You are right, we should encourage judges to sepcialize in a feild where they can claim some expertiese. Perhapse set up a formal system that would pay them more if they hold a degree in something other than law? Or scholorships for judges who want to go to school for another degree (especially medical, scientific and technical degrees).
However, it is important to note that in the present system, there are plenty of judges who specialize in certain areas of the law. The courts are partitioned such that different kinds of cases tend to fall under the jurisdiction of judges who are most experienced dealing with them. There are judges that deal in bankrupcy law, small claims, drug enforcement, devorce, capital crimes, and so on. There are judges who specialize in patent and trade disputes, and among them there are judges that specialize in technical issues such as this one. I can't say anything about the particular judge presiding over this case, but I do know they exist.
However, it is also important to note that although they do exist, we don't have enough of them. It is also important to note that the system that places cases before courts experienced enough to deal with them is more or less informal. It would be silly to file your multi-billion dollar patent dispute case so that it would be presided over by Judge Judy. Any compotent lawyer would file the case with the appropriate court so that it will have a good chance of being heard by a judge with the right background. It benifits no one to have a clueless judge.
Well, self-healing servers. That's pretty cool for us geeks, actually. That means that instead of mucking around with annoying config problems and babysitting retarded servers, we can actyally (gasp!) get some work done. Like, you know, running a company's IS infostructure.
There have been a lot of movements in history to prevent cetrain types of automation and increased reliability from going to market on the fear that it would hurt people's jobs. In reality, these inovations tend to make things better, not worse for those whose jobs use them. For instance, it used to be that railroad cars had to be linked by hand, resulting in tens of thousands of maimings and deaths. When automatic couplers were invented, there was an outcry that it would destroy jobs. In the end, it turned out that automatic couplers still needed people to work right, but the people didn't have to get between the railcars. Injuries and deaths decreased, and there was more cheese for all.
Honestly, I think fixing broken computers is the least appealing part of being a computer person. Very, very rarely, a problem comes up that is complicated enough to warrent some actual thinking but not self-defeating enough to be infuriating. I'm sure that IBM's self-healing servers will have quirks of their own, and hopefully fixing them will be more interesting that the usual "hey, look - the NT server crashed again. Oh, look - no more registry. When can we replace this thing with a real server? OK, sure, boss, it is a real server if you say so. Where's the install CD?"
These cases would look sooo cool with those nifty neon case lights they've got at ThinkGeek.
Then you could do one of those watter cooled overclock thingies that feeds to a little aquarium. You could probably find one that matched the case design. Oh, and you could use clear tubing instead of the usual black rubber hoses, and put colored water in the tank. Or better yet, put a black light in the case, and color the watter with a highighter pen! Then the watter for the overclock cooler would glow!
Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go put shinier chrome wheels and a exaust noisemaker on my '94 Honda Civic. Just kidding - these things do look pretty cool.
I should clarify this - I don't mean it's slow in an absoulute sense. I mean it's slow compaired to what one would expect it to be.
You mentioned the PPC chip - with each successive generation of the PPC, it's made a jump in power and performance. Usually, the jump is pretty significant, like with the G3 to the G4 and the 601 to the 604.
Intel used to be able to produce those kinds of results - like the 286 to 386 to 486 to pentium. But then they seem to have petered out - the PPro stunk, even in 32 bit mode, compaired to its OWN design spec. It was strangled by really bad memory bandwidth and heat thrown off by the cache. The PII was actually slower than the PPro when it first came out in a very real sense (they had to sacrifice the PPro's nice cache to fit in the MMX stuff). The PIII was basically a fix for the PII, for all I can tell - it has some more spiffy instructions that no one seems to use for anything, and they put a decent cache back in, like with the late PII models.
I'm not an expert, but that seems to be how things played out, more or less. I'm just surprised Intel is still faltering when they've got so much talent on their payrole.
What's the deal with Intel? Why did they bother with the P4? It's a disaster, if you ask me. It's slow, it overheats, no software (allright, QuakeIII) can use it, and it's going to be obsolete in a few months when they switch to a new form factor. Plus, you have to buy RIMMs.
Did someone hit them with a stupid stick?
If the ClawHammer is even a little bit cooler than the Thunderbird (like 15% more awsome), it'll just beat the pants off the P4.
I also can't see how this thead has anything to do with furnishing examples of nit-picking. But if it makes you happy, fine - if you can't imagine how nuclear policy in the US has anything to do with nuclear policy in South Africa, or how two such disperate ideas might have a few comonalities (like, uh, policy on nuclear energy), then you can pat yourself on the back for locating this egregious violation of topicality.
We will have the Bruit Squad abuse the author with Wiffle ball bats, and you can ask Hemos for your cookie. Keep fightin' the good fight, AC.
If you recall back to 1994, or thereabouts, when banner ads started popping up in force, the big deal wasn't clickthroughs. The currency of the advertising industry is not and has never been effectiveness. Billboard adversising has never been rated by the number of people who make a purchase triggered by the ad. TV comercials have never been expected to generate instant revenue. Advertising just doesn't work that way, and there was never any expectation (at least not origionally) that banner adds would be any different.
The critical measurement in adverstising is the number of "impressions" an ad gets. In other words, how many people drive past a billboard or sit through a compercial. In the case of print adversising, it's also important to note how many people will read a single unit (in some countries, magazenes get passed around among a few dozzen readers).
The problem with this aproach is that advertisers always had to guess the actual number of impressions. Who's to say how many people actually read that billboard they drive past every day? Does it count that the same thousand people drive past it every morning and evening? These things are maddeningly difficult to measure, which is bad if you are trying to figure out how much an ad is worth.
With banner ads, that's no problem - you can measure presicely, practically to a one, how many impressions an ad received. With a little extra work, some database code and a cookie, you can even identify individuals, and take note of how many of those impressions were duplicates. With a little more work, you can even test to see if a particular customer now buying a product on your web site has seen one of your banner ads (and when, where and how often they were seen).
So what if no one clicks on banner ads? Who cares? It's still a decent advertising medium, as they go. As a matter of fact, it's even a little bit more valuable because you can actually say how many people saw the ad, as opposed to a TV producer saying "well, we think that this many people watch this show, and there is such-and-such a chance that someone channel surfing will flip past your comercial as it was aring..."
Anyway, the dirty little secret about advertising is this: It Doesn't Work. At least, it usually doesn't. No one knows how much it might be worth, how effective it is, or even if it does more good than harm. Banner ads, however nifty they might be, quantitatively prove what advertisers have been attempting to conceal for generations - ads don't work, and in the rare cases when they do, there's no way of explaining or reproducing the results.
This has been misreported so many times it seems to have become accepted as fact. Goddard didn't launch from Worcester - he launched his rockets from Auburn, MA. True, Worcester is bigger than Auburn and is right next to it, but lets keep the facts streight. You wouldn't say that the Jet Propultion Laboritory is in LA, even if LA is the closest big city. You would say that JPL is in Pasadena, because that's where it is. Likewise, Slashdot isn't based out of Boston - last I heard, it was based out of Andover, wherever that is;-).
I've got a few friends from Auburn, and they get hopping mad whenever someone claims that Goddard launched from Worcester. For their sake, please, please correct this! For my sake too, because I don't want to hear the tirade again.
I appoligize for my misstep - I should have said it went into effect a decade later. In any event, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are separate documents written under very different circumstances. Obviosly, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments modify the constitution, but they really are separate law based on different philosiphies. If you read them, they even sound different.
As for things like the 1917 War Powers Act, it's clear that they arn't really enforcable. I was merely pointing out that the laws exist, and are technically in effect. The fact that they woudln't make feasable arguments in a court today is a good thing, but doesn't change the fact that such laws are still around. They represent a threat to free speech, even if the threat is empty.
As for the expiration of the War Powers Act, I'm a little dubious. I've read the bill, and it doesn't itelf provide for an expiration, and I haven't found any evidence that it's been repealed. My guess is that it was simply thrown on the pile of other outdated, unenforced laws. I suppose there is a legal precident for deciding when a law is useless. For instance, in Massachusetts, you are technically required to obtain a license to wear a beard. Fortunatly for the unshaven, if a DA tried to prosecuete unlicenced beard-wearers, they would probably be laughed out of their jobs. No judge in his or her right mind would allow anyone to be procecuted for wearing an unlicensed beard. So, there must be some kind of precident for allowing a law to lapse without an actual legislative act.
Anyway, the way I wrote my origional post made it flamebate anyway. That's what I get for writing under the influence of sleep-deprivation;-).
Just a little note here - according to the constitution, cencorship for any reason by any level of government is OK. According to the constitutuion, It's perfectly within the rights of congress to pass a law that would condem you to be desolved alive in sulphuric acid for saying that "the government is bad."
The Bill of Rights says otherwise, but it is a completely seperate document that was written a decade later.
Besides, there are plenty of laws on the books right here in the good old US of A that curtail your supposed free speech. For instance, the War Powers Act of 1917 allows the government to throw you in jail indefinitely without a trial (which, by the way, is OK by the constitution, but not the Bill o' Rights) for doing things like critisizing the government, the country's allies, et cetera.
The fact is, there isn't a place in the world that has legal freedom of speech, with the possible exception of Antarctica, which I don't know very much about. There are even laws specifically limiting free speech in international waters and airspace.
Say what you will about the WTO, but it we (I'll carefully avoid defining "we") were able to persuade a member nation of the WTO to take up this issue on our behalf, it would probaly be realivly simple to prove that this technology is a de facto trade barrier. The WTO has the power to ban the use of such a system, I beleive.
It's just a question of what nation would be willing to champion the cause. Clearly, not the US, since US companies have the most to gain and the from this sort of thing - maybe China? Wouldn't that be an irony - a Stalinist dictatorship and the tool of global corperatism get together to strike a blow in the name of free speech.
Also, has anyone considered using the WTO arbitration process against the CCS standard used in DVD's? It seems clear to me that CCS standard is an illegal trade barrier of the sort the WTO has the authrity to mitigate.
A possible solution to this problem is the model that Microsoft uses for DirectX. They probably didn't invent it, and it doesn't seem to be the best solution out there from a technical perspective, but it seems to work.
Microsoft's specifications for the DirectX libraries contain, as you might expect from a library spec, definitions, descriptions and examples for a bunch of functions. It also specifies the in-house rules Microsoft uses to update DirectX - specifically, once a function is put into DirectX, it is never removed and never updated. Each subsequent release of DirectX contains precicely the same functionality of previous releases in addition to new functionality. Functions can be "obsoleted", but are never removed or disabled.
Obviously, this makes DirectX kind of bloated, but at least you know that installing a new version isn't likly to break your old stuff. When sorting throught DirectX functions, they tend to be grouped by revision (oldest.older.old.new.newer.newest). Older applications that aren't aware of the SuperWizBang(int a) function from the latest release can just continue using the function it replaced.
As I said, it's not the best solution, but it's simple and it works. If it makes you feel better, I'm sure you can find an example of this kind of specification from someone other than Microsoft.
If you put that 60GB (gigabucks) into regular old US T-bills at 6% anual interest, it would take about a month or two to accumulate enough interest to buy the ferries at 400MB. I'm fudging it, but that seems to be a pretty concervative estimate.
It seems there is a veritable laundry list of IP laws and crummy patents that people hate. From the laws protecting CSS from reverse-engineering to Amazon's infamous "1-click" patents. It seems to me that these things all have a common thread. Is it that they curtail something "sacred" (free expression? innovation? free enterprise?), or that it permits something nasty (monopolies? expansion of corporate controll?)?
In either case, can the current law be interpretted better so as to assuage these conserns, or is there something wrong with current law? It seems to me that the basic principles for gaining a patent on something are pretty restrictive. If I were a judge, I would be very dubious as to the validity of patents on software at all. In the strictest reading of the law, it would seem to me that software (and data in general) cannot be patented because it is merely information, and doesn't "do" anything. This would put it firmly in the arena of copyright law. If I were conviced that software is patentable, I would only allow process patents for software, which are the hardest to get.
I know this is somewhat of a side issue, but personally, I would never, under any circumstances, grant or uphold a patent on a gene. The very idea seems absurd to me - it would be like an astronomer patenting a particularly interesting globular cluster because they found it first. I might allow patents on drugs that utilize particular genes, but the gene itself is part of nature. I would require that a gene be written from scratch or be sustantially and directly modified inorder to be patentable.
What is the "right" way of looking at IP law? I mean this in both the ethical and the legal sense. It seems to me that the government is not granting patents in accordance to the letter and spirit of the law. Nonetheless, it seems comfortable in the way it grants them. Why is the government muddying the waters?
The knee-jerk response is that what big money wants, big money gets. But there has always been pressure from big money to grant and enforce spurrious patents. Today, though, it seems that nearly every modestly clever idea is being rubber-stamped by the patent office. It seems to me that this shift in standards coencides with a similar slip in rigorous interpretation of the first amendment. What happened? Or am I just paranoid?
I'm not convinced that moral panics are more prevalent today than in the past. On the contrary, in the United States, the era just before, during and after World War I precipitated some of the worst "moral panics" in our history. In fact, we're sill feeling their aftershocks today. I'm not a sociologist, so I can't very well speak about moral panics directly, but I can mention some of the events that occured as a direct result of these cultural spasams.
Prohibition, to name one, fundamentally changed the way people think about substance abuse. Before prohibition, substance abuse was thought of as a failing of character, like infidelity or dishonesty. Even though it eventually failed, prohibition created a cultural consensus that substance abuse was a criminal problem. The so-called "war on drugs" the latest effect of this attitude.
But Prohibition was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the scariest or most destructive "moral panic" of the era. During the war era some of the worst attacks on civil liberties since slavery were carried out with consent from the "moral majority".
Criticism of the state was squelched for fear it would jeopardize the war effort. The film "The Spirit of '76", which was about the American Revolution, was censored and its creators jailed because it depicted the British, America's allies in the Great War, in a negative light. One could expect to be jailed and possibly tortured for the offense of "rable-rousing", otherwise known as giving a protest speech. Congress went as far as to pass laws, still on the books today, banning such terms as "sour Craut" and "hamburger" because they could be seen as positive depictions of America's enemy in the Great War, Germany. You should be careful to refer to these dishes as "saulsburry steak" and "victory cabbage".
But that wasn't the worst. If you want a political litmus test of the times, read the transcripts of the trail of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Venzetti, two Italian immigrants accused of a murder they could not have committed. The prosecution was awarded a conviction after offering only cursory presentations of such arguments as motive, opportunity or intent. The case rested firmly, and one could argue solely, on the fact that both men were immigrants and anarchists. After protest from nearly the whole world, Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted in 1927.
This is to say nothing of the MaCarthy trials, and the "moral panics" that came later.
Today's "moral panic" about alleged pornography, profanity and violence in assorted media is rather tame in comparison to what's happened in the past. It it important to point out that without the erosion of civil liberties that took place after World War I and II, the censorship proposed today would be utterly inconceivable.
This is not meant to trivialize the current situation - in fact, one should be more concerned about this trend having realized that it is not isolated, sporadic or random. It is, in fact, the latest outlet of a social flow that has tributaries running at least a hundred years into the past.
So, if anyone is going to take a stand against the advocates of censorship today, they should take caution from the lessons learned by people who fought these forces in the past. They should also understand that, in taking a stand for personal liberty, they find themselves in very good company. While Kevin Mitnick has a lot less to complain about that Sacco and Venzetti, the battle is one and the same.
This is the fundamental question of living in a democracy - the liberties of the individual verses the wishes of the majority. In my mind, the question is not as sticky as it seems at first. It is a matter of determining when you are truely dealing with the "wishes of the majority" and when you are dealing with opportunists who claim to be acting on behalf of the majority. I suppose that it might also be possible defend the liberties of the individual by understanding the diffrence between the "wishes of the majority" and a "moral panic".
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Re:No physical ballots = No meaningful recount
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Here's a solution that could be used in any voting system, be it computerized, paper-based, punch card powered or telepathic.
When you vote, you are issued a certificate that says that you voted, where you voted, when you voted, what official(s) were there to check you, what credentials you presented, and who you voted for. You keep this certificate.
To keep things anonymous, the voter's personal information and ballot choices could be encrypted on the certificate.
That way, if there is a recount, or some row over the assorted breeds of skullduggery that might occur at a voting location, you have an alternate way of proceeding. If a voter is ticked-off about their ballot, they have a certificate that shows how THEY voted. If there is a really big stink, like the one going on now in Florida, the election officials can ask everyone to bring their certificates back to be tallied.
To tally and confirm the votes from the certificates, you set up processing stations where election officials read the certificates into a computer to decrypt them, and the voter can review the information. A blind system could be set up so that the official can't actually see the plaintext of the certificate. If the voter sees a problem with the information, there could be some process to correct it.
The certificates could be printed with bar codes to make them machine readable, which would make things go quicker.
This would solve (mostly, anyway) the situation now. The problem now is that there was something wrong with the ballots, but they've already been cast. You can't exacly re-do the election, and you can't exactly fix the problem by looking at the submitted ballots. Because we have anonymous ballots, you can't match the angry voter with the botched ballot.
There should be some redress for this situation. Even if someone is completely inept, it is all-important that their will be expressed as a vote and that thier vote be counted in the relavant elections. Elections shouldn't be a gamble.
If we're all really cranky about a lack of independant news, why not beef up/. to fill the need? Secure some more funding, hire some full time professional reporters, corraspondants and editors and start a full-blown/. news service. We could even take an open-source approach to reporting - users volonteer some time as reporters, editors or where ever they have some skill, and they get called on to write stories, cover events, edit copy... If your work doesn't totaly suck and it doesn't take you too long to finish it, you get karma. (er, maybe it should be a different kind of karma - like in Battletech, you can have a Karma system and a MegaKarma system) We could keep it going by offering bounties for good, well written stories. (Free Tux to author of the best article of the day on The MS case!!!!)
Just out of curiocity, can anyone name at least three significant examples of large corporations that hold dominant roles in key industreis that use their influence for "good"?
Try this sometime - open up the Wall St. Journal to the NYSE listings and run your finger down the list of companies. Pretend that you're Santa Clause and make a naughty and nice list. Pretend that you have a workshop of genious elves at your disposal who can develop market-shattering technologies for good little multinationals.
Would you give Boeing a ream of pattents to practical hyperspace travel? Glaxo-Welcome the cure for cancer? Food replicator technology to ADM? Quantum computing to Intel? AI of human intellegence to Microsoft?
My stock portfolio aside, I certainly wouldn't grant any boons to a multinational. I submit that it is the size that matters. I'm not anti-corportate per se, but the very nature of decision making when billions of dollars of other people's money are involved forces large companies to behave in certain ways and not in others. There is no question of how AOL will behave now that it controlls Time Warner. It will behave in the way anyone with billions to loose and trillions to gain would behave, and you can be absolutely certain that your best insterests are not in mind.
Large corporations are inherantly agressive organizations. This is a great thing when that agressive drive leads to competition among buissnesses for the favor of customers. The aggressive nature of capitalism is what makes it work. The key, though, is that this agressive behavior is among buissnesses, not among buissnesses and customers, buissnesses and government or buissnesses and the law. If anything other than another large company fights a large company for control of something, the result will be very, very bad.
AOL doesn't really have anyone to compete with, and therefore should not exist in its present form. I say this not because it might turn out to be dangerous, but because it must turn out to be dangerous. How dangerous is a function of AOL's size, the determination of other companies, the alertness of government, the justness the law and the awareness of consumers.
The solution to this and many other problems with civil liberties issues on the internet is, as always, better technology. The main problem is that, under current networking protocols, extracting information about a physical host or a user is a trivial affair. With IP, the whole idea is based on the fact that a particular packet is stamped with the permanent address of is destination and origin. If you a packet is intercepted, it is trivial to tell where it came from and where it is going. Even if nothing is intercepted, it is still possible for a host to take advantage of the unprotected nature of IP to learn just about anything it wants to know about a user. Hosts can use IP addresses to track users, gather information, learn their physical locations, and, in many cases, find their email addresses, their real names and so forth.
The fact of the matter is that IP was designed with no considerations for personal liberties or rights. Because of this, everything that is done with IP is susceptible to its weaknesses. Companies can track your buying habits, employers can read your email and the recording industry can chose its victims at its leisure. Under the status quo, the freedom to speak your mind and the freedom to speak in private does not exist in an electronic form, except in constrained, limited ways.
Partial solutions exist for these problems, but like all partial solutions, they have crippling weaknesses. For instance, when it came to email, anonymity and privacy were addressed by using anonymous remailers and encryption. Both have met with strong opposition from government over the years, and because of this opposition, both systems have suffered. When you send encrypted email, you may as well notify everyone that you are about to send a secret message. If the government wants it, they subpoena it. If industry wants it, they steal the keys or they work the levers of the court system to get it, and you're back with the subpoena. As for anonymous remailers, the government can simply target the remailers themselves, either to shut them down or to subpoena the logs.
If people are serious about personal liberties, the solution is to build a software solution that fixes this problem with IP. Napster, Hotline and IRC can all act as buffers between two hosts, and can be used to bury a host deep enough to make it a difficult target. To get serious personal freedom on the internet, what is needed is a distributed, anonymous and encrypted protocol. Hosts should be able to communicate with one another independent of physical location within a network. When using this system, people should be able to be completely confident in the security of their communication. Additionally, they should be confident that they are in complete control over any and all information available about them.
The technologies already exist to build this protocol. The problem is that it would probably be viewed simply as a vehicle to commit crime, and thus the effort of building the protocol would probably be considered a crime as well. While it is true that such a system could be used to aid in crime, I believe that personal liberties, particularly ones that can't cause any physical harm, vastly outweigh this consideration. Besides, it is very unwise to trust the FBI, the ATF or even the local Rent-A-Cop with a position of authority. Law enforcement should be trusted with the task of enforcing the law, not dictating it. On the other hand, I must admit that I do have a lot of respect for and faith in good, old fashioned detective work. When a crime worth thinking about is committed, the criminal will leave evidence worth thinking about. The way I see it, Scotland Yard has been solving crimes the old fashioned way for a hundred years. Now they have DNA technology and surveillance cameras pointed at every cobblestone and hackney carriage in Britain. What are they worried about? The only people who stand to loose from real free speech and privacy are cleptocrats.
I think we should go ahead and build the tools to truly subvert the recording industry. But this time, we're going to have to understand that the "recording industry" includes the FBI. It's time to dust off those ideals everyone had back before Usenet became a hill of Spam - back in the days when Mosaic was still king. Remember? The internet was going to change the world! It was going to let people confidently talk to each other for free, to share their ideas with everyone unhindered. The internet was going to bash down the gates that keep billions of people cooped up by the lucky few. It was going to unleash the creative potential of everyone. This was the whole reason people got excited about the internet in the first place - before anyone made any money off of it, or, in any event, wrote a business plan that claimed they would. Government and big money have found technologies to hijack the positive sociological properties of the internet. Remember why everyone was so afraid of the internet in 1992? Because no one could control it. Its time to find out just how difficult to control we really are.
A long time ago, I used to say stuff like this all the time. The internet represented an expression of freedom that I had never seen before. Then came the Netscape IPO. I got a little carried away after doubling my money a couple of times just by investing in what looked "cool." The Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be a wake up call for us all. It's time to get back to what this was all about in the first place - freedom.
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However, it is important to note that in the present system, there are plenty of judges who specialize in certain areas of the law. The courts are partitioned such that different kinds of cases tend to fall under the jurisdiction of judges who are most experienced dealing with them. There are judges that deal in bankrupcy law, small claims, drug enforcement, devorce, capital crimes, and so on. There are judges who specialize in patent and trade disputes, and among them there are judges that specialize in technical issues such as this one. I can't say anything about the particular judge presiding over this case, but I do know they exist.
However, it is also important to note that although they do exist, we don't have enough of them. It is also important to note that the system that places cases before courts experienced enough to deal with them is more or less informal. It would be silly to file your multi-billion dollar patent dispute case so that it would be presided over by Judge Judy. Any compotent lawyer would file the case with the appropriate court so that it will have a good chance of being heard by a judge with the right background. It benifits no one to have a clueless judge.
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There have been a lot of movements in history to prevent cetrain types of automation and increased reliability from going to market on the fear that it would hurt people's jobs. In reality, these inovations tend to make things better, not worse for those whose jobs use them. For instance, it used to be that railroad cars had to be linked by hand, resulting in tens of thousands of maimings and deaths. When automatic couplers were invented, there was an outcry that it would destroy jobs. In the end, it turned out that automatic couplers still needed people to work right, but the people didn't have to get between the railcars. Injuries and deaths decreased, and there was more cheese for all.
Honestly, I think fixing broken computers is the least appealing part of being a computer person. Very, very rarely, a problem comes up that is complicated enough to warrent some actual thinking but not self-defeating enough to be infuriating. I'm sure that IBM's self-healing servers will have quirks of their own, and hopefully fixing them will be more interesting that the usual "hey, look - the NT server crashed again. Oh, look - no more registry. When can we replace this thing with a real server? OK, sure, boss, it is a real server if you say so. Where's the install CD?"
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Then you could do one of those watter cooled overclock thingies that feeds to a little aquarium. You could probably find one that matched the case design. Oh, and you could use clear tubing instead of the usual black rubber hoses, and put colored water in the tank. Or better yet, put a black light in the case, and color the watter with a highighter pen! Then the watter for the overclock cooler would glow!
Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go put shinier chrome wheels and a exaust noisemaker on my '94 Honda Civic. Just kidding - these things do look pretty cool.
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You mentioned the PPC chip - with each successive generation of the PPC, it's made a jump in power and performance. Usually, the jump is pretty significant, like with the G3 to the G4 and the 601 to the 604.
Intel used to be able to produce those kinds of results - like the 286 to 386 to 486 to pentium. But then they seem to have petered out - the PPro stunk, even in 32 bit mode, compaired to its OWN design spec. It was strangled by really bad memory bandwidth and heat thrown off by the cache. The PII was actually slower than the PPro when it first came out in a very real sense (they had to sacrifice the PPro's nice cache to fit in the MMX stuff). The PIII was basically a fix for the PII, for all I can tell - it has some more spiffy instructions that no one seems to use for anything, and they put a decent cache back in, like with the late PII models.
I'm not an expert, but that seems to be how things played out, more or less. I'm just surprised Intel is still faltering when they've got so much talent on their payrole.
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Did someone hit them with a stupid stick?
If the ClawHammer is even a little bit cooler than the Thunderbird (like 15% more awsome), it'll just beat the pants off the P4.
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We will have the Bruit Squad abuse the author with Wiffle ball bats, and you can ask Hemos for your cookie. Keep fightin' the good fight, AC.
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The critical measurement in adverstising is the number of "impressions" an ad gets. In other words, how many people drive past a billboard or sit through a compercial. In the case of print adversising, it's also important to note how many people will read a single unit (in some countries, magazenes get passed around among a few dozzen readers).
The problem with this aproach is that advertisers always had to guess the actual number of impressions. Who's to say how many people actually read that billboard they drive past every day? Does it count that the same thousand people drive past it every morning and evening? These things are maddeningly difficult to measure, which is bad if you are trying to figure out how much an ad is worth.
With banner ads, that's no problem - you can measure presicely, practically to a one, how many impressions an ad received. With a little extra work, some database code and a cookie, you can even identify individuals, and take note of how many of those impressions were duplicates. With a little more work, you can even test to see if a particular customer now buying a product on your web site has seen one of your banner ads (and when, where and how often they were seen).
So what if no one clicks on banner ads? Who cares? It's still a decent advertising medium, as they go. As a matter of fact, it's even a little bit more valuable because you can actually say how many people saw the ad, as opposed to a TV producer saying "well, we think that this many people watch this show, and there is such-and-such a chance that someone channel surfing will flip past your comercial as it was aring..."
Anyway, the dirty little secret about advertising is this: It Doesn't Work. At least, it usually doesn't. No one knows how much it might be worth, how effective it is, or even if it does more good than harm. Banner ads, however nifty they might be, quantitatively prove what advertisers have been attempting to conceal for generations - ads don't work, and in the rare cases when they do, there's no way of explaining or reproducing the results.
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I've got a few friends from Auburn, and they get hopping mad whenever someone claims that Goddard launched from Worcester. For their sake, please, please correct this! For my sake too, because I don't want to hear the tirade again.
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As for things like the 1917 War Powers Act, it's clear that they arn't really enforcable. I was merely pointing out that the laws exist, and are technically in effect. The fact that they woudln't make feasable arguments in a court today is a good thing, but doesn't change the fact that such laws are still around. They represent a threat to free speech, even if the threat is empty.
As for the expiration of the War Powers Act, I'm a little dubious. I've read the bill, and it doesn't itelf provide for an expiration, and I haven't found any evidence that it's been repealed. My guess is that it was simply thrown on the pile of other outdated, unenforced laws. I suppose there is a legal precident for deciding when a law is useless. For instance, in Massachusetts, you are technically required to obtain a license to wear a beard. Fortunatly for the unshaven, if a DA tried to prosecuete unlicenced beard-wearers, they would probably be laughed out of their jobs. No judge in his or her right mind would allow anyone to be procecuted for wearing an unlicensed beard. So, there must be some kind of precident for allowing a law to lapse without an actual legislative act.
Anyway, the way I wrote my origional post made it flamebate anyway. That's what I get for writing under the influence of sleep-deprivation ;-).
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The Bill of Rights says otherwise, but it is a completely seperate document that was written a decade later.
Besides, there are plenty of laws on the books right here in the good old US of A that curtail your supposed free speech. For instance, the War Powers Act of 1917 allows the government to throw you in jail indefinitely without a trial (which, by the way, is OK by the constitution, but not the Bill o' Rights) for doing things like critisizing the government, the country's allies, et cetera.
The fact is, there isn't a place in the world that has legal freedom of speech, with the possible exception of Antarctica, which I don't know very much about. There are even laws specifically limiting free speech in international waters and airspace.
Just a small point I thought I'd bring up.
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It's just a question of what nation would be willing to champion the cause. Clearly, not the US, since US companies have the most to gain and the from this sort of thing - maybe China? Wouldn't that be an irony - a Stalinist dictatorship and the tool of global corperatism get together to strike a blow in the name of free speech.
Also, has anyone considered using the WTO arbitration process against the CCS standard used in DVD's? It seems clear to me that CCS standard is an illegal trade barrier of the sort the WTO has the authrity to mitigate.
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Microsoft's specifications for the DirectX libraries contain, as you might expect from a library spec, definitions, descriptions and examples for a bunch of functions. It also specifies the in-house rules Microsoft uses to update DirectX - specifically, once a function is put into DirectX, it is never removed and never updated. Each subsequent release of DirectX contains precicely the same functionality of previous releases in addition to new functionality. Functions can be "obsoleted", but are never removed or disabled.
Obviously, this makes DirectX kind of bloated, but at least you know that installing a new version isn't likly to break your old stuff. When sorting throught DirectX functions, they tend to be grouped by revision (oldest.older.old.new.newer.newest). Older applications that aren't aware of the SuperWizBang(int a) function from the latest release can just continue using the function it replaced.
As I said, it's not the best solution, but it's simple and it works. If it makes you feel better, I'm sure you can find an example of this kind of specification from someone other than Microsoft.
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It seems there is a veritable laundry list of IP laws and crummy patents that people hate. From the laws protecting CSS from reverse-engineering to Amazon's infamous "1-click" patents. It seems to me that these things all have a common thread. Is it that they curtail something "sacred" (free expression? innovation? free enterprise?), or that it permits something nasty (monopolies? expansion of corporate controll?)?
In either case, can the current law be interpretted better so as to assuage these conserns, or is there something wrong with current law? It seems to me that the basic principles for gaining a patent on something are pretty restrictive. If I were a judge, I would be very dubious as to the validity of patents on software at all. In the strictest reading of the law, it would seem to me that software (and data in general) cannot be patented because it is merely information, and doesn't "do" anything. This would put it firmly in the arena of copyright law. If I were conviced that software is patentable, I would only allow process patents for software, which are the hardest to get.
I know this is somewhat of a side issue, but personally, I would never, under any circumstances, grant or uphold a patent on a gene. The very idea seems absurd to me - it would be like an astronomer patenting a particularly interesting globular cluster because they found it first. I might allow patents on drugs that utilize particular genes, but the gene itself is part of nature. I would require that a gene be written from scratch or be sustantially and directly modified inorder to be patentable.
What is the "right" way of looking at IP law? I mean this in both the ethical and the legal sense. It seems to me that the government is not granting patents in accordance to the letter and spirit of the law. Nonetheless, it seems comfortable in the way it grants them. Why is the government muddying the waters?
The knee-jerk response is that what big money wants, big money gets. But there has always been pressure from big money to grant and enforce spurrious patents. Today, though, it seems that nearly every modestly clever idea is being rubber-stamped by the patent office. It seems to me that this shift in standards coencides with a similar slip in rigorous interpretation of the first amendment. What happened? Or am I just paranoid?
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Prohibition, to name one, fundamentally changed the way people think about substance abuse. Before prohibition, substance abuse was thought of as a failing of character, like infidelity or dishonesty. Even though it eventually failed, prohibition created a cultural consensus that substance abuse was a criminal problem. The so-called "war on drugs" the latest effect of this attitude.
But Prohibition was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the scariest or most destructive "moral panic" of the era. During the war era some of the worst attacks on civil liberties since slavery were carried out with consent from the "moral majority".
Criticism of the state was squelched for fear it would jeopardize the war effort. The film "The Spirit of '76", which was about the American Revolution, was censored and its creators jailed because it depicted the British, America's allies in the Great War, in a negative light. One could expect to be jailed and possibly tortured for the offense of "rable-rousing", otherwise known as giving a protest speech. Congress went as far as to pass laws, still on the books today, banning such terms as "sour Craut" and "hamburger" because they could be seen as positive depictions of America's enemy in the Great War, Germany. You should be careful to refer to these dishes as "saulsburry steak" and "victory cabbage".
But that wasn't the worst. If you want a political litmus test of the times, read the transcripts of the trail of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Venzetti, two Italian immigrants accused of a murder they could not have committed. The prosecution was awarded a conviction after offering only cursory presentations of such arguments as motive, opportunity or intent. The case rested firmly, and one could argue solely, on the fact that both men were immigrants and anarchists. After protest from nearly the whole world, Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted in 1927.
This is to say nothing of the MaCarthy trials, and the "moral panics" that came later.
Today's "moral panic" about alleged pornography, profanity and violence in assorted media is rather tame in comparison to what's happened in the past. It it important to point out that without the erosion of civil liberties that took place after World War I and II, the censorship proposed today would be utterly inconceivable.
This is not meant to trivialize the current situation - in fact, one should be more concerned about this trend having realized that it is not isolated, sporadic or random. It is, in fact, the latest outlet of a social flow that has tributaries running at least a hundred years into the past.
So, if anyone is going to take a stand against the advocates of censorship today, they should take caution from the lessons learned by people who fought these forces in the past. They should also understand that, in taking a stand for personal liberty, they find themselves in very good company. While Kevin Mitnick has a lot less to complain about that Sacco and Venzetti, the battle is one and the same.
This is the fundamental question of living in a democracy - the liberties of the individual verses the wishes of the majority. In my mind, the question is not as sticky as it seems at first. It is a matter of determining when you are truely dealing with the "wishes of the majority" and when you are dealing with opportunists who claim to be acting on behalf of the majority. I suppose that it might also be possible defend the liberties of the individual by understanding the diffrence between the "wishes of the majority" and a "moral panic".
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When you vote, you are issued a certificate that says that you voted, where you voted, when you voted, what official(s) were there to check you, what credentials you presented, and who you voted for. You keep this certificate.
To keep things anonymous, the voter's personal information and ballot choices could be encrypted on the certificate.
That way, if there is a recount, or some row over the assorted breeds of skullduggery that might occur at a voting location, you have an alternate way of proceeding. If a voter is ticked-off about their ballot, they have a certificate that shows how THEY voted. If there is a really big stink, like the one going on now in Florida, the election officials can ask everyone to bring their certificates back to be tallied.
To tally and confirm the votes from the certificates, you set up processing stations where election officials read the certificates into a computer to decrypt them, and the voter can review the information. A blind system could be set up so that the official can't actually see the plaintext of the certificate. If the voter sees a problem with the information, there could be some process to correct it.
The certificates could be printed with bar codes to make them machine readable, which would make things go quicker.
This would solve (mostly, anyway) the situation now. The problem now is that there was something wrong with the ballots, but they've already been cast. You can't exacly re-do the election, and you can't exactly fix the problem by looking at the submitted ballots. Because we have anonymous ballots, you can't match the angry voter with the botched ballot.
There should be some redress for this situation. Even if someone is completely inept, it is all-important that their will be expressed as a vote and that thier vote be counted in the relavant elections. Elections shouldn't be a gamble.
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If we're all really cranky about a lack of independant news, why not beef up /. to fill the need? Secure some more funding, hire some full time professional reporters, corraspondants and editors and start a full-blown /. news service. We could even take an open-source approach to reporting - users volonteer some time as reporters, editors or where ever they have some skill, and they get called on to write stories, cover events, edit copy... If your work doesn't totaly suck and it doesn't take you too long to finish it, you get karma. (er, maybe it should be a different kind of karma - like in Battletech, you can have a Karma system and a MegaKarma system) We could keep it going by offering bounties for good, well written stories. (Free Tux to author of the best article of the day on The MS case!!!!)
Try this sometime - open up the Wall St. Journal to the NYSE listings and run your finger down the list of companies. Pretend that you're Santa Clause and make a naughty and nice list. Pretend that you have a workshop of genious elves at your disposal who can develop market-shattering technologies for good little multinationals.
Would you give Boeing a ream of pattents to practical hyperspace travel? Glaxo-Welcome the cure for cancer? Food replicator technology to ADM? Quantum computing to Intel? AI of human intellegence to Microsoft?
My stock portfolio aside, I certainly wouldn't grant any boons to a multinational. I submit that it is the size that matters. I'm not anti-corportate per se, but the very nature of decision making when billions of dollars of other people's money are involved forces large companies to behave in certain ways and not in others. There is no question of how AOL will behave now that it controlls Time Warner. It will behave in the way anyone with billions to loose and trillions to gain would behave, and you can be absolutely certain that your best insterests are not in mind.
Large corporations are inherantly agressive organizations. This is a great thing when that agressive drive leads to competition among buissnesses for the favor of customers. The aggressive nature of capitalism is what makes it work. The key, though, is that this agressive behavior is among buissnesses, not among buissnesses and customers, buissnesses and government or buissnesses and the law. If anything other than another large company fights a large company for control of something, the result will be very, very bad.
AOL doesn't really have anyone to compete with, and therefore should not exist in its present form. I say this not because it might turn out to be dangerous, but because it must turn out to be dangerous. How dangerous is a function of AOL's size, the determination of other companies, the alertness of government, the justness the law and the awareness of consumers.
The fact of the matter is that IP was designed with no considerations for personal liberties or rights. Because of this, everything that is done with IP is susceptible to its weaknesses. Companies can track your buying habits, employers can read your email and the recording industry can chose its victims at its leisure. Under the status quo, the freedom to speak your mind and the freedom to speak in private does not exist in an electronic form, except in constrained, limited ways.
Partial solutions exist for these problems, but like all partial solutions, they have crippling weaknesses. For instance, when it came to email, anonymity and privacy were addressed by using anonymous remailers and encryption. Both have met with strong opposition from government over the years, and because of this opposition, both systems have suffered. When you send encrypted email, you may as well notify everyone that you are about to send a secret message. If the government wants it, they subpoena it. If industry wants it, they steal the keys or they work the levers of the court system to get it, and you're back with the subpoena. As for anonymous remailers, the government can simply target the remailers themselves, either to shut them down or to subpoena the logs.
If people are serious about personal liberties, the solution is to build a software solution that fixes this problem with IP. Napster, Hotline and IRC can all act as buffers between two hosts, and can be used to bury a host deep enough to make it a difficult target. To get serious personal freedom on the internet, what is needed is a distributed, anonymous and encrypted protocol. Hosts should be able to communicate with one another independent of physical location within a network. When using this system, people should be able to be completely confident in the security of their communication. Additionally, they should be confident that they are in complete control over any and all information available about them.
The technologies already exist to build this protocol. The problem is that it would probably be viewed simply as a vehicle to commit crime, and thus the effort of building the protocol would probably be considered a crime as well. While it is true that such a system could be used to aid in crime, I believe that personal liberties, particularly ones that can't cause any physical harm, vastly outweigh this consideration. Besides, it is very unwise to trust the FBI, the ATF or even the local Rent-A-Cop with a position of authority. Law enforcement should be trusted with the task of enforcing the law, not dictating it. On the other hand, I must admit that I do have a lot of respect for and faith in good, old fashioned detective work. When a crime worth thinking about is committed, the criminal will leave evidence worth thinking about. The way I see it, Scotland Yard has been solving crimes the old fashioned way for a hundred years. Now they have DNA technology and surveillance cameras pointed at every cobblestone and hackney carriage in Britain. What are they worried about? The only people who stand to loose from real free speech and privacy are cleptocrats.
I think we should go ahead and build the tools to truly subvert the recording industry. But this time, we're going to have to understand that the "recording industry" includes the FBI. It's time to dust off those ideals everyone had back before Usenet became a hill of Spam - back in the days when Mosaic was still king. Remember? The internet was going to change the world! It was going to let people confidently talk to each other for free, to share their ideas with everyone unhindered. The internet was going to bash down the gates that keep billions of people cooped up by the lucky few. It was going to unleash the creative potential of everyone. This was the whole reason people got excited about the internet in the first place - before anyone made any money off of it, or, in any event, wrote a business plan that claimed they would. Government and big money have found technologies to hijack the positive sociological properties of the internet. Remember why everyone was so afraid of the internet in 1992? Because no one could control it. Its time to find out just how difficult to control we really are.
A long time ago, I used to say stuff like this all the time. The internet represented an expression of freedom that I had never seen before. Then came the Netscape IPO. I got a little carried away after doubling my money a couple of times just by investing in what looked "cool." The Digital Millennium Copyright Act should be a wake up call for us all. It's time to get back to what this was all about in the first place - freedom.
Russell