Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008 - (Page 72)

Swaine’s Flames by Michael Swaine Gates and the Doomsday Seed Vault IS BILL GATES HATCHING a doomsday plot to eradicate all life on Earth? F. William Engdahl isn’t sure. You experience doubts of a different kind as the unmarked helicopter sets you down on this godforsaken rock in the Barents Sea midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. As you stumble out onto the frozen ground, the merciless wind rips at your parka and the cold cuts to the bone. This island strikes you profoundly as a dead place: Even the sky seems stripped of color and as far as the eye can see, there is no living creature. Except for that scruffy-looking penguin smoking a cigar. “You gonna stand there admiring the scenery?” the penguin asks. “Because it’s no skin off my beak but the bus leaves in about two seconds and I’m gonna be on it.” “Bus?” “Figure of speech.” He points a flipper in the direction of the mountainside defects, he’s your guide and your only human—or looming over your shoulder. “It’s this way. But we gotta walk. C’mon.” whatever—contact here in the Svalbard Global Seed Minutes later you are out of the wind but no warmer. You are under the per- Vault. mafrost of this island called Spitzbergen, vertically 426 feet above mean sea level And with that thought I’m going to leave you there and thus on dry ground even if the ice caps melt, horizontally 393 frigid feet deep under the permafrost, examining the specially inside the mountain. You have still seen no living thing, with the exception of the wrapped seeds from all around the world, while I conpenguin, and this puzzles you. sider the question, why is Bill Gates donating $30 mil“What’s the deal on security here? We passed through two blast-proof doors, lion to this project of the Global Crop Diversity Trust? each with motion sensors, through two airlocks, I know the walls are steelMaybe it’s a dumb question. Some might consider reinforced concrete a meter thick, but there are no guards. What’s up with that?” it a wise precaution to set up a secure vault to store An insufferably smug expression comes over the penguin’s face. “Lucky for you, seeds for millions of varieties of plants against the posyou got Tux the Linux penguin to get you through all that security, huh? Yeah, we in sibility of their becoming extinct in the event of a disthe Linux community keep a close eye on anything Bill Gates is up to, especially aster like runaway global warming, a massive meteor hush-hush stuff like this vault.” strike, nuclear or biological war, or pollution of the “I don’t know how hush-hush it is. I heard about it on BBC radio.” Seeing the pen- genepool from transgenic plants. guin bristle at being contradicted, you quickly add, “But the absence of guards?” But I first stumbled on this vault in an essay by “Don’t need ’em. This place is so remote the electronic and physical barriers are economist F. William Engdahl, author of Seeds of all they need. Of course I had no trouble getting through any security Microsoft’s Destruction, which I think raises appropriate conboss can set up.” cerns about genetic manipulation of food crops by a Electronic indeed. The place looks like Bill Gates’ bedroom. Not that you’ve ever few powerful corporations. Engdahl sees the Vault, seen Bill Gates’ bedroom. But you can imagine. “But isn’t there a village on the island?” though, as part of a Strangelovian plot involving “Under two thousand people. Probably all bought and paid for by the Gates Hitler’s eugenics scientists, Planned Parenthood Foundation. Rice milk?” founder Margaret Sanger, former UN Secretary “Beg pardon?” General Kofi Annan, and Jorio Dauster, the former “You want rice milk? Perrier? Disaronno on the rocks? Pickled herring?” president of the Brazilian Coffee Institute. You look around for any suggestion of a refrigerator. Although it occurs to you, I’d go under the Spitzbergen permafrost before I’d given that the temperature in this vault is a brisk –20 Celsius, that installing a refrig- accompany Engdahl on that trip. erator in this setting would be like—that it would be a joke. “Do you actually have rice milk?” “Do you see any of that crap here?” he snaps, poking you with the cigar. “Jeez, I was just trying to be gracious.” Michael Swaine “And succeeding marvelously,” you reply. Whatever his shortcomings, and Editor-at-Large there’s a phrase you might want to eliminate from your vocabulary for the duration mike@swaine.com of the visit, along with shortcake, shortstop, and Burgess Meredith, whatever his 72 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l March 2008 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Social Networks and Software Development Conversations Detecting Bugs in Safety-Critical Code Change Code Without Fear Continuous Integration and Performance Testing Wt: A Web Toolkit Automating Release Notifications The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008

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