They had a fire yestreday which took out their cable TV service. If I had had one of these devices I could have smelled it and not have had to spend 15 minutes in a telephone queue!
what about the other five billion people in the world, who consider gaps in a resume to be immediate grounds for File 13?
If they are that clueless, there is probably no point taking a job from them, unless you desperately need money today. Better a slighly longer gap in your CV than having to explain to the next employer that this one was so clueless the job only lasted three weeks through no fault of yours.
The rule the USPO uses for obviousness is "Could a person with mediocre talent, and completely lacking in creativity, come up with the same thing?"
Clearly they are applying lower test than that in IT, presumably due to lack of staff with clues about this area.
Eg, the Amazon one-click patent was awarded for what anyone who knew the technology involved would have suggested as the first idea which came to mind: the IT equivalent of giving a patent for `using screws to attach things to the wall'.
In the case at hand they seem to have awarded a patent for someone realising that the way to know what to run when a disk is inserted is to put the thing to be executed, or a pointer to it, on the disk with a known name. I don't think anyone could seriously claim that comeing up with that required creativity.
I consider non-governmental restrictions on speech to still be restricted.
But Rupert Murdoch deciding not to broadcast your speech to the Upper-Thistlewait slug balancers guild semi-monthly seminar on the importance of paperclips in the soft furnishings industry is not a restriction on your speech, just his right to use his property for what he chooses.
The resultant problem is not censorship, but a kind of DoS attack on certain subjects. Eg in the UK, the Murdoch press (I keep using him because I don't know a US equivenent, but I'm sure there are some) is rabidly anti the EU (coincidentally, so is Rupert:-)). Whatever ones personal opinion on various EU related issues, this high level of background noise makes sensible public debate very difficult.
I dissagree that anonymous speech is vital for the political process. I don't think the UK or US is that far gone yet (I worry about France, but then I'm English and we always worry about France:-)). In a reasonably open system, political speech needs to be done in open and public spaces. You need to be seen to stand behind your statement (hopefully along side lots of other equally obviously real and different people). Once you start to act in secret you have given `them' a wonderful stick to beat you with.
There are other areas where anonymous speech is vital -- corporate corruption being an obvious case. Anonymity for government employees is a different thing, they are just in the position of employees of any other organisation.
Of course, it fails the obviousness test, but since the USPO has aparently interpereted this test to be `obvious to somoene who doesn't know what a computer is and has no problem solving ability at all'...
Note that I'm not talking about immunity for the people posting the comments, neccesarily - I'm talking about immunity for the people HOSTING the comments, which is where people attack.
Which is why I suggested that a first step woul;d be to allow such immunity for forums where the participants can be identified (to some agreed standard). Then it is clear who is responsible for a statement. The problem really only occurs for anonymous speech.
there is no way that unrestricted speech can make people less free.
The obvious case is where someone with an agenda controls the media through which one can speak. If all the means of distributing speech widely are owned by Rupert Murdoch, or the polit beaurau or whoever, then your freedom of speech becomes freedom to speak to yourself and your friends. You don't need to control writers if you can control who has access to a printing press (or then current technological equivalent). In such a situation more free speech amplifies the inequality -- you may now be free to talk about some topic which was previously forbidden, but if you dissagree with Rupert's POV you will be drowned out by all the people who agrree with him and so get a huge megaphone. Which is not to say that even in such a situation freedom of speech shouldn't be advocated, just that one has to be aware that there will be a painful kick-back.
Fair is fair, and profs that don't deserve tenure should have it stripped from them
It seems you don't know what the word `tenure' means, and why it exists.
Your confusion seems to extend to other words too: marxism and liberalism very rarely end up in the same person's beliefs (the former being fundamentally class based, the latter individual based).
As for UCB being marxist. I don't see that it makes sense to ascribe beliefs to a beurocratic organisation, especially rather abstract historiographical and economic theories. However, if one were to do so, it seems clear that a marxist university would not be charging large tuition fees to all (qualified) comers, but would be giving courses free and only to people from the correct class background or holding the correct beliefs so there would be no issue of any student and staff member dissagreeing on such matters.
_I_ know what the difference between protocol, application, infrastructure and service provider is.
I never said you didn't, I just said that you were allowing the fact that the article wandered off into la-la land to distract you from the fact that the first part is making a valid point about the internet per-se, at the lowest level. Hence you tried to refute their claim that the internet doesn't need fixing, at that level, with an example of a problem from a quite different one (spam). That the author later made the same level slip, doesn't mean you get to do it too.:-)
The copyright part of the article is just evidence that the writer has a monomania he has to work into every conversation. A reason to avoid them socially, but not to dismiss all that they say on other topics.
Public forums that allow for the free posting of all viewpoints (like Slashdot) should be inherently protected from libel claims based on those posts.
This effectively a call for the repeal of all libel laws and any law which allows for reparations for damage caused by speech, since anyone can set up such a forum as a token to allow them to say anything they feel like.
Consider a newspaper with a letters page. If they set it up in such a way that they do not editorially control which letters are printed, they would be free to print anything. Indeed, newspapers tend to print letters from people who object to what they have previously printed -- it makes them look even handed at no cost, and allows them to put a tag at the end of the letter saying `Being a baby raping communist folk dancer, he would say that wouldn't he'.
The accused never has the credibility of the accuser. This is why we have a burdon of proof set at `beyond reasonable doubt' against the accuser for serious (ie criminal) cases. (random, off topic, and UK-centric rant: until David bloody Blunkett gets his way).
Freedom of speech is just that, freedom to speak. It isn't freedom from the consequences of your actions. The problem is how to allow some people to indeed escape the consequences of their actions, because it is in all our interest that they do so, without allowing all to or giving the decision on who does to those with most reason to abuse that power.
No offense, but here you use just the kind of smoke and mirrors show that I despised in the article. He uses different meaning for the same word, and somehow draws a conclusion which doesn't fit any of those meanings.
No, there is a fundamental and important distinction. I think you are making one of the big mistakes which should have been in the article (which I agree is poor BTW). How often have you seen articles in the mainstream (and even, shamefully, the specialist) press written as if `internet' and `web' are interchangable?
There is an issue about people asserting that the internet, not applications, needs to be modified to address various social issues. Eg putting in authentication and identification down in the fundamental levels to prevent people from doing whatever the ranter thinks is going to cause the end of civilisation as we know it. Or technalogically preventing people at the edges from providing services, in case they provide a service someone dissaproves of. (a simple-minded example of the latter is port blocking by ISPs)
That is the contrast with the phone network the article sensibly makes before wandering off into `I have a right to steal your work'. The phone network is contructed in such a way that the operator of the network makes the decisions. You can try and set up a movie review by phone service, but the phone company will only let you have N simultaneous calls down your connection, so they have ultimate control. You can't decide `I think I'll double the number of calls I can take in parallel by reducing the audio quality'.
E.g., when you later talk about getting answers on Usenet or message boards, you're talking about another very speciffic application, not about the TCP/IP stack.
Yes, but then I was addressing a different point, the economic one, not the internet related one....
A lot of those NNTP servers are paid for by ISPs. They're a form of adding value for their customers, and hopefully keeping more subscribers paying the monthly fee.
That one service is provided as a means to getting money from the user does not imply that all services are provided for that reason. I wasn't talking about the infrastructure used to provide the answers, I was talking about the service provided by the person who actually posts the answer. Again you are confusing infrastructure with a service using the infrastructure. Are you a journalist?:-)
Another example, if you get depressed at the anouncement of yet another huge Windows security hole, and decide to call the Samaritans, the phone company is providing the network you use for money (even if they let you make this call for free as a PR move). The person you talk to at the other end is providing you with a service for non-monitary reasons.
E.g.: see how spam is exponentially increasing. Even just configuring spam filters is getting to be a full time job.
Spam is not a problem of the internet, it is a problem of an application which uses the internet. Even draconian changes to how we all do email to deal with spam could be made without affecting the internet per-se. Eg, all email could be signed by keys given out personally by Bill Gates, the internet would not even notice, it's all just bits.
(BTW, if configuring spam filters is a full time job, you are using the wrong kind of spam filter.)
Someone has to make money out of offering you a service, or they won't offer it at all.
Have you never gotten a helpful reply to a question you asked in a public forum (Usenet, mailing list etc.)? All the best such replies I have ever recieved have come from people providing that service for free (ie they are not employed even in part to answer such questions).
At another level, I just did a run to recycle stuff. That service is provided by a not-for-profit organisation. The individuals doing the work are payed, but the organisation is not making money. In fact, from what I know of the econmomics of recycling, I presume they lose money hand over fist and get `subsidised' out of my taxes. Effectively the tax payers of Edinburgh provide that service for themselves and the non-taxpayers because they (or at least enough of them) believe it makes their lives better, not to make money.
Teachers get to write reports and give labels to students such as ADHD, or whatever. Why the hell cant students do the same?
They can.
The problem is when someone stands between the person making the judgement and the world at large. They become vulnerable to legal attacks.
A UK site which was set up to allow people to find old friends had the same problem because it allowed people to post comments. ISPs providing Usenet servers have had this problem./. might if it more often talked about individual people who weren't (at least within the nerdy sub-culture) public figures.
Usenet could be given the local equivalent of US common carrier status everywhere to avoid this problem, but web sites have more of a problem.
Perhaps there needs to be a legaly recognised `good enough' method for such sites to authenticate users which would allow them to pass any legal comeback through to the person who actually wrote the problematic comments. That would work for things like teacher reviewing which are after the fact, but still leave a problem for sites dealing with issues where users might have a legitimate reason for wanting anonymity.
How do we allow, for instance, a police officer to post anonymously that his superior is corrupt, in the hope of justifiably sinking the superior's career, without providing a method for crooks to anonymously sink the career of a good police officer who is a thorn in their sides?
If a competitor were to arise that makes a better product, the first company would no longer be able to do business and would either have to adapt or fold up.
What makes you think that quality of the product is the deciding factor? It's quite low down on the list behind things like quality of marketing (Windows, McDonalds), business politics (VHS, DOS), fashon (brand labeled clothes) and social inertia (NTSC).
I think Mao said it best: "All power comes from the barrel of a gun".
Less pesimisticly, there is Ghandi's:
No government can exist for a single moment without the cooperation of the people, willing or forced, and if people suddenly withdraw their cooperation in every detail, the government will come to a standstill.
You leave your computer running while your away from it?
Yep, my freezer and my central heating boiler too!
And my wallclock! Oh my god! I'm a monster! And my doorbell! Shoot me now!:-)
I dont want to burn energy which costs $$$ and tonnes of pollution for nothing.
Clealy you need to find more things for it to do.
[actually, apart from simply maintaining my state when I quit for the day in the middle of working on something, the main reason my machines are on overnight is backups.]
Not to flame, but I don't believe that oil dependency was the reason a lot of europeans were against siding with the us.
But lower dependency means they had less need to side with the US against their other reasons.
The US needs an alternative to SA, Caspain energy means Europe has one. Neither Iraq nor the caspian states are what one would choose to rely on, but two unstable sources are better than one.
There are plenty of good reasons why somebody might want to boot more often than once a month.
However, most of them also apply to freezers, the answer is to fix the reasons, not to keep turning the freedzer off.
More importantly, if a Strangelove quote doesn't cue you to a comment not being entirely serious, you better get a friend to hit you with the big foam clue bat quickly:-)
I did mean it about emacs+twm though. Of course you need a C compiler to customise twm, but what's wrong with that?
Minor quibble, but given UNIX was first developed on computers with a mighty 128KB of RAM, I think you may be slightly confused regarding the design priorities of "unixoid OSs".
Yes, but a PDP with a stonkinging big power supply gives a massively different fundamental design than something which has to deal with small batteries which will always go zonk! at the most inconvinient time possible.
As for size, yes early unixes were designed small, but there was a fundamental switch when they hit virtual memory and expected space and processing power started growing faster than anyone could think what to do with it. From that point, things like orthogonality have been much more valued than trimming a few killobytes from some module. The kernel on this machine is nearly 3GB, not counting loadable modules.
I do know the first system I ran linux on was a 486/33SX (feel that emulated FPU goodness) with 4MB
I've never run linux on anything, but back when I was running FBSD on a DX2/50 which just about managed to get X up if I was patient, my psion 3a was running (subjectively) faster with a nice integrated desktop, a pre-emtive multi-tasking OS giving a 30 hour expected battery life. Oh, and it ran for years without a restart.
Maybe I'm missing something, but ISTM that unixoid OSs were not designed for this kind of role. Eg power management is just an afterthough on such systems, and size has never been a high priority.
Same can be said for windoze too of course.
What's the battery life like on one of these things? Psions go for 10s of hours (and run off normal batteries, which is a huge advantage).
Actually, of all the small computers which have come and gone, the only one which really made me go `I want one' was the (now deceased) rex. When my Psion 5 started looking it's age I was tempted to get a very small laptop and a rex. The buggers had stopped making them.
Slashdot Mirror
They had a fire yestreday which took out their cable TV service. If I had had one of these devices I could have smelled it and not have had to spend 15 minutes in a telephone queue!
If they are that clueless, there is probably no point taking a job from them, unless you desperately need money today. Better a slighly longer gap in your CV than having to explain to the next employer that this one was so clueless the job only lasted three weeks through no fault of yours.
Clearly they are applying lower test than that in IT, presumably due to lack of staff with clues about this area.
Eg, the Amazon one-click patent was awarded for what anyone who knew the technology involved would have suggested as the first idea which came to mind: the IT equivalent of giving a patent for `using screws to attach things to the wall'.
In the case at hand they seem to have awarded a patent for someone realising that the way to know what to run when a disk is inserted is to put the thing to be executed, or a pointer to it, on the disk with a known name. I don't think anyone could seriously claim that comeing up with that required creativity.
But Rupert Murdoch deciding not to broadcast your speech to the Upper-Thistlewait slug balancers guild semi-monthly seminar on the importance of paperclips in the soft furnishings industry is not a restriction on your speech, just his right to use his property for what he chooses.
The resultant problem is not censorship, but a kind of DoS attack on certain subjects. Eg in the UK, the Murdoch press (I keep using him because I don't know a US equivenent, but I'm sure there are some) is rabidly anti the EU (coincidentally, so is Rupert:-)). Whatever ones personal opinion on various EU related issues, this high level of background noise makes sensible public debate very difficult.
I dissagree that anonymous speech is vital for the political process. I don't think the UK or US is that far gone yet (I worry about France, but then I'm English and we always worry about France:-)). In a reasonably open system, political speech needs to be done in open and public spaces. You need to be seen to stand behind your statement (hopefully along side lots of other equally obviously real and different people). Once you start to act in secret you have given `them' a wonderful stick to beat you with.
There are other areas where anonymous speech is vital -- corporate corruption being an obvious case. Anonymity for government employees is a different thing, they are just in the position of employees of any other organisation.
Of course, it fails the obviousness test, but since the USPO has aparently interpereted this test to be `obvious to somoene who doesn't know what a computer is and has no problem solving ability at all'...
[...] and until Disney anounced a deal to use Microcruft security technology to protect their IPR a couple of days before microsoft anounce their latest security disaster.
Of course, just after a string of bad news reports is the correct time to launch a share-swap bid.
Oh, and someone has to say it:
Which is why I suggested that a first step woul;d be to allow such immunity for forums where the participants can be identified (to some agreed standard). Then it is clear who is responsible for a statement. The problem really only occurs for anonymous speech.
there is no way that unrestricted speech can make people less free.
The obvious case is where someone with an agenda controls the media through which one can speak. If all the means of distributing speech widely are owned by Rupert Murdoch, or the polit beaurau or whoever, then your freedom of speech becomes freedom to speak to yourself and your friends. You don't need to control writers if you can control who has access to a printing press (or then current technological equivalent). In such a situation more free speech amplifies the inequality -- you may now be free to talk about some topic which was previously forbidden, but if you dissagree with Rupert's POV you will be drowned out by all the people who agrree with him and so get a huge megaphone. Which is not to say that even in such a situation freedom of speech shouldn't be advocated, just that one has to be aware that there will be a painful kick-back.
It seems you don't know what the word `tenure' means, and why it exists.
Your confusion seems to extend to other words too: marxism and liberalism very rarely end up in the same person's beliefs (the former being fundamentally class based, the latter individual based).
As for UCB being marxist. I don't see that it makes sense to ascribe beliefs to a beurocratic organisation, especially rather abstract historiographical and economic theories. However, if one were to do so, it seems clear that a marxist university would not be charging large tuition fees to all (qualified) comers, but would be giving courses free and only to people from the correct class background or holding the correct beliefs so there would be no issue of any student and staff member dissagreeing on such matters.
I never said you didn't, I just said that you were allowing the fact that the article wandered off into la-la land to distract you from the fact that the first part is making a valid point about the internet per-se, at the lowest level. Hence you tried to refute their claim that the internet doesn't need fixing, at that level, with an example of a problem from a quite different one (spam). That the author later made the same level slip, doesn't mean you get to do it too.:-)
The copyright part of the article is just evidence that the writer has a monomania he has to work into every conversation. A reason to avoid them socially, but not to dismiss all that they say on other topics.
This effectively a call for the repeal of all libel laws and any law which allows for reparations for damage caused by speech, since anyone can set up such a forum as a token to allow them to say anything they feel like.
Consider a newspaper with a letters page. If they set it up in such a way that they do not editorially control which letters are printed, they would be free to print anything. Indeed, newspapers tend to print letters from people who object to what they have previously printed -- it makes them look even handed at no cost, and allows them to put a tag at the end of the letter saying `Being a baby raping communist folk dancer, he would say that wouldn't he'.
The accused never has the credibility of the accuser. This is why we have a burdon of proof set at `beyond reasonable doubt' against the accuser for serious (ie criminal) cases. (random, off topic, and UK-centric rant: until David bloody Blunkett gets his way).
Freedom of speech is just that, freedom to speak. It isn't freedom from the consequences of your actions. The problem is how to allow some people to indeed escape the consequences of their actions, because it is in all our interest that they do so, without allowing all to or giving the decision on who does to those with most reason to abuse that power.
No, there is a fundamental and important distinction. I think you are making one of the big mistakes which should have been in the article (which I agree is poor BTW). How often have you seen articles in the mainstream (and even, shamefully, the specialist) press written as if `internet' and `web' are interchangable?
There is an issue about people asserting that the internet, not applications, needs to be modified to address various social issues. Eg putting in authentication and identification down in the fundamental levels to prevent people from doing whatever the ranter thinks is going to cause the end of civilisation as we know it. Or technalogically preventing people at the edges from providing services, in case they provide a service someone dissaproves of. (a simple-minded example of the latter is port blocking by ISPs)
That is the contrast with the phone network the article sensibly makes before wandering off into `I have a right to steal your work'. The phone network is contructed in such a way that the operator of the network makes the decisions. You can try and set up a movie review by phone service, but the phone company will only let you have N simultaneous calls down your connection, so they have ultimate control. You can't decide `I think I'll double the number of calls I can take in parallel by reducing the audio quality'.
E.g., when you later talk about getting answers on Usenet or message boards, you're talking about another very speciffic application, not about the TCP/IP stack.
Yes, but then I was addressing a different point, the economic one, not the internet related one....
A lot of those NNTP servers are paid for by ISPs. They're a form of adding value for their customers, and hopefully keeping more subscribers paying the monthly fee.
That one service is provided as a means to getting money from the user does not imply that all services are provided for that reason. I wasn't talking about the infrastructure used to provide the answers, I was talking about the service provided by the person who actually posts the answer. Again you are confusing infrastructure with a service using the infrastructure. Are you a journalist? :-)
Another example, if you get depressed at the anouncement of yet another huge Windows security hole, and decide to call the Samaritans, the phone company is providing the network you use for money (even if they let you make this call for free as a PR move). The person you talk to at the other end is providing you with a service for non-monitary reasons.
Spam is not a problem of the internet, it is a problem of an application which uses the internet. Even draconian changes to how we all do email to deal with spam could be made without affecting the internet per-se. Eg, all email could be signed by keys given out personally by Bill Gates, the internet would not even notice, it's all just bits.
(BTW, if configuring spam filters is a full time job, you are using the wrong kind of spam filter.)
Someone has to make money out of offering you a service, or they won't offer it at all.
Have you never gotten a helpful reply to a question you asked in a public forum (Usenet, mailing list etc.)? All the best such replies I have ever recieved have come from people providing that service for free (ie they are not employed even in part to answer such questions).
At another level, I just did a run to recycle stuff. That service is provided by a not-for-profit organisation. The individuals doing the work are payed, but the organisation is not making money. In fact, from what I know of the econmomics of recycling, I presume they lose money hand over fist and get `subsidised' out of my taxes. Effectively the tax payers of Edinburgh provide that service for themselves and the non-taxpayers because they (or at least enough of them) believe it makes their lives better, not to make money.
They can.
The problem is when someone stands between the person making the judgement and the world at large. They become vulnerable to legal attacks.
A UK site which was set up to allow people to find old friends had the same problem because it allowed people to post comments. ISPs providing Usenet servers have had this problem. /. might if it more often talked about individual people who weren't (at least within the nerdy sub-culture) public figures.
Usenet could be given the local equivalent of US common carrier status everywhere to avoid this problem, but web sites have more of a problem.
Perhaps there needs to be a legaly recognised `good enough' method for such sites to authenticate users which would allow them to pass any legal comeback through to the person who actually wrote the problematic comments. That would work for things like teacher reviewing which are after the fact, but still leave a problem for sites dealing with issues where users might have a legitimate reason for wanting anonymity.
How do we allow, for instance, a police officer to post anonymously that his superior is corrupt, in the hope of justifiably sinking the superior's career, without providing a method for crooks to anonymously sink the career of a good police officer who is a thorn in their sides?
That wouldn't be ones who by luck, skill or corruption got good write-ups would it?:-)
What makes you think that quality of the product is the deciding factor? It's quite low down on the list behind things like quality of marketing (Windows, McDonalds), business politics (VHS, DOS), fashon (brand labeled clothes) and social inertia (NTSC).
That depends how quickly SCO move to point out they own the copyright on TNR (because someone once found it installed on a Unix machine).
Less pesimisticly, there is Ghandi's:
Yep, my freezer and my central heating boiler too! And my wallclock! Oh my god! I'm a monster! And my doorbell! Shoot me now!:-)
I dont want to burn energy which costs $$$ and tonnes of pollution for nothing.
Clealy you need to find more things for it to do.
[actually, apart from simply maintaining my state when I quit for the day in the middle of working on something, the main reason my machines are on overnight is backups.]
But lower dependency means they had less need to side with the US against their other reasons.
The US needs an alternative to SA, Caspain energy means Europe has one. Neither Iraq nor the caspian states are what one would choose to rely on, but two unstable sources are better than one.
However, most of them also apply to freezers, the answer is to fix the reasons, not to keep turning the freedzer off.
More importantly, if a Strangelove quote doesn't cue you to a comment not being entirely serious, you better get a friend to hit you with the big foam clue bat quickly:-)
I did mean it about emacs+twm though. Of course you need a C compiler to customise twm, but what's wrong with that?
Yes, but a PDP with a stonkinging big power supply gives a massively different fundamental design than something which has to deal with small batteries which will always go zonk! at the most inconvinient time possible.
As for size, yes early unixes were designed small, but there was a fundamental switch when they hit virtual memory and expected space and processing power started growing faster than anyone could think what to do with it. From that point, things like orthogonality have been much more valued than trimming a few killobytes from some module. The kernel on this machine is nearly 3GB, not counting loadable modules.
I do know the first system I ran linux on was a 486/33SX (feel that emulated FPU goodness) with 4MB
I've never run linux on anything, but back when I was running FBSD on a DX2/50 which just about managed to get X up if I was patient, my psion 3a was running (subjectively) faster with a nice integrated desktop, a pre-emtive multi-tasking OS giving a 30 hour expected battery life. Oh, and it ran for years without a restart.
15 seconds once a month is hardly a problem.
What? you boot your machine more often than that? Are you some kind of windows deviated prevert?
[in any case, what's the point of these bloatware projects? If twm and emacs won't do the job, it's not a job I want to do]
Same can be said for windoze too of course.
What's the battery life like on one of these things? Psions go for 10s of hours (and run off normal batteries, which is a huge advantage).
Actually, of all the small computers which have come and gone, the only one which really made me go `I want one' was the (now deceased) rex. When my Psion 5 started looking it's age I was tempted to get a very small laptop and a rex. The buggers had stopped making them.
Is that a page fault in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?
Talk about culture clash. Imagine putting in an order ofr an `ultra portable' laptop and getting back something that size.