OK, so Google's setting up a datacenter along the Columbia River in order to get cheap power from the Bonneville Power Authority. That makes sense. As cooling needs are one of the major factors in server-farm power demands, why not build, say, in Minnesota, Montana, or N. Dakota, where there's plenty of cool (if not frigid) air most of the year and powerplants at the mouths of the coal mines can supply cheap base load? As Google is global, its power-demand peak-to-tough ratio is probably pretty low, so it could negotiate a nice base-load tarriffed contract and not have to cover the cost of transmission line-loss thanks to being next to the powerplants. (Yeah, I know those plants generate huge amounts of CO2, but see below).
And if, with all that available coolant (free cold air), google still has surplus heat, why not build greenhouses next door? Many of our vegetables here in Michigan come from Canadian greenhouses heated by waste heat, and Minnesota greenhouses could suck up some of the CO2 from the powerplants.
And indeed, M$ understood the need to pony up donations for a Republican Admin after the antitrust case, hoping that a more pliable AG (ultimately, Ashcroft) would back off in the penalty phase. Voila!...and it was so.
Any coincidence that Bill Gates' dad is a principal (not to be confused with principle!) in the same lobbying firm for which Jack Abramoff once worked?
The distinction between.doc and OD is not trivial, despite both being "openly published." The.doc format can be changed on MS' whim, driven by anything from a wish to force upgrades (they've done it before) to improving s/w performance (which they may do someday). OD will always be (presumably) forward- and backward compatible. Organizations can archive documents in OD and be fully confident that they will be retrievable decades from now--as long as a device can make sense of flat-text XML. Not so for what M$ might do. I still occasionally get papers from my students in M$ Works format and I can find nothing except Works on DOS/Windows that can read it.
From an institutional document-management and archiving standpoint,.doc is pretty high-risk, while OD is a safe bet.
Sorry, you are incorrect. Americans' "right to privacy" in the contemporary sense is a consequence of case law, ie, Supreme Court decisions. The first major break toward our contemporary notion of a right to privacy was in Giswold v. Connecticut (1963), where the court held that state and federal laws prohibiting the sending and possession of birth control information violated citizens' rights to privacy in their personal affairs. Roe v. Wade (1973--yes, the "abortion decision") was based on Griswold and affirmed it, as did Lawrence v. Texas (2003--overturning state anti-sodomy laws). Based on the current reading of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause (which, no doubt, Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas would love to reverse), those decisions cover all units of government within the USA.
It's interesting to note, BTW, that this series of decisions, largely based around the personal privacy of one's sexual life, are a major wedge within the right wing in the US. Religious conservatives would love to overturn them all, thereby allowing states into the bedroom in the name of protecting Christian virtue, while libertarians largely want to keep the government out of citizens' private lives. At the same time, however, privacy protections of personal data wrt third parties are badly under-defined, except for medical and financial data. Recent European Union directives are much more solid on those questions.
What you're referring to is "predatory pricing," defined as pricing at a loss with the intention of drivinga competitor away. It's illegal in the US under the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. Whether the FTC or DoJ would bother to enforce is doubtful given their record recently.
TS is 100% on point and correct here--and he's addressing something the silly discussion of the economics of pricing didn't, viz, that in most instances broadband services are a "natural monopoly." Such was the theory behind the regulatory framework over electrical power, natural gas, telephones, airlines, etc. The deregulation craze started about 1978 (with airlines), and the economist who designed it, Albert Kahn, now admits that it was a mistake. Dereg of power gave us Enron, dereg of phones gave us SBC and its buy-up rather build-out business model.
TC writes about the Postal Service--and it was the original natural monopoly, as understood by Madison, Jefferson, et al. We should revisit the logic there, as it was a good one, and it certainly applies to broadband.
A colleague and I did an experiment. We both get broadband from Comcast, but he's in an area where DSL is available, so he negotiates 40% off his bill every six months. I tried, but being out of DSL range, Comcast refused to discount (I noted the pause on their end as the operator looked up availability of DSL at my address). In a number of areas, DSL and cable are priced by collusion (illegal under Sherman Antitrust, but who's enforcing?!) and there is no discounting there, either.
The cost of the famed "last mile" in broadband services is formidable enough that it'd be silly to build a half-dozen different infrastructures. Save everybody money, preclude overbuilding, and regulate broadband.
I know that calling for economic regulation is very out of fashion even now, post-Enron, but it's the only way to keep citizens/netizens from getting gouged. Shucks, if we were in Europe, broadband would probably be provided by the public sector; I wrote my dissertation on Electricite de France, and believe me, that line about "private firms can do it better" is utter ideological BS.
I teach in a School of Information, one that offers only grad-level degrees. We are right now working to revise our curriculum and one key agenda item is to impart a strong set of IT skills among our students, whose future careers will range from Google info-retrieval experts to interface designers, to digital librarians, to museologists. A wide range indeed that we must address. Obviously, many students don't need the basics, but for the librarians in particular, having seen abuses in the past, I want to assure that as managers they won't be gulled and manipulated by IT hustlers selling pricey, proprietary turn-key systems that lock institutions into dreadful equipment-service-support contracts.
That said, the worst one can do in this realm is to teach software- and application-specific skills, or, for that matter, any skills whose half life is less than a decade. To avoid that, we move to the next higher level, that of architectures and inner logics. We pose questions like, "how is a secure network connection best made?," "what might be the advantages of an open document format over, say,.doc?," "what sort of database architecture would be best to handle diverse material objects and generate cross-readable XML?," "under how much cognitive load is a user placed when using this interface as opposed to that one?"... You get the idea.
To master this sort of knowledge/skill set, a student doesn't need to know any programming language except for perhaps a little html, learned only because it's a way to show how code generates output, not to author web pages in Notebook. Yet we expect our students to understand how coding works, what is and is not possible. We give them the knowledge they need to supervise people with a deeper set of technical skills--and to recognize that those with such narrow skill sets might be able to understand questions of project management, contracting, intellectual property, etc so that they can be promoted into managerial positions.
This is, indeed, a very different flavor of "IT literacy" than one would be teaching to middle-aged, laid-off auto workers trying to retool for reemployment. Yet some similarities hold, especially the need to avoid generating skill sets that are highly context and time dependent. The auto-workers (yes, again, the car analogies), or worse, those airline mechanics got laid off because their skill sets were brittle: once the technology or corporate agendas changed, they were useless to their employers. As educators, we should never repeat that mistake.
I remember touring the French breeder when it was under construction in 1980. The shock to me was the coolant: liquid sodium, pumped through the core to the tune of tons per hour. And sodium is, of course, extremely corrosive, so a leak can be if not catastrophic, a real major mess.
What is worse, however, is that unlike "classic" PWRs and PWRs, under LOCAs (loss of coolant accidents), breeders blow up, not melt down. They contain sufficient fissile material closely enough packed to sustain an explosive chain reaction. Admittedly, the odds of that are long, but the costs would be astronomical, so IMHO, they are not worth the risk. What the Hell, the French scaled their fuel cycle to accommodate being the world's sole fuel reprocessor, so they have ample capacity for reprocessing--let them take the risk and bear the expense and ship our spent fuel to them.
Except for one problem: is there a safe way to transport spent fuel, be it to Yucca or to Bretagne? Maybe, maybe not. A shipment of spent fuel would make a dandy terrorist target (those individual terrorists, not the state ones sitting on thousands of nuclear weapons sited in NDAK and on Poseidons). Or just a train wreck. It's not out of paranoia that many states have passed laws (admittedly prolly unconstitutional) forbidding the transport of nuke waste across their states.
All that said, I'm almost where the original writer is on the issue of nukes. I was an anti-nuke activist in the late 1970s and that actually was in part behind my doctoral work. In the interim, nukes look better today from a risk standpoint, thanks to some interesting redesigns. For P/BWRs of the '70s generation, the dominant failure mode is a LOCA and melt-down. Newer designs' failure mode is cold, fast shutdown. ABB was designing those 20 years back. So plant-specific risks are possibly pretty low today, but risks in the fuel cycle remain. So make your choices. I'm still not convinced either way.
Government routinely creates property--think about patents, for example, or broadcast frequencies. More significantly, in the big historical picture, we can see that, for example, most Europeans in the Middle Ages had only the barest conception of land as susceptible to ownership. Sure, a lord had sovereignty and could exact taxes and labor services, but the land itself was encumbered with all manner of obligations and was far from alienable in the modern sense of private land. That the modern state permits inheritance (recall that democracy was once considered a counterweight to inherited wealth, which is why the rich fought for centuries against it) is simply a consequence of the abiding power of the wealthy over the state.
Every time I hear a libertarian dis the state/government, I urge him (and 99% of the time they are male) to advocate the abolition of the Register of Deeds and the Patent Office. While he's at it, he might also consider getting rid of that odd "legal person" known as the corporation (a 19th-century invention by the state), which has all of the rights of we individuals, yet can never be jailed for the crimes it may commit.
Better still, if you're going to collect information on me and resell it, pay me, dammit! Why is it that in the capitalist economy in theory everyone gets paid for the value they produce (in theory, I said...), but when we produce value by generating user data and that data gets sold and resold, why aren't we, the originators of that value, ever paid? Pamela Samuelson of Berkeley Law School wrote a very good piece a few years back arguing that if we're going to extend intellectual property rights to damn near everything in sight, at least we should consider extending them to our personal data.
I wonder... I've heard rumors that ideally, with the MacTel boxes, one could someday run Windows apps without using Windows/Vista/etc. Booting into Vista and indeed, Vista itself wouldn't be necessary--just boot to OSX, then fire off your Windoze apps.
I know little about details, granted, but I do know that the myriad oddball.dlls and the Windows API generally are a mess to handle, but didn't the DoJ (or EU) antitrust settlement force M$ to publish that stuff? This would hit Billy Boy where it hurts.
Indeed. Economists have studied this question, roughly framed as, "to which actors and to what degree, on the margin, have the benefits of increased productivity since 1973 been distributed?" The answer is fairly simple: to capital holders, especially in the US. For all of the productivity increases since that time, gross returns to non-managerial salaried and wage labor have stayed virtually frozen---real wages have, in short, not risen in about 30 years.
Here in Michigan, home of the auto industry, that's all too obvious. Since the mid-70s, employment in the industry has dropped by well over 50%, yet for those lucky few who are still employed, real wages have been stagnant. So where did all the money go? Largely to investors. A company like GM or Ford is, of course, competitive, but the critical unrecognized venue of competition is not in the product markets (I'm not about to claim that they make world-class products, tho their stupid accessories are cool) but on Wall Street. As companies, GM and Ford have to offer returns on equity comparable to those of the pay-or-die pharmaceutical companies. If they don't, their stock prices fall, they can't borrow to retool/upgrade equipment, etc. This essentially means that pressures to provide high returns on equity force companies to allocate more and more of their marginal revenue to dividends and less to wages, salaries, and investments in capital equipment. This also explains why, despite the massive investments in IT over the past 30 years, according to numerous economists, most of our productivity increases have come from people simply working harder.
Capital and product markets notwithstanding, the core of the problem lies in political power. Those who own the capital have the power across the economy to extract an ever larger share of the revenue generated by the production of goods and services. This is why for many firms, the most lucrative investment is to buy politicians. We call it "campaign contributions," "junkets," and the like, but helping the pol's daughter get into Princeton, say, is also a part of the deal. A well-bought politician will assure that subsidies and tax cuts flow handsomely and that the political power of labor gets annihilated via legislation. Why innnovate--or heaven forbid!, raise wages--when the rate of return on buying a politician is so high?
Truth be told, I've never understood the value of on-board nav systems. 99% of our driving is in familiar venues (commuting back/forth to work, erranding locally, etc), so for that remaining 1%, why aren't old paper maps sufficient or, for the digerati, a quick look at Google Maps/Earth before departing? I can understand cabbies and limo drivers, delivery ppl, etc using them, but for us regular ppl, the cost of on-board GPS is justified only on a conspicuous-consumption basis. Good for those who buy the Acura instead of its lower-priced Honda eqivalent, but for those of us who just want to pay for functionality, a pure waste of $.
Be careful not to imply that negligent security measures are not in any way the fault of the people running an IT system for which the latter should be held respnsible.
To take a different setting, consider the data breaches at places like ChoicePoint, the [right-wing Republican] data-mining company. They amass vast quantities of personal info--as always, without the consent of the people on whom they collect the data and do records-matching--for credit rating and employment background check services. With its dicey security system, ChoicePoint seems to be routinely hacked by identity thieves and data resellers. Should they not be held responsible?? Would you sit by idly if a valet-parking service left your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition? Sure, the car thief would be the primary culprit, but wouldn't the valet service be rightly charged with contributory negligence?
Don't hold your breath hoping that regulation will happen. Since the dereg of airlines in 1978 (which did go well and became the poster child for the "all dereg is a good thing, as it stops gov't meddling), the notion of natural monopolies inherently needing regulation is largely gone from our political discourse. Most cable services in the US were rolled after 1978, so there's minimal regulation on them, resulting in the highest prices for the lowest broadband speed in the developed world. I'm not about to cry for the Baby Bells, whose largely brain-dead management has treated their customers as a cash cow since the end of Ma Bell in 1984, but they still face a bit of regulation as a legacy from the old days. This means that they have to allow 3rd party services over their wires, something cable operators don't have to do. The 1996 Telecomm Act set the whole dysfunctional mess in concrete.
That means, of course, that broadband ISPs in the US are pretty free to set discriminatory tariffs. The worst of these is emerging right now (in the talking stages) in VoIP. Monopolist cable broadband ISPs were, as expected, well behind the curve in rolling out their own VoIP services, so many of us opted for third party VoIP providers. I pay less than $17/mo to SunRocket (which is impeccably good!), yet for an identical service package, Comcast wants to charge me $40/mo. Knowing that many customers are smart enough not to fall for their screw-job, Comcast is now making noises about blocking competing VoIP services. How can they do that, you ask? Gov't has largely avoided regulating them.
No doubt, the bushies are malevolent when it comes to respecting our rights as citizens, but they are also monumentally incompetent and clueless (ex: running the Ministry of Homeland Security 100% on the most insecure OS). Bottom line here is, I believe, that their reach far exceeds their grasp. Secondly, their philosophy of govennment is that it exists largely as a mechanism to award contracts to those who've paid up to them. This means that if there's a choice at some juncture between doing something competently and delivering the goods (aka, our $) to their pals, they almost always go for the latter.
I remember once in my Intro to Info class launching into an EPIC-like disquisition of fear when Poindexter announced the Total Info Awareness (TIA) initiative. I said things like, "the feds will be reading all our email, looking over all out airline travel, snooping into our credit card receipts..." One of my very smart undergrads replied that he wasn't worried because those in govt are far from competent enough to make that work. I replied about "false positives" and the like, but he was correct. These were the people who got the PDB of 2001-08-04 headlined, "bin Laden preparing to strike the US" and did nothing.
Conclusion: successful systematic malevolence takes far more competence than the bushies have as they do their "heck of a good job."
On the government side (and arguably on the private as well), M$ products are a veritable black box, and for security purposes, that stinks. When the source code is open, programmers working for the gov't can comb through the code to understand how secure it is. That, as much as cost considerations, is why a number of countries (and now Mass) are moving away from closed code. It's simply irresponsible for a CIO to adopt products that prevent security analysis.
That the US' new Ministry of Homeland Security opted for end-to-end M$ products indicates to me that that agency is more concerned with nurturing the connections of the bushies to M$. The latter not only dumped big bucks into Shrub's last campaign, Bill's dad is a principle of the lobbying firm for which the notorious Jack Abramoff worked when all of the above happened. Conclusion: gov'ts who *don't* go open-source might often have agendas that have little to do with "good govenment."
Please, spare us these discussions of what media outlets are "objective." At the outset, the vast majority are for-profit and thus have an implicit pro-business bias. Basic knowledge of epistemology informs us that objectivity is impossible, as everyone writes and reports from a situated position, a context. Each time I hear a media outlet claiming to be unbiased (or my undergrads doing the same or claiming a source is) I want to shout.
Most of the rest of the world has media that don't play to the lie of objectivity. In France the Left has Le Monde (for intellectuals) and Liberation, and the Right has Le Figaro. Ditto for most of Europe. Under that regime the reader is implicitly invited to take all reportage with the proverbial grain of salt and to think for herself. Truth be told, I'm much more confident in admissions by the press of where they come from (Fox News' claim of "no spin" notwithstanding) than in claims that they have a monopoly on THE TRUTH.
Wrong. Google Print does far more than scan and post. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the project is the massive effort at indexing. In addition, relying on the catch-as-catch can dynamic of p2p will result in a large concentration of material toward the center of the normal curve of content sought and will exclude the tails--the rarely-used yet valuable material for which libraries of the Stanford/Michigan/etc type are famous.
Think of what you see for music in p2p: lots of "popular" material, but not much of the more obscure stuff--unless you happen to look when it's posted. Don't underestimate the vast difference in value-added between Google Print and p2p. They don't even come close.
Earlier this week the NY Times ran a piece on the emergence of broadband over power lines (BPL) and it looks pretty promising. There are successful tests being run now in Manassas VA and in the Cincinnatti area. Essentially users will plug a sort-of power brick into an outlet, then plug an ether line into that. That procedure says to me thatit'll exhibit many of the same operational characteristics as broadband over cable, so we'd not have the signal flakiness and security issues associated with WiMAX.
Indeed, we're starting a new dorm/academic facility on my campus soon and I'm hoping to see BPL used at least locally to facilitate near-ubiquitous connectivity.
In a book a few years back about light industry in northern Italy, which he offers as a model for other hot regions of innovation (read Silicon Valley, etc) Charles Sabel argued that leakage of knowledge among firms is essential to building innovative synergy. This means that NDAs, for example, can seriously block the building of mind-share among communities of professionals across multiple firms. As we know, many companies acquire other companies not for their product portfolios, but for the knowledge their workers have.
I've long tried to get evidence of alternative practices in the software industry--that everyone signs NDAs, yet the employers know that the NDAs get violated at countless coffee shops and watering holes, yet they do little about it, as everyone benefits in the long run.
I know AnnaLee Saxenian at Berkeley has done a little bit of work on this, but I can't find much else. Anyone able to offer help in this? I'm rfrost[at]umich.edu. Thanks.
Absolutely right--the Grokster decision is relevant here. As Larry Lessig has ceaselessly pointed out, the key downside to that poor decision is that software writers now have to worry that some company might sue because a consumer of the software might use it "illegally," which, under DMCA and other (read: "anti-terrorist") legislation, is pretty broad. While SCOTUS formally upheld the legality of products with "significant non-infringing uses" as set by the Betamax case (1984), in fact, a self-defined offended party can file suit and subject the software writer and company to massive legal expenses just to defend themselves.
Grokster also implies that such plaintiffs have a right to discovery, so they can subpoena myriad internal files of the software company, fishing for evidence that it consciously attempted to produce a product that facilitates illegal activity. For the more civil libertarian types among us, this notion of facilitation gets perilously close to RICO statutes, which have been used broadly to perform roundups of people the gov't or rich plaintiffs don't like.
All that would be great, indeed--except that such a major effort would come to completion just about the time we run out of oil (or rather, as we start to run out, with the Saudis and Exxon, etc charging >$100/barrel). Whatever "smart" highways we begin today better be designed with future adaptation to other modes of fuel/transport.
Indeed--what you say about our personal information being of value is so true. A couple of years back, in reflecting on the copyright wars and the corporate insistance on what is "their" property, I began to think how cavalierly they take our personal info and resell it (think ChoicePoint here). Figuring that the intellectual property juggernaut was not going away any time soon, I developed an idea of granting us, everyday citizens, property rights over our own personal info. That way, any company who took our info and resold it (esp w/o our consent) could be liable for , yes, copyright violations! I thought I was original in that idea, but it turns out that Pamela Samuelson, developed the idea in about 1999. Surprise, surprise--nothing came of it.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so Google's setting up a datacenter along the Columbia River in order to get cheap power from the Bonneville Power Authority. That makes sense. As cooling needs are one of the major factors in server-farm power demands, why not build, say, in Minnesota, Montana, or N. Dakota, where there's plenty of cool (if not frigid) air most of the year and powerplants at the mouths of the coal mines can supply cheap base load? As Google is global, its power-demand peak-to-tough ratio is probably pretty low, so it could negotiate a nice base-load tarriffed contract and not have to cover the cost of transmission line-loss thanks to being next to the powerplants. (Yeah, I know those plants generate huge amounts of CO2, but see below).
And if, with all that available coolant (free cold air), google still has surplus heat, why not build greenhouses next door? Many of our vegetables here in Michigan come from Canadian greenhouses heated by waste heat, and Minnesota greenhouses could suck up some of the CO2 from the powerplants.
And indeed, M$ understood the need to pony up donations for a Republican Admin after the antitrust case, hoping that a more pliable AG (ultimately, Ashcroft) would back off in the penalty phase. Voila! ...and it was so.
Any coincidence that Bill Gates' dad is a principal (not to be confused with principle!) in the same lobbying firm for which Jack Abramoff once worked?
The distinction between .doc and OD is not trivial, despite both being "openly published." The .doc format can be changed on MS' whim, driven by anything from a wish to force upgrades (they've done it before) to improving s/w performance (which they may do someday). OD will always be (presumably) forward- and backward compatible. Organizations can archive documents in OD and be fully confident that they will be retrievable decades from now--as long as a device can make sense of flat-text XML. Not so for what M$ might do. I still occasionally get papers from my students in M$ Works format and I can find nothing except Works on DOS/Windows that can read it.
.doc is pretty high-risk, while OD is a safe bet.
From an institutional document-management and archiving standpoint,
Sorry, you are incorrect. Americans' "right to privacy" in the contemporary sense is a consequence of case law, ie, Supreme Court decisions. The first major break toward our contemporary notion of a right to privacy was in Giswold v. Connecticut (1963), where the court held that state and federal laws prohibiting the sending and possession of birth control information violated citizens' rights to privacy in their personal affairs. Roe v. Wade (1973--yes, the "abortion decision") was based on Griswold and affirmed it, as did Lawrence v. Texas (2003--overturning state anti-sodomy laws). Based on the current reading of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause (which, no doubt, Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas would love to reverse), those decisions cover all units of government within the USA.
It's interesting to note, BTW, that this series of decisions, largely based around the personal privacy of one's sexual life, are a major wedge within the right wing in the US. Religious conservatives would love to overturn them all, thereby allowing states into the bedroom in the name of protecting Christian virtue, while libertarians largely want to keep the government out of citizens' private lives. At the same time, however, privacy protections of personal data wrt third parties are badly under-defined, except for medical and financial data. Recent European Union directives are much more solid on those questions.
I teach this stuff. See: .
What you're referring to is "predatory pricing," defined as pricing at a loss with the intention of drivinga competitor away. It's illegal in the US under the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. Whether the FTC or DoJ would bother to enforce is doubtful given their record recently.
TS is 100% on point and correct here--and he's addressing something the silly discussion of the economics of pricing didn't, viz, that in most instances broadband services are a "natural monopoly." Such was the theory behind the regulatory framework over electrical power, natural gas, telephones, airlines, etc. The deregulation craze started about 1978 (with airlines), and the economist who designed it, Albert Kahn, now admits that it was a mistake. Dereg of power gave us Enron, dereg of phones gave us SBC and its buy-up rather build-out business model.
TC writes about the Postal Service--and it was the original natural monopoly, as understood by Madison, Jefferson, et al. We should revisit the logic there, as it was a good one, and it certainly applies to broadband.
A colleague and I did an experiment. We both get broadband from Comcast, but he's in an area where DSL is available, so he negotiates 40% off his bill every six months. I tried, but being out of DSL range, Comcast refused to discount (I noted the pause on their end as the operator looked up availability of DSL at my address). In a number of areas, DSL and cable are priced by collusion (illegal under Sherman Antitrust, but who's enforcing?!) and there is no discounting there, either.
The cost of the famed "last mile" in broadband services is formidable enough that it'd be silly to build a half-dozen different infrastructures. Save everybody money, preclude overbuilding, and regulate broadband.
I know that calling for economic regulation is very out of fashion even now, post-Enron, but it's the only way to keep citizens/netizens from getting gouged. Shucks, if we were in Europe, broadband would probably be provided by the public sector; I wrote my dissertation on Electricite de France, and believe me, that line about "private firms can do it better" is utter ideological BS.
I teach in a School of Information, one that offers only grad-level degrees. We are right now working to revise our curriculum and one key agenda item is to impart a strong set of IT skills among our students, whose future careers will range from Google info-retrieval experts to interface designers, to digital librarians, to museologists. A wide range indeed that we must address. Obviously, many students don't need the basics, but for the librarians in particular, having seen abuses in the past, I want to assure that as managers they won't be gulled and manipulated by IT hustlers selling pricey, proprietary turn-key systems that lock institutions into dreadful equipment-service-support contracts.
.doc?," "what sort of database architecture would be best to handle diverse material objects and generate cross-readable XML?," "under how much cognitive load is a user placed when using this interface as opposed to that one?"... You get the idea.
That said, the worst one can do in this realm is to teach software- and application-specific skills, or, for that matter, any skills whose half life is less than a decade. To avoid that, we move to the next higher level, that of architectures and inner logics. We pose questions like, "how is a secure network connection best made?," "what might be the advantages of an open document format over, say,
To master this sort of knowledge/skill set, a student doesn't need to know any programming language except for perhaps a little html, learned only because it's a way to show how code generates output, not to author web pages in Notebook. Yet we expect our students to understand how coding works, what is and is not possible. We give them the knowledge they need to supervise people with a deeper set of technical skills--and to recognize that those with such narrow skill sets might be able to understand questions of project management, contracting, intellectual property, etc so that they can be promoted into managerial positions.
This is, indeed, a very different flavor of "IT literacy" than one would be teaching to middle-aged, laid-off auto workers trying to retool for reemployment. Yet some similarities hold, especially the need to avoid generating skill sets that are highly context and time dependent. The auto-workers (yes, again, the car analogies), or worse, those airline mechanics got laid off because their skill sets were brittle: once the technology or corporate agendas changed, they were useless to their employers. As educators, we should never repeat that mistake.
I remember touring the French breeder when it was under construction in 1980. The shock to me was the coolant: liquid sodium, pumped through the core to the tune of tons per hour. And sodium is, of course, extremely corrosive, so a leak can be if not catastrophic, a real major mess.
What is worse, however, is that unlike "classic" PWRs and PWRs, under LOCAs (loss of coolant accidents), breeders blow up, not melt down. They contain sufficient fissile material closely enough packed to sustain an explosive chain reaction. Admittedly, the odds of that are long, but the costs would be astronomical, so IMHO, they are not worth the risk. What the Hell, the French scaled their fuel cycle to accommodate being the world's sole fuel reprocessor, so they have ample capacity for reprocessing--let them take the risk and bear the expense and ship our spent fuel to them.
Except for one problem: is there a safe way to transport spent fuel, be it to Yucca or to Bretagne? Maybe, maybe not. A shipment of spent fuel would make a dandy terrorist target (those individual terrorists, not the state ones sitting on thousands of nuclear weapons sited in NDAK and on Poseidons). Or just a train wreck. It's not out of paranoia that many states have passed laws (admittedly prolly unconstitutional) forbidding the transport of nuke waste across their states.
All that said, I'm almost where the original writer is on the issue of nukes. I was an anti-nuke activist in the late 1970s and that actually was in part behind my doctoral work. In the interim, nukes look better today from a risk standpoint, thanks to some interesting redesigns. For P/BWRs of the '70s generation, the dominant failure mode is a LOCA and melt-down. Newer designs' failure mode is cold, fast shutdown. ABB was designing those 20 years back. So plant-specific risks are possibly pretty low today, but risks in the fuel cycle remain. So make your choices. I'm still not convinced either way.
Government routinely creates property--think about patents, for example, or broadcast frequencies. More significantly, in the big historical picture, we can see that, for example, most Europeans in the Middle Ages had only the barest conception of land as susceptible to ownership. Sure, a lord had sovereignty and could exact taxes and labor services, but the land itself was encumbered with all manner of obligations and was far from alienable in the modern sense of private land. That the modern state permits inheritance (recall that democracy was once considered a counterweight to inherited wealth, which is why the rich fought for centuries against it) is simply a consequence of the abiding power of the wealthy over the state.
Every time I hear a libertarian dis the state/government, I urge him (and 99% of the time they are male) to advocate the abolition of the Register of Deeds and the Patent Office. While he's at it, he might also consider getting rid of that odd "legal person" known as the corporation (a 19th-century invention by the state), which has all of the rights of we individuals, yet can never be jailed for the crimes it may commit.
Better still, if you're going to collect information on me and resell it, pay me, dammit! Why is it that in the capitalist economy in theory everyone gets paid for the value they produce (in theory, I said...), but when we produce value by generating user data and that data gets sold and resold, why aren't we, the originators of that value, ever paid? Pamela Samuelson of Berkeley Law School wrote a very good piece a few years back arguing that if we're going to extend intellectual property rights to damn near everything in sight, at least we should consider extending them to our personal data.
I know little about details, granted, but I do know that the myriad oddball .dlls and the Windows API generally are a mess to handle, but didn't the DoJ (or EU) antitrust settlement force M$ to publish that stuff? This would hit Billy Boy where it hurts.
Here in Michigan, home of the auto industry, that's all too obvious. Since the mid-70s, employment in the industry has dropped by well over 50%, yet for those lucky few who are still employed, real wages have been stagnant. So where did all the money go? Largely to investors. A company like GM or Ford is, of course, competitive, but the critical unrecognized venue of competition is not in the product markets (I'm not about to claim that they make world-class products, tho their stupid accessories are cool) but on Wall Street. As companies, GM and Ford have to offer returns on equity comparable to those of the pay-or-die pharmaceutical companies. If they don't, their stock prices fall, they can't borrow to retool/upgrade equipment, etc. This essentially means that pressures to provide high returns on equity force companies to allocate more and more of their marginal revenue to dividends and less to wages, salaries, and investments in capital equipment. This also explains why, despite the massive investments in IT over the past 30 years, according to numerous economists, most of our productivity increases have come from people simply working harder.
Capital and product markets notwithstanding, the core of the problem lies in political power. Those who own the capital have the power across the economy to extract an ever larger share of the revenue generated by the production of goods and services. This is why for many firms, the most lucrative investment is to buy politicians. We call it "campaign contributions," "junkets," and the like, but helping the pol's daughter get into Princeton, say, is also a part of the deal. A well-bought politician will assure that subsidies and tax cuts flow handsomely and that the political power of labor gets annihilated via legislation. Why innnovate--or heaven forbid!, raise wages--when the rate of return on buying a politician is so high?
Truth be told, I've never understood the value of on-board nav systems. 99% of our driving is in familiar venues (commuting back/forth to work, erranding locally, etc), so for that remaining 1%, why aren't old paper maps sufficient or, for the digerati, a quick look at Google Maps/Earth before departing? I can understand cabbies and limo drivers, delivery ppl, etc using them, but for us regular ppl, the cost of on-board GPS is justified only on a conspicuous-consumption basis. Good for those who buy the Acura instead of its lower-priced Honda eqivalent, but for those of us who just want to pay for functionality, a pure waste of $.
To take a different setting, consider the data breaches at places like ChoicePoint, the [right-wing Republican] data-mining company. They amass vast quantities of personal info--as always, without the consent of the people on whom they collect the data and do records-matching--for credit rating and employment background check services. With its dicey security system, ChoicePoint seems to be routinely hacked by identity thieves and data resellers. Should they not be held responsible?? Would you sit by idly if a valet-parking service left your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition? Sure, the car thief would be the primary culprit, but wouldn't the valet service be rightly charged with contributory negligence?
That means, of course, that broadband ISPs in the US are pretty free to set discriminatory tariffs. The worst of these is emerging right now (in the talking stages) in VoIP. Monopolist cable broadband ISPs were, as expected, well behind the curve in rolling out their own VoIP services, so many of us opted for third party VoIP providers. I pay less than $17/mo to SunRocket (which is impeccably good!), yet for an identical service package, Comcast wants to charge me $40/mo. Knowing that many customers are smart enough not to fall for their screw-job, Comcast is now making noises about blocking competing VoIP services. How can they do that, you ask? Gov't has largely avoided regulating them.
I remember once in my Intro to Info class launching into an EPIC-like disquisition of fear when Poindexter announced the Total Info Awareness (TIA) initiative. I said things like, "the feds will be reading all our email, looking over all out airline travel, snooping into our credit card receipts..." One of my very smart undergrads replied that he wasn't worried because those in govt are far from competent enough to make that work. I replied about "false positives" and the like, but he was correct. These were the people who got the PDB of 2001-08-04 headlined, "bin Laden preparing to strike the US" and did nothing.
Conclusion: successful systematic malevolence takes far more competence than the bushies have as they do their "heck of a good job."
On the government side (and arguably on the private as well), M$ products are a veritable black box, and for security purposes, that stinks. When the source code is open, programmers working for the gov't can comb through the code to understand how secure it is. That, as much as cost considerations, is why a number of countries (and now Mass) are moving away from closed code. It's simply irresponsible for a CIO to adopt products that prevent security analysis.
That the US' new Ministry of Homeland Security opted for end-to-end M$ products indicates to me that that agency is more concerned with nurturing the connections of the bushies to M$. The latter not only dumped big bucks into Shrub's last campaign, Bill's dad is a principle of the lobbying firm for which the notorious Jack Abramoff worked when all of the above happened. Conclusion: gov'ts who *don't* go open-source might often have agendas that have little to do with "good govenment."
Please, spare us these discussions of what media outlets are "objective." At the outset, the vast majority are for-profit and thus have an implicit pro-business bias. Basic knowledge of epistemology informs us that objectivity is impossible, as everyone writes and reports from a situated position, a context. Each time I hear a media outlet claiming to be unbiased (or my undergrads doing the same or claiming a source is) I want to shout. Most of the rest of the world has media that don't play to the lie of objectivity. In France the Left has Le Monde (for intellectuals) and Liberation, and the Right has Le Figaro. Ditto for most of Europe. Under that regime the reader is implicitly invited to take all reportage with the proverbial grain of salt and to think for herself. Truth be told, I'm much more confident in admissions by the press of where they come from (Fox News' claim of "no spin" notwithstanding) than in claims that they have a monopoly on THE TRUTH.
Think of what you see for music in p2p: lots of "popular" material, but not much of the more obscure stuff--unless you happen to look when it's posted. Don't underestimate the vast difference in value-added between Google Print and p2p. They don't even come close.
Earlier this week the NY Times ran a piece on the emergence of broadband over power lines (BPL) and it looks pretty promising. There are successful tests being run now in Manassas VA and in the Cincinnatti area. Essentially users will plug a sort-of power brick into an outlet, then plug an ether line into that. That procedure says to me thatit'll exhibit many of the same operational characteristics as broadband over cable, so we'd not have the signal flakiness and security issues associated with WiMAX. Indeed, we're starting a new dorm/academic facility on my campus soon and I'm hoping to see BPL used at least locally to facilitate near-ubiquitous connectivity.
In a book a few years back about light industry in northern Italy, which he offers as a model for other hot regions of innovation (read Silicon Valley, etc) Charles Sabel argued that leakage of knowledge among firms is essential to building innovative synergy. This means that NDAs, for example, can seriously block the building of mind-share among communities of professionals across multiple firms. As we know, many companies acquire other companies not for their product portfolios, but for the knowledge their workers have. I've long tried to get evidence of alternative practices in the software industry--that everyone signs NDAs, yet the employers know that the NDAs get violated at countless coffee shops and watering holes, yet they do little about it, as everyone benefits in the long run. I know AnnaLee Saxenian at Berkeley has done a little bit of work on this, but I can't find much else. Anyone able to offer help in this? I'm rfrost[at]umich.edu. Thanks.
Absolutely right--the Grokster decision is relevant here. As Larry Lessig has ceaselessly pointed out, the key downside to that poor decision is that software writers now have to worry that some company might sue because a consumer of the software might use it "illegally," which, under DMCA and other (read: "anti-terrorist") legislation, is pretty broad. While SCOTUS formally upheld the legality of products with "significant non-infringing uses" as set by the Betamax case (1984), in fact, a self-defined offended party can file suit and subject the software writer and company to massive legal expenses just to defend themselves.
Grokster also implies that such plaintiffs have a right to discovery, so they can subpoena myriad internal files of the software company, fishing for evidence that it consciously attempted to produce a product that facilitates illegal activity. For the more civil libertarian types among us, this notion of facilitation gets perilously close to RICO statutes, which have been used broadly to perform roundups of people the gov't or rich plaintiffs don't like.
All that would be great, indeed--except that such a major effort would come to completion just about the time we run out of oil (or rather, as we start to run out, with the Saudis and Exxon, etc charging >$100/barrel). Whatever "smart" highways we begin today better be designed with future adaptation to other modes of fuel/transport.
Yeah, think about the Airport Express... I've read that there's en/decyrption at each end, and I've noticed that that 's pretty CPU-intensive.
Indeed--what you say about our personal information being of value is so true. A couple of years back, in reflecting on the copyright wars and the corporate insistance on what is "their" property, I began to think how cavalierly they take our personal info and resell it (think ChoicePoint here). Figuring that the intellectual property juggernaut was not going away any time soon, I developed an idea of granting us, everyday citizens, property rights over our own personal info. That way, any company who took our info and resold it (esp w/o our consent) could be liable for , yes, copyright violations! I thought I was original in that idea, but it turns out that Pamela Samuelson, developed the idea in about 1999. Surprise, surprise--nothing came of it.