The virus originally being part of the cell actually seems more realistic then a cell incorporating a virus. The gene people haven't quite gotten it yet. It seems this will end up being just like the so called junk DNA which turned out not to be junk after all.
To all those people who say don't do it, the results are always worse without real input from the people doing the work.
If you don't do it you will end up getting something stupid like tickets responded to with no degree of difficulty. The people will fight to get the easiest tickets and the really good people who take the most difficult task will end up getting laid off or leaving first.
Been doing Sys Admin work for decades in a variety of different environments so it really depends on your shop. Uptime is a goal, not a unit of work. Risk management is also a goal and not a unit of work.
If no one knows what you are doing then keep a log and find out.
In development shops there could be support in scripting new jobs.
In production shops one would expect mostly support issues.
Automation might also be a target.
Back up and recovery always big on the list.
Upgrading of hardware and software nice to add.
The most important thing is to reinforce with this PHB that there is probably not going to be a single unit of work other then 1 staff hour.
Presumably the more senior people will get more done in the hour the the junior people.
It's interesting that you opinion from a cursory examination of the site and the opinion of a participant are diametrically opposed. His complaint was about automatically not liking the proposal.
Both of you raise good points though on how to avoid the problem. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
No discussion of U.S. patents should start without first looking at the constitution, Article I Section 8 Clause 8
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
It's interesting to note that initially Jefferson thought it was a really bad idea to give out a monopoly. He should have gone with his first thought.
There are other ways of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts then granting a monopoly. The most obvious being granting ownership of the idea but requiring the owner license it to any and all.
A simple 10% fee on all goods which can then be split between all IP holder for the item would eliminate the risk to those producing goods. An arbitration board could decide the value of each patent but it would not effect those producing the goods. Once the patent runs out the government would get the money.
Only goods with patents are protected. So if a company comes up with a new protocol and tries to keep it a trade secret by the license it would have no protection and could be reverse engineered for free, no matter what the license may say. The law always trumps private contracts.
Valid patent applications should be free. On the other hand invalid ones should cost. The scale should be sliding so the more obvious, the more overly broad or just plain ridiculous the application the higher the fee. Also there should be higher fees for repeat offenders.
It is believed that this will encourage progress without getting in the way of competition. The point here is that progress and production are not the same thing and should not be conflated.
Wouldn't clever devils who want to use the technology in a particular patent application just say it's not patent worthy. This seems like a really bad idea. It's just changed where the fighting takes place, it fixes nothing.
This whole thing seems ridiculous. Just one absurd sweeping over generalization after an other.
First it seems silly to assume that all poor people are impulsive, violent and lazy and that's why they are poor. Has anyone ever heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_exper iment
These participants were predominantly white and middle-class.
In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attributions of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities.
In other words the poor are impulsive, violent and lazy because they are poor, it's not the case that they became poor because they were impulsive, violent and lazy. Obviously this is also an over simplification some people really are poor because they are impulsive, violent and lazy but the causes of poverty, especially in ridge class systems are many and varied.
In evolutionary biology the population is not typically just one or the other (rich or poor). Diversity is pretty common. Humans are pretty adaptable creatures so it wouldn't be that hard to adapt to capitalism once it was introduced. History seems to bare this out.
The speed at which the Industrial Revolution spread would indicate it wasn't simply genetic unless one argues that the exact same replacement occurred everywhere at the same time. Which seems highly unlikely.
Next, the Industrial Revolution did not bring unbridled wealth to everyone who worked hard.
The 18th century economist Adam Smith noted the imbalance in the rights of workers in regards to owners (or "masters"). In The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 8, Smith wrote:
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate...
When workers combine, masters... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.
Hence the term wage slave. It's always the goal of the owners (masters) to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at the expense of workers, suppliers and customers.
Finally has anybody heard of Occam's Razor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
"All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."
Why go for a non economic explanation for an economic phenomenon.
Actually emailed Pimental several weeks ago when the story first came out. Wow Slashdot is really slow these days. He emailed back a copy of the report. I found it to be detailed to the point of anal. He even included the energy for the people working and the manufacture of the machines used.
I don't know if I would say he always took the worse possible approach to things but it certainly was unoptimized. Two areas really stood out.
Fertilizer and Distilling.
It seems that if there ever was an application for genetic engineering then the production of fuel would be a relatively harmless one. Soy eliminates the need for nitrogen fertilizer so splicing in the correct gene for affixing nitrogen to the soil would be a big win.
Distilling can be done using waste heat from power plants. Seem like it would be a free energy source.
Finally, the leftover mash should have some value for animal feed.
"Second, I have been in business for myself, and worked for others. I made money in both modes."
So you had time to do sales & marketing, negotiate contracts and development. If you did then you must be one of the few. Most of the owner/operators that I know, including me, have a tough time doing all that at the same time.
"Third, I am a little confused - you seem to argue that creatives drive the economy (I agree) but that "you can't eat creativity or sleep under a product" and go on to talk about reducing overhead - meaning, essentially, you need businesspeople to efficiently bring a product to market. So, do we like businesspeople for helping up get our products and services to market, or do we dislike them because they exploit us?"
Businesspeople spend all of their time controlling the market, and they are good at it. They are a gatekeeper between development and customers. The middleman as it were. If they actively prevent new competitors from coming in then you may have the best product in the world but if you can't sell it then you are screwed.
Businesspeople's goal is to extract maximume money for minimum effort. So they maximize profits by controlling both ends of the market. Look at M$. How many times do they have to be convicted of either monoplistic practices or theft of IP before people get it. They are not providing a useful service they are just extracting as much as they can. I'm not sure if you can't see it or if you won't.
"As far as reducing sales, marketing and management as far as possible, BFOTO - why do you think companies lay off pretty much anyone they can? This is patently obvious."
Laying off people is not the same as reducing cost. Particularly when the CEO lays off people and then awards himself a bonus which is more then the victim's compensation was. That was just more corporate double speak.
Kearns was just the most visible example. How many people didn't fight or were forced to settle for pennies on the dollar. Havign done boardroom consulting I can tell you they are not sitting around saying how can we add value to our developers and customers. The bottom line isn't everything, it's the only thing.
As far as creativity is easy to find, it's demonstratably not true. If it were then software would just work. Instead the PHBs look for the lowest cost engineers and get the lowest quality product that barely runs and is very late. Longhorn comes to mind.
Are you a developer who struck out on his own or did you do some other function? Have you worked in sales & marketing in companies. Have you done boardroom work? Having done these things, among others, I find it hard to believe that you have such a high regard for these people if you've actually worked with them on a day to day basis. This whole value add proposition sounds like B school stuff and is nothing like the real world people I've dealt with.
I can only assume you actually aren't in business for yourself. Maybe you've read an article or two in some B school publication about how academics view business.
I disagree. "Business" is merely a mechanism by which a provider of a good or service works out how to sustainably provide same to the market in such a way that he/she/they can skim some value out of the process to survive.
Business is all about dominating markets and extracting maximum profits. To do that you must raise prices and reduce cost. Look at the recording labels that bitch about illegal file copying and forget to pay the artist.
the artists needs a studio to sell, or must create his/her own studio.
If you are talking about music I think you meant to say label. Studio time is cheap these days. Some of my friends rent it for less then 50 USD/hr. There would be no reason to build your own studio. Of course most would say that while performing is hard work the real creative part is in the composing. Performers usually interpret the music, unless you do a lot of improvosation.
1. Bad negotiating skills on the creative side.
It doesn't really matter how good your negotiating skills are if you have a weak hand and they know it. I've negotiated contracts from both stregnth and weakness. I always do much better from a position of stregnth.
2. Unwillingness of the creative to acknowledge that their skills and creativity are not so special that someone else won't provide them for the ask price.
A lot of people believe that creativity is probably not even needed in mature industries, which software is supposed to becoming. So then the goal would simply be to reduce cost. But creative people can also significantly reduce cost even in mature industries, so I don't buy this argument. Or the argument that there are lots of creative people out there. PHBs think that everyone else is interchangable but my experience says it's just not so.
Unwillingness of the creative to market his/her product themselves, and so uses a third party to market the good/service, and then gripes about the cost of their own laziness/inability to sell.
You have no idea how difficult it is to wear all of those different hats, and I suspect you never will.
If you don't like the deal, don't make it. Your employer cannot take advantage of you or your creativity unless you let them.
You can't eat creativity or sleep under a product. It would make sense if we were all self sufficient and didn't need to work but only did so for our own ammusment.
You ought to read the story of Robert Kearns and the intermittent windshield wiper patent. This guy spent the rest of his life suing the automakers who stole his IP. Think of all the great ideas this guy never had because he spent all of his time trying to collect on his previous invention. Sales, marketing, even managment is overhead and should be reduced as much as possible.
Capitalism without everyone having capital is like democracy without everyone having the vote.
Creativity is the engine that drives progress. Greed is the engine that drives business. Is it any wonder that the greedy are trying to exploit the creative. Of course there is no need to give stock options to those who actually create the products, doing that would only encourage them to move on at some point. Make them chose between a decent work enviroment or money. They will chose the enviroment most of the time. Is there really any reason a person can't be creative and own a piece of what they create?
Capitalism without everyone owning capital is like democracy without everyone having the vote.
Slashdot Mirror
The virus originally being part of the cell actually seems more realistic then a cell incorporating a virus. The gene people haven't quite gotten it yet. It seems this will end up being just like the so called junk DNA which turned out not to be junk after all.
To all those people who say don't do it, the results are always worse without real input from the people doing the work.
If you don't do it you will end up getting something stupid like tickets responded to with no degree of difficulty. The people will fight to get the easiest tickets and the really good people who take the most difficult task will end up getting laid off or leaving first.
Been doing Sys Admin work for decades in a variety of different environments so it really depends on your shop. Uptime is a goal, not a unit of work. Risk management is also a goal and not a unit of work.
If no one knows what you are doing then keep a log and find out.
In development shops there could be support in scripting new jobs.
In production shops one would expect mostly support issues.
Automation might also be a target.
Back up and recovery always big on the list.
Upgrading of hardware and software nice to add.
The most important thing is to reinforce with this PHB that there is probably not going to be a single unit of work other then 1 staff hour.
Presumably the more senior people will get more done in the hour the the junior people.
It's interesting that you opinion from a cursory examination of the site and the opinion of a participant are diametrically opposed. His complaint was about automatically not liking the proposal.
Both of you raise good points though on how to avoid the problem. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
No discussion of U.S. patents should start without first looking at the constitution, Article I Section 8 Clause 8
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
It's interesting to note that initially Jefferson thought it was a really bad idea to give out a monopoly. He should have gone with his first thought.
There are other ways of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts then granting a monopoly. The most obvious being granting ownership of the idea but requiring the owner license it to any and all.
A simple 10% fee on all goods which can then be split between all IP holder for the item would eliminate the risk to those producing goods. An arbitration board could decide the value of each patent but it would not effect those producing the goods. Once the patent runs out the government would get the money.
Only goods with patents are protected. So if a company comes up with a new protocol and tries to keep it a trade secret by the license it would have no protection and could be reverse engineered for free, no matter what the license may say. The law always trumps private contracts.
Valid patent applications should be free. On the other hand invalid ones should cost. The scale should be sliding so the more obvious, the more overly broad or just plain ridiculous the application the higher the fee. Also there should be higher fees for repeat offenders.
It is believed that this will encourage progress without getting in the way of competition. The point here is that progress and production are not the same thing and should not be conflated.
Wouldn't clever devils who want to use the technology in a particular patent application just say it's not patent worthy. This seems like a really bad idea. It's just changed where the fighting takes place, it fixes nothing.
This whole thing seems ridiculous. Just one absurd sweeping over generalization after an other. First it seems silly to assume that all poor people are impulsive, violent and lazy and that's why they are poor. Has anyone ever heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_exper iment
These participants were predominantly white and middle-class.
In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attributions of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities.
In other words the poor are impulsive, violent and lazy because they are poor, it's not the case that they became poor because they were impulsive, violent and lazy. Obviously this is also an over simplification some people really are poor because they are impulsive, violent and lazy but the causes of poverty, especially in ridge class systems are many and varied.
In evolutionary biology the population is not typically just one or the other (rich or poor). Diversity is pretty common. Humans are pretty adaptable creatures so it wouldn't be that hard to adapt to capitalism once it was introduced. History seems to bare this out.
The speed at which the Industrial Revolution spread would indicate it wasn't simply genetic unless one argues that the exact same replacement occurred everywhere at the same time. Which seems highly unlikely.
Next, the Industrial Revolution did not bring unbridled wealth to everyone who worked hard.
The 18th century economist Adam Smith noted the imbalance in the rights of workers in regards to owners (or "masters"). In The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 8, Smith wrote:
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate...
When workers combine, masters... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen.
Hence the term wage slave. It's always the goal of the owners (masters) to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at the expense of workers, suppliers and customers.
Finally has anybody heard of Occam's Razor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
"All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."
Why go for a non economic explanation for an economic phenomenon.
Actually emailed Pimental several weeks ago when the story first came out. Wow Slashdot is really slow these days. He emailed back a copy of the report. I found it to be detailed to the point of anal. He even included the energy for the people working and the manufacture of the machines used.
I don't know if I would say he always took the worse possible approach to things but it certainly was unoptimized. Two areas really stood out.
Fertilizer and Distilling.
It seems that if there ever was an application for genetic engineering then the production of fuel would be a relatively harmless one. Soy eliminates the need for nitrogen fertilizer so splicing in the correct gene for affixing nitrogen to the soil would be a big win.
Distilling can be done using waste heat from power plants. Seem like it would be a free energy source.
Finally, the leftover mash should have some value for animal feed.
Just my 0.02 USD worth
"Second, I have been in business for myself, and worked for others. I made money in both modes."
So you had time to do sales & marketing, negotiate contracts and development. If you did then you must be one of the few. Most of the owner/operators that I know, including me, have a tough time doing all that at the same time.
"Third, I am a little confused - you seem to argue that creatives drive the economy (I agree) but that "you can't eat creativity or sleep under a product" and go on to talk about reducing overhead - meaning, essentially, you need businesspeople to efficiently bring a product to market. So, do we like businesspeople for helping up get our products and services to market, or do we dislike them because they exploit us?"
Businesspeople spend all of their time controlling the market, and they are good at it. They are a gatekeeper between development and customers. The middleman as it were. If they actively prevent new competitors from coming in then you may have the best product in the world but if you can't sell it then you are screwed.
Businesspeople's goal is to extract maximume money for minimum effort. So they maximize profits by controlling both ends of the market. Look at M$. How many times do they have to be convicted of either monoplistic practices or theft of IP before people get it. They are not providing a useful service they are just extracting as much as they can. I'm not sure if you can't see it or if you won't.
"As far as reducing sales, marketing and management as far as possible, BFOTO - why do you think companies lay off pretty much anyone they can? This is patently obvious."
Laying off people is not the same as reducing cost. Particularly when the CEO lays off people and then awards himself a bonus which is more then the victim's compensation was. That was just more corporate double speak.
Kearns was just the most visible example. How many people didn't fight or were forced to settle for pennies on the dollar. Havign done boardroom consulting I can tell you they are not sitting around saying how can we add value to our developers and customers. The bottom line isn't everything, it's the only thing.
As far as creativity is easy to find, it's demonstratably not true. If it were then software would just work. Instead the PHBs look for the lowest cost engineers and get the lowest quality product that barely runs and is very late. Longhorn comes to mind.
Are you a developer who struck out on his own or did you do some other function? Have you worked in sales & marketing in companies. Have you done boardroom work? Having done these things, among others, I find it hard to believe that you have such a high regard for these people if you've actually worked with them on a day to day basis. This whole value add proposition sounds like B school stuff and is nothing like the real world people I've dealt with.
Just my $0.02 worth.
I can only assume you actually aren't in business for yourself. Maybe you've read an article or two in some B school publication about how academics view business.
I disagree. "Business" is merely a mechanism by which a provider of a good or service works out how to sustainably provide same to the market in such a way that he/she/they can skim some value out of the process to survive.
Business is all about dominating markets and extracting maximum profits. To do that you must raise prices and reduce cost. Look at the recording labels that bitch about illegal file copying and forget to pay the artist.
the artists needs a studio to sell, or must create his/her own studio.
If you are talking about music I think you meant to say label. Studio time is cheap these days. Some of my friends rent it for less then 50 USD/hr. There would be no reason to build your own studio. Of course most would say that while performing is hard work the real creative part is in the composing. Performers usually interpret the music, unless you do a lot of improvosation.
1. Bad negotiating skills on the creative side.
It doesn't really matter how good your negotiating skills are if you have a weak hand and they know it. I've negotiated contracts from both stregnth and weakness. I always do much better from a position of stregnth.
2. Unwillingness of the creative to acknowledge that their skills and creativity are not so special that someone else won't provide them for the ask price.
A lot of people believe that creativity is probably not even needed in mature industries, which software is supposed to becoming. So then the goal would simply be to reduce cost. But creative people can also significantly reduce cost even in mature industries, so I don't buy this argument. Or the argument that there are lots of creative people out there. PHBs think that everyone else is interchangable but my experience says it's just not so.
Unwillingness of the creative to market his/her product themselves, and so uses a third party to market the good/service, and then gripes about the cost of their own laziness/inability to sell.
You have no idea how difficult it is to wear all of those different hats, and I suspect you never will.
If you don't like the deal, don't make it. Your employer cannot take advantage of you or your creativity unless you let them.
You can't eat creativity or sleep under a product. It would make sense if we were all self sufficient and didn't need to work but only did so for our own ammusment.
You ought to read the story of Robert Kearns and the intermittent windshield wiper patent. This guy spent the rest of his life suing the automakers who stole his IP. Think of all the great ideas this guy never had because he spent all of his time trying to collect on his previous invention. Sales, marketing, even managment is overhead and should be reduced as much as possible.
Capitalism without everyone having capital is like democracy without everyone having the vote.
Creativity is the engine that drives progress. Greed is the engine that drives business. Is it any wonder that the greedy are trying to exploit the creative. Of course there is no need to give stock options to those who actually create the products, doing that would only encourage them to move on at some point. Make them chose between a decent work enviroment or money. They will chose the enviroment most of the time. Is there really any reason a person can't be creative and own a piece of what they create? Capitalism without everyone owning capital is like democracy without everyone having the vote.