It might be more interesting to look for stolen Linux code in Unixware, I'd suggest with the support for a very well known Linux fileystem in the Linux compat addon product for UnixWare.." Could be intresting:)
I wonder if IBM has standing to be able to sue SCO for violating the GPL.
In a March 4 Senate hearing, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller announced that "in the one-year period from September 11 [2001] to September 19, 2002, we have obtained more than double the number of emergency FISAs [warrants] as compared to the total number of emergency FISAs we obtained in the prior 23-year history of the FISA statute." Attorney General John Ashcroft announced at the same hearing that the FBI had sought "over 1,000" FISA warrants in 2002.
So it appears the number of post-9/11 covert warrants is about equal to the number of public ones.
While I find this disturbing, 3,000 or so wiretap orders still isn't much in the grand scheme of things.
An integrated component, such as one computer system wouldn't be considered a network, which means that if you want to create prior art, make sure that you're run the program/whatever at least once via VNC, so that you can claim that you were doing networked systems research years ago if a patent-monger comes along and creates a spurious claim as to patenting some blatently obvious piece of networking technology.
Fortunately many applications did get used over a network via X, Citrix, NFS, SMTP, or even FTP. The trick is getting the defense to show examples of this to throw out the "over a network" claims.
Still digging up prior art may convince them of the error of their ways.
Perhaps someone could contact JWZ about this, surely there must be at least a partially documented demo of these ideas 12 months prior to filing.
I think I have a web book from 1995 that shows a screen shot of a site with a "nav bar". Probably not implemented using frames, but possibly enough to be useful in court.
In any case "Nav Bars" as claimed by SBC go back even further than frames, back at least as far as the <img> tag if not further
well, i guess i'll just have to base my evaluation of the meaningfulness of your opinion on what you know.... which is what, precisely? or are you not allowed to talk about that...?
The information is out there if you care to look for it (hint start with Google). I'm not going to attempt to summarize many years of school, practical experience, reading, and converstations here.
The short answer is current technology for speech recognition with multiple speakers with no training is very limited. The system Sprint uses for its customer service is pushing the state of the art and even then is quite limited and likely to be confused if someone isn't speaking clearly.
There are a number of other problems such as bandwidth requirements to perform monitoring and the general lack of intercept capablity in most central office gear.
Wiretaps are (or, at least, until very recently were) far less common than they were in the 1960's, when the McCarthy bug was going around. That's because we started requiring the FBI to get court orders to do wiretapping. Since then, it's become much easier to do a wiretap, and we've had 9/11, which has opened the floodgates on funding to "counter terrorism."
They don't have the means or the funds to monitor everyone, or even most people. But they do have the means to at least somewhat monitor the million or so they consider the most dangerous. But, since you're willing to patronize the conspiracy theorists, that will probably bump you far enough down the list that *you're* safe. And after all, that's what really matters, isn't it?
I'm a member of the ACLU, People for the American Way, the EFF, and the NRA. I am a strong believer in electronic privacy and Constitutional freedoms and have been for some time. I wrote letters (actually FAXes) to my Representative and Senators urging them to oppose the PATRIOT act.
The problem I see is the paranoids make it much harder to oppose government intrusions on privacy. You often have to spend a lot of time convincing people you aren't just someone who's tinfoil hat is on a bit tight before they will listen to your arguments.
Let's face it law enforcement resources are limited. There just isn't the manpower to monitor a million or even a hundred-thousand people on any sort of regular basis. This doesn't mean abuses don't happen or that the acceptable number of abuses is anything other than zero.
Oh, and don't say shooting at the mailboy with BB-gunns or stuff. I've tried that, and it hurts to be shot at. (I was doing the delivery...)
In the US this is a really bad idea. Assulting a US Postal Worker while they are on duty is a Federal felony and will land you in pound-you-in-the-ass prison.
I haven't yet seen anyone come up with a way to skip the interstitials (there's that word again!) on, say, salon.com.
I consider sites like salon.com a special case in that they will let you access pay content for viewing an ad. In addition using an adblocker on a site that lets you get rid of ads by subscribing goes against my personal code of ethics. Salon's ads aren't that bad so I don't think it's unreasonable to susbscribe to get rid of them, if their ads were as obnoxious as some sites I would consider the subscriptions to be a form of extortion however.
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one."
The first time I saw this was on a poster distributed by RSA Security. This was back in the clipper chip days when there was a real possiblity non-escrowed encryption might be banned.
According to the report encryption was encountered on only 18 wiretaps. It is entirely possible very poor encryption tools were used in these cases.
Given that most wiretaps were for narcotics and that your average drug dealer isn't exactly a rocket scientist, I suspect most of the "encryption" was somthing lame Joe criminal picked up out of a "spy/PI" catalog.
Sorry, but wiretaps really ARE expensive and aren't all that common. The tinfoil hat crowd may think the NSA/CIA/FBI is monitoring all of their phone and computer communications but, really, there just isn't the manpower or the time. I've heard the paranoids claim there is "s00per-s33kr1t" voice reconition to do automated monitoring, but based on what I know about computers and linguistics this just isn't currently possible.
Things like fossil fuels, fisheries, mountaintops, tropical forests, etc.
See my comment on fossil fuels below.
Some fisheries may be depleted but in most cases they seem to recover if the harvest is reduced or stopped for a period of time. There are also some fisheries that are managed in a sustainable manner (Copper River Salmon). In addition there are substitutes for fish as a food source.
As far as mountaintops goes. Mountains aren't the resource being exploited, coal is. You can mine coal in this area without blasting the mountaintop off. There are also other areas such as the Great Plains where strip mining can be done with less terrain alteration. If anything the incredibly low prices mines in Wyoming and Colorado are able to offer should make it uneconomical to use mountaintop strip mining in West Virginia. BTW this is a localized phenomena, I assure you out West mountaintops aren't being blasted away, and we still have plenty.
In the case of tropical forests, I agree the logging needs to stop entirely or at least be slowed. There have been successful efforts to harvest tropical hardwoods in a sustainable manner or to use tree farms to raise them. From an economic viewpoint there are substitutes for tropical forest products that are the same or lower cost. True it may be impossible to make a teak chest without products from a tropical forest, but the same chest can be made of metal or oak harvested from a sustainable tree farm in New York. Also consider that eventually forests can grow back.
Well, that's not entirely true. Even if one accepts the simplified economic model of supply and demand, demand plays just as much a role in the price of things as supply (perhaps more).
Also, consider the (hypothetical) scenario where solar energy becomes cheap, efficient and effective. Suppose it's even cheaper than other sources, like fossil fuels. In this case, manufacturers of other energy sources will need to reduce their prices to compete. But that doesn't mean that there are more fossil fuels. It means that there are more energy sources.
So, ultimately, I'd say that the relationship between supply (of any one given thing) and price is more complicated than that.
I agree the supply and demand is not a simplistic model that was to some extent my point. For most commodities there are alternatives. The cost of those alternatives dictates what is and is not economical to produce for a given commodity. If you are using less of a given alternative because something else is cheaper for certain applications you end up using less of the first product which means it will last longer if it is a non-renewable.
To use your example if solar energy becomes cost competitive with coal fired power plants there will be less coal mined than before which means that what you have will last longer or can be used for another application (say conversion into jet fuel)
But, take fossil fuels, for example. Oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness may create a larger supply of fossil fuel on the market. This may lead to lower prices in the short term. But the total amount of fossil fuel on the planet is definitely decreasing (which is why they want to drill in Alaska in the first place).
You assume fossil fuels covers only conventional crude oil sources. This is quite untrue. There is natural gas, coal, tar sands, oil shale, etc. Some of these can hardly be said to be in short supply. For example even if all fossil fuel was to come from coal we have several hundred years of it left.
For most uses of fossil fuel sources there are substitutes, some of which are getting cost competitive with fossil fuel sources. The 2 main uses of fossil fuel are power production and transportation.
Power production does have some non-fossil fuel sources such as hydro, nuclear, and "green" power. Right now most fossil fuel use for power generation is either coal or natural gas, we still have plenty of both.
If you use other technology for anti-shoplifting applications RFID still has it's uses in a retail environment. Think of it as barcode on steroids.
You can still track items and parts through the supply chain. You can still take inventory without needing someone to go physically count every item. You can still use it to speed up checkout. You can still use it to rotate perishable stock. There are still some downsides to the technology, but as long as the chips can be killed once they leave the store the danger is much less.
I come from a state in India where the local fishermen campaigned and successfully prevented (by law) commercial overfishing for a number of months every year. This has successfully preventted the local fishing communities from collapsing due to commercial overfishing.
This sounds similar to the Copper River salmon fishery in SE Alaska. A majority of the fishermen who harvest there very much want to see it continue to be managed in a sustainable manner.
And with Canada only having an Armored Brigade and half of thier F/A-18s operational right now that would be problematic.
Still unless the country in question is the US, UK, France, or Austrailia I wouldn't mess with the Canadian Navy. Another reason not to mess with Canada is their really big neighbor to the south. The US has an intrest in Canada being able to enforce their 200 mile EEZ.
In the general theme of Guns, Germs and Steel Diamond likes to cut down the role of free thinking societies in the success of Europeans and America and actually says that Europeans have geneticly inferior mental capacity. He tries too hard to reduce history to biology and geography.
While I agree philoshiphies promoting rationality, free thinking, etc. are a big part of the story of the success of the West. You cannot deny the roles biology and geography have played in history.
PayPal is about the closest thing to micro-payments I've seen.
I've noticed quite a few sites out there using it for transactions in the $1-$10 range. It seems like a good payment mechanism if you just need to charge a small subscription fee or want to charge for some documents.
And source safe deserves most if not all of the bashing. It is actually LESS suited for large muti-developer projects than not using a source control system at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be more interesting to look for stolen Linux code in Unixware, :)
I'd suggest with the support for a very well known Linux fileystem in
the Linux compat addon product for UnixWare.."
Could be intresting
I wonder if IBM has standing to be able to sue SCO for violating the GPL.
Sorry forgot to cite the source of the above quote:
"Red Means Big Brother's in Charge" Village Voice April 23, 2003.
Some were wondering abut this elsewhere.
In a March 4 Senate hearing, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller announced that "in the one-year period from September 11 [2001] to September 19, 2002, we have obtained more than double the number of emergency FISAs [warrants] as compared to the total number of emergency FISAs we obtained in the prior 23-year history of the FISA statute." Attorney General John Ashcroft announced at the same hearing that the FBI had sought "over 1,000" FISA warrants in 2002.
So it appears the number of post-9/11 covert warrants is about equal to the number of public ones.
While I find this disturbing, 3,000 or so wiretap orders still isn't much in the grand scheme of things.
Oh wait that's Verizon (BellSouth & GTE I think, god GTE sucked).
Verizon is made up of Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, and GTE. NYNEX made even GTE look good.
I do agree about GTE sucking, who would have thought Verizon would be an improvement.
Unfortuantely Qwest is far worse than USWest could ever hope to be. They are almost at the SBC level of suckage.
Something tells me that SBC probably has an Enron, Qwest, or Worldcom size financial scandal hiding in its books somewhere.
I sure hope these assholes go down, nothing like a little accounting and securities fraud.
An integrated component, such as one computer system wouldn't be considered a network, which means that if you want to create prior art, make sure that you're run the program/whatever at least once via VNC, so that you can claim that you were doing networked systems research years ago if a patent-monger comes along and creates a spurious claim as to patenting some blatently obvious piece of networking technology.
Fortunately many applications did get used over a network via X, Citrix, NFS, SMTP, or even FTP. The trick is getting the defense to show examples of this to throw out the "over a network" claims.
Still digging up prior art may convince them of the error of their ways.
Perhaps someone could contact JWZ about this, surely there must be at least a partially documented demo of these ideas 12 months prior to filing.
I think I have a web book from 1995 that shows a screen shot of a site with a "nav bar". Probably not implemented using frames, but possibly enough to be useful in court.
In any case "Nav Bars" as claimed by SBC go back even further than frames, back at least as far as the <img> tag if not further
well, i guess i'll just have to base my evaluation of the meaningfulness of your opinion on what you know.... which is what, precisely? or are you not allowed to talk about that...?
The information is out there if you care to look for it (hint start with Google). I'm not going to attempt to summarize many years of school, practical experience, reading, and converstations here.
The short answer is current technology for speech recognition with multiple speakers with no training is very limited. The system Sprint uses for its customer service is pushing the state of the art and even then is quite limited and likely to be confused if someone isn't speaking clearly.
There are a number of other problems such as bandwidth requirements to perform monitoring and the general lack of intercept capablity in most central office gear.
Wiretaps are (or, at least, until very recently were) far less common than they were in the 1960's, when the McCarthy bug was going around. That's because we started requiring the FBI to get court orders to do wiretapping. Since then, it's become much easier to do a wiretap, and we've had 9/11, which has opened the floodgates on funding to "counter terrorism."
They don't have the means or the funds to monitor everyone, or even most people. But they do have the means to at least somewhat monitor the million or so they consider the most dangerous. But, since you're willing to patronize the conspiracy theorists, that will probably bump you far enough down the list that *you're* safe. And after all, that's what really matters, isn't it?
I'm a member of the ACLU, People for the American Way, the EFF, and the NRA. I am a strong believer in electronic privacy and Constitutional freedoms and have been for some time. I wrote letters (actually FAXes) to my Representative and Senators urging them to oppose the PATRIOT act.
The problem I see is the paranoids make it much harder to oppose government intrusions on privacy. You often have to spend a lot of time convincing people you aren't just someone who's tinfoil hat is on a bit tight before they will listen to your arguments.
Let's face it law enforcement resources are limited. There just isn't the manpower to monitor a million or even a hundred-thousand people on any sort of regular basis. This doesn't mean abuses don't happen or that the acceptable number of abuses is anything other than zero.
Oh, and don't say shooting at the mailboy with BB-gunns or stuff. I've tried that, and it hurts to be shot at. (I was doing the delivery...)
In the US this is a really bad idea. Assulting a US Postal Worker while they are on duty is a Federal felony and will land you in pound-you-in-the-ass prison.
I haven't yet seen anyone come up with a way to skip the interstitials (there's that word again!) on, say, salon.com.
I consider sites like salon.com a special case in that they will let you access pay content for viewing an ad. In addition using an adblocker on a site that lets you get rid of ads by subscribing goes against my personal code of ethics. Salon's ads aren't that bad so I don't think it's unreasonable to susbscribe to get rid of them, if their ads were as obnoxious as some sites I would consider the subscriptions to be a form of extortion however.
Get HR interested in installing popup blockers.
They tend to get nervous about sex ads and spam.
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas
of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new
research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and
ask for one."
The first time I saw this was on a poster distributed by RSA Security. This was back in the clipper chip days when there was a real possiblity non-escrowed encryption might be banned.
According to the report encryption was encountered on only 18 wiretaps. It is entirely possible very poor encryption tools were used in these cases.
Given that most wiretaps were for narcotics and that your average drug dealer isn't exactly a rocket scientist, I suspect most of the "encryption" was somthing lame Joe criminal picked up out of a "spy/PI" catalog.
Sorry, but wiretaps really ARE expensive and aren't all that common. The tinfoil hat crowd may think the NSA/CIA/FBI is monitoring all of their phone and computer communications but, really, there just isn't the manpower or the time. I've heard the paranoids claim there is "s00per-s33kr1t" voice reconition to do automated monitoring, but based on what I know about computers and linguistics this just isn't currently possible.
Things like fossil fuels, fisheries, mountaintops, tropical forests, etc.
See my comment on fossil fuels below.
Some fisheries may be depleted but in most cases they seem to recover if the harvest is reduced or stopped for a period of time. There are also some fisheries that are managed in a sustainable manner (Copper River Salmon). In addition there are substitutes for fish as a food source.
As far as mountaintops goes. Mountains aren't the resource being exploited, coal is. You can mine coal in this area without blasting the mountaintop off. There are also other areas such as the Great Plains where strip mining can be done with less terrain alteration. If anything the incredibly low prices mines in Wyoming and Colorado are able to offer should make it uneconomical to use mountaintop strip mining in West Virginia. BTW this is a localized phenomena, I assure you out West mountaintops aren't being blasted away, and we still have plenty.
In the case of tropical forests, I agree the logging needs to stop entirely or at least be slowed. There have been successful efforts to harvest tropical hardwoods in a sustainable manner or to use tree farms to raise them. From an economic viewpoint there are substitutes for tropical forest products that are the same or lower cost. True it may be impossible to make a teak chest without products from a tropical forest, but the same chest can be made of metal or oak harvested from a sustainable tree farm in New York. Also consider that eventually forests can grow back.
Well, that's not entirely true. Even if one accepts the simplified economic model of supply and demand, demand plays just as much a role in the price of things as supply (perhaps more).
Also, consider the (hypothetical) scenario where solar energy becomes cheap, efficient and effective. Suppose it's even cheaper than other sources, like fossil fuels. In this case, manufacturers of other energy sources will need to reduce their prices to compete. But that doesn't mean that there are more fossil fuels. It means that there are more energy sources.
So, ultimately, I'd say that the relationship between supply (of any one given thing) and price is more complicated than that.
I agree the supply and demand is not a simplistic model that was to some extent my point. For most commodities there are alternatives. The cost of those alternatives dictates what is and is not economical to produce for a given commodity. If you are using less of a given alternative because something else is cheaper for certain applications you end up using less of the first product which means it will last longer if it is a non-renewable.
To use your example if solar energy becomes cost competitive with coal fired power plants there will be less coal mined than before which means that what you have will last longer or can be used for another application (say conversion into jet fuel)
But, take fossil fuels, for example. Oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness may create a larger supply of fossil fuel on the market. This may lead to lower prices in the short term. But the total amount of fossil fuel on the planet is definitely decreasing (which is why they want to drill in Alaska in the first place).
You assume fossil fuels covers only conventional crude oil sources. This is quite untrue. There is natural gas, coal, tar sands, oil shale, etc. Some of these can hardly be said to be in short supply. For example even if all fossil fuel was to come from coal we have several hundred years of it left.
For most uses of fossil fuel sources there are substitutes, some of which are getting cost competitive with fossil fuel sources. The 2 main uses of fossil fuel are power production and transportation.
Power production does have some non-fossil fuel sources such as hydro, nuclear, and "green" power. Right now most fossil fuel use for power generation is either coal or natural gas, we still have plenty of both.
As far as transportation u
If you use other technology for anti-shoplifting applications RFID still has it's uses in a retail environment. Think of it as barcode on steroids.
You can still track items and parts through the supply chain. You can still take inventory without needing someone to go physically count every item. You can still use it to speed up checkout. You can still use it to rotate perishable stock. There are still some downsides to the technology, but as long as the chips can be killed once they leave the store the danger is much less.
I come from a state in India where the local fishermen campaigned and successfully prevented (by law) commercial overfishing for a number of months every year. This has successfully preventted the local fishing communities from collapsing due to commercial overfishing.
This sounds similar to the Copper River salmon fishery in SE Alaska. A majority of the fishermen who harvest there very much want to see it continue to be managed in a sustainable manner.
Then that becomes an act of war.
And with Canada only having an Armored Brigade and half of thier F/A-18s operational right now that would be problematic.
Still unless the country in question is the US, UK, France, or Austrailia I wouldn't mess with the Canadian Navy. Another reason not to mess with Canada is their really big neighbor to the south. The US has an intrest in Canada being able to enforce their 200 mile EEZ.
Perhaps, because of our increasing population and decreasing resources
Huh? What decreasing resources? Decreasing supply leads to higher prices, yet the cost of most basic materials is going DOWN not up.
Er, look at the guy in the Whitehouse.
And at the helm of Microsoft.
While Bill may have dropped out of Harvard, he wasn't exactly a C student. He just felt he had better things to do with his time other than college.
Whatever one may say about Mr. Gates he is known for being rather intelligent and well educated.
In the general theme of Guns, Germs and Steel Diamond likes to cut down the role of free thinking societies in the success of Europeans and America and actually says that Europeans have geneticly inferior mental capacity. He tries too hard to reduce history to biology and geography.
While I agree philoshiphies promoting rationality, free thinking, etc. are a big part of the story of the success of the West. You cannot deny the roles biology and geography have played in history.
Don't forget:
Battlefield 1942
This seems to be quite popular. I know it has drawn in people who haven't played MMORPG's before.
Another game with the potential to draw many new users, especially women, to the MMORPG world is:
The Sims Online
PayPal is about the closest thing to micro-payments I've seen.
I've noticed quite a few sites out there using it for transactions in the $1-$10 range. It seems like a good payment mechanism if you just need to charge a small subscription fee or want to charge for some documents.
Did you? The link is a SourceSafe bashing site.
And source safe deserves most if not all of the bashing. It is actually LESS suited for large muti-developer projects than not using a source control system at all.