That's something we should watch out for, after reading so much yesterday about Alan Sokal's Social Text hoax [nyu.edu]. In summary, he tricked a popular publication of the literary, postmodern Left into printing a hoax article of his that any amount of editorial review should have uncovered as a hoax, to the discredit of the journal, the editors, and (hopefully) perhaps some of the movement itself.
There is an interesting postscript, Sokal and one of the editors of the journal are now the principal movers in a campaign to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Sokal's article was actually much less than he claimed it to be. In private he has admitted to me that it is not the 'postmodern' parts of the piece that are nonsense, it is his physics and the quotations he uses.
So what the Sokal incident really boils down to is he got a poor article accepted by an obscure journal and then subsequently declared it to be nonsense. So far from being the Papper like proof that he presented it as to the media what Sokal actually did was simply to refer to his own assertion.
The right often do this with 'research that prooves XXX about bringing up kids', where xxx can be exposure to porn, violence, Harry Potter, daycare whatever. The conclusions of the report are released to the media in a press release but the report itself is not available for comment until long after when it usually turns out to be a litterature review.
The dust jacket on Sokal's book implies that it is a dennunciation of the likes of Derrida, Eco, Habbermass, the true intellectual forces of postmodernism. In fact it is nothing of the kind, most of his targets are actually Freudian psychologists who have nothing to do with postmodernism and with the exception of Kristeva are generally considered frauds and loonies. Kristeva is the exception that prooves the rule since she did some genuine and interesting work early on and after getting tenure just went plain bonkers. But Sokal never objected when the press eagerly reported his book as a denunciation of Derrida who is barely mentioned.
I suspect that what was really going on there was that the journalist was just looking for a way to recycle the opinions they read on slashdot as news. So slashdot then uses the report to support its initial claim.
This is the sort of activity that cults engage in...
I remember getting a CIP that was transferred to me from another examining group; I found better art and just stood my ground; for some reason, the applacant did not appeal, but just kept filing continuations; as soon as I was aware of a refiling, I quickly issued a "first action final rejection"; applicant refiled. This charade contined for about a half dozen continuations; the issue never changed and was never really argued; a clear abuse of the system, but there was (and I don;t think there is) any legal basis to prevent this kind of abuse.
Well that would be the doctrine of latches. Fortunately the appellate court recently dismissed the Lemelson claim on the grounds that the continuations were being used to maniulate the system.
It looks to me as if the applicant was shopping for a more liant examiner.
He lost a prior suit for the same patent against American Airlines in 1994, charging that the SABRE online reservation system (and the Travelocity offshoot) infringed on his patent, according to this article
SABRE! That thing is so old that the patents would have expired before UNIX came along. SABRE was the very first airline reservation system and the first large scale computerized anything.
One patent has been filed on November 1996, the other on September 2001. As the hyperlink patent controversy showed, all you need to do is to prove that the concept that's been patented preceeds the date the patent has been filled. I became an Amazon.com customer in August 1995 - more that a year before the initial patent has been filled. As such, the patents will be overturned as soon as a single entity challenges them.
Unfortunately not, read further this is heavilly submarined:
This is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 08/116,654 filed Sep. 3, 1993, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,309,355 which is a continuation of abandoned application Ser. No. 07/396,283 filed Aug. 21, 1989, which is a continuation-in-part of abandoned application Ser. No. 07/152,973 filed Feb. 8, 1988, which is a continuation-in-part of abandoned application Ser. No. 822,115 filed Jan. 24, 1986, which is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 613,525 filed May 24, 1984, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,567,359.
The bastards have been using the Lemelson technique. Under the corrupt rules of the USPTO the inventors are presumed to have invented the stuff thery described in their 1994 filing in 1986.
The US is the only country in the world where you can backdate a patent claim in this way. This is how Lemelson got his corrupt bar code patent, after bar codes were invented he added them to his 1950s paten on 'machine vision'. Fortunately the bastard is deservedly dead and you can't libel the dead in the US so we can describe him in the terms he deserves.
I don't think that the pan-ip claim would stand an actual lawsuit. The prosecution history of patents that have been submarined tends to be full of exclusions and limitations that are not present in the actual patent.
But no, the fact is that the US patent system is far more corrupt than even the average slashdot user would think. Forget the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft, the USPTO is the real enemy.
Actually Internet Explorer is descended from Mosaic. They purchased the rights to use the Mosaic code and then gave IE away for free. This destroyed both the value of the Mosaic source code (who else was going to license the rights if they could get the IE derivative for free), and it also helped destroy Netscape. Since many of the early Netscape employees had contributed to Mosaic I imagine that they were pretty ticked off to see that happen
Actually you are somewhat off there. Mosaic was licensed to spyglass and the Netscapers deliberately flooded the market with effectively free browsers to sink spyglass long before Microsoft thought of the idea. The Netscaper's were somewhat justifiably peeved over the terms under which the code was sold to Spyglass which did not benefit the people who wrote the code a bit, but they appeared to be (rightly or wrongly) under the impression others did benefit.
The majority of the code that was in Mosaic was originally from CERN in any case. The NCSA people used it without any attribution which they were allowed to do legally because we put libwww in the public domain. According to academic rules of conduct one would expect a citation in the source code, or for that matter a mention of the World Wide Web. Until it suited their purposes to do otherwise the NCSA crew tried to insist that the project was Mosaic and that they were the originators.
If Mosaic had been GPL it would have made no difference. Microsoft would have used the CERN code direct and maybe come out with the browser a couple of quarters later. Or they could have bought a different browser.
Mosaic is not a very good example of the benefits of a BSD-style license. TCP/IP is a much better example.
Mosaic is a wrong example of the BSD license, it was a non-comercial use only license.
On the basic principle I think that the logic underlying the senators point is sound, government money should not be used to fund research that is then encumbered. I don't like what has happened in the biotech area and I certainly don't like the idea that the government pays a research lab like MIT $2 million to develop software that later on becomes a proprietary operating system. This was the point that originally anoyed RMS, the AI lab was paid by the military to develop the lisp machine which then mysteriously drifted accross the road to become the product of symbolics inc.
Now Microsoft are pissed about the RMS encumberances rather than the symbolics type encumberance but I think that the same point is valid. RMS designed the license with the intent of it being viral and encumbering commercial development. If you think otherwise you have either not met Stallman or not listened to him.
I think that on this point there is actually a reasonable middle ground. I would certainly not recommend putting code into the public domain like we did with the Web. While the plagarism issue was resolved in the end and we know know Tim's role far fewer people know the role that I or Dave Ragget, Dan Connoly, Henryk Frystyk Nielsen, etc. played. The Web could not have grown as fast with a GPL license however, we knew what we were doing, we wanted the browser and server to come free with the operating system, that is what they were designed for. For that to be possible DEC, Microsoft, IBM etc had to be able to use our code.
From the article:
"And Warby says Microsoft has told him that it plans eventually to eliminate users' ability to disable Microsoft's access to their systems."
I don't believe that 1) Microsoft have any such plan, 2) That Microsoft would be likely to say so even if they did, 3) That if they were going to say so they would inform random bank employees, 4) That the bank employee would be likely to have made such a statement - see the title 'probably a misquote'.
Even if the quote was true the sales people who would talk to customers like the bank employee are very unlikely to be told company strategy in advance and especially not issues like this.
What we had said was that Maya and 3DStudio were both good programs for all those reasons. We never mentioned what package we were using on that project but the writer had 'condensed' the quotes, to the point where it was false.
It is not only the journalist. I was recently asked how long it would take to get a specification agreed as a standard. Since the group had not met I gave a range of 6 months to 2 years but said I expected it to be done within a year. The headline writer wrote 'xxx to take 2 years'.
I don't quite see the point of the story beyond the obligatory pandering to the slashdot editors predjudices. The guy only restated the anti-Microsoft sentiment on this issue that had already been reported on slashdot. This is not really a new story, it is simply a journalist recycling slashblather as a news story.
Extrapolation from legal wording to company policy is a ludicrous exercise. It should be fairly obvious that the Windows update facility modifies the machine and thus requires the permission of the user. The 'auto-update' without intervention requires ongoing permission.
It is not difficult to block windows update using network security measures. Just block access to the update site, same way you would block access to Yahoo or AOL instant messanger - which are also contrary to HIPPA and Financial regulations.
The claim that Microsoft intends to require the ability to modify the machine in the future is pure speculation and contrary to any business logic for Microsoft.
Because that country invented the Internet. It's the most poweful, the most prosperous, the most democratic country in the world. Where would you rather the root servers be... Iran, Iraq, China, Russia? Use your fucking mind.
Actually that is not the reason. By the time DNS came along the Internet was already international. And never confuse the claim that the US invented the Internet with the idea that the US invented computer networking. Lots of countries had computer networks, the idea of protocol design to overcome the political problems of connecting disparate networks was what came out of the US.
The DNS servers are where they are because they are expensive to maintain and are run on a volunteer basis. Most of the people prepared to provide the necessary resources happened to be in the US. This is the reason why 9 of the root servers went down you cannot expect someone to pay for multiple OC3 or above connectivity to support a volunteer effort.
As far as geography goes China and Russia should have a root server. There should also be servers in Australia, south America and northern and southern africa. This is actually likely to happen when it becomes feasible to turn on use of anycast. At present there is a hard limit of 13 root servers. Some of those servers are multiple machines in fault tolerant configurations but they are still bound by the IP assumption that an IP address is served at a single location.
With anycast we simply fiddle the router tables so that there are multiple servers arround the world all responding to the same IP address. This will make it possible to have 50 sites serving each of the 13 root DNS addresses. In practice it is likely that only one of those addresses will need to be anycast and the BIND software tweaked to favor it.
Wouldn't Microsoft love this: no more need for ssl certificates... no, no, no, now you'll need a registered and authenticated copy of IE
You would still need the SSL certificate because the customer would need to know that it was their bank they were dealing with.
Let's be serious though, no bank is going to require such a thing.
Not for consumers, but Visa is willing to offer better terms to online merchants who deploy technology that provides this level of protection and the merchants will be able to pass it on to the customers.
But when it comes to deep e-comerce, integrated supply chain etc. this is exactly what the banks will require purchasing officers to be using for medium to high value transfers.
Microsoft understands that Palladiums bread and butter is DRM.
The project was begun as a DRM project to ensure that if the content providers would only release content to closed platforms the PC could provide a closed partition with equivalent security. However if you look at what it does it is certainly insufficient to meet RIAA/MPAA demands at present and is unlikely to be close for ten years at the least. Palladium simply does not have the type of trusted display or output devices the MPAA/RIAA would need. The Palladium hardware is on the low pin count bus. Just think for a minute what it would take to encrypt a movie in the Palladium partition. Every byte would have to be sent over the LPC bus, not going to happen.
Since you were there and had a higher opinion of all this, please tell me how Palladium would solve _any_ of the scenarios that are purportedly keeping Palladium developers up at night.
The most serious cases are of the form 'virus makes trades on stock market, purchase books from Amazon' type. This problem is not solved by Palladium, but Palladium makes it easier to solve. It means that the stock broker or bank can be assured that the order comes from an unmodified, unmolested application with trusted input and output.
I saw the Palladium talk and RMS's little rant at the end. He started well but went on far too long and by the end the audience had really turned against him. In particular most of us who were present know Brian and have done for years so hearing RMS make the unsubstantiated claim that everything being said was a deliberate lie was hardly doing his argument much good.
Most of us had gone there hoping that someone would put Brian on the spot. Even those who are friends would have liked to see how he would cope with a difficult question. Unfortunately RMS did not ask a difficult question, he just went off onto a rant. As a result everyone who followed was making sure that they distanced themselves from RMS.
The way to put someone on the spot in a case like that is not to make the most ridiculous assertion about the other side. Instead you should make the question appear to be as reasonable as possible and design it so that it exposes the unreasonableness of the other person.
The truth is Brian was being disingenuous when he described the nightmare
scenarios that motivate the Palladium team. In all honesty, there are only
two nightmare scenarios that are relevant to the Palladium project:
I was also there. I don't think you are qualified to call Brian a liar. Nor for that matter is RMS, I watched him during the presentation it was very clear that he was not listening, he was merely waiting to make his speech at the end.
Microsoft has made no attempt to hide the fact that Palladium could be used for content protection. However anyone who has gone that route quickly realises that there is no money in content protection. The RIAA have no intention for paying for any of it. I once flew off to London to an SDMI meeting, the deal on offer was that if I flew out to ten more meetings like it I might be in with a chance to bid on a contract worth about $150K - which I would have easily spent in hotel and air fare. Microsoft know the content guys are 1) cheap and 2) trying to solve the wrong problem. What they need is a means to generate revenues from their content.
Palladium is most likely to be used for document based DRM within large enterprises and the government. It is a pretty good solution to problems like HIPPA and corporate security.
What Palladium is not a solution to is what Brian called 'Break Once Run Anywhere'. You only need one Palladium machine with a mod chip to be able to decrypt all the CDs and video you like. That does not compromise the enterprise applications however since you would have to both mod chip a machine loaded with a private key for that enterprise. I have it on a higher authority that the DRM problem is impossible, [Mathew 10:27]
Of
course, it doesn't hurt that Palladium could provide quite a few wrench's to
throw at Microsoft's open source competitors.
All Palladium does is make it possible to build a trusted security reference monitor without having to rewrite Windows from scratch. So how does that threaten open source which is already secure - isn't it?
Incidentally the idea of cryptographically protected O/S is not new. Bill Joy had the idea twenty years ago, and left an inch on the original sun workstation motherboards to put the crypto. Thing is that Sun never followed through and delivered on their original promise.
The only things stopping an open source palladium are the patents and writing the code. The second is more likely to be a problem than the first.
It seems to me that anything claimed in these patents was nothing more than obvious applications of HTTP technology. Maybe CERN could have patented it all in the beginning, but they made it available to all of us, and some idiot is claiming he owns some piece of that.
For prior art see the Internet Shopping Network (now part of HSN) which was operating in '94, Also the UK Prestel system which operated in the early 80s.
I don't doubt that we could have got a patent for HTTP, but it is only a more efficient transport than ftp. There used to be quite a few sites that used ftp to serve HTML.
This type of extortion should be punished. In the UK you would be hit with a crippling legal bill for the defendant's costs if you lost so there is little point in filing vexatious patents. Also prior review means that the probability of getting a vexatious patent is much lower.
The problem with the USPTO is that it speaks with a forked tongue. When it is justifying its racket it claims that a patent has to be 'novel', when justifying the actions of its franchisees it claims that their legal definition of 'novel' is 'anything at all, even something completely obvious'.
Actually cases like these are the ones that might lead to reform. A corrupt senator bought by USPTO franchisees can ignore the complaints from the likes of Microsoft or slashdotters, but it is harder to ignore small business owners. And no, the judgemet against Microsoft on the disk compression patent was not any more justified than the present scam. What was being claimed there was not LZW but the idea of a compressed disk.
Don't you think Amazon would be well served to help these little guys squash this thing in the first round before it gets any momentum.
They have their own problems in this area, there are something like 2000 odd patent extortion scams going on and Amazon have their fair share.
It's not fear. My point is only the carrot is not the sole management tool - as too many managers believe it is. It can work wonders in the right evironment - but fail miserably in others. It's particularly ineffective at motivating staff to follow small, niggling details like cleanroom policy or security policy. I've talked to experts on this(at research labs, semiconductor firms & telcom), believe me, and worked on implementing them
Al Dunlap? Is that you?
Ahh you have 'talked to experts'.
I have yet to read a management book that does anything other than argue against what you suggest. So much for your 'experts'.
As for 'too many managers' not behaving like tin pot tyrants, nah exactly the opposite.
When I see a company being run like that I consider it a potential short. The Tyco/Enron/Worldcom school of management just went out of fashion.
One of the most effective ways to get people to learn is for them to play the game at stakes they can't afford to lose. To often companies try to enforce compliance by strident language alone - to obtain true compliance some amount of threats are necessary (but pay docking & negative performance reviews work better than outright firing)
Hopefuly you will never be a manager of any kind. Idiotic macho talk like that is exactly the way companies are run into the ground.
How many billion dollar companies have you helped to create? I helped to build one with over a billion dollars in revenues.
Fear is a pretty useless method of motivating staff. The best people know their worth and will either leave or make sure that you fail and take the blame for it.
Believe it or not there are other options besides 'strident language', dismissals pay docking and all the rest of the stupid stuff you suggest. Every time you make a threat you make another enemy.
Don't count on the idiot in the Whitehouse keeing the unemloyment rate high enough to give you a disosable workforce. Not so long ago it could take twelve months to fill a position. Dilbert boss tactics will only mean that your staf will leave en-masse the minute things look up
Now that the cult members weren't crazy and everything,
They did it to themselves. They fired on police investigating well founded allegations of fire arms violations and child molesting.
I would rather live in the real world than this fantasy land libertopia where it is automaticaly assumed that anyone protesting the government has to be in the right.
Whatever your view of the government, my view of the libertopians is lower. I have seen anarchy, I have seen the tyes of people who come out with glorious promises of freedom to get ower and betray them with violence the minute they get it.
Dual display (DVI, S-Video, analog), DirectX 8.0 and OpenGL supported, etc.
Only two heads????
So I have to ut the other monitors on cheezy pCI cards which are getting harder to find, especially if you want something with decent power.
Re:lack of performance
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Tackling AGP 8X
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Ability to have multiple displays on the bus would be useful. There really is no good solution for multiple head systems, particularly if you want as many monitors as I tend to. Basically double headed cards tend to offer either TV out or second monitor, not both.
Don't just tell them you will fire them, Actually fire a couple. The rest shape up real quick.
Dilbert's boss posts on Slashdot!
There is no point in threats when people have no idea what to do. And there is simply no point in trying to solve an enterprise security problem with tools designed by geeks for geeks.
PGP is as you point out not an easy concept to explain to an end user. In particular PGP is designed arround an ideology of personal security, and not enforcing an enterprise wide security policy.
First you need someone to write the security policy. 'We don't believe in security' is probably not a starter, might put off the patients. Fortunately the more complex privacy issues have been punted on - for now, expect them to return in due course. For the time being you need your network security measures and application security. But don't buy into a system unless the vendor is likely to be arround in a couple of years to provide privacy management infrastructure as well.
What you need for messaging security is a PKI that enables the encryption features of Outlook, Lotus Notes, Netscape etc. Given your time constraints it would probably be best to look at an outsourced solution so you don't have to worry about building secure infrastructure or write a CPS or anything stupid. This is also much cheaper up front on capital costs.
The other thing you will need to do is to draw up some sort of survey that describes the circumstances under which you report confidential patient information to outside bodies - under HIPPA that includes external medical practices, labs etc. You will need to make sure that their privacy practices align with the ones you communicate to the patients.
Here is a question - Why did 5 Central African nations with horrible HIV/AIDS infection rates just fight a long war in the Congo? Why wasn't that money put towards buying drugs or treatments?
Well before getting on your high horse and claiming that this is all the fault of those miserable foreigners, the West can hardly claim to be blameless.
Zaire (Congo) had one democratic election. The winner Patrice Lumumba was assasinated on the orders of Eisenhower.
Before that the Congo was ruled by Belgium in what was the most brutal colonial regime of all. Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is actually about the Belgian Congo, not Vietnam.
So I would say that the West really has no moral claim on patent royalties from the Congo until it gets round to paying damages for some of the attrocities it visited on the country.
Of course if you want to stay in your bubble the way to avoid listening to uncomfortable facts like these are to dismiss them as 'anti-American'.
Re:Keeping .su as an area?
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See Ya .su
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is that everytime an article of international scope is posted someone turns it into an attack against the US. The issue is not an unliked TLD, it is an oboslete TLD.
Start making decisions about whether to recognize domains and you will find it very difficult to stop.
Last I checked the US Congress were not considered in particularly high regard within the US, as a body they are particularly prone to posturing and political pandering. So one can attack the Congress without attacking the US people just as one can consider the fool in the Whitehouse a crook who bilked the investors in Harken without attacking the US.
So folk get all wound up about a US company exercising a patent right in a developed country that can afford to pay. This has been going on in Third world for twenty years with very little comment until the cost of AIDs drugs hit the news.
It is not just the people who will die because the western drug companies refuse to sell drugs at affordable prices. There is no guarantee that epidemics (AIDS is now a pandemic) will stay there and not cross to the developed world. Perhaps that is the drug co executives plan, Enron style to keep the diseases going so they can sell the drugs.
Of course the US is not above hypocrisy here. During the Anthrax scare Sen. Biden craftily proposed that the US seize the patent rights to cipro and mandate the production of generics. Congress quickly agreed. I have no doubt that Biden knew about the controversy over AIDS drugs and used the anthrax scare to deliberately cut the legs out from under the drug companies claims just before a crucial conference.
I remember once watching a reel that someone had put together of all the out takes from several years of editing films for distribution in the UK. He had the bits cut out of 9 1/2 weeks etc etc. all just spliced together, somewhat surreal to watch.
One of the interesting effects of the DVD zone system is that it means that to get the un-cut version of a film you have to get a region 1 player or a region free player. Once you have such a player however you have a bigger incentive to go for the un-cut version.
Thus as GDP increases, taxes increase as well. Now you are right, IN THE LONG TERM, deficit spending can have a negative effect on GDP by raising interest rates through crowding out.
Actually I mentioned long term interest rates, not the long term. In the months after the Bush tax cuts were proposed to Congress long term interest rates went up markedly. This is the reason why the cuts in short term interest rates by the fed have had so little effect, businesses use the long term cost of money as the basis for investment decisions.
The point is not the detailed economic argument, the point is that the voters were told a deliberate lie to get their votes then Congress was fed more lies to get their votes. This was all done in great haste because the Bush administration knew that if anyone stopped to think the lies would be exposed.
Thats what the laffer curve tells you, and russia's experience with the flat tax is teaching us too.
There is very little of the Russian experience that is applicable to the US. The closest parallel to the USSR economy when it collapsed was post WWII Europe. There was very little infrastructure and a huge dependent population. Most of the skilled labor was emigrating. The fact the comparison is attempted only shows how ridiculous those proposing it are.
The connection to the suppression of science data is that this administration really does not care about analysis or facts. They only want to be told information that backs up their predetermined policies. Everything else is blocked out and is to be suppressed.
Has anyone wondered why we have not heard much of star wars lately even though the last justification given was in case North Korea got nukes? Or for that matter we heard nothing about the statement made by North Korea two weeks ago until after the congress voted on Iraq? Fact is that the only 'scientific' reports that say that start wars can be built are those written by the 'defense' contractors wanting to build it. Everyone else knows that the North Korean's don't have a missile that could carry their bomb so if they were to explode one in the US they would have to load it into a cargo container and ship it into the harbor of San Francisco or New York.
Well, there is correlation but not causation there. Basic Macro, the sort we teach to the undergrads, tells us that lowering taxes raises GDP.
No it does not. There is clearly an area where taxation has an effect on GDP and also clearly an area where the effects are irrelevant. Even the infamous Laffer-curve used to justify Reaganomics accepted that. Now Economics 101 taught by Phil Gramm might teach that but most genuine economists explain that economics is very complex and that simple minded ideology does not give infallible answers.
Deficit spending can clearly have a negative effect on GDP by raising long term interest rates and hence the cost of capital. So tax cuts that increase the deficit without creating offsetting incentives for greater economic activity can actually reduce GDP. In particular eliminating inheritance tax does not encourage people to die.
The claim that tax cuts cost nothing because every dollar of lost revenue will somehow be made up in increased GDP is clearly a right-wing fairy tale.
The point is that we were told that the tax cuts would not cause or worsen the deficit over and over again. At no point did the administration admit that the tax cut might result in deficit spending. When Gore challenged Bush on this in the debate Bush made his infamous 'fuzzy math' claim. It is very clear now that Bush was the one using fuzzy math.
To take a more clear cut example, Bush has repeatedly asserted that he had said during the campaign that his balanced budget pledge was subject to conditions, it might be necessary to run a deficit for war, a recession or national emergency. Only thing is that this was actually said by Gore, there is no contemporary press record of the conditions, nor can the administration provide any evidence that they were ever made, or any press release of policy statement that mentions them. The oft repeated pledge to balance the budget unconditionally is retrospectively made subject to a condition that was never stated at the time.
One wonders what secret conditions might apply to the numerous other undertakings the Bush administration has made.
Slashdot Mirror
There is an interesting postscript, Sokal and one of the editors of the journal are now the principal movers in a campaign to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Sokal's article was actually much less than he claimed it to be. In private he has admitted to me that it is not the 'postmodern' parts of the piece that are nonsense, it is his physics and the quotations he uses.
So what the Sokal incident really boils down to is he got a poor article accepted by an obscure journal and then subsequently declared it to be nonsense. So far from being the Papper like proof that he presented it as to the media what Sokal actually did was simply to refer to his own assertion.
The right often do this with 'research that prooves XXX about bringing up kids', where xxx can be exposure to porn, violence, Harry Potter, daycare whatever. The conclusions of the report are released to the media in a press release but the report itself is not available for comment until long after when it usually turns out to be a litterature review.
The dust jacket on Sokal's book implies that it is a dennunciation of the likes of Derrida, Eco, Habbermass, the true intellectual forces of postmodernism. In fact it is nothing of the kind, most of his targets are actually Freudian psychologists who have nothing to do with postmodernism and with the exception of Kristeva are generally considered frauds and loonies. Kristeva is the exception that prooves the rule since she did some genuine and interesting work early on and after getting tenure just went plain bonkers. But Sokal never objected when the press eagerly reported his book as a denunciation of Derrida who is barely mentioned.
I suspect that what was really going on there was that the journalist was just looking for a way to recycle the opinions they read on slashdot as news. So slashdot then uses the report to support its initial claim.
This is the sort of activity that cults engage in...
Well that would be the doctrine of latches. Fortunately the appellate court recently dismissed the Lemelson claim on the grounds that the continuations were being used to maniulate the system.
It looks to me as if the applicant was shopping for a more liant examiner.
SABRE! That thing is so old that the patents would have expired before UNIX came along. SABRE was the very first airline reservation system and the first large scale computerized anything.
Unfortunately not, read further this is heavilly submarined:
This is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 08/116,654 filed Sep. 3, 1993, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,309,355 which is a continuation of abandoned application Ser. No. 07/396,283 filed Aug. 21, 1989, which is a continuation-in-part of abandoned application Ser. No. 07/152,973 filed Feb. 8, 1988, which is a continuation-in-part of abandoned application Ser. No. 822,115 filed Jan. 24, 1986, which is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 613,525 filed May 24, 1984, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,567,359.
The bastards have been using the Lemelson technique. Under the corrupt rules of the USPTO the inventors are presumed to have invented the stuff thery described in their 1994 filing in 1986.
The US is the only country in the world where you can backdate a patent claim in this way. This is how Lemelson got his corrupt bar code patent, after bar codes were invented he added them to his 1950s paten on 'machine vision'. Fortunately the bastard is deservedly dead and you can't libel the dead in the US so we can describe him in the terms he deserves.
I don't think that the pan-ip claim would stand an actual lawsuit. The prosecution history of patents that have been submarined tends to be full of exclusions and limitations that are not present in the actual patent.
But no, the fact is that the US patent system is far more corrupt than even the average slashdot user would think. Forget the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft, the USPTO is the real enemy.
Actually you are somewhat off there. Mosaic was licensed to spyglass and the Netscapers deliberately flooded the market with effectively free browsers to sink spyglass long before Microsoft thought of the idea. The Netscaper's were somewhat justifiably peeved over the terms under which the code was sold to Spyglass which did not benefit the people who wrote the code a bit, but they appeared to be (rightly or wrongly) under the impression others did benefit.
The majority of the code that was in Mosaic was originally from CERN in any case. The NCSA people used it without any attribution which they were allowed to do legally because we put libwww in the public domain. According to academic rules of conduct one would expect a citation in the source code, or for that matter a mention of the World Wide Web. Until it suited their purposes to do otherwise the NCSA crew tried to insist that the project was Mosaic and that they were the originators.
If Mosaic had been GPL it would have made no difference. Microsoft would have used the CERN code direct and maybe come out with the browser a couple of quarters later. Or they could have bought a different browser.
Mosaic is not a very good example of the benefits of a BSD-style license. TCP/IP is a much better example.
Mosaic is a wrong example of the BSD license, it was a non-comercial use only license.
On the basic principle I think that the logic underlying the senators point is sound, government money should not be used to fund research that is then encumbered. I don't like what has happened in the biotech area and I certainly don't like the idea that the government pays a research lab like MIT $2 million to develop software that later on becomes a proprietary operating system. This was the point that originally anoyed RMS, the AI lab was paid by the military to develop the lisp machine which then mysteriously drifted accross the road to become the product of symbolics inc.
Now Microsoft are pissed about the RMS encumberances rather than the symbolics type encumberance but I think that the same point is valid. RMS designed the license with the intent of it being viral and encumbering commercial development. If you think otherwise you have either not met Stallman or not listened to him.
I think that on this point there is actually a reasonable middle ground. I would certainly not recommend putting code into the public domain like we did with the Web. While the plagarism issue was resolved in the end and we know know Tim's role far fewer people know the role that I or Dave Ragget, Dan Connoly, Henryk Frystyk Nielsen, etc. played. The Web could not have grown as fast with a GPL license however, we knew what we were doing, we wanted the browser and server to come free with the operating system, that is what they were designed for. For that to be possible DEC, Microsoft, IBM etc had to be able to use our code.
I don't believe that 1) Microsoft have any such plan, 2) That Microsoft would be likely to say so even if they did, 3) That if they were going to say so they would inform random bank employees, 4) That the bank employee would be likely to have made such a statement - see the title 'probably a misquote'.
Even if the quote was true the sales people who would talk to customers like the bank employee are very unlikely to be told company strategy in advance and especially not issues like this.
It is not only the journalist. I was recently asked how long it would take to get a specification agreed as a standard. Since the group had not met I gave a range of 6 months to 2 years but said I expected it to be done within a year. The headline writer wrote 'xxx to take 2 years'.
I don't quite see the point of the story beyond the obligatory pandering to the slashdot editors predjudices. The guy only restated the anti-Microsoft sentiment on this issue that had already been reported on slashdot. This is not really a new story, it is simply a journalist recycling slashblather as a news story.
Extrapolation from legal wording to company policy is a ludicrous exercise. It should be fairly obvious that the Windows update facility modifies the machine and thus requires the permission of the user. The 'auto-update' without intervention requires ongoing permission.
It is not difficult to block windows update using network security measures. Just block access to the update site, same way you would block access to Yahoo or AOL instant messanger - which are also contrary to HIPPA and Financial regulations.
The claim that Microsoft intends to require the ability to modify the machine in the future is pure speculation and contrary to any business logic for Microsoft.
Actually that is not the reason. By the time DNS came along the Internet was already international. And never confuse the claim that the US invented the Internet with the idea that the US invented computer networking. Lots of countries had computer networks, the idea of protocol design to overcome the political problems of connecting disparate networks was what came out of the US.
The DNS servers are where they are because they are expensive to maintain and are run on a volunteer basis. Most of the people prepared to provide the necessary resources happened to be in the US. This is the reason why 9 of the root servers went down you cannot expect someone to pay for multiple OC3 or above connectivity to support a volunteer effort.
As far as geography goes China and Russia should have a root server. There should also be servers in Australia, south America and northern and southern africa. This is actually likely to happen when it becomes feasible to turn on use of anycast. At present there is a hard limit of 13 root servers. Some of those servers are multiple machines in fault tolerant configurations but they are still bound by the IP assumption that an IP address is served at a single location.
With anycast we simply fiddle the router tables so that there are multiple servers arround the world all responding to the same IP address. This will make it possible to have 50 sites serving each of the 13 root DNS addresses. In practice it is likely that only one of those addresses will need to be anycast and the BIND software tweaked to favor it.
You would still need the SSL certificate because the customer would need to know that it was their bank they were dealing with.
Let's be serious though, no bank is going to require such a thing.
Not for consumers, but Visa is willing to offer better terms to online merchants who deploy technology that provides this level of protection and the merchants will be able to pass it on to the customers.
But when it comes to deep e-comerce, integrated supply chain etc. this is exactly what the banks will require purchasing officers to be using for medium to high value transfers.
Microsoft understands that Palladiums bread and butter is DRM.
The project was begun as a DRM project to ensure that if the content providers would only release content to closed platforms the PC could provide a closed partition with equivalent security. However if you look at what it does it is certainly insufficient to meet RIAA/MPAA demands at present and is unlikely to be close for ten years at the least. Palladium simply does not have the type of trusted display or output devices the MPAA/RIAA would need. The Palladium hardware is on the low pin count bus. Just think for a minute what it would take to encrypt a movie in the Palladium partition. Every byte would have to be sent over the LPC bus, not going to happen.
The most serious cases are of the form 'virus makes trades on stock market, purchase books from Amazon' type. This problem is not solved by Palladium, but Palladium makes it easier to solve. It means that the stock broker or bank can be assured that the order comes from an unmodified, unmolested application with trusted input and output.
Most of us had gone there hoping that someone would put Brian on the spot. Even those who are friends would have liked to see how he would cope with a difficult question. Unfortunately RMS did not ask a difficult question, he just went off onto a rant. As a result everyone who followed was making sure that they distanced themselves from RMS.
The way to put someone on the spot in a case like that is not to make the most ridiculous assertion about the other side. Instead you should make the question appear to be as reasonable as possible and design it so that it exposes the unreasonableness of the other person.
I was also there. I don't think you are qualified to call Brian a liar. Nor for that matter is RMS, I watched him during the presentation it was very clear that he was not listening, he was merely waiting to make his speech at the end.
Microsoft has made no attempt to hide the fact that Palladium could be used for content protection. However anyone who has gone that route quickly realises that there is no money in content protection. The RIAA have no intention for paying for any of it. I once flew off to London to an SDMI meeting, the deal on offer was that if I flew out to ten more meetings like it I might be in with a chance to bid on a contract worth about $150K - which I would have easily spent in hotel and air fare. Microsoft know the content guys are 1) cheap and 2) trying to solve the wrong problem. What they need is a means to generate revenues from their content.
Palladium is most likely to be used for document based DRM within large enterprises and the government. It is a pretty good solution to problems like HIPPA and corporate security.
What Palladium is not a solution to is what Brian called 'Break Once Run Anywhere'. You only need one Palladium machine with a mod chip to be able to decrypt all the CDs and video you like. That does not compromise the enterprise applications however since you would have to both mod chip a machine loaded with a private key for that enterprise. I have it on a higher authority that the DRM problem is impossible, [Mathew 10:27]
Of course, it doesn't hurt that Palladium could provide quite a few wrench's to throw at Microsoft's open source competitors.
All Palladium does is make it possible to build a trusted security reference monitor without having to rewrite Windows from scratch. So how does that threaten open source which is already secure - isn't it?
Incidentally the idea of cryptographically protected O/S is not new. Bill Joy had the idea twenty years ago, and left an inch on the original sun workstation motherboards to put the crypto. Thing is that Sun never followed through and delivered on their original promise.
The only things stopping an open source palladium are the patents and writing the code. The second is more likely to be a problem than the first.
For prior art see the Internet Shopping Network (now part of HSN) which was operating in '94, Also the UK Prestel system which operated in the early 80s.
I don't doubt that we could have got a patent for HTTP, but it is only a more efficient transport than ftp. There used to be quite a few sites that used ftp to serve HTML.
This type of extortion should be punished. In the UK you would be hit with a crippling legal bill for the defendant's costs if you lost so there is little point in filing vexatious patents. Also prior review means that the probability of getting a vexatious patent is much lower.
The problem with the USPTO is that it speaks with a forked tongue. When it is justifying its racket it claims that a patent has to be 'novel', when justifying the actions of its franchisees it claims that their legal definition of 'novel' is 'anything at all, even something completely obvious'.
Actually cases like these are the ones that might lead to reform. A corrupt senator bought by USPTO franchisees can ignore the complaints from the likes of Microsoft or slashdotters, but it is harder to ignore small business owners. And no, the judgemet against Microsoft on the disk compression patent was not any more justified than the present scam. What was being claimed there was not LZW but the idea of a compressed disk.
Don't you think Amazon would be well served to help these little guys squash this thing in the first round before it gets any momentum.
They have their own problems in this area, there are something like 2000 odd patent extortion scams going on and Amazon have their fair share.
Al Dunlap? Is that you?
Ahh you have 'talked to experts'.
I have yet to read a management book that does anything other than argue against what you suggest. So much for your 'experts'.
As for 'too many managers' not behaving like tin pot tyrants, nah exactly the opposite.
When I see a company being run like that I consider it a potential short. The Tyco/Enron/Worldcom school of management just went out of fashion.
Hopefuly you will never be a manager of any kind. Idiotic macho talk like that is exactly the way companies are run into the ground.
How many billion dollar companies have you helped to create? I helped to build one with over a billion dollars in revenues.
Fear is a pretty useless method of motivating staff. The best people know their worth and will either leave or make sure that you fail and take the blame for it.
Believe it or not there are other options besides 'strident language', dismissals pay docking and all the rest of the stupid stuff you suggest. Every time you make a threat you make another enemy.
Don't count on the idiot in the Whitehouse keeing the unemloyment rate high enough to give you a disosable workforce. Not so long ago it could take twelve months to fill a position. Dilbert boss tactics will only mean that your staf will leave en-masse the minute things look up
They did it to themselves. They fired on police investigating well founded allegations of fire arms violations and child molesting.
I would rather live in the real world than this fantasy land libertopia where it is automaticaly assumed that anyone protesting the government has to be in the right.
Whatever your view of the government, my view of the libertopians is lower. I have seen anarchy, I have seen the tyes of people who come out with glorious promises of freedom to get ower and betray them with violence the minute they get it.
Only two heads????
So I have to ut the other monitors on cheezy pCI cards which are getting harder to find, especially if you want something with decent power.
Ability to have multiple displays on the bus would be useful. There really is no good solution for multiple head systems, particularly if you want as many monitors as I tend to. Basically double headed cards tend to offer either TV out or second monitor, not both.
Dilbert's boss posts on Slashdot!
There is no point in threats when people have no idea what to do. And there is simply no point in trying to solve an enterprise security problem with tools designed by geeks for geeks.
PGP is as you point out not an easy concept to explain to an end user. In particular PGP is designed arround an ideology of personal security, and not enforcing an enterprise wide security policy.
First you need someone to write the security policy. 'We don't believe in security' is probably not a starter, might put off the patients. Fortunately the more complex privacy issues have been punted on - for now, expect them to return in due course. For the time being you need your network security measures and application security. But don't buy into a system unless the vendor is likely to be arround in a couple of years to provide privacy management infrastructure as well.
What you need for messaging security is a PKI that enables the encryption features of Outlook, Lotus Notes, Netscape etc. Given your time constraints it would probably be best to look at an outsourced solution so you don't have to worry about building secure infrastructure or write a CPS or anything stupid. This is also much cheaper up front on capital costs.
The other thing you will need to do is to draw up some sort of survey that describes the circumstances under which you report confidential patient information to outside bodies - under HIPPA that includes external medical practices, labs etc. You will need to make sure that their privacy practices align with the ones you communicate to the patients.
Well before getting on your high horse and claiming that this is all the fault of those miserable foreigners, the West can hardly claim to be blameless.
Zaire (Congo) had one democratic election. The winner Patrice Lumumba was assasinated on the orders of Eisenhower.
Before that the Congo was ruled by Belgium in what was the most brutal colonial regime of all. Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is actually about the Belgian Congo, not Vietnam.
So I would say that the West really has no moral claim on patent royalties from the Congo until it gets round to paying damages for some of the attrocities it visited on the country.
Of course if you want to stay in your bubble the way to avoid listening to uncomfortable facts like these are to dismiss them as 'anti-American'.
Start making decisions about whether to recognize domains and you will find it very difficult to stop.
Last I checked the US Congress were not considered in particularly high regard within the US, as a body they are particularly prone to posturing and political pandering. So one can attack the Congress without attacking the US people just as one can consider the fool in the Whitehouse a crook who bilked the investors in Harken without attacking the US.
So folk get all wound up about a US company exercising a patent right in a developed country that can afford to pay. This has been going on in Third world for twenty years with very little comment until the cost of AIDs drugs hit the news.
It is not just the people who will die because the western drug companies refuse to sell drugs at affordable prices. There is no guarantee that epidemics (AIDS is now a pandemic) will stay there and not cross to the developed world. Perhaps that is the drug co executives plan, Enron style to keep the diseases going so they can sell the drugs.
Of course the US is not above hypocrisy here. During the Anthrax scare Sen. Biden craftily proposed that the US seize the patent rights to cipro and mandate the production of generics. Congress quickly agreed. I have no doubt that Biden knew about the controversy over AIDS drugs and used the anthrax scare to deliberately cut the legs out from under the drug companies claims just before a crucial conference.
You show your age there!
I remember once watching a reel that someone had put together of all the out takes from several years of editing films for distribution in the UK. He had the bits cut out of 9 1/2 weeks etc etc. all just spliced together, somewhat surreal to watch.
One of the interesting effects of the DVD zone system is that it means that to get the un-cut version of a film you have to get a region 1 player or a region free player. Once you have such a player however you have a bigger incentive to go for the un-cut version.
Actually I mentioned long term interest rates, not the long term. In the months after the Bush tax cuts were proposed to Congress long term interest rates went up markedly. This is the reason why the cuts in short term interest rates by the fed have had so little effect, businesses use the long term cost of money as the basis for investment decisions.
The point is not the detailed economic argument, the point is that the voters were told a deliberate lie to get their votes then Congress was fed more lies to get their votes. This was all done in great haste because the Bush administration knew that if anyone stopped to think the lies would be exposed.
Thats what the laffer curve tells you, and russia's experience with the flat tax is teaching us too.
There is very little of the Russian experience that is applicable to the US. The closest parallel to the USSR economy when it collapsed was post WWII Europe. There was very little infrastructure and a huge dependent population. Most of the skilled labor was emigrating. The fact the comparison is attempted only shows how ridiculous those proposing it are.
The connection to the suppression of science data is that this administration really does not care about analysis or facts. They only want to be told information that backs up their predetermined policies. Everything else is blocked out and is to be suppressed.
Has anyone wondered why we have not heard much of star wars lately even though the last justification given was in case North Korea got nukes? Or for that matter we heard nothing about the statement made by North Korea two weeks ago until after the congress voted on Iraq? Fact is that the only 'scientific' reports that say that start wars can be built are those written by the 'defense' contractors wanting to build it. Everyone else knows that the North Korean's don't have a missile that could carry their bomb so if they were to explode one in the US they would have to load it into a cargo container and ship it into the harbor of San Francisco or New York.
No it does not. There is clearly an area where taxation has an effect on GDP and also clearly an area where the effects are irrelevant. Even the infamous Laffer-curve used to justify Reaganomics accepted that. Now Economics 101 taught by Phil Gramm might teach that but most genuine economists explain that economics is very complex and that simple minded ideology does not give infallible answers.
Deficit spending can clearly have a negative effect on GDP by raising long term interest rates and hence the cost of capital. So tax cuts that increase the deficit without creating offsetting incentives for greater economic activity can actually reduce GDP. In particular eliminating inheritance tax does not encourage people to die.
The claim that tax cuts cost nothing because every dollar of lost revenue will somehow be made up in increased GDP is clearly a right-wing fairy tale.
The point is that we were told that the tax cuts would not cause or worsen the deficit over and over again. At no point did the administration admit that the tax cut might result in deficit spending. When Gore challenged Bush on this in the debate Bush made his infamous 'fuzzy math' claim. It is very clear now that Bush was the one using fuzzy math.
To take a more clear cut example, Bush has repeatedly asserted that he had said during the campaign that his balanced budget pledge was subject to conditions, it might be necessary to run a deficit for war, a recession or national emergency. Only thing is that this was actually said by Gore, there is no contemporary press record of the conditions, nor can the administration provide any evidence that they were ever made, or any press release of policy statement that mentions them. The oft repeated pledge to balance the budget unconditionally is retrospectively made subject to a condition that was never stated at the time.
One wonders what secret conditions might apply to the numerous other undertakings the Bush administration has made.