In a capitalist society companies go bust all the time. The current shakeout of the dotcoms has made venture capital much harder to get. Companies that make a loss have to convince their backers they will make a profit soon.
This is a good thing. The job market for geeks at the moment is still pretty tight. Better to lay off staff while there are jobs to be had at profitable concerns than to wait for a real recession to hand out pink slips.
The only way you can think G.W. Bush is a threat to the internet and Privacy is if you're a knee jerk liberal who doesn't care to find out the facts.
Or you could be a knee jerk liberal who thinks that Bush is an untrustworthy liar who said anything that would get him elected.
Remember that Bush tried to get gwbush.com closed down during the campaign saying 'there ought to be limits to freedom'.
The promise to be a uniter not a divider was broken when they used the Supreme Court to stop the election count in Florida. The promise to put a cap on green house gases was broken when the check from the oil industry trade association made it into the campaign fund.
Let us see which way Bush jumps on the issue of online copyright. If he does not do the bidding of the people with the fattest wallets it will surprise me greatly.
Stupidest company that did something of the sort is ZixIt corporation, a dotcom that still has to make any revenues.
The original business plan for ZixIt was to make money out of a CyberCash like payment system called ZixCharge. To build a market for the wallet they planned to distribute a free email security application called ZixMail.
The CEO of the company, David Cook said 'sell your shares if we don't have partners for ZixCharge by the end of the year'. The year being 1999 ended with no partners. Instead the firm brought a suit against Visa corporation claiming that a Visa employee had 'disparaged' the company and its products on the ZixIt Yahoo newsgroup. For a long time the posts were available from the ZixIt web site. They got pulled after folk pointed out that independent observers might consider that Paul Guthrie (the Visa employee) might well have given an honest opinion about a product he considered to be rubbish.
The lawsuit goes on, the company still has no revenues. The latest plan is to charge $24 a month for ZixMail. Problem here is that the products that ZixMail add security to all have S/MIME encryption built in.
Jerry Falwell lost a case against Hustler in which he sued for being named "Asshole of the Month."
That was not the principal cause of action in the case. Hustler could have won the 'asshole' allegation on factual grounds alone. Falwell is a racist bigott who has made a fortune out of persuading little old ladies to send him their life savings to 'do the work of Christ' - standing up in front of a TV screen persuading little old ladies...
I can't remember the principal allegation that Falwell sued over but seem to recall it involved maternal incest.
With that said, if I were to say "Bill Gates is an asshole", he could sue me for defamation of character, however, if I add those three precious words "in my opinion", he cannot touch me no matter how many attorneys he can afford.
Untrue on both counts. In the first place the statement 'Bill Gates is an Asshole" would be defensible in the US since 1) Bill Gates is a public person and 2) the statement is a statement of opinion and not fact.
Simply adding 'in my opinion' does not make it an opinion, nor for that matter does adding the word 'alleged'. Unless a reporter is reporting on an allegation that has already become known stating that an allegation has been made has the same effect as making the allegation.
For example stating 'Bill Gate is a peadophile' would be actionable even if followed by 'in my opinion' or preceeded by 'it is alleged' since it is a statement of fact. Because he is a public persona Gates is considered to have less protection than a private individual would. However the statement would be clearly made 'with actual mallice' so the public interest defence fails.
Of course in the UK there was a time when a man could pay a prostitute $3000 on a London station platform and subsequently be awarded a multimillion dollar award for damages after newspapers alleged that he had sex with the woman. Today said Jeffrey Archer is facing perjury charges at the Old Bailey and if convicted looks like serving a serious stretch of prison.
CERT used to be notorious for not giving credit. I had a blazing row with their sysop over email on Bugtraq on the topic. Amongst the 'excuses' for not crediting the discoverers of the bugs was that 'they are mostly private individuals and not academic authors'.
Needless to say this struck me as a bit off since a private consultant has a much bigger need to get credit for their work than a tenured academic and every bit as much right.
I sent a registered letter to the Director of CERT telling him that if I saw another similar complaint of not giving credit in an alert on Bugtraq I would make a formal complaint to the CMU board of plagarism. Shortly thereafter the alerts started to give credits. If they have slipped call CMU and complain.
Security types tend to be very smart and very paranoid, why the CERT git thought plagarising their work would be a good plan is beyond me.
CERT are entirely dependent on the quality of the information they are provided. The main complaint of CERT is that they have in the past waited to long for the vendor to put out a fix to issue an alert. Restricted publication of early alerts could be a good way to put vendors feet to the fire without full disclosure.
Sigh.... It's called a joke dude, there isn't really a test.
Yes there is, I've got one here. I can't be caught out like that!
That is a dog license with the word dog crossed out and the word cat written in crayon.
Man didn't have the right form
Yes, the other poster is right, there is absolutely nothing that the BBC has contributed to world culture and the fact that so many US citizens give money to PBS to watch reruns of Dr Who and Are You Being Served is because they are ignorant lefties who ought to be shipped off the Russia where they belong (and where they would be unable to watch the BBC).
Sunstein argued back, I think convincingly, that a certain segment of the population will seek out like minds and ignore everything else.
He is a bit late here and his proposed solution is a non starter. The hate sites don't want to hear other views and there is no way to force them.
Hate sites are not devoid of all links to opposing material, it is just that the links they provide are chosen to reinforce their case. There is no way to disprove a case of someone who is prepared to manufacture as much 'evidence' as they need.
In fact the sustein remedy would force the mainstream to link to the hate group sites. The society for the advancement of science would be forced to link to every crackpot creationist site. The ACLU would be forced to the Phelps anti gay bigotry site. The anti defamation league to the neo-nazi league.
The problem with the sustein inanity is that there are simply too many ways to argue against the meme. You can argue against his stupid premise or his equally loopy solution.
The underlying falacy behind Susteins whacky scheme is the belief that this type of people respond to reasoned argument. The fact is that the whackos in the extreemist movements simply don't have either a belief system rooted in reality or care about rational argument. In fact that is what makes them extreemist whackos in the first place.
Sustein's scheme is not new by the way, it is exactly what Chairman Mao's 're-education' was meant to be, returning disident believers to the mainstream. Well sometimes the mainstream belief is wrong - segregation in the US south, any dictatorship you care to name, sexism, anti-gay bigotry.
Need a divorce? Go to http://www.a-fool-and-his-alimony-are-soon-parted. com
Since so many have asked, yes you do need a license to watch TV in the UK. The program has a two fold purpose, first to raise revenue for the BBC (apart from the World service which is funded by a foreign office grant).
The other purpose of the license fee is to set minimum standards of competence for television viewers. It is quite a while since I passed the test but I still remember some of the questions.
Q. Who played Emma Peel in the Avengers before Diana Rigg?
Q. True or False, Reginald Bosequett's hair [False]
Q. Why is Star Trek the most commonly shown US TV series A: The BBC purchased the UK rights outright for $80 per episode during the initial runs
To pass you had to score no more than 5 out of 10, thus demonstrating that you were not a total couch potatoe.
I had a Jaz drive, damn thing broke after a few months of not very intensive use.
I don't know why Iomega is still in business. The capacity of Zip drives has been overtaken by flash rom. Zip only offers a significant cost saving if you have lots of the disks but is much bulkier and pretty shodily made.
The Jaz drive was obsolete pretty soon after I got it. The cost of IDE drives is now $200 for 60Gb. I have no interest at all in a Jaz drive offering a measly 2Gb at a cost of $100+ per cartridge. In fact I have little interest in a Jaz drive if the cartridges are free.
Iomega is a classic overhyped dotcom stock. IOM rocketed upwards on the assumption that everyone would be forced to buy them.
One of SOAP's principal designer's is Henrick Frystyk Nielsen, one of the key authors of HTTP and the lead author on HTTP-NG. SOAP is simply a logical extension of stuff he has been working on for years before he joined Microsoft.
But he WASN'T the system admin anymore.. The person who WAS the admin should get reamed for not using shadow passwords (or having an improperly protected shadow file)...
Note the date. At that time shadow passwords were being denounced in much of the UNIX community as security through obscurity after all Moriss had written the gospel on the subject, trust in cryptography not access controls. The fact that Moriss was head of the NSA at the time the argument was going on was beside the point. I agree that the system admin should have used shaddow passwords, and at the time I was making that very argument. However the amount of shite we got for going against the weenie types was substantial, it is not surprising that the sysadmin was not running shaddow passwords at the time, in fact Sun may not even have supported them when the system was installed.
The net is not much of a threat to the RIAA compared to my Archos MP3 jukebox. With the net you get to swap a track at a time and the transaction is inherently observable.
With the archos device I have a 6Gb hard drive that is slightly smaller than a walkman and connects to a PC via USB. To the PC it looks just like a hard drive (I often use it to swap large files between office and home, it is much faster than burning a CDROM and bigger capacity).
Unlike the crappy SDMI influenced systems the archos device allows tracks to be copied to or from the drive.
With napster or any net based system it would take weeks to snarf a thousand tracks. With the archos device the CD collection becomes the unit of exchange. I have 120CDs on mine, I could copy them onto someone else's machine in about 10 minutes and then replace them by 120 from their collection.
Interestingly enough this probably passes for 'fair use' as currently understood
I am not currently disposed to do this, I believe that artists have a right to an income. However the RIAA is making it harder and harder for folk like myself to be influential. Ultimately the only means by which laws are observed is if there is a general consensus that they should. The RIAA made it very difficult for me to sympathize with their position after their legislative grab for the 'returned rights' that previously belonged to their artists. Meanwhile the DVD 'zone control' system is designed to maintain differential pricing across markets - Europe will pay most, Asia least.
The RIAA need to understand that buying congressmen and legislation will be counterproductive.
AGAIN have you read the document, if you haven't then please hold your comments because you'd look like an ass in all due respect.
I have read the paper, I have also corresponded with Jim Bell at length on other lists. He is in my opinion a dangerous and obsessive lunatic.
Jim is not charged with 'writing a paper'. Anyone who relies on the articles by Declan McCullagh is hearing only the parts of the story that fit Declan's own anti-establishment nihilist politics.
The reason Jim is on trial is
He wrote an article about killing government officials
He wrote a series of letters to federal agents making unspecified threats
He admits to pouring a noxious chemical of some kind on the doormat of a federal agency
He attempted to obtain materials to make sarin gas
He was subsequently charged and plea bargained
After his release he compiled a list of government officials home addresses, and visited their houses to conduct surveilance.
Now that may be a weak case for conspiracy etc. However it iws misleading in the extreeme to claim that the government is prosecuting him for the Assasination Politics article alone, that Bell is an entirely detached academic observer who did not take any steps to attack government officials. The AP article is only one piece of evidence that demonstrates that Bell is a paranoid crazy who is very likely to kill someone. The fact is that Bell admitted in the previous case to going beyond talking about murdering government officials to actively planning attacks - albeit attacks well short of murder.
On the specifics of the paper itself, it was nothing more innovative than observing that Chaum's Digital cash coupled with an auction scheme would be a good way to hire hitmen. The scheme is pretty Rube Goldberg and has a number of problems, not least the fact that no US court is likely to consider the auction site as a legitimate exercise of the first ammendment, nor is any foreign government going to tollerate it. Beyond that as several cipherpunks have pointed out the scheme itself does not work since the hit man has no assurance that they would be paid the cash rather than an impostor. In fact if the board was set up it would be filled by the same federal agents who post the 'I solve problems' classifieds in soldier of fortune.
No neutrons, no excess heat either
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Excess Heat
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The F&P experiments were duplicated by many major laboratories, none of the major labs observed the claimed 'excess heat'. None observed neutrons either.
The problem with the F&P setup was that the thermocouple itself had a power supply and was adding heat to the mixture. This was conclusively demonstrated when an exact duplicate of the F&P setup was run with heavy water and a control version with light water with identical 'excess heat' measurements.
The Rutherford Appleton laboratory had a good experiment in which they could swap from light to heavy water with the same electrode and measure in both circumstances. The Rutherford Experiment took rather longer than the 'amateur' copies because Perkins and the RA management made the experimenters stack up lots of concrete bricks before they started to protect them from the neutron flux if the experiment worked.
The lack of neutrons and the fact that the control experiment behaved identically conclusively demonstrate that whatever F&P were observing was not cold fusion.
Now that does not disprove the possibility of cold fusion. It is generally accepted that muon catalysed fusion is genuine for example - albeit not a viable source of energy since muons have a short lifetime and require incredible amounts of energy to produce.
Unfortunately those working in the field will now have to deal with the assorted conspiracy theorists, cranks, astrologers and the like drawn to it by the F&P media circus. A similar thing happened when the English parliament set up the longitude prize. Amongst the whacky schemes proposed was the 'sympathetic potion' which when administered to two dogs caused one to feel any pain felt by the other. One dog was carried on the ship, the other remained at Grenwich and was cerimonially kicked at 12 noon on the Grenwich meridian, causing the dog on the ship to bark, thus allowing local time to be measured.
Similar things happen all the time without becomming media circuses. I remember a group of researchers who thought they had found a very heavy neutrino. The neutrino appeared in a duplicate of the experiment with completely different equipment at another university. It turned out that the measurement was due to a very obscure software/hardware error in the counting device they were using.
Ultimately F&P have to receive the blame for the media circus. They rushed out their press release after they discovered another experimenter (the reviewer of their paper as it turned out) had been working on the same idea and was close to publishing results. The grad student who actually did the experiments was inexcusably left of the list of authors of the paper.
If a means of achieving cold fusion is found it will be in spite of F&P. Many people will sensibly avoid the field because of the numerous cranks who attached themselves to it. The book being reviewed was likely written by one of them. Of course that may be an unfair assesment of the work. However the ultimate legacy of F&P is that they have ensured that anyone who tries to do legitimate work in the same field is likely to recieve the same response. If I had infinite time I might maybe read stuff likely to be from a crank, however the ad-hominem crank filter is indispensible for any mortal.
The core concept of Object Oriented languages is data abstraction. The ability to define datatypes that act like primitive types is what OO programming does for you. That's it. Message-passing is just a term used for objects to interact with each other... while hiding the helper methods and internal data structures away.
I did use the past tense.
If by 'data abstraction' you mean a vacuous phrase used by marketting types in place of thought then I would agree that that is what OO has become.
This does not sound like a Tim company as the PR puff suggests. I have known him for almost ten years. Tim has been resolutely determined not to cash in on the web or do anything that would threaten his percieved 'impartiality' as W3C director. The only other board he has been on to my knowledge was Akamai which was founded by LCS people. He received some stock but sold it as soon as the lockup expired. I doubt his current involvement is any greater, the Curl language has been in development at MIT for years.
So the PR description of Tim and Michael 'throwing their weight behind' Curl strikes me as unlikely and out of character. If Tim was interested in money he could have an options package almost certain to be worth seven figures from any number of profitable Internets.
What would be more Tim's scene would be a conference on scripting languages with lots of alternative proposals.
It strikes me though that rather than just rehashing for the nth time specification of yet another ALGOL or LISP like language it would be good to see use been made of other ideas that are not currently mainstream.
C# and Java do no more than a necessary and useful cleanup of C. But neither fits my concept of an object oriented language. These days OO has come to mean 'support for inheritance and methods bound to data structures'. I remember when the core idea of OO was considered message passing.
Surely there is much that could be done with message passing, direct support for parallel processing concepts etc.? The Inmos Occam language had many features that would be exceptionally useful in the context of programming for Internet applications.
Nothing could be less interesting however than merely tweaking the syntax of C to make it less eggregious. Syntactic sugar is important but ultimately an editor or preprocessor can be programmed to do the same work. Anyone can remember using RATFOR? Or the days when C++ was a preprocessor?
And I'm sure that his shifting position between two groundswell movements that have minor philosophical differences is going to greatly enhance his credibility while making a marginal economic proposition to some of the largest corporations in the world.
The philosophical differences may be small. The personality differences are not. The problem with FSF is that there is a fundamental conflict between the outward liberating aims and the controlling methods used to achieve them. It is always do things the RMS way or be treated as the enemy.
I simply don't have time these days to deal with RMS's ego. He made a contribution to the movement but the changes in society that computers and networks and the change in power that they make possible are about much more than Free or Open software or any individual.
If the objective of the meeting is to get IBM to cough up some IP and back the idea of multilateral disarmament on software then take folk like Brian along. If on the other hand the idea is to launch some my-way-is-the-only-way jihad then please don't bother.
Asking IBM etc. to give up patent rights is not unheard of. Just read the IETF lists to see racks of IP to which a free open licens has been granted.
Asking for a complete patent license tends to get refused. However I have neogitated what amounts to the same thing - a free license for use in an open standard protocol - which is all that anyone really cares about in any case.
Most patents are filled for defensive purposes. Only a very few companies actually make money from patents as such - TI being the biggest example in the tech sector. IBM does make significant patent royalties but those tend to be manufacturing and processing.
Software patents are not actually terrifically profitable. If an idea is patented then people tend to design arround the patent. The number of ideas so devastatingly original that they can't be evaded is very small.
If the meeting has been set up right then Brian and co have already got some deal with IBM and this is simply an excuse to allow the IBM management to give away property rather than sit on it and watch it be unused.
The biggest lever the open source community has against patents is that in general a patented product is nowhere near as useful as a standards based one. There are exceptions but very few.
Software companies started making much of their programs for MS, because they could. A lack of choices push more people and businesses to an IBM Clone computer with the MS OS.
You leave out the biggest factor behind the choice of Microsoft - IBM. For the clone manufacturers the only alternatives were to accept a combined IBM hardware/software monopoly or to back Microsoft. IBM had made it crystal clear that it planned to make the O/S dependent on IBM controlled hardware (microchannel being the first). The clone makers bolted and agreed upon the EISA hardware, Intel processors and Windows as the new common platform.
At the same time Apple brought in a bunch of consultants who told them that they should take engineering resources away from their core business 'cash cows' and put them in whacky innovative new markets 'stars'. Development of the MAC O/S was to all intents and purposes halted at the very time that Microsoft started to challenge it. The Apple management tried to keep Microsoft out with a bunch of patents they had filled on the technology they took from Xerox. Meanwhile instead of developing a better MAC O/S the engineers were developing the Newton, the Dylan programming language and practically anything other than making their core product better.
I have no love for Apple. This stems largely from their practice of charging inflated prices outside the US where I was living at the time. Microsoft survived the bogus patent lawsuit but the Atari GEM operating system was entirely crushed. The Atari O/S was vastly better than an MAC O/S up to the most recent release (which I haven't seen and doubt I will need to bother). It ran on pretty much the same platform but had memory protection, multitasking that worked and did not have the nanny knows best attitude of the Apple GUI.
Microsoft has done the world a favor, Apple and IBM both deserved a poke in the eye and Gates gave it to them.
One suit claims that MSFT charged more for windows than it "should". The entire basis of the claim is a single internal memorandum that asserts that Microsoft would make more money from Windows by charging a lower price than it did and the findings of fact written by Judge Jackson in the federal case. Against this the federal case claims that Microsoft undercharged to drive out competition.
The basic problem the plaintifs have is that the entire concept of copyright law is to grant a limited term monopoly for the commercial exploitation of copyright material. The conflicts between anti-trust and copyright law are discussed for many pages in the federal trial briefs.
A more immediate problem however is that the cases were all filled in the hope that Judge Jackson's 'findings of fact' could be used as evidence. Unfortunately for the plaintifs Jackson has been shooting off his mouth in most unjudicial terms since. Folk can argue over whether he has met the legal standard for demonstrating 'actual bias' but even the DoJ has been forced to agree that he has come very close. Calling the appeals court judges 'supercillious' and 'lacking trial experience' however seems to me to guarantee some sort of ascerbic response.
Given the incompetence of Jackson I think the appeals court is certain to reverse at least part of the rulling. One of the judges has already described the 'findings of fact' as 'conclusatory' and stated that 'just because the district court describes them as a fact does not make them so'. The idea that the Bush administration will persue the case further is laughable so the appeals court has a free hand. My guess is that the Appeals court will make a rulling that excortiates Jackson and pins the entire blame for the fiasco on him. Reprimands of judges may be rare but Jackson has pretty well made it impossible for the Appeals court to ignore his behavior.
The chances of Jackson's findings of fact surviving the process are slim. At which point the cost of making the case would suddenly jump by $20 million or so. The parasites will then settle with Microsoft for a low tens of millions in lawyers fees and the 'consumers' will get a handfull of vouchers giving them $10 to $20 off their next copy of Windows XP.
To me the most fascinating point revealed here is that the judge's ruling values the damages associated with stealing the domain name to be higher than the total revenues earned by the site.
That is easy to explain, the damages are $40 million and represent the lost business opportunity. The amount the fraudster made from the domain is not actually very relevant to the calculation of the damages. Kremen could reasonably argue that as a legitimate trader he could have formed aliances with Playboy Enterprises, Hustler and the like to generate additional revenue. These companies would not have dealt with the fraudster.
Furthermore by failing to appear and failling to release records demanded by the court the defendant made a higher award practically inevitable. A judge is almost always going to side with the guy who turns up against a fugitive.
While Kremen is unlikely to get back all the damages he is likely to obtain a significant sum. The guy who stole the domain had registered a bunch of other domains, some of which have significant value and were impounded by the court a few months back.
Another lever Kremen has is that as long as the case is not settled there is an outstanding arrest warrant. My guess is that this will lead to an eventual settlement for a percentage of the damages.
The guy has the wrong model
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Republic.Com
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· Score: 3
The problem with online discussion is not that voices aren't heard, the problem is that some voices try to deliberately speak so loud as to drwon out others.
Longstanding UseNetters will remember the activities of Achmed Cosar, a member of the Turkish Secret police who posted hundreds of messages a day to the soc.culture groups of Usenet under the aliases Serdar Argic and Hasan B-) Mutlu.
The clear intention was to drown out any discussion of the 1918 massacre of Armenians by the Turks. The massacre is a touchy subject for the Turkish government and Turkey recently withdrew its ambassador to France after France recognised the massacre as genocide and made vehement complaints to the British after the Armenian masscre was amongst those recognized on 'Holocaust day'.
What Cosar did was to run an AWK script that scanned several USEnet groups for any occurrences of certain keywords. The script would then return the first paragraph of the post, append a randomly chosen insult and add a piece of Turkish government propaganda to the end. Cosar's activities stopped when the US cancelled his H1B visa. [Don't ask how I know this stuff, I am not going to discuss my sources on/.]
Cosar's activities were an extreeme but there are plenty of similar examples. Shouting down the opposition was a popular tactic of Facist and Trotskyite groups. In the 1930s the NAZI party and the Communists would disrupt each other's meetings. Trotsky called the strategy of taking over another party by joining en-masse and being deliberately unpleasant to force others to leave 'entryism'.
These tactics are rare but not unheard of and it is this against this type of behavior that the majority of negative moderation is directed. On slashdot the 'first post' and 'goat**x' messages are a kind of mindless apolitical version of the same thing.
Strictly speaking I don't think that 'trolls' should necessarily be marked down since there is a very fine line between a deliberately provocative post and a troll. In each of the cases I have made a post that scored 5 I have thought that some people would think of as a troll. A well written intelligent troll can be fun - if the intention is to provoke thought rather than to trigger mindless reactions from the unthinking.
For these reasons I see moderation as a tool to protect the middle ground against the people whose purpose is to prevent debate.
Re:So how biased is discussion on /.?
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Republic.Com
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Second, I think online discussion suffers from a lack of in-depth thought.
I don't think this is restricted to online discussion. One of my frustrations with what Brill's content calls 'Shout TV' is the lack of in depth thought.
To take one topical example, on chat show after chat show the Administration claim that it is 'unthinkable' that the US airplane could have been responsible in any part for the collision near China. I have only heard one 'news' show mention the submarine sinking of a Japanesse trawler in connection with this claim - and that was The Daily Shown on the Comedy Channel.
Other relevant incidents that the research departments of the news media have overlooked are 1) the fact that the US also claims 200 mile territorial limits with respect to certain activities 2) the fact that a Russian MIG landed in Hong Kong a few decades ago and was dismantled by the Brits and the US 3) the fact that the U2 flown by Gary Powers is still in Russia
Not that these pieces of information necessarily change the situation. But listening to so called experts pontificate while they fail to address the issue the rest of the worlds press is discussing suggests that the real problem is not with the new media but with the established media who have become incompetent and lazy.
It is ironic that Mathew Gaylor should take issue with filtering however since he is the principal individual I try to filter out - in many cases by unsubscribing from the mailing lists he infests. His principal waking activity appears to be bombarding mailing lists with off topic rants/trolls on his pet obsessions. These include guns, libertarianism, gun rights, constitutionality of gun ownership, lack of civil liberties in the UK (guns again), some screed by a right wing nut that is probably about guns etc. To say he is a boring one issue monomaniac is an understatement.
I prefer to filter out all discussion of guns, abortion and the works of Ayn Rand. this is not because I don't care about the issues, I just don't care to listen to ideologues rehashing second or third hand arguments I have heard hundreds of times.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a good thing. The job market for geeks at the moment is still pretty tight. Better to lay off staff while there are jobs to be had at profitable concerns than to wait for a real recession to hand out pink slips.
Or you could be a knee jerk liberal who thinks that Bush is an untrustworthy liar who said anything that would get him elected.
Remember that Bush tried to get gwbush.com closed down during the campaign saying 'there ought to be limits to freedom'.
The promise to be a uniter not a divider was broken when they used the Supreme Court to stop the election count in Florida. The promise to put a cap on green house gases was broken when the check from the oil industry trade association made it into the campaign fund.
Let us see which way Bush jumps on the issue of online copyright. If he does not do the bidding of the people with the fattest wallets it will surprise me greatly.
The original business plan for ZixIt was to make money out of a CyberCash like payment system called ZixCharge. To build a market for the wallet they planned to distribute a free email security application called ZixMail.
The CEO of the company, David Cook said 'sell your shares if we don't have partners for ZixCharge by the end of the year'. The year being 1999 ended with no partners. Instead the firm brought a suit against Visa corporation claiming that a Visa employee had 'disparaged' the company and its products on the ZixIt Yahoo newsgroup. For a long time the posts were available from the ZixIt web site. They got pulled after folk pointed out that independent observers might consider that Paul Guthrie (the Visa employee) might well have given an honest opinion about a product he considered to be rubbish.
The lawsuit goes on, the company still has no revenues. The latest plan is to charge $24 a month for ZixMail. Problem here is that the products that ZixMail add security to all have S/MIME encryption built in.
That was not the principal cause of action in the case. Hustler could have won the 'asshole' allegation on factual grounds alone. Falwell is a racist bigott who has made a fortune out of persuading little old ladies to send him their life savings to 'do the work of Christ' - standing up in front of a TV screen persuading little old ladies...
I can't remember the principal allegation that Falwell sued over but seem to recall it involved maternal incest.
Untrue on both counts. In the first place the statement 'Bill Gates is an Asshole" would be defensible in the US since 1) Bill Gates is a public person and 2) the statement is a statement of opinion and not fact.
Simply adding 'in my opinion' does not make it an opinion, nor for that matter does adding the word 'alleged'. Unless a reporter is reporting on an allegation that has already become known stating that an allegation has been made has the same effect as making the allegation.
For example stating 'Bill Gate is a peadophile' would be actionable even if followed by 'in my opinion' or preceeded by 'it is alleged' since it is a statement of fact. Because he is a public persona Gates is considered to have less protection than a private individual would. However the statement would be clearly made 'with actual mallice' so the public interest defence fails.
Of course in the UK there was a time when a man could pay a prostitute $3000 on a London station platform and subsequently be awarded a multimillion dollar award for damages after newspapers alleged that he had sex with the woman. Today said Jeffrey Archer is facing perjury charges at the Old Bailey and if convicted looks like serving a serious stretch of prison.
Needless to say this struck me as a bit off since a private consultant has a much bigger need to get credit for their work than a tenured academic and every bit as much right.
I sent a registered letter to the Director of CERT telling him that if I saw another similar complaint of not giving credit in an alert on Bugtraq I would make a formal complaint to the CMU board of plagarism. Shortly thereafter the alerts started to give credits. If they have slipped call CMU and complain.
Security types tend to be very smart and very paranoid, why the CERT git thought plagarising their work would be a good plan is beyond me.
CERT are entirely dependent on the quality of the information they are provided. The main complaint of CERT is that they have in the past waited to long for the vendor to put out a fix to issue an alert. Restricted publication of early alerts could be a good way to put vendors feet to the fire without full disclosure.
Yes there is, I've got one here. I can't be caught out like that!
That is a dog license with the word dog crossed out and the word cat written in crayon.
Man didn't have the right form
Yes, the other poster is right, there is absolutely nothing that the BBC has contributed to world culture and the fact that so many US citizens give money to PBS to watch reruns of Dr Who and Are You Being Served is because they are ignorant lefties who ought to be shipped off the Russia where they belong (and where they would be unable to watch the BBC).
He is a bit late here and his proposed solution is a non starter. The hate sites don't want to hear other views and there is no way to force them.
Hate sites are not devoid of all links to opposing material, it is just that the links they provide are chosen to reinforce their case. There is no way to disprove a case of someone who is prepared to manufacture as much 'evidence' as they need.
In fact the sustein remedy would force the mainstream to link to the hate group sites. The society for the advancement of science would be forced to link to every crackpot creationist site. The ACLU would be forced to the Phelps anti gay bigotry site. The anti defamation league to the neo-nazi league.
The problem with the sustein inanity is that there are simply too many ways to argue against the meme. You can argue against his stupid premise or his equally loopy solution.
The underlying falacy behind Susteins whacky scheme is the belief that this type of people respond to reasoned argument. The fact is that the whackos in the extreemist movements simply don't have either a belief system rooted in reality or care about rational argument. In fact that is what makes them extreemist whackos in the first place.
Sustein's scheme is not new by the way, it is exactly what Chairman Mao's 're-education' was meant to be, returning disident believers to the mainstream. Well sometimes the mainstream belief is wrong - segregation in the US south, any dictatorship you care to name, sexism, anti-gay bigotry.
Need a divorce? Go to http://www.a-fool-and-his-alimony-are-soon-parted. com
The other purpose of the license fee is to set minimum standards of competence for television viewers. It is quite a while since I passed the test but I still remember some of the questions.
Q. Who played Emma Peel in the Avengers before Diana Rigg?
Q. True or False, Reginald Bosequett's hair [False]
Q. Why is Star Trek the most commonly shown US TV series A: The BBC purchased the UK rights outright for $80 per episode during the initial runs
To pass you had to score no more than 5 out of 10, thus demonstrating that you were not a total couch potatoe.
I don't know why Iomega is still in business. The capacity of Zip drives has been overtaken by flash rom. Zip only offers a significant cost saving if you have lots of the disks but is much bulkier and pretty shodily made.
The Jaz drive was obsolete pretty soon after I got it. The cost of IDE drives is now $200 for 60Gb. I have no interest at all in a Jaz drive offering a measly 2Gb at a cost of $100+ per cartridge. In fact I have little interest in a Jaz drive if the cartridges are free.
Iomega is a classic overhyped dotcom stock. IOM rocketed upwards on the assumption that everyone would be forced to buy them.
One of SOAP's principal designer's is Henrick Frystyk Nielsen, one of the key authors of HTTP and the lead author on HTTP-NG. SOAP is simply a logical extension of stuff he has been working on for years before he joined Microsoft.
Note the date. At that time shadow passwords were being denounced in much of the UNIX community as security through obscurity after all Moriss had written the gospel on the subject, trust in cryptography not access controls. The fact that Moriss was head of the NSA at the time the argument was going on was beside the point. I agree that the system admin should have used shaddow passwords, and at the time I was making that very argument. However the amount of shite we got for going against the weenie types was substantial, it is not surprising that the sysadmin was not running shaddow passwords at the time, in fact Sun may not even have supported them when the system was installed.
With the archos device I have a 6Gb hard drive that is slightly smaller than a walkman and connects to a PC via USB. To the PC it looks just like a hard drive (I often use it to swap large files between office and home, it is much faster than burning a CDROM and bigger capacity).
Unlike the crappy SDMI influenced systems the archos device allows tracks to be copied to or from the drive.
With napster or any net based system it would take weeks to snarf a thousand tracks. With the archos device the CD collection becomes the unit of exchange. I have 120CDs on mine, I could copy them onto someone else's machine in about 10 minutes and then replace them by 120 from their collection.
Interestingly enough this probably passes for 'fair use' as currently understood
I am not currently disposed to do this, I believe that artists have a right to an income. However the RIAA is making it harder and harder for folk like myself to be influential. Ultimately the only means by which laws are observed is if there is a general consensus that they should. The RIAA made it very difficult for me to sympathize with their position after their legislative grab for the 'returned rights' that previously belonged to their artists. Meanwhile the DVD 'zone control' system is designed to maintain differential pricing across markets - Europe will pay most, Asia least.
The RIAA need to understand that buying congressmen and legislation will be counterproductive.
I have read the paper, I have also corresponded with Jim Bell at length on other lists. He is in my opinion a dangerous and obsessive lunatic. Jim is not charged with 'writing a paper'. Anyone who relies on the articles by Declan McCullagh is hearing only the parts of the story that fit Declan's own anti-establishment nihilist politics.
The reason Jim is on trial is
He wrote an article about killing government officials
He wrote a series of letters to federal agents making unspecified threats
He admits to pouring a noxious chemical of some kind on the doormat of a federal agency
He attempted to obtain materials to make sarin gas
He was subsequently charged and plea bargained
After his release he compiled a list of government officials home addresses, and visited their houses to conduct surveilance.
Now that may be a weak case for conspiracy etc. However it iws misleading in the extreeme to claim that the government is prosecuting him for the Assasination Politics article alone, that Bell is an entirely detached academic observer who did not take any steps to attack government officials. The AP article is only one piece of evidence that demonstrates that Bell is a paranoid crazy who is very likely to kill someone. The fact is that Bell admitted in the previous case to going beyond talking about murdering government officials to actively planning attacks - albeit attacks well short of murder.
On the specifics of the paper itself, it was nothing more innovative than observing that Chaum's Digital cash coupled with an auction scheme would be a good way to hire hitmen. The scheme is pretty Rube Goldberg and has a number of problems, not least the fact that no US court is likely to consider the auction site as a legitimate exercise of the first ammendment, nor is any foreign government going to tollerate it. Beyond that as several cipherpunks have pointed out the scheme itself does not work since the hit man has no assurance that they would be paid the cash rather than an impostor. In fact if the board was set up it would be filled by the same federal agents who post the 'I solve problems' classifieds in soldier of fortune.
The problem with the F&P setup was that the thermocouple itself had a power supply and was adding heat to the mixture. This was conclusively demonstrated when an exact duplicate of the F&P setup was run with heavy water and a control version with light water with identical 'excess heat' measurements.
The Rutherford Appleton laboratory had a good experiment in which they could swap from light to heavy water with the same electrode and measure in both circumstances. The Rutherford Experiment took rather longer than the 'amateur' copies because Perkins and the RA management made the experimenters stack up lots of concrete bricks before they started to protect them from the neutron flux if the experiment worked.
The lack of neutrons and the fact that the control experiment behaved identically conclusively demonstrate that whatever F&P were observing was not cold fusion.
Now that does not disprove the possibility of cold fusion. It is generally accepted that muon catalysed fusion is genuine for example - albeit not a viable source of energy since muons have a short lifetime and require incredible amounts of energy to produce.
Unfortunately those working in the field will now have to deal with the assorted conspiracy theorists, cranks, astrologers and the like drawn to it by the F&P media circus. A similar thing happened when the English parliament set up the longitude prize. Amongst the whacky schemes proposed was the 'sympathetic potion' which when administered to two dogs caused one to feel any pain felt by the other. One dog was carried on the ship, the other remained at Grenwich and was cerimonially kicked at 12 noon on the Grenwich meridian, causing the dog on the ship to bark, thus allowing local time to be measured.
Similar things happen all the time without becomming media circuses. I remember a group of researchers who thought they had found a very heavy neutrino. The neutrino appeared in a duplicate of the experiment with completely different equipment at another university. It turned out that the measurement was due to a very obscure software/hardware error in the counting device they were using.
Ultimately F&P have to receive the blame for the media circus. They rushed out their press release after they discovered another experimenter (the reviewer of their paper as it turned out) had been working on the same idea and was close to publishing results. The grad student who actually did the experiments was inexcusably left of the list of authors of the paper.
If a means of achieving cold fusion is found it will be in spite of F&P. Many people will sensibly avoid the field because of the numerous cranks who attached themselves to it. The book being reviewed was likely written by one of them. Of course that may be an unfair assesment of the work. However the ultimate legacy of F&P is that they have ensured that anyone who tries to do legitimate work in the same field is likely to recieve the same response. If I had infinite time I might maybe read stuff likely to be from a crank, however the ad-hominem crank filter is indispensible for any mortal.
I did use the past tense.
If by 'data abstraction' you mean a vacuous phrase used by marketting types in place of thought then I would agree that that is what OO has become.
So the PR description of Tim and Michael 'throwing their weight behind' Curl strikes me as unlikely and out of character. If Tim was interested in money he could have an options package almost certain to be worth seven figures from any number of profitable Internets.
What would be more Tim's scene would be a conference on scripting languages with lots of alternative proposals.
It strikes me though that rather than just rehashing for the nth time specification of yet another ALGOL or LISP like language it would be good to see use been made of other ideas that are not currently mainstream.
C# and Java do no more than a necessary and useful cleanup of C. But neither fits my concept of an object oriented language. These days OO has come to mean 'support for inheritance and methods bound to data structures'. I remember when the core idea of OO was considered message passing.
Surely there is much that could be done with message passing, direct support for parallel processing concepts etc.? The Inmos Occam language had many features that would be exceptionally useful in the context of programming for Internet applications.
Nothing could be less interesting however than merely tweaking the syntax of C to make it less eggregious. Syntactic sugar is important but ultimately an editor or preprocessor can be programmed to do the same work. Anyone can remember using RATFOR? Or the days when C++ was a preprocessor?
Actually MIT have been working on their Curl for many years. I saw it six or seven years ago. Who has priority in naming we can leave to the lawyers.
The philosophical differences may be small. The personality differences are not. The problem with FSF is that there is a fundamental conflict between the outward liberating aims and the controlling methods used to achieve them. It is always do things the RMS way or be treated as the enemy.
I simply don't have time these days to deal with RMS's ego. He made a contribution to the movement but the changes in society that computers and networks and the change in power that they make possible are about much more than Free or Open software or any individual.
If the objective of the meeting is to get IBM to cough up some IP and back the idea of multilateral disarmament on software then take folk like Brian along. If on the other hand the idea is to launch some my-way-is-the-only-way jihad then please don't bother.
Asking for a complete patent license tends to get refused. However I have neogitated what amounts to the same thing - a free license for use in an open standard protocol - which is all that anyone really cares about in any case.
Most patents are filled for defensive purposes. Only a very few companies actually make money from patents as such - TI being the biggest example in the tech sector. IBM does make significant patent royalties but those tend to be manufacturing and processing.
Software patents are not actually terrifically profitable. If an idea is patented then people tend to design arround the patent. The number of ideas so devastatingly original that they can't be evaded is very small.
If the meeting has been set up right then Brian and co have already got some deal with IBM and this is simply an excuse to allow the IBM management to give away property rather than sit on it and watch it be unused.
The biggest lever the open source community has against patents is that in general a patented product is nowhere near as useful as a standards based one. There are exceptions but very few.
You leave out the biggest factor behind the choice of Microsoft - IBM. For the clone manufacturers the only alternatives were to accept a combined IBM hardware/software monopoly or to back Microsoft. IBM had made it crystal clear that it planned to make the O/S dependent on IBM controlled hardware (microchannel being the first). The clone makers bolted and agreed upon the EISA hardware, Intel processors and Windows as the new common platform.
At the same time Apple brought in a bunch of consultants who told them that they should take engineering resources away from their core business 'cash cows' and put them in whacky innovative new markets 'stars'. Development of the MAC O/S was to all intents and purposes halted at the very time that Microsoft started to challenge it. The Apple management tried to keep Microsoft out with a bunch of patents they had filled on the technology they took from Xerox. Meanwhile instead of developing a better MAC O/S the engineers were developing the Newton, the Dylan programming language and practically anything other than making their core product better.
I have no love for Apple. This stems largely from their practice of charging inflated prices outside the US where I was living at the time. Microsoft survived the bogus patent lawsuit but the Atari GEM operating system was entirely crushed. The Atari O/S was vastly better than an MAC O/S up to the most recent release (which I haven't seen and doubt I will need to bother). It ran on pretty much the same platform but had memory protection, multitasking that worked and did not have the nanny knows best attitude of the Apple GUI.
Microsoft has done the world a favor, Apple and IBM both deserved a poke in the eye and Gates gave it to them.
The basic problem the plaintifs have is that the entire concept of copyright law is to grant a limited term monopoly for the commercial exploitation of copyright material. The conflicts between anti-trust and copyright law are discussed for many pages in the federal trial briefs.
A more immediate problem however is that the cases were all filled in the hope that Judge Jackson's 'findings of fact' could be used as evidence. Unfortunately for the plaintifs Jackson has been shooting off his mouth in most unjudicial terms since. Folk can argue over whether he has met the legal standard for demonstrating 'actual bias' but even the DoJ has been forced to agree that he has come very close. Calling the appeals court judges 'supercillious' and 'lacking trial experience' however seems to me to guarantee some sort of ascerbic response.
Given the incompetence of Jackson I think the appeals court is certain to reverse at least part of the rulling. One of the judges has already described the 'findings of fact' as 'conclusatory' and stated that 'just because the district court describes them as a fact does not make them so'. The idea that the Bush administration will persue the case further is laughable so the appeals court has a free hand. My guess is that the Appeals court will make a rulling that excortiates Jackson and pins the entire blame for the fiasco on him. Reprimands of judges may be rare but Jackson has pretty well made it impossible for the Appeals court to ignore his behavior.
The chances of Jackson's findings of fact surviving the process are slim. At which point the cost of making the case would suddenly jump by $20 million or so. The parasites will then settle with Microsoft for a low tens of millions in lawyers fees and the 'consumers' will get a handfull of vouchers giving them $10 to $20 off their next copy of Windows XP.
That is easy to explain, the damages are $40 million and represent the lost business opportunity. The amount the fraudster made from the domain is not actually very relevant to the calculation of the damages. Kremen could reasonably argue that as a legitimate trader he could have formed aliances with Playboy Enterprises, Hustler and the like to generate additional revenue. These companies would not have dealt with the fraudster.
Furthermore by failing to appear and failling to release records demanded by the court the defendant made a higher award practically inevitable. A judge is almost always going to side with the guy who turns up against a fugitive.
While Kremen is unlikely to get back all the damages he is likely to obtain a significant sum. The guy who stole the domain had registered a bunch of other domains, some of which have significant value and were impounded by the court a few months back.
Another lever Kremen has is that as long as the case is not settled there is an outstanding arrest warrant. My guess is that this will lead to an eventual settlement for a percentage of the damages.
Longstanding UseNetters will remember the activities of Achmed Cosar, a member of the Turkish Secret police who posted hundreds of messages a day to the soc.culture groups of Usenet under the aliases Serdar Argic and Hasan B-) Mutlu.
The clear intention was to drown out any discussion of the 1918 massacre of Armenians by the Turks. The massacre is a touchy subject for the Turkish government and Turkey recently withdrew its ambassador to France after France recognised the massacre as genocide and made vehement complaints to the British after the Armenian masscre was amongst those recognized on 'Holocaust day'.
What Cosar did was to run an AWK script that scanned several USEnet groups for any occurrences of certain keywords. The script would then return the first paragraph of the post, append a randomly chosen insult and add a piece of Turkish government propaganda to the end. Cosar's activities stopped when the US cancelled his H1B visa. [Don't ask how I know this stuff, I am not going to discuss my sources on /.]
Cosar's activities were an extreeme but there are plenty of similar examples. Shouting down the opposition was a popular tactic of Facist and Trotskyite groups. In the 1930s the NAZI party and the Communists would disrupt each other's meetings. Trotsky called the strategy of taking over another party by joining en-masse and being deliberately unpleasant to force others to leave 'entryism'.
These tactics are rare but not unheard of and it is this against this type of behavior that the majority of negative moderation is directed. On slashdot the 'first post' and 'goat**x' messages are a kind of mindless apolitical version of the same thing.
Strictly speaking I don't think that 'trolls' should necessarily be marked down since there is a very fine line between a deliberately provocative post and a troll. In each of the cases I have made a post that scored 5 I have thought that some people would think of as a troll. A well written intelligent troll can be fun - if the intention is to provoke thought rather than to trigger mindless reactions from the unthinking.
For these reasons I see moderation as a tool to protect the middle ground against the people whose purpose is to prevent debate.
I don't think this is restricted to online discussion. One of my frustrations with what Brill's content calls 'Shout TV' is the lack of in depth thought.
To take one topical example, on chat show after chat show the Administration claim that it is 'unthinkable' that the US airplane could have been responsible in any part for the collision near China. I have only heard one 'news' show mention the submarine sinking of a Japanesse trawler in connection with this claim - and that was The Daily Shown on the Comedy Channel.
Other relevant incidents that the research departments of the news media have overlooked are 1) the fact that the US also claims 200 mile territorial limits with respect to certain activities 2) the fact that a Russian MIG landed in Hong Kong a few decades ago and was dismantled by the Brits and the US 3) the fact that the U2 flown by Gary Powers is still in Russia
Not that these pieces of information necessarily change the situation. But listening to so called experts pontificate while they fail to address the issue the rest of the worlds press is discussing suggests that the real problem is not with the new media but with the established media who have become incompetent and lazy.
It is ironic that Mathew Gaylor should take issue with filtering however since he is the principal individual I try to filter out - in many cases by unsubscribing from the mailing lists he infests. His principal waking activity appears to be bombarding mailing lists with off topic rants/trolls on his pet obsessions. These include guns, libertarianism, gun rights, constitutionality of gun ownership, lack of civil liberties in the UK (guns again), some screed by a right wing nut that is probably about guns etc. To say he is a boring one issue monomaniac is an understatement.
I prefer to filter out all discussion of guns, abortion and the works of Ayn Rand. this is not because I don't care about the issues, I just don't care to listen to ideologues rehashing second or third hand arguments I have heard hundreds of times.