Well, we know that conventional physics doesn't cover everything, obviously. I'm pretty skeptical of this myself, but I'm reserving my opinion.
Virtual particles are definitely not a fringe understanding of the quantum mechanical realm, but they've always been representative of something... well... virtual. They would be generally expected to cancel out at macro scales. The only example I've heard of where they don't is Hawking radiation, and that's only because of the very specific consequences of anything that goes across an event horizon.
While the probability of any one discovery being a real quantum leap (so to speak) is very, very small, we know that our incomplete understanding of the quantum realm also means that finding new physics is almost certain, given enough time. So I'm interested in this, although not overly excited yet. I'm thinking someone had a bad network cable or something.:)
You can get at the owners in certain circumstances, and it is likely that rolling over at settlement probably was the line where further fighting would have started exposing the owners to actual liability either from the fines or investor lawsuits and such.
They don't want to operate Grooveshark. They just want to make sure that no service operates where they don't get paid. They're being paid by Spotify and the other services. It's Spotify and their ilk's problem to operate a streaming service. The *industry* doesn't care, since a lack of streaming just means they can go back to making sales on CDs.
The patent system is actually there to let other people copy your design, but adds a grace period where you can be paid back for your effort in working on an idea, usually through making sure you are first to implement that idea. It is merely supposed to be a provision to encourage you to share an idea which you might otherwise hide while you sought to benefit from it. It is not supposed to "protect" your "property".
It is quite possible for a company to preserve its trade secrets without a patent. Patents are primarily supposed to help the People, not the "owners". The patent period is a bribe so that the information is more effectively spread and not hidden.
If a patent is turned from a vehicle which is supposed to encourage the spread of ideas into simply a government sponsored industry, which counter intuitively tries to make it harder to spread ideas, it goes against the original reason for patents.
Copyright has a similar premise, and is going the same way. Mickey Mouse or a Metallica album is supposed to be protected only long enough to make it worthwhile for the artist to profit from its creation. That isn't supposed to be a guarantee that they get to drive a Bentley at the end of it or that you'll be able to have an industry based on the limitation of ideas.
What is actually happening is that the copyright and patents are being used to make it worthwhile not for the artist to make their music or the inventor to profit from their invention, it's being used to make it possible for publishing companies and patent-holding organizations to profit from the works of those artists. That's why copyrights are getting extended all the time.
Ease in which music or ideas can be copied should be a hint that these are not a solid basis for an industry. And the extremes to which these industries go to in order to halt the natural spread of performances and ideas only proves that point.
As someone who works in software, I think we have actually solved this issue very simply. Open source software makes money and provides a living to people who work with it every day. The ease in which that software can be copied has only made it more popular and the people who have created it even more in demand.
You can add more fault tolerance to your power by adding this, but honestly, you're effectively creating a second, more expensive infrastructure to make up for the existing infrastructure that isn't working.
That's fine if you have the money and the need to do so. That's why people have diesel backup generators.
Still, if your normal grid is that messed up, that's not a problem with centralized generation, that's a problem were you have idiots managing your system. There's no scenario where you won't have a more efficient system through economies of scale by centralizing generation.
You may be forced to have solar and battery backup because of poorly managed utilities or perhaps because of location, but that doesn't mean that kind of arrangement is the overall solution to the issue. It's a band-aid that perhaps you can afford and are willing to pay, but that doesn't mean you aren't overpaying for it.
Except it isn't. Having a distribution network is not cheap, but still cheaper than having to maintain and service units at every location.
You can subsidize individual generation that that so that the cost is hidden to individuals as part of a tax bill or a utility bill, but it is still more expensive even so.
Well, someone needs to get us to the point it is affordable and even then, I have my doubts.
A home installation of solar power is not a necessity. A home itself is a necessity, and thus you must pay for it. However, distributed solar generation is inefficient, and the homeowner is forced to make a capital investment to get something that they can otherwise get more efficiently from the grid.
The insulation that people do to their houses is probably a much better plan anyhow. You don't need to worry about the grid or panels or batteries at all, you just waste less power in maintaining your internal environment.
Solar power is a good idea, but like most forms of generation, is most efficient when generated centrally. We're really only adding complexity to the system with individual generation.
Right. There's no issue with them putting their best foot forward if this is something you can get with the basic product.
However, if you have to enable these features AND you have to pay for them, that's a different product. The danger is that the reviewers rate their "basic" product as a top-rated AV product. Then people flock to get this basic product over the basic offerings of other AV companies who did not rate as well, but might well have a better "basic" product.
It's basically bait and switch, and probably fraudulent. It seems like every crime in China can get you executed or sent to a camp, so the fact that so many Chinese companies work this way makes me think that China itself has a very different view of what makes up a fraudulent practice.
Those are corporation assets and are being taken in lieu of a punitive fine. If they didn't turn them over then the corporation would have been fined, gone into bankruptcy, and those assets would have been sold off to pay the debt by the bankruptcy trustee anyway.
It's not clear why they wouldn't have just gone bankrupt, but there's probably terms in there that would be better than they would get if they had gone down kicking and screaming. Well, more kicking and screaming than they did before the case went against them, anyway.
It is tragic in a manner of speaking, when you see the death of an idea that the company wanted to bring to the table. If Grooveshark would have succeeded, it would have been... interesting. It was never going to happen, it was just too explicitly illegal, but they held out awhile.
It is also tragic in that real people lose their jobs, possibly suddenly.
Corporations aren't just CEOs and shareholders. I can feel bad for one going under, even if I don't necessarily consider them to be people. Corporations don't exist without individuals within them, those people can represent something you can feel for, even if the tendency is for them to be faceless. So it is a case-by-case proposition.
Can't really do that or they legitimize this model and Spotify and all the rest start jumping on the bandwagon and the publishers start losing their juicy cuts of those services.
It was probably in the terms of the settlement. When they ask for an apology in a settlement, you can't half-ass it or make it a smirking "apology". That doesn't mean they believe it personally.
No, it is not. It gives the sort of people who want to hide their money under their bed a warm fuzzy, but it's basically condemning the economy to stagnation at best.
Yes, inflation does have a dark side of printing more money to pay for things that you can't afford, but the positive side of it is that it encourages people to provide cash to economic engines to maintain value. Companies need to be able to borrow against future revenues to grow their capacity, and the only way to do that is for people to invest money in them. So inflation provides growth because it demands growth.
People who have a simpler view of the "value" of their money will believe that they should be able to not lose value by holding on to it. The reality is that money has never been actually "valuable" by itself. You can't eat it and it doesn't make for a very good roofing material. It is there to spend, and if it isn't being spent, then you have potential which is not being realized.
Actually, they got in trouble by *not* printing money, but instead by borrowing. They were working hard to keep inflation down for awhile in the 1990's and that meant that they borrowed to cover their work on building infrastructure. This actually worked fairly well... for awhile.
When the global financial crisis hit in the early 2000's it left Argentina unable to service debts. Argentina had to deal with huge unemployment and political instability. That resulted in the largest default on sovereign debt ever. No bueno.
Argentina is still a "pariah" but was doing a little better until recently. Some people are blaming new populist policies for having put Argentina back in trouble with a shrinking economy again.
Argentina is just chock full of corruption, as well. That means that unless things are peachy keen and there's enough money for everyone, like in the 1990s, people don't want to touch Argentina with a 10 foot pole. That hurts their ability to recover where less corrupt countries might bounce back faster.
Whipsawing around is a shitty reason to throw investment money into a currency like Bitcoin, no matter how high it goes.
Hopefully, they are buying because they expect it to stabilize in a good place or the utility of it will make it ubiquitous, but if its value doesn't stabilize, then you're not investing, you're speculating. Full-on gambling.
I've seen the lottery hit 500 million dollars. That doesn't make a lottery ticket a good investment.
If you have pesos, sure. If you have dollars? Then bitcoin is a speculative currency. It's just that Argentina has such a bad situation that even a gamble is better than the sure loss of trying to hold their currency for any period of time.
We have the type of managers you are talking about, we call them project managers. Although, there are some very skilled PMs out there, many are there to call meetings and manage spreadsheets, MS Project, or JIRA. Very useful tasks, that don't require them to know how to do the actual work.
The problem becomes supervision of those skilled employees. You need someone who has authority and skills who can call bullshit and call on their knowledge of how things actually work when they do that.
In reality, you're skilled manager is a good technician and also understands business requirements, as well as how to manage a team of skilled workers. You can see why this is a tough job to fill.
Sometimes they force you to accept a higher position, but in most cases, a key ingredient is that the person in question allows themselves to be moved into that position. There have been plenty of people who I have reviewed who are very good at their jobs and I will neither promote them, nor do they wish to be promoted. We all know that the person in question is not going to do a good job at it.
The reason for the Peter Principle is that *somebody* has to do the job. There are a lot of bad managers, but there is always the potential for a *worse* manager. You have to promote somebody for *something*, and so they pick someone who is good at their current job because you can't very well promote the people who are terrible at their current tasks, even if they suspect that the non-performer might actually have management skills. That's actually an argument for having people trained as managers as a career, but we all know the problems with that as well.
As long as you promote from your current staff, you have to accept that your pool is made up of people who you originally interviewed for their (for instance) coding skills, as opposed to for their management skills.
You don't need an MBA to make management even today. You really don't need it if you're a middle manager. Executive? Maybe.
An MBA is buying yourself an opportunity with a piece of paper. That opportunity can be worth it, if you know how to exploit it, but there are other opportunities to be had.
There is no guarantee that we'll nuke Iran just because they nuked Israel. In fact, it's very likely that we wouldn't do so. Iran's government knows that as well as anyone.
Besides, their "defensive" capability is merely cover for them to increase their regional presence in terms of more overt support of groups in other countries. They don't really want to nuke Israel. They just want to increase their influence in Iraq or Syria or Lebanon. If Israel is likely to have a problem, that will come about due to more overt activities to support proxies like Hamas.
The real threat of Iran with nukes isn't nuclear war, per se. It's that they get a free hand to increase their interference in the region and that's very dangerous. Say what you will about US invasions, but no one seriously believed that we were there to stay. Iran is right next door to a lot of countries that don't want to have to deal with a nuclear Iran which would be able to hold off the US, because the US is what is guaranteeing the balance in the region between Muslim states that hate each other's guts. A nuclear Iran could cause a country like Saudi Arabia to obtain its own nuclear weapons because the threat of a US invasion in support of the status quo is lessened.
The reality is that we're not just trying to keep nukes out of the hands of the Iranians, we're trying to make sure that the rest of the ME doesn't enter an arms race which puts nukes in the hands of other countries.
Although there is a very substantial distance between the sun and Pluto, I'd imagine that the radiation from the Sun still causes the ices (in this case any sort of ice, not just water) to sublimate from the areas more exposed to solar radiation year-round. You'd get a cap in places where that radiation does not regularly reach, such as at the poles.
I think you actually need specific conditions of atmosphere, or at least gravity, to actually maintain a snowball planet, as opposed to a very cold, but otherwise barren rock.
Agile doesn't make up for poor coordination above the product level. It can help in the sense that you have business involvement, but if the product owners don't talk to each other, then you have a bunch of completely uncoordinated products all being developed under Agile, and very efficiently tripping all over one another.
Then fund a startup. Seriously, their problem is them trying to turn an existing IBM group or team into a "startup". That isn't going to happen. You need to hire a new staff, new management, and simply hand them the money, and let them work outside the box, including not having to use IBM products by default, even deeply discounted IBM products. Perhaps *especially not* discounted IBM products.
Yes, Agile (if done correctly) is one methodology that may help them with certain problems, but you need full buy-in from the executives and product owners. If IBM management still expects the same sort of planning and budgeting and milestones they got with waterfall, then Agile is never going to deliver on what it does best. Then it will be a bunch of people working out their waterfall plan in a "standup" where everyone sits around a table. There are certain things an Agile development cycle isn't going to give a executive, and if they can't handle that, then it's going to fail.
A lot of the people who work for an IBM or a big company like that are institutionalized, much like prison inmates become. They speak a certain language, they think a certain way. That doesn't preclude individuals from breaking that conditioning, but if they are surrounded by people who think the same way, then the group will return to old ways of thinking, perhaps with a new buzzword.
IBM needs to step back and actually change their culture. They have a lot to offer simply by insisting on profitability and having decent accounting structure that many startups dearly need. But they can't just turn their existing development teams into Agile teams by fiat. I think the best way to assure that is perhaps for IBM to almost become a venture fund or an overall holding organization for these teams where they provide adult supervision, but they don't tell you how to build your sand castles.
The problem is that these Republicans are seeing the economic requirements of something like Kyoto as an economic problem which disadvantages the United States, which is most certainly does.
The real problem isn't that these people deny climate change or even science, the problem is that we've been hearing about "peak oil", "population bombs" and the like for so long that these folks are hearing people crying wolf. So they view it, not as a scientific problem, but a political tempest in a teapot that has been manufactured to get Democratic party votes. And thus they view using this BS as fair game politically, because in the end, that's what they think they're getting.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we know that conventional physics doesn't cover everything, obviously. I'm pretty skeptical of this myself, but I'm reserving my opinion.
Virtual particles are definitely not a fringe understanding of the quantum mechanical realm, but they've always been representative of something... well... virtual. They would be generally expected to cancel out at macro scales. The only example I've heard of where they don't is Hawking radiation, and that's only because of the very specific consequences of anything that goes across an event horizon.
While the probability of any one discovery being a real quantum leap (so to speak) is very, very small, we know that our incomplete understanding of the quantum realm also means that finding new physics is almost certain, given enough time. So I'm interested in this, although not overly excited yet. I'm thinking someone had a bad network cable or something. :)
You can get at the owners in certain circumstances, and it is likely that rolling over at settlement probably was the line where further fighting would have started exposing the owners to actual liability either from the fines or investor lawsuits and such.
They don't want to operate Grooveshark. They just want to make sure that no service operates where they don't get paid. They're being paid by Spotify and the other services. It's Spotify and their ilk's problem to operate a streaming service. The *industry* doesn't care, since a lack of streaming just means they can go back to making sales on CDs.
The patent system is actually there to let other people copy your design, but adds a grace period where you can be paid back for your effort in working on an idea, usually through making sure you are first to implement that idea. It is merely supposed to be a provision to encourage you to share an idea which you might otherwise hide while you sought to benefit from it. It is not supposed to "protect" your "property".
It is quite possible for a company to preserve its trade secrets without a patent. Patents are primarily supposed to help the People, not the "owners". The patent period is a bribe so that the information is more effectively spread and not hidden.
If a patent is turned from a vehicle which is supposed to encourage the spread of ideas into simply a government sponsored industry, which counter intuitively tries to make it harder to spread ideas, it goes against the original reason for patents.
Copyright has a similar premise, and is going the same way. Mickey Mouse or a Metallica album is supposed to be protected only long enough to make it worthwhile for the artist to profit from its creation. That isn't supposed to be a guarantee that they get to drive a Bentley at the end of it or that you'll be able to have an industry based on the limitation of ideas.
What is actually happening is that the copyright and patents are being used to make it worthwhile not for the artist to make their music or the inventor to profit from their invention, it's being used to make it possible for publishing companies and patent-holding organizations to profit from the works of those artists. That's why copyrights are getting extended all the time.
Ease in which music or ideas can be copied should be a hint that these are not a solid basis for an industry. And the extremes to which these industries go to in order to halt the natural spread of performances and ideas only proves that point.
As someone who works in software, I think we have actually solved this issue very simply. Open source software makes money and provides a living to people who work with it every day. The ease in which that software can be copied has only made it more popular and the people who have created it even more in demand.
You can add more fault tolerance to your power by adding this, but honestly, you're effectively creating a second, more expensive infrastructure to make up for the existing infrastructure that isn't working.
That's fine if you have the money and the need to do so. That's why people have diesel backup generators.
Still, if your normal grid is that messed up, that's not a problem with centralized generation, that's a problem were you have idiots managing your system. There's no scenario where you won't have a more efficient system through economies of scale by centralizing generation.
You may be forced to have solar and battery backup because of poorly managed utilities or perhaps because of location, but that doesn't mean that kind of arrangement is the overall solution to the issue. It's a band-aid that perhaps you can afford and are willing to pay, but that doesn't mean you aren't overpaying for it.
Except it isn't. Having a distribution network is not cheap, but still cheaper than having to maintain and service units at every location.
You can subsidize individual generation that that so that the cost is hidden to individuals as part of a tax bill or a utility bill, but it is still more expensive even so.
Well, someone needs to get us to the point it is affordable and even then, I have my doubts.
A home installation of solar power is not a necessity. A home itself is a necessity, and thus you must pay for it. However, distributed solar generation is inefficient, and the homeowner is forced to make a capital investment to get something that they can otherwise get more efficiently from the grid.
The insulation that people do to their houses is probably a much better plan anyhow. You don't need to worry about the grid or panels or batteries at all, you just waste less power in maintaining your internal environment.
Solar power is a good idea, but like most forms of generation, is most efficient when generated centrally. We're really only adding complexity to the system with individual generation.
Right. There's no issue with them putting their best foot forward if this is something you can get with the basic product.
However, if you have to enable these features AND you have to pay for them, that's a different product. The danger is that the reviewers rate their "basic" product as a top-rated AV product. Then people flock to get this basic product over the basic offerings of other AV companies who did not rate as well, but might well have a better "basic" product.
It's basically bait and switch, and probably fraudulent. It seems like every crime in China can get you executed or sent to a camp, so the fact that so many Chinese companies work this way makes me think that China itself has a very different view of what makes up a fraudulent practice.
Those are corporation assets and are being taken in lieu of a punitive fine. If they didn't turn them over then the corporation would have been fined, gone into bankruptcy, and those assets would have been sold off to pay the debt by the bankruptcy trustee anyway.
It's not clear why they wouldn't have just gone bankrupt, but there's probably terms in there that would be better than they would get if they had gone down kicking and screaming. Well, more kicking and screaming than they did before the case went against them, anyway.
It is tragic in a manner of speaking, when you see the death of an idea that the company wanted to bring to the table. If Grooveshark would have succeeded, it would have been... interesting. It was never going to happen, it was just too explicitly illegal, but they held out awhile.
It is also tragic in that real people lose their jobs, possibly suddenly.
Corporations aren't just CEOs and shareholders. I can feel bad for one going under, even if I don't necessarily consider them to be people. Corporations don't exist without individuals within them, those people can represent something you can feel for, even if the tendency is for them to be faceless. So it is a case-by-case proposition.
Can't really do that or they legitimize this model and Spotify and all the rest start jumping on the bandwagon and the publishers start losing their juicy cuts of those services.
It was probably in the terms of the settlement. When they ask for an apology in a settlement, you can't half-ass it or make it a smirking "apology". That doesn't mean they believe it personally.
No, it is not. It gives the sort of people who want to hide their money under their bed a warm fuzzy, but it's basically condemning the economy to stagnation at best.
Yes, inflation does have a dark side of printing more money to pay for things that you can't afford, but the positive side of it is that it encourages people to provide cash to economic engines to maintain value. Companies need to be able to borrow against future revenues to grow their capacity, and the only way to do that is for people to invest money in them. So inflation provides growth because it demands growth.
People who have a simpler view of the "value" of their money will believe that they should be able to not lose value by holding on to it. The reality is that money has never been actually "valuable" by itself. You can't eat it and it doesn't make for a very good roofing material. It is there to spend, and if it isn't being spent, then you have potential which is not being realized.
Actually, they got in trouble by *not* printing money, but instead by borrowing. They were working hard to keep inflation down for awhile in the 1990's and that meant that they borrowed to cover their work on building infrastructure. This actually worked fairly well... for awhile.
When the global financial crisis hit in the early 2000's it left Argentina unable to service debts. Argentina had to deal with huge unemployment and political instability. That resulted in the largest default on sovereign debt ever. No bueno.
Argentina is still a "pariah" but was doing a little better until recently. Some people are blaming new populist policies for having put Argentina back in trouble with a shrinking economy again.
Argentina is just chock full of corruption, as well. That means that unless things are peachy keen and there's enough money for everyone, like in the 1990s, people don't want to touch Argentina with a 10 foot pole. That hurts their ability to recover where less corrupt countries might bounce back faster.
Whipsawing around is a shitty reason to throw investment money into a currency like Bitcoin, no matter how high it goes.
Hopefully, they are buying because they expect it to stabilize in a good place or the utility of it will make it ubiquitous, but if its value doesn't stabilize, then you're not investing, you're speculating. Full-on gambling.
I've seen the lottery hit 500 million dollars. That doesn't make a lottery ticket a good investment.
If you have pesos, sure. If you have dollars? Then bitcoin is a speculative currency. It's just that Argentina has such a bad situation that even a gamble is better than the sure loss of trying to hold their currency for any period of time.
We have the type of managers you are talking about, we call them project managers. Although, there are some very skilled PMs out there, many are there to call meetings and manage spreadsheets, MS Project, or JIRA. Very useful tasks, that don't require them to know how to do the actual work.
The problem becomes supervision of those skilled employees. You need someone who has authority and skills who can call bullshit and call on their knowledge of how things actually work when they do that.
In reality, you're skilled manager is a good technician and also understands business requirements, as well as how to manage a team of skilled workers. You can see why this is a tough job to fill.
Sometimes they force you to accept a higher position, but in most cases, a key ingredient is that the person in question allows themselves to be moved into that position. There have been plenty of people who I have reviewed who are very good at their jobs and I will neither promote them, nor do they wish to be promoted. We all know that the person in question is not going to do a good job at it.
The reason for the Peter Principle is that *somebody* has to do the job. There are a lot of bad managers, but there is always the potential for a *worse* manager. You have to promote somebody for *something*, and so they pick someone who is good at their current job because you can't very well promote the people who are terrible at their current tasks, even if they suspect that the non-performer might actually have management skills. That's actually an argument for having people trained as managers as a career, but we all know the problems with that as well.
As long as you promote from your current staff, you have to accept that your pool is made up of people who you originally interviewed for their (for instance) coding skills, as opposed to for their management skills.
In tech, they usually can.
You don't need an MBA to make management even today. You really don't need it if you're a middle manager. Executive? Maybe.
An MBA is buying yourself an opportunity with a piece of paper. That opportunity can be worth it, if you know how to exploit it, but there are other opportunities to be had.
There is no guarantee that we'll nuke Iran just because they nuked Israel. In fact, it's very likely that we wouldn't do so. Iran's government knows that as well as anyone.
Besides, their "defensive" capability is merely cover for them to increase their regional presence in terms of more overt support of groups in other countries. They don't really want to nuke Israel. They just want to increase their influence in Iraq or Syria or Lebanon. If Israel is likely to have a problem, that will come about due to more overt activities to support proxies like Hamas.
The real threat of Iran with nukes isn't nuclear war, per se. It's that they get a free hand to increase their interference in the region and that's very dangerous. Say what you will about US invasions, but no one seriously believed that we were there to stay. Iran is right next door to a lot of countries that don't want to have to deal with a nuclear Iran which would be able to hold off the US, because the US is what is guaranteeing the balance in the region between Muslim states that hate each other's guts. A nuclear Iran could cause a country like Saudi Arabia to obtain its own nuclear weapons because the threat of a US invasion in support of the status quo is lessened.
The reality is that we're not just trying to keep nukes out of the hands of the Iranians, we're trying to make sure that the rest of the ME doesn't enter an arms race which puts nukes in the hands of other countries.
Although there is a very substantial distance between the sun and Pluto, I'd imagine that the radiation from the Sun still causes the ices (in this case any sort of ice, not just water) to sublimate from the areas more exposed to solar radiation year-round. You'd get a cap in places where that radiation does not regularly reach, such as at the poles.
I think you actually need specific conditions of atmosphere, or at least gravity, to actually maintain a snowball planet, as opposed to a very cold, but otherwise barren rock.
Agile doesn't make up for poor coordination above the product level. It can help in the sense that you have business involvement, but if the product owners don't talk to each other, then you have a bunch of completely uncoordinated products all being developed under Agile, and very efficiently tripping all over one another.
Then fund a startup. Seriously, their problem is them trying to turn an existing IBM group or team into a "startup". That isn't going to happen. You need to hire a new staff, new management, and simply hand them the money, and let them work outside the box, including not having to use IBM products by default, even deeply discounted IBM products. Perhaps *especially not* discounted IBM products.
Yes, Agile (if done correctly) is one methodology that may help them with certain problems, but you need full buy-in from the executives and product owners. If IBM management still expects the same sort of planning and budgeting and milestones they got with waterfall, then Agile is never going to deliver on what it does best. Then it will be a bunch of people working out their waterfall plan in a "standup" where everyone sits around a table. There are certain things an Agile development cycle isn't going to give a executive, and if they can't handle that, then it's going to fail.
A lot of the people who work for an IBM or a big company like that are institutionalized, much like prison inmates become. They speak a certain language, they think a certain way. That doesn't preclude individuals from breaking that conditioning, but if they are surrounded by people who think the same way, then the group will return to old ways of thinking, perhaps with a new buzzword.
IBM needs to step back and actually change their culture. They have a lot to offer simply by insisting on profitability and having decent accounting structure that many startups dearly need. But they can't just turn their existing development teams into Agile teams by fiat. I think the best way to assure that is perhaps for IBM to almost become a venture fund or an overall holding organization for these teams where they provide adult supervision, but they don't tell you how to build your sand castles.
The problem is that these Republicans are seeing the economic requirements of something like Kyoto as an economic problem which disadvantages the United States, which is most certainly does.
The real problem isn't that these people deny climate change or even science, the problem is that we've been hearing about "peak oil", "population bombs" and the like for so long that these folks are hearing people crying wolf. So they view it, not as a scientific problem, but a political tempest in a teapot that has been manufactured to get Democratic party votes. And thus they view using this BS as fair game politically, because in the end, that's what they think they're getting.