Slashdot Mirror

www.grameen.org, Grameen Bank

wlink.com.np, an affordable ISP in Nepal

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow.htm l, a Wired article by John Perry Barlow

www.grameen.org, Grameen Bank, a microlending bank in Bangladesh

wlink.com.np, an affordable ISP in Nepal

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow.htm l, a Wired article by John Perry Barlow about his travels in Africa and Internet access availability there

Freenet (not to be confused with the library system of providing free Internet access) apparently creates a sort of decentralized network for the exchange of files and information and such. It looks like an interesting idea, though critics charge it would be nothing more than a tool for piracy.

There are a few reasons, the simplest is that they are generally selling a metered service and don't make any money during downtime. Depending on the bandwidth of the link, and the price of the service, this can be thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute (this is especially true of under-sea cables: see Neal Stephenson's article Mother Earth, Mother Board)

Second, these are industries that are or have been highly regulated, and while overregulation breeds inefficiency, at least part of that inefficiency is overengineering.

Finally, while Joe Average doesn't care too much about a busy signal for 5 minutes, big customers do and have quality of service and availability guarantees built into the contract. These customers will want to see that appropriate hardware is being used, since no matter how good the contract, it is unlikely to cover actual customer losses caused by an extended downtime, say for a financial institution.

As you point out, however, it doesn't necessarily make sense to route all calls over this kind of network, which is why voice over IP is growing more popular. It is cheaper because there are less gaurantees for availability and quality of service.
--

Excerpt from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/playstatio n.html:

Howard Stringer, Sony America's president, has called PlayStation 2 the "Trojan horse" that will bring the Sony network home. PlayStation 2 could serve as a central node of the Sony home network - particularly if sales of the new system approach the numbers of the original PlayStation. Even at its reported high price of ¥45,000 (US$380) in Japan, it could serve as an excellent "entry system" - marketing parlance for introduction to the brand. The PlayStation 2 can be connected via modem, cable modem, or i.Link to the Net, and by i.Link and Sony's Memory Stick to other digital devices. Plus, because it uses the Memory Stick, it needn't be upgraded to function as a PC.

i.Link is the same as FireWire and IEEE 1394 except i.Link lacks the 2 wires which transmit power to devices. Otherwise, i.Link communicates and acts in the same way, 400 Mbit/s, hot-swappable, and up to 63 devices per bus. I think the reference to a Sony network is more that Sony would like to be the one who sells PS2 owners Internet access. Sony would also like you to buy other Sony devices for your home to hook up with the PS2, but since i.Link is merely a marketing name for an International standard whose specifications are open to all, you will be able to hook up whatever you want. That's my interpretation. FireWire is cool.

I have a friend who when he was feeling angst, would sit alone in his room blasting Nine Inch Nails music. And that's kind of what I'm feeling right now.

Sounds a lot like me. More and more I seem to get depressed by all the advertising and hype and just plain ignorance of the media and the government. I listen to NIN to, and Metallica, Pantera, Godsmack, Type O Negative or just anything that's fast enough and loud enough to distract me.

I agree that advertiser supported services, such as TV, Internet, and magazines, may have lower prices. However, I'm becoming more and more annoyed at the distractions. I don't watch MTV anymore because I can't stand the spinning logo in the corner. I always throw a window over the top of IM because I don't want to see blinking ads. I use The Proxomitron to kill animated GIFs.

I quit watching MTV years ago for some of the same reasons. I used to be a telemarketer and while I worked there I couldn't figure out why people were such jerks. I was just doing a job right? After working there and seeing some of the things that go on in the telemarketing buisiness. I realized that even if I was telling the truth and doing what I was supposed to do, others were all around me were consistantly lying to the public. They got rewarded and I just managed to keep my job by playing by the rules. I quit after only three months figuring that good pay wasn't worth the bad karma and stress. Since then I can't tolerate telemarketers. Whenever one calls I shut it(it is appropriate here) down. The constant battle for my money has left a bad taste in my mouth. At least the telemarketing improved my social engeneering skills ;).

I never really had a problem with advertisments until they started interfering with my focus and my time. Sometimes I'd rather just outright pay for content instead of having to waste time and energy on an ad.

I couldn't agree more but it's more then that it's the loss of freedom. Whenever I watch a movie or listen to the radio my privacy is invaded by some company wanting me to see the light and come buy something. Not to get to far off topic but it's not just advertising that distracts me. It's our society, the media, the government, and buisiness. I have to constantly hear about how my rights are being erroded and how politicians that wouldn't know a computer language for chinese are deciding what my future will be. And that's what it comes down to choice my friends. These things are all battleing for controll of what we think and do.

Some might say that we have a choice. Unfortunatly that is just not true anymore. Like any other mass consumer good, the majority will always win, and the majority wants cheap at any cost. (I can't *buy* a way to message my friends w/o advertisments - and the MSM/AIM thing killed development of IM for BeOS).

Again it's not just the media and advertising choice and free will are what all of this boils down to. This is just another syptom of a common ill in our society. We as a people have come to believe that we have no control or power to choose. Look at law. A women orders hot coffee spills it on herself what does she do sue the people that provided her with the coffee. She had no control over the circumstance it was obviously not her fault right. :( If you own land and some moron comes on your property and does something stupid to hurt themselves you are responcible because people can't be resonably expected to be intelligent or cabable of makeing the right decisions they have to be lead.

The government feels that it need more control and they are willing to do anything even trample our rights. Companies want more control over what we think and they will do anything in their power legal or not to get that control.

All I want is a choice. I want a list of the expected return per advertisment, so that I can decided whether to pay off the company directly for use of their services.

My worst nightmare is being stuck on the side of the road at 2am and have to listen to an advertisement for Chucky Cheese before I can call a tow truck.

I realize that most of what I wrote is not directly related to web on cell technology. However, the reason that I would want such a technology is convience. Anything that lessens the convience of a cell phone can and will make me angry, especally if I can't decide to turn it off. And in today's slow speed cellular networks and with today's small screens, the impact of advertising will be especially annoying.

All I want is choice too. I want my freedom. I rights. I want to be responsible for what I do and think.

Oh and one more thing. Someone was joking about double click and how they would be able to track your cell phone usage. Well it's more than that. GTE has a working system that can track a ESN to within a couple of feet by using the timing that signals return to base stations.

Oh, it's even more then that. Digital cell phones are going to be required to be trackable. GPS, or whatever. The government wants to know what we are doing when we are doing it and why. They will be more then happy to overlook or even change the law to allow companies to track/trace/know consumers.

This is my last post for tonight. I'm begining to sound really paranoid. I must need some sleep.

The bathroom is the one place I don't really mind ads. It's more interesting than staring at a wall.

Whenever new technology is created, someone will come up with a way to put ads on it. The internet is covered in them, many freeware programs are starting to come with a built-in ad window, and now cell phones. Here are two more examples:

"Tarzan" DVD forces viewers through a jungle of previews -- First Disney makes you watch the FBI warning before enabling the Menu button, now they're putting 4 minutes of ads at the beginning. (I wonder if you could hack a software DVD player to disallow the disabling of the menu button.)

Ads Take Aim at Online Music -- How would you like to have banner ads embedded in your downloaded music files, and have them displayed in an "always on top" window while the music is playing. (They're trying to get it integrated into Winamp, etc.) Oh yeah, DoubleClick supplies the ads.

http://www.wired.com/wired/arch ive/7.06/barnes.html

Specifically, they talk about how they implemented most of amazon's functionality, almost feature by feature.

Bezos has a point about not wanting to be "Netscape." Barnes & Nobles is just like Microsoft - they are leveraging their wielding power in the brick and mortar stores (operating systems) and trying to gain a presence online by providing an Amazon clone (web browser).

We should be boycotting B&N, not amazon.

Some screenshots of Nautilus, part of Eazel's attempt to bring us a next-generation file navigation system.

One of the things I find interesting about Nautilus is its idea of 'zooming in' on the standard icon/list views we're used to reveal more information about the various file system objects represented there. While the example screenshots don't reveal much useful information (oh, WOW, an item count!), it at least suggests a drill-down method for further investigating a subset of documents. Combining this sort of technique with a data-soup method would let a user go straight to the file/folder they're looking for if they recognize it in the "big picture" view, or drill-down if they still aren't sure which item they're looking for.

In addition, Tog's latest column discusses some UI niceties he considers long over-due. Part of the column covers what he calls "screen objects." He brings up the concepts of piles, notebooks, and scrapbooks, but perhaps one of the most innovate ideas is how to convey time to the user through icons. He suggests having cobwebs or dust pile up on folders and files that haven't been touched in years, among other things.

Link summary:

• Nautilus
• Related Wired Article
• Ask Tog OSX/UI Design Article

According to this Wired article, they plan to wait until there are more govenment and industry privacy standards. This means that once someone develops some self-serving standard, DoubleClick will consider it a-ok to follow that, and track everything you do again. Unfortunatley, the Yahoo article doesn't mention this.

I feel that we should be careful of DC's promises not to abuse our privacy, as they have not shown themseleves to be the most trustworthy business in that regard. We also should not blindly assume than any 'industry standard' for privacy will agree with the beliefs of people here on slashdot.


Sam TH

Believe it or not, someone actually has created (and is trying to market) such an animal.

Manufacturer's web site: http://www.romemp3.com/ - Wired News reviewed it a couple days ago.

They say that they're working on an upgraded version including 64MB and an LCD display... I might be convinced to shell out for the 64MB version (would be nice to be able to play my tunes in my car).
________________________

League for Programming Freedom -- organization that opposes software patents and user interface copyrights.

Free Patents Pretty much what the name says. Patent reform. No software patents. Etc.

Patently Absurd-- Great, but old, article from Wired about the Patent office.

HTH

You see it in lots of arenas:

1. Net taxes. Even though the Congress said no decisions should be made until the Advisory Commission on E-Commerce made its recommendation(s), the President is meddling already. Here, the pro-tax politicians want to insert a tax code designed for the Great Depression on the Internet! That makes no sense!

2. Intellectual property. As everyone on Slashdot knows, the government and major corporations aren't ready to reexamine the idea of "copyright," because they don't see that the notion of "copying" has completely changed in the information age.

3. Law enforcement. News is out this morning from Wired (click here) that law enforcement officials are considering reducing the amount of anonymity (and pseudonymity, one presumes) Net users can enjoy.

4. Equity. Based on data several years old, the government is spending $2 billion (!!!) to help close the digital divide. Using the "chicken in every pot" mentality of FDR (and later LBJ), they intend to "solve" the problems of technological inequality, not realizing how slow, late and meaningless their action is.

There are dozens more examples, but the point is this: the pace of innovation is leaving policymakers in the dust, and they are going to keep making uninformed decisions that may plague us for years . Our only recourse is an intensive campaign to educate them in the new realities, while respecting how difficult this period of transition will be.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Read the story over at Wired.

Read the story over at Wired.

This article from Wired states the contrary...

"They need to rethink the entire approach... They're saying let's implement a Mac-like interface so that we can have a nicer Unix. That's a nice thing, I guess, but it's not really revolutionary."

Can you describe some specific ideas and UI elements you would consider if you were designing the "revolutionary" Linux GUI?

These articles sound like auditions for those outlets that we're getting the second-run of and not original, provocative content written for Slashdot.

Wired has an article too.

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

Wired has an article too.

Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

Try reading this
"The basic security issue is that Microsoft has the power to freely run code in our systems," Cuartango said ... I want to be warned. Microsoft software will bypass this security configuration setting."

Plugins don't allow other plugins to run code on your machine.

Microsoft's Active Setup control essentially circumvents the user approval process, granting over-arching permission to all subsequent ActiveX controls coming from a site during installation. Unlike normal controls, the installer program starts without prompting the user for permission.

One wonders how WIRED can have any credibility at all after making such blatant mistakes avoidable through the most cursory research. (I say mistakes because it's common to many their articles, not just this. <sigh>)

One wonders how WIRED can have any credibility at all after making such blatant mistakes avoidable through the most cursory research. (I say mistakes because it's common to many their articles, not just this. <sigh>)

Read this: Fear And Trembling In Silicon Valley

Do you still want Microsoft and their Office to CONTROL EVERY COMPUTER PLATFORM IN EXISTENCE??

There's evidence to suggest that they control the Mac. How can anybody want them to get equivalent leverage (and ability to decree the killing of competing technology) on Linux? For God's sake, Linux is about the only place left that they don't get to say, "Kill that. We don't like it. Or we'll kill Office for your platform/withhold Windows/lock you out of the market/etc". And people want to hand them that power?

There is an article in the Sept. 98 issue of Wired that addresses the same issues on a personal level; the writer looks for a medium to preserve a dying friend's voice and poetry.

There is also a very well-written, very accessible article on this topic, titled "Saved", available at Wired magazine's archive. It was written by Steven Gulie, in 1998 and I distinctly remember reading it, thinking it had a profound impact on my thinking about this topic.

Take a look. -Paul

Microsoft may seem, from the article, to be an okay place to work (why not work where all the money is), however, Microsoft's business practices do not change. The two articles below outline (1) price gouging and (2) low-quality product release, both in reference to Windows 2000. Bill Gates is responsible for the software which comes out of MS. If he had not used a slew of anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices to force his OS onto 90% plus of desktop computers, we would not have to deal with his sub-standard products, since real competition would have ousted him and his company years ago. Do not claim to know what other people do and do not realize.

Licensing fees a feature of Windows 2000, researcher says

Microsoft's new corporate operating system could force many businesses to pay thousands of dollars in additional licensing fees, a research firm said today.

...charges built into how Microsoft sells its software would affect a large percentage of companies upgrading to Windows 2000 ... Many of these fees are not up-front, said analyst Michael Gartenberg.

First Win2000 Fix Out

Windows 2000 is aimed at the suits. Twenty-four hours after the rollout of the new OS, Microsoft issues a compatibility patch that lists 45 popular games. Can you say productivity decrease? By Andy Patrizio.

For good measure, here's an article on the Anti-trust Trial set to resume today. It supports the reality of MS's practice. Read carefully.

Microsoft trial set to resume

WASHINGTON--The Microsoft trial resumes tomorrow with arguments before a federal judge to help him decide whether the abuse of monopoly power he found in November amounts to a violation of the nation's antitrust laws.

There's a much funnier story on Wired about the same research: Study: Humans Do Many Things

I think you mean " Clinton deploys vowels to Bosnia". That's the article that apparently convinced the editor-in-chief to set up a web presence.

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Al Gore Mar 1999

If you don't remember check it out on Wired, or the Slashdot Article.

So here is my question did he ever retract this statement?

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

You can read more about it on WIRED.

France has also complained about PROMIS.

Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Corporation who was going after the government for stealing PROMIS gave this document to each member of the House Judicary Committee.

and we must not forget that Crypto AG supplied encryption machines to over 120 countries. Officials from Iran, Iraq, and the Vatican, to name a few, relied on Crypto's tech for top secret dispatches and the NSA had a deal with Crypto, which gave them a backdoor that made those encrypted messages easy to decipher and they were not even a US company.

Also what about Lotus Notes' NSA backdoor that is in international versions of the software.

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

The first option is public funding. This can take several forms, all of which have one thing in common: no one reaps profit from the research, except the beneficiaries of its application. When you sit at home and write freeware or participate in an open-source project, you are publicly funding research in a sense. The project you are participating in costs money, even if you don't shell out a dime, because you are spending time that you could instead be spending holding down a second (or first) job.

A second type of public funding is charitable funding, from nonprofit foundations. Often, however, this money comes with strings attached. Researchers looking at aging might get gobs of cash from nonprofit foundations funded by the geriatric, but with the understanding that the conclusions will help improve some condition or point in a certain direction. In fact, many foundations that fund research select who to fund based on each project's previous results. That means a researcher trying to prove the mental inferiority of blacks (I'm thinking of J. Philippe Rushton here) is likely to get funding from a foundation with a history of racism (as he did). Researchers trying to prove that there is a genetic cause for homosexuality will get funded by those with a vested interest in that debate. An organization trying to get funding to search for life beyond Earth will get funding from a group that belives life is out there. But some dude who wants to figure out what makes a dead frog's legs twitch will probably never find a Deceased Paroxysm Society to fund his work. (This thought consciously echoes jd's thoughtful post.)

That second type of public funding is, as you might imagine, a little tainted; you are expected to show results for your money. Occasionally, there are some foundations that will fund research without considering results necessary, but these organizations are rare - and for an understandable reason: It is not natural for people to give without expecting something in return. A few very altruistic groups will do so, but it is an unusual trait. Even the patrons and sponsors of history's greatest scientists, like the Medicis who poured rivers of cash into the coffers of Florentine researchers and artists, got paid back in a currency they highly valued: social prestige. What could be snazzier than letting the world know that you've got crazy ol' Leonardo downstairs writing backwards and drawing flying machines?

Our natural reticence for giving without expecting to receive is the reason for the third type of public funding: taxes. Taxes are a form of coercion, but often a forgiveable one. We all pay for things that will benefit all of us, or at least many of us. The mail and the military and Medicare.

But government - this should surprise no one - is not constituted of impartial wise men who are unfallible judges of the public good. Funding for research projects is the result of a treacherous process of application, rejection and (frankly) supplication. (Some of us have to use a similar process to get a date.)

The scientific projects that government chooses to fund are very selectively chosen, since government has limited funds. (It is good that government has limited funds, since that means we have kept more of our own money.) So the government will fund research that improves our collective national security - the Manhattan Project, the current missile defense projects, and even DARPANET all come to mind. The government will also fund research that improves the general welfare of the population - hence, the Genome Project and the work of the CDC. Some projects have switched between those two categories: the race to space was well-funded at first because it served national security interests; today, it only gets money because NASA points out the many mundane benefits of our space endeavors.

Do we really want government to do much more than that? Is is wise for us to allow government the power to fund whichever projects it wishes? Hasn't the long and sorry history of government abuse shown us that we should remove power from the hands of government whenever possible? And isn't this especially true in the arena of science and technology, because progress in those fields yield inordinate power - which government cannot be trusted to safeguard? Government's history of using new technologies to preserve and entrench its own power has led James Burke (among others) to describe the Internet's creation as fortuitous and accidental.

Government's appropriate role is to perform those tasks that we cannot perform ourselves. And as the innovations of private industry in the last century have shown, each day there are fewer things we cannot do ourselves; in many regards our need for government is diminishing.

And indeed, none of the three types of public funding I described above work well. Personal, sacrificial public funding leaves you with no food on your table. (Hence the completely understandable buyouts of Slashdot and l0pht.) Funding from foundations is too rare, and often tainted by bias. And government funding - which has admittedly led to many of our greatest scientific and technological triumphs - lends itself to abuse, so it should be spared as often as possible.

What about private funding, then? Strident private corporations often have the courage to tread where public foundations cannot - and for an obvious reason: while a foundation cannot hope to make serious profit from the research it funds, privately funded research can make some moolah. An side benefit of private research, then, is that it acts as a creator of wealth. If you need evidence of the positive effects of privately-funded research, all you need do is look around you. For that matter, look right in front of you: affordable and usable computers are preponderant today only because of the competition fostered by private innovation.

The last line of the article above clucks that we should despair if "science, and if biology in particular, became a victim of new monopolies." Quite right: but corporations are not all monopolies . That's one place where government's rod should not be spared; it should aggressively act to increase competition by refusing to suffer a monopolized marketplace.

We needn't sob when some inventor or innovator "caves in" to the "profit motive." We should cheer him on, since it means he has developed an idea which intrigues people enough that they are willing to pay for it. (And more importantly, he can afford to feed himself.)

I'd like to respond to a few arguments made by others in previous postings. First, Idrach wrote that "We know that proper scientific research can be done with free software - Seti At Home." Well that's simply not true; while the software is free on our end, it was created by the hard work of programmers who got paid, and their paychecks came from somewhere. (I already wrote about Seti above.)

zyqqh wrote that he would like to see "the free-market philosophy be limited when it comes to pursuit of knowledge. As long as universities prosper, we will see good research, which doesn't get hogged by some corporation, and which remains in the public domain for the good of mankind." Well, you have very little to worry about, because most universities are corporations and businesses funded by the cash flow of undergrad tuition and endowments paid for by benefactors. But even so, is it better to keep knowledge hermetically sealed in institutions of higher learning? Isn't it better to release that knowledge into the frothy and unpredictable arena of profiteering savages - who will fight over it and make it useful? Imagine if Google (or any of the other Internet start-ups that began in schools) had remained the profitless property of the universities that birthed them. What reason would Stanford have to continue operating Google after the first few years? But transition it into the marketplace, and it will be available for longer, and will be forced to improve.

I've already responded to a number of the assertions in vlax's well-considered post, I'd just like to say a little more. First, it is false that science can't function in secret. Why do you say that? Even publicly funded research can happen in secret, like the Manhattan Project and any number of government endeavors of which we only hear snippets. As for the dig at Hawking, Gould and others getting rich from their research (or rather, its popularization), so what? Good for them. I don't see how their money decreases the legitimacy of their work. I may have missed your point.

Finally, I'd like to back-track a little bit. Despite everything I said, there are still instances where public funding is wholly appropriate. I strongly believe government funding should continue to go to projects which we cannot ourselves do - which is why I am disturbed by the current lack of interest in the space program. What's more, I believe that a mix of private and public funding has great potential, especially in the spectacular race to complete mapping the three billion human gene sequences.

And I am also extremely disturbed by the ability of companies to turn bits and pieces of nature into proprietary information. Not just Celera (as was mentioned in the parent article), but Human Genome Sciences, Incyte and others are applying for patents on genes.

This is an echo of the same problem facing those involved in the copyright debate today: we have to strike a balance between protecting the public's right to have innovation and competition, and protecting the companies' right to make a buck off their work. There are no easy solutions here, except perhaps offering a special class of short-term patents that expire after a set number of years, allowing companies to deservedly profit from their work and investment.

The reckless granting of patents and copyrights, and the occasional monopolistic corporation, must not mislead us into believing corporate science is evil. Public funding is sparse, and occasionally dangerous. Far better to get our money from the deep pockets of investors willing to take a risk than to suckle at the teat of a possibly pernicious government.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

The first option is public funding. This can take several forms, all of which have one thing in common: no one reaps profit from the research, except the beneficiaries of its application. When you sit at home and write freeware or participate in an open-source project, you are publicly funding research in a sense. The project you are participating in costs money, even if you don't shell out a dime, because you are spending time that you could instead be spending holding down a second (or first) job.

A second type of public funding is charitable funding, from nonprofit foundations. Often, however, this money comes with strings attached. Researchers looking at aging might get gobs of cash from nonprofit foundations funded by the geriatric, but with the understanding that the conclusions will help improve some condition or point in a certain direction. In fact, many foundations that fund research select who to fund based on each project's previous results. That means a researcher trying to prove the mental inferiority of blacks (I'm thinking of J. Philippe Rushton here) is likely to get funding from a foundation with a history of racism (as he did). Researchers trying to prove that there is a genetic cause for homosexuality will get funded by those with a vested interest in that debate. An organization trying to get funding to search for life beyond Earth will get funding from a group that belives life is out there. But some dude who wants to figure out what makes a dead frog's legs twitch will probably never find a Deceased Paroxysm Society to fund his work. (This thought consciously echoes jd's thoughtful post.)

That second type of public funding is, as you might imagine, a little tainted; you are expected to show results for your money. Occasionally, there are some foundations that will fund research without considering results necessary, but these organizations are rare - and for an understandable reason: It is not natural for people to give without expecting something in return. A few very altruistic groups will do so, but it is an unusual trait. Even the patrons and sponsors of history's greatest scientists, like the Medicis who poured rivers of cash into the coffers of Florentine researchers and artists, got paid back in a currency they highly valued: social prestige. What could be snazzier than letting the world know that you've got crazy ol' Leonardo downstairs writing backwards and drawing flying machines?

Our natural reticence for giving without expecting to receive is the reason for the third type of public funding: taxes. Taxes are a form of coercion, but often a forgiveable one. We all pay for things that will benefit all of us, or at least many of us. The mail and the military and Medicare.

But government - this should surprise no one - is not constituted of impartial wise men who are unfallible judges of the public good. Funding for research projects is the result of a treacherous process of application, rejection and (frankly) supplication. (Some of us have to use a similar process to get a date.)

The scientific projects that government chooses to fund are very selectively chosen, since government has limited funds. (It is good that government has limited funds, since that means we have kept more of our own money.) So the government will fund research that improves our collective national security - the Manhattan Project, the current missile defense projects, and even DARPANET all come to mind. The government will also fund research that improves the general welfare of the population - hence, the Genome Project and the work of the CDC. Some projects have switched between those two categories: the race to space was well-funded at first because it served national security interests; today, it only gets money because NASA points out the many mundane benefits of our space endeavors.

Do we really want government to do much more than that? Is is wise for us to allow government the power to fund whichever projects it wishes? Hasn't the long and sorry history of government abuse shown us that we should remove power from the hands of government whenever possible? And isn't this especially true in the arena of science and technology, because progress in those fields yield inordinate power - which government cannot be trusted to safeguard? Government's history of using new technologies to preserve and entrench its own power has led James Burke (among others) to describe the Internet's creation as fortuitous and accidental.

Government's appropriate role is to perform those tasks that we cannot perform ourselves. And as the innovations of private industry in the last century have shown, each day there are fewer things we cannot do ourselves; in many regards our need for government is diminishing.

And indeed, none of the three types of public funding I described above work well. Personal, sacrificial public funding leaves you with no food on your table. (Hence the completely understandable buyouts of Slashdot and l0pht.) Funding from foundations is too rare, and often tainted by bias. And government funding - which has admittedly led to many of our greatest scientific and technological triumphs - lends itself to abuse, so it should be spared as often as possible.

What about private funding, then? Strident private corporations often have the courage to tread where public foundations cannot - and for an obvious reason: while a foundation cannot hope to make serious profit from the research it funds, privately funded research can make some moolah. An side benefit of private research, then, is that it acts as a creator of wealth. If you need evidence of the positive effects of privately-funded research, all you need do is look around you. For that matter, look right in front of you: affordable and usable computers are preponderant today only because of the competition fostered by private innovation.

The last line of the article above clucks that we should despair if "science, and if biology in particular, became a victim of new monopolies." Quite right: but corporations are not all monopolies . That's one place where government's rod should not be spared; it should aggressively act to increase competition by refusing to suffer a monopolized marketplace.

We needn't sob when some inventor or innovator "caves in" to the "profit motive." We should cheer him on, since it means he has developed an idea which intrigues people enough that they are willing to pay for it. (And more importantly, he can afford to feed himself.)

I'd like to respond to a few arguments made by others in previous postings. First, Idrach wrote that "We know that proper scientific research can be done with free software - Seti At Home." Well that's simply not true; while the software is free on our end, it was created by the hard work of programmers who got paid, and their paychecks came from somewhere. (I already wrote about Seti above.)

zyqqh wrote that he would like to see "the free-market philosophy be limited when it comes to pursuit of knowledge. As long as universities prosper, we will see good research, which doesn't get hogged by some corporation, and which remains in the public domain for the good of mankind." Well, you have very little to worry about, because most universities are corporations and businesses funded by the cash flow of undergrad tuition and endowments paid for by benefactors. But even so, is it better to keep knowledge hermetically sealed in institutions of higher learning? Isn't it better to release that knowledge into the frothy and unpredictable arena of profiteering savages - who will fight over it and make it useful? Imagine if Google (or any of the other Internet start-ups that began in schools) had remained the profitless property of the universities that birthed them. What reason would Stanford have to continue operating Google after the first few years? But transition it into the marketplace, and it will be available for longer, and will be forced to improve.

I've already responded to a number of the assertions in vlax's well-considered post, I'd just like to say a little more. First, it is false that science can't function in secret. Why do you say that? Even publicly funded research can happen in secret, like the Manhattan Project and any number of government endeavors of which we only hear snippets. As for the dig at Hawking, Gould and others getting rich from their research (or rather, its popularization), so what? Good for them. I don't see how their money decreases the legitimacy of their work. I may have missed your point.

Finally, I'd like to back-track a little bit. Despite everything I said, there are still instances where public funding is wholly appropriate. I strongly believe government funding should continue to go to projects which we cannot ourselves do - which is why I am disturbed by the current lack of interest in the space program. What's more, I believe that a mix of private and public funding has great potential, especially in the spectacular race to complete mapping the three billion human gene sequences.

And I am also extremely disturbed by the ability of companies to turn bits and pieces of nature into proprietary information. Not just Celera (as was mentioned in the parent article), but Human Genome Sciences, Incyte and others are applying for patents on genes.

This is an echo of the same problem facing those involved in the copyright debate today: we have to strike a balance between protecting the public's right to have innovation and competition, and protecting the companies' right to make a buck off their work. There are no easy solutions here, except perhaps offering a special class of short-term patents that expire after a set number of years, allowing companies to deservedly profit from their work and investment.

The reckless granting of patents and copyrights, and the occasional monopolistic corporation, must not mislead us into believing corporate science is evil. Public funding is sparse, and occasionally dangerous. Far better to get our money from the deep pockets of investors willing to take a risk than to suckle at the teat of a possibly pernicious government.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

According to the article, some researchers think the financial aspirations of scientific researchers are "a blatant conflict of interest, while others say only that the matter needs further scrutiny."

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Read more about Andy Hertzfeld in this old wired article from when he was working at General Magic. My favorite line is:

"Are you guys going to be here ten years from now?" I ask Bill and Andy.

"Yeah," says Bill.

Andy looks startled. "At General Magic?"

"Oh, I don't know," says Bill.

"I don't think I'll be at General Magic," says Andy, "because I'm better at starting things.... There'll be new adventures - "

"I would guess that General Magic will have been taken over by weird people who don't know what they've got," concedes Bill.

"It's not so much that," says Andy. "I don't know if I have the wherewithal inside me as a person in his forties to try and start another platform. I think it's most likely for me to want to go work as an independent artist."

Guess he is starting with a new platform after all.

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

On a more serious note, this does raise some interesting points. As stated a few posts up, by Slashdot-Terminal, it seems to largely be those who are in the older age bracket (though not exclusively so... afterall, I'm here ;) But even within that bracket, you get isolationists. Now, I'm no statician, and haven't dealt with statistics since... I'd rather not admit how long ago HighSchool was :) ANYhow, what I have noticed, and what many of these studies seem to never delve into, is that those who grew up with and around computers seem to have an easier time using them for comminicative and solcial purposes. I, for instance, remember growing up with such beasts as the Sinclair, Zenith Heath, and TI-99. When modems became readily available in my area, those of us who had been the computer-weenies nearly suspended for hacking into school records from the computer lab (Ha! _I_ had 8088's and 386's in MY Highschool!) started forming BBS communities. Many of my longest lasting and most solid freindships were developed Back in the Day. Ah for the sound of my new, blazingly fast 2400baud... Dang, I keep digressing :) By contrast, the majority of our classmates throughout the state school system were NOT connected. To them, we would go home and hole ourselves up with our computers, never to be seen outside of school. Were we actually isolated? No, but to the non-geeks, we appeared so.
And so I get to my point: Now, we have a wide range of generations who suddenly find themselves feeling as though the computer is being forced upon them; if they don't get a computer, don't get connected, somehow they'll be left out. Some manage to find out there IS community, IS interaction & whathaveyou out here in the digital realm, but many more never do. To the masses, the internet and the web are synonymous. Especially now with web-based e-mail interfaces, people do not realize just how limited port 80 is. Usenet, irc, online multiplayer games such as Diablo or Quake, MU*'s... all foreign concepts. Now their children, or at least it would seem a good many of them (again, I've done no formal study on this, so this is really all tounge-in-cheek), have at one point learned about these things, and communicate with peers through them. I can see where problems can arise from this, all with regards to internet censorship and "protecting our children" [protect from what?], but that's a whole other article :)
Anyway, back to my point; a lot of these studies seem to be run by the people who did NOT grow up with these mediums, do NOT understand how it could be a form of community and interaction, and thus are not qualified to properly study it's unique social structure at this time. Likewise, it may help steer those who otherwise WOULD end up mindless zombies (please be refraining from your luser=mindless zombie jokes, tempting as they are :) from trying to enter a world they do not, and likely never will, fully grasp or understand (note: If you are one of these people who came in relatively late in the game, and did manage to find your niche, then kudos! That statement applies to you not), but keep them in the "real" world they know how to interact with and otherwise be a producing member of society.
So, do I agree with this study? No, it is incomplete, failing to take into account all aspects of net use. Do I think this is a useful study? Yes, but not for the reasons intended by the researchers.

I should go now, for I have rambled enough on company time :)

--

The following is the full text of a letter I wrote to the Wired interviewer.

Dear Lakshmi Chaudhry -

Your recent interview with Dr. Borg is fascinating on a philosophical and sociological level; she makes several useful points about how the sexes are socialized and educated differently. The broad idea she tried to get across, that women deserve equal opportunities with technology, is right on the money. However, the interview is also quite misleading.

The first problem is with the age of Dr. Borg's data. A quick search of the Department of Education web page shows that the most recent data on the sexes' fields of study date back to 1995-96 - hearkening back to a time when only a fifth the number of people who use the Internet today were online. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the percentages (both male and female) of students entering computer science have increased in the intervening years, given the opportunities for exciting and lucrative employment in that field.

Second, it is important to look at the data as a whole. Only 324 women received bachelor degrees in computer science in 1971; in 1995, over 6,900 women did. Put another way, women received 14 percent of all comp-sci bachelor degrees in 1971, and 28 percent in 1995. The number of women granted masters in computer science went from 164 in 1971 to 2,699 in 1995. The number of women granted doctorates in computer science went from 3 (!!!) in 1971 to 161 in 1995.

So, on the whole, the number and the percentage of women getting degrees in computer science has increased dramatically.

Dr. Borg claims that the number of women going into engineering has "leveled off in the last five years." Dr. Borg probably has little or no data from the last five years, since there is such a dearth of available evidence. But let's consider the data that are available, which go through 1995-96. What can she possibly mean?

* Has the number of women getting undergrad degrees in engineering decreased? Nope - the number and the percentage have both held pretty steady since the late 70s. About 2 percent of all women who get bachelors get them in engineering, and about 13 percent of all men who get bachelors get them in engineering.

* What about compared to men? Have men been outpacing women in getting these degrees? No. In the 50s and 60s, men received very nearly 100 percent of all engineering bachelors. By 1980, women earned 10 percent of them, and by 1996, women earned 16 percent.

* Has the number of women getting bachelors in computer science decreased? Yes - in fact, this is the only "leveling off" anywhere in the data. However, this is because the number of women AND men getting bachelors spiked in the early 80s and decreased through the mid-90s. As far as the data indicate, fewer women AND men are getting bachelors in computer science, but despite the dip, the percentage of women scholars getting comp-sci degrees is holding steady. A related statistic, the percentage of the comp-sci degrees that go to women, has barely moved, except to parallel the spike in the mid-80s.

To summarize my two main points: (1) the data Dr. Borg and others cite to prove that the technology gender gap is widening are severely out of date; and (2) even so, the data do not actually show what they purportedly show.

Dr. Borg's fearful and pessimistic attitude ("I'm quite frightened. ... [T]he rollercoaster will go down eventually.") is not warranted, and not justified by facts. Yes, there is a technology gender gap, but it is closing.

Now, I greatly admire many things you have written, including your recent piece on the Harris polling firm, which did a good job of explaining a technical matter. However, the sentence used to summarize your article on Wired's homepage ("the number of women in computer science is actually decreasing") doesn't even correspond to Dr. Borg's claim, which is that the *percentage* of women in these fields is decreasing. Also, you seem to miss that point (percentages vs. numbers) in your follow-up question, asking about "these declining numbers" - when in fact, the numbers are not declining.

(Incidentally, you asked about math and *sciences*. In other fields of scientific endeavor, the gender gap has disappeared. For example, in biological sciences over half of all degrees have gone to women in recent years.)

This is very important, and deserves clarification, not just because your interview is in danger of crossing the line between journalism and activism, but because these distorted and outdated facts can inappropriately influence policymakers. Politicians and regulators are apt to act on incomplete evidence, and if they are fooled into believing the technology gender gap is widening, they may make inappropriate decisions.

Thanks for your time.

Yours,
Adam Keiper
Washington, D.C.
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

**************
Post-script: My letter was published on Wired's Rants and Raves page. I also received a gracious reply from the interviewer, who acknowledged that "Maybe I should keep a closer eye on the dek (front-door teaser) next time." -ATK

The following is the full text of a letter I wrote to the Wired interviewer.

Dear Lakshmi Chaudhry -

Your recent interview with Dr. Borg is fascinating on a philosophical and sociological level; she makes several useful points about how the sexes are socialized and educated differently. The broad idea she tried to get across, that women deserve equal opportunities with technology, is right on the money. However, the interview is also quite misleading.

The first problem is with the age of Dr. Borg's data. A quick search of the Department of Education web page shows that the most recent data on the sexes' fields of study date back to 1995-96 - hearkening back to a time when only a fifth the number of people who use the Internet today were online. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the percentages (both male and female) of students entering computer science have increased in the intervening years, given the opportunities for exciting and lucrative employment in that field.

Second, it is important to look at the data as a whole. Only 324 women received bachelor degrees in computer science in 1971; in 1995, over 6,900 women did. Put another way, women received 14 percent of all comp-sci bachelor degrees in 1971, and 28 percent in 1995. The number of women granted masters in computer science went from 164 in 1971 to 2,699 in 1995. The number of women granted doctorates in computer science went from 3 (!!!) in 1971 to 161 in 1995.

So, on the whole, the number and the percentage of women getting degrees in computer science has increased dramatically.

Dr. Borg claims that the number of women going into engineering has "leveled off in the last five years." Dr. Borg probably has little or no data from the last five years, since there is such a dearth of available evidence. But let's consider the data that are available, which go through 1995-96. What can she possibly mean?

* Has the number of women getting undergrad degrees in engineering decreased? Nope - the number and the percentage have both held pretty steady since the late 70s. About 2 percent of all women who get bachelors get them in engineering, and about 13 percent of all men who get bachelors get them in engineering.

* What about compared to men? Have men been outpacing women in getting these degrees? No. In the 50s and 60s, men received very nearly 100 percent of all engineering bachelors. By 1980, women earned 10 percent of them, and by 1996, women earned 16 percent.

* Has the number of women getting bachelors in computer science decreased? Yes - in fact, this is the only "leveling off" anywhere in the data. However, this is because the number of women AND men getting bachelors spiked in the early 80s and decreased through the mid-90s. As far as the data indicate, fewer women AND men are getting bachelors in computer science, but despite the dip, the percentage of women scholars getting comp-sci degrees is holding steady. A related statistic, the percentage of the comp-sci degrees that go to women, has barely moved, except to parallel the spike in the mid-80s.

To summarize my two main points: (1) the data Dr. Borg and others cite to prove that the technology gender gap is widening are severely out of date; and (2) even so, the data do not actually show what they purportedly show.

Dr. Borg's fearful and pessimistic attitude ("I'm quite frightened. ... [T]he rollercoaster will go down eventually.") is not warranted, and not justified by facts. Yes, there is a technology gender gap, but it is closing.

Now, I greatly admire many things you have written, including your recent piece on the Harris polling firm, which did a good job of explaining a technical matter. However, the sentence used to summarize your article on Wired's homepage ("the number of women in computer science is actually decreasing") doesn't even correspond to Dr. Borg's claim, which is that the *percentage* of women in these fields is decreasing. Also, you seem to miss that point (percentages vs. numbers) in your follow-up question, asking about "these declining numbers" - when in fact, the numbers are not declining.

(Incidentally, you asked about math and *sciences*. In other fields of scientific endeavor, the gender gap has disappeared. For example, in biological sciences over half of all degrees have gone to women in recent years.)

This is very important, and deserves clarification, not just because your interview is in danger of crossing the line between journalism and activism, but because these distorted and outdated facts can inappropriately influence policymakers. Politicians and regulators are apt to act on incomplete evidence, and if they are fooled into believing the technology gender gap is widening, they may make inappropriate decisions.

Thanks for your time.

Yours,
Adam Keiper
Washington, D.C.
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

**************
Post-script: My letter was published on Wired's Rants and Raves page. I also received a gracious reply from the interviewer, who acknowledged that "Maybe I should keep a closer eye on the dek (front-door teaser) next time." -ATK

I disagree. It is the responsability to verify (and in the case of REUTERS, proofread) any articles for accuracy. If they decide to trust REUTERS implicitly, they are betting their reputation on that trust -- which is why you so rarely (ever?) see respectable newspapers print raw REUTERS stories.

Could you ever imagine a newspaper running a raw REUTERS/AP article on their front page? Not only is the english at an almost pre-literate level (spelling and grammar is routinely atrocious), but as we've all noticed the factual elements leave alot to be desired. Not to mention any analysis. Shudder.

Everytime I read some online news, and think to myself "my gawd this is poorly written," I look at the top of the story, and it is almost always a wire news story -- and most often REUTERS. You've done this too.

On a related note, have you ever read a Newspaper story of something you were [tangentially] involved in? They always (well, I used to live in a smallish town, so the bar for "news" was pretty low) emphasize the "wrong" points. It's kinda sobering to extend this to news in general -- it's all wrong, at some level.

But I agree. It's very rare that I see decent tech news. The Register, wired (but a shadow of its former self), and the always interesting salon (with a much nicer URL now that they dropped the "mag" suffix) seem to do the best jobs. YMMV

If a web site brought in little or no money, could a candidate still view it as successful, or is income the final measure of success?

According to this Wired story, Echelon proof has been discovered in declassified NSA documents. The documents are located here.

--

A while back, an idiot sent in a few hundred fraudulent requests to transfer big-name domains to my ownership. None succeeded, except two: angelfire.com and excite.com. NSI fixed it instantly -- I never showed up as owner of excite.com publicly (although I did for angelfire). The shame is they REFUSED to do that for a friend of mine who had his domain stolen in the same manner... I guess they only help the multi-million dollar companies out. Not only that, after they fixed angelfire.com, the changes switched back a few times over the next few weeks (causing downtime at Angelfire, and also people pissed at spammers to call ME and bitch). Now I was extremely nice about everything -- I didn't want to profit or gain off of this, that wouldn't be right... but imagine if I did? There was a Wired news article about it, you can check it out here.

There was an excellent Wired article about this subject that talks about NEAR's mission director Bob Farquhar, his expertise at using unique orbits to slingshot objects, and his habit of scheduling mission events to coincide with interesting dates.

The rendevous was initially scheduled for a different date. "January 10, 1999, the day the spacecraft was due at Eros, was the fifth anniversary of his civil marriage to his second wife, Irina."

It's a very interesting read!

- StaticLimit

And I anticipate a great hue and cry from various business sectors, who would very happily endorse any amount of surveillance if persuaded that they "need it to stay in business".

This, the same day that the following surfaces on the cypherpunks list:

http://www.wired.com/news/p olitics/0,1283,34164,00.html

Clinton's Wiretap-Heavy Budget
by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)

1:25 p.m. 7.Feb.2000 PST
WASHINGTON -- President Clinton's
proposed $1.84 trillion budget includes
millions of dollars in new spending on
technology and law enforcement
programs.

The record budget request for the 2001
fiscal year, which begins 1 October, asks
Congress for more money for wiretapping,
police databases, antitrust enforcement,
and computer crime forensics.

One of the heftiest increases, from $15
million to $240 million, will pay telephone
companies to rewire their networks to
facilitate federal and state wiretapping.
Under the 1994 Communications
Assistance to Law Enforcement Act
(CALEA), Congress may "reimburse" phone
companies for their efforts, but the
controversial process is the subject of a
lawsuit currently before a federal appeals
court.

Half of that money, $120 million, will come
from the Department of Defense's
"national security" budget -- a move that
alarms privacy groups.

"The proposal to use thinly disguised
intelligence agency money to fund CALEA
confirms what we have suspected all
along: the National Security Agency is a
silent partner in the government's
campaign to make our entire
telecommunications system, including the
Net, wiretap ready," says Barry
Steinhardt, associate director of the
American Civil Liberties Union.

[...]

• Yahoo isn't the only site to be DoS'd out of existance: Buy.com, eBay and stamps.com have fallen as a result as well. Relatively intelligent report on MSNBC, but it seems to promote the idea that these DoS's are by the same group of persons (not that it's not likely, but I don't like the assumption).
  
• Informed article on Wired which asks the question "Was Yahoo Smurfed or Trinooed?"
  
• Anonymous engineer blames misconfigured router for Yahoo's troubles.

• Yahoo isn't the only site to be DoS'd out of existance: Buy.com, eBay and stamps.com have fallen as a result as well. Relatively intelligent report on MSNBC, but it seems to promote the idea that these DoS's are by the same group of persons (not that it's not likely, but I don't like the assumption).
  
• Informed article on Wired which asks the question "Was Yahoo Smurfed or Trinooed?"
  
• Anonymous engineer blames misconfigured router for Yahoo's troubles.

First Wired says AMD is finally catching up to *ntel in the race to make a GHz cpu and now they say the problem was a misconfigured router. . . that would be why the FBI has contacted Yahoo! about the DoS attact that they say originated from over 50 points on the internet and at the peak of the attack, the site was being hit by over 800 mbps of data. So much for that misconfigured router. Here is the article from ABC news: http://abcnews.go.co m/sections/tech/DailyNews/yahoo000208.html --includes updated info with DoS attacks on buy.com and ebay that have happened today--

Real-time report for www.yahoo.com
[204.71.200.74]
Analysis: IP packets are stopping in network "Global Village Communication" between hops 12 and 13. Connections to HTTP port 80 are being rejected.

Some one kick those fools at Global Village Communications and turn port 80 back on.. :/

I posted this yesterday as this problem was happening.. I still don't know if it was a bad router and they are claiming foul play to avoid embaressment.. Wired News does not know either, they have conflicting stories posted!

One thing is for sure, Yahoo did not struggle stock wise because of this...

-X-