A basic truth about white-collar crime is that even short jail terms are a huge deterrent. The important thing is not to just impose fines. Those are considered a business expense by crooks.
But a few sentences of a year or two of prison,
and word gets around.
Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO and chief crook, is finally going to jail. He just pled guilty and got a 10 year sentence and a $24 million fine.
That's just the beginning. He has more charges hanging over him (over a thousand years worth), and he has to fully cooperate with prosecutors or face even more jail time. (So Fastow gives up Skilling and Lay. The big question is whether they give up Bush.)
The FTC's study of false claims in spam has already established that most spam is legally actionable under current law. Adding a copyrighted haiku doesn't help much.
Under the CAN-SPAM act, ISPs can sue. If you read the definition of an "ISP" in the act, it's clear that a mail processing service like SpamCop would qualify. What's needed is a paid service like SpamCop that files at least one high-profile lawsuit a month, increasing to one a week as volume builds up. That would make a dent.
A true peer-to-peer virtual world is probably within reach. The technological problems can be overcome. (The limited uplink bandwith of home broadband is more of a problem.) The real problem is the jerk factor, as with IRC. How do you keep people from messing up the system?
It doesn't necessarily take a central authority. Suppose you had to post a bond to join, and if enough people became annoyed with you, you forfeited the bond and it was paid out to all the other participants. All that requires is an escrow agent.
After a year of good behavior, you get your bond back, with interest. Requiring a bond of about $100 to connect a server would be about right.
The effort to clean up unexploded ordnance in Western France has been going on for half a century, and they're still finding tons of stuff every month. Those WWI artillery duels, where both sides brought in trainloads of ammo and fired it off, left a huge mess.
The US is lucky to have not had a war like that on its own territory.
Then we'll have the labels compress everything so that it's up near the top of the scale anyway.
"Nobody wants to be the softest CD in the changer". Most popular music is compressed so hard it's badly damaged.
The main reason you need more than 16 bits is because, during soft passages, most of the high bits are zero and you may effectively have only six or four bit audio. Classical recordings that aren't compressed really do suffer from this problem.
But really, the number of people who buy classical piano recordings is small.
If the industry can agree that the reference level for popular audio is somewhere well below 100%, this could work out. But that won't happen.
The true embarassing moment will come when the Chinese go to the moon, land at Tranquility Base, fold up the US flag, and put up theirs. They'll probably bring home the US flag and put it on display in Beijing.
It's not clear to anybody that an organized, hierarchical military force is capable of victory against guerillas, even in a desert environment.
The US military is doing fine in deserts.
But that's not good enough.
Hostile deserts aren't a big problem to the US Army. Hostile cities are. Now that we own Bagdad, what do we do with it? Or Tikrit or Kabul or Mogadishu. Mao wrote "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue".
That may not have been original with him, but he went further with it than anyone before or since.
We also need to develop doctrine on how to take down a religion. It's not impossible. We've done it before. State Shinto is dead. We need to learn how to marginalize clerics and make them irrelevant.
Each servicing mission for the Hubble costs more than all the proposed large ground-based telescopes put together.
If NASA is going to spend a launch on space telescopes, they may as well put up a new one.
The Hubble was designed when NASA PR was claiming that shuttle launches were going to be cheap. They're not. Each one costs about a quarter billion dollars.
What's keeping students from putting a copyright notice on the front page of all their papers, with some boilerplate text like "Reproduction of any type without the express written permission of me is prohibited"?
I did that while at Stanford. My Master's project code listing was turned in with "Illegal Copy if Not in Red" stamped in huge letters on every page.
The program shipped as a commercial product sold by a major software company, which worked out quite well for me financially. There was some grumbling from the Stanford CS department, but after some foot-dragging they finally issued me a diploma.
For that specific problem, there's a solution: Akamai. Akamai really does much of what the "grid computing" people blither about. Akamai serves many web sites from a big farm, but the resources are more shared than with the typical hosting service. So when there's a huge load (someone gets Slashdotted, or more likely, the Game of the Week is on and the sports fans are online), more servers are diverted to serving that website.
Akamai has about 80% of that business. They're losing money, although they may pull through to profitability. They've dabbled with the ASP and "utility computing" things, but their main business remains high-volume web hosting.
"Grid computing" is a dumb idea for a very simple reason.
CPUs are cheap.
Once upon a time, computers were really expensive. Control Data Corporation proposed designs in the 1960s with one supercomputer (of about 5 MIPS power) per metropolitan area. They went on to build time-sharing data centers, and for a decade or so, it was a viable business. Back then, when a CPU cost over a million dollars, time-sharing made economic sense. It hasn't been that way for a long time. A very long time.
It's notable that there's little enthusiasm for "grid computing" from the businesses best positioned to provide it - hosting services. They have the right infrastructure in place. If they wanted to sell number-crunching power during off-peak periods, they could. But nobody wants that service.
The ASP business is a disaster. The biggest player, Corio, has had its stock price decline from 25 to 3 over the last three years. Their revenue is declining, and they're losing money. Many smaller ASPs have gone bankrupt, often leaving their customers in desperate straits.
There are risks to outsourcing key business functions.
The real trend in business computing is "buy once, run forever". That's what "utility computing" is really about. How often do you replace your power transformer? The real push for Linux comes from businesses that hate Microsoft's "buy once, pay forever" plan, "Software Assurance".
On January 23rd, the matter comes before the judge again, to determine whether SCO has complied with the order to produce the evidence. It's not likely that the judge will rule that SCO has complied. This will probably result in the matter going up to the district court judge (a low-level magistrate judge is hearing this preliminary stuff), and it might be appealed from there.
I'm not sure how much delay can be obtained that way. Who's up on the Federal rules of procedure?
Then again, IBM could move to strike or dismiss, the judge could rule for IBM, and it might end quickly. But probably not.
This is basically a search algorithm with an experimental component. That's a very reasonable thing to automate.
Biotech labs will have farms of machines like this, communicating on a network and updating the search plan. They'll run continuously, so things will happen faster than they do with people. It's like genome sequencing, which is mostly robotic now.
Of course, what this all reflects is that biotech doesn't know enough yet to do engineering design. They have to do a vast amount of trial and error to get results. Think for a moment about what "recombinant DNA" work really is. Someday there may be real genetic engineering, but not yet.
The European Union is considering
legislation to require technologies in digital image processing software to limit counterfeiting:
In the context of protecting euro banknotes against counterfeiting the European Central Bank (ECB)invites manufacturers
based in the European Union (EU)and importers or
distributors of products capable of handling digital images
(hereinafter 'the industry ') to submit comments in connection
with the ECB's request to the Commission of the European
Communities to initiate legislation making it mandatory to
incorporate counterfeit deterrence technology into such
products.Such legislation would apply to products produced,
imported or distributed in the EU.Any individual,organisation
or group of organisations may submit comments.
The comment period closed December 19th, but it might still be worthwhile to send in comments if you're in the EU.
The worst case is for customers of "application service providers", one of the bad ideas of the dot-com boom.
See this article on how to survive the bankruptcy of your application service provider. That's a situation in which software escrow is almost mandatory. If you've outsourced a key business function to an ASP, and they go under, you need both the correct contractual terms and software escrow
to survive.
For a good laugh (assuming you're not an ASP user)
see ASP news. Lots of happy talk about how, even though 2002 was a bad year, 2003 will be really great. There don't seem to have been any updates for a year or so. Many of the 2002 stories involve bankruptcies.
Any ASP customer without a software escrow agreement in place is taking a big business risk.
Realistically, the IP assets of defunct software companies typically have very low value.
Yes, there are IP liquidators, but the number of "back from the dead and profitable" success stories is very, very low.
Bush and his pork programs are bankrupting the country. He's trying to buy re-election, and like the lousy businessman he was, he's overpaying.
NASA "spinoffs" are mostly vaporware. NASA has, over the years, tried to claim credit for everything from Teflon to computers. The only real NASA innovation that's had significant market penetration is NASTRAN, the structural analysis program.
Cutting NASA's PR and "education" budget by 80% would be a good start. They try to do the NSF's job, badly. And they do it strictly as a PR exercise.
Big customers should require that when a company drops a software product, it goes open source. This offers the option to keep the product alive if it's needed by the customer. Such terms are occasionally seen in the embedded world, but on a single-customer basis. A standard, well-accepted contract for software escrow and open-sourcing when the product is abandoned would be a useful thing to have.
Vendors go bankrupt, exit a field of business, or simply discontinue products all the time. Deals like this could help small vendors, providing long-term customer assurance.
It's gone much further than forms. There's an effort underway to develop a worldwide XML-based infrastructure for surveillance.
This is not a joke. This is being implemented.
A sizable infrastructure for authorizing wiretaps in high volume with minimal oversight is going into place.
That's probably the correct decision. It's a case brought by owners of a dead product produced by a defunct company against a third party unlikely to sue them. But it will come back when low-cost PVRs that don't require a subscription service start appearing from China.
The real news is that SCO had a deadline to disclose to IBM, "with specificity", exactly what the claimed infringements are. That was yesterday. Neither IBM nor SCO has announced anything.
On January 23rd, there will be a hearing on whether IBM is satisfied with what SCO disclosed. Then we'll know quite a bit more.
Slashdot Mirror
The American Civil War left behind only solid shot. High explosives hadn't been invented yet.
Andrew Fastow, Enron's CFO and chief crook, is finally going to jail. He just pled guilty and got a 10 year sentence and a $24 million fine. That's just the beginning. He has more charges hanging over him (over a thousand years worth), and he has to fully cooperate with prosecutors or face even more jail time. (So Fastow gives up Skilling and Lay. The big question is whether they give up Bush.)
Under the CAN-SPAM act, ISPs can sue. If you read the definition of an "ISP" in the act, it's clear that a mail processing service like SpamCop would qualify. What's needed is a paid service like SpamCop that files at least one high-profile lawsuit a month, increasing to one a week as volume builds up. That would make a dent.
It doesn't necessarily take a central authority. Suppose you had to post a bond to join, and if enough people became annoyed with you, you forfeited the bond and it was paid out to all the other participants. All that requires is an escrow agent. After a year of good behavior, you get your bond back, with interest. Requiring a bond of about $100 to connect a server would be about right.
The US is lucky to have not had a war like that on its own territory.
The main reason you need more than 16 bits is because, during soft passages, most of the high bits are zero and you may effectively have only six or four bit audio. Classical recordings that aren't compressed really do suffer from this problem.
But really, the number of people who buy classical piano recordings is small.
If the industry can agree that the reference level for popular audio is somewhere well below 100%, this could work out. But that won't happen.
They have a point. They're called "news readers" in the UK, and "radio personalities" in the US.. Talking heads. They're not journalists.
That whole job can be automated anyway. Check out Ananova. A few more years of improvement, and we'll be able to ditch most TV celebrities.
The true embarassing moment will come when the Chinese go to the moon, land at Tranquility Base, fold up the US flag, and put up theirs. They'll probably bring home the US flag and put it on display in Beijing.
The US military is doing fine in deserts. But that's not good enough. Hostile deserts aren't a big problem to the US Army. Hostile cities are. Now that we own Bagdad, what do we do with it? Or Tikrit or Kabul or Mogadishu. Mao wrote "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue". That may not have been original with him, but he went further with it than anyone before or since.
We also need to develop doctrine on how to take down a religion. It's not impossible. We've done it before. State Shinto is dead. We need to learn how to marginalize clerics and make them irrelevant.
If NASA is going to spend a launch on space telescopes, they may as well put up a new one. The Hubble was designed when NASA PR was claiming that shuttle launches were going to be cheap. They're not. Each one costs about a quarter billion dollars.
I did that while at Stanford. My Master's project code listing was turned in with "Illegal Copy if Not in Red" stamped in huge letters on every page. The program shipped as a commercial product sold by a major software company, which worked out quite well for me financially. There was some grumbling from the Stanford CS department, but after some foot-dragging they finally issued me a diploma.
Akamai has about 80% of that business. They're losing money, although they may pull through to profitability. They've dabbled with the ASP and "utility computing" things, but their main business remains high-volume web hosting.
CPUs are cheap.
Once upon a time, computers were really expensive. Control Data Corporation proposed designs in the 1960s with one supercomputer (of about 5 MIPS power) per metropolitan area. They went on to build time-sharing data centers, and for a decade or so, it was a viable business. Back then, when a CPU cost over a million dollars, time-sharing made economic sense. It hasn't been that way for a long time. A very long time.
It's notable that there's little enthusiasm for "grid computing" from the businesses best positioned to provide it - hosting services. They have the right infrastructure in place. If they wanted to sell number-crunching power during off-peak periods, they could. But nobody wants that service.
The ASP business is a disaster. The biggest player, Corio, has had its stock price decline from 25 to 3 over the last three years. Their revenue is declining, and they're losing money. Many smaller ASPs have gone bankrupt, often leaving their customers in desperate straits. There are risks to outsourcing key business functions.
The real trend in business computing is "buy once, run forever". That's what "utility computing" is really about. How often do you replace your power transformer? The real push for Linux comes from businesses that hate Microsoft's "buy once, pay forever" plan, "Software Assurance".
I'm not sure how much delay can be obtained that way. Who's up on the Federal rules of procedure?
Then again, IBM could move to strike or dismiss, the judge could rule for IBM, and it might end quickly. But probably not.
Or at least get writers who can write. The Buffy team is available.
Biotech labs will have farms of machines like this, communicating on a network and updating the search plan. They'll run continuously, so things will happen faster than they do with people. It's like genome sequencing, which is mostly robotic now.
Of course, what this all reflects is that biotech doesn't know enough yet to do engineering design. They have to do a vast amount of trial and error to get results. Think for a moment about what "recombinant DNA" work really is. Someday there may be real genetic engineering, but not yet.
Already we have a big schedule slip. That's so NASA.
-
In the context of protecting euro banknotes against counterfeiting the European Central Bank (ECB)invites manufacturers
based in the European Union (EU)and importers or
distributors of products capable of handling digital images
(hereinafter 'the industry ') to submit comments in connection
with the ECB's request to the Commission of the European
Communities to initiate legislation making it mandatory to
incorporate counterfeit deterrence technology into such
products.Such legislation would apply to products produced,
imported or distributed in the EU.Any individual,organisation
or group of organisations may submit comments.
The comment period closed December 19th, but it might still be worthwhile to send in comments if you're in the EU.For a good laugh (assuming you're not an ASP user) see ASP news. Lots of happy talk about how, even though 2002 was a bad year, 2003 will be really great. There don't seem to have been any updates for a year or so. Many of the 2002 stories involve bankruptcies.
Any ASP customer without a software escrow agreement in place is taking a big business risk.
Realistically, the IP assets of defunct software companies typically have very low value. Yes, there are IP liquidators, but the number of "back from the dead and profitable" success stories is very, very low.
NASA "spinoffs" are mostly vaporware. NASA has, over the years, tried to claim credit for everything from Teflon to computers. The only real NASA innovation that's had significant market penetration is NASTRAN, the structural analysis program.
Cutting NASA's PR and "education" budget by 80% would be a good start. They try to do the NSF's job, badly. And they do it strictly as a PR exercise.
Vendors go bankrupt, exit a field of business, or simply discontinue products all the time. Deals like this could help small vendors, providing long-term customer assurance.
This is not a joke. This is being implemented. A sizable infrastructure for authorizing wiretaps in high volume with minimal oversight is going into place.
That's probably the correct decision. It's a case brought by owners of a dead product produced by a defunct company against a third party unlikely to sue them. But it will come back when low-cost PVRs that don't require a subscription service start appearing from China.
The real news is that SCO had a deadline to disclose to IBM, "with specificity", exactly what the claimed infringements are. That was yesterday. Neither IBM nor SCO has announced anything.
On January 23rd, there will be a hearing on whether IBM is satisfied with what SCO disclosed. Then we'll know quite a bit more.