If you treat food as a commodity, and you have free markets (or some approximation thereof), you will have plenty of food barring some incredible catastrophe. The market is an extremely adaptable mechanism.
If you treat it as something special, like you propose, you will simply create a less adaptable system. You will create rules and bureaucrats and special interests, etc.
Of course, we have far from a free market today because of silly agricultural subsidies. Subsidies keep the market from seeking the most efficient food production! Not exactly what you want in a crisis.
Of course, the biggest problem today with famine is not food supply, but food distribution. And this is primarily caused by corrupt third world governments which do not allow the markets to operate. The current best example is Zimbabwe, which has taken a productive exporting agricultural sector and in a few years converted it to a spoils system for the current ruler... in the process destroying agricultural production. Zimbabwe is now entering a famine as a result.
The best way to avoid famine is to avoid corrupt and dictatorial governments. Ask the Zimbabweans or the North Koreans (where an estimated 1,000,000 people have starved to death recently).
It costs very little to use the notation. One of the ways I find it most useful is to distinguish between members of an array and the array itself (we prefix an array name with an "a").
I don't expect to convince you... like I said, it seems to be a personal preference, like editors.
If you name your variables well, search and replace will easily change your hungarian notation without screwing things up.
And really, how often do you have to change the types of variables?
The tradeoff for the very rare case where you have to change a variable name en-mass is a program where somebody else can read it and know without cross referencing something about the typing of the variables we are looking at. Or you can go back a year later and see that one variable is a string and another an integer.
We use HN in Java, and I find reading other code that does not use it to be harder than reading our code.
It wasn't invented to make the original coding easier. It was invented to make code *maintenance* easier... and the most common problem in code maintenance is reading and understanding someone else's code, not changing a variable name.
I suspect variable naming is like editor preferences. There are strong, almost religious beliefs on the subject, and they are held more or less randomly among different people. I like hungarian notation and I like vi (and variants). Maybe you like non-hungarian and Emacs.
Perhaps, but it wasn't well stated. All languages do hide the underlying machine language nature of the computer (except assembly. But otherwise they are so radically different as to render the statement silly.
For example, real-time extensible languages like FORTH are radically different from fixed memory model languages like FORTRAN-IV. Likewise functional languages (such as XSL) are completely different from procedural languages.
Beyond that, I wouldn't even say there is a unifying theory behind them. There is not even a common model of computing. For example, COBOL and PL/B, as originally intended, assume modifyable code. FORTH, LISP and others assume a modifyable language, at compile and run time (which are often the same thing). This means that as originally intended, COBOL and PL/B could not run on a Harvard architecture machine (except we know that we can *simulate* self-modfying code).
And even there... I wouldn't call that a unifying theory. It is more like a unifying common engineering practice - like TCP or something. The fact that computers simulate or operate as single-instruction-at-a-time state machines is not universal. Nor is it a theory as opposed to a practice. Note that most of these languages fail to take advantage of a highly parallel architecture, but some languages don't. Again, hardly a unifying theory. Also consider that COBOL and FORTRAN-IV were invented before there was any significant work in language theory. Even expression evaluation was ad-hoc until sometime after these languages were produced, when somebody published a paper showing how to do it right every time.
Of course, I expect that Waterloo, which has a long history of contributing to computer science, produces graduates with a good general computing science knowledge. I went to UCLA myself, which also seemed to do that.
Oh, and some advice: almost all computer languages are the same. If you actually know your stuff you can pick up a reasonable language (i.e., not malbolge) in no time at all.
This from a UW "computer scientists and mathematicians ?
Perhaps your education hasn't included languages as diverse as:
FORTH
Assembly Languages
DB/C (also known as PL/2) , COBOL
Fortran
Java/C/PL-I/Algol
LISP
PERL
APL
These languages are only "the same" in the sense that they are used to program computers, and they start out as text files!
If convergence is the only reason, why not just do it all over TCP/IP or even HTML? (Answer: engineering reasons - same argument one might make against IP itself!).
Furthermore, IP is a low level protocol. It doesn't guarantee interopterability! To have interoperability, one needs all levels of the protocol stack to be compatable, and the hardest one there is the applications level, not the various transport levels. This means, for example, that if your phone does messaging, that it interoperate with other phones and/or hosts that provide messaging service. IP is the least of your problems in that regard!
I could see having, IPv6 addressability for all phones, but that is not the same thing as actually using *IP* as the transport mechanism.
I am the original poster on the "earth is covered with water". I live in Arizona, which is also in "extreme drought." Water conservation may even be a good idea *here* at some point. My issue is that water, like so many things, is a *local* commodity. But environmentalists treat it like a goddess or something. Thus everyone is the US is required to have low water usage toilets and maximum 2.5 gpm showers - whether they live in a water shortage area or not.
And this is dumb, dumb, dumb. But it is typical of big government solutions, and it is typical of the shallow thinking that treats "water" as a scarce resource.
BTW... evenly distributed, there is a huge surfeit of fresh water on earth.
Governments control information because it works! The *first* thing to be lost in a totalitarian society is free interchange of information. Once it is lost, people *know* that they are missing something, and they *know* that the government lies. But what they don't know is the facts. The government counts on this and is able to influence their opinion, even though the people know they are being lied to.
A recent example was the USSR. Back in the Breshnev days, a group of high ranking Soviet scientists paid my family a visit in the US midwest. They thought that the US was one big slum and mass of violence, so they assumed, and stated, that they were seeing a Potemkin village (i.e. that the place they were visiting was staged for their benefit). My father took them for a ride, and told them to give him directions and he would take them wherever they wanted to go. As far as I can tell, they concluded that he lived in a very *big* Potemkin village since they couldn't find "the real America" wherever they went!
These were very intelligent people. They were near the top of Soviet society. They had more access to information than ordinary Soviet citizens. But they were badly misinformed about the United States because that is what their government wanted.
This is a result of the technique of the "big lie." It means that the government a lies a lot and the people know they are lying, but they still don't know the truth and hence lean in the direction of the lies. It is the basis for all modern non-democratic societies.
BTW... you see this sort of thing on a smaller scale with ordinary media. When my daughter went to an eastern school, and was the only student from Arizona, she was (seriously) asked questions about whether she had a telephone and whether any roads were paved. It's easy to draw wrong impressions, in this case where nobody was even trying to lie, just from small amounts of information. The Russians thought we still had cowboys our here shooting Indians. (We do have cowboys, and we do have Indians, but we most of the shooting is done by inner city gangs... including ones that have invaded rural Indian reservations... so much for stereotypes).
And you provide such a shining example of repressed free speech! Obviously it must be really repressive here if you can post such criticisms (NOT). You have no clue of the difference between a free society like the US and a fascist country like China, or a totalitarian country like Cuba. If you did, you wouldn't blather that we are "well on our way toward government control like China."
The DMCA sucks big time - no doubt about it. It is a travesty. But in any society, capitalist, socialist, totalitarian, whatever... there are always big cheese who occasionally take away goodies from the little guy.
OTOH the Patriot Act doesn't take away *any* of your freedoms. None! Count them! ZERO. NONE! It certainly doesn't take away your free speech rights.
Our constitution promotes representative democracy and capitalism (othwise, why would we have the "property" clause in the fifth amendment?).
Capitalism cannot thrive without a functioning democracy (as China will find out). And a democracy cannot survive without an effective economic system, of which capitalism, in one form or the other, is the only proven candidate.
My goal is to use 100% more electricity. Why? Energy usage correlates with comfort and capabilities (computers, music, transportation, etc).
So far I am up to a daily average of about 250 kwh/day. But I'm working on it!
Saving energy is a silly way to spend your time. It is only an issue because of folks who want to make it hard to produce energy (i.e. anti-nuke people who haven't really looked into the issue).
It's almost as bad as saving water! The planet is covered with water!
If we simply granted property rights to explorers, we might already have a large space industry.
Instead, we have turned outer space into a government monopoly, and the result is that we have a pathetic space program.
I remember when Sputnik was launched, and how exciting it was that man was going into space. I remember the Apollo moon landings. And I remember how after that space had to "justify" itself in order to get funded.
Private organizations don't have to deal with that nonsense. If the He3 on the moon is worth recovering, and they can get the rights to it, they will raise the money and do it!
Sure, we should make sure that not all the land is private... parks are a good thing. And we should prevent excess environmental degration.
But if the younger people on slashdot want to see serious space travel in their lifetime, they should consider *privatizing* space including property rights to asteroids, plots on the moon, mars minerals, etc.
I have waited almost 50 years now (since Sputnik), and am bitterly disappointed.
I am in the middle of a long battle with them over changing the domain access. My daughter's site host went belly up, and Verisign's autoresponder never responds. We go to the site, log in, put in the changes, get a message at the correct email, respond to it as requested, and it vanishes into a black hole.
Finally, yesterday I called them on the phone and in about 45 minutes of hassling with a live human (no wonder they are hurting), still got no satisfaction. She told me the system was changing and they could not change the domain in any way except through the autoresponder, and had no idea why it didn't work. She did manage to get it to generate a couple of "unauthorized" person trying to change your domain messages (she works for them, but she is unauthorized)! She later told me should would fix the problem (which she had earlier told me was unfixable) but it would take a few days to show up in the database! This is modern technology? Now the whois record shows yesterday as the last date changed, but it still has the same wrong information in it!
This incompetent company deserves to have their domain privileges removed. Their whois database should be given to someone who can make it work!
Sigh... no sonner did I send in the previous post than I came across an article in tomorrow's (west coast time) New York Times on revenue management moving into retailing (fortunately not yet real time).
The link is http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/02/technology/02ECO M.html
Perhaps I don't know what demand metering is. I know that I get charged for my peak hour demand for the month - so many bucks per KWH for the peak load during the time of day. So it is time of day related, but the charge is based on measured peak demand.
I don't think real-time pricing is realistic at the residential level. At some point, the cost of having everyone process that information into their decision loops isn't worth it - it is too much burden on society. I think this is one reason consumers like fixed rates on many things - so they don't have to incur decision cost (or anxiety, or whatever you want to call it).
I used to work in the hotel reservations industry. We adopted the same tricks that the airlines did ("revenue management"). We looked at the implications of doing the same thing in grocery stores, etc. These techniques basically vary the price continuously, based on very sophisticated demand forecast models and constant updates of actual demand. I am sure there is a limit to how much of this sort of stuff the average consumer is willing to put up with! You can't spend all your time optimizing your costs, or you don't have time to live you life! So real-time variable electrical pricing is IMHO a nice theoretical idea, but not a practical one. Time of day/demand is a compromise that consumers can live with, and it achieves a lot of the goals of the full time market driven price fluctuations.
It is true that one of the major reasons for the electrical crisis in California was the lack of rational pricing. The utilities, due to political concerns, could not charge the cost they had to pay. The state put them into a position (which they agreed to, but then they act sort of stupid, since they are sorta like governments themselves) where they sold power at long term prices but were prohibited from buying it except at the spot price. Dumb is a kind description of this sort of government regulation!
As far as the rolling blackouts... there was never a shortage of generating or transmission capability. There was only a shortage of power to buy. It was not a matter of too much demand, it was a matter of market failure (and possibly some collusion on the part of suppliers)! The shortages miraculously stopped as soon as the purchasing rules were changed... no significant additional generating or transmission capacity was created to solve the problem.
Actually, the California power crises presents a great example of why I distrust governments messing around in markets, including the energy market. A true deregulation would have delivered power, but perhaps at a higher price. Since utilities are still monopolies (like Microsoft, ahem), regulation is required. But regulation is frequently stupid, and sometimes, as in CA, catastrophic.
Hence my objections to subsidies for PV (or burning camel dung, etc).
Personally, I am in favor of removing the enormous unnecessary obstacles placed in the path of nuclear power generation. Any rational analysis of the power situation would go for nuclear power as the primary electrical power source for the country. The fears that people have about nuclear plants are misguided (even Chernobyl, which could not happen with our kind of reactor, has killed at most 3 people outside of the fire crews). Waste is an easy problem if you don't get stupid about it. The biggest danger is terrorism, and that can be handled with proper design and protection.
So here we have one already proven low pollution, low cost energy solution that has basically been crunched by uneducated environmental wackos. But for some reason they love solar cells (but don't let anyone build the silicon processing plants near their houses!).
Phil,
You are raising the issues of externalities. But surely, if the externalities are real, the way to deal with them is to force their cost onto those who create them, rather than to pick, by fiat, an alternative. There is no question that failing to account for externalities itself biases the economic system. However, even the cure I suggest above (put the cost on those who benefit from them) brings in the heavy hand of government, and unfortunately government usually does a really terrible job of that sort of thing.
I have nothing against PV. I also think that if the technology is worthwhile, the small difference caused by the reverse metering won't make much difference either way. It just isn't enough money, compared to system costs and other issues, to really push it over the top.
However, there have been all sorts of government environmental and energy regulations that have been much more significant, much more costly, and foolish. For example, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy rule - to raise gas mileage in cars - kills several thousand people a year, and has driven many folks like myself into buying RV's. No matter where you live in the US, it is illegal for you to be sold a shower head that will put out more than 2.5GPM. This is absurdly overbroad.
So I am extremely skeptical of getting the government into this sort of thing.
I think a better way in general is through government programs that need technology and select it based on need rather than ideology or market forecast. The best of breed there has been defense and space. It's very expensive, but the fallout has more than paid for it. I am sure one reason it has been valuable is becaue no bureaucrat was charged with *making* it valuable! Now that NASA tries to cost justify itself, it has turned into a pretty pathetic organization.
I refer you to Moore's Laws of Bureaucracy (http://www.tinyvital.com/Misc/Lawsburo.htm) for my thoughts on the subject.
A final comment... the market is far from perfect, and as one who likes the free market, I am still ready to acknowledge its weaknesses. The market has a broad problem domain over which it is useful, but there exist other domains (for example, war and peace belong to the political world, not the market). However, the government is so terribly bad at "industrial policy," which is essentially what you are arguing for, that it should be used only when absolutely, totally necessary. I don't think we are yet to that position in the country where the government needs to steal my money at the implied threat of violence in order to subsidize one particular alternative technology!
PV's are good things. *Maybe* they will turn out to be broadly helpful in energy usage. However, the numbers I have looked at put PV still well in the marginal category for many years into the future.
I think that a subsidy is a subsidy, and in general I oppose such things. A subsidy means that politicians think they know a better way to do something than the market does, and history shows that this is rarely the case (look at Japan's big initiatives in the 80's for example, or Carter's various misguided programs).
BTW, I *do* pay demand metering on my power... the power company considers demand to be so important that with demand metering, I pay about 1/3 the normal KWH charge, plus a demand charge. Demand metering is very common, and I wouldn't be surprised if your utility also offers it on residential property. Demand metering works by reducing the amount of peak power that utilities need to generate, and peak power is always the most expensive. It time shifts their power production to base load power, often nuclear or big-time natural gas, which is very cheap.
Certainly your small 1KW is not a problem. But when lots of people are doing it, as you say, it does become an issue. Then I agree that time metering (and even the ability to refuse the power) should be the way to go. Also, in an area with air conditioning, the power peaks may more or less coincide (although there is a lag between peak insolation and peak usage, due to heat storage). My house reaches its top temperature around 9 to 10PM, well after dark, due to the thermal mass of the tile roof and stone and brick walls.
Currently all sorts of energy technologies are under extensive research. I really do want to see a lot of progress there... especially in mobile energy storage, because I *want* an electric car, but I don't want to sacrifice characteristics for it.
I have never been one to demand that a system meet all needs in order to be valuable. For example, there have long been cases where PV's were the way to generate power. We operated a ham radio site for years on a power-less mountaintop, using PV and huge batteries. Unfortunately, ice falls from the tower destroyed the PV's at some point, but by then power was available. Also, because at the time we had inadequate monitoring, our charger failed one time and we didn't detect it until many weeks later when these huge batteries finally discharged. I then had to spend a summer driving to the mountaintop almost every weekend to care for the batteries. This was over 15 years ago, and they are still there (as backup). But I also created telemetry for the system (which later became a business for me) so we would know when they system was operating on batteries!
I do believe that the market usually achieves better results than government policies - especially when balancing a complex of issues. Thus I think that PV, if it makes sense, will make economic sense without subsidies.
I had an acquaintance who was employed by the government to push PV. She proudly showed me her all-solar house (with reverse metering like you have). I asked a few questions, and it became clear (at that time) that her real cost of power, minus subsidies, was enormous. But she didn't know that, not being an engineer, and was paid to troop around the country telling people all sorts of nonsense about it.
I built one of these things (salt water hydrolizer) in a (foolish) attempt to cut my pool chemical costs. Unfortunately, it leaked chlorine gas! I don't think my lungs have yet recovered, and it's been 20 years! Done right, however (and not being a putz as I was in the way I built it), people used to chlorinate their pools this way.
The Cl- ions form chlorine gas> If you can keep it involved in the water, the whole thing works. It does, however, produce lots of NAOH, which is not a nice thing to have around either!
Oh, and the design I used (I found it somewhere around town) used asbestos to separate the positive and negative regions.
In general, it was your all around chemical warfare and carcinogenic dream!
Your postings go against my understanding of the facts, but frankly you have more detail than my sources, and obiously have researched this in depth, so I have to tentatively grant you the facts:-(:-)... It's always nice when one can learn something new, and I think I did. You should get modded up!
MOD UP THE GUY I AM REPLYING TO, PLEASE
A couple of comments... you should probably compare your car to best-of-breed gas powered small cars, which would have a mileage closer to 50mpg than 25mpg. But that still leaves you with a 2 x 1 energy advantage.
My comment on the reverse metering is that it is an unreasonable subsidy for your power. One could argue, as you do, that it is reasonable to jumpstart a better energy source, and you may be right. But the power you feed back to the utility definitely isn't worth as much as you get paid for it, because they cannot control it or count on it. Thus they have to build peak load and transmission capacity as if the photovoltaics weren't there at all (in fact, this in general is a problem with photovoltaics - outside of energy efficiency which I'll tentatively grant you).
So a major consideration of solar power (not to mention wind power) has to include the peaking/storage issue - i.e. the cost of energy storage. At that point, on a personal basis, you are down to batteries, which unfortunately suck. They contain lots of lead and production of them produces lead pollution. They have lifetime problems (although we have a mountain top radio repeater site running on 30 year old telephone company batteries - but we are *very* nice to them). They are heavy to ship, and contain and produce dangerous chemicals. The batteries are capable of extremly high currents, which means that they are more dangerous in some ways than primary power - and to get best energy efficiency you want them in series producing at least 40V or more. Oh, and they are really expensive. Submariners know well the dangers of batteries, as all submarines have huge banks of them - and most diesel submarines provided all underwater power via batteries (I believe there are now underwater combustion systems that can be used).
Large scale solar power could use more efficient systems. Of course, one of the best - gravity storage - runs afoul of the environmentalists (gravity storage, for other readers of this post who may not know, means pumping water upstream into reservoirs. You can then get the energy back - mostly - by draining it into generators when you need it). I don't know of any other good systems. People have talked about all sorts of things, but nobody seems to build them - stuff like superconducting magnetic storage (big BOOM if it overheats - nuclear bomb class energy release) - or big flywheels (same issue). Of course, you can produce hydrogen and store it, but again, that is not very efficient, and hydrogen, contrary to what some people here have posted, offers its own dangers: except at night, its very hot flame is invisible, so a leak can TOAST you with no warming. It is extremely good at embrittling metal (it adsorbs into it, permanently changing its structure). Hydrogen corrosion of steel has been studied for at least 140 years! In fact, the whole cold fusion approach was based on hydrogen adsorbtion into palladium, as are some hydrogen storage approaches. Not all of these are impossible things to overcome, btw... just issues.
Power systems have to be built for reliable peak power, and cheap base load. I happen to favor nuclear in this regard because done right, it can give you lots of power at a good price with no pollution. In fact, I believe in it so much that I wouldn't mind if all of California was powered by nuke plants here in Arizona - even upwind of where I live:-) Actually, we do supply a lot of your power now - the largest nuclear plant in the US is 50 mi SW of Phoenix (Palo Verde), and it sends a lot of power to California.
Oh...re the power consumption in my home...
It is a big home (>5000 ft^2), built before the environmentalists killed the "too cheap to meter" nuclear power... i.e. energy inefficient. It has three good sized air conditioners, and in the summer, during the day *and* evening, their duty cycle is almost 100%. And, it is in the desert - the temperature here right now at 1725 local is 109 degrees F.
I have looked at making it more energy efficient, and other than replacing the air conditioners with modern high efficiency units (which I had to do anyway due to death of the old units), nothing makes economic sense. I have had two energy consultants out (one from the power company, and an acquaintance who is an architectural engineer specializing in alternative energy) and they agreed with me. Of course, as an engineer/nerd, I naturally had done all the fun stuff - calculating heat fluxes and heat storage in the brick and tile, measuring temperatures, measuring air conditioner power usage, etc, etc, etc.
I have considered retiring to nicer climes (I once lived on Malibu Beach - wonderful place!) but they are just too crowded and too expensive (So Cal), too far away (Hawaii where a relative lives), or too foreign (Mexico) - and besides, I still need to make a living just to get medical insurance (but that's a different subject).
Actually, the NSA was influential in the past in getting private companies to advance the state of the art in computing. I believe the IBM stretch was one of the early ones that they funded.
The NSA is still using private companies to develop advanced technology. The CIA even has a not-secret venture capital firm! And the NRO also funded a lot of stuff using the CIA as cover (NRO's existence was classified until congress blew their cover a few years ago).
And NSA may indeed have some sort of supercomputer - probably a highly specialized goodie for cryptography. Hell, probably acres of these things. But they also probably have no significant commercial use.
The government isn't all idiots... it's just that the system selects for idiots at too many decision making positions, and it also cripples anyone with brains that actually makes it into those positions.
Oh, keep in mind that the FBI, our pre-eminent law enforcement agency, as of 9/11 only equipped its agents with poorly networked 486's!
As for the $10,000 toliet seat--that was the military paying for a seat on a battle-craft (not sure if it was naval or air force.) And I think it was a case of corruption / fraud, to boot.
The seat was for the P-3 Orion (anti-sub craft that I used to crew on). I believe the cost was so high because they only ordered a small number of this highly custom piece of plastic.
You've obviously never had a Powerbook with a Lithium battery.
You obviously never heard that you aren't supposed to pee on the Lithium!
Re:Just to argue with one point...
on
Want Freedom?
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I don't think I quite buy this, but I do agree that there's nothing stopping the people who make up a corporation from getting together with money that they, as the corporation, have agreed to set aside, and buying an ad without the company's official sponsorship.
Sounds like a big loophole to me!
>i> That said, however, I believe that if the people (ie, the stockholders) were asked about it, they wouldn't want their money (as it is partly their money) being spent on campaign ads. It isn't the people who get to decide what money gets spent on campaign contributions, and it wouldn't be the people who got to decide what money got spent on campaign ads: it is, and would be, the C*Os & various upper management--the ones who really benefit from the legislation they buy. I think that if the shareholders got a say, there wouldn't be so much of such corruption now.
I think you have an incorrect view of who benefits for what in corporate governance. Although we have distortions at time - such as the invalid use of stock options for CEO's - the job of the board of directors and major stockholders is to make sure the CEO's run the company for the benefit of the stockholders! If the CEO's happen to benefit from that - that should be the choice of the board and stockholders. A big piece of the current bear market is the market self-adjusting to the fact that CEO's were improperly "incented" to pump up prices, sell their options, and bail. It is also trying to figure out what to do with all the MBA's who were educated in modern liberal institutions where character and values are no longer important. There has been a significant shift in the ethical views of executives as a result of the devaluation of individual responsibility in business schools - a direct result of that devaluation, by the postmodernists and other leftist movements - in the overall university environment.
Anyway... people are disinvesting from those sorts of companies and being more careful about where they invest. In other words, other than the recent short-term mess, corporation officers generally operate on behalf of their shareholders, or they get kicked out! So unless they are using political contributions to change those rules, they are in general contributing with the benefit of the company (read: stockholders) in mind.
Thus a law restricting corporations from contributing does reduces the ability of the company to act on behalf of its owners - who are mostly individuals directly or through their retirement funds (the biggest stock market player is the California Personnel retirement fund - CALPERS). And again, I think you are thus infringing on the free speech of those individuals by prohibiting their fiduciaries from adequately representing their economic interests in the political debate!
Me thinks you have been taking in by the modern anti-corporatist rhetoric, which assumes that corporations are run for CEO's, and the little guy gets no benefits. In fact, there are forces pushing in both directions. The corruption of wall street in the '90s is temporary. It was cam about through consolidated firms where stock analysts had to keep the firm's corporate customers happy; through the suspension of skeptical analysis as a result of the bubble - any idiot could win for a while; through the now-discredited theory that stock option grants alone were enough to get CEO's to act for the benefit of the stockholders; through the lack of ethics of accountants and lawyers who were willing to allow devious tricks such as WorldCom and Enron accounting - tricks that might have been technically correct (in some cases - in others they were outright fruad) - but were ethically unjustifiable; through the foolishness of individuals and their mutual fund fiduciaries in investing in companies where the board of directors was controlled by the CEO instead of the reverse.
But the countervailing forces including the now awakened stockholders and their fiduciaries (not how many anaylsis and fund holders are suddenly not employed, for example). They are punishing badly any company in which the slightest conflict of interest or accounting trick is possible. They will probably go too far, in fact, and hobble startup technology companies which *need* stock options to attract and hold people.
So the fact that corporations occasionally screw their stockholders should not be construed as a general characteristic of corporations nor a reason to deny them the ability to represent the interests of their shareholders. It is simply a result of human nature and temporal concentration of power... the same sort of power that exists in government bureaucracies that likewise screw people for their own perverse reasons.
Personal note: I have benefited greatly from stock options several times in companies which I was involved in founding, and in which I contributed a lot as a technical person. Those stock options certainly kept me from seeking greener pastures. They worked in that case!
Slashdot Mirror
If you treat food as a commodity, and you have free markets (or some approximation thereof), you will have plenty of food barring some incredible catastrophe. The market is an extremely adaptable mechanism.
If you treat it as something special, like you propose, you will simply create a less adaptable system. You will create rules and bureaucrats and special interests, etc.
Of course, we have far from a free market today because of silly agricultural subsidies. Subsidies keep the market from seeking the most efficient food production! Not exactly what you want in a crisis.
Of course, the biggest problem today with famine is not food supply, but food distribution. And this is primarily caused by corrupt third world governments which do not allow the markets to operate. The current best example is Zimbabwe, which has taken a productive exporting agricultural sector and in a few years converted it to a spoils system for the current ruler... in the process destroying agricultural production. Zimbabwe is now entering a famine as a result.
The best way to avoid famine is to avoid corrupt and dictatorial governments. Ask the Zimbabweans or the North Koreans (where an estimated 1,000,000 people have starved to death recently).
Hey aardvark...
It appears that young people like you don't read too well. Us old folks screwed up the school systems, ya know.
I had the date right: Nov 22, 1963. The original poster was wrong.
I'm impressed, since JFK was killed Nov 22, 1963! I remember that day well - I was in high school at the time.
What cost?
It costs very little to use the notation. One of the ways I find it most useful is to distinguish between members of an array and the array itself (we prefix an array name with an "a").
I don't expect to convince you... like I said, it seems to be a personal preference, like editors.
If you name your variables well, search and replace will easily change your hungarian notation without screwing things up.
And really, how often do you have to change the types of variables?
The tradeoff for the very rare case where you have to change a variable name en-mass is a program where somebody else can read it and know without cross referencing something about the typing of the variables we are looking at. Or you can go back a year later and see that one variable is a string and another an integer.
We use HN in Java, and I find reading other code that does not use it to be harder than reading our code.
It wasn't invented to make the original coding easier. It was invented to make code *maintenance* easier... and the most common problem in code maintenance is reading and understanding someone else's code, not changing a variable name.
I suspect variable naming is like editor preferences. There are strong, almost religious beliefs on the subject, and they are held more or less randomly among different people. I like hungarian notation and I like vi (and variants). Maybe you like non-hungarian and Emacs.
Perhaps, but it wasn't well stated. All languages do hide the underlying machine language nature of the computer (except assembly. But otherwise they are so radically different as to render the statement silly.
For example, real-time extensible languages like FORTH are radically different from fixed memory model languages like FORTRAN-IV. Likewise functional languages (such as XSL) are completely different from procedural languages.
Beyond that, I wouldn't even say there is a unifying theory behind them. There is not even a common model of computing. For example, COBOL and PL/B, as originally intended, assume modifyable code. FORTH, LISP and others assume a modifyable language, at compile and run time (which are often the same thing). This means that as originally intended, COBOL and PL/B could not run on a Harvard architecture machine (except we know that we can *simulate* self-modfying code).
And even there... I wouldn't call that a unifying theory. It is more like a unifying common engineering practice - like TCP or something. The fact that computers simulate or operate as single-instruction-at-a-time state machines is not universal. Nor is it a theory as opposed to a practice. Note that most of these languages fail to take advantage of a highly parallel architecture, but some languages don't. Again, hardly a unifying theory. Also consider that COBOL and FORTRAN-IV were invented before there was any significant work in language theory. Even expression evaluation was ad-hoc until sometime after these languages were produced, when somebody published a paper showing how to do it right every time.
Of course, I expect that Waterloo, which has a long history of contributing to computer science, produces graduates with a good general computing science knowledge. I went to UCLA myself, which also seemed to do that.
Oh, and some advice: almost all computer languages are the same. If you actually know your stuff you can pick up a reasonable language (i.e., not malbolge) in no time at all.
This from a UW "computer scientists and mathematicians ?
Perhaps your education hasn't included languages as diverse as:
FORTH
Assembly Languages
DB/C (also known as PL/2) , COBOL
Fortran
Java/C/PL-I/Algol
LISP
PERL
APL
These languages are only "the same" in the sense that they are used to program computers, and they start out as text files!
If convergence is the only reason, why not just do it all over TCP/IP or even HTML? (Answer: engineering reasons - same argument one might make against IP itself!).
Furthermore, IP is a low level protocol. It doesn't guarantee interopterability! To have interoperability, one needs all levels of the protocol stack to be compatable, and the hardest one there is the applications level, not the various transport levels. This means, for example, that if your phone does messaging, that it interoperate with other phones and/or hosts that provide messaging service. IP is the least of your problems in that regard!
I could see having, IPv6 addressability for all phones, but that is not the same thing as actually using *IP* as the transport mechanism.
I am the original poster on the "earth is covered with water". I live in Arizona, which is also in "extreme drought." Water conservation may even be a good idea *here* at some point.
My issue is that water, like so many things, is a *local* commodity. But environmentalists treat it like a goddess or something. Thus everyone is the US is required to have low water usage toilets and maximum 2.5 gpm showers - whether they live in a water shortage area or not.
And this is dumb, dumb, dumb. But it is typical of big government solutions, and it is typical of the shallow thinking that treats "water" as a scarce resource.
BTW... evenly distributed, there is a huge surfeit of fresh water on earth.
Sadly, this is just not true.
Governments control information because it works! The *first* thing to be lost in a totalitarian society is free interchange of information. Once it is lost, people *know* that they are missing something, and they *know* that the government lies. But what they don't know is the facts. The government counts on this and is able to influence their opinion, even though the people know they are being lied to.
A recent example was the USSR. Back in the Breshnev days, a group of high ranking Soviet scientists paid my family a visit in the US midwest. They thought that the US was one big slum and mass of violence, so they assumed, and stated, that they were seeing a Potemkin village (i.e. that the place they were visiting was staged for their benefit). My father took them for a ride, and told them to give him directions and he would take them wherever they wanted to go. As far as I can tell, they concluded that he lived in a very *big* Potemkin village since they couldn't find "the real America" wherever they went!
These were very intelligent people. They were near the top of Soviet society. They had more access to information than ordinary Soviet citizens. But they were badly misinformed about the United States because that is what their government wanted.
This is a result of the technique of the "big lie." It means that the government a lies a lot and the people know they are lying, but they still don't know the truth and hence lean in the direction of the lies. It is the basis for all modern non-democratic societies.
BTW... you see this sort of thing on a smaller scale with ordinary media. When my daughter went to an eastern school, and was the only student from Arizona, she was (seriously) asked questions about whether she had a telephone and whether any roads were paved. It's easy to draw wrong impressions, in this case where nobody was even trying to lie, just from small amounts of information. The Russians thought we still had cowboys our here shooting Indians. (We do have cowboys, and we do have Indians, but we most of the shooting is done by inner city gangs... including ones that have invaded rural Indian reservations... so much for stereotypes).
And you provide such a shining example of repressed free speech! Obviously it must be really repressive here if you can post such criticisms (NOT). You have no clue of the difference between a free society like the US and a fascist country like China, or a totalitarian country like Cuba. If you did, you wouldn't blather that we are "well on our way toward government control like China."
The DMCA sucks big time - no doubt about it. It is a travesty. But in any society, capitalist, socialist, totalitarian, whatever... there are always big cheese who occasionally take away goodies from the little guy.
OTOH the Patriot Act doesn't take away *any* of your freedoms. None! Count them! ZERO. NONE! It certainly doesn't take away your free speech rights.
Our constitution promotes representative democracy and capitalism (othwise, why would we have the "property" clause in the fifth amendment?).
Capitalism cannot thrive without a functioning democracy (as China will find out). And a democracy cannot survive without an effective economic system, of which capitalism, in one form or the other, is the only proven candidate.
My goal is to use 100% more electricity. Why? Energy usage correlates with comfort and capabilities (computers, music, transportation, etc).
So far I am up to a daily average of about 250 kwh/day. But I'm working on it!
Saving energy is a silly way to spend your time. It is only an issue because of folks who want to make it hard to produce energy (i.e. anti-nuke people who haven't really looked into the issue).
It's almost as bad as saving water! The planet is covered with water!
Give me a break.
Tree City USA
The little town of Paradise Valley, AZ - near where I live - is also a "Tree City, USA" - in the middle of the upper sonoran desert.
What they did is plant ugly desert foliage in the street medians (natural desert foliage, like I have in my yard) is much nicer.
Every time I see the "tree city" sign I snicker.
As far as Santa Clara gettings X% of its power from this and that source... nonsense! It gets its power off the grid like everybody else does.
If we simply granted property rights to explorers, we might already have a large space industry.
Instead, we have turned outer space into a government monopoly, and the result is that we have a pathetic space program.
I remember when Sputnik was launched, and how exciting it was that man was going into space. I remember the Apollo moon landings. And I remember how after that space had to "justify" itself in order to get funded.
Private organizations don't have to deal with that nonsense. If the He3 on the moon is worth recovering, and they can get the rights to it, they will raise the money and do it!
Sure, we should make sure that not all the land is private... parks are a good thing. And we should prevent excess environmental degration.
But if the younger people on slashdot want to see serious space travel in their lifetime, they should consider *privatizing* space including property rights to asteroids, plots on the moon, mars minerals, etc.
I have waited almost 50 years now (since Sputnik), and am bitterly disappointed.
I am in the middle of a long battle with them over changing the domain access. My daughter's site host went belly up, and Verisign's autoresponder never responds. We go to the site, log in, put in the changes, get a message at the correct email, respond to it as requested, and it vanishes into a black hole.
Finally, yesterday I called them on the phone and in about 45 minutes of hassling with a live human (no wonder they are hurting), still got no satisfaction. She told me the system was changing and they could not change the domain in any way except through the autoresponder, and had no idea why it didn't work. She did manage to get it to generate a couple of "unauthorized" person trying to change your domain messages (she works for them, but she is unauthorized)! She later told me should would fix the problem (which she had earlier told me was unfixable) but it would take a few days to show up in the database! This is modern technology?
Now the whois record shows yesterday as the last date changed, but it still has the same wrong information in it!
This incompetent company deserves to have their domain privileges removed. Their whois database should be given to someone who can make it work!
Sigh... no sonner did I send in the previous post than I came across an article in tomorrow's (west coast time) New York Times on revenue management moving into retailing (fortunately not yet real time).
O M.html
The link is http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/02/technology/02EC
and of course requires simple registration.
Perhaps I don't know what demand metering is. I know that I get charged for my peak hour demand for the month - so many bucks per KWH for the peak load during the time of day. So it is time of day related, but the charge is based on measured peak demand.
I don't think real-time pricing is realistic at the residential level. At some point, the cost of having everyone process that information into their decision loops isn't worth it - it is too much burden on society. I think this is one reason consumers like fixed rates on many things - so they don't have to incur decision cost (or anxiety, or whatever you want to call it).
I used to work in the hotel reservations industry. We adopted the same tricks that the airlines did ("revenue management"). We looked at the implications of doing the same thing in grocery stores, etc. These techniques basically vary the price continuously, based on very sophisticated demand forecast models and constant updates of actual demand. I am sure there is a limit to how much of this sort of stuff the average consumer is willing to put up with! You can't spend all your time optimizing your costs, or you don't have time to live you life! So real-time variable electrical pricing is IMHO a nice theoretical idea, but not a practical one. Time of day/demand is a compromise that consumers can live with, and it achieves a lot of the goals of the full time market driven price fluctuations.
It is true that one of the major reasons for the electrical crisis in California was the lack of rational pricing. The utilities, due to political concerns, could not charge the cost they had to pay. The state put them into a position (which they agreed to, but then they act sort of stupid, since they are sorta like governments themselves) where they sold power at long term prices but were prohibited from buying it except at the spot price. Dumb is a kind description of this sort of government regulation!
As far as the rolling blackouts... there was never a shortage of generating or transmission capability. There was only a shortage of power to buy. It was not a matter of too much demand, it was a matter of market failure (and possibly some collusion on the part of suppliers)! The shortages miraculously stopped as soon as the purchasing rules were changed... no significant additional generating or transmission capacity was created to solve the problem.
Actually, the California power crises presents a great example of why I distrust governments messing around in markets, including the energy market. A true deregulation would have delivered power, but perhaps at a higher price. Since utilities are still monopolies (like Microsoft, ahem), regulation is required. But regulation is frequently stupid, and sometimes, as in CA, catastrophic.
Hence my objections to subsidies for PV (or burning camel dung, etc).
Personally, I am in favor of removing the enormous unnecessary obstacles placed in the path of nuclear power generation. Any rational analysis of the power situation would go for nuclear power as the primary electrical power source for the country. The fears that people have about nuclear plants are misguided (even Chernobyl, which could not happen with our kind of reactor, has killed at most 3 people outside of the fire crews). Waste is an easy problem if you don't get stupid about it. The biggest danger is terrorism, and that can be handled with proper design and protection.
So here we have one already proven low pollution, low cost energy solution that has basically been crunched by uneducated environmental wackos. But for some reason they love solar cells (but don't let anyone build the silicon processing plants near their houses!).
Phil,
You are raising the issues of externalities. But surely, if the externalities are real, the way to deal with them is to force their cost onto those who create them, rather than to pick, by fiat, an alternative. There is no question that failing to account for externalities itself biases the economic system. However, even the cure I suggest above (put the cost on those who benefit from them) brings in the heavy hand of government, and unfortunately government usually does a really terrible job of that sort of thing.
I have nothing against PV. I also think that if the technology is worthwhile, the small difference caused by the reverse metering won't make much difference either way. It just isn't enough money, compared to system costs and other issues, to really push it over the top.
However, there have been all sorts of government environmental and energy regulations that have been much more significant, much more costly, and foolish. For example, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy rule - to raise gas mileage in cars - kills several thousand people a year, and has driven many folks like myself into buying RV's. No matter where you live in the US, it is illegal for you to be sold a shower head that will put out more than 2.5GPM. This is absurdly overbroad.
So I am extremely skeptical of getting the government into this sort of thing.
I think a better way in general is through government programs that need technology and select it based on need rather than ideology or market forecast. The best of breed there has been defense and space. It's very expensive, but the fallout has more than paid for it. I am sure one reason it has been valuable is becaue no bureaucrat was charged with *making* it valuable! Now that NASA tries to cost justify itself, it has turned into a pretty pathetic organization.
I refer you to Moore's Laws of Bureaucracy (http://www.tinyvital.com/Misc/Lawsburo.htm) for my thoughts on the subject.
A final comment... the market is far from perfect, and as one who likes the free market, I am still ready to acknowledge its weaknesses. The market has a broad problem domain over which it is useful, but there exist other domains (for example, war and peace belong to the political world, not the market). However, the government is so terribly bad at "industrial policy," which is essentially what you are arguing for, that it should be used only when absolutely, totally necessary. I don't think we are yet to that position in the country where the government needs to steal my money at the implied threat of violence in order to subsidize one particular alternative technology!
PV's are good things. *Maybe* they will turn out to be broadly helpful in energy usage. However, the numbers I have looked at put PV still well in the marginal category for many years into the future.
I think that a subsidy is a subsidy, and in general I oppose such things. A subsidy means that politicians think they know a better way to do something than the market does, and history shows that this is rarely the case (look at Japan's big initiatives in the 80's for example, or Carter's various misguided programs).
BTW, I *do* pay demand metering on my power... the power company considers demand to be so important that with demand metering, I pay about 1/3 the normal KWH charge, plus a demand charge. Demand metering is very common, and I wouldn't be surprised if your utility also offers it on residential property. Demand metering works by reducing the amount of peak power that utilities need to generate, and peak power is always the most expensive. It time shifts their power production to base load power, often nuclear or big-time natural gas, which is very cheap.
Certainly your small 1KW is not a problem. But when lots of people are doing it, as you say, it does become an issue. Then I agree that time metering (and even the ability to refuse the power) should be the way to go. Also, in an area with air conditioning, the power peaks may more or less coincide (although there is a lag between peak insolation and peak usage, due to heat storage). My house reaches its top temperature around 9 to 10PM, well after dark, due to the thermal mass of the tile roof and stone and brick walls.
Currently all sorts of energy technologies are under extensive research. I really do want to see a lot of progress there... especially in mobile energy storage, because I *want* an electric car, but I don't want to sacrifice characteristics for it.
I have never been one to demand that a system meet all needs in order to be valuable. For example, there have long been cases where PV's were the way to generate power. We operated a ham radio site for years on a power-less mountaintop, using PV and huge batteries. Unfortunately, ice falls from the tower destroyed the PV's at some point, but by then power was available. Also, because at the time we had inadequate monitoring, our charger failed one time and we didn't detect it until many weeks later when these huge batteries finally discharged. I then had to spend a summer driving to the mountaintop almost every weekend to care for the batteries. This was over 15 years ago, and they are still there (as backup). But I also created telemetry for the system (which later became a business for me) so we would know when they system was operating on batteries!
I do believe that the market usually achieves better results than government policies - especially when balancing a complex of issues. Thus I think that PV, if it makes sense, will make economic sense without subsidies.
I had an acquaintance who was employed by the government to push PV. She proudly showed me her all-solar house (with reverse metering like you have). I asked a few questions, and it became clear (at that time) that her real cost of power, minus subsidies, was enormous. But she didn't know that, not being an engineer, and was paid to troop around the country telling people all sorts of nonsense about it.
I built one of these things (salt water hydrolizer) in a (foolish) attempt to cut my pool chemical costs. Unfortunately, it leaked chlorine gas! I don't think my lungs have yet recovered, and it's been 20 years! Done right, however (and not being a putz as I was in the way I built it), people used to chlorinate their pools this way.
The Cl- ions form chlorine gas> If you can keep it involved in the water, the whole thing works. It does, however, produce lots of NAOH, which is not a nice thing to have around either!
Oh, and the design I used (I found it somewhere around town) used asbestos to separate the positive and negative regions.
In general, it was your all around chemical warfare and carcinogenic dream!
Your postings go against my understanding of the facts, but frankly you have more detail than my sources, and obiously have researched this in depth, so I have to tentatively grant you the facts :-( :-) ... It's always nice when one can learn something new, and I think I did. You should get modded up!
:-) Actually, we do supply a lot of your power now - the largest nuclear plant in the US is 50 mi SW of Phoenix (Palo Verde), and it sends a lot of power to California.
MOD UP THE GUY I AM REPLYING TO, PLEASE
A couple of comments... you should probably compare your car to best-of-breed gas powered small cars, which would have a mileage closer to 50mpg than 25mpg. But that still leaves you with a 2 x 1 energy advantage.
My comment on the reverse metering is that it is an unreasonable subsidy for your power. One could argue, as you do, that it is reasonable to jumpstart a better energy source, and you may be right. But the power you feed back to the utility definitely isn't worth as much as you get paid for it, because they cannot control it or count on it. Thus they have to build peak load and transmission capacity as if the photovoltaics weren't there at all (in fact, this in general is a problem with photovoltaics - outside of energy efficiency which I'll tentatively grant you).
So a major consideration of solar power (not to mention wind power) has to include the peaking/storage issue - i.e. the cost of energy storage. At that point, on a personal basis, you are down to batteries, which unfortunately suck. They contain lots of lead and production of them produces lead pollution. They have lifetime problems (although we have a mountain top radio repeater site running on 30 year old telephone company batteries - but we are *very* nice to them). They are heavy to ship, and contain and produce dangerous chemicals. The batteries are capable of extremly high currents, which means that they are more dangerous in some ways than primary power - and to get best energy efficiency you want them in series producing at least 40V or more. Oh, and they are really expensive. Submariners know well the dangers of batteries, as all submarines have huge banks of them - and most diesel submarines provided all underwater power via batteries (I believe there are now underwater combustion systems that can be used).
Large scale solar power could use more efficient systems. Of course, one of the best - gravity storage - runs afoul of the environmentalists (gravity storage, for other readers of this post who may not know, means pumping water upstream into reservoirs. You can then get the energy back - mostly - by draining it into generators when you need it). I don't know of any other good systems. People have talked about all sorts of things, but nobody seems to build them - stuff like superconducting magnetic storage (big BOOM if it overheats - nuclear bomb class energy release) - or big flywheels (same issue). Of course, you can produce hydrogen and store it, but again, that is not very efficient, and hydrogen, contrary to what some people here have posted, offers its own dangers: except at night, its very hot flame is invisible, so a leak can TOAST you with no warming. It is extremely good at embrittling metal (it adsorbs into it, permanently changing its structure). Hydrogen corrosion of steel has been studied for at least 140 years! In fact, the whole cold fusion approach was based on hydrogen adsorbtion into palladium, as are some hydrogen storage approaches. Not all of these are impossible things to overcome, btw... just issues.
Power systems have to be built for reliable peak power, and cheap base load. I happen to favor nuclear in this regard because done right, it can give you lots of power at a good price with no pollution. In fact, I believe in it so much that I wouldn't mind if all of California was powered by nuke plants here in Arizona - even upwind of where I live
Oh...re the power consumption in my home...
It is a big home (>5000 ft^2), built before the environmentalists killed the "too cheap to meter" nuclear power... i.e. energy inefficient. It has three good sized air conditioners, and in the summer, during the day *and* evening, their duty cycle is almost 100%. And, it is in the desert - the temperature here right now at 1725 local is 109 degrees F.
I have looked at making it more energy efficient, and other than replacing the air conditioners with modern high efficiency units (which I had to do anyway due to death of the old units), nothing makes economic sense. I have had two energy consultants out (one from the power company, and an acquaintance who is an architectural engineer specializing in alternative energy) and they agreed with me. Of course, as an engineer/nerd, I naturally had done all the fun stuff - calculating heat fluxes and heat storage in the brick and tile, measuring temperatures, measuring air conditioner power usage, etc, etc, etc.
I have considered retiring to nicer climes (I once lived on Malibu Beach - wonderful place!) but they are just too crowded and too expensive (So Cal), too far away (Hawaii where a relative lives), or too foreign (Mexico) - and besides, I still need to make a living just to get medical insurance (but that's a different subject).
Actually, the NSA was influential in the past in getting private companies to advance the state of the art in computing. I believe the IBM stretch was one of the early ones that they funded.
The NSA is still using private companies to develop advanced technology. The CIA even has a not-secret venture capital firm! And the NRO also funded a lot of stuff using the CIA as cover (NRO's existence was classified until congress blew their cover a few years ago).
And NSA may indeed have some sort of supercomputer - probably a highly specialized goodie for cryptography. Hell, probably acres of these things. But they also probably have no significant commercial use.
The government isn't all idiots... it's just that the system selects for idiots at too many decision making positions, and it also cripples anyone with brains that actually makes it into those positions.
Oh, keep in mind that the FBI, our pre-eminent law enforcement agency, as of 9/11 only equipped its agents with poorly networked 486's!
As for the $10,000 toliet seat--that was the military paying for a seat on a battle-craft (not sure if it was naval or air force.) And I think it was a case of corruption / fraud, to boot.
The seat was for the P-3 Orion (anti-sub craft that I used to crew on). I believe the cost was so high because they only ordered a small number of this highly custom piece of plastic.
You've obviously never had a Powerbook with a Lithium battery.
You obviously never heard that you aren't supposed to pee on the Lithium!
I don't think I quite buy this, but I do agree that there's nothing stopping the people who make up a corporation from getting together with money that they, as the corporation, have agreed to set aside, and buying an ad without the company's official sponsorship.
Sounds like a big loophole to me!
>i> That said, however, I believe that if the people (ie, the stockholders) were asked about it, they wouldn't want their money (as it is partly their money) being spent on campaign ads. It isn't the people who get to decide what money gets spent on campaign contributions, and it wouldn't be the people who got to decide what money got spent on campaign ads: it is, and would be, the C*Os & various upper management--the ones who really benefit from the legislation they buy. I think that if the shareholders got a say, there wouldn't be so much of such corruption now.
I think you have an incorrect view of who benefits for what in corporate governance. Although we have distortions at time - such as the invalid use of stock options for CEO's - the job of the board of directors and major stockholders is to make sure the CEO's run the company for the benefit of the stockholders! If the CEO's happen to benefit from that - that should be the choice of the board and stockholders. A big piece of the current bear market is the market self-adjusting to the fact that CEO's were improperly "incented" to pump up prices, sell their options, and bail. It is also trying to figure out what to do with all the MBA's who were educated in modern liberal institutions where character and values are no longer important. There has been a significant shift in the ethical views of executives as a result of the devaluation of individual responsibility in business schools - a direct result of that devaluation, by the postmodernists and other leftist movements - in the overall university environment.
Anyway... people are disinvesting from those sorts of companies and being more careful about where they invest. In other words, other than the recent short-term mess, corporation officers generally operate on behalf of their shareholders, or they get kicked out! So unless they are using political contributions to change those rules, they are in general contributing with the benefit of the company (read: stockholders) in mind.
Thus a law restricting corporations from contributing does reduces the ability of the company to act on behalf of its owners - who are mostly individuals directly or through their retirement funds (the biggest stock market player is the California Personnel retirement fund - CALPERS). And again, I think you are thus infringing on the free speech of those individuals by prohibiting their fiduciaries from adequately representing their economic interests in the political debate!
Me thinks you have been taking in by the modern anti-corporatist rhetoric, which assumes that corporations are run for CEO's, and the little guy gets no benefits. In fact, there are forces pushing in both directions. The corruption of wall street in the '90s is temporary. It was cam about through consolidated firms where stock analysts had to keep the firm's corporate customers happy; through the suspension of skeptical analysis as a result of the bubble - any idiot could win for a while; through the now-discredited theory that stock option grants alone were enough to get CEO's to act for the benefit of the stockholders; through the lack of ethics of accountants and lawyers who were willing to allow devious tricks such as WorldCom and Enron accounting - tricks that might have been technically correct (in some cases - in others they were outright fruad) - but were ethically unjustifiable; through the foolishness of individuals and their mutual fund fiduciaries in investing in companies where the board of directors was controlled by the CEO instead of the reverse.
But the countervailing forces including the now awakened stockholders and their fiduciaries (not how many anaylsis and fund holders are suddenly not employed, for example). They are punishing badly any company in which the slightest conflict of interest or accounting trick is possible. They will probably go too far, in fact, and hobble startup technology companies which *need* stock options to attract and hold people.
So the fact that corporations occasionally screw their stockholders should not be construed as a general characteristic of corporations nor a reason to deny them the ability to represent the interests of their shareholders. It is simply a result of human nature and temporal concentration of power... the same sort of power that exists in government bureaucracies that likewise screw people for their own perverse reasons.
Personal note: I have benefited greatly from stock options several times in companies which I was involved in founding, and in which I contributed a lot as a technical person. Those stock options certainly kept me from seeking greener pastures. They worked in that case!