The illegal exports bound for Iran have involved such items as missile guidance systems, Improvised Explosive Device (IED) components, military aircraft parts, night vision systems and other materials. The illegal exports to China have involved rocket launch data, Space Shuttle technology, missile technology, naval warship data, unmanned aircraft technology, thermal imaging systems, military night vision systems and other materials.
Apart from things like missile guidance components and IED parts for Iran I really wonder why such exports should be stopped. There is a market for them after all and most of it can be second-sourced.
First off I agree with your ethical misgivings. What you describe would be clearly unethical if practised by ordinary people. But not, unfortunately, when practised by ordinary people in the course of a business venture.
I think you need to realize that there is a big difference between business ethics, ethics in e.g. politics, and ethics between ordinary people.
In business there is no such thing as "ethics" as a self-standing concept. Except perhaps in a company's Code of Conduct, which is only ever meant as a piece of PR material. Everything is relative to the long-term and short-term business prospects. The time period being dependent on the length of tenure of the manager who takes the decision. If it's a course of action likely to generate a net benefit within that time-frame then it's "not unethical", otherwise it's probably "unethical".
Any action that's not outright illegal *and at the same time* very much open to detection, is acceptable from a business ethics point of view, and therefore "not unethical". Things that are illegal and likely to be found out are "unethical" (provided the damage they do is not exceeded by the revenues they bring). But only because they're likely to harm the company under the above-mentioned timeframe, and for no other reason. I just thought I'd make that clear.
So I'm sorry to say that my advice is: cooperate fully with your boss and keep him happy.
You may however wish to engage in a little CYA practise, just to guard against the possibility that if this little caper is found out and embarrasses your company, your boss may or may not be replaced but *you* probably will be blamed for carrying out something that you ought to have known is unethical. You are the one with the specialist knowledge after all, right?
If anything, your boss might even claim ignorance as a defense and blame *you*, the specialist, for not alerting him.
So yes, send him a polite and low-key email explaining (briefly) why you believe that this move might be less than beneficial to the company and suggesting that he consider an alternative (if possible give him one). That's all. Having sent it, get busy with the screen-scraping.
Do NOT in any way or form mention the word "ethics", "ethical", or even worse "legal". If you do, you'll create an immediate conflict (because you imply that (a) you know better than he (b) that you're telling him how to do his job and (c) that he's acting unethically or even illegally and (d) if you produce it later, your *then* boss will see that it's less than helpful) because your boss will know instantly that you are preparing to shift the blame on him, and only engaged in a CYA exercise.
Oh, and by the way, you will need to be able to prove you sent it, so (depending on how much power your boss has on email retention) make an unobtrusive backup of your out-box on a CD a week or so after you've sent it and hide the CD.
It just so happens that I *know* that Aliens are all over our planet.
How do I know? Well... you hear too many accounts of sightings for it not to be true. Where there is smoke there is fire. Am I right?
And the fact that we don't see more accounts of this in the mainstream media and that declassified reports don't mention them only means that there's a huge conspiracy to suppress all the evidence.
Not to be trite, but it's quite possible to circumvent this problem provided you can exercise some control over a portion of the budget and you can find someone to "front" OSS software as their own.
It would work like this: you see a need that could be addressed very well using OSS package X. You also ensure that there is budget to buy software.
What you do next is to get a software consultancy you trust to take that piece of OSS software, modify it slightly (e.g. a new splash screen) and sell it to your company. That's perfectly legal, if a bit sneaky, and therefore requires heavy-duty CYA precautions.
First off, make certain that you cannot be suspected of fraud (i.e. do a thorough requirements study and a cost-benefit study and make sure that the resold OSS stuff wins on those grounds).
Next make sure that the company your company will buy the stuff from provides your company with a service agreement and certain guarantees (they will have to talk with an insurance firm for that, but they can silently charge for that in their asking price; that's not unusual for consultancies).
Together that will allow you to show that you purchased good measure for your company's money, even if the company could have gotten the software for free. The reason being that your company purchased support and guarantees, which arguable are the sole difference between OSS and closed-source stuff. The fact that the packaged OSS software won the contract after comparison with commercial competition will show that the company got what it wanted.
Now be sure to check this theory with your personal lawyer first (but don't tell the company), then involve your company's legal department during purchasing; go through channels and get their buy-in once you have people willing to act as a vendor.
Now since it's OSS they will have to deliver the source code, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't have to say so in great big letters in the purchase agreement; it might even say that it delivers an *un-customised* version of the software by way of on-site escrow and hint that this is due to them being a startup. That's all. The trick is to get this past whoever approves software purchases. If he's stupid (likely, or he wouldn't go around blocking OSS stuff) you're likely to be able to get away with it. But make sure you are blameless if found out, or you'll loose your job and gain a lawsuit!
If you think a bit "formally" you'll see why this works: your company wants to buy software objects of class A (commercial software). What you have are software objects of class "B" (OSS software). So the only thing you need to do is create an object of class "A" which borrows the "implementation" from an object of class "B", but which adds a (legitimate) shell that makes it class "A", and everyone is happy.
Alternatively propose to buy a package (e.g. Open Office) for which there exists a commercial version and neglect to mention that it's also available as OSS.
If you don't have the amount of control that will let you do this, I can think of nothing else.
I'm afraid your Upper Management is quite right about distrust in the market against anything called "version 1.0".
Having said that, I'm afraid that Upper Management will soon be engaged in a massive rebranding exercise as they find that the market shuns a certain software product from a particular company that displays "1.0 quality" when the version number reads 5.x or something. They will probably have to completely rename and rebrand the product and perhaps even see damage to the name of the company as a whole.
I'm sorry to say that that it looks as if that's the way things are going to be. You see, rebranding products is something that Management understands, and they might just be happy to look forward to an exercise that falls squarely within their core competency. I don't think that damage to the name of the company will impress them however, since that typically is a long-term thing. Longer than their likely tenure with the company in question anyway.
Having said this, it's not unlikely that you will see an urgent demand for bug-fixes (apart from the usual demand for additional features) as the product meets headwinds in the market. There is a chance that this will enhance your job security, highly desirable in an economic downturn, so don't look down your nose at it.
What you might do is start thinking about what type of defects the product is still likely to exhibit (despite your best efforts during development, testing and debugging), what additional features are most likely to be demanded, and start thinking about how to go about fixing those bugs and implementing those new features plus how much time / effort that would take.
Then when the defects emerge you can impress your boss with a calm but supportive attitude, and well-thought through plans that offer him alternatives and allow him to offer sensible options to higher management.
Besides which, it's not unheard of to run a book among your co-developers with bets on what general type of errors will be found and what priority Upper Management will attach to them. Only, be sure not to let Upper Management catch on, as they will then insist on placing bets themselves and will adapt their priorities in a way that will make their own bets come true. Be warned!
The opening post displays a startling lack of insight as far as the purpose of having a Code of Conduct is concerned.
There really do seem to be people who believe that a Code of Conduct is there to limit what a company can do. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First and foremost, a Code of Conduct is an integral part of the company's PR effort. Every self-respecting company has to have one. It's cool to have one, and you look stupid and unsophisticated if you don't. Besides, there is no need to be without. There are templates with good-sounding Codes of Conduct that are guaranteed to leave everyone a comfortably free hand.
Secondly: damage limitation. A Code of Conduct is there to be able to shield a company from legal consequences of unethical conduct by it's employees on its behalf. If an employee is caught red-handed, it really helps if a company is able to state (truthfully) that this action contravenes their official Code of Conduct. This can really limit the damage.
The article refers to a further article that postulates an economic model to describe how researchers, their articles, publishers, and the public interact.
Nevermind the results that emerge once one accepts the model as true. The real trick is finding the right model.
The model that's used in the article starts with a lot of assumptions.
Starting with the one that scientific articles are a commodity. Now one aspect of commodities is that they have a price, and that the value of X grams of gold is the same as that of Y kilograms of lead, simply because the price is the same. This for example does not hold for scientific articles. Many mediocre (or even weak) articles do not increase the citation factor of a publication. You need good to very good articles, and the odd seminal article to do that. There is something quantitative to the value of scientific articles, or at least some extremely non-linear relationship between "quality" and price. Therefore publications aren't "commodities" in the usual sense of the word.
Another assumption is that the consumers (scientists) can't assess the value of a publication. Well, they can assess the value of an article at the time they read it. What they have much more difficulty with is to estimate the value of an article at some point in the future. Which may be very different from its value today. Take e.g. the pure mathematics involved in coding theory. A completely academic (and therefore not so often cited) subject until the advent of the music CD, DVD's, and the need for error-correcting codes. Suddenly this transformed the "value" of theretofore obscure mathematical publications in ways non-one had foreseen.
Of course this doesn't mean that a model that assumes they are will be totally devoid of value. On the contrary. One can study the properties of a hypothetical market in which they are, and then compare the properties of that hypothetical market with what one sees in reality.
There are lots of discrepancies, and then one can adjust one's modelling assumptions, change the model, and study the changed conclusions. This is one of the ways to advance science.
The only thing one should *not* do is treat the outcomes of this little modeling exercise as anything other than a particularly systematic and disciplined form of speculation.
But the current union structure of education makes experiments like this impossible. Unions don't want one teacher teaching thousands of students. They want the maximum number of union teachers teaching the minimum number of students. It's not about quality. It's not about productivity. It's not about achievement. It's about expanding the union payroll and nothing else.
No, I don't think so at all. Expensive (but effective) private schools take on good staff *and* ensure a favourable student/teacher ratio. If there were anything in conveniently exposing pupils to videotaped maths lectures from sports-star like teachers, private schools would be doing just that, but they don't. They simply invest in good teachers and make the pupils *work*. That's all there is to it.
It may sound very "American" to go on a rant about "unions" and waffle about how they supposedly block progress, but in its simple-mindedness and it's lack of thought it's a veritable poster-child of what's wrong with the US approach to academic achievement.
Criticism that Microsoft is mistakenly touts Windows-only projects as Open Source is pure nit-picking.
Just consider: Microsoft can obtain all Windows source code, Microsoft is licensed to modify Windows source code, and Microsoft is empowered to impose any condition it likes on subsequent users (if any) of the Windows source code. So from Microsoft's point of view, Open Source is as good a moniker for Windows-only software as any. It's just a question of hacking the definition of "Open Source" a bit.
Of course you always have intolerant extremists who feel that only their own views on Open Source should be considered, but Microsoft makes a pretty good case for their own definition of Open Source.
So why not open the "Open Source" trademark so that anyone can use it? Everyone can see that it's hypocritical to demand free software and then insist on closed trademarks. There clearly is a demand for opening the Open Source trademark!
It sounds as if the author of the opening post is looking for a Network-Attached Storage device that will function as a server, is based on Linux, and comes with pre-loaded applications.
I found and tested the predecessor of the following device (which I can recommend on basis of a year-long test of a sample with N=1): Bubba (see http://excito.com/bubba/about-bubba.html ). A Swedish NAS device. I have to note that it's certainly not "distributed" in the sense that it's easy to mirror data across multiple devices (I didn't try and wouldn't know an easy way of doing that). It's basically a server, so you'd still need to take care of backups yourself.
It's a metal box the size of a lunch-box, contains a HDD, a PowerPC processor, two ethernet interfaces, and comes pre-loaded with Linux 2.6 (Debian Etch), and has a web-based control interface for adding users (see http://excito.com/bubba/about-bubba.html ). It can act as a server (Samba), torrent and email downloader, and router (if you want). It's got decent tech support through this forum (see http://forum.excito.net/). You can buy the box with or without HDD.
Nevermind the website (they brought in a consultant who made something I really dislike), the box and its applications are solid. Have a look and see if it's what you need.
Choosing the subject with care is all very well, but to really connect you've got to get the language right. For 4th graders I suggest extensive use of four-letter words.
Personally I'm no great fan of mr. Stallman. I subscribe to about half of his ideas and regard the rest as ranging from "going a bit far" to "ludicrous". But I have to admit that he has seen through the thicket of issues and identified the one and only thing that truly matters.
It's Control.
Every single bit of Open Source and Free Software hinges on the placement of control: who controls the software and who sets the rules by which it can be used.
The whole idea of "not getting enmeshed in proprietary software" is ultimately about control. Nobody would object to using "their own" proprietary software. And why not? Because you control it.
Free software is primarily software that the end-user (any end-user) has control over. Oh yes, and incidentally you can't really have that control unless you anchor that empowerment in the license for the source code, making it free and open and making sure no-one can close it again.
Now the whole idea of "cloud computing" can be viewed from a "control" perspective too. As in: "who controls the hardware, the software, the service, and the data that's in the 'cloud?'". Answer: whoever runs the server and offers the service that people want. That means at the very least a transfer of control, and with it a bargaining chip for whoever provides the "service in the cloud" that we use.
By contrast, text documents that reside on my hard disk and are written in Latex are under my control. Those on my hard disk in Open Office format too. Those in MS Office format less so.
But what if I had any data "in the cloud"? For starters I am dependent on the good offices of the service provider to make my data available. If he were to suddenly go under (Now that can't happen, can it? Firms like that are as solid as the bank...).
Secondly, I would be obliged to follow whatever format the service provider uses, or stop using the service. Not that much of a hassle when there are multiple service providers to choose from, but that can't last.
Thirdly, who among us carefully studies their service provider's Terms Of Service with the intent of being bound by them? I know I don't. Now what if there are small and sneaky clauses giving the service provider world-wide distribution rights to what I put on their servers? Or clauses that give the service provider the right to study your data (Google queries anyone? MSN email profiling?), or that can be used by others to study your online behaviour in ways you might not have intended (Employers reading up on facebook profiles anyone?).
People who warn about that tend to be seen as alarmists, and told "If you don't like their TOS, don't use their servers". And there is the rub. The question of control is turned into the question of "How much control do you want to exchange for convenience or (in the face of e.g. social sites) being part of a 'scene'?"
That's why "Cloud Computing" is a bit pernicious and certainly dangerous. We're not talking about distributed calculations or Internet-size parallelism. We're talking about using people's proprietary services.
That's why I fear that Stallman really does have a point here. When considering "Cloud Computing" one really should be aware of the implications of control.
Although I am as skeptical as anyone about mysterious electric or magnetic devices attached to your fuel line, this looks bona fide.
For a number of reasons.
First of all the work is devoid of hype, mysterious "black boxes", is well-documented, links to established physics known since 1905 and 1959, and actually gives a credible explanation, verified in detail, of why we are seeing this improvement.
Secondly, prof. Tao's work spans at lest 2 years, witness this http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/enfuem/2006/20/i05/pdf/ef060072x.pdf?sessid=2827
article, by the same prof. Tao, from 2006. In that publication, the authors properly relate their own work to much earlier theoretical work on viscosity (from 1905) that describes how viscosity of a fluid changes if you suspend a small amount of non-interacting spherical particles in it and later work (1959 by Krieger and Dougherty) on how much the viscosity changes. when you suspend a not-so-small amount of particles. The earlier work was backed up by experiments.
So up to that point we have the "thinning" effect on viscosity by suspending inert particles in a fluid, and it's solid physics to boot. Now what does this all have to do with magnetic or electric fields?
Well, it turns out that the thinning effect depends on the size of the particles you suspend in it. That's not so surprising either, and (again) experimentally verifiable.
Now here comes the trick: if you take a fluid that has large molecules in it that can be polarised by an electric or magnetic field that is strong enough to orient the particles despite the Brownian motion, you will see that short-distance order emerges in clusters of polarised molecules within the liquid. The net effect is as if you were seeding the liquid with particles. Now that's interesting. If you leave on the field for several minutes, the short-distance order extends a bit and you get fairly large ordered structures within your fluid, leading to an increase in viscosity. So there is an effect, but if you leave the field on for a long time it makes your liquid more viscous, not less. However, and this is the second trick, if you switch off the field soon enough, the molecules have enough time to become so polarised that short-distance order ensues, but not long-distance order. The net effect is that the "particles" (in reality small clusters of polarised and more-or-less ordered molecules) remain small. This effect is described in detail and the article describes tests that verified the effect. The level of detail coupled to the careful description of the underlying physics again make this claim credible.
And yes, with enough fiddling you seem to be able to tune your field strength and pulse duration so that you get an amount of polarised clusters that will measurably decrease the viscosity of your liquid. By about 9% or so. That seems pretty solid too.
Now about the applications. The first thing they though about was decreasing the viscosity of crude oil in pipelines. That will save a little energy if you're pumping lots of viscous oil through long cold pipelines. Nine percent isn't nothing, but it's not a great gain either. That was the state of affairs reported in Tao's 2006 paper.
The second application (Tao's 2009 paper) however is in internal combustion engines. As the article avers, lower viscosity leads to smaller droplets when fuels is injected. And smaller droplets seem to cause a cleaner and more efficient combustion. In fact, the authors report tests on a diesel engine by Cornaglia Iveco that showed a 5.5% efficiency improvement. Of course this result still has to be confirmed by independent tests, but its modest claims and well-publicised details make it thoroughly credible.
To produce the final results, the authors modified their device and claim to have obtained 20% efficiency improvement on a Mercedes-Benz diesel engine. The centerpiece
This is why the US has to import engineers
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Tech Vs. Business?
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Seriously, sales and business hinge upon a different skill-set than research and product development. It's more about being able to command attention, being able to insinuate yourself into places and circles, being astute enough to recognize advantageous career opportunities, supple enough to avoid blame and to grab credits, and smart enough to succeed in getting mindshare. Those traits are what makes business tick, especially if the "fulfillment department" is manned by someone else. It's certainly less intellectually challenging and it's much closer to the point where the money is being made, so management is more involved and achievement is more visible.
It's also much less work-intensive (resulting in vastly greater dollar turnover per person hour), resulting in higher salaries.
Engineers tend to be fairly interchangeable too, because they tend not to connect to very many others inside or outside an organization. The upshot its that they can be fairly easily replaced by someone with the same specifications. So, yes, engineer types have become something of a commodity. And commodities don't command high margins, don't get much recognition, and aren't in a position to make many demands.
As a result most US students will now (quite rightly from the perspective of making money) prefer a career in business administration and sales over one in engineering, product development, or research. It's easier, the potential rewards are higher, and the competitions from overseas is a lot less because language skills and cultural "fit" are more important. Which is also why businesses need to import ever more engineers from places like India and China. Just have a look on any tech campus in the US. When it comes to Mathematics, Engineering, and Science half of the students are from abroad. Narrow it down to Ph.D. students and you arrive at about 60%-80% Chinese and Indians.
But that doesn't matter much, does it? Demand will be met and slots will be filled. It's just that engineers and scientists will increasingly have an Indian or Chinese background. But that's not a problem either. Their communication skills aren't why they were hired anyway. Once those guys have their greencard they're as American as anyone else. Why produce what you can import more cheaply? As long as the US pays them more than their native country they will be happy to live and work here.
Counter to what you postulate I do not begrudge her her legal rights. What I do is, on balance, to condone a transgression that infringes on her legal rights, i.e. hacking into her email account. That is something different. In itself that's also wrong, and I admit it.
When you condone it, that renders your admission that the act was wrong utterly and completely meaningless, and supports my contention that you believe she does not rate equal treatment. Period.
Nonsense. There is a broad spectrum of grey between right and wrong, even if you choose not to acknowledge that if it makes your position sound better. Hacking into an email account is a relatively small transgression, which may in this case be condoned because of the potential importance of the revelations. Besides which, using a *private* email account to conduct US government business is illegal too, and a good deal more serious (see http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/091608/sta_333013278.shtml). Especially if it's used to evade data retention acts or evade government transparency.
I can see you will gleefully stick to your this-is-the-letter-of-the-law position about the break-in of the email account and ignore the broader issues. That's Ok for law enforcement officers, but I don't believe it's a good line to take as a private citizen.
In other words, you believe she should be judged in the court of your opinion - rather than in a court of law and without regard for the law.
In case you forgot, it so happens that the entire election is a court of public opinion. Your idea of election by lawsuit in a court of law may generate interest though.
I call it "nebulous and handwaving" and "biased" in that anyone who can level the charge of lack of experience at her with a straight face, especially compared with the experience of the other three candidates, to be simply astounding. (Disclaimer: I'm not fond of or voting for any of 'em.)
Meaning you didn't read any of the articles I linked to, or what I wrote about my reservations. Lack of experience is the least of her problems. Cluelessness, administrative incompetence, contempt for law and due process, and abuse of power rate higher I'd say.
I call it "nebulous and handwaving" and "biased" because she is under investigation, not convicted. In America, there is a difference between the two. As before, there are words for those who don't believe or support this - and they aren't complementary.
So, reports from city councillors about a mismanaged white-elephant sports-center land-buy, about illegal appropriation of road-maintenance funds for office decoration, about environmental irresponsibility, are "nebulous", "hand-waiving" and "biased" are they? And not to be considered until affirmed by a court of law (safely after election day), yes?
Well, I'm not sure I would be interested in any of your compliments. Thanks.
Again I disagree with your assessment, now on two counts.
I don't think that you have a basis to accuse me of believing "that she does not rate equal treatment under the law". Counter to what you postulate I do not begrudge her her legal rights. What I do is, on balance, to condone a transgression that infringes on her legal rights, i.e. hacking into her email account. That is something different. In itself that's also wrong, and I admit it.
However, given that the person and her husband are currently sabotaging an official probe into the question as to whether or not she abused the powers of her office, I believe that the ethical aspects my opinion are more or less balanced given the seriousness of the consequence if someone were to be elected who later turns out to be flawed in this way.
What you are pleased to call "nebulous and handwaving reasons, mostly extreme bias" are in my opinion very good reasons to scrutinise this candidate for high office, who has been sprung on us a mere 50 days before election day and who may be hiding serious flaws.
I think your assessment of my reasoning is off by a wide margin. It's not so much that I "dislike Palin", I'm really afraid she may be so stupid and blinkered that she is likely to be genuinely dangerous anywhere near the White House.
Now that's something that needs to be assessed, urgently, before Election Day. With her credentials she wouldn't even merit an advisory position to a secretary of state. But apparently it's Ok for her to be pushed into the VP seat without further notice, and possibly even the President's seat. The sheer contempt for the need for any sort of qualification for the office staggers me, even after having seen politics play out for decades.
As such things seem to work, putting her on the ticket is excellent political calculation. McCain is an elder male, so complement his ticket with a young female. McCain is a long-standing Senator, so complement him with a complete outsider. Makes sense from all perspectives but one. What has Palin done so far, and what is she likely to do in case she becomes VP or even President?
If this question is to be answered, then conventional sources are to be preferred of course. However, in this special case unconventional sources may have a role to play too.
Ok... so you would then support breaking into Barack Obama's private Yahoo account as well?
Condoning something is different from supporting it. The difference may be subtle but it's there. I don't support break-ins of people's Yahoo accounts, but if they happen I'm not too worried about it. As in: It's still a breach of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and should prosecuted (see http://www.abanet.org/irr/hr/winter99_pivec.html). However I don't think that we should disregard what is found, and I don't think that prosecution should have a very high priority. That's called "condoning". It's different from "supporting" in the sense that I'm not taking the position that we should go out and do it.
So yes, I would condone breaking into Obama's Yahoo account as well. For no other reason than that he is a presidential candidate. When weighing his interest in having privacy against the public interest in seeing him as he is, I think that the public interest weighs more heavily.
Since we are innundated by carefully prepared propaganda from both candidates as to their personality and their ideas, it's important that we also see something that's not stage-managed.
If e.g. Senator Obama were secretly sympathising with a plan to halve the armed forces and use the proceeds to finance a national health insurance, we ought to know about that. Even if that means hacking his Yahoo account.
If Governor Palin were a mean-spirited, clueless mouthpiece of whatever her handlers tell her, we ought to know about that too.
Although I'll admit that breaking into someone's Yahoo account is a breach of privacy, I think that in this case I condone it.
Why?
Simply because the next President and Vice President will be chosen for perhaps 50% on the strength of their respective programmes, and for the other 50% on the strength of their personality. As in "Do we feel that we can trust that person to take the helm for 4 years?".
That's why trying to dig up dirt on candidates is part of the procedure. If they can stand that test, they're either clean or adequately adept at covering up. I personally see little difference between snooping in someone's private life using private detectives and hacking into his (or her) email account.
Now whatever their political color, I think that most Americans would be Ok with McCain as a person. Nevermind his age, his health, his policies, or his party. McCain comes across as someone who won't panic in a tight corner, who won't flip and start pushing the nuclear button, who won't let his personal feelings get in the way of necessary politics, and who won't stick his head in the sand when there's bad news. You may or may not agree with his policies and his ideas, but at least he's reliably and predictably biased in certain directions.
When it comes to Governor Palin, I'm not convinced. Being a relative outsider she hasn't really had so much time in the limelight as the other candidates, so her past and personal quirks haven't been looked at in as much detail.
Personally I'm scared of having someone as VP who doesn't know what the Bush doctrine is, who doesn't know why we went into Iraq, who felt that "I'm the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't." (see http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/09/17/palin_mayor/). That level of ignorance coupled with that level of contempt for rules (in my view) creates a level of unpredictability which is very uncomfortable in someone who might become president on medical grounds. Such ignorance is Ok for Joe Sixpack, but not Ok for a candidate VP. If I had to choose between Palin and Cheney, Cheney would get my vote. I find his political ideas abhorrent, but at least I can trust him to have thought them through. By the same token, I find Hillary no more likeable than Palin, but at least I trust Hillary to know what she's doing.
What I can discern of Palin's political ideas doesn't appeal to me either, and I have grave doubts about her intellectual abilities.
In this respect I find the following disturbing:
Carney, who comes from a long-established homesteading family in the area and once ran the city's garbage collection business, has decided to speak out for the first time since Palin's vice-presidential nomination. He is viewed as a longtime Palin gadfly, ever since he sided with her opponent in the 1996 mayor's race. After Palin won, she froze out Carney, refusing to call on him at City Council meetings and deep-sixing his proposals. "That's the way Sarah is," Carney said. "She rewards friends and cuts everyone else off at the knees."
Other local officials -- who lack Carney's acrimonious history with Palin -- share his dim view of her mayoral reign. When Palin ran for mayor, she dismissed concerns about her lack of managerial expertise by saying the job was "not rocket science." But after a tumultuous start, marked by controversial firings and lawsuits against the city, Palin felt compelled to hire a city manager named John Cramer to steady the ship.
"Sarah was unprepared to be mayor -- it was John Cramer who actually ran the city," said Michelle Church, a member of the Mat-Su Borough Assembly, who knows Palin socially. "As vice-president she'll certainly have to rely on faceless advisors with no public accountability. Haven't we had enough of that in the past eight years?"
Nevermind that whatever collisions CERN has planned are nothing but a wan reflection of the violence of cosmic rays that have been sleeting through the earth every second since it was formed. Unfortunately no-one who has sold all his stock in because he believes in the end of the world believes is going to be swayed by such wishy-washy considerations, right?
What they might be swayed by however are Legal considerations.
Now I have been told that CERN's legal department has been asked for an assessment of CERN's potential liability in case the world ended because of their experiments.
I have furthermore heard that the legal department reasoned thusly. In case the CERN machinery does not cause the end of the world, there will be no damage and therefore CERN will not be liable. In case however that it *does* destroy the world all in one day or less, it is very likely that both the the mail service and any courier service needed to deliver a subpoena will be out of action. Obviously CERN won't be able to be sued for liability if the subpoena can't be delivered, right? In case the destruction of the world takes longer, the legal department is confident that the current court backlog will be sufficient to prevent the case being heard before the end of the world.
The upshot is that people won't be able to make a quick fortune by suing CERN for e.g. property damage. So from a legal point of view they saw no reason to raise objections and CERN is in the clear.
I haven't verified this story but it strikes me as solid thinking, and it ought to satisfy doom-sayers. Right?
This sort of unethical behaviour is well-documented as absolutely typical for the Scientology sect I'm afraid. The term the sect uses to indicate its position vis-a-vis critics or opponents is to call them "fair game". Meaning that they condone, encourage, or initiate thoroughly unethical conduct against them (ranging from slander and defamation, intimidation through harassment in the widest sense of the word to costly nuisance lawsuits).
In 1994, Vicky Aznaran, who had been the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center (the Church's central management body), claimed in an affidavit that
Because of my position and the reports which regularly crossed my desk, I know that during my entire presidency of RTC "fair game" actions against enemies were daily routine. Apart from the legal tactics described below, the "fair game" activities included break-ins, libel, upsetting the companies of the enemy, espionage, harassment, misuse of confidential communications in the folders of community members and so forth.
This is one of the good reasons why the sect tends to be viewed with suspicion in Western Europe (the sect is currently defending itself in France against a charge of fraud (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7604311.stm)). I'm still unclear as to exactly how sect has been able to secure the tax-exempt status of "church" with the US authorities. I have read that it was by successfully harassing the relevant officials, but that's quite hard to prove of course.
There is no escaping it: if you offer any desirable good for free, people will consume it in large quantities. If that good also happens to be scarce, you will face shortages. So if you want to remove shortages you have to price the good in question. Now for "good" read "bandwith" and you're there.
In an ideal world I would therefore be in favour of traffic metering. One in which ISPs offer cheap subscriptions with a low bandwidth and a low traffic cap (as long as you don't want to download videos or music you'll do fine with 1-2Gb per month). Another one with, say, a higher-speed connection 5 Gb. a month plus a small fee per Mb.
Only... there is one fly in the ointment. We don't live in an ideal world, and ISPs are profit maximizers that often don't face any real competition in any given area. In addition the information we have about "excessive" traffic comes from ISPs, and they are notoriously less-than-candid about the precise performance of their network (for obvious reasons). If given the opportunity to meter traffic without anyone checking up on how they do that, ISPs will happily gauge the consumer and give nothing back. Now lay off the righteous indignation. They wouldn't *be* profit maximizers if they didn't have that tendency, Ok?
I would be willing to pay per Mb. if I somehow had a guarantee that I wasn't being fleeced. Now information from ISPs about what's causing the problem just isn't satisfactory because it may well be counter to their commercial interests to be truthful. Again... spare me the righteous indignation. Commercial entities aren't about being truthful, they're about making a profit. They can be kept honest through enough competition or through oversight, but through little else.
So if we could get an independent assessment of network capacity, network load, and how the infrastructure is being paid for, we could see what the real bottleneck is and decide how to pay for that (instead of trusting ISPs to handle the problem). Because we're not the only ones who'll have to pay. If consumers are the car-drivers of the internet, companies that do internet adverts and providers of (non-free) content are its fleet operators.
I think that approximately the same holds for traffic shaping, but with vastly greater possibilities for abuse by ISPs and content providers. Again, it's possible to implement it in ways that benefit the consumer, and it's possible to implement this in ways that fleece them and sell out to vendors of proprietary sites and / or protocols. And who can we trust to give us a reasonable deal? When we're not even allowed to see what they're doing?
To give a small example: I understand that streaming video material puts a heavy burden on a connection, but I don't understand why P2P connections do the same. I have a broadband connection which I used e.g. to downloaded 2 Gb Linux distros in an hour and a half directly from the server (using HTTP) and in 10 hours during the night using P2P. Guess which option causes the greatest band-width hit.
So I'm not quite ready to believe the contention that it's P2P traffic that's causing the problem, despite what ISPs say. What I do know is that my ISP throttles HTTP downloads after a few MBs. The download speed starts high and then falls off after a few seconds, and even more after a few minutes. I don't believe that they throttle P2P traffic since each stream is limited by the upload speed of the peers, which is a lot lower than my download speed. ISPs may at this point stand up and shout "See that's why you're hogging bandwidth!", but I don't believe it. Not when it takes 10 hours to download 2Gb. using P2P and 90 minutes using HTTP.
In short, I believe that this is one of those instances where a little government regulation would be helpful. E.g. by mandating all ISPs and Telcos to give full and truthful disclosure of their traffic volume and download rate by hour of day in total and by protocol, say at ward level. That should guarantee transparency. And its effects on competition should be bearable if every company has to do that. How about that?
This particular issue had slipped my mind, but the parent post and the article cited there bring it back into focus.
US export regulations have a way of being over-broad, just for the ease of legislating. As the Rather than protecting one or two key components, the export regulations tend to protect an entire assembly.
To quote from the article referenced by the parent post (http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11965352): "IN THE spring of 2006 Robert Bigelow needed to take a stand on a trip to Russia to keep a satellite off the floor. The stand was made of aluminium. It had a circular base and legs. It was, says the entrepreneur and head of Bigelow Aerospace in Nevada, "indistinguishable from a common coffee table". Nonetheless, the American authorities told Mr Bigelow that this coffee table was part of a satellite assembly and so counted as a munition. During the trip it would have to be guarded by two security officers at all times."
If that sounds a bit off-center, then perhaps I might add a personal anecdote. In the 1980's I corresponded with someone in a Dutch consultancy. Their company had just won a contract from some Dutch ministry to move a lot of data and Fortran software from a mainframe to a PC environment. They had figured to dump the lot on tape, get the tape to their offices, and then read the tape using a 9-track tape drive connected to a PC on their LAN, recompile the Fortran code on PC, and process the data on PC.
They had (accurately) budgeted for the purchase of a 9-track tape drive and needed one in a hurry. I was asked for a name of good a US manufacturer (they didn't even consider any other source) of 9-track tapes, which I found in 10 minutes and gave to them. So far so good.
That's when the trouble started.
They were careful people and actually phoned the US embassy in The Netherlands to see if they could just order that tape drive, and what the import/export formalities would be. It's well that they did, because, yes, there were some difficulties. Just the formality of an export license. Asked how to obtain one, the embassy responded that not they, but the manufacturer would have to get the license. And that it would take anywhere between 3-4 months to process the paperwork.
Yes, that's right. In order to export a 9-track tape drive to The Netherlands in the nineteen eighties (NATO partner and all) there would be a 3-4 month wait while the paperwork cleared!
Well... that wasn't an option for them, since the deadline on their contract was only 6 months away. So they went and bought another make. I believe it was Japanese. Or French. Which was duly bought and installed in their offices two weeks later. They successfully completed the move too and delighted the ministry they were working for by much quicker turnaround times (on high-end PCs; the software being CPU-bound) at a fraction of the cost they would incur on the mainframe.
But in the mean time the US Inc. lost an order for a rather ordinary and fairly innocuous 9-track tape drive, which could be second-sourced on the open market within a week or so, while starting off as the *only* name on the shortlist. And all because of some well-intentioned but rather inept export regulations.
They're very thorough and dedicated and they tend to dispense final and non-reversible solutions to trouble. Any trouble. Hundreds of testimonials available from individuals in sunny locations overseas, including government officials.
Happy to oblige. Things can be pretty simple if you know where and how to look.
There are lots and lots of conclusive observations that expose "Flat Earth" as total humbug (from the fact that ships disappear under the horizon, to satellite launches to high-altitude flights, to classical mechanics to geodesy) but they all require a little intelligence and some thought to understand, and may allow willfully stupid charlatans enough leeway to obfuscate the discussion that some people loose their way in the argument.
Satellite imagery on the other hand provides direct and totally conclusive evidence that doesn't require *any* thought or intelligence to understand, and it can't very well be argued about. So it can't be obfuscated either. But alas, satellite imagery proves the Earth is round (no matter what other considerations Flat Earthers might wish to trot out), so if "Flat Earthers" were to admit any of that as evidence, they have lost the debate before it's even started. So they don't admit satellite imagery as evidence. Instead Flat Earth enthousiasts will tell you that those satellite images are all "fakes" put up by a "conspiracy of governments".
When the main FAQ starts off by telling you that the conclusive evidence provided by satellite imagery showing the Earth to be round is considered inadmissible evidence by Flat Earth enthousiasts, on account of it all being a global "conspiracy by governments". And when the only "evidence" for this is based on the hypothesis of a global conspiracy which in turn can only be "proven" by assuming the Flat Earth hypothesis itself to be true (something that Flat Earthers had to prove in the first place), you see the logical fallacy in their argument (circular reasoning) which no amount of additional posts can repair. So reading all or any of them is a total waste of time.
And something else. The *number* of posts on the site has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they are humbug or not. There are lots and lots of extremely stupid people about, and unfortunately they can be quite diligent. If they all make a single post, then you can rack up an impressive total in no time at all. But that doesn't imply that any of those posts make sense. Sorry about that, but there it is. It's not quantity that counts but quality.
So, to avoid the need of crawling through a stack of 400,000 pretty darned clueless posts, you ask Flat Earthers to tell us why we should disbelieve direct observational evidence (satellite imagery again) that can decide the matter all by itself. When they can't, there is nothing but quasi objectivity to be gained by saying "gee perhaps somewhere in that stack of 40,000 posts there is one that actually makes sense", Ok? Whatever else they come up with is already beside the point since we already have conclusive evidence about whether the Earth is round or flat.
The point is whether direct evidence from satellites or high-altitude flights can or cannot be used to decide the matter. If "Flat Earthers" can only resort to conspiracy theories to neutralise that evidence (admitting it exposes them immediately), they have lost the debate and there is no point in looking what else they might bring forward, right?
That's how you distinguish real science from bogus: real Science doesn't rely on logical fallacies such as circular reasoning, and doesn't try to discard direct evidence by a gratuitous claim about a global "government conspiracy" rendering it fake".
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Apart from things like missile guidance components and IED parts for Iran I really wonder why such exports should be stopped. There is a market for them after all and most of it can be second-sourced.
I think you need to realize that there is a big difference between business ethics, ethics in e.g. politics, and ethics between ordinary people.
In business there is no such thing as "ethics" as a self-standing concept. Except perhaps in a company's Code of Conduct, which is only ever meant as a piece of PR material. Everything is relative to the long-term and short-term business prospects. The time period being dependent on the length of tenure of the manager who takes the decision. If it's a course of action likely to generate a net benefit within that time-frame then it's "not unethical", otherwise it's probably "unethical".
Any action that's not outright illegal *and at the same time* very much open to detection, is acceptable from a business ethics point of view, and therefore "not unethical". Things that are illegal and likely to be found out are "unethical" (provided the damage they do is not exceeded by the revenues they bring). But only because they're likely to harm the company under the above-mentioned timeframe, and for no other reason. I just thought I'd make that clear.
So I'm sorry to say that my advice is: cooperate fully with your boss and keep him happy.
You may however wish to engage in a little CYA practise, just to guard against the possibility that if this little caper is found out and embarrasses your company, your boss may or may not be replaced but *you* probably will be blamed for carrying out something that you ought to have known is unethical. You are the one with the specialist knowledge after all, right?
If anything, your boss might even claim ignorance as a defense and blame *you*, the specialist, for not alerting him.
So yes, send him a polite and low-key email explaining (briefly) why you believe that this move might be less than beneficial to the company and suggesting that he consider an alternative (if possible give him one). That's all. Having sent it, get busy with the screen-scraping.
Do NOT in any way or form mention the word "ethics", "ethical", or even worse "legal". If you do, you'll create an immediate conflict (because you imply that (a) you know better than he (b) that you're telling him how to do his job and (c) that he's acting unethically or even illegally and (d) if you produce it later, your *then* boss will see that it's less than helpful) because your boss will know instantly that you are preparing to shift the blame on him, and only engaged in a CYA exercise.
Oh, and by the way, you will need to be able to prove you sent it, so (depending on how much power your boss has on email retention) make an unobtrusive backup of your out-box on a CD a week or so after you've sent it and hide the CD.
How do I know? Well ... you hear too many accounts of sightings for it not to be true. Where there is smoke there is fire. Am I right?
And the fact that we don't see more accounts of this in the mainstream media and that declassified reports don't mention them only means that there's a huge conspiracy to suppress all the evidence.
So there!
It would work like this: you see a need that could be addressed very well using OSS package X. You also ensure that there is budget to buy software.
What you do next is to get a software consultancy you trust to take that piece of OSS software, modify it slightly (e.g. a new splash screen) and sell it to your company. That's perfectly legal, if a bit sneaky, and therefore requires heavy-duty CYA precautions.
First off, make certain that you cannot be suspected of fraud (i.e. do a thorough requirements study and a cost-benefit study and make sure that the resold OSS stuff wins on those grounds).
Next make sure that the company your company will buy the stuff from provides your company with a service agreement and certain guarantees (they will have to talk with an insurance firm for that, but they can silently charge for that in their asking price; that's not unusual for consultancies).
Together that will allow you to show that you purchased good measure for your company's money, even if the company could have gotten the software for free. The reason being that your company purchased support and guarantees, which arguable are the sole difference between OSS and closed-source stuff. The fact that the packaged OSS software won the contract after comparison with commercial competition will show that the company got what it wanted.
Now be sure to check this theory with your personal lawyer first (but don't tell the company), then involve your company's legal department during purchasing; go through channels and get their buy-in once you have people willing to act as a vendor.
Now since it's OSS they will have to deliver the source code, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't have to say so in great big letters in the purchase agreement; it might even say that it delivers an *un-customised* version of the software by way of on-site escrow and hint that this is due to them being a startup. That's all. The trick is to get this past whoever approves software purchases. If he's stupid (likely, or he wouldn't go around blocking OSS stuff) you're likely to be able to get away with it. But make sure you are blameless if found out, or you'll loose your job and gain a lawsuit!
If you think a bit "formally" you'll see why this works: your company wants to buy software objects of class A (commercial software). What you have are software objects of class "B" (OSS software). So the only thing you need to do is create an object of class "A" which borrows the "implementation" from an object of class "B", but which adds a (legitimate) shell that makes it class "A", and everyone is happy.
Alternatively propose to buy a package (e.g. Open Office) for which there exists a commercial version and neglect to mention that it's also available as OSS.
If you don't have the amount of control that will let you do this, I can think of nothing else.
Cheers.
Having said that, I'm afraid that Upper Management will soon be engaged in a massive rebranding exercise as they find that the market shuns a certain software product from a particular company that displays "1.0 quality" when the version number reads 5.x or something. They will probably have to completely rename and rebrand the product and perhaps even see damage to the name of the company as a whole.
I'm sorry to say that that it looks as if that's the way things are going to be. You see, rebranding products is something that Management understands, and they might just be happy to look forward to an exercise that falls squarely within their core competency. I don't think that damage to the name of the company will impress them however, since that typically is a long-term thing. Longer than their likely tenure with the company in question anyway.
Having said this, it's not unlikely that you will see an urgent demand for bug-fixes (apart from the usual demand for additional features) as the product meets headwinds in the market. There is a chance that this will enhance your job security, highly desirable in an economic downturn, so don't look down your nose at it.
What you might do is start thinking about what type of defects the product is still likely to exhibit (despite your best efforts during development, testing and debugging), what additional features are most likely to be demanded, and start thinking about how to go about fixing those bugs and implementing those new features plus how much time / effort that would take. Then when the defects emerge you can impress your boss with a calm but supportive attitude, and well-thought through plans that offer him alternatives and allow him to offer sensible options to higher management.
Besides which, it's not unheard of to run a book among your co-developers with bets on what general type of errors will be found and what priority Upper Management will attach to them. Only, be sure not to let Upper Management catch on, as they will then insist on placing bets themselves and will adapt their priorities in a way that will make their own bets come true. Be warned!
There really do seem to be people who believe that a Code of Conduct is there to limit what a company can do. Nothing could be further from the truth.
First and foremost, a Code of Conduct is an integral part of the company's PR effort. Every self-respecting company has to have one. It's cool to have one, and you look stupid and unsophisticated if you don't. Besides, there is no need to be without. There are templates with good-sounding Codes of Conduct that are guaranteed to leave everyone a comfortably free hand.
Secondly: damage limitation. A Code of Conduct is there to be able to shield a company from legal consequences of unethical conduct by it's employees on its behalf. If an employee is caught red-handed, it really helps if a company is able to state (truthfully) that this action contravenes their official Code of Conduct. This can really limit the damage.
Nevermind the results that emerge once one accepts the model as true. The real trick is finding the right model.
The model that's used in the article starts with a lot of assumptions.
Starting with the one that scientific articles are a commodity. Now one aspect of commodities is that they have a price, and that the value of X grams of gold is the same as that of Y kilograms of lead, simply because the price is the same. This for example does not hold for scientific articles. Many mediocre (or even weak) articles do not increase the citation factor of a publication. You need good to very good articles, and the odd seminal article to do that. There is something quantitative to the value of scientific articles, or at least some extremely non-linear relationship between "quality" and price. Therefore publications aren't "commodities" in the usual sense of the word.
Another assumption is that the consumers (scientists) can't assess the value of a publication. Well, they can assess the value of an article at the time they read it. What they have much more difficulty with is to estimate the value of an article at some point in the future. Which may be very different from its value today. Take e.g. the pure mathematics involved in coding theory. A completely academic (and therefore not so often cited) subject until the advent of the music CD, DVD's, and the need for error-correcting codes. Suddenly this transformed the "value" of theretofore obscure mathematical publications in ways non-one had foreseen.
Of course this doesn't mean that a model that assumes they are will be totally devoid of value. On the contrary. One can study the properties of a hypothetical market in which they are, and then compare the properties of that hypothetical market with what one sees in reality.
There are lots of discrepancies, and then one can adjust one's modelling assumptions, change the model, and study the changed conclusions. This is one of the ways to advance science.
The only thing one should *not* do is treat the outcomes of this little modeling exercise as anything other than a particularly systematic and disciplined form of speculation.
No, I don't think so at all. Expensive (but effective) private schools take on good staff *and* ensure a favourable student/teacher ratio. If there were anything in conveniently exposing pupils to videotaped maths lectures from sports-star like teachers, private schools would be doing just that, but they don't. They simply invest in good teachers and make the pupils *work*. That's all there is to it.
It may sound very "American" to go on a rant about "unions" and waffle about how they supposedly block progress, but in its simple-mindedness and it's lack of thought it's a veritable poster-child of what's wrong with the US approach to academic achievement.
Just consider: Microsoft can obtain all Windows source code, Microsoft is licensed to modify Windows source code, and Microsoft is empowered to impose any condition it likes on subsequent users (if any) of the Windows source code. So from Microsoft's point of view, Open Source is as good a moniker for Windows-only software as any. It's just a question of hacking the definition of "Open Source" a bit.
Of course you always have intolerant extremists who feel that only their own views on Open Source should be considered, but Microsoft makes a pretty good case for their own definition of Open Source.
So why not open the "Open Source" trademark so that anyone can use it? Everyone can see that it's hypocritical to demand free software and then insist on closed trademarks. There clearly is a demand for opening the Open Source trademark!
I found and tested the predecessor of the following device (which I can recommend on basis of a year-long test of a sample with N=1): Bubba (see http://excito.com/bubba/about-bubba.html ). A Swedish NAS device. I have to note that it's certainly not "distributed" in the sense that it's easy to mirror data across multiple devices (I didn't try and wouldn't know an easy way of doing that). It's basically a server, so you'd still need to take care of backups yourself.
It's a metal box the size of a lunch-box, contains a HDD, a PowerPC processor, two ethernet interfaces, and comes pre-loaded with Linux 2.6 (Debian Etch), and has a web-based control interface for adding users (see http://excito.com/bubba/about-bubba.html ). It can act as a server (Samba), torrent and email downloader, and router (if you want). It's got decent tech support through this forum (see http://forum.excito.net/). You can buy the box with or without HDD.
Nevermind the website (they brought in a consultant who made something I really dislike), the box and its applications are solid. Have a look and see if it's what you need.
Choosing the subject with care is all very well, but to really connect you've got to get the language right. For 4th graders I suggest extensive use of four-letter words.
It's Control.
Every single bit of Open Source and Free Software hinges on the placement of control: who controls the software and who sets the rules by which it can be used.
The whole idea of "not getting enmeshed in proprietary software" is ultimately about control. Nobody would object to using "their own" proprietary software. And why not? Because you control it.
Free software is primarily software that the end-user (any end-user) has control over. Oh yes, and incidentally you can't really have that control unless you anchor that empowerment in the license for the source code, making it free and open and making sure no-one can close it again.
Now the whole idea of "cloud computing" can be viewed from a "control" perspective too. As in: "who controls the hardware, the software, the service, and the data that's in the 'cloud?'". Answer: whoever runs the server and offers the service that people want. That means at the very least a transfer of control, and with it a bargaining chip for whoever provides the "service in the cloud" that we use.
By contrast, text documents that reside on my hard disk and are written in Latex are under my control. Those on my hard disk in Open Office format too. Those in MS Office format less so.
But what if I had any data "in the cloud"? For starters I am dependent on the good offices of the service provider to make my data available. If he were to suddenly go under (Now that can't happen, can it? Firms like that are as solid as the bank ...).
Secondly, I would be obliged to follow whatever format the service provider uses, or stop using the service. Not that much of a hassle when there are multiple service providers to choose from, but that can't last.
Thirdly, who among us carefully studies their service provider's Terms Of Service with the intent of being bound by them? I know I don't. Now what if there are small and sneaky clauses giving the service provider world-wide distribution rights to what I put on their servers? Or clauses that give the service provider the right to study your data (Google queries anyone? MSN email profiling?), or that can be used by others to study your online behaviour in ways you might not have intended (Employers reading up on facebook profiles anyone?).
People who warn about that tend to be seen as alarmists, and told "If you don't like their TOS, don't use their servers". And there is the rub. The question of control is turned into the question of "How much control do you want to exchange for convenience or (in the face of e.g. social sites) being part of a 'scene'?"
That's why "Cloud Computing" is a bit pernicious and certainly dangerous. We're not talking about distributed calculations or Internet-size parallelism. We're talking about using people's proprietary services.
That's why I fear that Stallman really does have a point here. When considering "Cloud Computing" one really should be aware of the implications of control.
For a number of reasons.
First of all the work is devoid of hype, mysterious "black boxes", is well-documented, links to established physics known since 1905 and 1959, and actually gives a credible explanation, verified in detail, of why we are seeing this improvement.
Secondly, prof. Tao's work spans at lest 2 years, witness this http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/enfuem/2006/20/i05/pdf/ef060072x.pdf?sessid=2827 article, by the same prof. Tao, from 2006. In that publication, the authors properly relate their own work to much earlier theoretical work on viscosity (from 1905) that describes how viscosity of a fluid changes if you suspend a small amount of non-interacting spherical particles in it and later work (1959 by Krieger and Dougherty) on how much the viscosity changes. when you suspend a not-so-small amount of particles. The earlier work was backed up by experiments.
So up to that point we have the "thinning" effect on viscosity by suspending inert particles in a fluid, and it's solid physics to boot. Now what does this all have to do with magnetic or electric fields?
Well, it turns out that the thinning effect depends on the size of the particles you suspend in it. That's not so surprising either, and (again) experimentally verifiable.
Now here comes the trick: if you take a fluid that has large molecules in it that can be polarised by an electric or magnetic field that is strong enough to orient the particles despite the Brownian motion, you will see that short-distance order emerges in clusters of polarised molecules within the liquid. The net effect is as if you were seeding the liquid with particles. Now that's interesting. If you leave on the field for several minutes, the short-distance order extends a bit and you get fairly large ordered structures within your fluid, leading to an increase in viscosity. So there is an effect, but if you leave the field on for a long time it makes your liquid more viscous, not less. However, and this is the second trick, if you switch off the field soon enough, the molecules have enough time to become so polarised that short-distance order ensues, but not long-distance order. The net effect is that the "particles" (in reality small clusters of polarised and more-or-less ordered molecules) remain small. This effect is described in detail and the article describes tests that verified the effect. The level of detail coupled to the careful description of the underlying physics again make this claim credible.
And yes, with enough fiddling you seem to be able to tune your field strength and pulse duration so that you get an amount of polarised clusters that will measurably decrease the viscosity of your liquid. By about 9% or so. That seems pretty solid too.
Now about the applications. The first thing they though about was decreasing the viscosity of crude oil in pipelines. That will save a little energy if you're pumping lots of viscous oil through long cold pipelines. Nine percent isn't nothing, but it's not a great gain either. That was the state of affairs reported in Tao's 2006 paper.
The second application (Tao's 2009 paper) however is in internal combustion engines. As the article avers, lower viscosity leads to smaller droplets when fuels is injected. And smaller droplets seem to cause a cleaner and more efficient combustion. In fact, the authors report tests on a diesel engine by Cornaglia Iveco that showed a 5.5% efficiency improvement. Of course this result still has to be confirmed by independent tests, but its modest claims and well-publicised details make it thoroughly credible.
To produce the final results, the authors modified their device and claim to have obtained 20% efficiency improvement on a Mercedes-Benz diesel engine. The centerpiece
It's also much less work-intensive (resulting in vastly greater dollar turnover per person hour), resulting in higher salaries.
Engineers tend to be fairly interchangeable too, because they tend not to connect to very many others inside or outside an organization. The upshot its that they can be fairly easily replaced by someone with the same specifications. So, yes, engineer types have become something of a commodity. And commodities don't command high margins, don't get much recognition, and aren't in a position to make many demands.
As a result most US students will now (quite rightly from the perspective of making money) prefer a career in business administration and sales over one in engineering, product development, or research. It's easier, the potential rewards are higher, and the competitions from overseas is a lot less because language skills and cultural "fit" are more important. Which is also why businesses need to import ever more engineers from places like India and China. Just have a look on any tech campus in the US. When it comes to Mathematics, Engineering, and Science half of the students are from abroad. Narrow it down to Ph.D. students and you arrive at about 60%-80% Chinese and Indians.
But that doesn't matter much, does it? Demand will be met and slots will be filled. It's just that engineers and scientists will increasingly have an Indian or Chinese background. But that's not a problem either. Their communication skills aren't why they were hired anyway. Once those guys have their greencard they're as American as anyone else. Why produce what you can import more cheaply? As long as the US pays them more than their native country they will be happy to live and work here.
Nonsense. There is a broad spectrum of grey between right and wrong, even if you choose not to acknowledge that if it makes your position sound better. Hacking into an email account is a relatively small transgression, which may in this case be condoned because of the potential importance of the revelations. Besides which, using a *private* email account to conduct US government business is illegal too, and a good deal more serious (see http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/091608/sta_333013278.shtml). Especially if it's used to evade data retention acts or evade government transparency.
I can see you will gleefully stick to your this-is-the-letter-of-the-law position about the break-in of the email account and ignore the broader issues. That's Ok for law enforcement officers, but I don't believe it's a good line to take as a private citizen.
In case you forgot, it so happens that the entire election is a court of public opinion. Your idea of election by lawsuit in a court of law may generate interest though.
Meaning you didn't read any of the articles I linked to, or what I wrote about my reservations. Lack of experience is the least of her problems. Cluelessness, administrative incompetence, contempt for law and due process, and abuse of power rate higher I'd say.
So, reports from city councillors about a mismanaged white-elephant sports-center land-buy, about illegal appropriation of road-maintenance funds for office decoration, about environmental irresponsibility, are "nebulous", "hand-waiving" and "biased" are they? And not to be considered until affirmed by a court of law (safely after election day), yes?
Well, I'm not sure I would be interested in any of your compliments. Thanks.
I don't think that you have a basis to accuse me of believing "that she does not rate equal treatment under the law". Counter to what you postulate I do not begrudge her her legal rights. What I do is, on balance, to condone a transgression that infringes on her legal rights, i.e. hacking into her email account. That is something different. In itself that's also wrong, and I admit it.
However, given that the person and her husband are currently sabotaging an official probe into the question as to whether or not she abused the powers of her office, I believe that the ethical aspects my opinion are more or less balanced given the seriousness of the consequence if someone were to be elected who later turns out to be flawed in this way.
What you are pleased to call "nebulous and handwaving reasons, mostly extreme bias" are in my opinion very good reasons to scrutinise this candidate for high office, who has been sprung on us a mere 50 days before election day and who may be hiding serious flaws.
Now that's something that needs to be assessed, urgently, before Election Day. With her credentials she wouldn't even merit an advisory position to a secretary of state. But apparently it's Ok for her to be pushed into the VP seat without further notice, and possibly even the President's seat. The sheer contempt for the need for any sort of qualification for the office staggers me, even after having seen politics play out for decades.
As such things seem to work, putting her on the ticket is excellent political calculation. McCain is an elder male, so complement his ticket with a young female. McCain is a long-standing Senator, so complement him with a complete outsider. Makes sense from all perspectives but one. What has Palin done so far, and what is she likely to do in case she becomes VP or even President?
If this question is to be answered, then conventional sources are to be preferred of course. However, in this special case unconventional sources may have a role to play too.
Perhaps the best way I've seen my worries expressed (better than I can do it) is by Bradley Burston in this article here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1021317.html.
Condoning something is different from supporting it. The difference may be subtle but it's there. I don't support break-ins of people's Yahoo accounts, but if they happen I'm not too worried about it. As in: It's still a breach of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and should prosecuted (see http://www.abanet.org/irr/hr/winter99_pivec.html). However I don't think that we should disregard what is found, and I don't think that prosecution should have a very high priority. That's called "condoning". It's different from "supporting" in the sense that I'm not taking the position that we should go out and do it.
So yes, I would condone breaking into Obama's Yahoo account as well. For no other reason than that he is a presidential candidate. When weighing his interest in having privacy against the public interest in seeing him as he is, I think that the public interest weighs more heavily.
Since we are innundated by carefully prepared propaganda from both candidates as to their personality and their ideas, it's important that we also see something that's not stage-managed.
If e.g. Senator Obama were secretly sympathising with a plan to halve the armed forces and use the proceeds to finance a national health insurance, we ought to know about that. Even if that means hacking his Yahoo account.
If Governor Palin were a mean-spirited, clueless mouthpiece of whatever her handlers tell her, we ought to know about that too.
Besides which, I still don't see why hacking someone's Yahoo account is different from Standard Operating Procedure in politics (see e.g. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19295680/, http://celestiniosity.com/2007/02/13/digging-dirt-on-obama/, http://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/index.ssf/2008/08/mayor_don_williamson_pleges_to.html, http://www.theherald-nc.com/opinion/story/8762.html) such as scouring the records, talking to former associates, dumpster diving, hiring private detectives to dig up dirt on sex lives.
Why?
Simply because the next President and Vice President will be chosen for perhaps 50% on the strength of their respective programmes, and for the other 50% on the strength of their personality. As in "Do we feel that we can trust that person to take the helm for 4 years?".
That's why trying to dig up dirt on candidates is part of the procedure. If they can stand that test, they're either clean or adequately adept at covering up. I personally see little difference between snooping in someone's private life using private detectives and hacking into his (or her) email account.
Now whatever their political color, I think that most Americans would be Ok with McCain as a person. Nevermind his age, his health, his policies, or his party. McCain comes across as someone who won't panic in a tight corner, who won't flip and start pushing the nuclear button, who won't let his personal feelings get in the way of necessary politics, and who won't stick his head in the sand when there's bad news. You may or may not agree with his policies and his ideas, but at least he's reliably and predictably biased in certain directions.
When it comes to Governor Palin, I'm not convinced. Being a relative outsider she hasn't really had so much time in the limelight as the other candidates, so her past and personal quirks haven't been looked at in as much detail.
Personally I'm scared of having someone as VP who doesn't know what the Bush doctrine is, who doesn't know why we went into Iraq, who felt that "I'm the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't." (see http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/09/17/palin_mayor/). That level of ignorance coupled with that level of contempt for rules (in my view) creates a level of unpredictability which is very uncomfortable in someone who might become president on medical grounds. Such ignorance is Ok for Joe Sixpack, but not Ok for a candidate VP. If I had to choose between Palin and Cheney, Cheney would get my vote. I find his political ideas abhorrent, but at least I can trust him to have thought them through. By the same token, I find Hillary no more likeable than Palin, but at least I trust Hillary to know what she's doing.
What I can discern of Palin's political ideas doesn't appeal to me either, and I have grave doubts about her intellectual abilities.
In this respect I find the following disturbing:
(see http://www.sa
What they might be swayed by however are Legal considerations.
Now I have been told that CERN's legal department has been asked for an assessment of CERN's potential liability in case the world ended because of their experiments.
I have furthermore heard that the legal department reasoned thusly. In case the CERN machinery does not cause the end of the world, there will be no damage and therefore CERN will not be liable. In case however that it *does* destroy the world all in one day or less, it is very likely that both the the mail service and any courier service needed to deliver a subpoena will be out of action. Obviously CERN won't be able to be sued for liability if the subpoena can't be delivered, right? In case the destruction of the world takes longer, the legal department is confident that the current court backlog will be sufficient to prevent the case being heard before the end of the world.
The upshot is that people won't be able to make a quick fortune by suing CERN for e.g. property damage. So from a legal point of view they saw no reason to raise objections and CERN is in the clear.
I haven't verified this story but it strikes me as solid thinking, and it ought to satisfy doom-sayers. Right?
See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology)#Court_cases_involving_.22Fair_Game.22, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karin_Spaink, http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/, http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/cos/idx_coskit.html, http://home.snafu.de/tilman/j/general.html
See also this quote from Wikipedia:
In 1994, Vicky Aznaran, who had been the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center (the Church's central management body), claimed in an affidavit that Because of my position and the reports which regularly crossed my desk, I know that during my entire presidency of RTC "fair game" actions against enemies were daily routine. Apart from the legal tactics described below, the "fair game" activities included break-ins, libel, upsetting the companies of the enemy, espionage, harassment, misuse of confidential communications in the folders of community members and so forth.
This is one of the good reasons why the sect tends to be viewed with suspicion in Western Europe (the sect is currently defending itself in France against a charge of fraud (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7604311.stm)). I'm still unclear as to exactly how sect has been able to secure the tax-exempt status of "church" with the US authorities. I have read that it was by successfully harassing the relevant officials, but that's quite hard to prove of course.
In an ideal world I would therefore be in favour of traffic metering. One in which ISPs offer cheap subscriptions with a low bandwidth and a low traffic cap (as long as you don't want to download videos or music you'll do fine with 1-2Gb per month). Another one with, say, a higher-speed connection 5 Gb. a month plus a small fee per Mb.
Only ... there is one fly in the ointment. We don't live in an ideal world, and ISPs are profit maximizers that often don't face any real competition in any given area. In addition the information we have about "excessive" traffic comes from ISPs, and they are notoriously less-than-candid about the precise performance of their network (for obvious reasons). If given the opportunity to meter traffic without anyone checking up on how they do that, ISPs will happily gauge the consumer and give nothing back. Now lay off the righteous indignation. They wouldn't *be* profit maximizers if they didn't have that tendency, Ok?
I would be willing to pay per Mb. if I somehow had a guarantee that I wasn't being fleeced. Now information from ISPs about what's causing the problem just isn't satisfactory because it may well be counter to their commercial interests to be truthful. Again ... spare me the righteous indignation. Commercial entities aren't about being truthful, they're about making a profit. They can be kept honest through enough competition or through oversight, but through little else.
So if we could get an independent assessment of network capacity, network load, and how the infrastructure is being paid for, we could see what the real bottleneck is and decide how to pay for that (instead of trusting ISPs to handle the problem). Because we're not the only ones who'll have to pay. If consumers are the car-drivers of the internet, companies that do internet adverts and providers of (non-free) content are its fleet operators.
I think that approximately the same holds for traffic shaping, but with vastly greater possibilities for abuse by ISPs and content providers. Again, it's possible to implement it in ways that benefit the consumer, and it's possible to implement this in ways that fleece them and sell out to vendors of proprietary sites and / or protocols. And who can we trust to give us a reasonable deal? When we're not even allowed to see what they're doing?
To give a small example: I understand that streaming video material puts a heavy burden on a connection, but I don't understand why P2P connections do the same. I have a broadband connection which I used e.g. to downloaded 2 Gb Linux distros in an hour and a half directly from the server (using HTTP) and in 10 hours during the night using P2P. Guess which option causes the greatest band-width hit.
So I'm not quite ready to believe the contention that it's P2P traffic that's causing the problem, despite what ISPs say. What I do know is that my ISP throttles HTTP downloads after a few MBs. The download speed starts high and then falls off after a few seconds, and even more after a few minutes. I don't believe that they throttle P2P traffic since each stream is limited by the upload speed of the peers, which is a lot lower than my download speed. ISPs may at this point stand up and shout "See that's why you're hogging bandwidth!", but I don't believe it. Not when it takes 10 hours to download 2Gb. using P2P and 90 minutes using HTTP.
In short, I believe that this is one of those instances where a little government regulation would be helpful. E.g. by mandating all ISPs and Telcos to give full and truthful disclosure of their traffic volume and download rate by hour of day in total and by protocol, say at ward level. That should guarantee transparency. And its effects on competition should be bearable if every company has to do that. How about that?
US export regulations have a way of being over-broad, just for the ease of legislating. As the Rather than protecting one or two key components, the export regulations tend to protect an entire assembly.
To quote from the article referenced by the parent post (http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11965352): "IN THE spring of 2006 Robert Bigelow needed to take a stand on a trip to Russia to keep a satellite off the floor. The stand was made of aluminium. It had a circular base and legs. It was, says the entrepreneur and head of Bigelow Aerospace in Nevada, "indistinguishable from a common coffee table". Nonetheless, the American authorities told Mr Bigelow that this coffee table was part of a satellite assembly and so counted as a munition. During the trip it would have to be guarded by two security officers at all times."
If that sounds a bit off-center, then perhaps I might add a personal anecdote. In the 1980's I corresponded with someone in a Dutch consultancy. Their company had just won a contract from some Dutch ministry to move a lot of data and Fortran software from a mainframe to a PC environment. They had figured to dump the lot on tape, get the tape to their offices, and then read the tape using a 9-track tape drive connected to a PC on their LAN, recompile the Fortran code on PC, and process the data on PC.
They had (accurately) budgeted for the purchase of a 9-track tape drive and needed one in a hurry. I was asked for a name of good a US manufacturer (they didn't even consider any other source) of 9-track tapes, which I found in 10 minutes and gave to them. So far so good.
That's when the trouble started.
They were careful people and actually phoned the US embassy in The Netherlands to see if they could just order that tape drive, and what the import/export formalities would be. It's well that they did, because, yes, there were some difficulties. Just the formality of an export license. Asked how to obtain one, the embassy responded that not they, but the manufacturer would have to get the license. And that it would take anywhere between 3-4 months to process the paperwork.
Yes, that's right. In order to export a 9-track tape drive to The Netherlands in the nineteen eighties (NATO partner and all) there would be a 3-4 month wait while the paperwork cleared!
Well ... that wasn't an option for them, since the deadline on their contract was only 6 months away. So they went and bought another make. I believe it was Japanese. Or French. Which was duly bought and installed in their offices two weeks later. They successfully completed the move too and delighted the ministry they were working for by much quicker turnaround times (on high-end PCs; the software being CPU-bound) at a fraction of the cost they would incur on the mainframe.
But in the mean time the US Inc. lost an order for a rather ordinary and fairly innocuous 9-track tape drive, which could be second-sourced on the open market within a week or so, while starting off as the *only* name on the shortlist. And all because of some well-intentioned but rather inept export regulations.
They're very thorough and dedicated and they tend to dispense final and non-reversible solutions to trouble. Any trouble. Hundreds of testimonials available from individuals in sunny locations overseas, including government officials.
Happy to oblige. Things can be pretty simple if you know where and how to look.
There are lots and lots of conclusive observations that expose "Flat Earth" as total humbug (from the fact that ships disappear under the horizon, to satellite launches to high-altitude flights, to classical mechanics to geodesy) but they all require a little intelligence and some thought to understand, and may allow willfully stupid charlatans enough leeway to obfuscate the discussion that some people loose their way in the argument.
Satellite imagery on the other hand provides direct and totally conclusive evidence that doesn't require *any* thought or intelligence to understand, and it can't very well be argued about. So it can't be obfuscated either. But alas, satellite imagery proves the Earth is round (no matter what other considerations Flat Earthers might wish to trot out), so if "Flat Earthers" were to admit any of that as evidence, they have lost the debate before it's even started. So they don't admit satellite imagery as evidence. Instead Flat Earth enthousiasts will tell you that those satellite images are all "fakes" put up by a "conspiracy of governments".
When the main FAQ starts off by telling you that the conclusive evidence provided by satellite imagery showing the Earth to be round is considered inadmissible evidence by Flat Earth enthousiasts, on account of it all being a global "conspiracy by governments". And when the only "evidence" for this is based on the hypothesis of a global conspiracy which in turn can only be "proven" by assuming the Flat Earth hypothesis itself to be true (something that Flat Earthers had to prove in the first place), you see the logical fallacy in their argument (circular reasoning) which no amount of additional posts can repair. So reading all or any of them is a total waste of time.
And something else. The *number* of posts on the site has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they are humbug or not. There are lots and lots of extremely stupid people about, and unfortunately they can be quite diligent. If they all make a single post, then you can rack up an impressive total in no time at all. But that doesn't imply that any of those posts make sense. Sorry about that, but there it is. It's not quantity that counts but quality.
So, to avoid the need of crawling through a stack of 400,000 pretty darned clueless posts, you ask Flat Earthers to tell us why we should disbelieve direct observational evidence (satellite imagery again) that can decide the matter all by itself. When they can't, there is nothing but quasi objectivity to be gained by saying "gee perhaps somewhere in that stack of 40,000 posts there is one that actually makes sense", Ok? Whatever else they come up with is already beside the point since we already have conclusive evidence about whether the Earth is round or flat.
The point is whether direct evidence from satellites or high-altitude flights can or cannot be used to decide the matter. If "Flat Earthers" can only resort to conspiracy theories to neutralise that evidence (admitting it exposes them immediately), they have lost the debate and there is no point in looking what else they might bring forward, right?
That's how you distinguish real science from bogus: real Science doesn't rely on logical fallacies such as circular reasoning, and doesn't try to discard direct evidence by a gratuitous claim about a global "government conspiracy" rendering it fake".