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No thanks to yet another way to drive up the cost of free software. How else can Microsoft make distribution on shiny disks competitive again? Patent extortions? That's a whole other issue that strangely has help from ATT in Texas.

Thank you, hairyfeet, for pointing out the obvious anti-competitive nature of pay by the minute internet service. You might want to mention that cable companies already have all the bandwith anyone could want but they use 99% for pay per view movies and other rip off services.

Now, let's look at some possible solutions. Municiple networks and Open Spectrum are winners that make entertainment and telcos very nervous.

Municiple wires work well in Tacoma, Washington which only has 250,000 people, so it should work just about anywhere and it should. Almost all US cable networks were built with monopoly protection and have that obligation to the public.

Open Specturm and free software are really the only way to insure free speech in the future. If you haven't figured it out yet, non free software and network control are two sides of the same coin. It's about the power to shove adverts in your face and control public opinion about issues, just like the good old days of broadcast and switched networks. Only free software gives you control of your computer and only free networks let you share news and opinions with your neighbors. The rest resembles the old USSR more than anything else, the publisher's paradise. We already own what we need to stay free, all we lack is the collective knowledge and will to take it.

The authors of this work may believe that an open Internet will succeed on its merits alone. I don't. However we arrive at it, Network Neutrality is simply not negotiable.

Thank you for your partial quote of the document and your insightful commentary. If anything, "specialized services" are the things that might be granted an exception to rule by a liberal government. Neutral networks are what should be mandated but, as pointed out above, only a tiny fraction of available bandwith is given to customers as "open internet" if the likes of Comcast can be described that way. The rest of it is utilized as wasteful push services. Media companies simply won't give up their lucrative and powerful position as information gatekeepers unless forced by real competition in physical media (hint - giving a movie company ownership of a monopoly cable service is the opposite of a free market) or we are finally granted open spectrum. The FCC should keep itself busy busting spammers rather than upholding 110 year old spectrum laws that no longer make sense. Now, would someone be kind enough to paste the actual text of the article, "On Advancing the Open Internet by Distinguishing it from Specialized Services"? Scribd wants me to have a Facebook page to download the document and I can't read it through whatever nasty software they serve it with.

Oh poor little bankers and telcom monopolists, cry me a river because they might be expected to do the public a service and keep their word. We can only imagine what the world would look like if $23 trillion dollars were spent on education, parks, housing, medicine, and reasonable regulation of the predatory industries that have left the US fat, cancer prone, broke and ignorant. Telco companies are in a position to refuse this money and it is in their best interest to leave customers paying per byte of third world service. It is in every one else's best interest to regulate the piss out of these theives.

It is instructive to study what happened to the last broadband stimulus. Had these vultures carried through with their promisses, the US would already have the best network service in the world. Instead, they pocketed the $200 billion dollars that we all gave them and have done trillions of dollars in damages to the US economy. The tide was so turned in the 90's, that by the time the Clinton administration was over, the US government was overseeing corrupt auctions of spectrum for cell phones to the highest bidder. Yes, we now have cheap, 3rd world grade cell phone service as well as copper lines but we could have had much more. The greedy people responsible for this fraud deserve jailtime, not more money.

The public has a right to regulate these companies because they make use of public assets. You own public servitude and the public should put it's regulatory foot down on the Bells with it. More importantly, we own the spectrum which can and should be liberated. All of our communications goals can be met this way. Let the telcos refuse the money, we don't need them.

It may be reasonable for a court to order a wiretap from an ISP, but it should only be for a specific person and for a limited time and done under reasonable, sworn testimony, suspicion of real crime. That's the legitimate standard set by the fourth amendment. Keeping tabs on everyone is obviously unreasonable - it is expensive and potentially abusive. Private interests should not even be allowed to do the same and there are good ways to demand it.

The kind of laws that people demand are the opposite, that ISPs not be allowed to keep this kind of information because it violates the privacy of users. Almost all US ISPs enjoy some kind of government protection from competition, be it public servitude monopoly, frequency allocation monopolies or other exclusive use of public resources. This exclusivity can be used if government does not have the courage to do what is right for moral reasons alone. Open spectrum will eliminate the kind of centralization that makes it possible for government to demand records keeping in the first place, but it is becoming clear that surveillance and control are the reasons the US has such crappy networks.

Government censorship of broadcast was a scary and unAmerican experiment justified by judicious use of scarce frequency space. Technology has removed that scarcity and the censorship can no longer be justified.

This is checkmate for traditional broadcast and telco by Google, M$ and other tech companies. Watch for all manner of new cellphones and free internet to flow from this decision. When those companies die, the rest of the spectrum will be liberated too.

Yes, M$ should be mentioned here. Given the federally approved success of their Slog against Yahoo, we should know who really carries influence in Washington. The result, this time, is good as long as everyone gets fair access to these newly unlicensed frequencies.

Because you own the spectrum and there's no longer a valid technical reason to grant it exclusively. Government granted monopolies on spectrum is a primary internet regulation someone that believes in free markets should oppose.

Laying cable and fiber in other people's back yards and public property is a privilege. Those granted that privilege must accept public regulation in return for the public servitude. Think about that for a while and you realize that the Internet is already highly regulated but the regulations do not always serve the public interest. Common carrier and net neutrality is the least the public can ask in return for exclusive use of public property. The public can and should also demand competition in wired service. Someone who believes in free markets would lower barriers to entry and use of wired networks.

You should make the link between David Reed and Open Spectrum a little more clear. His writing on the subject is worth reading anyway. You might also mention Vanu Bose and his little company, which has been mentioned here along the founder's advocacy of Open Spectrum .

David Reed has a nice collection of open spectrum articles. Of the two experts here, Reed looks real.

They won't win by sitting on their hands and had better get moving. They tried that back in US back in the 80s and lost big time. It has taken ATT the last 20 years to lie cheat and steal their way back to government protected monopoly status and they are about to lose it all again. Your government is not the only one feeling redfaced about the pathetic network capacity they got in return for $200 billion and a lot of promisses. The next monopoly break up is not going to leave pieces large enough to grasp - it's going to be spectrum liberation, and that will be the end of all traditional broadcast and telcos. The more they piss their customers off, the sooner customers will realize what a fraud traditional telco is.

The problem you should have is the waste of spectrum on broadcast. Real change must come sooner or later.

Commercials as programs will be the only way to advert sponsor fund programs when NBC and friends are just another site on the internet (as they should be) and copyright law has been reformed for digital freedom. Will anyone watch? I doubt it. Every highschool and college in the world makes plays - these will be transformed into regular programming and distributed for free over the liberated spectrum.

Both Apple and ATT have non free practices at the core of their business. It is not surprising that they would each pretend to be more customer friendly than they really are. The iPhone suffers restrictions from both companies that are integral to each company's business model.

It would be better to have free software devices that could use free spectrum. This would remove the ability of others to restrict your communications and such things are vital if we are to undo the damage broadcast media has done to democracy.

There is nothing modest about broadcast power requirements and antennas. They are some of the tallest structures built by man and they require hundreds of kilowatts. They also require special technical knowledge to operate. Now compare that to the cost and ubiquity of wifi. All radio could be like that.

These issues and more are well covered in the link I provided and it's author knows what he's talking about.

There is no technical excuse for spectrum regulation in it's current form. If wimax has faults, the cause is poor spectrum allocation. Why is it that we still have broadcast TV and AM radio? Nothing short of spectrum liberation is just or acceptable.

Why do people think that hotspots will die because of increased cell phone coverage? Does anyone really think that the winners of the most expensive spectrum fraud ever want to do more than charge you every nickel and dime they can per byte? I don't and as long as the same players are not allowed to dominate the wired network, hotspots will be a cheaper and more convenient way to get on line when you travel.

The FCC is no longer needed, only open spectrum will give you the service you want.

See, Reed, Bose, and The Prometheus Project for a sensible way to end government control of a public resource that's not really scarce.

That should not relieve incumbents from their regulatory burdens. The money and power they have was gained by government protection and for the last 20 years it's been done against better technical advice. At the very least the public servitude should be protected from vandalism and other crimes. At best, their infrastructure should be considered public so that others can connect to it without fear. Open spectrum will kill the economic advantages of land lines but we must not allow incumbents to continue owning those few places there's a good business case for it.

You're thinking of Reed's Law (it is also mentioned in TFA).

http://www.reed.com/gfn/

In the original vision of the Internet everything is supposed to be a server, so we're back at square one.

Creating a system where one has to opt in to have a routable IP is treading on a slippery slope. Soon after, you might need a special permit to have a server, and before you know it we're back to gatekeepers and the telephone network.

Why shouldn't non-geeks have routable IPs? How many future Shawn Fannings, DVD Jons, or Linus Torvalds' would we lose through such restriction? The Internet should stay as connected as possible, so that the innovation and creativity at the ends stays unencumbered and free. Just think about how long it took telephone companies to implement call-waiting, *69, etc. Also check out the End-to-end Arguments in System Design, it's a classic.

Considering that radio communications is one of the most highly regulated aspects of the economy, I don't see how this is much of a challenge to libertarians.

You can't have a decent transmitter without getting licensed by the government. Most licenses are expensive. The least-regulated bands with decent range are the ham radio bands, and looky that, ham radio is the fallback in emergencies when everything else fails.

Another poster expressed frustration that the FCC puts such a tight rein on ultrawideband, because UWB does a lot better with interference from rain and so on. It also gets great range for a given amount of power. So of course they limit it to miniscule power with a range of 30 feet. That's government for ya. If it weren't for the FCC and government copyright enforcement,
MP3 players by now would have UWB transceivers hooked into a mesh network covering the city, with microphones included for podcasts, and communications would be fine as long as the AA supply held out.

The FCC was necessary when it started, but technology now makes all these restrictions just get in the way of progress. For more on the technical details, check out David Reed's OpenSpectrum site.

Reed's OpenSpectrum site has technical papers arguing for the lack of spectrum scarcity with modern protocols..."when we begin measuring the utility of the spectrum in terms of its information capacity and options to connect, rather than the number of frequency channels, the scarcity argument does not apply."

The last few decades have seen a tremendous growth
in wireless communication. The most popular examples are
cellular voice and data networks and satellite communication
systems. These and other similar applications have moti-
vated researchers to extend Shannon's information theory for
a single-user channel to some that involve communication
among multiple users. A few such examples are the multiple-
access channel, the broadcast channel, and the interference
channel. The exact capacity region is, however, known in the
most general case only for the multiple-access channel, while
the broadcast capacity region is known only for few specific
channels, like the additive white Gaussian noise channel and
the deterministic channel [7], and even fewer results are available for the interference channel [23]. It should be further
noted that the above applications as well as the channel models
used for analyzing them involve mainly single-hop wireless
communication.

The explosion in value in those cases is actually a result of Reed's Law, which states that the connectivity value of Group Forming Networks (GFNs) grows at 2^n

See Reed's Locus, "That Sneaky Exponential",
http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html

When I was working on clearing the pioneer-preference hurdles for the first Ka-band license from the FCC the main problem was getting people to realize that with two high gain Ka-band antennas pointed at each other, you're not talking your normal "orbital slot". With phased array antennas you can beam-switch very rapidly and, with a large dish combined with a large phased array, the spot on the ground can be very small. It actually makes sense to have a number of such satellites in a small sector of the sky. This is related to what David P. Reed has been trying to say to the guys at the higher levels of the FCC for a while. Just getting it across to the lower level technical staff was hard enough during the first license.

Delivered-To: dfarber+@ux13.sp.cs.cmu.edu
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 09:59:40 -0400
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] OUTSIDE THE BOX: Wi-Fi Is Dead, Long Live Wi-Max
X-Sender: mail.reed.com:dpreed@127.0.0.1
To: dave@farber.net, ip@v2.listbox.com

The idea that WiMax replaces WiFi is like thinking that 18 Wheelers replace
private automobiles, or a saw replaces a screwdriver. That such ideas
even pass muster in the "press" is a comment on how little the technology
press understands the technology it covers. (of course the marketers who
tell the press how to think are guilty, too - the idea that the prefix "Wi"
means seems to be "hot new technology that ought to boost the stock price
like -tronics used to").

What WiMax might replace is coaxial cable or DSL copper, or the fantasy of
FTTH - certainly the companies that leverage themselves by huge junk bond
issues to put infrastructure in the ground are vulnerable to a
high-performance, cheap to deploy, rapidly depreciable alternative. In a
stretch it might compete for 3G's slot in the world (if they change the
underlying physical layer to compensate for 60 mph mobility).

That's a fascinating article. What does it have to do with radio spectrum?

Huh? I've got one 'Funny' moderation (which I tried to ignore ;-) ) and now your comment... Strange, I guess the link was pretty much about Open Spectrum, was it the wrong one??? ... ...

Well, yeas, it was! ;-( (He did a trick or two, after all, what whould you expect of the guy! ;-) )

The correct one is here

Paul B.

Thoughts of Dave Reed (the guy who gave us TCP/IP)
on the subject

Paul B.

Content would probably get cached better with BT than DNS because of the dynamically constructed network topology. The caching in DNS works as well as it does because it happens along the domain name hierarchy (duh). The default topology probably wouldn't be very efficient for content.

Further, DNS would need to be upgraded. There is a good reason that short-term, experimental applications are better done at the ends; read the End-to-end arguments in system design for further insights.

Google for "David Reed Open Spectrum" for introduction or check the papers at Reed's site for details of some protocols.

You need to read up on phased arrays. Basically think of a dish antenna with an incredibly high speed pointing mechanism so you can reposition it for each time slot on the access point. You, in essence, have no cross talk between the users. This is a large part of why David P. Reed is debunking the myth of spectrum scarcity -- an example of which myth is in your phrase "everyone on at most ... one for each non-overlapping channel".

Finally, one thing that is missing from the discussion is security. If we make any enhancement to IP, this would seem the most likely candidate (ie: packet-level encryption at the transport layer).

That's what popped into my head when I was reading the list - well, skimmed near the end, it started to feel like preaching and I lost my patience.

Surprise, surprise, that paper is what they reference for "the internet is stupid."

But I think that TCP/IP, the protocol the internet is built on, is a great counter example to end-to-end arguments. TCP/IP provides the abstraction of a virtual stream of bytes. It does this by ensuring packet integrity not at the application level (the "ends"), but along the way, inside the ends. This is in contrast to the FTP example used in the paper, which says that you'll need to do data integrity checking at the application level, so doing it along the way is redundant.

Given the end-to-end argument is it much more important that we start to use OpenPGP, even if some one discovers our userid/password the encrypted email will be only readable by the addressee, and no one else.

This IMHO also put a end to the discusion that WEP is weak. Why shouldn't be? If it was strong it would be even more expensive, and regulated, and it would have been overkill for most applications. If a application needs encryption, like email, the application should provide encryption and not the lower protocols.

Why there are still mail clients with out openpgp surport I really do not understand, email is as privat as a postcard... Is nobody telling users that?

Also interesting is David P. Reed's Open Spectrum page.

Half a million letters were written to the FCC, discouraging the move towards media consolidation. Now the big media companies are shaking their champagne bottles and spraying it all over each other.
If you think ideas like public, Open Spectrum have any chance of becoming reality under Bush, then all I have to say is "Wow you're naive".

If they are really interested in openning up the spectrum for more and varied uses, particularly at the low power end of the scale, they would not be talking about spectrum as a "limited" resource. Instead they would be talking more about Open Spectrum and finding more ways for more uses to share spectrum and make it effectively an unlimited resource.

As to being international, don't you think that a lot of value can be had from international coordination of this sort of effort? At the very least, coordination might prevent situations where wireless equipment needs to be customized for each region. Even if this is strictly a configuration issue for flexible hardware, it introduces unnecessary complications and cost.

You guys are all missing the point. If you have a software radio you have something that is inherently able to adapt to the spectral environment that it currently "sees". Develop logic that deals with interference, and you've eliminated the concept of management bands and spectrum management agencies. You've essentially automated the process that these agencies seek to fufill, and you've eliminated the politics, lobbying mechanisms and the grip that the old world broadcast industry has on the raw resource that should be essentially free for everyone to use.

Some people may argue that you've taken revenue (licensing) away from central government. That is true. But my belief is that Central Government should be focussing on developing innovative smart technology rather than maintaining archaic processes. Revenue through process rather than red-tape.

Are radiowaves the electromagnetic equivalent of GNU bandwidth?

Check here and here for clue.

somewhere in texas, a village is missing it's idiot

There are evident, unsolved, pragmatic problems with native IP multicast. For instance, there is no proven, support inter-domain multicast routing system, and thus no way for multicast groups to sync up between different ISPs.

There are application-layer problems with multicast. For instance, nobody has come up with a reliability scheme with a service model other than "streaming video" or "big fucking file transfer" (as opposed to, say, web page download).

But even if you believe that problems like these are close to being solved, there is a fundamental, intensely painful scaleability problem with global native IP multicast: rather than asking the Internet backbone to route entities that represent hosts (a hard enough problem), native multicast demands that the backbone route entities that effectively represent pieces of content. As in, web pages.

Most of the benefits of multicast will come from overlay systems, both centralized (like the one Akamai built) and decentralized (like peer-to-peer file sharing networks). There's no evidence that the problems Deering-model multicast aims to solve can't be solved more easily at a higher layer.

It's just another example of the end to end principle in action.

i'm completely willing to consider other design possibilities. i do it all the time. but in this case, i'd say the end-to-end argument doesn't go very far. i wouldn't, in the case of transactions, want an outside system doing the following:
- deciding whether or not my commit succeeded (safe-write to disk)
- deciding which tuples i can see (and in what state)
- deciding who gets to write to a tuple (when the database, and its decision as to which serial request to consider next, has the last word on that one) ...

i can do simple locking elsewhere -- for example, we have functionality that doesn't -obviously- get protected by database transaction isolation: when it's mostly inserts, and none of the relation-constraints have anything to say about it ... you -can- resort to, for example, having a 'lock' table containing tuples for each operation you want to maintain locks on, and then lock the rows (for update) as you start your operation. you could -also- do it in an outside system. so long as your local logic respects the results, you're fine. or you could guarantee you won't have trouble, and actually put all the operations on one transaction, handled by one agent (the database server app.)

on a similar note: i agree individual applications -might- be able to manage (virtual) memory better than the OS. but would i recommend it? no. there's a limited resource, with many agents vying for it. it makes sense for a central agent to manage the resource. an OS usually manages files, memory, ports, and other resources to avoid conflicts; i expect a database management system to do the same for my data. i like modular designs. i really do. but that's just one chunk i'd rather not out-source.

You should read some of the articles linked at David Reed's web site:

In particular it seems that the Shannon limit only limits the amount of data exchangeable between 2 points in space. Even with simple relaying the total bandwidth available for n people scales with sqrt(n). In other words, while the individual's bandwidth still goes to zero, the total bandwidth is unlimited.

There are more advanced schemes which already scale linearly in highly specific situations.

Practically speaking, our capacity to transmit data over radio frequency propagation is at least several orders of magnitude above what is currently allowed by law.

Put two of these on the same frequency, close enough, and you have inteference at the receiver. PERIOD.

Your 25 years as a ham are limiting your perspective. Ultrawideband doesn't work on specific frequencies, it's very short bursts on a very wide band. Bandwidth is vastly higher than with narrowband, though not unlimited.

Further, a single economical helmet can cover four of these analog holes at once!

I humbly suggest the most cost-effective and reliable solution to the copyright industries' troubles will be DRM helmets, bolted onto each dutiful consumer at the neck. When these helmets sense watermarked audio or video within earshot/eyeshot, they check their local license manager and instantly "fog up" if payment has not been delivered.

This will especially teach people not to listen to unauthorized copies of music while driving.

By fastening suitably-small DRM helmets onto children at an appropriately-early age, the citizenry's consumptive habits can be "arrested" (along with cranial volume) at a revenue-maximizing developmental stage. I'd guess this is around age 13, but I'm open to the latest research. Give and take is what policymaking is all about.

So step up to the plate, senators, lobbyists, and titans of industry. Write this into the next rev of the CBDTPA. We can call it the SNEHNEA: "See No Evil, Hear No Evil Act". Why try to haphazardly plug billions of analog holes, when you can just cap the problem at its far fewer human endpoints? (The end-to-end design principle is your friend!)

If we can put a man on the moon, then surely we can cage every American's mind.

[Intellectual Property Disclosure: The "DRM Helmet" and the "Cranial Arrest Adolescent DRM Helmet" may be covered by patents granted or applied for by Gordon Mohr. Licensing will be available on unreasonable and discriminatory terms.]

David Reed's open spectrum site links a paper showing that if you're willing to put up with some latency, having mobile nodes can make your total wireless network capacity scale up linearly with the number of nodes. (pdf ps). It's a simple store-and-forward scheme. Put this in every car, with a big hard disk, and say goodbye to wireless bandwidth congestion.

There are several interesting alternatives to the radio model we have today. The first is micropowered broadcasting. Micropower broadcasting is all about creating very cheap, low-powered transmitters in the 1 to 100 watt range. At these power levels the equipment is cheap, simple to use, can reach across most cities and rural areas, and allows a larger concentration of micropower broadcasting. Micropower allows communities, neighborhoods, and special interest groups to have their own radio stations and communicate with their local communities. I find it to be an attractive, democratic vision. Also check out Free Radio Berkeley for information on low-cost transmitters that are available, as well as educational information.

Another model that is still developing, and which is beautifully decentralized, is the OpenSpectrum idea. This model is based on several ideas. One part that is core is that the spectrum is not prematurely allocated to particular uses and users; instead, people have transceivers that can both broadcast and receive at a range of powers and at a range of frequencies. These transceivers constantly look at the spectrum, jumping around and broadcasting at various frequencies depending on the density of other transceivers. One important aspect is that transceivers can also act as repeaters for other transceivers. A few years ago it was theoretically shown that if this is done that "one can build a practical network whose capacity increases the more stations you add". This is powerful stuff, and the ideas should slowly percolate into society over the next few decades as the technology continues to improve (things like Ultra Wide Band, software defined radio, decentralized wireless meshes, etc.)

Make media! Make Trouble!
Brad GNUberg

Who would you appoint king to divide the oceans?

The whole point is that there is NO scarcity of bandwith. I'm not a PhD from MIT like Reed is so let's quote the article then the man:

David P. Reed gave a provocative talk to the Federal Communications Commission's Technological Advisory Council. He told the group of experts, in effect, that the FCC's fundamental mission is flawed, maybe obsolete.

Wow, heavy stuff. The FCC invited Reed to tell them they are impeeding the march of progress. That's impressive, perhapse they will listen, you too now:

``Radio waves pass through each other,'' Reed said. ``They do not damage each other.'' In the early days of radio, the gear could easily be confused by overlapping signals. But we can now make devices that can sort out the traffic.

Let's go to Reed's site to learn some more. Woops, freaking Real, encrypted pdfs requiring a non US plugin for ghost script. OK, enlightenment there will have to wait a little.

The basic concept is that there is more specturm than everyone needs, and therfore no need to regulate what was once considered scarce. Haven't you been convinced by the use of a single frequency to handle everyone's cell phones, bluetooth, 802.11 what not? Imagine if the entire specturm was allocated that way, free for everyone. Kinda like air. People like you would like to lease me the air I breath, wouldn't you? Hopefully, technical demonstrations will prove their worth before the FCC crushes everything by encouraging 2.4 GHz light bulbs. The revolution will come when people like you get out of the way and let the rest of the world do as it pleases with a virtually unlimited resource.

ICANN finally admitting that they are run by, and for, the large groups with big pockets is just truth in advertising.

Something everyone should read and understand is Reed's Law as in the end ICANN et al don't matter a lot...

TCP/IP adds a 16-bit checksum to the packets. This will generally detect an error burst of 15 bits or less, if the data is uniformly distributed then this will accept a corrupt segment with probability 1 / (2^16-1). [Snader p70]. This was designed to catch bugs in routers etc. (which may write the wrong data when forwarding packets) rather than catch all data corruption on the wire.

Depending on how much noise goes undetected at your physical layers, you should expect a TCP session to pass thru incorrect data about 1 in 10^9 to 10^12 bytes passed (thats the metric I use) - and if this is unacceptable then your application layer should check and/or correct data itself, bearing in mind the end-to-end argument for system design.

T

We cannot give these people an Internet that's good for their needs without throwing away the net as we have it now. Perhaps it's very good that Michels (whoever this guy is) says in the article: "We don't have any control over the Internet". Mr. Michels, it's by design. Even bright people don't have control over the Internet. Business suits should think about what they understand and leave engineering alone.

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.