As dependent on as our economy is upon routers, and Cisco in particular, it seems that his disclosure was definitely in the public interest, and if he isn't entitled to whistleblower protection, we need to mount a campaign to get him protected. Write your Congressoid.
Nawhh- There are too many companies like 3M that provide really cool and useful stuff among their hundreds of inventions, and I'd like to see them prosper. Better we teach people to invent. (See TRIZ http://www.triz.org/triz.htm)
I read the application first and, listen up, Dude: This is how computers work! (But, since no one studies anything but Java in CS courses anymore, I guess it's not that obvious.)
BAD thinking! There is no reason to establish rights over something unless you intend to exercise those rights. Even just the threat of enforcing those rights, legitimate or not, is an obstacle to competition or individual initiative, and in this case, it coerces people into MS-sanctioned behavior.
In some countries, like Japan for instance, the loser in a lawsuit has to compensate the winner for their expenses and may be assessed a fine. Some judges here in the US require a bond be placed to protect parties from frivolous lawsuits. IMO, the next needed steps in patent reform are, first, fines for filing frivolous patents, and second, clearer criteria for what is and is not patentable. These criteria need to be so clearly written that even government employees can determine if a patent application has merit.
A third reform step is to eliminate the limits on the time a patent can be challenged and overturned. For instance, if no one challenges a patent within two years, the patent holder can benefit from the de facto protection of the patent without recourse, until such time as that protection was determined to be erroneously granted and the patent overturned. My thinking is that a person erroneously granted patent rights should not be granted full patent protection just because someone didn't notice it within the challenge period. I wonder how many thousands of people are unproductively tied up spending anxious hours perusing published patent apps to protect themselves from trivial patent abuse.
Which brings me to the fourth reform: Patent apps need to be screenable by computer. (I wonder who is going to get the patent on that!)
No offense taken. Your suggestion is a VERY good one, although I'm not sure it goes far enough. My goal was just to provide feedback to the USPTO that they had made an unpopular decison, your suggestion seems like the first step in something like patent reform activism.
I'm certainly not qualified to describe the Patent Office workings, so I couldn't generate a guide today if my life depended on it. However, I'm having a fanatasy about a wiki-type guide with workflow/process flow diagrams (possibly interactive to allow for intervention at certain points in the process) where people can learn the process and and knowledgeable people can contribute and update the data as necessary.
One thing that bothers me is how unclear the line is between what is patentable and what should be patentable. I believe that intellectual property should be protected, but what are the characteristics of something "crossing the line"? My questions are: Why, specifically, is this a bad patent decision? Why, specifically, is it so unpopular? What are the specific criteria separating a good patent decision from a bad one? How can we make it clearer to everybody?
All the clever comments on slashdot don't help much. Why not give the USPTO the feedback it needs when it does something dumb? Send the link to this article to: usptoinfo@uspto.gov
They might then get the idea that there are consequences for stupid decisions.
I'm thinking that the fact that this was accidental means that there is tremendous room for innovation by users of TRIZ, who can solve problems on purpose.
Once upon a time, there was a group of warriors appointed by the King to administer justice in the domain and protect the citizenry from outside agression. For hundreds of years these lords of the realm took their hereditary responsibilities seriously, and, working with a body of representatives of the common citizenry, managed to maintain the kingdom in relative peace.
Then one day the citizenry and the monarch reduced their status from hereditary protectors of the realm to common citizens, and rescinded the hereditary responsibilities.
Now, in the 21st century, common elected officials are self-promoting themselves to knighted protectors of society...
IMO, a "knight" is respected because he holds himself to a higher standard than is expected of non-knights. Knighthood is an acknowledgement of the person's willingness to hold to these high standards. No self-respecting knight would run for the office of knighthood (though he might kill for the hereditary title).
Uh-huh. And what,specifically, does that do? How does thinking about their life make them excellent techs? Isn't this a little fuzzy? What will they do differently? If you're their supervisor, what would you expect to see different from what it was before? (Of course, this implies that you are measuring something now, so you would be able to tell if there is improvement. What are you measuring now? what is the potential? What specifically would you like to see improved and by how much? I having the techs read Bob's book the way to get that improvement?)
How will your customers know your techs are better for eading the book? how will they know you have excellent techs instead of average techs? How will you get feedback?
Out of the hundreds of responses to this question, only about 5 offerred any worthwile suggestions or comments. The rest was mostly noise. What happened to the thinkers that used to populate/.? (Were they ever here, or has the S/N ratio always been this bad and I never noticed?)
After the Japanese wake-up call in the 80's, companies like Motorola improved their performance by ratios of 100:1 in only 3 years. We need to have a breakthrough like this in service, both call center and on-site consulting, or we're going to see those jobs going away also. You will wake up tomorrow morning to find a package at your office from Toshiba and note saying, "We noticed your video was degrading, so please run the CD enclosed with this new system to clone your system perfectly to the new system. It will optimize your OS and save your data and settings perfectly. Then you can return the old system in the box provided. You will be out of service less than 10 minutes."
Can your techs fix your customers' computers in less than 10 minutes? Will reading Bob's book help them do that? If you needed to provide a 100:1 improvement in tech support, how would you do it?
You mis-understood me or I didn't make myself clear, but I'm not denigrating India. I was trying to make a humorous point that that not every spot in the world has the most modern telephone switching systems yet. You point out, correctly, that India has found it easier and more economicaal to have more wireless infrastructure as opposed to putting more massive central switching systems in the more remote and economically deprived areas. (In 1990, I had to have a line run from Omaha, Nebraska to Alma, Nebraska to complete an internet installation. I had been prepared for everything except for Alma, Nebraska not have tone dialing...they were still on pulse!)
Modern technology is not spread evenly across India or Argentina, anymore than it is spread evenly across any other country. It would be great if I could find immediate, complete data on everything at once, but sometimes my knowledge ages between updates. For instance, mobile phones and supporting infrastructure have multiplied logarithmically in India since the last time I checked. I presume some areas have increased more rapidly than others, and I wonder if it is now more expensive or less expensive for a household to have telephone service or internet service. How long does it take to get internet service to a household and what does it cost? Is it DSL, wireless, or dialup? (4 years ago a friends daughter went to school in Italy, and it took over three months to get dialup Internet service, and it cost the equivalent of $150/month as opposed to current US prices of $10 - $30/mo.) I subscribe to CIOL and a couple of other info sources, but this type of thing is not usually discussed.
Thank you for your offer of a beer. (I actually don't drink, thank you anyway.) It is typical of the people I met in India that they were some of the most hospitable people I've ever met. I constantly felt like an honored guest in their homes and businesses. It would be nice to go to India and actually know someone there. (Usually my parties were mountain climbers.) It would also be nice to be able to spend enough months to actually see more of India. I love the hills and lakes in the North, but I'd also like to see some of the jungles and tiger country.
Rhetorical fallacy detected: "Ad hominum" rebuttal. No value to discussion, therefore. Apologies tendered on behalf of all intelligent life to the intended target of "ad hominum" attack.
Funny, I've been looking for quality standards for on-site service techs for about a week now, and haven't found ahything useful.
OK, something breaks, somone calls someone else, someone shows up and maybe fixes it. What makes a good on-site technician? What do customers expect from a good on-site technician? What distinguishes an excellent tech from the average tech? Where can I find the answers to these questions?
Now, think about the tech business: It costs a certain amount of money to live these days. Your tech needs $750/week to support his wife and family. In order to pay him $750/wk your business has to receive $2250 in revenues from his weekly business. There is only about 20 hours of billable tech time available in a week, the rest of it is taken up by travel, errands, sickness, vacations, delays from missing parts or customer rescheduling, etc., therefore your business has to charge about $112/hr in order to break even. If you have a lousy tech, he could cost you the business of someone who can afford to pay over $100/hr for a good tech. Where are those standards, again?
By the way, those figures are not made up. I transposed them from a National Office Machine Dealer's presentation I went to about 15 years ago concerning making service a profitable activity instead of a money sink. NOMDA merged with LANDA (Local Area Network Dealer's Association). If anyone knows the name of the subsequent organization, they may have some good information on standards.
Yup. Most recently installing communications in a rural area of Argentina. Some pulse switches, but still some manual switchboards before I got there. Even in Buenos Aires the power was funky and had scheduled outages for a couple of hours each day. It's been a couple of years, though. Maybe things have improved.
That is precisely my point: Menial jobs get lost during a phase of heavy progress, along with irrelevant skills.
R. Buckminster Fuller, in his book, "Critical Path", made a point of showing how the speed of progress is going to require educated people who can learn new things quickly as opposed to specialists who cannot be flexible. I suspect that one of the greatest job markets for smart people in the near future is going to be education and training. If you want a technology job 5 years from now, learn Math, Dynamic Systems and Analysis, TRIZ, Propositional Logic, and have highly-honed interpersonal communications skills besides a set of core skills in your field (such as Computer Science).
Well, first of all, I'm still quite a few years away from retirement, and I'm already no longer part of the "workforce". I hire people who are part of the "workforce". I've been lucky enough to associate with people who are worth paying, and none of them are whiners or Anonymous Cowards. My job is to make sure we all have plenty to do, and I can tell you that it looks like we'd need three lifetimes to finish what's coming up.
Actually, US passenger service sucks big time. It is now a "government service" and has been going downhill ever since. Passenger service was getting in the way of freight and wasn't so profitable, and one of the biggest scams in US rail was selling the passenger service to the public as a government service.
Freight rail, on the other hand, is doing very well in this country, but I don't expect much in the way of technological improvement unless the government comes up with some money. It's not that the railroads couldn't reinvest and make the improvements themselves, but they've been sucking up government money for 150 years and old habits are hard to break (not to mention harder on the profit margin.) The worst part, is that people who want to make the railroads better are hampered by government red tape.
The weapons I spoke of were confiscated back about 1989 or so...There was a lot of bitternes on the part of collectors at that time, and my friends were definitely not the only ones.
We've gotten far afield from the original topic, but the same principles apply: When government meddles in business there are costs. Some of those costs are monetary costs and some are costs against freedoms. IMO, the chemical researchers should either share their knowledge or not ask the public for money.
I just used the ownership example of administration of justice to point out that it is more than just police and courts. My point wasn't clear and I apologize.
As to the "costs" of rail being privatized in the UK, remember that public rail costs as much or more, it's just that everyone is subsidizing the ones who truly benefit from it.
The same is true about the heart transplant example: It still costs the same or more under socialism, but the costs are distributed to include the people who take care of themselves.
I have friends in the martial arts who had their Antique Japanese swords and antique firearms collections confiscated. I won't pretend to try understanding the benefit to society.
Obviously I have some strong opinions about centralized government, but my point regarding this article is that once the confiscated assets (tax dollars) are applied in the name of public good, then private interests lose their claim to exclusivity.
Next month I will have been a programmer for 40 years. This is not the first bust I've seen in programming employment, but I'm not sure this is a cyclical change as much as a structural change. The task cannot continue "as is" in the face of advancing technology. Thirty-five years ago there were predictions of software being written by software, and we're on the verge of a BIG explosion of software. (Just look at all the submissions at Freshmeat.)
However, there is a severe shortage of thinkers. Face it, any moron can write code, even good code, if the design is done well enough. But if 9 out of 10 software projects in the US are cancelled before completion (apparently due to cost overruns and design problems), then there is a tremendous pent-up demand for good, creative design implemented in affordable software! The new possibilities that could be addressed by a multitude of programmers freed from writing accounting reports and database forms could change our world in terrific ways!
Unfortunately, the low education level in the US has produced a bunch of code peasants without the vision to use the tools they now have. These are persons whose main interest is getting a paycheck and going home to the bottle or TV.
It took 40 years for the railroad to substantially change our lives. Same thing, 40 years, for electricity, automobiles and aircraft. Don't cry for buggy-whip code jobs. Those are something we had to get through to get to the chance for jetliner opportunities. Larry Ellison said (back in '96) that computing power had increased a millionfold in the last 20 years, and if it continued like that for another 20 years it would produce a future he couldn't even imagine. Back in '79, when Cincom Systems was building one of the best database managers to run on IBM mainframes, they had presentation that included this one fact: Back in 1940 the telephone companies had all the technology necessary to handle all the telephone calls made in 1979, but it would have taken every man, woman and child older than 14 in New York City to handle the calls! (Anyone else remember the days when you picked up the phone and got an operator? Oh, wait...there are places like that in Argentina and India.) Routine jobs will always be downsized, eliminated or automated, and any job becomes routine with progress. Some researchers are predicting huge unemployment in the unskilled labor market in 25 years. Robotic machinery will handle routine skills like cooking fast food, housework, framing homes, etc., but somebody will have to build and design those machines. I say we have a great opportunity to get there before the Chinese! I say , "Bring on the automated programming!" There is no end to the things I could build if didn't have to hire lazy, unreliable and expensive wetware to do the routine tasks.
Attacking the argument because it sounds like Libertarianism invalidates your response on rhetorical grounds, just as I would invalidate my response if I attacked you as a Socialist. Your comparison of television quality is not relevant to the issues at hand.
IMO, if the government (read the taxpayers) pays for the research, then the results should be distributed. It is no longer proprietary, and the ACS has no right to lock up the information.
The other issue is, "Should the government be paying for the research?" Well, IMO, the only legitimate use of the national government is for National Defense and the administration of Justice.
The strength of our administration of justice (which is certainly NOT perfect) is well illustrated by the ease with which we in the US can obtain title or ownership of private property such as cars and land, compared to say, Central America or Mexico.
When the government re-allocates confiscated wealth (tax dollars), it funds inefficient industries and gives an unfair advantage to a select few. In the US, this has never been demonstrated more clearly than government funding of the railroads: The only profitable, efficient railroad in the American West was the Great Northern, which was unsupported by government funds and financed by Henry Hill and investors. We won't know what effect the the government has on our industrial development until some time in the future when we can look back and analyze it. I'm pretty certain that government programs are somewhat beneficial, but I believe that private enterprise would be more beneficial in the long run.
Who knows what chemical research is not being done because there's more funding in a competitive area?
Also, in my mind, a bigger question is not, "Should they?" or "Shouldn't they?", but "What is the best way of overcoming the shortcomings of both paths?"
Now, on a personal note: I'm NOT a big fan of the UK. They have one of the worst records for civil rights of any government on earth, my "Economist Pocket World in Figures" indicates that the US purchasing power is second-highest in the world and about 20% greater than the UK, Canada, Japan and Germany, I'm apalled that the people of the UK let the government confiscate their personal property (such as weapons collections after the 1988 Security Act), and that, while homicides have declined in the UK, other violent crime is growing significantly, that heart transplants and bypasses (which can be gotten in the US within a couple of weeks) take an average of 3 months in the UK (if they will let you have one), and much, much more.
Oh, yeah, British TV sucks (boring), but people who live their lives to suck on the glass teat get what they deserve. American TV isn't any better.
The article doesn't impress me: BSD has some good features but some difficult deficiencies also.
However, BSD does seem to have a coherent design strategy, and from what I've seen of the internals, there is a discernable structure. The statement one poster made about LINUX having kludge piled on kludge comes close enough to the truth to make me VERY uncomfortable, and the exponential growth of code seems to lead to more severe complexity.
The good news is that companies like Sun, HP and IBM are behind LINUX. These companies have a history of turning out excellent software, and their contribution to LINUX might include best practices for software quality control.
This site totally sucks. Screenshots don't give a good functional comparison, only a look and feel comparison. It's a troll site designed to provide adspace aimed at people who are dumb enough to come here. It doesn't work well in Firefox, it's best seen in IE (you might see blank spaces or links in Firefox). Don't waste your time going to this site.
Slashdot Mirror
Combine this with the video of the radio-contlled woman, and you have a winner for the totalitarinist forces of evil!
As dependent on as our economy is upon routers, and Cisco in particular, it seems that his disclosure was definitely in the public interest, and if he isn't entitled to whistleblower protection, we need to mount a campaign to get him protected. Write your Congressoid.
I would have settled for just blinding him.
Nawhh- There are too many companies like 3M that provide really cool and useful stuff among their hundreds of inventions, and I'd like to see them prosper. Better we teach people to invent. (See TRIZ http://www.triz.org/triz.htm)
I read the application first and, listen up, Dude: This is how computers work! (But, since no one studies anything but Java in CS courses anymore, I guess it's not that obvious.)
BAD thinking! There is no reason to establish rights over something unless you intend to exercise those rights. Even just the threat of enforcing those rights, legitimate or not, is an obstacle to competition or individual initiative, and in this case, it coerces people into MS-sanctioned behavior.
In some countries, like Japan for instance, the loser in a lawsuit has to compensate the winner for their expenses and may be assessed a fine. Some judges here in the US require a bond be placed to protect parties from frivolous lawsuits. IMO, the next needed steps in patent reform are, first, fines for filing frivolous patents, and second, clearer criteria for what is and is not patentable. These criteria need to be so clearly written that even government employees can determine if a patent application has merit.
A third reform step is to eliminate the limits on the time a patent can be challenged and overturned. For instance, if no one challenges a patent within two years, the patent holder can benefit from the de facto protection of the patent without recourse, until such time as that protection was determined to be erroneously granted and the patent overturned. My thinking is that a person erroneously granted patent rights should not be granted full patent protection just because someone didn't notice it within the challenge period. I wonder how many thousands of people are unproductively tied up spending anxious hours perusing published patent apps to protect themselves from trivial patent abuse.
Which brings me to the fourth reform: Patent apps need to be screenable by computer. (I wonder who is going to get the patent on that!)
No offense taken. Your suggestion is a VERY good one, although I'm not sure it goes far enough. My goal was just to provide feedback to the USPTO that they had made an unpopular decison, your suggestion seems like the first step in something like patent reform activism.
I'm certainly not qualified to describe the Patent Office workings, so I couldn't generate a guide today if my life depended on it. However, I'm having a fanatasy about a wiki-type guide with workflow/process flow diagrams (possibly interactive to allow for intervention at certain points in the process) where people can learn the process and and knowledgeable people can contribute and update the data as necessary.
One thing that bothers me is how unclear the line is between what is patentable and what should be patentable. I believe that intellectual property should be protected, but what are the characteristics of something "crossing the line"? My questions are: Why, specifically, is this a bad patent decision? Why, specifically, is it so unpopular? What are the specific criteria separating a good patent decision from a bad one? How can we make it clearer to everybody?
All the clever comments on slashdot don't help much. Why not give the USPTO the feedback it needs when it does something dumb? Send the link to this article to: usptoinfo@uspto.gov They might then get the idea that there are consequences for stupid decisions.
I'm thinking that the fact that this was accidental means that there is tremendous room for innovation by users of TRIZ, who can solve problems on purpose.
http://www.triz-journal.com/whatistriz.htm
Once upon a time, there was a group of warriors appointed by the King to administer justice in the domain and protect the citizenry from outside agression. For hundreds of years these lords of the realm took their hereditary responsibilities seriously, and, working with a body of representatives of the common citizenry, managed to maintain the kingdom in relative peace.
Then one day the citizenry and the monarch reduced their status from hereditary protectors of the realm to common citizens, and rescinded the hereditary responsibilities.
Now, in the 21st century, common elected officials are self-promoting themselves to knighted protectors of society...
IMO, a "knight" is respected because he holds himself to a higher standard than is expected of non-knights. Knighthood is an acknowledgement of the person's willingness to hold to these high standards. No self-respecting knight would run for the office of knighthood (though he might kill for the hereditary title).
Uh-huh. And what,specifically, does that do? How does thinking about their life make them excellent techs? Isn't this a little fuzzy? What will they do differently? If you're their supervisor, what would you expect to see different from what it was before? (Of course, this implies that you are measuring something now, so you would be able to tell if there is improvement. What are you measuring now? what is the potential? What specifically would you like to see improved and by how much? I having the techs read Bob's book the way to get that improvement?)
/.? (Were they ever here, or has the S/N ratio always been this bad and I never noticed?)
How will your customers know your techs are better for eading the book? how will they know you have excellent techs instead of average techs? How will you get feedback?
Out of the hundreds of responses to this question, only about 5 offerred any worthwile suggestions or comments. The rest was mostly noise. What happened to the thinkers that used to populate
After the Japanese wake-up call in the 80's, companies like Motorola improved their performance by ratios of 100:1 in only 3 years. We need to have a breakthrough like this in service, both call center and on-site consulting, or we're going to see those jobs going away also. You will wake up tomorrow morning to find a package at your office from Toshiba and note saying, "We noticed your video was degrading, so please run the CD enclosed with this new system to clone your system perfectly to the new system. It will optimize your OS and save your data and settings perfectly. Then you can return the old system in the box provided. You will be out of service less than 10 minutes."
Can your techs fix your customers' computers in less than 10 minutes? Will reading Bob's book help them do that? If you needed to provide a 100:1 improvement in tech support, how would you do it?
Yeah, I read the book four or five times, the first time in the early '70's when it first came out.
And I knew Robert Pirsig personally from around Dinkytown (an area near the University of Minnesota) and from other mutually popular locations.
So would your techs be better at serving their customers if they read Bob's book? How, specifically, would that happen?
You mis-understood me or I didn't make myself clear, but I'm not denigrating India. I was trying to make a humorous point that that not every spot in the world has the most modern telephone switching systems yet. You point out, correctly, that India has found it easier and more economicaal to have more wireless infrastructure as opposed to putting more massive central switching systems in the more remote and economically deprived areas. (In 1990, I had to have a line run from Omaha, Nebraska to Alma, Nebraska to complete an internet installation. I had been prepared for everything except for Alma, Nebraska not have tone dialing...they were still on pulse!)
Modern technology is not spread evenly across India or Argentina, anymore than it is spread evenly across any other country. It would be great if I could find immediate, complete data on everything at once, but sometimes my knowledge ages between updates. For instance, mobile phones and supporting infrastructure have multiplied logarithmically in India since the last time I checked. I presume some areas have increased more rapidly than others, and I wonder if it is now more expensive or less expensive for a household to have telephone service or internet service. How long does it take to get internet service to a household and what does it cost? Is it DSL, wireless, or dialup? (4 years ago a friends daughter went to school in Italy, and it took over three months to get dialup Internet service, and it cost the equivalent of $150/month as opposed to current US prices of $10 - $30/mo.) I subscribe to CIOL and a couple of other info sources, but this type of thing is not usually discussed.
Thank you for your offer of a beer. (I actually don't drink, thank you anyway.) It is typical of the people I met in India that they were some of the most hospitable people I've ever met. I constantly felt like an honored guest in their homes and businesses. It would be nice to go to India and actually know someone there. (Usually my parties were mountain climbers.) It would also be nice to be able to spend enough months to actually see more of India. I love the hills and lakes in the North, but I'd also like to see some of the jungles and tiger country.
Rhetorical fallacy detected: "Ad hominum" rebuttal. No value to discussion, therefore. Apologies tendered on behalf of all intelligent life to the intended target of "ad hominum" attack.
Thank you! This group offers insurance, training research and lots of help to the small tech business, and I appreciate you pointing me to the site.
Funny, I've been looking for quality standards for on-site service techs for about a week now, and haven't found ahything useful.
OK, something breaks, somone calls someone else, someone shows up and maybe fixes it. What makes a good on-site technician? What do customers expect from a good on-site technician? What distinguishes an excellent tech from the average tech? Where can I find the answers to these questions?
Now, think about the tech business: It costs a certain amount of money to live these days. Your tech needs $750/week to support his wife and family. In order to pay him $750/wk your business has to receive $2250 in revenues from his weekly business. There is only about 20 hours of billable tech time available in a week, the rest of it is taken up by travel, errands, sickness, vacations, delays from missing parts or customer rescheduling, etc., therefore your business has to charge about $112/hr in order to break even. If you have a lousy tech, he could cost you the business of someone who can afford to pay over $100/hr for a good tech. Where are those standards, again?
By the way, those figures are not made up. I transposed them from a National Office Machine Dealer's presentation I went to about 15 years ago concerning making service a profitable activity instead of a money sink. NOMDA merged with LANDA (Local Area Network Dealer's Association). If anyone knows the name of the subsequent organization, they may have some good information on standards.
Yup. Most recently installing communications in a rural area of Argentina. Some pulse switches, but still some manual switchboards before I got there. Even in Buenos Aires the power was funky and had scheduled outages for a couple of hours each day. It's been a couple of years, though. Maybe things have improved.
That is precisely my point: Menial jobs get lost during a phase of heavy progress, along with irrelevant skills.
R. Buckminster Fuller, in his book, "Critical Path", made a point of showing how the speed of progress is going to require educated people who can learn new things quickly as opposed to specialists who cannot be flexible. I suspect that one of the greatest job markets for smart people in the near future is going to be education and training. If you want a technology job 5 years from now, learn Math, Dynamic Systems and Analysis, TRIZ, Propositional Logic, and have highly-honed interpersonal communications skills besides a set of core skills in your field (such as Computer Science).
Well, first of all, I'm still quite a few years away from retirement, and I'm already no longer part of the "workforce". I hire people who are part of the "workforce". I've been lucky enough to associate with people who are worth paying, and none of them are whiners or Anonymous Cowards. My job is to make sure we all have plenty to do, and I can tell you that it looks like we'd need three lifetimes to finish what's coming up.
Actually, US passenger service sucks big time. It is now a "government service" and has been going downhill ever since. Passenger service was getting in the way of freight and wasn't so profitable, and one of the biggest scams in US rail was selling the passenger service to the public as a government service.
Freight rail, on the other hand, is doing very well in this country, but I don't expect much in the way of technological improvement unless the government comes up with some money. It's not that the railroads couldn't reinvest and make the improvements themselves, but they've been sucking up government money for 150 years and old habits are hard to break (not to mention harder on the profit margin.) The worst part, is that people who want to make the railroads better are hampered by government red tape.
The weapons I spoke of were confiscated back about 1989 or so...There was a lot of bitternes on the part of collectors at that time, and my friends were definitely not the only ones.
We've gotten far afield from the original topic, but the same principles apply: When government meddles in business there are costs. Some of those costs are monetary costs and some are costs against freedoms. IMO, the chemical researchers should either share their knowledge or not ask the public for money.
I just used the ownership example of administration of justice to point out that it is more than just police and courts. My point wasn't clear and I apologize.
As to the "costs" of rail being privatized in the UK, remember that public rail costs as much or more, it's just that everyone is subsidizing the ones who truly benefit from it.
The same is true about the heart transplant example: It still costs the same or more under socialism, but the costs are distributed to include the people who take care of themselves.
I have friends in the martial arts who had their Antique Japanese swords and antique firearms collections confiscated. I won't pretend to try understanding the benefit to society.
Obviously I have some strong opinions about centralized government, but my point regarding this article is that once the confiscated assets (tax dollars) are applied in the name of public good, then private interests lose their claim to exclusivity.
Next month I will have been a programmer for 40 years. This is not the first bust I've seen in programming employment, but I'm not sure this is a cyclical change as much as a structural change. The task cannot continue "as is" in the face of advancing technology. Thirty-five years ago there were predictions of software being written by software, and we're on the verge of a BIG explosion of software. (Just look at all the submissions at Freshmeat.)
However, there is a severe shortage of thinkers. Face it, any moron can write code, even good code, if the design is done well enough. But if 9 out of 10 software projects in the US are cancelled before completion (apparently due to cost overruns and design problems), then there is a tremendous pent-up demand for good, creative design implemented in affordable software! The new possibilities that could be addressed by a multitude of programmers freed from writing accounting reports and database forms could change our world in terrific ways!
Unfortunately, the low education level in the US has produced a bunch of code peasants without the vision to use the tools they now have. These are persons whose main interest is getting a paycheck and going home to the bottle or TV.
It took 40 years for the railroad to substantially change our lives. Same thing, 40 years, for electricity, automobiles and aircraft. Don't cry for buggy-whip code jobs. Those are something we had to get through to get to the chance for jetliner opportunities. Larry Ellison said (back in '96) that computing power had increased a millionfold in the last 20 years, and if it continued like that for another 20 years it would produce a future he couldn't even imagine. Back in '79, when Cincom Systems was building one of the best database managers to run on IBM mainframes, they had presentation that included this one fact: Back in 1940 the telephone companies had all the technology necessary to handle all the telephone calls made in 1979, but it would have taken every man, woman and child older than 14 in New York City to handle the calls! (Anyone else remember the days when you picked up the phone and got an operator? Oh, wait...there are places like that in Argentina and India.) Routine jobs will always be downsized, eliminated or automated, and any job becomes routine with progress. Some researchers are predicting huge unemployment in the unskilled labor market in 25 years. Robotic machinery will handle routine skills like cooking fast food, housework, framing homes, etc., but somebody will have to build and design those machines. I say we have a great opportunity to get there before the Chinese! I say , "Bring on the automated programming!" There is no end to the things I could build if didn't have to hire lazy, unreliable and expensive wetware to do the routine tasks.
Attacking the argument because it sounds like Libertarianism invalidates your response on rhetorical grounds, just as I would invalidate my response if I attacked you as a Socialist. Your comparison of television quality is not relevant to the issues at hand.
IMO, if the government (read the taxpayers) pays for the research, then the results should be distributed. It is no longer proprietary, and the ACS has no right to lock up the information.
The other issue is, "Should the government be paying for the research?" Well, IMO, the only legitimate use of the national government is for National Defense and the administration of Justice.
The strength of our administration of justice (which is certainly NOT perfect) is well illustrated by the ease with which we in the US can obtain title or ownership of private property such as cars and land, compared to say, Central America or Mexico.
When the government re-allocates confiscated wealth (tax dollars), it funds inefficient industries and gives an unfair advantage to a select few. In the US, this has never been demonstrated more clearly than government funding of the railroads: The only profitable, efficient railroad in the American West was the Great Northern, which was unsupported by government funds and financed by Henry Hill and investors. We won't know what effect the the government has on our industrial development until some time in the future when we can look back and analyze it. I'm pretty certain that government programs are somewhat beneficial, but I believe that private enterprise would be more beneficial in the long run.
Who knows what chemical research is not being done because there's more funding in a competitive area?
Also, in my mind, a bigger question is not, "Should they?" or "Shouldn't they?", but "What is the best way of overcoming the shortcomings of both paths?"
Now, on a personal note: I'm NOT a big fan of the UK. They have one of the worst records for civil rights of any government on earth, my "Economist Pocket World in Figures" indicates that the US purchasing power is second-highest in the world and about 20% greater than the UK, Canada, Japan and Germany, I'm apalled that the people of the UK let the government confiscate their personal property (such as weapons collections after the 1988 Security Act), and that, while homicides have declined in the UK, other violent crime is growing significantly, that heart transplants and bypasses (which can be gotten in the US within a couple of weeks) take an average of 3 months in the UK (if they will let you have one), and much, much more.
Oh, yeah, British TV sucks (boring), but people who live their lives to suck on the glass teat get what they deserve. American TV isn't any better.
The article doesn't impress me: BSD has some good features but some difficult deficiencies also.
However, BSD does seem to have a coherent design strategy, and from what I've seen of the internals, there is a discernable structure. The statement one poster made about LINUX having kludge piled on kludge comes close enough to the truth to make me VERY uncomfortable, and the exponential growth of code seems to lead to more severe complexity.
The good news is that companies like Sun, HP and IBM are behind LINUX. These companies have a history of turning out excellent software, and their contribution to LINUX might include best practices for software quality control.
This site totally sucks. Screenshots don't give a good functional comparison, only a look and feel comparison. It's a troll site designed to provide adspace aimed at people who are dumb enough to come here. It doesn't work well in Firefox, it's best seen in IE (you might see blank spaces or links in Firefox). Don't waste your time going to this site.