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... then you know it's a load of manure.

Check out some of their other predictions:

by 2015 a G20 nation will see its critical infrastructure disrupted by online sabotage. Nope, wrong; didn't happen. I suppose there are still a couple of months left... :)

By 2015, automation will cut 25 percent of IT labor hours. No, don't think that's happened.

And the ones they got right or mostly-right were timid and obvious predictions anyway.

"Texas Instruments comes on [a scheduled conference call] along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... "

After discovering a flaw in one of Texas Instruments' RFID tags, researchers from RSA Labs and Johns Hopkins University say they plan to continue their testing with exploits against other RFID equipment.

Doesn't look like the secret everyone thinks it is. Note the date. And this just from a few seconds with Google.

Not too long ago two of IT's top original thinkers and innovators, Jeff Hawkins and Ray Kurzweil, appeared at an MIT emerging tech conference to discuss artificial intelligence. Both see computing mirroring the functions of the human brain. But they disagree on how fast scientists and engineers will develop technologies that exhibit the most complex cerebral traits of humans: self-awareness, emotion, and even a sense of one's own mortality.

Because of technology's exponential growth, Kurzweil sees emotion-laden, self-aware machines being developed by mid-century.

Hawkins' view on technology patterned after the human brain is more limited than Kurzweil's prognostications, saying such artificial beings will take centuries, not decades, to create. The brain is just too complex to replicate that quickly. In this video, Hawkins says robots that run amok, will remain science fiction for a very long time. In a recent magazine interview, Hawkins discusses his theories on building an intelligent machine.

Here's a series of podcasts of Kurzweil's vision of a computer that reasons and shows emotion.

Here's a Q&A with Jeff Hawkins from May 2006 that asks him to better explain how his theory works and how it can be applied.

http://www.cioinsight.com/slideshow/0,1206,s=26924 &a=195461,00.asp

Check out the Microsoft results. Even though they rank mediocre in almost every question (average between 50-60%, though sometimes up to a solid C+), 80% of vendors said that, given a choice, they'd still choose Microsoft. Strange O.o

According to the list ms went up. They were 31 in 2005 and now are 24.

http://www.cioinsight.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205, l=&s=300&a=195461&po=24,00.asp

Strange, is it snowing in hell?

Well, according to the page, 17% of the companies questioned dealt with Apple. So I assume it's a case where not too many people do, but those who do are pretty happy.

I was amused by the individual rankings, though. Apple's highest scores came in "increasing revenue", "solves problems", and "high quality." Apple's lowest scores were "costs", "return on investment" (related to cost), and "flexible and responsive." In others words, they love Macs but they think they cost too much.

From a Q&A CIO Insight published with web content expert Gerry McGovern: "It's easy to get carried away with this Wired magazine view of 'All You Need is Web 2.0,' but in some ways the very technology that is meant to solve problems merely makes people more emotional---not more reasonable. We ultimately do a disservice to society by creating this euphoria about what technology can really deliver." The full piece can be found at: http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,2052119, 00.asp

This is why there needs to be greater accountabiility and control over chain-of-custody procedures when it comes to e-voting. There is no way the U.S. is going to revert back to paper at this point, and there is also no way to make any of these machines fully tamper-proof. To keep integrity in the voting process, we have to start holding peoples' feet to the fire. And we need poll volunteers who know a thing or two about how to operate these machines correctly.

If you really wanna know how deep the e-voting rabbit hole goes, check this out...

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,2003163, 00.asp

Umm why do you think the average virtualization rule of thumb for virtualization is 4x vm's / cpu, when the average utilization of those individually is much less than 25% (actually around 5-10%)? Hello it's headroom, you don't dump bazzillions onto one and run it upto 100% utilization at all time, you run it from 10% up to 50% leaving you ample headroom.

Businesses buy excess superfast machines all the time, majority of businesses in datacenters lease their equipment. Every three years you get to buy a system 3x as fast for an application that was having acceptable response time. A datacenter having 1000x old 700mhz systems, when they go to replace them they can buy 1000x new 4ghz systems, do a massive consolidation effort getting different apps to try and play nice with different libraries or you can virtualize them onto a smaller ammount of servers.

According to gartner the average utilization rate is ~5-10% for x86 servers, the average rate is so damn low saying 75% could be virtualized is a conservative statement, not an aggressive one.

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,1914946, 00.asp
http://www.webwereld.nl/articles/41675/gartner-ene rgy-costs-at-forefront-of-it.html

I wonder if Ellison understands the industry or just makes stuff up as he goes along. CIO Insight Magazine named Red Hat #1 for offering value to its customers two years in a row. Oracle doesn't even seem to appear in the top 10.

It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to such an offer.

Actually, there are plenty of RFID chips on the market which respond with non-static data. Some have field-programmable memory, others use encrypted challenge-response systems to autheticate tags (such as the ExxonMobil Speedpass). Of course, these systems are not without their own problems.

So someone's finally doing something with Dorothy Denning's Geo-Encryption and location based authentication ideas from a couple of years ago.

Wake me when Woz has an original, interesting idea...

hmm...

In addition, spammers would try to workaround those taxes, and possibly succeed, just like they forge the headers of spam they send today. As a result, legimate users would pay the tax and spammers would send the spam for free. Adding some heavy-weight bureaucracy to the problem (tax system) isn't the solution.

The idea in A Bounty on Spammers article seems like a one possible way to go. It's not perfect because it doesn't get rid of the wasted bandwidth immediatly as it doesn't outlaw spam, only spam that isn't clearly marked as spam. I'm not entirely sure about the $10000 bounty the article suggests. I think it should be proportional to the number of spams sent -- say, $5 per spam sent. And make that $50 per spam sent if the spammer tried to forge headers! It would really hurt to send one million spams with forged headers unlike today.

Once we have [ADV:] in every spam we get, we can modify SMTP servers to return "555 Advertisements not allowed" if one tries to send a spam and save some wasted bandwidth.

Alternatively, once we get micropayments work, we can allow spammers to send spam that transfers some money to the reader once he reads the spam. Because sending spam doesn't cost anything, the spammer could choose to pay some small amount of money to get the receiver to read the spam.

You have 25 paid advertisements in your inbox. If you read all of those, you'll reveice $2 to your MicroPayments Account. What do you want to do? [Read advertisements] [Remove advertisements]"

Media companies would like the internet to be heavily regulated so that things like copyright law can be strongly enforced, whereas tech companies recognize that the unregulated nature of the internet is the very reason that all sorts of innovations can happen on the network. If you think about it, things like napster were very innovative. Never before was it possible to try out new music. I for one never really enjoyed listening to cds in cd stores, trying to decide if the album was worth buying. With napster, though, I could sit in the privacy of my home and try anything.

I think that we have not nearly come close to exploring the possibilities that the internet can offer us. As user interfaces improve and mobile devices become more ubiquituous (i can never spell that, sorry not a native english speaker...kuro5hin has spell checking...) new innovations will spring up that nobody can think of right now...

Did you actually *read* the proposal? If not, you should. It explains why legislation is part of the solution. He's separated the parts of the solution that code fix from the parts that people fix.

They missed the link to his idea

This idea means licensing them so that they are properly registered, Meaning we know who they are and where they live.

Meaning that they can be billed for use of service, etc. and jail those not properly licensed.

Meaning that we can send bill collectors and tax collectors hunting after them.

The bottom line is that IF we can make it profitable to go after these guys, someone will make a business of it. We just go to figure a way how.

Then we get to use the scum of society, such as bill collectors and tax collectors, and turn them to some good, going after spammers.

And we can use the money collected to subsidise the cost of something useful.

Now Lessig has also proposed something similar to this:

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,3959,533225,0 0.asp

Which essentially means that there are more eyeballs to track the scum down. And a financial reward to do so.

The twist in my proposal is to mach spam have a cost even if sent "legally" - [lots of states have finance problems], and make the penalties truly painful if done illegally. I want to set my own fees for receiving spam

Is this the same Lessig that is totally clueless about spam, and proposes silly ideas like this?

I seriously doubt that William Raduchel will be needing food stamps anytime soon.