Re: Lisp is Sin

Cameron MacKinnon wrote:
>
> So you're envisioning some sort of giant organization, like the Nobel
> Prize committee, but a million times bigger, presumably supported by
> taxation? And inventors would have to hope they get noticed, and that
> the judges don't show favouritism along country or zaibatsu lines? That
> sounds like a big, expensive, easily corruptible drag on the market to me.
[..]
>
> The current system, for all its warts, has the advantage of bringing me
> an awful lot of neat stuff for cheap, having stimulated the greatest era
> of invention that mankind has ever known. The costs of regulation are
> comparatively low, and borne by the companies that benefit. I don't
> think your command-economy solutions would be either cheaper or more
> stimulative than the status quo. This probably isn't the place for this
> debate, either -- that's what slashdot is for.

Quick antidote to the above misinformation... I'm not going to spend
much time on this, so I'll just use the words of Steele, Gabriel, Bill
Gates's dad, John McCarthy, former Intel head honcho Andy Grove, Noam
Chomsky, etc.

(Of course, corporations, patent offices, gov't, etc, are all "command
economies," with bureacratic appendages.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_economy



"2.10 Early Common Lisp
"If there were no consolidation in the Lisp community at this point,
Lisp might have died. ARPA was not interested in funding a variety of
needlessly competing and gratuitously different Lisp projects. And
there was no commercial arena - yet."
-- Steele, Gabriel in "The Evolution of Lisp" (uncut)


"Let's talk about the question of why people are wealthy. There is a
myth that it's a function of enormous personal attributes. There's a
myth that achieving wealth is a function of personal intelligence and
energy and thus that the product of that intelligence and energy being
wealth is the sole and exclusive possession of the person who developed
and earned it. And that myth is so egregious. It's just egregious.
[...]
"The individual wealth which is generated in this economy is, in my
judgment, and I doubt that there is much that anyone could disagree
with about this, is a function of the innovative businesses which are
created as a result of federal research. But you understand that the
people who benefit from that research get it free. [...] So, if
somebody starts a software company or a biotechnology company, or even
if somebody owns a building in downtown Washington which you rent to
those people, it starts from the same place. It starts from this
incredible research activity which is going on with federal money."
-- Bill Gates Sr., 2003
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/template.cfm?PubID=900584


"Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa,
have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new
weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to
the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to
basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent
advances as the Web search technologies that Google and others have
introduced.

"The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer
scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be
long-term consequences for the nation's economy. They are accusing the
Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in
fostering America's lead in computer and communications technologies.
[..]
"John McCarthy founded the Stanford artificial research lab in 1964,
helping to turn it into a wellspring for some of Silicon Valley's most
important companies, from Xerox Parc to Apple to Intel.

"'American leadership in computer science and in applications has
benefited more from the longer-term work,' Mr. McCarthy said, 'than
from the deliverables.'"
-- John Markoff, New York Times in "Pentagon Redirects Its Research
Dollars"
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/technology/02darpa.html?ex=1270094400&en=6ca69efefeb9c0dc&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt


"It should be borne in mind that 'military spending' does not mean just
military spending. A great deal of it is high-tech R&D. Virtually the
entire 'new economy' has relied heavily on the military cover to
socialize risk and cost and privatize profit, often after many decades:
computers and electronics generally, telecommunications and the
Internet, satellites, the aeronautical industry (hence tourism, the
largest 'service industry'), containerization (hence contemporary
trade), computer-controlled machine tools, and a great deal more. Alan
Greenspan and others like to orate about how all of this is a tribute
to the grand entrepreneurial spirit and consumer choice in free
markets. That's true of the late marketing stage, but far less so in
the more significant R&D stage. Much the same is true in the
biology-based sectors of industry, though different pretexts are used.
The record goes far back, but these mechanisms to sustain the advanced
industrial economy became far more significant after World War II."
[..]
"In the 1950s, computers were not marketable, so the public paid 100
percent of the cost of research, development and production through the
Pentagon. By the 1960s, they were beginning to be marketable in the
commercial market, so the public participation declined to about 50
percent. The idea is that the public pays the costs, the corporations
make the profits. Public subsidy, private profit; that's what we call
free enterprise. By the 1980s there were very substantial new
expenditures required for advances in fifth-generation computers and
new fancy parallel processing systems, etc. So the public's share in
the costs went up very substantially through Star Wars and the
Pentagon, etc. That's the way it works."
[..]
"Well, that's what the intellectual property rights are for. In fact
there's a name for it in economic history. Friedrich List, famous
German political economist in the 19th century, who was actually
borrowing from Andrew Hamilton, called it 'kicking away the ladder.'
First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away
those procedures so that other people can't do it.

"Intellectual property rights has very little to do with individual
initiative. I mean, Einstein didn't have any intellectual property
rights on relativity theory. Science and innovation is carried out by
people that are interested in it. That's the way science works.
There's an effort in very recent years to commercialize it, like they
commercialize everything else. So you don't do it because it's
exciting and challenging, and you want to find out something new, and
you want the world to benefit from it. You do it because maybe you can
make some money out of it. I mean that's a... you can make your own
judgment about the moral value. I think it's extremely cheapening,
but, also destructive of initiative and development.

"And the profits don't go back to individual inventors. It's a very
well studied topic. Take one that's really well studied, MIT's
involved: computer controlled machine tools, a very fundamental
component of the economy. Well, there's a very good study of this by
David Noble, a leading political economist. What he pointed out and
discovered is the techniques were invented by some small guy, you know
working in his garage somewhere in, I think, Michigan. Actually when
the MIT mechanical engineering department learned about it they picked
them up and they developed them and extended them and so on. And then
the corporations came in and picked them up from them, and finally it
became a core part of US industry. Well, what happened to the guy who
invented it? He's still probably working in his garage in Michigan, or
wherever it is. And that's very typical.

-- MIT prof. Noam Chomsky


"In the case of steel, U.S. companies never recovered, dropping from
nearly 90 percent of worldwide market share to roughly 10 percent. The
semiconductor industry, Intel's core business, faced similar challenges
in the 1980s, when it began its drop from 90 percent to 40 percent of
the world market, Grove said, before aggressive trade and other U.S.
policies helped it recover and stabilize at about 50 percent."
http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/10/1010grovepinnacor.html


Tayssir

.

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