Many countries are cinsidering DMCA type legislation to bring them into compliance with the WIPOIntelectual Property Treaties. For more on the the legal constructs being cinsidered by the World Intellectual Property Organization, see their whitepaper "Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of Technology, Law, and Commercial Licenses" (M$ Word or PDF). Take a good look at this stuff. It's important that people fully understand the actions being taken by WIPO and begin to realize that arguing about your rights or my rights isn't the critical issue. The critical issue is that if WIPO has their way, there will be no protection for citizens of any country, from potentially usurous and monopolistic IP practices.
It will be interesting to see if once it does get out, if companies will seek to hold him responsible, even if e doesn't release it himself. I winder if the DMCA covers the eventuality of having done research which facilitates bypassing encryption. It really isn't that far to go from doing research (and finding the solution) to writing the software that actually performs the operation. Will it become a crime to do research?
--CTH
Good to see desktop enviroments live and well
on
KDE 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 2
This looks to be a pretty solid release.
Perhaps linux on the desktop isn't dead yet, dispite what Microsoft and others keep insisting...?
Rights language less useful than legal constructs
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 3, Informative
While we've been focusing on rights language, and discussions of what should be, WIPO, with the support of many old-economy publishers have begun to implement the legal constructs which will allow prosecution for net based offenses, related to intellectual property. The first evidence of this in the US was the DMCA, but for the rest of the story, read the WIPO whitepaper "Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of Technology, Law, and Commercial Licenses" (available in M$ word format and PDF format). It's a vary interesting read.
Weather it's FUD or not isn't important. It'd be a blast to even try to come up with a real world implementation. Remember, technology fot technology's sake.
The earlier poster just grazed the surface of this issue. A key financial percentage that analysts like to look at is revenue or'Earnings per Employee' as an indicator of employee productivity as it reflects good management practices and corporate health.
The issue is not how many employees are being laid off, but what services are being outsourced. Oursourcing services such as call centers and HR, as well as IT infastructure management, etc. look on paper the same as layoffs, in that such outsourcing reduces the number of 'Regular Fulltime Employees' thus improving the revenue percentage shown as Earnings per Employee. This is a common practice and we shouldn't be suprised that AOL is making use of them.
Teoma was discussed earlier on/.. The article featured in that posting was quite interesting in it's own right and worth a close read, even if you don't go through the comments of the earlier post.
Squabling over Intellectual Property in standard protocols is short sighted. It reduces the possibility the company holding the IP will be able to have the market advantage that comes with inclusion of their technology in a atandard (because no one will bother to include their technology) and potentially harms the quality and viability of the proposed standard There are plenty of residual revenue streams that come out of such inclusion of IP in a standard, that do not have the potential of harming the diability and rate-of-adoption of a standard (like treditional IP licensing would). The article about the internat fax standard says:
Adobe refuses to support TIFF-FX unless Xerox releases rights for its MRC technology to Adobe.
Xerox, meanwhile, won't back TIFF-FX unless Adobe promises to support the standard in its next version of TIFF.
This shouldn't ever be an issue. There should be a standard mechanism implemented for management and status handling of Intelectual property which becomes part of IETS standards (protocols, file formats, etc) such that there is never a question as to the availability for use of a standard. This is the same sort of issue that came up in an earlier discussion of Dolby Digital AC-3 decoding where the standards body, the Advanced Television Systems Committee has a patent policy which states in part that:
A license will be made available without compensation to applicants desiring to utilize the license for the purpose of implementing the standard.
Unfortunately, even with this policy, Dolby Labs is making claims against the NetBSD project for inclusing an unlicensed decoder in an Open Source product. The IETS needs to learn from this situation and develop an iron clad patent and IP policy such that these issues never arise when people attempt to implement IETF standards.
--CTH
Eliza replies to spam: "Tell me about your mother"
on
Eliza for Spam
·
· Score: 2
Forget the fill in forms. Too much effort. I got an email recently, about how I could be making $10,000/week working from home. If only I had ELIXA implementation to respond for me... I can see the response now:
Oh, I can make $10,000/week? How do you really feel about me making $10,000/week... wouldn't this just contribute to your feelings of inadequacy, stemming from your overly controlling mother? Perhaps if you tell me more about your relationship with your mother we can delve more deeply into the issues underlying your antisocial need to waste people's time with stupid email offers that no one gives a damn about.
Then again, I don't have the time to re-code ELIZA to do this, and besides, it's easier to bounce the email back after convirting it to an M$ Office document and attaching it, with a simple explanation:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice See you later. Thanks
This seems easier than the forms approach...
IRC vs. Instant Messaging Chat
on
Secure IRC?
·
· Score: 2
Does IRC hold promite as a secure communication mechanism? Seems to me it's major flaw is that it's server based, whereas there are Instant Messaging systems which facilitate Live Chat without the need for server intervention (for the chat function) which reduces the liklihood of the conversation being recorded/stored by some one who is not a party to the chat. What we really need is SSL integration with Instant Messaging systems (rather than just PGP as ICQ has), since Instant messaging has a far greater userbase than IRC, which is still dominated by the Geek set. The non-technical public has latched onto IM as their chief means of realtime online text chat. br> --CTH
is it possible that the componants used by the PC manufacturer are just of extremely low quality, and there have been an inordinate number of failures within their offered waranty... Perhaps the MoBo manufacturer is simply looking for a scapegoat. IF so, it certainly iss a creative solution. Do a statistical analysis of users with dead motherboards, and I'm almost certain a significant percentage would own palm pilots. Therefor, it must be te palm pilots causing the damage. Simple statistics. Vary useful when trying to trump up a frivilous lawsuit.
Lessig beat me to it. I've been considering this vary topic for some time now.
Consider for a moment, not the corporate manipulation of copyright, and IP, bur rather, the academic and research fields. I maintain that the Internet has done tremendous damage to scientific study, and that it has the potential to slow down discovery of new technologies. The internet has facilitated massive colaboration in research and development, both in academic an corporate enviroments.Such colaboration, while vary positive one one level, is quite negitive on another. Suppose 3 seperate academic groups scattered throughout the world, envevour to develop , say, Cold Fusion. In earlier decades, scientists would work only with theor closest coligues who were in physical proximity. In that case, there might be tree seperate tracks of research undertaken, to reach the same goal. Suppose then, that after 5 years of work, it turns out that one track is completely fruitless and it is decided to abandon it. There are still two other groups who have worked the last 5 years on alternate tracks of research tward the same goal.
In the internet age, massive colaboration would take place and the three schientific groups would decide on a common approach and undertake that approach together. Now, all pursuing one research track, 5 years later they discover that this approach s fruitless. In this case, there weren't two other groups working tward similar goals along different lines. As such, the target discovery is delayed by 300% due to the evils of colaboration. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against colaboration per-se. I'm against massive colaboration for just for the sake of colaboration, which has been fostered by the web economy in recent years.
Not all scientific doscivery has been the product of colaboration. Consider the invention of the telephone. Both Bell, and anpther scientist in Germany (who's name escapes me at the moment) developed a similar technology at almost exactly the same time, with no colaboration at all.
Again, I'm not against colaboration, I'm just against moving blindly to colaborate when such colaboration is not nessecery. It can be related directly to the.com economic bouble. Venture capitalists threw money at anything with the word internet in it, not because the company's proposed service was needed, or wanted by the market, just because it could be done. We need to stop and consider when making use of technology, weather the particular use's benefits are real or imagined, and stop pursuing things because we can, focusing on things because they're needed and add value.
--CTH
Synaptic vs. GnoRPM - a nice touch in this distro.
on
Conectiva Linux 7.0 is Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well, it's always nice to see an alternative to over-used under-developed tools. Synaptic seems stable and reliable, although I've only used it for about 10 minutes, but it looks vary solid. Well done gentlemen! (developers)
This distro is new to me. Does anyone have usage/popularity numbers for it?
It's amazing the quality od sercice(or lack thereof) that people will tolorate from large companies. When I gave up my dialup account in favor of DSL (those many moons ago) I switched from Mindspring to a small local ISP for service and I've never regretted it. Unfortunately there are lots of users who don't investigate their DSL service options before signing up with their local phone company. Small ISPs as a rule will always value their customers more than large outfits just because each customer contributes a larget percentage to their revenues (I don't pay more, they just make less). They'll bend over backwards to provide good customer sercice, and retain their customers.
Unfortunately the three largest ISPs continue to buy up the smaller regional players. One of the steps I've taken to garuntee my quality of service is to have an explicit QOS specific contract (in hopes of avoiding what's hapening to the QWest.net users as they're transitioned to MSN Internet access). What other steps might customers be able to take to insure that their small regional ISPs retain their independance, in this climate of consolidation?
Darwinian Predator - Prey relationship on the net
on
Fight Virus With Virus?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
So now you have a bunch of viruses, and counter-viruses roaming the net. This is not so bad until you have self-mutating viruses and antigens, several generations down the line. Eventually chaos theory will dictate that the nature of the relationship has become so complex as to be unknowable. This is a pandoras box we don't want to open. It's similar to the human cloning issue, in that there are a lot of good arguments not to do it, but there's one overwhelming argument for making it legal, lincensed and monitored; that is, if it's not legal, those who choose to pursue it will not be hindered in that activity, but will be forced to pursue it without oversight, while in hiding and possible in poorly controlled conditions.
All you can do here is appeal to the logic of those who would pursue such an activity and suggest that they not undertake it, but regardless of how much you argue, convince and suggest, someone will eventually do it and there will be severe concequences - not all negative, but severe, with respect to how we look at technology and how we use it.
It could further be argued that those against such undertakings, need to ajust to changing technology and make the appropriate changes to their world view. This is what the recording industry is having to do, as well as companies in other well established industries. The same will eventually be true of how we look at software design (computer viruses), and biology (human cloning).
--CTH
A K5 USer has published an anti-CodeRed virus
on
Fight Virus With Virus?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A K5 user has provided the source to a proposed code-red anti-virus, which actively repairs remote systems infected with the code red virus. The legal implications of this are a bis issue, but it's certainly an interesting code example.
Everyone here agrees that the chairs are less a cause and more a symbol of the.com fall from grace, but it's more important to evaluate why the money was spent in the first place.
It seems to me that the relitively young executives who recieved hundreds of millions in Venture Capital - since they didn't have to really earn it - failed to value it properly, perhaps due to youtht and inexperience (certainly not the fase for all) and perhaps simply due to market conditions which presented the delusion that money grew on trees, since there was no incentive at the time to make a proffit. Let's look at that for a minute. It's the CEO's responsibility to manage a company for success, usualy determined by it's stock price. The market seemed unconcerned with profit, or even revenue so why should the CEOs. Why not buy $750 chairs for every employee? It's not like we need to spend the money on technical infastructure, or support or production, after all the market thinks we're doing just fine. Look at our stock price! (circa July 1999).
My point is, while the blame for the fallout can be placed on CEOs who allowed their companies to make frivolous use of VC, they were only responding to the market, which told them they were doing fine. I blame stock analysts who started gaining celebrity status by whowing up on CNBC with wild preditions which were of course self-fulfilling prophecies, particularly in light of the tremendous number of uninformed indevidual investors - willing to follow anyone who stood up to lead - that flooded the markets durring those years.
Prior to approval of such a proposed ATSC Standard, the ATSC shall receive from the patent holder (in a form approved by the ATSC Executive Committee) either: assurance in the form of a general disclaimer to the effect that the patentee does not hold and does not anticipate holding any invention whose use would be required for compliance with the proposed ATSC Standard or assurance that:
(a) A license will be made available without compensation to applicants desiring to utilize the license for the purpose of implementing the standard, or
(b) A license will be made available to applicants under reasonable terms and conditions that are demonstrably free of any unfair discrimination.
This assurance, along with a statement of the basis for considering such terms and conditions reasonable and free of any unfair discrimination, shall be submitted to the ATSC Executive Committee for review.
Subsection (a) is of particular import here. Doesn't this mean that in order to become an ATSC standard, license to implement the technology underlying the standard must be provided without compensation or did I not read this correctly?
No one is suprised that this action is being taken, and the outcome is almost assured, however, it's important to get closure on the issue both for Microsoft and for their opponants/competitors. This way the courts can proceed with establishing a remedy, and Microsoft will not be able to delay further, that stage of the trial. As it stands now, their appeal to the supreme court may delay further action just long enough for them to be able to release Windows XP. Thile this in itself is a bad thing, it does finally exhause Microsoft's options with regard to delaying any remedies that may be established by the courts - which is a critical issue in the technology industry where the battlefields are created and dissapate in months, weels and sometimes days, with their foundations buried in the shifting sands that are the internet. Microsoft has already succeeded in the browser war, and the desktop space licending issue, neither of which are relevent any longer since Web inspired technologies have spawned far more insidious technoques for marketing such as embedding links to adversisers and vendors deep within applications such as was done with the digital camera software that's boundled with Windows, as evidenced by the Kodak case.
As usual, I should point out that if the root were run properly, allowing any TLD to be added, this squabbling over an artificially-limited resource would be eliminated.
Consider for a moment the implications of allowing any TLD to be established... It at first glance would cause a resource which has been artificially limited, to be freed up, however, it would cause the real limit to be reached far more quickly than would otherwise occur, in that, last names would be common as TLDs, and probably a whole set of business types, and so fourth, but allowing such a system would not truly cause the domain name resource pool to be less limited, it would simply alter the nature of domain names, removing the three letter TLD and replacing it with an infinate string, length TLD. This is certainly NOT an improvement over the current situation. At the vary least, the current system maintains some semblence of consistency (not nessecerily order...) within the system.
Regardless of weather this is a good idea or not, it can't/won't happen because it would put the folks at ICANN out of work, and it's amazing what people will do to justify their job. There would be lobying right left and center to maintain the status quo. Domain registrars will suddenly be put in the same position ads companies in the music industry foolishly put themselves, with regard to having a business model inconsistant with changing technology. I have to admit though, it is an interesting suggestion.
It's not clear to me what Dolby lAbs is claiming rights to. They're not claiming rights to the content being encoded using AC3. They're claiming rights to the mechanism of encoding. IF they were claiming rights to the content being encoded then they'd have rights under the DMCA, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
If they're claiming rights to the actual encoding/decoding mechanism, then do they really have a leg to stand on here? Under what thory are they claiming IP rights to an implementation of an AC3 decoder developed through reverse-engineering? Perhaps I missed that section of the DMCA... I'll have to read it again more carefully.
Besides, expertise isn't power. Publishing houses, bar associations and medical groups still wield enormous influence, not only over their respective fields but with with regulatory agencies and, viat hordes of lobbyists, with lawmakers. Entrenched insiders have great win-loss stats.
Here, Jon is correct (just here;-). I'm a big fan of Michael Lewis' writing and a I haven't read his newest book yet although I did read an article he wrote - an excerpt from his book - that was discussed here a month or so ago (I looked for the link but couldn't find it, sorry). Having qualified what I'm about to say, it seems to me that Michael Lewis must have states that it's the ability of the net to allow for the perception of a child as a lawyer, or a stock analyst. The net does not facilitate true the acumulation of years of expertise in a matter of minutes, nor does it confer true expertise on those who make use of it. It does, however facilitate the perception of expertise by confering anonymity upon those who make use of it, and it's not true anonymity by any streach of the imagination. Anyone who wished to discover the true identity of anyone on the net (with a few exceptions) would be able to do so relitively easily.
It seems, however, that people have no interest in the realities of the situation though, since they make no effort to confirm the expertise of these children (the lawyer or the stock analyst). They are satisfied to be getting free advice where previously they were paying exhorbinant fees.
Interestingly, after Marcus Arnold revealed to his online patrons that he was in fact a teenager - after a backlash by the professional lawyers on the site - he became even more popular than he was before he revealed his true identity. This suggests that people to not put additional value in formal training, but rather, that they are satisfied with the perceprion of expertise that the shroud of the net provides. It's an interesting comentary on the state of American culture that even after the shroud of anonymity is lifted, people still prefer the teenage pseudo-expert, to the formally trained real thing... For this phenomenon, I have no explanation.
I believe that Mob Psychology might model the web better, particularly the growth patterns of the web, however I don't have any studies to prove it yet.
I's interesting though that every academic out here has tried to comment on completely unrelated fields usin the language of his area of expertise. I've seen studies by mathematicians who claim to be able to model the web, and even industrial design students who claim that the design-to-maturity process of a network of websited (a small subset of the web) is identical to the processes championed by industrial designers who led the way in Japan in the late 1970s.
This seems to suggest (to me anyway) that those who enguage in this cross-discipline analysis, are somehow unsatisfied with their chosen field and are trying to latch onto an area of study that is populat at a particular moment in time.
There are a few other outfits that should be included in this investigation, as discussed in this article (somewhat dated now) about how the MPAA was trying to screw lyricists out of royalties using the same argument that Napster used.
It should be common knowlege, except management doesn't often seem to make the connection between reality and most management books. There's a great book The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey all about deligating tasks to reduce the mmanager's stress level and allow him to focus. Unfortunately, This book alocates vary little time to task assignment across staff, such that your staff can focus on a limited number of tasks in an organized sequence. This is unfortunate since the productivity of a manager doesn't often ralate as directly as we'd all like to believe; to the productivity of his employees.
Slashdot Mirror
Many countries are cinsidering DMCA type legislation to bring them into compliance with the WIPO Intelectual Property Treaties. For more on the the legal constructs being cinsidered by the World Intellectual Property Organization, see their whitepaper "Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of Technology, Law, and Commercial Licenses" (M$ Word or PDF). Take a good look at this stuff. It's important that people fully understand the actions being taken by WIPO and begin to realize that arguing about your rights or my rights isn't the critical issue. The critical issue is that if WIPO has their way, there will be no protection for citizens of any country, from potentially usurous and monopolistic IP practices.
--CTH
It will be interesting to see if once it does get out, if companies will seek to hold him responsible, even if e doesn't release it himself. I winder if the DMCA covers the eventuality of having done research which facilitates bypassing encryption. It really isn't that far to go from doing research (and finding the solution) to writing the software that actually performs the operation. Will it become a crime to do research?
--CTH
This looks to be a pretty solid release.
Perhaps linux on the desktop isn't dead yet, dispite what Microsoft and others keep insisting...?
While we've been focusing on rights language, and discussions of what should be, WIPO, with the support of many old-economy publishers have begun to implement the legal constructs which will allow prosecution for net based offenses, related to intellectual property. The first evidence of this in the US was the DMCA, but for the rest of the story, read the WIPO whitepaper "Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of Technology, Law, and Commercial Licenses" (available in M$ word format and PDF format). It's a vary interesting read.
--CTH
Weather it's FUD or not isn't important. It'd be a blast to even try to come up with a real world implementation. Remember, technology fot technology's sake.
The earlier poster just grazed the surface of this issue. A key financial percentage that analysts like to look at is revenue or'Earnings per Employee' as an indicator of employee productivity as it reflects good management practices and corporate health.
The issue is not how many employees are being laid off, but what services are being outsourced. Oursourcing services such as call centers and HR, as well as IT infastructure management, etc. look on paper the same as layoffs, in that such outsourcing reduces the number of 'Regular Fulltime Employees' thus improving the revenue percentage shown as Earnings per Employee. This is a common practice and we shouldn't be suprised that AOL is making use of them.
--CTH
Teoma was discussed earlier on /.. The article featured in that posting was quite interesting in it's own right and worth a close read, even if you don't go through the comments of the earlier post.
--CTH
--CTH
Oh, I can make $10,000/week? How do you really feel about me making $10,000/week... wouldn't this just contribute to your feelings of inadequacy, stemming from your overly controlling mother? Perhaps if you tell me more about your relationship with your mother we can delve more deeply into the issues underlying your antisocial need to waste people's time with stupid email offers that no one gives a damn about.
Then again, I don't have the time to re-code ELIZA to do this, and besides, it's easier to bounce the email back after convirting it to an M$ Office document and attaching it, with a simple explanation:This seems easier than the forms approach...
Does IRC hold promite as a secure communication mechanism? Seems to me it's major flaw is that it's server based, whereas there are Instant Messaging systems which facilitate Live Chat without the need for server intervention (for the chat function) which reduces the liklihood of the conversation being recorded/stored by some one who is not a party to the chat. What we really need is SSL integration with Instant Messaging systems (rather than just PGP as ICQ has), since Instant messaging has a far greater userbase than IRC, which is still dominated by the Geek set. The non-technical public has latched onto IM as their chief means of realtime online text chat. br>
--CTH
is it possible that the componants used by the PC manufacturer are just of extremely low quality, and there have been an inordinate number of failures within their offered waranty... Perhaps the MoBo manufacturer is simply looking for a scapegoat. IF so, it certainly iss a creative solution. Do a statistical analysis of users with dead motherboards, and I'm almost certain a significant percentage would own palm pilots. Therefor, it must be te palm pilots causing the damage. Simple statistics. Vary useful when trying to trump up a frivilous lawsuit.
Lessig beat me to it. I've been considering this vary topic for some time now.
.com economic bouble. Venture capitalists threw money at anything with the word internet in it, not because the company's proposed service was needed, or wanted by the market, just because it could be done. We need to stop and consider when making use of technology, weather the particular use's benefits are real or imagined, and stop pursuing things because we can, focusing on things because they're needed and add value.
Consider for a moment, not the corporate manipulation of copyright, and IP, bur rather, the academic and research fields. I maintain that the Internet has done tremendous damage to scientific study, and that it has the potential to slow down discovery of new technologies. The internet has facilitated massive colaboration in research and development, both in academic an corporate enviroments.Such colaboration, while vary positive one one level, is quite negitive on another. Suppose 3 seperate academic groups scattered throughout the world, envevour to develop , say, Cold Fusion. In earlier decades, scientists would work only with theor closest coligues who were in physical proximity. In that case, there might be tree seperate tracks of research undertaken, to reach the same goal. Suppose then, that after 5 years of work, it turns out that one track is completely fruitless and it is decided to abandon it. There are still two other groups who have worked the last 5 years on alternate tracks of research tward the same goal.
In the internet age, massive colaboration would take place and the three schientific groups would decide on a common approach and undertake that approach together. Now, all pursuing one research track, 5 years later they discover that this approach s fruitless. In this case, there weren't two other groups working tward similar goals along different lines. As such, the target discovery is delayed by 300% due to the evils of colaboration. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against colaboration per-se. I'm against massive colaboration for just for the sake of colaboration, which has been fostered by the web economy in recent years.
Not all scientific doscivery has been the product of colaboration. Consider the invention of the telephone. Both Bell, and anpther scientist in Germany (who's name escapes me at the moment) developed a similar technology at almost exactly the same time, with no colaboration at all.
Again, I'm not against colaboration, I'm just against moving blindly to colaborate when such colaboration is not nessecery. It can be related directly to the
--CTH
Well, it's always nice to see an alternative to over-used under-developed tools. Synaptic seems stable and reliable, although I've only used it for about 10 minutes, but it looks vary solid. Well done gentlemen! (developers)
This distro is new to me. Does anyone have usage/popularity numbers for it?
It's amazing the quality od sercice(or lack thereof) that people will tolorate from large companies. When I gave up my dialup account in favor of DSL (those many moons ago) I switched from Mindspring to a small local ISP for service and I've never regretted it. Unfortunately there are lots of users who don't investigate their DSL service options before signing up with their local phone company. Small ISPs as a rule will always value their customers more than large outfits just because each customer contributes a larget percentage to their revenues (I don't pay more, they just make less). They'll bend over backwards to provide good customer sercice, and retain their customers.
Unfortunately the three largest ISPs continue to buy up the smaller regional players. One of the steps I've taken to garuntee my quality of service is to have an explicit QOS specific contract (in hopes of avoiding what's hapening to the QWest.net users as they're transitioned to MSN Internet access). What other steps might customers be able to take to insure that their small regional ISPs retain their independance, in this climate of consolidation?
So now you have a bunch of viruses, and counter-viruses roaming the net. This is not so bad until you have self-mutating viruses and antigens, several generations down the line. Eventually chaos theory will dictate that the nature of the relationship has become so complex as to be unknowable. This is a pandoras box we don't want to open. It's similar to the human cloning issue, in that there are a lot of good arguments not to do it, but there's one overwhelming argument for making it legal, lincensed and monitored; that is, if it's not legal, those who choose to pursue it will not be hindered in that activity, but will be forced to pursue it without oversight, while in hiding and possible in poorly controlled conditions.
All you can do here is appeal to the logic of those who would pursue such an activity and suggest that they not undertake it, but regardless of how much you argue, convince and suggest, someone will eventually do it and there will be severe concequences - not all negative, but severe, with respect to how we look at technology and how we use it.
It could further be argued that those against such undertakings, need to ajust to changing technology and make the appropriate changes to their world view. This is what the recording industry is having to do, as well as companies in other well established industries. The same will eventually be true of how we look at software design (computer viruses), and biology (human cloning).
--CTH
A K5 user has provided the source to a proposed code-red anti-virus, which actively repairs remote systems infected with the code red virus. The legal implications of this are a bis issue, but it's certainly an interesting code example.
--CTH
Everyone here agrees that the chairs are less a cause and more a symbol of the .com fall from grace, but it's more important to evaluate why the money was spent in the first place.
It seems to me that the relitively young executives who recieved hundreds of millions in Venture Capital - since they didn't have to really earn it - failed to value it properly, perhaps due to youtht and inexperience (certainly not the fase for all) and perhaps simply due to market conditions which presented the delusion that money grew on trees, since there was no incentive at the time to make a proffit. Let's look at that for a minute. It's the CEO's responsibility to manage a company for success, usualy determined by it's stock price. The market seemed unconcerned with profit, or even revenue so why should the CEOs. Why not buy $750 chairs for every employee? It's not like we need to spend the money on technical infastructure, or support or production, after all the market thinks we're doing just fine. Look at our stock price! (circa July 1999).
My point is, while the blame for the fallout can be placed on CEOs who allowed their companies to make frivolous use of VC, they were only responding to the market, which told them they were doing fine. I blame stock analysts who started gaining celebrity status by whowing up on CNBC with wild preditions which were of course self-fulfilling prophecies, particularly in light of the tremendous number of uninformed indevidual investors - willing to follow anyone who stood up to lead - that flooded the markets durring those years.
Come on, we can't blame the chairs.
--CTH
--CTH
No one is suprised that this action is being taken, and the outcome is almost assured, however, it's important to get closure on the issue both for Microsoft and for their opponants/competitors. This way the courts can proceed with establishing a remedy, and Microsoft will not be able to delay further, that stage of the trial. As it stands now, their appeal to the supreme court may delay further action just long enough for them to be able to release Windows XP. Thile this in itself is a bad thing, it does finally exhause Microsoft's options with regard to delaying any remedies that may be established by the courts - which is a critical issue in the technology industry where the battlefields are created and dissapate in months, weels and sometimes days, with their foundations buried in the shifting sands that are the internet. Microsoft has already succeeded in the browser war, and the desktop space licending issue, neither of which are relevent any longer since Web inspired technologies have spawned far more insidious technoques for marketing such as embedding links to adversisers and vendors deep within applications such as was done with the digital camera software that's boundled with Windows, as evidenced by the Kodak case.
--CTH
Regardless of weather this is a good idea or not, it can't/won't happen because it would put the folks at ICANN out of work, and it's amazing what people will do to justify their job. There would be lobying right left and center to maintain the status quo. Domain registrars will suddenly be put in the same position ads companies in the music industry foolishly put themselves, with regard to having a business model inconsistant with changing technology. I have to admit though, it is an interesting suggestion.
--CTH
It's not clear to me what Dolby lAbs is claiming rights to. They're not claiming rights to the content being encoded using AC3. They're claiming rights to the mechanism of encoding. IF they were claiming rights to the content being encoded then they'd have rights under the DMCA, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
If they're claiming rights to the actual encoding/decoding mechanism, then do they really have a leg to stand on here? Under what thory are they claiming IP rights to an implementation of an AC3 decoder developed through reverse-engineering? Perhaps I missed that section of the DMCA... I'll have to read it again more carefully.
--CTH
It seems, however, that people have no interest in the realities of the situation though, since they make no effort to confirm the expertise of these children (the lawyer or the stock analyst). They are satisfied to be getting free advice where previously they were paying exhorbinant fees.
Interestingly, after Marcus Arnold revealed to his online patrons that he was in fact a teenager - after a backlash by the professional lawyers on the site - he became even more popular than he was before he revealed his true identity. This suggests that people to not put additional value in formal training, but rather, that they are satisfied with the perceprion of expertise that the shroud of the net provides. It's an interesting comentary on the state of American culture that even after the shroud of anonymity is lifted, people still prefer the teenage pseudo-expert, to the formally trained real thing... For this phenomenon, I have no explanation.
--CTH
I believe that Mob Psychology might model the web better, particularly the growth patterns of the web, however I don't have any studies to prove it yet.
I's interesting though that every academic out here has tried to comment on completely unrelated fields usin the language of his area of expertise. I've seen studies by mathematicians who claim to be able to model the web, and even industrial design students who claim that the design-to-maturity process of a network of websited (a small subset of the web) is identical to the processes championed by industrial designers who led the way in Japan in the late 1970s.
This seems to suggest (to me anyway) that those who enguage in this cross-discipline analysis, are somehow unsatisfied with their chosen field and are trying to latch onto an area of study that is populat at a particular moment in time.
--CTH
There are a few other outfits that should be included in this investigation, as discussed in this article (somewhat dated now) about how the MPAA was trying to screw lyricists out of royalties using the same argument that Napster used.
It should be common knowlege, except management doesn't often seem to make the connection between reality and most management books. There's a great book The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey all about deligating tasks to reduce the mmanager's stress level and allow him to focus. Unfortunately, This book alocates vary little time to task assignment across staff, such that your staff can focus on a limited number of tasks in an organized sequence. This is unfortunate since the productivity of a manager doesn't often ralate as directly as we'd all like to believe; to the productivity of his employees.
--CTH