You're essentially advocating one giant, massive computer to track all these vehicles. And you're suggesting a 10-second latency between vehicle reports. Here's an academic exercise for you: there are more than 5 million registered vehicles in the New York City metropolitan area (specifically, the FCC-designated MSC). If a position report requires a minimum of 64 bytes (it more or less does), and each vehicle is reporting every 10 seconds, how much bandwidth does it take to handle all the traffic?
Lots.
Having one massive system to control vehicle traffic can work--but only if it is
incredibly tightly controlled
rigidly enforced with draconian penalties for those who fail to participate
Willing to tolerate the occasional fatal catastrophe
Which is to say, this works when you're the Federal Aviation Administration tracking airplanes through the sky (there are only several thousand airliners worldwide). The problem is vastly more complicated when you have hundreds of millions of cars in North America--the bandwidth requirements, and the computing requirements, are overwhelming. And all you need is one vehicle in the middle of it all to suddenly decide to fry its GeoBigBrother chip, and lots of people die.
Yes--some transit systems monitor the positions of their buses. Here's how: the bus does have geodata onboard--but since it is only traveling within the Portland area, it doesn't need any more data than a few counties. That's substantially less than 37 CD-ROMs. The bus also includes a radio transmitter that is talking back and forth with a controller. The system tells the controller where the bus is.
But--that bus gets "lost" all the time, depending on how often it passes large buildings, goes under bridges, etc. If there's a tunnel on the route, forget about it. In a real sense, these systems are just like cell phones (and in some cases, they are cell phones): there are some places where you just can't get radio reception. (And there's the opposite problem, too--sometimes you get radio reception a hundred miles away.)
The system you see when you ride the bus is a reporting system. A system to govern a vehicle's speed--with obvious life-and-death implications--is a command and control system. Don't confuse the two--the first is relatively easy. The second is extremely hard--and the consequences of a failure are catastrophic.
While I admire your ingenuity, I must also point out that you're not the first to think of the problem along those lines.
In fact, the data in any given 4 km area is substantially more complex than a vector and a few arcs. So there are significant bandwidth issues.
There are also significant geography issues--because your vehicle would have to know which 4 km square to download next. (In fact, you wouldn't download 4 km squares--you'd download.2 or.25-degree squares. GIS generally doesn't do miles or kilometers.)
And once again--you'd have to absolutely, positively guarantee, regardless of wind, weather, or atmospheric disturbance, that the data transfer happened in time. Or you could be sending cars at 100 kmph hurtling into an interchange whose speed limit was just reduced to 40 kmph.
Politicians love control. But they get very nervous about the possibility of large numbers of voters getting killed.
My firm is developing a web-based vehicle locator system which uses GPS receivers mounted in a vehicle, coupled with a GIS database. I can tell you that while this sounds technically feasible, it won't work.
A system like this requires two parts: a GPS-based locator; and a GIS (Geographic Information System). The GPS locator is relatively easy--there are commercial GPS chipsets that (depending on technology) can identify your position to +/- 3 meters. The latitute/longitude values can be mapped against a database of road segments--and that's where the problem begins.
With what speed limit data?
Even computer professionals tend to leap to unbelievable conclusions about the ability of computers. This is an excellent case: GIS data is stored in a massive database (the MapQuest.com database ships on 37 CD-ROMs). Look at any digital map--it is made up of bazillions of very short line segments. Each and every one of those segments has to be categorized by the type of road, the street numbers of buildings on the road, the lat/lon where the segment starts, the lat/lon where it ends, and lots more. But there is some surprising information that is not included in that data: weight restrictions, load restrictions (such as haz mats), and speed limits. Adding that information would be a big job--and an expensive job.
Expensive? We're talking about the government here....
Okay--so there has never been a government initiative yet that was dropped for being too expensive. That's not the only problem. Getting 37 CD-ROMs worth of data into storage on your vehicle may be a worthy challenge, but let's assume that the bright lights in government can handle that one too. (Stop snickering.) The big problem here is that geographic information changes--all the time. That new shopping center you drive past on your way to work? You may have noticed the new traffic signal--but did you notice that the shopping center driveway has a street name? Did you notice that the speed limit on the boulevard past the shopping center changed? Did you notice the housing development behind the shopping center, with a dozen new streets?
Anybody working with street-level GIS data gets a quarterly database update. (Which means we're all re-loading 37 CDs every quarter.) Streets get dug up and moved; streets get extended; streets get eliminated; streets get widened; bridges get closed. A quarter's update might include changes to millions of street segments--it is by no means trivial. And typically there is a 3 to 6 month lag between the time a street is changed or added and the time it appears in the database. In order for this system to work, every single car would have to be updated to the current speed limits--and they'd all have to be updated more or less simultaneously. Consider the spring construction schedule on your favorite interstate highway--what happens when construction starts? They'll drop the speed limit to 25 mph, and make all the computers slow all the vehicles down. What happens on the day the project ends--and only 96% of the cars have had their computers updated to show the speed limit on that road segment to be 75 mph again? Answer: 4% of your drivers die. Updating all that data to every single car--simultaneously poses a massive challenge.
And that's not all. With a GPS chipset that supports WAAG (fixed-position, ground-based GPS transmitters) we can determine your position to +/- 3 meters--but the road data frequently isn't that accurate. In the U.S., for instance, all but one commercial GIS data provider uses street data based on the U.S. Commerce Department TIGR data files. Different providers will tweak the data--fixing problems, even comparing the TIGR data to satellite photography (the difference in price between different vendors is generally due to the detail quality of their maps). But even with the best maps you can buy, vehicles sometimes still seem to appear well off the actual road. Not all the time, not most of the time, but often enough that this system won't work. Consider what happens when the onboard computer on a vehicle on I-78 in New Jersey (speed limit 65) decides that it is really on the adjacent service road (speed limit 25, just 15 meters south) and slows down....
As it happens, this level of imprecision drives me nuts. The client is continually having to remind me that GPS and GIS are about displaying information, and letting a human brain do the pattern analysis to determine what it sees. For example: suppose we have a position report that shows a vehicle at 40.638 North/74.8974 West. Is the vehicle on I-78 (speed limit 65 mph), County Route 513 (speed limit 40 mph), or Old Highway 22 (speed limit 25)? The answer is--could be any of the three. (The lat/lon--and it's real data--is an overpass.) You and I can easily answer that question based on our knowledge of other data points, and perhaps knowledge of the specific vehicle we're tracking. (We can see four other data points showing the vehicle westbound on I-78, and we know the vehicle is being driven by a Pennsylvania resident, and we know that the data points were mapped during the westbound rush hour: we can easily deduce that the vehicle is probably on I-78. But all we can do is deduce that--and all we can deduce is that the vehicle is probably on I-78. The driver may well be on the off-ramp, heading for a nearby McDonald's. We have to accept that level of imprecision, because that level of fuzziness is the best we can do.
There is an enthusiasm for technology today that sometimes can let people get carried away. This is one of those times. The developers will get a grant from the government to pursue the idea. And maybe they'll do pilot studies and tests and generate a lot of good PR. And hopefully they won't kill anybody before they realize the limits of this technology, and give it up.
Now just how high is the percentage? How do we know that it's higher than the general population?
My bullshit detector is going off here....
I'm sure that you realize that I'm not the first person to suggest that criminal conduct among NFL players is a problem. A good article on the subject appeared on APBOnline.com on January 25th, 2000. Let me quote the first paragraph:
When the Tennessee Titans and St. Louis Rams take the field for Super Bowl XXXIV on Sunday, a wide receiver convicted of drug charges will line up against a convicted girlfriend-beating cornerback.
There will also be a convicted thief playing running back, a prostitute's john in the defensive backfield, a drunken driver on the field and a man convicted of negligent homicide patrolling at linebacker.
Note: This article ran in 2000, not 2001--it ran several days before Ray Lewis and his two friends "were involved" in killing two men.
The article then goes on to raise a provocative point: according to how they interpret the numbers, the fact that 21% of the players in last year's Super Bowl had criminal records meant that they had fewer cons than society as a whole. The article goes on to refer to compare "arrest rates" from several studies with the percentage of convicts on NFL teams--and draws the completely fallacious conclusion that NFL teams have fewer hoods than most 'hoods.
The article is wrong. The writer is comparing arrest rates with the percentage of players with criminal records. That's a false comparison--the arrest rate compares the total number of arrests with the population. If you have a small group of people getting arrested all the time, you'll see a high arrest rate.
(Example: a town of 500 people with 4 jerks. Each gets arrested for being drunk and disorderly every Friday and Saturday night of the year (taking two weekends off to go get arrested someplace else, just to keep the math simple). That's 400 arrests in the town, and 500 people--an 80% arrest rate. But the percentage of criminals in the town (assuming no other criminal activity) is actually less than 1%.)
The writer cites studies that compare the rate of criminal activity among NFL players with the rate of criminal activity in the community as a whole. Again, it is a poor comparison, for two reasons. First, any NFL player is well-to-do, by any standard--the league minimum salary is better than $80,000 per year. Second, it is no secret that the rules for the rich and famous are different than they are for the rest of us. There's no better example than Ray Lewis: two men publicly "diss" three men. All five meet up outside. The two men are murdered, and all kinds of evidence (including their blood) ends up in the limousine of the three attackers. Yet nobody is convicted of the crime--the most notable of the killers pleads to negligence, and the other two walk.
11 percent of the players in the 2000 Super Bowl had criminal records. According to Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play In the NFL 21% of NFL players in the 1996-97 season had been indicted or convicted of a felony. That's not the arrest rate, mind you--that's the percentage of players with felony rap sheets.
At Raymond James Stadium, surveillance system cameras were focused only on people entering at turnstiles. No cameras were used inside to pan the fans inside.
They spent who knows how many bucks to install cameras, high-speed data lines, a control center, and links to municipal, state, and federal databases of bad guys. And positively identified no known perps.
Because they were looking in the wrong direction, perhaps?
The middle linebacker of the Ravens, Ray Lewis, is presently on probation as a result of his plea bargain in two homicides a year ago. The news media made quite a stir a while back about the alarmingly high percentage of NFL players with criminal records. A former receiver for the Carolina Panthers, Rae Carruth, was just convicted of felonies for his involvement in the death of his wife; Mark Chmura, formerly of the Green Bay Packers, is presently on trial for sexually molesting his 17-year-old babysitter.
Why are the cops looking at the fans?
I'm Sure the Chinese Will Love This....
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 4
Hi!
Everybody hates spam. Everybody thinks spam is a pain in the neck. Everybody thinks spam should go away. And those inclined to expect the government to do everything for them will--not surprisingly--tend to expect the government to protect them from spam.
Which may be a good thing, except for one little detail. If the government is going to protect you from "spam", the government is going to define what "spam" means. And you may not be happy with that definition--because as sure as the fact that the sun is coming up tomorrow, any government is going to figure out a way to protect itself with its definition of spam.
Remember "Junk Fax"?
Back when fax machines first appeared it didn't take office supply companies, delis, and a horde of other advertisers to figure out that they could send you virtual flyers with a local phone call--substantially cheaper than paying for postage.
Lots of people objected to junk fax. Lots of legislators climbed on the bandwagon--junk fax came to be viewed by politicians as an easy target: nobody was in favor of (euphemism) "unsolicited commercial fax."
Then a funny thing happened--except that it wasn't funny at all if you are old enough to remember watching it on CNN. Students in the People's Republic of China staged a demonstration in Tianamien Square in Beijing that quickly became a serious challenge to the authority of the Communist Party. At first the authorities dismissed this as an annoyance--but as the protest continued, the government got more and more scared. The government ultimately crushed the protest with tanks and machine guns--no one in the West knows yet how many students were killed.
What was significant about the "uprising" was that the Chinese government was right about one thing: the PRC kept insisting that the protest was being directed by "outside agitators". They were right--Chinese dissidents, in the U.S. as graduate students, were directing the protests across China from an office in suburban Boston--via fax. The PRC finally figured it out, and blocked phone traffic from the Boston area--but they never figured out concepts like call-forwarding, etc. The students were able to communicate with very little restriction right up until the end.
In the aftermath, the Communists decided that "the people" needed protection from "unsolicited fax". They required every fax machine to be registered. They enacted laws spelling out draconian punishments for unregistered fax usage. They tried their damndest to prevent anybody ever doing this again.
Now the Internet is here.
And try as the Chinese Communists might, they're having a tough time preventing people from getting information. The PRC has worked diligently to block access to foreign news sites, foreign chat sites, etc.--especially anything published in Chinese. I'm certain that one dimension of the PRC's reported enthusiasm for Linux is that they can be certain that the U.S. doesn't have a trap door in their computers--and that they can install a trap door of their own. (Somehow, I'm sure the PRC will--what a surprise!--forget to distribute the source code of their distros.)
But they can't block e-mail.
I have mail in my in-box from a young Chinese man. He and his wife are deeply fond of my mother--she and my late stepfather helped them escape from China in the immediate aftermath of Tianemien Square. They are still actively in touch with friends and relatives back in China--by email. And if the need ever arises, they can maintain those communication links: through open relays; through "anonymizer" relays; through throwaway accounts--in short, using exactly the same techniques as the spammers.
We live in a free society--with the advent of the Internet our freedom of expression and (if only virtual) assembly are practically limitless. It doesn't work that way everywhere in the world. There are places in the world where defaming the Imam earns you a fatwa--a price on your head. There are places in the world where refusing to pledge allegiance to the Dear Leader and embrace the "scientific truths" of Kim-Il-Sungism means that your family doesn't get food rations, and is left to starve. There are places in the world where billions of people are "protected" from "unsolicited fax" and other such dangers.
Those places all have governments that would be more than happy to "protect" their citizens from "spam."
Yup. Spam is an annoyance. By golly, I have to press that Delete key four, sometimes five times a day. And I'm sure that having the government decide what email I can see, and making sure that I only see "unsolicited" mail from people they approve of, will make my life so much more enjoyable. So much more buoyant--so much more vibrant--so much more liberating. At least, right up to the point where I want to send or receive messages the government doesn't approve of.
Thanks, but...
For me and my household--we'll just use SpamCop, and the Delete key.
Okay. The cops in Salem, New Hampshire--after a month-long investigation--determined that this kid had copied the text from several web sites related to the police department, modified the text, and had replaced photos on one site with rotating porn pictures.
This is clear, and compelling, proof of two things:
The Salem, New Hampshire police are idiots. They evidently can't read simple documents like, say, the U.S. Constitution.
The Salem, New Hampshire police evidently aren't just stupid--they're incompetent, too. Think about it: it took them a month to figure out that the guy had parodied their site. An entire month of investigation. Kinda makes you think these bozos might just deserve some parody, wouldn't you think?
But something stuck in my mind about "police" and "New Hampshire"...
Of course! The ultra-Libertarian legislator who got elected in November, before anybody noticed the outrageous comments he'd posted on the Web about cops. I looked up the article, figuring I'd post a link to it here. Here's the MSNBC article. But the article includes a neat little point right at the bottom--it turns out that the cop-killer wannabe isn't the only state legislator in trouble. It seems that while the Salem cops were busy with their month-long investigation of a parody web site ("Uh, sarge--how do you spell 'freedom of the press'?"), the town elected an ex-con living under an assumed name to be their legislator:
In a separate case, state Rep. Ron "Tony" Giordano has revealed a criminal past he didn't disclose to New Hampshire voters. The Republican from Salem said this week that he did two stints in jail in Massachusetts during the early 1980s for five check-forging convictions and one handcuff-stealing incident. He was known as Ron Gordon at the time.
"We all make mistakes. I've turned my life around," Giordano said.
Giordano, who moved to Salem six years ago after changing his name, said he would step down only if his 6,000 constituents demanded he quit.
Whatever parody this kid put up had better be hilarious--because the officials clowns are pretty funny all by themselves....
In addition to traditional fee-for-service health insurance, you may want to look into a Medical Savings Account. There are substantial advantages to an MSA for people who are self-employed--chief among them that you are paying for your health coverage with pre-tax dollars, but also you are able to keep a significant portion of what you pay.
Here's how it works: a Medical Savings Account consists of two parts:
A high-deductible insurance policy (typical deductible is $3,500-5,000 for a family)
An investment account
You pay a relatively low premium for the insurance policy, and you pay a monthly "contribution" into your investment account. Major expenses are paid (after the deductible) by the insurance policy--but the minor expenses, routine medical care, etc. are paid from the investment account.
As I mentioned above, the advantages for somebody who is self-employed (or who works for a small company) are substantial:
Both premium payments and contributions to the investment account are paid with pre-tax dollars.
Any amount left in your investment account is yours to keep. The amount in your investment account can grow as large as you wish--and interest or investment income on that money is tax-deferred.
Once you reach age 65, you can withdraw funds from your investment account, just like an IRA.
You are not limited to an insuror's list of medical conditions--you can use your investment account funds to pay for any medical expense (including, for instance, eyeglasses for your kids).
The down side of having an MSA is that you can find yourself being taken advantage of by doctors--because they are used to overbilling and then just taking what the insurance company pays. Since you don't have Blue Cross/Blue Shield to say, "the reasonable and customary amount is $48, so that's all we're paying" you can occasionally get popped for a $250 visit to the doctor where the family behind you with traditional insurance pays a fraction of that. Most of the time you can negotiate--but every now and again you'll stumble across a jerk who gets greedy.
Let's take a step back here, and analyze what this article is really about. The writer had a problem with two modems and a printer driver--but bitched until she got somebody to come on-site to replace the motherboard and the entire printer. Her solution to these problems is to cite examples of Indian enthusiasm for software engineering.
There's just one little problem--software engineering has ZIP to do with the problems this not-quite-up-to-speed writer had. Her modem problems? I'd bet money she had IRQ conflicts, but the tech on the phone couldn't walk her through fixing them. The simple solution was to send a human out there--hence, replace the motherboard. The real solution: a legacy-free box that connects a modem without hardware interrupts. Her printer driver problems? Yes--there are crappy drivers. That's a marketing problem. But a printer driver problem is not solved by shipping a new printer--and for an allegedly experienced computer journalist to have to wait months for a CD-ROM to arrive with a printer driver (what--she couldn't find how to download a LaserJet driver from www.hp.com?) is simply laughable.
I'm a big believer in software engineering. But I'm also a big believer in quality journalism--and this article most definitely isn't quality journalism at all. This article essentially boils down to whining from a particularly clueless user about how she can't manage to get her computer to work. The solution she suggests--software engineering--has nothing to do with the problem. All the software engineering in the world isn't going to solve her IRQ problems with her modem--a USB port will. The best software engineering in the world may produce the best printer driver in the world--but printers will still need drivers. Updating a printer driver will always require replacing the driver--not the printer.
What Cogent is doing is part of a small but growing phenomenon--commonly called "metropolitan area networking." The basic idea is to wire a densely-populated area like a campus network--connecting to the larger Internet through a few gateways just like a university or corporate network would. The benefits of doing this are reasonably obvious: wiring an entire "campus" at once represents a single construction project, rather than becoming a years-long incremental installation of line after line after line. Typically the network service is provided with an Ethernet switch rather than a router--the host "Ethernet service provider" typically will also offer network management services for network participants.
Another emerging provider of MANs is 3rd Wire, which is presently in discussions to wire the downtown "Digital District" in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 3rd Wire is publicly indicating that they expect bandwidth costs to drop dramatically over the next 5 years--they expect to provide bandwidth within the Allentown Digital District at approximately $400/GB within a year, and their business model projects that price to drop to roughly $50/GB of bandwidth in five years.
Mind blowing? What they're doing--and they are by no means the only people doing this--is seeing that there is critical mass in providing fiber in that "last mile" to the end user. And they're being helped, in part, by communities that recognize that "urban infrastructure" in the 21st century will require bandwidth just as much as it requires paved roads and traffic signals. Those communities are actively working to bring in providers to wire their communities--reasoning (entirely correctly) that high-tech firms are going to gravitate to cities with gigabit bandwidth for sub-K bucks.
Incidentally, several posters have mentioned that this is meant "for business only"--not so. Certainly the Allentown Digital District very much wants to use the metropolitan area network to revitalize business in downtown Allentown--but we also want to encourage urban redevelopment in the surrounding neighborhoods with the offer of dramatic bandwidth for small dollars. If you can live and work a couple of blocks apart, and have gigibit Ethernet at home and at work, wouldn't that be attractive? We think it will be.
Full disclosure: I'm heavily involved with the Lehigh Valley Partnership and the Allentown Digital District.
I'm the father of an eight-year-old with Down Syndrome. Annie is mentally retarded, and (like many Downs kids) she prizes the independence of watching videotapes on TV, and playing the companion CDs on her computer.
However, a mentally-retarded eight-year-old is nobody's idea of a "safe" user. She has proven, empirically, that crunchy peanut butter applied to a CD-ROM makes the perfect grinding medium for destroying the laser in the CD-ROM drive. She has proven, empirically, just how much popcorn you must stuff into an RCA VCR to make it eat the videotape. She routinely destroys videotapes and CDs.
I can address the problem by making copies--duplicating the media. Annie watches the copy, and when it is destroyed I just make another copy of the original. I can duplicate videos, CDs, and (through a client) DVDs. But--when I duplicate that content I am violating the DMCA.
An MPAA lawyer might ask "why not just buy another DVD? (or videotape or CD-ROM)?" For most media I could--but Annie particularly lives for Disney animation. And Disney, for years, has maintained the practice of only selling videotapes (and now DVDs) for a limited period of time. They will sell a movie, like Toy Story for a limited period of time. Once that title is removed from stores it is not available, anywhere, in any form. So the only way I can permit Annie to watch Toy Story is to duplicate the original, and let her watch the duplicate.
I have previously written to the EFF, offering to participate with Annie in any litigation regarding the DMCA. My offer still stands--I believe strongly in the legal benefits of intellectual property law, and am extremely conscious of the image that I project to my (other) children when I bootleg media for Annie. I'm violating the DMCA--and I know it. And they know it. And they know that violating the law is wrong.
All I want to do is let my little girl watch videos, achieving some pride in her self-sufficiency....
I can't find any reference to the story mentioned by CmdrTaco about the Furby challenge being inspired by the mother of an autistic boy. I would dearly love to learn more about this--I work with a couple of children with autism in an Easter Seals program, and the son of some friends has autism. All three sets of parents have the same limitation: zero programming skills.
Can anyone provide a link (or just point in the right direction) to more information about the boy with autism?
Yes--the BSA can raid your office. Here's how it works.
The BSA actively advertises for disgruntled employees or former employees to turn in companies that cheat on their license agreements. When they get a complaint they typically attempt to substantiate the allegation (that is, is the source of the complaint credible as a witness?). The process is quite similar to ascertaining the credibility of an informant by the police. We'll get to the reason why below.
If the BSA thinks there is something to the case, they will send a scary letter from the lawyers--we have reason to believe you are in violation of license agreements, etc. The letter will ask the company to "voluntarily" permit the BSA to come and audit the company's network to determine whether or not the company is in violation of license agreements.
If the company agrees to a "voluntary" inspection, the BSA shows up, installs a network app that scans the network for software from the BSA membership, and totals up the number of copies. They then ask the company to document purchases of all of the copies on the network--and they bill the company for the retail price of any copies that cannot be documented. Full retail can be a pretty stiff price to pay--but most companies figure that full retail is cheap compared to the cost of fighting the BSA in court. If the company pays up, the case ends.
If the company ignores the first scary letter, they get a second scary letter from the BSA lawyers. That is much more direct, and to the point. If the company agrees, the same "volutary" inspection happens.
But let's suppose that the company ignores the scary letters. If you've watched a videotape recently you will note that videotapes sold in the U.S. include a warning that copyright infringement is punishable under federal law, and is investigated by the FBI. Federal law permits private individuals (including corporations and associations) to gather evidence of a crime and present it to the feds for them to pursue. The BSA's initial complaint, buttressed by a "good faith" effort to enlist the company cooperation (that is, the first and second scary letters), is regarded by the FBI as justification for a warrant. (That's why the BSA evaluates the credibility of the complaint--that's a key part of the request for a federal warrant.) The FBI and/or the U.S. Marshals, with the BSA, arrive--unannounced--at the company site, with a federal warrant.
When they enter the premises they will serve the warrant, and they will announce, loudly, that everyone in the premises must stand up and step away from their keyboards immediately. These people are feds--they carry guns. They mean business. And they are serious. If this happens where you work, by all means, stand up, and step away from your keyboard. Do not try to be a hero for your employer and attempt to delete the 3000 bootleg copies of Leisure Suit Larry that you know are distributed across the enterprise. They can 'cuff you and arrest you.
Once the feds have "secured" the scene, the BSA people step up and install their network spy application to identify all the software on the network that doesn't have a license. If they find any (and they almost certainly will) they and the feds will propose a settlement: pay full retail, plus a whopping fine (like $1500 per copy) for each bootleg copy found. Or, face criminal prosecution by the FBI for copyright infringement--followed by a civil court action for damages after the criminal case is finished. Any company with half a brain (or anything resembling a competent lawyer) is going to cave and pay the "settlement". The cost (and the adverse publicity) of a criminal court proceeding is sufficiently onerous that its just smarter to pay up.
I have seen this happen at a former client, and recently declined an engagement with a prospective client because they just been raided by the feds and the BSA. There are too many good clients out there to bother getting associated with known bootleggers. (And if they cheat on their licenses, there's a good chance that they'll try to jerk us around too. Or at least that's the way we view it.)
This is, on the one hand, a compelling argument for paying for licenses and using license monitoring software to ensure compliance. On the other hand, this can also be a compelling argument for free (open source, home-brewed, or abandonware) software.
Any tech employer with a brain knows the numbers: unemployment (overall) is at an all-time low; tech unemployment is simply nonexistant (if you can spell "VB" in New York City you can get a job); and the situation isn't changing any time soon. When Burger King is advertising $7 an hour, plus health insurance and (I'm not making this up) a 401k plan you know the job market is tight. How do you find employees?
An interesting fact to remember is that employment statistics aren't what you think they are. The "unemployed" that count in the stats are people who have been employed that are now receiving unemployment benefits. If you've never had a full-time job, if you never filed for unemployment, or if your unemployment benefits have expired, you don't count in the stats. The people who count these things at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculate the employment rate based on people presently working or collecting benefits.
There are tech workers out there...
There are tech workers to be found--and IMHO the largest cohort are skilled, experienced tech workers who'd love to pick up a job. They're moms who want to stay at home with their children, but still make the bucks you can make in the IT world. Those workers are generally much more sensitive to employee benefits than they are to salary--they're far more interested in working hours (and the limits to working hours) than they are in what they'll make per hour. If you create a workplace where telecommuting and bring-the-kids-on-a-snow-day are acceptable, employers can find a lot of talent.
That said, I'm not sure that SlashDot is the place to ask whether techs care about employee benefits. The SlashDot crowd has a heavy representation of young kids, in or just out of college, that is heavily male. IOW, very few Slashdotters are wondering about Mommy-track decisions, so your answers may not be that helpful. If you're contemplating a Mommy-track kind of career choice, yes--there are employers who are sensitive to your concerns. And trust me--as the economic expansion continues, there will be more of them.
But my own personal journey began when I was a kid of 10, watching my dad [Sen. Albert Gore Sr.] write law authorizing the Interstate Highway System. He took me to meetings, and I remember how it all came to pass--the voting to make the signs green, how wide the lanes would be. Quite a lesson.
I seriously doubt this. The Interstate Highway System was established in the early 1950s, and the design decisions about factors like signs and lane widths were handled by members of the nascent Institute of Traffic (now Transportation) Engineers later in the Fifties. There might have been committee hearings in which lane widths or sign colors might have been discussed, but I strongly question whether they were issues that were put to a vote.
(How do I know this, you might ask? Because my stepfather was one of the transportation engineers who determined all of that stuff. And I never heard him say 'boo' about any congressional votes on the subject.)
I grew up, as much as anywhere, in a small town in northern Vermont with my grandmother. My siblings and I still own the house, and we vacation there with our families. The town library has an Internet connection--for most of the people in the town that's the only connection they can get.
And they have a serious problem with people viewing porn on the (one) computer. They've turned the computer so it faces the wall--so if you view a bunch of porn sites no impressionable kiddies are watching too. But what they haven't considered is doubleclick.net--when the next user comes along and connects to Hotmail they get a bunch of banner ads advertising pr0n. My niece went to check her Hotmail account and got banners for lesbian pr0n--definitely rattled her.
My sister (who, incidentally, lives inside the Beltway) is now suddenly in favor of a federal agency to Put A Stop To This(tm). My thought is that my sister ought to spend the eight bucks a month necessary to get email accounts for her kids that don't serve banner ads.
Much has been made in the current presidential debates about the foreign policy of the United States, and whether it is the role of the U.S. military to intervene in humanitarian crises around the globe. This was hotly discussed at the time of the Kosovo atrocities, of course, but "humanitarian concerns" have been cited as the reason for U.S. military intervention in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere.
Some of you have called for a "compelling national interest" before committing U.S. troops; others have rejected the use of U.S. troops for humanitarian intervention--or indeed for any purpose at all. One of you, in particular, has decried the "interventionist" policies of American presidents since Roosevelt, who interfere abroad in the affairs of other sovereign nations.
It is 11 o'clock Eastern time as I write this. It is not quite dawn in Khartoum, in the Sudan. In just a few hours there will be Dinka slaves sold in the marketplace. 137 years after the Emancipation Proclamation--135 years after the end of the American Civil War--there is an active, vibrant slave trade in Africa today. Black Africans from the southern part of the Sudan are being captured and sold into slavery by Arabs from the northern Sudan--according to many sources they act with tacit approval of the Sudanese government. Several freed Sudanese slaves have made moving presentations in the media, but to date there has been little or no official comment by the Clinton Administration. To date, the most effective voice in the U.S. has been a class of fifth graders from Colorado that have raised $50,000 to buy slaves and set them free.
I ask you--is the worldwide traffic in human slaves a compelling humanitarian interest of the United States? Is the capture, sale, and breeding of black Africans cause to consider U.S. military intervention?
If your answer is "no", what can you say to the millions of American citizens whose ancestors were brought to these shores in chains? If your answer is "yes", what--precisely--do you propose to do?
Yup--I mean it. Spend a little time in the business world and you'll be amazed at how often a business process depends upon there being a signature on a document--without the slightest regard for whether or not that is your signature.
For example, consider your checking account. When you opened the account you had to sign a card, right? So the bank could compare your signature on each check to prove that it's really you? Guess what--banks do not check signatures on checks. In fact, if you ask your bank to validate the signature on each check cashed they will typically charge you for the "service." So unless you allege that a check was forged, your signature at the bottom of that check is meaningless.
Case in point: ABC News is a client. For some reason, known only to ABC's Accounts Payable department, they pay their invoices from a bank in North Dakota--on a joke of a check form. The bank name, transit routing numbers, and the signature are all printed in place on an old-fashioned chain printer--they don't even have one of those stamps that purports to be an authorized signature. The first time we got paid we looked at the check and said, "yeah, right. No way on earth is this going to be accepted by the bank." We took it to the bank in town, the teller looked at it, said, "are you going to be on TV?" and processed the deposit. Without any "signature" beyond the words "American Broadcasting Companies, Inc."
I have a project starting later in the month designing a new system for a U.S. sports sanctioning body. As part of the entry process for competitions a competitor has to present copies of various documents (medical forms, membership cards, etc.). The system, in theory, depends upon the validity of signatures--but the forms are typically photocopied. It is child's play to create a phony medical certificate--in essence to cheat--using any $99 graphics program. But--if we assign the competitor a digital signature (using the PGP trust method), and counter-sign with a trusted medical provider and a date, we have a substantially more trustworthy certificate. It becomes vastly harder to cheat. We really, really like the idea of digital signatures--and we really, really hope that the client (the sanctioning body) will adopt the plan.
It will be possible to cheat with e-signatures. You will hear horror stories repeated by breathless bimbos on the 11 o'clock news. But signature fraud happens all the time today--what e-signatures will do is make signature fraud substantially more difficult to accomplish, and therefore a crime that occurs much less frequently.
If you want to run an Open Source project, hey, that's great. But by its very nature Open Source is open--the very opposite of clandestine. If you're going to write clandestine software you need to maintain an absolutely closed development group--you simply cannot tell the world the names and addresses of all the members in your cadre of 3l33t haX0r d00dz.
Corporations? You're Aiming Too Low
DeCSS may scare the (few remaining) wits out of the MPAA--but ultimately the MPAA is just a trade organization dedicated to staging an awards ceremony. If you really want to have a little excitement, consider doing something really subversive. Say, develop Arabic-language courseware targeted at girls (particularly Afghan girls). Or Bible-club software in modernized Chinese.
I have been involved, in years past, with an ad hoc operation that smuggled Bibles and other Christian books into countries where they were (and in several cases still are) considered contraband. The operation was relatively small--because we had limited funds, and because we depended upon people in-country to handle distribution. Our funds were limited by our need for security--if we'd broadcast to the world that we were smuggling Bibles to women in the Persian Gulf the locals might have caught on. Or worse, caught our contact in-country. Security is paramount.
That said, yes--Microsoft compilers do point to unique identifiers in things like class IDs. A necessary part of the COM interface requires a globally-unique identifier--that identifier of necessity points to your machine. That doesn't make it easy to find your machine--it only means that once the authorities get to your door they can prove that a particular class or DLL was originally compiled there. (That is, it was compiled there first--subsequent compiles on other machines won't change the class IDs, so those later builds will still point to your machine.)
There already is an ASP targeted directly at not-for-profits. (Distinction: Bethlehem Steel is a non-profit, the Bethlehem YMCA is a not-for-profit.) Look at 3rd Sector.net. 3rd Sector was launched by a group of software executives who did well in a buyout and decided to invest a chunk of their boodle in providing services to the community. (I'm on a couple of local economic development committees with these guys--very, very good people.)
all politicians should be required to take an intelligence test before they are allowed to mention the word "computer." Let alone write laws about computers, or (perish the thought) use one.
This is an election year
At first glance, this bill seems too stupid for words--let's be serious. Is there anybody who has been online for, oh, say two weeks that hasn't figured out that on the Internet there are no state lines? And if you've been through law school (which, presumably, most Colorado legislators have been) you have heard something at some time about restrictions on Interstate Commerce? This bill is one colossal exercise in taxpayer-funded flamebait, destined to be overturned by the first judge who reads it. Right?
Except...
Politicians should generally be kept away from computers and other things they might hurt themselves with--but that doesn't mean they don't have a nascent form of Neanderthal cunning. Remember--this is an election year. Periodically politicians have to demonstrate that they are fighting, tooth and nail, for their constituents. That they are defending the weak, empowering the powerless, and valiantly struggling to defeat the wicked schemes and machinations of [if democrat==1 {big business, big oil, Republicans} else {labor unions, environmental wackos, Democrats}]. Americans may revere national leaders who are proven veterans of decades of foreign policy--but everybody votes for the guy who "fights". Nobody gets re-elected because he or she is regarded as a serious legal scholar with a remarkable ability to grasp the subtle nuances of extremely complex litigation.
Example: Bill Bradley, when he was a senator, was reknowned for his serous scholarship, and his ability to grasp the subtle nuances of extremely complex litigation. After two terms, as a senior senator with national prominence, he just barely squeaked past an unknown opponent (Christie Todd Whitman, subsequently elected governor of New Jersey) who promised to "fight for our children." He just got thoroughly spanked by Al Gore in the presidential primaries, even though when they both were in Congress Al wasn't regarded as bright enough to carry Bradley's luggage. But Al promised to "fight for the people."
So a politician must periodically demonstrate that he is a fighter--pretty much regardless of who he fights, or whether he ever wins. At the same time, most politicians really do want to achieve something or other, and they realize that in order to be effective in a group of 100, 200, or 435 Type A personalities you have to have cooperation. Being a "fighter" and working cooperatively would seem mutually exclusive, no?
What happens if they stage a fight, but only one fighter shows up?
Yup. What many politicians have discovered is a way to "fight" that actually doesn't include an opponent. A phenomenon in recent years has been a steady succession of legislation by one "fighting" politico or another designed to prevent the crisis du jour. Cocaine vendors, pornographers, child predators, and now email spammers all have one thing in common: none of them is willing to appear in a public hearing to oppose any legislation. There isn't a Recividist Pedophiles Industry Association wining and dining legislators, or an Alternative Neuro-Pharmacology Association staging demonstrations for government-subsidized blow. Everybody, Republican and Democrat alike, can "fight" email spam with the sure and certain conviction that nobody, anywhere, will oppose them. They all get to print "co-sponsored the Colorado Anti-Junk-Email Law" on their campaign brochures, and they look like heroes.
The fact that the Colorado Anti-Junk-Email Law is totally unenforceable, absolutely unconstitutional, and guaranteed to be overturned within minutes of getting litigated doesn't mean anything. These politicians may not be that bright--but they're not completely stupid. They know perfectly well that this law is going to get tossed in the hopper by the first judge to see it. And they know that nobody yet has put "...and 47% of my opponent's legislation was overturned within minutes of getting litigated." on a campaign brochure. The practice won't stop until candidates start running ads pointing out how much tax money is wasted by incumbents writing frivilous legislation in order to look like "fighters".
This is an election year. The Colorado Anti-Junk-Email Law is an election year gimmick. Don't be fooled into thinking it is anything more--at the very best it is a waste of tax money.
When some government or other decides to oppress their citizens, inevitably somebody insists that "this is insufferable--why if this [fill in title of legislation here] passes I'll be forced to move offshore." The politicians notice that the guy's total revenue the year before amounted to less than 100,000 [fill in name of local currency here] and decide that he's blowing smoke. He gets ignored, the bill passes, and in fact a year later the guy doing the hollering is still running an ISP on the second floor over a fast food [insert local greasy cultural delicacy here] shop.
Except...
In this case there are two companies to watch: one is hollering, and one presumably is rubbing its hands with glee. HavenCo is doubtless chortling as they finish their buildout of high-bandwidth connections. They'll be offering secure Email, and presumably will ignore requests for encryption keys from the UK MI5. Sure--the Royal Marines could invade: but the political costs, both nationally and internationally, outweigh any merits.
What is particularly interesting, though, is that the ISP doing the yelling (in this article) not some one-man-band doing business from a flat over the local fish 'n chips. It's PSINet--a major international ISP. A major part of their pitch to businesses is the strength of their international presence--I'm a PSINet customer, and they don't let me forget how many points of presence they have worldwide. For PSINet to threaten to exit the UK market--entirely--is simply dramatic news.
Frankly, I wonder if the Standard's reporter may have over-interpreted something PSINet announced. If PSINet is indeed serious about exiting the UK, it will doubtless enrage many PSINet customers, and cost PSINet a chunk of business. If PSINet is serious about this--and really did make the threat--we could see the UK become isolated as other international ISPs follow PSINet's suit.
Watch both HavenCo and PSINet carefully As this legislation is enacted, watch to see what happens. Does HavenCo get inundated with business from people and businesses that don't want their email read? Does PSINet follow through on the threat, and exit the UK? And when does the UK arrest the first person to refuse to divulge encryption keys?
In this case, they knew the online personality. They didn't know the individual behind the curtain. They didn't know his name, his ailment, his problems, merely a handle and his technical savvy. While I like being appreciated for my technical skills, I'd rather be known for who I am.
My SlashDot "nick" should make plain my thoughts about using handles. 8-) But for some people in this world, the Internet and a handle let them be known precisely for what they are not. In an evil sense that can be a 40-something bald man pretending to be a 15-year-old blonde chiquita looking for Life in the Fast Lane. But many times it can be people with disabilities who--for once in their lives--can be accepted as part of a community without anybody knowing or caring that they're different.
Years ago, on CompuServe, there was a sysop on a bunch of forums named Ed. Ed was a busybody. Ed was a know-it-all. Ed, to be candid, was something of a jerk. But Ed had some grounds to be a know-it-all--he did know it all. He was an incredibly talented guy, just a guy who seemed to have a colossal chip on his shoulder. Long story, but I came to learn that Ed had a raft of serious disabilities. It made it easier to understand the guy. But Ed didn't want people to know about his features--he wanted to be known for who he was, and what he was capable of doing. He wanted the force of his intellect and personality to be the features that identified him, not the nature of his disabilities.
People in the real world tend to joke about us--they say that geeks relate better to machines than to people. In truth, many of us participate online because we do relate better when we're writing HTML code. We can toss off witty bon mots, we can use italics to subtly shade our views, and we can use emoticons to take the edge off when we are treading the fine line between being forthright and being a flamer. 8-) For the vast majority of us, that's a matter of choice--we can get up and walk through the door out into the Big Blue Room[tm] and say, "oh, my--what a lovely day." For others of us, that isn't possible. We may not be able to walk, we may not be able to talk, we may not be able to see.
But online, nobody can tell.
Joel Klecker evidently took advantage of that. As Espy, he wasn't a bed-ridden kid, withering away. He wasn't an object of pity, he wasn't "included" so that other people could feel good about themselves, he wasn't somebody's class pet. He mattered--and he was evidently known for the force of his personality and intellect.
I see your point. Some people use handles because they're afraid to use their own names. But some people--and probably more than you'd think--use handles as a way to express who they are, as opposed to how the world sees them. For the Eds and the Barrys that I've known--and for Joel, whom I did not know--the online community was the one place where they were not disabled.
The way PayPal works is that each person is depositing money with PayPal. You can deposit money with PayPal by writing a check, by charging your credit card, or by giving PayPal permission to charge your card. PayPal permits you (the whole point is to encourage you) to trade PayPal play money with your friends--such as on auction sites. PayPal promises that any time you want your money back, they'll send it--by crediting a credit card, or sending a check, etc. The result is that PayPal is the merchant that is charging the credit card--not the seller in an auction. Both the buyer and the seller are PayPal customers.
Note that PayPal is free. How do they make money? MSNBC notes that they have racked up 2.4 million customers. If each has $50 in PayPal credits, that's $120 million of no-interest capital that PayPal has to play with. Given the number of semi-pro computer hardware merchants on EBay that are hyping PayPal, I'd bet that they have even more money than that. Even at a meager 5% return on investment, that's $6.0 million per year in revenue. Not bad for a B2C e-commerce business.
I'm asking because I'm looking for a way to do something similar myself--to be able to process CC transactions without requiring my (very small) customers to each get merchant accounts.
I have looked into the same thing. I'm a (very minor) official of the U.S. sanctioning body for one of the horse sports. Our competitions are organized by local promoters--each promoter will typically run one or two events a year. A lot of organizers want to take entries over the Web--but accepting credit cards is a stumbling block. (More precisely, paying a $35 monthly fee 12 months out of the year in order to accept payments in the month of August puts a lot of people off.)
The financial and technical solution is to have the sanctioning body act as the merchant--the money is paid to the sanctioning body, which in turn transfers funds simultaneously to accounts managed by the local organizer. This is much more palatable for the credit card processors--they get a large organization processing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. BUT--it requires a measure of trust between the local organizers and the sanctioning body. That's why I said we have the financial and technical solution, as opposed to the political solution. (The organizers pay fees to the sanctioning body--they fear, probably correctly, that some day some bright light is going to realize that the sanctioning body could just take the fees right off the top. They want their money, and they want to determine how much gets paid to the sanctioning body at what time.)
If this looks at all like your situation, I think the financial and technical part is easy. The really big question is the political one--is there a strong bond of trust between the small not-quite-merchants and the parent entity? If there is, then the solution works. If there is not, I'd strongly recommend not pursuing this--just a little bit of mistrust can lead to terrible squabbling.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi!
You're essentially advocating one giant, massive computer to track all these vehicles. And you're suggesting a 10-second latency between vehicle reports. Here's an academic exercise for you: there are more than 5 million registered vehicles in the New York City metropolitan area (specifically, the FCC-designated MSC). If a position report requires a minimum of 64 bytes (it more or less does), and each vehicle is reporting every 10 seconds, how much bandwidth does it take to handle all the traffic?
Lots.
Having one massive system to control vehicle traffic can work--but only if it is
Which is to say, this works when you're the Federal Aviation Administration tracking airplanes through the sky (there are only several thousand airliners worldwide). The problem is vastly more complicated when you have hundreds of millions of cars in North America--the bandwidth requirements, and the computing requirements, are overwhelming. And all you need is one vehicle in the middle of it all to suddenly decide to fry its GeoBigBrother chip, and lots of people die.
Yes--some transit systems monitor the positions of their buses. Here's how: the bus does have geodata onboard--but since it is only traveling within the Portland area, it doesn't need any more data than a few counties. That's substantially less than 37 CD-ROMs. The bus also includes a radio transmitter that is talking back and forth with a controller. The system tells the controller where the bus is.
But--that bus gets "lost" all the time, depending on how often it passes large buildings, goes under bridges, etc. If there's a tunnel on the route, forget about it. In a real sense, these systems are just like cell phones (and in some cases, they are cell phones): there are some places where you just can't get radio reception. (And there's the opposite problem, too--sometimes you get radio reception a hundred miles away.)
The system you see when you ride the bus is a reporting system. A system to govern a vehicle's speed--with obvious life-and-death implications--is a command and control system. Don't confuse the two--the first is relatively easy. The second is extremely hard--and the consequences of a failure are catastrophic.
While I admire your ingenuity, I must also point out that you're not the first to think of the problem along those lines.
In fact, the data in any given 4 km area is substantially more complex than a vector and a few arcs. So there are significant bandwidth issues.
There are also significant geography issues--because your vehicle would have to know which 4 km square to download next. (In fact, you wouldn't download 4 km squares--you'd download .2 or .25-degree squares. GIS generally doesn't do miles or kilometers.)
And once again--you'd have to absolutely, positively guarantee, regardless of wind, weather, or atmospheric disturbance, that the data transfer happened in time. Or you could be sending cars at 100 kmph hurtling into an interchange whose speed limit was just reduced to 40 kmph.
Politicians love control. But they get very nervous about the possibility of large numbers of voters getting killed.
Hi!
My firm is developing a web-based vehicle locator system which uses GPS receivers mounted in a vehicle, coupled with a GIS database. I can tell you that while this sounds technically feasible, it won't work.
A system like this requires two parts: a GPS-based locator; and a GIS (Geographic Information System). The GPS locator is relatively easy--there are commercial GPS chipsets that (depending on technology) can identify your position to +/- 3 meters. The latitute/longitude values can be mapped against a database of road segments--and that's where the problem begins.
With what speed limit data?
Even computer professionals tend to leap to unbelievable conclusions about the ability of computers. This is an excellent case: GIS data is stored in a massive database (the MapQuest.com database ships on 37 CD-ROMs). Look at any digital map--it is made up of bazillions of very short line segments. Each and every one of those segments has to be categorized by the type of road, the street numbers of buildings on the road, the lat/lon where the segment starts, the lat/lon where it ends, and lots more. But there is some surprising information that is not included in that data: weight restrictions, load restrictions (such as haz mats), and speed limits. Adding that information would be a big job--and an expensive job.
Expensive? We're talking about the government here....
Okay--so there has never been a government initiative yet that was dropped for being too expensive. That's not the only problem. Getting 37 CD-ROMs worth of data into storage on your vehicle may be a worthy challenge, but let's assume that the bright lights in government can handle that one too. (Stop snickering.) The big problem here is that geographic information changes--all the time. That new shopping center you drive past on your way to work? You may have noticed the new traffic signal--but did you notice that the shopping center driveway has a street name? Did you notice that the speed limit on the boulevard past the shopping center changed? Did you notice the housing development behind the shopping center, with a dozen new streets?
Anybody working with street-level GIS data gets a quarterly database update. (Which means we're all re-loading 37 CDs every quarter.) Streets get dug up and moved; streets get extended; streets get eliminated; streets get widened; bridges get closed. A quarter's update might include changes to millions of street segments--it is by no means trivial. And typically there is a 3 to 6 month lag between the time a street is changed or added and the time it appears in the database. In order for this system to work, every single car would have to be updated to the current speed limits--and they'd all have to be updated more or less simultaneously. Consider the spring construction schedule on your favorite interstate highway--what happens when construction starts? They'll drop the speed limit to 25 mph, and make all the computers slow all the vehicles down. What happens on the day the project ends--and only 96% of the cars have had their computers updated to show the speed limit on that road segment to be 75 mph again? Answer: 4% of your drivers die. Updating all that data to every single car--simultaneously poses a massive challenge.
And that's not all. With a GPS chipset that supports WAAG (fixed-position, ground-based GPS transmitters) we can determine your position to +/- 3 meters--but the road data frequently isn't that accurate. In the U.S., for instance, all but one commercial GIS data provider uses street data based on the U.S. Commerce Department TIGR data files. Different providers will tweak the data--fixing problems, even comparing the TIGR data to satellite photography (the difference in price between different vendors is generally due to the detail quality of their maps). But even with the best maps you can buy, vehicles sometimes still seem to appear well off the actual road. Not all the time, not most of the time, but often enough that this system won't work. Consider what happens when the onboard computer on a vehicle on I-78 in New Jersey (speed limit 65) decides that it is really on the adjacent service road (speed limit 25, just 15 meters south) and slows down....
As it happens, this level of imprecision drives me nuts. The client is continually having to remind me that GPS and GIS are about displaying information, and letting a human brain do the pattern analysis to determine what it sees. For example: suppose we have a position report that shows a vehicle at 40.638 North/74.8974 West. Is the vehicle on I-78 (speed limit 65 mph), County Route 513 (speed limit 40 mph), or Old Highway 22 (speed limit 25)? The answer is--could be any of the three. (The lat/lon--and it's real data--is an overpass.) You and I can easily answer that question based on our knowledge of other data points, and perhaps knowledge of the specific vehicle we're tracking. (We can see four other data points showing the vehicle westbound on I-78, and we know the vehicle is being driven by a Pennsylvania resident, and we know that the data points were mapped during the westbound rush hour: we can easily deduce that the vehicle is probably on I-78. But all we can do is deduce that--and all we can deduce is that the vehicle is probably on I-78. The driver may well be on the off-ramp, heading for a nearby McDonald's. We have to accept that level of imprecision, because that level of fuzziness is the best we can do.
There is an enthusiasm for technology today that sometimes can let people get carried away. This is one of those times. The developers will get a grant from the government to pursue the idea. And maybe they'll do pilot studies and tests and generate a lot of good PR. And hopefully they won't kill anybody before they realize the limits of this technology, and give it up.
Note: This article ran in 2000, not 2001--it ran several days before Ray Lewis and his two friends "were involved" in killing two men.
The article then goes on to raise a provocative point: according to how they interpret the numbers, the fact that 21% of the players in last year's Super Bowl had criminal records meant that they had fewer cons than society as a whole. The article goes on to refer to compare "arrest rates" from several studies with the percentage of convicts on NFL teams--and draws the completely fallacious conclusion that NFL teams have fewer hoods than most 'hoods.
The article is wrong. The writer is comparing arrest rates with the percentage of players with criminal records. That's a false comparison--the arrest rate compares the total number of arrests with the population. If you have a small group of people getting arrested all the time, you'll see a high arrest rate.
The writer cites studies that compare the rate of criminal activity among NFL players with the rate of criminal activity in the community as a whole. Again, it is a poor comparison, for two reasons. First, any NFL player is well-to-do, by any standard--the league minimum salary is better than $80,000 per year. Second, it is no secret that the rules for the rich and famous are different than they are for the rest of us. There's no better example than Ray Lewis: two men publicly "diss" three men. All five meet up outside. The two men are murdered, and all kinds of evidence (including their blood) ends up in the limousine of the three attackers. Yet nobody is convicted of the crime--the most notable of the killers pleads to negligence, and the other two walk.
11 percent of the players in the 2000 Super Bowl had criminal records. According to Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play In the NFL 21% of NFL players in the 1996-97 season had been indicted or convicted of a felony. That's not the arrest rate, mind you--that's the percentage of players with felony rap sheets.
They spent who knows how many bucks to install cameras, high-speed data lines, a control center, and links to municipal, state, and federal databases of bad guys. And positively identified no known perps.
Because they were looking in the wrong direction, perhaps?
The middle linebacker of the Ravens, Ray Lewis, is presently on probation as a result of his plea bargain in two homicides a year ago. The news media made quite a stir a while back about the alarmingly high percentage of NFL players with criminal records. A former receiver for the Carolina Panthers, Rae Carruth, was just convicted of felonies for his involvement in the death of his wife; Mark Chmura, formerly of the Green Bay Packers, is presently on trial for sexually molesting his 17-year-old babysitter.
Why are the cops looking at the fans?
Hi!
Everybody hates spam. Everybody thinks spam is a pain in the neck. Everybody thinks spam should go away. And those inclined to expect the government to do everything for them will--not surprisingly--tend to expect the government to protect them from spam.
Which may be a good thing, except for one little detail. If the government is going to protect you from "spam", the government is going to define what "spam" means. And you may not be happy with that definition--because as sure as the fact that the sun is coming up tomorrow, any government is going to figure out a way to protect itself with its definition of spam.
Remember "Junk Fax"?
Back when fax machines first appeared it didn't take office supply companies, delis, and a horde of other advertisers to figure out that they could send you virtual flyers with a local phone call--substantially cheaper than paying for postage.
Lots of people objected to junk fax. Lots of legislators climbed on the bandwagon--junk fax came to be viewed by politicians as an easy target: nobody was in favor of (euphemism) "unsolicited commercial fax."
Then a funny thing happened--except that it wasn't funny at all if you are old enough to remember watching it on CNN. Students in the People's Republic of China staged a demonstration in Tianamien Square in Beijing that quickly became a serious challenge to the authority of the Communist Party. At first the authorities dismissed this as an annoyance--but as the protest continued, the government got more and more scared. The government ultimately crushed the protest with tanks and machine guns--no one in the West knows yet how many students were killed.
What was significant about the "uprising" was that the Chinese government was right about one thing: the PRC kept insisting that the protest was being directed by "outside agitators". They were right--Chinese dissidents, in the U.S. as graduate students, were directing the protests across China from an office in suburban Boston--via fax. The PRC finally figured it out, and blocked phone traffic from the Boston area--but they never figured out concepts like call-forwarding, etc. The students were able to communicate with very little restriction right up until the end.
In the aftermath, the Communists decided that "the people" needed protection from "unsolicited fax". They required every fax machine to be registered. They enacted laws spelling out draconian punishments for unregistered fax usage. They tried their damndest to prevent anybody ever doing this again.
Now the Internet is here.
And try as the Chinese Communists might, they're having a tough time preventing people from getting information. The PRC has worked diligently to block access to foreign news sites, foreign chat sites, etc.--especially anything published in Chinese. I'm certain that one dimension of the PRC's reported enthusiasm for Linux is that they can be certain that the U.S. doesn't have a trap door in their computers--and that they can install a trap door of their own. (Somehow, I'm sure the PRC will--what a surprise!--forget to distribute the source code of their distros.)
But they can't block e-mail.
I have mail in my in-box from a young Chinese man. He and his wife are deeply fond of my mother--she and my late stepfather helped them escape from China in the immediate aftermath of Tianemien Square. They are still actively in touch with friends and relatives back in China--by email. And if the need ever arises, they can maintain those communication links: through open relays; through "anonymizer" relays; through throwaway accounts--in short, using exactly the same techniques as the spammers.
We live in a free society--with the advent of the Internet our freedom of expression and (if only virtual) assembly are practically limitless. It doesn't work that way everywhere in the world. There are places in the world where defaming the Imam earns you a fatwa--a price on your head. There are places in the world where refusing to pledge allegiance to the Dear Leader and embrace the "scientific truths" of Kim-Il-Sungism means that your family doesn't get food rations, and is left to starve. There are places in the world where billions of people are "protected" from "unsolicited fax" and other such dangers.
Those places all have governments that would be more than happy to "protect" their citizens from "spam."
Yup. Spam is an annoyance. By golly, I have to press that Delete key four, sometimes five times a day. And I'm sure that having the government decide what email I can see, and making sure that I only see "unsolicited" mail from people they approve of, will make my life so much more enjoyable. So much more buoyant--so much more vibrant--so much more liberating. At least, right up to the point where I want to send or receive messages the government doesn't approve of.
Thanks, but...
For me and my household--we'll just use SpamCop, and the Delete key.
Okay. The cops in Salem, New Hampshire--after a month-long investigation--determined that this kid had copied the text from several web sites related to the police department, modified the text, and had replaced photos on one site with rotating porn pictures.
This is clear, and compelling, proof of two things:
But something stuck in my mind about "police" and "New Hampshire"...
Of course! The ultra-Libertarian legislator who got elected in November, before anybody noticed the outrageous comments he'd posted on the Web about cops. I looked up the article, figuring I'd post a link to it here. Here's the MSNBC article. But the article includes a neat little point right at the bottom--it turns out that the cop-killer wannabe isn't the only state legislator in trouble. It seems that while the Salem cops were busy with their month-long investigation of a parody web site ("Uh, sarge--how do you spell 'freedom of the press'?"), the town elected an ex-con living under an assumed name to be their legislator:
In a separate case, state Rep. Ron "Tony" Giordano has revealed a criminal past he didn't disclose to New Hampshire voters. The Republican from Salem said this week that he did two stints in jail in Massachusetts during the early 1980s for five check-forging convictions and one handcuff-stealing incident. He was known as Ron Gordon at the time.
"We all make mistakes. I've turned my life around," Giordano said.
Giordano, who moved to Salem six years ago after changing his name, said he would step down only if his 6,000 constituents demanded he quit.
Whatever parody this kid put up had better be hilarious--because the officials clowns are pretty funny all by themselves....
"They must be getting bored in Salem, with all those witches extinct now...."
Especially since those witches were tried and burned in Salem, Massachusetts--not Salem, New Hampshire.
(Yeesh.)
Hi!
In addition to traditional fee-for-service health insurance, you may want to look into a Medical Savings Account. There are substantial advantages to an MSA for people who are self-employed--chief among them that you are paying for your health coverage with pre-tax dollars, but also you are able to keep a significant portion of what you pay.
Here's how it works: a Medical Savings Account consists of two parts:
You pay a relatively low premium for the insurance policy, and you pay a monthly "contribution" into your investment account. Major expenses are paid (after the deductible) by the insurance policy--but the minor expenses, routine medical care, etc. are paid from the investment account.
As I mentioned above, the advantages for somebody who is self-employed (or who works for a small company) are substantial:
The down side of having an MSA is that you can find yourself being taken advantage of by doctors--because they are used to overbilling and then just taking what the insurance company pays. Since you don't have Blue Cross/Blue Shield to say, "the reasonable and customary amount is $48, so that's all we're paying" you can occasionally get popped for a $250 visit to the doctor where the family behind you with traditional insurance pays a fraction of that. Most of the time you can negotiate--but every now and again you'll stumble across a jerk who gets greedy.
To find out more, check out Golden Rule Insurance Company or the Internal Revenue Service publication 969.
Uh...
Let's take a step back here, and analyze what this article is really about. The writer had a problem with two modems and a printer driver--but bitched until she got somebody to come on-site to replace the motherboard and the entire printer. Her solution to these problems is to cite examples of Indian enthusiasm for software engineering.
There's just one little problem--software engineering has ZIP to do with the problems this not-quite-up-to-speed writer had. Her modem problems? I'd bet money she had IRQ conflicts, but the tech on the phone couldn't walk her through fixing them. The simple solution was to send a human out there--hence, replace the motherboard. The real solution: a legacy-free box that connects a modem without hardware interrupts. Her printer driver problems? Yes--there are crappy drivers. That's a marketing problem. But a printer driver problem is not solved by shipping a new printer--and for an allegedly experienced computer journalist to have to wait months for a CD-ROM to arrive with a printer driver (what--she couldn't find how to download a LaserJet driver from www.hp.com?) is simply laughable.
I'm a big believer in software engineering. But I'm also a big believer in quality journalism--and this article most definitely isn't quality journalism at all. This article essentially boils down to whining from a particularly clueless user about how she can't manage to get her computer to work. The solution she suggests--software engineering--has nothing to do with the problem. All the software engineering in the world isn't going to solve her IRQ problems with her modem--a USB port will. The best software engineering in the world may produce the best printer driver in the world--but printers will still need drivers. Updating a printer driver will always require replacing the driver--not the printer.
Bottom line: the article is a waste of time.
Hi!
What Cogent is doing is part of a small but growing phenomenon--commonly called "metropolitan area networking." The basic idea is to wire a densely-populated area like a campus network--connecting to the larger Internet through a few gateways just like a university or corporate network would. The benefits of doing this are reasonably obvious: wiring an entire "campus" at once represents a single construction project, rather than becoming a years-long incremental installation of line after line after line. Typically the network service is provided with an Ethernet switch rather than a router--the host "Ethernet service provider" typically will also offer network management services for network participants.
Another emerging provider of MANs is 3rd Wire, which is presently in discussions to wire the downtown "Digital District" in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 3rd Wire is publicly indicating that they expect bandwidth costs to drop dramatically over the next 5 years--they expect to provide bandwidth within the Allentown Digital District at approximately $400/GB within a year, and their business model projects that price to drop to roughly $50/GB of bandwidth in five years.
Mind blowing? What they're doing--and they are by no means the only people doing this--is seeing that there is critical mass in providing fiber in that "last mile" to the end user. And they're being helped, in part, by communities that recognize that "urban infrastructure" in the 21st century will require bandwidth just as much as it requires paved roads and traffic signals. Those communities are actively working to bring in providers to wire their communities--reasoning (entirely correctly) that high-tech firms are going to gravitate to cities with gigabit bandwidth for sub-K bucks.
Incidentally, several posters have mentioned that this is meant "for business only"--not so. Certainly the Allentown Digital District very much wants to use the metropolitan area network to revitalize business in downtown Allentown--but we also want to encourage urban redevelopment in the surrounding neighborhoods with the offer of dramatic bandwidth for small dollars. If you can live and work a couple of blocks apart, and have gigibit Ethernet at home and at work, wouldn't that be attractive? We think it will be.
Full disclosure: I'm heavily involved with the Lehigh Valley Partnership and the Allentown Digital District.
Hi!
I'm the father of an eight-year-old with Down Syndrome. Annie is mentally retarded, and (like many Downs kids) she prizes the independence of watching videotapes on TV, and playing the companion CDs on her computer.
However, a mentally-retarded eight-year-old is nobody's idea of a "safe" user. She has proven, empirically, that crunchy peanut butter applied to a CD-ROM makes the perfect grinding medium for destroying the laser in the CD-ROM drive. She has proven, empirically, just how much popcorn you must stuff into an RCA VCR to make it eat the videotape. She routinely destroys videotapes and CDs.
I can address the problem by making copies--duplicating the media. Annie watches the copy, and when it is destroyed I just make another copy of the original. I can duplicate videos, CDs, and (through a client) DVDs. But--when I duplicate that content I am violating the DMCA.
An MPAA lawyer might ask "why not just buy another DVD? (or videotape or CD-ROM)?" For most media I could--but Annie particularly lives for Disney animation. And Disney, for years, has maintained the practice of only selling videotapes (and now DVDs) for a limited period of time. They will sell a movie, like Toy Story for a limited period of time. Once that title is removed from stores it is not available, anywhere, in any form. So the only way I can permit Annie to watch Toy Story is to duplicate the original, and let her watch the duplicate.
I have previously written to the EFF, offering to participate with Annie in any litigation regarding the DMCA. My offer still stands--I believe strongly in the legal benefits of intellectual property law, and am extremely conscious of the image that I project to my (other) children when I bootleg media for Annie. I'm violating the DMCA--and I know it. And they know it. And they know that violating the law is wrong.
All I want to do is let my little girl watch videos, achieving some pride in her self-sufficiency....
John Murdoch
jmurdoch@windgap.com
Help!
I can't find any reference to the story mentioned by CmdrTaco about the Furby challenge being inspired by the mother of an autistic boy. I would dearly love to learn more about this--I work with a couple of children with autism in an Easter Seals program, and the son of some friends has autism. All three sets of parents have the same limitation: zero programming skills.
Can anyone provide a link (or just point in the right direction) to more information about the boy with autism?
Thanks!
Yes--the BSA can raid your office. Here's how it works.
The BSA actively advertises for disgruntled employees or former employees to turn in companies that cheat on their license agreements. When they get a complaint they typically attempt to substantiate the allegation (that is, is the source of the complaint credible as a witness?). The process is quite similar to ascertaining the credibility of an informant by the police. We'll get to the reason why below.
If the BSA thinks there is something to the case, they will send a scary letter from the lawyers--we have reason to believe you are in violation of license agreements, etc. The letter will ask the company to "voluntarily" permit the BSA to come and audit the company's network to determine whether or not the company is in violation of license agreements.
If the company agrees to a "voluntary" inspection, the BSA shows up, installs a network app that scans the network for software from the BSA membership, and totals up the number of copies. They then ask the company to document purchases of all of the copies on the network--and they bill the company for the retail price of any copies that cannot be documented. Full retail can be a pretty stiff price to pay--but most companies figure that full retail is cheap compared to the cost of fighting the BSA in court. If the company pays up, the case ends.
If the company ignores the first scary letter, they get a second scary letter from the BSA lawyers. That is much more direct, and to the point. If the company agrees, the same "volutary" inspection happens.
But let's suppose that the company ignores the scary letters. If you've watched a videotape recently you will note that videotapes sold in the U.S. include a warning that copyright infringement is punishable under federal law, and is investigated by the FBI. Federal law permits private individuals (including corporations and associations) to gather evidence of a crime and present it to the feds for them to pursue. The BSA's initial complaint, buttressed by a "good faith" effort to enlist the company cooperation (that is, the first and second scary letters), is regarded by the FBI as justification for a warrant. (That's why the BSA evaluates the credibility of the complaint--that's a key part of the request for a federal warrant.) The FBI and/or the U.S. Marshals, with the BSA, arrive--unannounced--at the company site, with a federal warrant.
When they enter the premises they will serve the warrant, and they will announce, loudly, that everyone in the premises must stand up and step away from their keyboards immediately. These people are feds--they carry guns. They mean business. And they are serious. If this happens where you work, by all means, stand up, and step away from your keyboard. Do not try to be a hero for your employer and attempt to delete the 3000 bootleg copies of Leisure Suit Larry that you know are distributed across the enterprise. They can 'cuff you and arrest you.
Once the feds have "secured" the scene, the BSA people step up and install their network spy application to identify all the software on the network that doesn't have a license. If they find any (and they almost certainly will) they and the feds will propose a settlement: pay full retail, plus a whopping fine (like $1500 per copy) for each bootleg copy found. Or, face criminal prosecution by the FBI for copyright infringement--followed by a civil court action for damages after the criminal case is finished. Any company with half a brain (or anything resembling a competent lawyer) is going to cave and pay the "settlement". The cost (and the adverse publicity) of a criminal court proceeding is sufficiently onerous that its just smarter to pay up.
I have seen this happen at a former client, and recently declined an engagement with a prospective client because they just been raided by the feds and the BSA. There are too many good clients out there to bother getting associated with known bootleggers. (And if they cheat on their licenses, there's a good chance that they'll try to jerk us around too. Or at least that's the way we view it.)
This is, on the one hand, a compelling argument for paying for licenses and using license monitoring software to ensure compliance. On the other hand, this can also be a compelling argument for free (open source, home-brewed, or abandonware) software.
Hi!
Any tech employer with a brain knows the numbers: unemployment (overall) is at an all-time low; tech unemployment is simply nonexistant (if you can spell "VB" in New York City you can get a job); and the situation isn't changing any time soon. When Burger King is advertising $7 an hour, plus health insurance and (I'm not making this up) a 401k plan you know the job market is tight. How do you find employees?
An interesting fact to remember is that employment statistics aren't what you think they are. The "unemployed" that count in the stats are people who have been employed that are now receiving unemployment benefits. If you've never had a full-time job, if you never filed for unemployment, or if your unemployment benefits have expired, you don't count in the stats. The people who count these things at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculate the employment rate based on people presently working or collecting benefits.
There are tech workers out there...
There are tech workers to be found--and IMHO the largest cohort are skilled, experienced tech workers who'd love to pick up a job. They're moms who want to stay at home with their children, but still make the bucks you can make in the IT world. Those workers are generally much more sensitive to employee benefits than they are to salary--they're far more interested in working hours (and the limits to working hours) than they are in what they'll make per hour. If you create a workplace where telecommuting and bring-the-kids-on-a-snow-day are acceptable, employers can find a lot of talent.
That said, I'm not sure that SlashDot is the place to ask whether techs care about employee benefits. The SlashDot crowd has a heavy representation of young kids, in or just out of college, that is heavily male. IOW, very few Slashdotters are wondering about Mommy-track decisions, so your answers may not be that helpful. If you're contemplating a Mommy-track kind of career choice, yes--there are employers who are sensitive to your concerns. And trust me--as the economic expansion continues, there will be more of them.
I seriously doubt this. The Interstate Highway System was established in the early 1950s, and the design decisions about factors like signs and lane widths were handled by members of the nascent Institute of Traffic (now Transportation) Engineers later in the Fifties. There might have been committee hearings in which lane widths or sign colors might have been discussed, but I strongly question whether they were issues that were put to a vote.
(How do I know this, you might ask? Because my stepfather was one of the transportation engineers who determined all of that stuff. And I never heard him say 'boo' about any congressional votes on the subject.)
I'm with rotor--
I grew up, as much as anywhere, in a small town in northern Vermont with my grandmother. My siblings and I still own the house, and we vacation there with our families. The town library has an Internet connection--for most of the people in the town that's the only connection they can get.
And they have a serious problem with people viewing porn on the (one) computer. They've turned the computer so it faces the wall--so if you view a bunch of porn sites no impressionable kiddies are watching too. But what they haven't considered is doubleclick.net--when the next user comes along and connects to Hotmail they get a bunch of banner ads advertising pr0n. My niece went to check her Hotmail account and got banners for lesbian pr0n--definitely rattled her.
My sister (who, incidentally, lives inside the Beltway) is now suddenly in favor of a federal agency to Put A Stop To This(tm). My thought is that my sister ought to spend the eight bucks a month necessary to get email accounts for her kids that don't serve banner ads.
Dear Candidate:
Much has been made in the current presidential debates about the foreign policy of the United States, and whether it is the role of the U.S. military to intervene in humanitarian crises around the globe. This was hotly discussed at the time of the Kosovo atrocities, of course, but "humanitarian concerns" have been cited as the reason for U.S. military intervention in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere.
Some of you have called for a "compelling national interest" before committing U.S. troops; others have rejected the use of U.S. troops for humanitarian intervention--or indeed for any purpose at all. One of you, in particular, has decried the "interventionist" policies of American presidents since Roosevelt, who interfere abroad in the affairs of other sovereign nations.
It is 11 o'clock Eastern time as I write this. It is not quite dawn in Khartoum, in the Sudan. In just a few hours there will be Dinka slaves sold in the marketplace. 137 years after the Emancipation Proclamation--135 years after the end of the American Civil War--there is an active, vibrant slave trade in Africa today. Black Africans from the southern part of the Sudan are being captured and sold into slavery by Arabs from the northern Sudan--according to many sources they act with tacit approval of the Sudanese government. Several freed Sudanese slaves have made moving presentations in the media, but to date there has been little or no official comment by the Clinton Administration. To date, the most effective voice in the U.S. has been a class of fifth graders from Colorado that have raised $50,000 to buy slaves and set them free.
I ask you--is the worldwide traffic in human slaves a compelling humanitarian interest of the United States? Is the capture, sale, and breeding of black Africans cause to consider U.S. military intervention?
If your answer is "no", what can you say to the millions of American citizens whose ancestors were brought to these shores in chains? If your answer is "yes", what--precisely--do you propose to do?
Yup--I mean it. Spend a little time in the business world and you'll be amazed at how often a business process depends upon there being a signature on a document--without the slightest regard for whether or not that is your signature.
For example, consider your checking account. When you opened the account you had to sign a card, right? So the bank could compare your signature on each check to prove that it's really you? Guess what--banks do not check signatures on checks. In fact, if you ask your bank to validate the signature on each check cashed they will typically charge you for the "service." So unless you allege that a check was forged, your signature at the bottom of that check is meaningless.
Case in point: ABC News is a client. For some reason, known only to ABC's Accounts Payable department, they pay their invoices from a bank in North Dakota--on a joke of a check form. The bank name, transit routing numbers, and the signature are all printed in place on an old-fashioned chain printer--they don't even have one of those stamps that purports to be an authorized signature. The first time we got paid we looked at the check and said, "yeah, right. No way on earth is this going to be accepted by the bank." We took it to the bank in town, the teller looked at it, said, "are you going to be on TV?" and processed the deposit. Without any "signature" beyond the words "American Broadcasting Companies, Inc."
I have a project starting later in the month designing a new system for a U.S. sports sanctioning body. As part of the entry process for competitions a competitor has to present copies of various documents (medical forms, membership cards, etc.). The system, in theory, depends upon the validity of signatures--but the forms are typically photocopied. It is child's play to create a phony medical certificate--in essence to cheat--using any $99 graphics program. But--if we assign the competitor a digital signature (using the PGP trust method), and counter-sign with a trusted medical provider and a date, we have a substantially more trustworthy certificate. It becomes vastly harder to cheat. We really, really like the idea of digital signatures--and we really, really hope that the client (the sanctioning body) will adopt the plan.
It will be possible to cheat with e-signatures. You will hear horror stories repeated by breathless bimbos on the 11 o'clock news. But signature fraud happens all the time today--what e-signatures will do is make signature fraud substantially more difficult to accomplish, and therefore a crime that occurs much less frequently.
IMHO, this is a very good thing.
Hi!
I think you have to decide what you want to do:
If you want to run an Open Source project, hey, that's great. But by its very nature Open Source is open--the very opposite of clandestine. If you're going to write clandestine software you need to maintain an absolutely closed development group--you simply cannot tell the world the names and addresses of all the members in your cadre of 3l33t haX0r d00dz.
Corporations? You're Aiming Too Low
DeCSS may scare the (few remaining) wits out of the MPAA--but ultimately the MPAA is just a trade organization dedicated to staging an awards ceremony. If you really want to have a little excitement, consider doing something really subversive. Say, develop Arabic-language courseware targeted at girls (particularly Afghan girls). Or Bible-club software in modernized Chinese.
I have been involved, in years past, with an ad hoc operation that smuggled Bibles and other Christian books into countries where they were (and in several cases still are) considered contraband. The operation was relatively small--because we had limited funds, and because we depended upon people in-country to handle distribution. Our funds were limited by our need for security--if we'd broadcast to the world that we were smuggling Bibles to women in the Persian Gulf the locals might have caught on. Or worse, caught our contact in-country. Security is paramount.
That said, yes--Microsoft compilers do point to unique identifiers in things like class IDs. A necessary part of the COM interface requires a globally-unique identifier--that identifier of necessity points to your machine. That doesn't make it easy to find your machine--it only means that once the authorities get to your door they can prove that a particular class or DLL was originally compiled there. (That is, it was compiled there first--subsequent compiles on other machines won't change the class IDs, so those later builds will still point to your machine.)
Hi!
There already is an ASP targeted directly at not-for-profits. (Distinction: Bethlehem Steel is a non-profit, the Bethlehem YMCA is a not-for-profit.) Look at 3rd Sector.net. 3rd Sector was launched by a group of software executives who did well in a buyout and decided to invest a chunk of their boodle in providing services to the community. (I'm on a couple of local economic development committees with these guys--very, very good people.)
This legislation conclusively proves two things:
At first glance, this bill seems too stupid for words--let's be serious. Is there anybody who has been online for, oh, say two weeks that hasn't figured out that on the Internet there are no state lines? And if you've been through law school (which, presumably, most Colorado legislators have been) you have heard something at some time about restrictions on Interstate Commerce? This bill is one colossal exercise in taxpayer-funded flamebait, destined to be overturned by the first judge who reads it. Right?
Except...
Politicians should generally be kept away from computers and other things they might hurt themselves with--but that doesn't mean they don't have a nascent form of Neanderthal cunning. Remember--this is an election year. Periodically politicians have to demonstrate that they are fighting, tooth and nail, for their constituents. That they are defending the weak, empowering the powerless, and valiantly struggling to defeat the wicked schemes and machinations of [if democrat==1 {big business, big oil, Republicans} else {labor unions, environmental wackos, Democrats}]. Americans may revere national leaders who are proven veterans of decades of foreign policy--but everybody votes for the guy who "fights". Nobody gets re-elected because he or she is regarded as a serious legal scholar with a remarkable ability to grasp the subtle nuances of extremely complex litigation.
So a politician must periodically demonstrate that he is a fighter--pretty much regardless of who he fights, or whether he ever wins. At the same time, most politicians really do want to achieve something or other, and they realize that in order to be effective in a group of 100, 200, or 435 Type A personalities you have to have cooperation. Being a "fighter" and working cooperatively would seem mutually exclusive, no?
What happens if they stage a fight, but only one fighter shows up?
Yup. What many politicians have discovered is a way to "fight" that actually doesn't include an opponent. A phenomenon in recent years has been a steady succession of legislation by one "fighting" politico or another designed to prevent the crisis du jour. Cocaine vendors, pornographers, child predators, and now email spammers all have one thing in common: none of them is willing to appear in a public hearing to oppose any legislation. There isn't a Recividist Pedophiles Industry Association wining and dining legislators, or an Alternative Neuro-Pharmacology Association staging demonstrations for government-subsidized blow. Everybody, Republican and Democrat alike, can "fight" email spam with the sure and certain conviction that nobody, anywhere, will oppose them. They all get to print "co-sponsored the Colorado Anti-Junk-Email Law" on their campaign brochures, and they look like heroes.
The fact that the Colorado Anti-Junk-Email Law is totally unenforceable, absolutely unconstitutional, and guaranteed to be overturned within minutes of getting litigated doesn't mean anything. These politicians may not be that bright--but they're not completely stupid. They know perfectly well that this law is going to get tossed in the hopper by the first judge to see it. And they know that nobody yet has put "...and 47% of my opponent's legislation was overturned within minutes of getting litigated." on a campaign brochure. The practice won't stop until candidates start running ads pointing out how much tax money is wasted by incumbents writing frivilous legislation in order to look like "fighters".
This is an election year. The Colorado Anti-Junk-Email Law is an election year gimmick. Don't be fooled into thinking it is anything more--at the very best it is a waste of tax money.
When some government or other decides to oppress their citizens, inevitably somebody insists that "this is insufferable--why if this [fill in title of legislation here] passes I'll be forced to move offshore." The politicians notice that the guy's total revenue the year before amounted to less than 100,000 [fill in name of local currency here] and decide that he's blowing smoke. He gets ignored, the bill passes, and in fact a year later the guy doing the hollering is still running an ISP on the second floor over a fast food [insert local greasy cultural delicacy here] shop.
Except...
In this case there are two companies to watch: one is hollering, and one presumably is rubbing its hands with glee. HavenCo is doubtless chortling as they finish their buildout of high-bandwidth connections. They'll be offering secure Email, and presumably will ignore requests for encryption keys from the UK MI5. Sure--the Royal Marines could invade: but the political costs, both nationally and internationally, outweigh any merits.
What is particularly interesting, though, is that the ISP doing the yelling (in this article) not some one-man-band doing business from a flat over the local fish 'n chips. It's PSINet--a major international ISP. A major part of their pitch to businesses is the strength of their international presence--I'm a PSINet customer, and they don't let me forget how many points of presence they have worldwide. For PSINet to threaten to exit the UK market--entirely--is simply dramatic news.
Frankly, I wonder if the Standard's reporter may have over-interpreted something PSINet announced. If PSINet is indeed serious about exiting the UK, it will doubtless enrage many PSINet customers, and cost PSINet a chunk of business. If PSINet is serious about this--and really did make the threat--we could see the UK become isolated as other international ISPs follow PSINet's suit.
Watch both HavenCo and PSINet carefully
As this legislation is enacted, watch to see what happens. Does HavenCo get inundated with business from people and businesses that don't want their email read? Does PSINet follow through on the threat, and exit the UK? And when does the UK arrest the first person to refuse to divulge encryption keys?
Hi Alex!
My SlashDot "nick" should make plain my thoughts about using handles. 8-) But for some people in this world, the Internet and a handle let them be known precisely for what they are not. In an evil sense that can be a 40-something bald man pretending to be a 15-year-old blonde chiquita looking for Life in the Fast Lane. But many times it can be people with disabilities who--for once in their lives--can be accepted as part of a community without anybody knowing or caring that they're different.
Years ago, on CompuServe, there was a sysop on a bunch of forums named Ed. Ed was a busybody. Ed was a know-it-all. Ed, to be candid, was something of a jerk. But Ed had some grounds to be a know-it-all--he did know it all. He was an incredibly talented guy, just a guy who seemed to have a colossal chip on his shoulder. Long story, but I came to learn that Ed had a raft of serious disabilities. It made it easier to understand the guy. But Ed didn't want people to know about his features--he wanted to be known for who he was, and what he was capable of doing. He wanted the force of his intellect and personality to be the features that identified him, not the nature of his disabilities.
People in the real world tend to joke about us--they say that geeks relate better to machines than to people. In truth, many of us participate online because we do relate better when we're writing HTML code. We can toss off witty bon mots, we can use italics to subtly shade our views, and we can use emoticons to take the edge off when we are treading the fine line between being forthright and being a flamer. 8-) For the vast majority of us, that's a matter of choice--we can get up and walk through the door out into the Big Blue Room[tm] and say, "oh, my--what a lovely day." For others of us, that isn't possible. We may not be able to walk, we may not be able to talk, we may not be able to see.
Joel Klecker evidently took advantage of that. As Espy, he wasn't a bed-ridden kid, withering away. He wasn't an object of pity, he wasn't "included" so that other people could feel good about themselves, he wasn't somebody's class pet. He mattered--and he was evidently known for the force of his personality and intellect.
I see your point. Some people use handles because they're afraid to use their own names. But some people--and probably more than you'd think--use handles as a way to express who they are, as opposed to how the world sees them. For the Eds and the Barrys that I've known--and for Joel, whom I did not know--the online community was the one place where they were not disabled.
Good for Joel.
Hi Dan!
The way PayPal works is that each person is depositing money with PayPal. You can deposit money with PayPal by writing a check, by charging your credit card, or by giving PayPal permission to charge your card. PayPal permits you (the whole point is to encourage you) to trade PayPal play money with your friends--such as on auction sites. PayPal promises that any time you want your money back, they'll send it--by crediting a credit card, or sending a check, etc. The result is that PayPal is the merchant that is charging the credit card--not the seller in an auction. Both the buyer and the seller are PayPal customers.
Note that PayPal is free. How do they make money? MSNBC notes that they have racked up 2.4 million customers. If each has $50 in PayPal credits, that's $120 million of no-interest capital that PayPal has to play with. Given the number of semi-pro computer hardware merchants on EBay that are hyping PayPal, I'd bet that they have even more money than that. Even at a meager 5% return on investment, that's $6.0 million per year in revenue. Not bad for a B2C e-commerce business.
I have looked into the same thing. I'm a (very minor) official of the U.S. sanctioning body for one of the horse sports. Our competitions are organized by local promoters--each promoter will typically run one or two events a year. A lot of organizers want to take entries over the Web--but accepting credit cards is a stumbling block. (More precisely, paying a $35 monthly fee 12 months out of the year in order to accept payments in the month of August puts a lot of people off.)
The financial and technical solution is to have the sanctioning body act as the merchant--the money is paid to the sanctioning body, which in turn transfers funds simultaneously to accounts managed by the local organizer. This is much more palatable for the credit card processors--they get a large organization processing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. BUT--it requires a measure of trust between the local organizers and the sanctioning body. That's why I said we have the financial and technical solution, as opposed to the political solution. (The organizers pay fees to the sanctioning body--they fear, probably correctly, that some day some bright light is going to realize that the sanctioning body could just take the fees right off the top. They want their money, and they want to determine how much gets paid to the sanctioning body at what time.)
If this looks at all like your situation, I think the financial and technical part is easy. The really big question is the political one--is there a strong bond of trust between the small not-quite-merchants and the parent entity? If there is, then the solution works. If there is not, I'd strongly recommend not pursuing this--just a little bit of mistrust can lead to terrible squabbling.