older, got the same treatment: forced to take "Typing 10" in a nearly all-girl classroom when the only point to it was as a first course towards a secretarial career. In my case, they'd turned it into a full-year course, the second half of which was beyond just typing and into various formats for business letters, filing systems, and so on. I got bored and managed to drop out after taking a test (51%, whew).
Mom's point was that typing was a generally useful skill, like being able to hammer nails. She wasn't thinking we'd become secretaries, just able to type our college papers without pain. She'd taken touch-typing in the 40's and never been a secretary but never regretted it.
Electric typewriters were still rare in 1972, the Apple ][ still in the future, so how much less excuse is there now for not calling it a "basic skill"? For me, it's been huge. A lot of IT work is very verbose and repetitive; I do SQL all day long some days, with tiresome table/column names like INFRANET_SW.WTR_HYDRANT.WH_VALVE_DIRECTION. (Or, yes, I can take my hands from the keyboard, move the mouse to the panel that's the list of tables, scroll down to the hydrant table, click on it, look down the column-panel for the column name, and click...which takes at least as long...if you touch type; or much longer than typing if you don't).
Well, it's 90km2 legally - but if you were to walk from the last farm on the west side to the first farm on the east side (or south to north), you'd be walking a good 30km each way. Much of the time you would be outside the legal "City of Paris" but you'd be in what anybody but a lawyer would still call "Paris". More like 1000km2.
My own home of Calgary, with just 1.1M population, is a proper "unicity" as planners call them - we don't have suburbs; from farmland to farmland, it's all in the City limits. And we clock in a 726 km2.
1mW/cm2 isn't just "non-lethal", by the way - that's like calling the 1PPM of chlorine in your tap water a "non-lethal" dose. The correct term would be "Undetectable without special equipment". Ten watts per square metre is 1% of the incident solar radiation. And unlike the solar, the microwave would be at a frequency that would pass through your body without interacting with it, just like the AM and FM radio and TV waves passing through your body right now.
The wikipedia article is a little vague on the lost-in-transit question, noting only that you can beam it one mile at 80% efficiency.
I found a paper on the subject the last time this came up on/. :
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1069437&cid=26187965...that boiled down to just 45% transmission efficiency. Or, to get 1GW into the grid on Earth, you have to generate 2.2GW of electricity up in space. Some is lost converting to microwaves and is radiated away up there, some is lost in space before it gets to the atmosphere, some is lost in the atmosphere, some is lost in the reconversion to electricity from microwave. The last two losses come out as heat in the biosphere. A little under 1GW.
And now for the important news: ALL electrical energy turns into heat except that which goes into making products like aluminum from aluminum ore...and even that turns back into heat in the very long run.
More news: all electrical energy except hydro, anything that involves boiling water to turn turbines, runs at maybe 33% efficiency. You'd have to burn 3GW of uranium, or coal, or oil into heat to get out 1GW of electrical energy in any earth power plant.
So, summary: to get 1GW of electricity by almost any means but hydro, you have to dump 2GW into the air or water, immediately, and the remaining 1GW goes into heat when it's used. This technology would dump less than 1GW into the environment immediately, and the other 1GW when it's used. Net SAVING of heat dump into the environment.
And it doesn't matter. Larry Niven's warnings in Ringworld about the trillion Puppeteers "drowning in their own waste heat" to the contrary, waste heat is a tiny percentage of the global warming problem; almost all of it comes from trapping more normal solar heat in the biosphere.
That's funny, corporations are constantly giving politicians much larger amounts of money for no good reason - since surely honest politicians would not let a few thousand dollars sway their administration of hundreds of millions of dollars away from the Common Good.
I don't see why you were modded down; it's a reasonable discussion.
I knew I should have kept the document when I found it; it was one of those medical meta-studies, maybe the CDC or some Canadian equivalent; it was NOT a popular article that might have had an agenda. It was just a list of numbers.
So, no, I wasn't lying through my teeth (Is there some other way to lie? If you have dentures, I suppose you have an option to lie through your gums) but there's no question that I googled until I found some numbers that answered my question about "it's all just crack babies", and quit; there may be various ways to look at it and room for dispute.
But it was certainly not about absolute numbers. You cannot imagine a Canadian is EVER unaware that there are 10X as many Americans, for crying out loud, man.
The list in question gave the AVERAGE SURVIVAL TIMES of patients diagnosed, not the number of the population that died. The average survival time after diagnosis is the best measure of the health care system. If you measure total fatalities per population, that mixes in how many people get cancer or diabetes in the first place, which can differ widely between city and rural, north and south, etc.
But this is all just bloviation. The notion that Canada does not have measurably better health outcomes than the US is just so beyond dispute that we might as well argue with "birthers"...or our dining room tables. You have to torture the stats out of recognition to get any different conclusion. (Torture, of course, is a new American specialty at which we have little experience.)
If you want another stat, here's a fun one that dates back to Harpers putting two surveys together during the last (Clinton) round of this nonsense: the number of Canadians who believe we would be better off with the US health care system is double that number of Canadians who believe that Elvis is still alive.
And believe me, we know all about American health care, almost all of us travel down there; nobody in their right mind goes down without a load of travel insurance. Everybody's heard a scare story of somebody going over the line for "just a day"... and a minor car accident costing them their savings or even their house.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I actually knew that. My sentence about "the source of the rights" didn't refer to the document that articulates them to the human-created entity (the federal government) charged with protecting them.
I was referring to the Deity. To "those of a religious bent".
The French, in their equivalent, used the phrase "The NATURAL rights of Man and the Citizen", dodging around the "Creator" term.
Those of us with other bents (ask my friends, I'm bent indeed), we still agree that there's just something special about human beings, we just believe they have a natural right to live, that somebody who takes human life away without the justification of protecting other human lives, is doing a Wrong.
A corporation, on the other hand, we'd dissolve ("kill") without shedding a tear, if it did something like running a sweatshop or defrauding old ladies, not capital crimes for the human directing them. Courts do it every day. So do the people that own them if the corp. stops making them money or doing whatever other job they had for it. Nobody charges them with murder.
And, man, if something doesn't have a right to LIFE, it sure as hell has no "natural right" to anything else.
If I get together with a thousand like-minded individuals, we all retain our rights to free speech, and indeed, we can coordinate our speech into a single consensus message, repeated a thousand times over, significantly multiplying its effect. That was the intent of the two constitutional rights.
The new "corporation is a legal person" doctrine, which the Union got along very well without for nearly 200 years, creates a thousand-and-first "person" and claims it has yet another set of the same civil rights - and a gigantic budget to push them with, a budget that only needs the approval of some fraction of the thousand people associating.
The fraction doesn't have to be 50%, much less 100%. Most corporations are in fact governed by the opinions of a few dozen people that have bonuses dependent on a variation in the corporate income a few percent per year. The million people who have invested in it (900,000 of them involuntarily, they don't control where "their" pension fund puts its money) may not even be aware that "they" have decided to lobby for exporting jobs to Mexico, ripping the tops off mountains in Virginia, or the US purchasing useless, extravagant weapons systems.
Given proper information and some real control over the corporation they "own" 0.00001% of, they would say "Hell, no, I'd rather have my pension be $1050 per month instead of $1100 if it comes at the price of sweatshops, public debt, and my favourite trout stream vanishing". But that can't possibly happen with most modern corporate governance.
Corporations are not people. People have consciences and value other things besides money. Corporations are EXACTLY like machines running a program to maximize profit margins. They only don't run wild and consume all resources because of limiting rules, The Law. (i.e. "No sweatshops or child labour") Otherwise, people would be used up like any other available resource, worked to death.
Giving corporations access to the law-making process is like giving a program supervisory access to the operating system, it introduces positive feedback loops guaranteed to run out of control.
For those of a religious bent, I'd draw your attention to the source of those constitutional rights you just quoted: "They are endowed by their creator..." So, if God created your corporation, I'm OK with it having civil rights of its own. Otherwise, all the members of it still have their freedom of speech, so let them exercise it as citizens, not go inventing a new "citizen" that was not of woman born.
I like the one suggestion above, to just go and ask. Few organizations are as mired in bureaucracy as the head offices of NGOs. It's the field offices that may be able to come up with some work on the spot.
Short of that, get a tan. Sorry, but there's no such thing as "intellectual day labour" - most jobs that use education require you to mesh in with a team, with an office environment, with a set of clients and problems. It takes a week, minimum, often a month, to be productive enough to pay back the hours spent showing you around, introducing you, briefing you.
If you want a great story about the fun of dealing with NGOs, try this 3-screen Atlantic article on the lady who had the terrific idea of a co-op of Afghan farmers that would produce essential oil from their pomegranates for use by "The Body Shop" and others for high-end soaps. It involved purchasing, at first, a single hand-cranked seed-oil press.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/afghans
My favourite bit on page 2 - asked to fill in a 14-screen spreadsheet with numbers on "production coefficients", the "equipment procurement, loan-repayment summaries, sales figures, labor costs, packaging and shipping costs, and cash-flow statements. It took me two weeks, full-time, just to fill in the cells with real numbers. And I have a master's degree from a U.S. university. I began to wonder how Afghan entrepreneurs would ever be able to negotiate such requirements." Presenting it to them at the end of the two weeks, she's told, the "...agribusiness team greeted the spreadsheet with a snort. "We don't need anything like that. He just loves to cook up these spreadsheets," they remarked of their colleague."
Normally, I'm as cranky an information-should-be-free idealogue as slashdot's best. But the NYT is just different. I started reading it when it came to the web, but I've become a hapless addict. Three reasons in ascending order of importance:
1) The journalism is top-notch. These days that's not saying as much, but they have a number of Pulitzer-winners and just supporting people like Charlie Savage (formerly Boston Globe) and Jane Meyer ("The Dark Side") gives my wallet warm fuzzies right there.
2) Very good op-ed contributors, columnists and editorials. From a wide spectrum, for all its rep as a liberal rag. If you're somebody really important with a message (today, David Stockman on taxing banks; yesterday, Bush & Clinton on Haiti) you flog it to the Times.
3) Astoundingly good reader comments. I'm not sure if this is the community or ruthless editing, but the result is like slashdot surfed at "5": first-person contributions from people with decades of experience in the subject; reasoned, informed debates from both sides with very few capitals, exclamation marks or blowhard rhetoric. If you sort by number of reader recommendations and just read the first few dozen, the commentary is often more informative than the article.
Bottom line: bring it on. Charge me a hundred a year. Or more. It's worth it. Good food takes time, and good journalism takes money. I'm happy to support it. I get more entertainment hours out of the NYT every year than any two $60 video games, or ten $12 movies.
I only wish I could say this of even a second newspaper. The reader comments in even the august Washington Post are routinely yahoos shouting insults at each other. And in my own local Calgary Herald, the reader comments are seldom anything else.
Those who imagined that Google was taking a principled stand against Chinese dictatorship might want to read this article in Foreign Policy:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/14/chinas_foreign_internet_purge
It builds a strong case that Google was simply cornered into protesting by an extreme and deliberate provocation - the most recent of many that have chased out by blocking or having their buttons pushed until they walked.
After reading it, I can't help but think that this is yet another case of protectionism disguised as censorship. That sounds strange - to most at /. that's like disguising a common assault as a kidnaping. But, of course, to the money guys at the top, protectionism is by far the worse - and more actionable - sin.
Jeez...I'm not a free-market conservative because I pretty much agree with the GP: there are problems it isn't good at solving.
But now that the parent post has three replies, not one of which is "Ummm, hey, the lynching thing, that isn't part of free-market conservatism, it's pure anarchy. Free-market conservatives do support the rule of law when they lose a court case."
Please, "free-market conservatives", somebody say that.
I like a good political argument, but the lynching thing, even for Monsanto execs I think are rotten, that makes me equate "I am a free-market conservative" with "Please put me on a terrorist watch-list".
I won't bother wishing that "Starship Troopers" could be re-made correctly with the combat suits and the "Heinlein was Fascist" commentary from Paul Verhoven removed - too late now.
The movie of his other novel that made for great movie material (lots of action and icky scares), "The Puppet Masters" was made on a tight budget with unknowns (save Donald Sutherland in a supporting role) is mostly forgotten already. Among other misses, it failed to bring out the cold-war paranoia that the guy next to you on the sidewalk could be the Enemy about to enslave your brain and steal your body.
A remake today could transfer that to War On Terror paranoia: imagine scenes of everybody lining up for a TSA-type full-body scan (and random strip search)...not to get on an airplane, but to go anywhere, especially a movie theatre. Total Surveillance state justified by the War on Aliens.
One of the best-loved things about the original Star Trek, and most-praised about the BSG reboot, was the sly (or, sometimes, blunt) commentary on issues of the day.
Generally, they'll whitelist any site that a user can come defend as needed for work.
If there is abuse of "IT power", it's that IT passes judgment on their own staff's claim that tech-sites are needed for asking questions and finding tech solutions. But, frankly, even a very lame claim that "I need access to localchat.com to check on how other local accountants are handling the new sales tax" will get a pass, too. IT staff aren't exactly Sam Spade. So any extra blind-eyes they get to their favourite sites is pretty marginal.
The big difference is that IT staff aren't shy of asking. Other users imagine some omniscient IT that will just know they really want to chat about their cats.
All those points apply to CEOs in Japan as well. The pay disparity does not.
Me, I have no skin in this game. Have enjoyed using MySQL on a few home projects running my own web server, but my job is an all-Oracle shop. I just like to see Open Source succeed on general principles.
But even a neutral observer can offer an obvious riposte: Mr. Widenius is clearly not a helpless bug about to be stepped on. Wikipedia says his capital gains hit 16M Euros in 2008, around $25M US. He has that wealth, and another wealth you can't buy with money: He's the famous and beloved Monty Widenius, and open source contributors will listen to him and rally about him in the right cause - he IS a "brand".
Younger programmers, at least, eager for the resume decoration, would probably work for him pretty cheerfully for about $50K per year. A single million bucks a year would get him a respectable programming shop of 20 people rolling. I suspect even with a large project like MySQL, that's enough to do a lot of maintenance and even some development. Then there are those free contributors, which can include whole companies, not just kids-in-parents-basements. If his Oracle-as-quicksand fears are shared, many companies not wanting to end up in quicksand will switch to "NewSQL", or "FreeSQL" or whatever he re-brands it as. Switch, not just their usage, but their code contributions.
I wouldn't allocate a dime to promotion and sales and PR - the best advertising in a move like this is word-of-mouth among server room admins and DBAs.
Needless to say, any SERIOUS challenge, like that, could quickly bring Oracle back to a bargaining table to perhaps concede all those demands he has. They might have more to gain by letting MySQL molder away than by keeping it healthy, but they don't have so much to gain that it's worth the risk of simply losing the whole purchase value if everybody starts bailing to the newer fork.
So he can probably solve this problem for a single million, just 4% of his 2008 capital gains. He's just trying to do it with a blog post, that being cheaper still.
NASA has always been used as a pork barrel, and the engineers who just want to fly birds have both used that shamelessly to get funded, and been victimized by it, in equal turns. It's hard to guess whether they would have created cheaper, simpler designs if feeding billions into the industrial complex (in all 50 states as often as possible) were not the more important goal than flying.
Bottom line, I find it hard to cheer for either side when these spats come up. You always want to take the side of the homies (fund NASA, fly something cool somewhere), but NASA is spending so many millions per kilogram flown that the whole thing will ALWAYS be for a lucky tiny few as long as their big-iron design philosophy is enabled by those who LIVE to spend tax dollars (in their state).
Silver lining though: Americans may have forgotten that their Congress has the power to tell the Executive branch "NO!". That the founders considered the legislature, NOT the executive, the first among three equals, because it directly represents the people on the most frequent election cycle.
Who knows, this "make the executive branch moves illegal" power, now revived for the first time in years, may one day be used to make torture, fake intelligence, and war itself less likely instead of perfectly acceptable.
I just wanted to say: while I normally read /. set at "Score 4", within those limits, it's really, really nice to be reading here rather than the letters column of most newspapers.
There are for and against postings, but they're all arguing the scientific procedures based on established rules for what kinds of data-reduction are acceptable and not.
It's the first place I've been in the last 3 days that isn't just people shouting "It's a fraud" and "It's nothing at all" at each other.
Metcalfe said he'd eat his words if the Internet didn't collapse in 1997 or some year near it.
When no such collapse occurred and letter writers began ragging him, he finally picked some conference where he was on a panel about bandwidth provision, filled a blender with a cup of water and his column, blended it into mush, and drank the mush. (He first did ask Infoworld what kind of ink they printed with. He was assured that it was a non-toxic vegetable compound.)
That was literal enough for most people!
In 1995, columnist and Ethernet-inventor Bob Metcalfe was again going on about a topic that eventually had him literally eating his words (he had to chop up a column in a blender with water and chug it) - that the Internet was going to collapse from all the heavy bandwidth demands of its exponentially-expanding clientele.
So I did a "View Source" on the Infoworld page with his column on it. I've lost the E-mail now, but the stats were something like his column being 2000 bytes and the sum of all the advertising around it, mostly GIF images at the time, was over 20,000 bytes. The Ad/Content ratio even then was over 10:1.
Metcalfe, who'd been railing against irresponsible bandwidth consumption in the column, could only plead that he had no control over the magazine's decisions on what went around it.
The web has always been the reverse of TV, where the ad/content bandwidth is about 1:4 or even 1:5. It's not far different from some magazines, though, where I swear there are 3 pages of ads for every page of content. And if you digitized the magazine, the ads would mostly be images, the content mostly text, and the ratio would be at least 10:1.
This is all prologue to new web content where you are slowed down not so much by download times as the start-up times for various Flash and JavaScript programs that make the ads so much more intrusive, zipping back and forth over the text you're trying to read, or just dancing in the corner of the page.
This is all necessary: they do what they MUST to get response from the ads. If the stats don't show a response, they stop buying them and the business model fails.
Everybody says "Nobody will pay for content on the Internet". Yes, they will. The put up with all that crap rather than pull out a credit card. They just pay with their time and attention instead of actual cash.
Rod Serling, one of the great TV writers of all time, once commented that it is hard to tell a story when you must work it around being interrupted every ten minutes by dancing rolls of toilet paper. I wonder what he'd think of writing for a medium where the toilet paper literally dances all over your words until you click on it to make it go back to the lower right frame.
THANK YOU for the GQ link. What a great article.
I read his "More Sex is Safer Sex" and spent about half of it muttering "but you're ignoring a relevant factor...".
I see that the reviews at the Amazon page for that book:
http://www.amazon.com/More-Sex-Safer-Unconventional-Economics/dp/1416532226/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2 ...agree with my assessment. Give the first couple a quick skim before buying this one. Many of his arguments read like he started off with the intention of writing somethingn entertainingly contrarian and counter-intuitive, then assembled an argument to defend it. And, of course, a book author has the advantage of only taking on arguments that he himself allows in the book, gets to decide which factors of the problem are relevant, and so on.
I did pass the test the reviewer offers here: I had specific points at which I disagreed with his argument. But I didn't find that fun; it's no fun halting all agreement with an argument at step 4 and having to go on and read steps 5-9 while holding a little asterisk in your head that says "none of this matters because 4 is clearly wrong".
As an example, the heart of his "more sex is safer sex" argument used in the title is that overall risk is reduced if *certain* *people*, those with lower odds of having disease, have more sex. Then the people they have sex with are having safer sex than if with someone else. Alas, it rests on the contention that if the "safer" people have more sex, every act *displaces* another sexual interaction - the possibility that simply more sex will occur, the added interactions being safer, but *not* displacing a less-safe one, is not allowed for. Recommending that certain prudent people have more sex, while assuming that the amount of total sex in the world will remain a constant, is not, to my mind, a safe assumption. But it wasn't slashdot; all I could do was sit there, frustrated at my inability to argue with the book.
So I'll give this one a miss. Thanks anyway.
Funny, kids at home have a tendency to make 3-hour phone calls to friends. And telecommuters do a lot more phone-calling from home as well. But notice nobody is claiming that "the telephone network will be unable to handle H1N1"?
Two reasons: 1) the network actually is better, built to be an essential service; the last 10 miles of Internet - whether cable or DSL - is built on a previous network with duct tape to save money, and has never been treated as essential.
2) Even so, it probably isn't true. What's so different about half the kids being home from school and half the office workers who can telecommute, from ALL of them being at home on every Saturday, playing games and watching YouTube? Not much. "The Internet is Falling" thing stopped being funny after we'd all had good laughs and John Dvorak and Bob Metcalfe, respectively. (At least Metcalfe had the class to put his column in a blender with some water and literally eat his words, as promised.)
It's not funny any more, especially when used as a power play. The right answer even if this WERE true is to tell them to get to work on building fiber-to-the-home... like they were supposed to with all the money they've been making and gargantuan tax breaks they were handed.
Actually, it's your sig I'm going to argue about. The Holocaust body count exceeds Jonestown by some four orders of magnitude. (918 vs nearly 9 million - or more than 9 million if you just blame them for all deaths in WW2).
Arguably, there ARE some IT projects that hold more than 918 lives in their digital fingers. But I have to admit, "drinking the kool-aid" is no more likely to come up in a discussion of aircraft or nuclear plant control systems than it is for a web development environment.
OK, I follow that three factors have to be constrained; and you can never seem to get all three. That makes fusion about 75% as hard as getting a two-year-old into a snow suit.
No wonder fusion is taking forever.
Thanks for letting me know Rod Walker was black. I never twigged. I found the confirmation here:
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/faqworks.html
It was very subtle, in my defense - it was a favourite trick of Heinlein's, the above source notes, to reveal or hint that positive characters were non-white late in the game (like Juan Rico), presumably to mess with racist's heads. I vividly remember my first Heinlein (at 9), Space Cadet, in a scene where a character is defending himself from a real charge of racism - against Venusians; he asks "Does it matter to any of us that Lieutenant Peters is black as the ace of spades?" This is long after Peters has left the scene and you must suddenly adjust your image of him. The novel's year: 1946.
By the way, you didn't get the vote in Troopers for combat duty: you got it for ANY FEDERAL SERVICE. Not everybody was good enough to be allowed into the forces, but everybody had a right to earn a vote. They would still find an unpleasant job for you, like testing new vaccines. But even a blind quadrapelegic could earn voting rights, even if they had to assign him to nasty make-work like "counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch". I think only a minority of volunteers for public service were taken for combat training and didn't wash out. The rest had to wash bedpans or sweep streets or whatever.
It aggravates me that Heinlein never comes up (from the professors) in these "college course" lists; he's considered too commercial or maligned as fascist for ST or something. But over 20 years after he died, his books are still on the shelves; doesn't that prove anything to these academics.
I took an SF course in 1978; one book was "Voyage to Arcturus" by David Lindsay, which is considered all artful and deep and influential and so forth. I found it tedious and obtuse, and despite the rave reviews ("greatest novel of the 20th century"), defy you to find it anywhere but Amazon; I've never seen it on any shelf but the University bookstore in 1978.
I gather Dickens was considered a commercial hack in his time by the academics; but where are the academic superstars of his era now?
I was in grade 10 in 1972, but my brothers, 7 and 9 years older, got the same treatment: forced to take "Typing 10" in a nearly all-girl classroom when the only point to it was as a first course towards a secretarial career. In my case, they'd turned it into a full-year course, the second half of which was beyond just typing and into various formats for business letters, filing systems, and so on. I got bored and managed to drop out after taking a test (51%, whew).
Mom's point was that typing was a generally useful skill, like being able to hammer nails. She wasn't thinking we'd become secretaries, just able to type our college papers without pain. She'd taken touch-typing in the 40's and never been a secretary but never regretted it.
Electric typewriters were still rare in 1972, the Apple ][ still in the future, so how much less excuse is there now for not calling it a "basic skill"? For me, it's been huge. A lot of IT work is very verbose and repetitive; I do SQL all day long some days, with tiresome table/column names like INFRANET_SW.WTR_HYDRANT.WH_VALVE_DIRECTION. (Or, yes, I can take my hands from the keyboard, move the mouse to the panel that's the list of tables, scroll down to the hydrant table, click on it, look down the column-panel for the column name, and click...which takes at least as long...if you touch type; or much longer than typing if you don't).
Well, it's 90km2 legally - but if you were to walk from the last farm on the west side to the first farm on the east side (or south to north), you'd be walking a good 30km each way. Much of the time you would be outside the legal "City of Paris" but you'd be in what anybody but a lawyer would still call "Paris". More like 1000km2.
My own home of Calgary, with just 1.1M population, is a proper "unicity" as planners call them - we don't have suburbs; from farmland to farmland, it's all in the City limits. And we clock in a 726 km2.
1mW/cm2 isn't just "non-lethal", by the way - that's like calling the 1PPM of chlorine in your tap water a "non-lethal" dose. The correct term would be "Undetectable without special equipment". Ten watts per square metre is 1% of the incident solar radiation. And unlike the solar, the microwave would be at a frequency that would pass through your body without interacting with it, just like the AM and FM radio and TV waves passing through your body right now.
The wikipedia article is a little vague on the lost-in-transit question, noting only that you can beam it one mile at 80% efficiency.
I found a paper on the subject the last time this came up on /. :
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1069437&cid=26187965 ...that boiled down to just 45% transmission efficiency. Or, to get 1GW into the grid on Earth, you have to generate 2.2GW of electricity up in space. Some is lost converting to microwaves and is radiated away up there, some is lost in space before it gets to the atmosphere, some is lost in the atmosphere, some is lost in the reconversion to electricity from microwave. The last two losses come out as heat in the biosphere. A little under 1GW.
And now for the important news: ALL electrical energy turns into heat except that which goes into making products like aluminum from aluminum ore...and even that turns back into heat in the very long run.
More news: all electrical energy except hydro, anything that involves boiling water to turn turbines, runs at maybe 33% efficiency. You'd have to burn 3GW of uranium, or coal, or oil into heat to get out 1GW of electrical energy in any earth power plant.
So, summary: to get 1GW of electricity by almost any means but hydro, you have to dump 2GW into the air or water, immediately, and the remaining 1GW goes into heat when it's used. This technology would dump less than 1GW into the environment immediately, and the other 1GW when it's used. Net SAVING of heat dump into the environment.
And it doesn't matter. Larry Niven's warnings in Ringworld about the trillion Puppeteers "drowning in their own waste heat" to the contrary, waste heat is a tiny percentage of the global warming problem; almost all of it comes from trapping more normal solar heat in the biosphere.
That's funny, corporations are constantly giving politicians much larger amounts of money for no good reason - since surely honest politicians would not let a few thousand dollars sway their administration of hundreds of millions of dollars away from the Common Good.
I don't see why you were modded down; it's a reasonable discussion.
I knew I should have kept the document when I found it; it was one of those medical meta-studies, maybe the CDC or some Canadian equivalent; it was NOT a popular article that might have had an agenda. It was just a list of numbers.
So, no, I wasn't lying through my teeth (Is there some other way to lie? If you have dentures, I suppose you have an option to lie through your gums) but there's no question that I googled until I found some numbers that answered my question about "it's all just crack babies", and quit; there may be various ways to look at it and room for dispute.
But it was certainly not about absolute numbers. You cannot imagine a Canadian is EVER unaware that there are 10X as many Americans, for crying out loud, man.
The list in question gave the AVERAGE SURVIVAL TIMES of patients diagnosed, not the number of the population that died. The average survival time after diagnosis is the best measure of the health care system. If you measure total fatalities per population, that mixes in how many people get cancer or diabetes in the first place, which can differ widely between city and rural, north and south, etc.
But this is all just bloviation. The notion that Canada does not have measurably better health outcomes than the US is just so beyond dispute that we might as well argue with "birthers"...or our dining room tables. You have to torture the stats out of recognition to get any different conclusion. (Torture, of course, is a new American specialty at which we have little experience.)
If you want another stat, here's a fun one that dates back to Harpers putting two surveys together during the last (Clinton) round of this nonsense: the number of Canadians who believe we would be better off with the US health care system is double that number of Canadians who believe that Elvis is still alive.
And believe me, we know all about American health care, almost all of us travel down there; nobody in their right mind goes down without a load of travel insurance. Everybody's heard a scare story of somebody going over the line for "just a day"... and a minor car accident costing them their savings or even their house.