Some undergraduates I know who were working in Tim (Gardner, the guy in the article)'s lab pointed out that their little tabletop fuel cell powered by bacteria did work, but produced _microwatts_ of power.
Tim's great (he gave an impassioned sermon on 'The End of Oil'... in his nonlinear dynamics class!) and he's in it for the long haul, but they're not there yet.
Someone I know is trying to engineer bacteria to produce proteins via an alternative pathway of her own design. The idea is that she could control the amount of cellular resources the bacterium invests in producing proteins for its own reproduction, versus the amount it spends producing some economically useful target protein.
Anyway, when she turns on a particular gene that shuts down the bacteria's ability to produce proteins via the usual pathway, it takes less than twenty four hours before her bacterial culture is completely taken over by bacteria that have mutated the gene to get around the shutdown...
This is strictly a non sequitur, but there in fact is an event where (as its organizers put it) "Anyone can run flat out on a public highway!" It's called the Silver State Classic Challenge. See www.silverstateclassic.com
I found a passage in a novel that explains why mass actions like the electrohippie's 'electronic sit-in' have always given me the creeps--no matter how much I agree or disagree with the goals of the protesters. (And, in this case, I just don't know. Free trade is a Good Thing, and I am no enemy of globalization, but people have painted the WTO as both the apotheosis of big government and as a convenient mechanism for corporate interests to make an end run around meaningful debates on, say, intellectual property.) But even though the electrohippies aren't actually marching anywhere--
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.
When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. 'You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?' She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.
(I posted this as a reply above but, oops, I think it should be a toplevel comment.)
I find this passage useful for thinking about protest marches.
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.
When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. 'You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?' She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.
Let me mention something that must have occurred to Stallman (and others) like twenty years ago.
But first, I agree that Microsoft should be broken up. Right now it's too easy for them to use the ubiquity of Office to prop up Windows sales; it's too easy for them to refuse to license VBA to a potential Office competitor; it's too easy for them to design Windows to give an unfair advantage to their own applications software--it's a self-reinforcing web of schemes to prop up Windows forever, giving them the ability, maybe, to dictate things to the world like The One True personal secure e-banking client. Which no one can really interoperate with unless they pay Microsoft.
Breaking them up functionally would at least cut the links of that web, leading perhaps to things like Office for Linux. It wouldn't necessarily prevent the OS or Office companies from abusing their respective monopolies--so maybe Microsoft should be split into clones--but it's a minimally invasive start.
Anyway. People have suggested that Microsoft be forced to publish their file formats and other interoperability standards.
I think that's a bad idea. How could you legislate it? How would you define which file formats are important enough to require opening? Legalistically! But then twenty years from now, people will roll their eyes at what people thought a 'file format' was way back in 2000, and the rigid rule will be seen as hampering technology. And then there will be a rush to change the law, and software companies will point to how important they are to the economy, and how they should have input; they will be given input, and the rule will end up a stick they use to beat each other over the head with.
Bah.
Instead, we need to let open standards acquire the standing of common-sense morality. Really.
I mean, the evil of closed standards is a given in the academic/old-school Internet/open-source world, but not always in the world at large. We think we have reasons to see it that way; we believe that closed standards invite abuse. Much of the rest of the world hasn't had reason to care--until computing threatened to upset everything, mostly via the Internet.
When society organized itself in new ways in the past, new moral orders came into being. When municipal governments became large and bureaucratic in the Industrial Revolution, people realized that there was 'nepotism'--something as natural as doing favors for your family could become a corrupting influence. When the printing press came around, people realized that somebody had to retain the mostly exclusive right to copy texts. We take those principles for granted now, but they had to be invented.
Hopefully by the time computing is really ubiquitous, people will have realized that society can't stand for the corrupting influence of closed standards, and using closed standards will be come to be seen as a bit sleazy and antisocial. I hope. (And then open standards will become a legal principle, taught in law schools!)
I don't mean we should just sit around and hope that society changes in this way. More that Stallman and the GNU folks may deserve a lot of credit for creating the GPL, which allowed a particular part of the community of people who believe in open standards to get together, become strong, and to one day prove to the larger world that open standards really are an important social good.
Or not. At least I hope I don't sound too much like Mr. Katz with my handwaving generalities and talk of sweeping social change.
Rich K
Another thought. Actually, I think there's something to the idea that open computing standards should become a principle taught in law schools. A law requiring open file formats or whatever would be clumsy and stupid and observed in the breach. A legal principle gets debated intelligently by law students and judges and in law journals and becomes part of legal reasoning. You could then sue somebody for having closed standards, without Congress or regulatory bureaucrats having gotten their grubby hands in the mix! I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Some undergraduates I know who were working in Tim (Gardner, the guy in the article)'s lab pointed out that their little tabletop fuel cell powered by bacteria did work, but produced
_microwatts_ of power.
Tim's great (he gave an impassioned sermon on 'The End of Oil'... in his nonlinear dynamics class!) and he's in it for the long haul, but they're not there yet.
Someone I know is trying to engineer bacteria to produce proteins via an alternative pathway of her own design. The idea is that she could control the amount of cellular resources the bacterium invests in producing proteins for its own reproduction, versus the amount it spends producing some economically useful target protein.
Anyway, when she turns on a particular gene that shuts down the bacteria's ability to produce proteins via the usual pathway, it takes less than twenty four hours before her bacterial culture is completely taken over by bacteria that have mutated the gene to get around the shutdown...
This is strictly a non sequitur, but there in fact is an event where (as its organizers put it) "Anyone can run flat out on a public highway!" It's called the Silver State Classic Challenge. See www.silverstateclassic.com
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
(I posted this as a reply above but, oops, I think it should be a toplevel comment.)From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
But first, I agree that Microsoft should be broken up. Right now it's too easy for them to use the ubiquity of Office to prop up Windows sales; it's too easy for them to refuse to license VBA to a potential Office competitor; it's too easy for them to design Windows to give an unfair advantage to their own applications software--it's a self-reinforcing web of schemes to prop up Windows forever, giving them the ability, maybe, to dictate things to the world like The One True personal secure e-banking client. Which no one can really interoperate with unless they pay Microsoft.
Breaking them up functionally would at least cut the links of that web, leading perhaps to things like Office for Linux. It wouldn't necessarily prevent the OS or Office companies from abusing their respective monopolies--so maybe Microsoft should be split into clones--but it's a minimally invasive start.
Anyway. People have suggested that Microsoft be forced to publish their file formats and other interoperability standards.
I think that's a bad idea. How could you legislate it? How would you define which file formats are important enough to require opening? Legalistically! But then twenty years from now, people will roll their eyes at what people thought a 'file format' was way back in 2000, and the rigid rule will be seen as hampering technology. And then there will be a rush to change the law, and software companies will point to how important they are to the economy, and how they should have input; they will be given input, and the rule will end up a stick they use to beat each other over the head with.
Bah.
Instead, we need to let open standards acquire the standing of common-sense morality. Really.
I mean, the evil of closed standards is a given in the academic/old-school Internet/open-source world, but not always in the world at large. We think we have reasons to see it that way; we believe that closed standards invite abuse. Much of the rest of the world hasn't had reason to care--until computing threatened to upset everything, mostly via the Internet.
When society organized itself in new ways in the past, new moral orders came into being. When municipal governments became large and bureaucratic in the Industrial Revolution, people realized that there was 'nepotism'--something as natural as doing favors for your family could become a corrupting influence. When the printing press came around, people realized that somebody had to retain the mostly exclusive right to copy texts. We take those principles for granted now, but they had to be invented.
Hopefully by the time computing is really ubiquitous, people will have realized that society can't stand for the corrupting influence of closed standards, and using closed standards will be come to be seen as a bit sleazy and antisocial. I hope. (And then open standards will become a legal principle, taught in law schools!)
I don't mean we should just sit around and hope that society changes in this way. More that Stallman and the GNU folks may deserve a lot of credit for creating the GPL, which allowed a particular part of the community of people who believe in open standards to get together, become strong, and to one day prove to the larger world that open standards really are an important social good.
Or not. At least I hope I don't sound too much like Mr. Katz with my handwaving generalities and talk of sweeping social change.
Rich K
Another thought. Actually, I think there's something to the idea that open computing standards should become a principle taught in law schools. A law requiring open file formats or whatever would be clumsy and stupid and observed in the breach. A legal principle gets debated intelligently by law students and judges and in law journals and becomes part of legal reasoning. You could then sue somebody for having closed standards, without Congress or regulatory bureaucrats having gotten their grubby hands in the mix! I think.