I think that it cost John Kerry a lot of votes when it was discovered that he and his idle billionaire wife were paying taxes at a rate of 15%, thanks to clever lawyering, while calling for higher taxes on hard-working dentists and doctors and small businessmen who were already paying 30% or more marginal tax rates.
No, due to investing in tax free state bonds. If you want to get tax free income the same way you don't need a fancy lawyer, just take the rate of interest that is adjusted downwards to compensate for the tax exemption.
The date coincides with the ending of the eleven plus. This is exactly what you would expect to happen.
IQ tests can be taught just like any other skill. The claims that they measure innate intelligence have never been substantiated. I was drilled in them when I was 10, my IQ rose from over 120 to over 140. By the end I was getting every question on the paper correct
Until the 1970s the UK had a two tier state education system. 5% of the kids went to grammar schools the rest went to 'secondary modern's' - sink schools in other words. To get into the grammar school and get a decent education (albeit not quite as good as the private education) you had to pass the eleven plus.
During the eleven plus era large numbers of kids were drilled in taking IQ tests. This continued for a while after the grammar schools had been phased out, partly due to inertia but also because there was tight competition for places at private schools which still have selection today.
so this is not a demonstration that kids are getting stupider, merely that the local effect of one bias in a ridiculous test is greater than the general bias.
Also, don't hardcode your CRL URL into your certificates. If that web server goes down, your entire PKI could break. It is better to leave revocation out of certificates and get all of your important PKI clients to use OSPF.
I suspect you mean OCSP here.
OCSP is definitely the way to do revocation. The CRL concept comes from the days before there was a real Internet, Lauren Kohnfelder's Msc thesis in '79. In that context a CRL is the only way to make the scheme work.
The problem with CRLs is that they are a bit like the old credit card blacklists that the cashiers used to have at department store checkouts. First there was a page of stolen card numbers, then a booklet, eventually it was going to be the size of a telephone book. Thats when the VeriPhone card verification machines appeared. An online check for every transaction.
With OCSP there is a realtime certificate status check for each transaction. That means a certain commitment to infrastructure but there are providers who can outsource PKI infrastructure to five nines or better.
Of course once you have a certificate status lookup per transaction you might as well move to a key centric PKI model similar to what Brian LaMachia did with PGP at MIT. Ultimately the PKI world is headed towards the XKMS style interaction which is simply a key centric PKI with a Web Service front end.
There are ways to extend the CRL model, distribution points, delta CRLS, partitioned CRLs, Kocher style revocation trees. I have even suggested similar schemes myself in the past. Ultimately I don't find them very convincing.
Whether you should go the homebrew route, implement an application or get an outsourced service really depends on what your resources are and what your needs are. The thing you have to be careful of is the fact that people cost money too.
For the root node of your PKI:
Take a laptop, scratch off all networking-type thingks (modem jack, ethernet jack), generated your root CA key, use it to sign your intermediate CA certificates, then lock the laptop in a safe.
Just go buy a couple of decent FIPS certified hardware tokens from someone like n-cipher.
As the seller did in fact report this vulerability to Microsoft first, would his subsequent attempt to call attention to the vulnerability by posting it for auction on eBay be considered 'irresponsible'?
No, criminal profiteering. The only type of person who could make use of the information apart from Microsoft is a criminal.
EBay has a right and a duty to stop trade in vulnerabilities same as they have a right and duty to stop trade in any other illegal material.
This is not 'full disclosure', its selling information to the criminals.
You forgot:
1. Requisition web server machine from IT
OK so you are saying that because your IT support have their keyboard wedged up their ass everyone else should configure their email systems to accept email with possible viruses.
Come to that, if you can't manage a web server what is the chance that you scan your distributions for viruses? What if your environment is compromised.
A ZIP or RAR archive, with a password (which you can specify in the email body) does the job just fine. Only don't make the archive self-extractable:-)
Actually no, the ZIP archive encryption format does not encrypt the manifest.
If you are a company distributing software updates by email you should learn about a neat new technology called the World Wide Web that does it very nicely. There is also a somewhat older technology called FTP that is designed for the same purpose.
SMTP was never intended as a mechanism for software distribution.
Hopefully GMail use the most secure, most effective form of virus scanning, block all executable attachments.
Traditional virus scanning based on a blacklist of known bad code is hopeless. By the time a new piece of trojan code has been identified a hundred million copies have been blasted out from a botnet. There is almost no legitimate use of email to send executable code, way over 99% of all executable attachments are malicious.
ISPs should block executable attachments by default and offer the people who really really think that they can't live without it the option of turning delivery back on. AIDS awareness campaigns have saved millions of lives by persuading people to use condoms even though some people think that they just have to have casual sex without one. Accepting code in email is like having casual unprotected sex, its idiotic.
There is a very small, largely theoretical problem with non-executable content. Any data that is transferred from one machine to another could be used to exploit a code vulnerability in theory. The use of anti-virus style malicious data lists will still be necessary but the problem is much, much smaller. It is a much easier signal to spot. AV systems spend huge numbers of cycles recursively unpacking program loaders. With a data exploit we know the shape of the lock it fits into.
Its pretty ironic for them to do that, especially considering China's history with banning bloggers. maybe they never noticed xinhua's general slant, or maybe its all because the news tips seem user sent. could their bloggers be in support of the PRC? either way I think its a cheap attempt to use a name to support a cast of second rate bloggers...
Or maybe the whole outfit is nothing but a front to promote wingnut propaganda for some corporate interests that have reasons for making nice with Bejing.
It might just be a mistake in configuring their moreover feed, but their terms of use which try to prohibit quoting or satire are not.
The site appears to be a carbon copy of the Huffington Post, only with right wing pundits instead of left and minus the reader comments. They have missed their moment for that, there is no shortage of right wing portal blogs without comments. What there is a growing shortage of is right wing fanatics wanting to endlessly debate why George W. Bush is absolutely right on everything.
What would make a lot more sense would be to set up a straight news and politics blog which does not have an eggregious tilt to either side. The right wing blogs play the Fox news game of pretending to be straight while delivering GOP talking points of the day verbatim. The left wing blogs make no bones about being partisan, the stated purpose of DailyKos is to campaign for Democratic candidates, Americablog makes no bones about being gay rights activism.
If you have any doubt about the right wingnut slant here just read the blogroll. Americablog? Kos? Huffington Post? Crooks and Liars? Nope. How about the commercial blogs, Salon? OK Slate, official blog of the WaPo? Nope, Nope. But pretty much every right wingnut blog you can imagine.
The cleverest thing Matt Drudge did was to put links to right and left wing media and blogs onto his home page. A lot of people still use him as a portal because the links are comprehensive. Of course that started back in the days when Drudge thought he could be a bipartisan bottomfeeder
So given the rest of the nonsense I don't see anything suprising about the deliberately misleading use of 'open source'. Clearly OSM is not open source, they don't even allow fair use of their stuff! (Like they have a choice).
Christopher Lydon appears to be refering to a different, older definition of 'open source', a term used by journalists that means publicly available information, like minutes of congress, stuff published in other media, etc. But the wingnuts are clearly using the term in the geek sense.
Just wait until inflation ramps up a bit more. Then at least the raises will seem bigger.
Fixed rate mortgage, 20% inflation with cost of living increases equals bliss for most.
I don't think the survey is particularly significant. IT people have had huge rises in recent years and they are still relatively well paid. There is unfortunately a huge surplus of certain types of IT 'skills' from the
dotcom days when everyone wanted to be in the business.
Coding is no longer a premium skill unless you are actually good at it. On one contract I was on I was doing a subcontract. The holder of the master contract had a 'programer' who didn't know C. Or Basic. Or Java. Or well anything other than Delphi. Not much use when he was meant to be writing as ISAPI filter.
Its not the curiosity of a six year old thats the problem. Its the twelve year old that decides to write 'penis' in the middle of the article for no reason.
The other huge problem are the people peddling their own political agendas. There are people who think that any page is 'biased' if it does not follow the editorial line of Fox News.
He most certainly was not Mitnicked, that would require 4 years of imprisonment without a trial.
Sure Mitnick got a trial, when he was arrested he was already a parole violator, so he went straight back to jail to complete his sentence. He could have got a quicker trial but his attorney was negotiating a plea bargain - he eventually pled guilty.
Mitnick was adept at social engineering, he appears to have socialy engineered you into thinking that he was somehow hard done by. He got the five year sentence for his sxith conviction, not his first (three of his convictions were as a juvenile).
They mentioned Paris Hilton. Apparently, the public images of herself (as a party girl with loose morals and limited brains) and that of her sister (quiet and reserved) are carefully crafted creations of a PR firm. Real-life Paris is supposed to be very street smart, with an ability to add up figures with the speed and accuracy of a computer.
You mean she has all the skills necessary to deal dope or run a numbers racket?
Actually her brand management is pretty slick, she has got to the position where she can charge $100K just to attend a party for a couple of hours. Much more of that image was created by Paris than you might imagine.
The main problem is that the sites had names like drsmithfraud.com not medicalreviews.com. If someone has a site with a name like that it is probably not a dis-interested review, it is more like publishing a hit piece on the subject.
On the other hand the doctors involved are interestingly similar. They are all promoting elective surgery for cosmetic or quality of life reasons, one at least is a heavily advertised brand that does frequent infomercials. These are not your usual doctors.
Folk who bring libel suits often have something to hide. Robert Maxwell successfully supressed criticism of his theft-in-progress of the Mirror group pension fund using libel writs. Only after he committed suicide did the massive fraud come out. Jeffry Archer got away with millions until he was found out and jailed for perjury. The US libel laws are not quite as idiotic but a successful defendant can't get costs of the plaintif and so the SLAPP potential of libel suits is much higher.
If we retire the entire NASA infrastructure and all of the taxpayer-funded hardware and facilites, is there any chance that private enterprise will take over and build huge boosters and space ports?
Absolutely no chance, which is a way of saying that the system is working, or would be working in that respect. The problem with NASA is that its real product is not much different to a high tech version of reality TV. It is NOT doing real science and the engineering value is somewhat questionable.
If NASA's first priority was science then it would have scrapped the shuttle long ago. The only scientific justification for the shuttle is to repair Hubble and thats something NASA refuses to do.
Better than repairing Hubble would be to reclaim the mirror from the Hubble copy in the Smithsonian - its actually a better mirror than the one in space, Kodak did the job right, put together a copy of Hubble from the original blueprints and launch that using the Russian rocket.
NASA is unfortunately going the way of Star Trek. TOS was good, so were the mercury missions. TNG was better (Appolo). Deep Space 9 was good in parts (unamanned mars exploration). Voyager and Enterprise sucked (the space station fiasco).
Its time to shut the manned program down and concentrate on the unmanned side for the next century or so. Until the space elevator works there is no point in doing any more.
Anyone that holds MS stock is helping the practice of off-shoring as well.
So? Is this Slashdot home of the net libertarians or has someone pharmed the site and redirected me to the Teamsters site?
Computer driven automation puts hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers out of jobs each year, far more than are put out of work due to outsourcing. So now the boot is on the other foot and jobs are somewhat tight we have computer nerds demanding protectionism???
Microsoft has a worldwide sales base. Most of its employees are concentrated in the US. That is not a sustainable situation. It is not simply a question of the balance of payments, the principle concern of India and China is to establish their own indigenous high tech industries.
Outsourcing is simply an arbitrage game and arbitrage rarely lasts for very long. In the medium term there will be a re-alignment of the currencies and the cost benefits to outsourcing will diminish.
Not such a big problem at all. Currently Google Talk only allows you to receive IMs from people already on your contact list. If all Jabber clients standardise on this then that will cut down on a considerable amount of spam.
Well I would still want to get the basic system working first before testing that theory. It is easier to add features than remove them.
In the race-timing industry, I can't get a passive RFID chip for less than $6. I can't get an active RFID chip for less than $20. That's my cost, on volume, as a timer.
Your idea of volume is rather different to the RFID scheme idea of volume. Even if you have 100,000 people in a marathon that is only of the order of the number of items bought in one store in one day.
The preliminary orders for RFID tags are in the millions of items, the expectation is that these will be churned out by the billion by third and fourth tier fabs using old processes.
Surely it's too early to be slating what they're doing with this technology. Don't you think they might be taking an incremental approach?
Well thats what I would do, test out the scheme in isolation, then allow for peering.
The big problem in the IM world is how to establish an open system without getting spammed. I don't think that Google will have missed the fact that their product is way behind the established networks. It is in Google's interest to be open here.
An RFID reader (the kind you would need for warehousing applications) will cost several thousand dollars, and each RFID chip will cost a dollar at the very least. Then, if you want active chips (so you don't have to be within feet of the item), you'll have to pay $20-ish on volume.
Nope, production prices are of the order of a few cents, that is the whole point.
Current prices are utterly irrelevant, RFID is based on the principle the tags will be cheap. If that is not true then the whole system falls apart.
The real issues here are inventory management and management of the supply chain. Its not about conveyor belts or even about unloading trucks. Its all about knowing what is on the truck, what is in the warehouse and what has been pilfered.
Over the 1990s real wages rose at an astonishing rate without significant inflation. The reason that was possible was that the wage increases were paid for by increases in productivity and in particular significant reductions in retail profit margins.
The most profitable retailer at this point is actually CostCo, a company whose shareholders have sued it for giving overly generous wages and benefits to the weekly paid staff. The way they make money off small margins is a very fast stock turnover rate. Typical turnover rate for retail is 3 times a year, CostCo turns over stock about four times faster.
If you know precisely what is in your inventory you don't need as much of it to maintain the same sales volume. So your turn over rate goes up.
... plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds"
That is more likely to be based on the IETF ATOM standard though than RSS 3.0. But it really does not matter which one Microsoft picks, just that they pick one and only one. Google made a good choice when they went with ATOM.
RSS is a mess, it became a mess because people refused to go to a standards forum and the result was a whole slew of incompatible ad-hoc extensions. There should be one syndication format and that should be a standard maintained by W3C or IETF.
Renaming RSS Web feeds makes a lot of sense, just as renaming the 802.11b WiFi made sense. RSS is underspecified and fragmented, just like 802.11b was. The point of WiFi was you knew stuff would work together. So renaming RSS Web Feeds makes a great deal of sense.
Perens completely fails to understand the real problem. Unless you have $5 million to spend defending a patent it is worthless.
The real problem here is not technology companies, they all have a stake in the industry. The real problem is patent trolls whose only asset is their patent portfolio and their only goal is to squeeze as much out of it as possible.
Most of the assanine patents that cause real issues have been bought from bankrupt dotcoms by lawyers.
The article is completely wrong when it says that the article is on Wikipedia, it is in a Wiki. Which is probably why a lot of people will do what I did and visit the site thinking 'massive NPVO violation'.
Of course what is really going on here is a massive competence violation on the part of Commander Buritto
You are still assuming that the millions of lines of code they were talking about and have not been able to supply a single example of while being reduced to grasping at straws actually exist.
Actually no, I think what will happen is that SCO will eventually be forced to identify some code areas or loose the case immediately. These will then be instantly replaced. Within a week or two there will be pretty good evidence produced that the code areas are not infringing.
Slashdot Mirror
No, due to investing in tax free state bonds. If you want to get tax free income the same way you don't need a fancy lawyer, just take the rate of interest that is adjusted downwards to compensate for the tax exemption.
IQ tests can be taught just like any other skill. The claims that they measure innate intelligence have never been substantiated. I was drilled in them when I was 10, my IQ rose from over 120 to over 140. By the end I was getting every question on the paper correct
Until the 1970s the UK had a two tier state education system. 5% of the kids went to grammar schools the rest went to 'secondary modern's' - sink schools in other words. To get into the grammar school and get a decent education (albeit not quite as good as the private education) you had to pass the eleven plus.
During the eleven plus era large numbers of kids were drilled in taking IQ tests. This continued for a while after the grammar schools had been phased out, partly due to inertia but also because there was tight competition for places at private schools which still have selection today.
so this is not a demonstration that kids are getting stupider, merely that the local effect of one bias in a ridiculous test is greater than the general bias.
I suspect you mean OCSP here.
OCSP is definitely the way to do revocation. The CRL concept comes from the days before there was a real Internet, Lauren Kohnfelder's Msc thesis in '79. In that context a CRL is the only way to make the scheme work.
The problem with CRLs is that they are a bit like the old credit card blacklists that the cashiers used to have at department store checkouts. First there was a page of stolen card numbers, then a booklet, eventually it was going to be the size of a telephone book. Thats when the VeriPhone card verification machines appeared. An online check for every transaction.
With OCSP there is a realtime certificate status check for each transaction. That means a certain commitment to infrastructure but there are providers who can outsource PKI infrastructure to five nines or better.
Of course once you have a certificate status lookup per transaction you might as well move to a key centric PKI model similar to what Brian LaMachia did with PGP at MIT. Ultimately the PKI world is headed towards the XKMS style interaction which is simply a key centric PKI with a Web Service front end.
There are ways to extend the CRL model, distribution points, delta CRLS, partitioned CRLs, Kocher style revocation trees. I have even suggested similar schemes myself in the past. Ultimately I don't find them very convincing.
Whether you should go the homebrew route, implement an application or get an outsourced service really depends on what your resources are and what your needs are. The thing you have to be careful of is the fact that people cost money too.
For the root node of your PKI: Take a laptop, scratch off all networking-type thingks (modem jack, ethernet jack), generated your root CA key, use it to sign your intermediate CA certificates, then lock the laptop in a safe.
Just go buy a couple of decent FIPS certified hardware tokens from someone like n-cipher.
No, criminal profiteering. The only type of person who could make use of the information apart from Microsoft is a criminal.
EBay has a right and a duty to stop trade in vulnerabilities same as they have a right and duty to stop trade in any other illegal material.
This is not 'full disclosure', its selling information to the criminals.
And comes with a highly effective bozo filter since the naive users who run code in email attachments are not the typical PGP user.
OK so you are saying that because your IT support have their keyboard wedged up their ass everyone else should configure their email systems to accept email with possible viruses.
Come to that, if you can't manage a web server what is the chance that you scan your distributions for viruses? What if your environment is compromised.
Actually no, the ZIP archive encryption format does not encrypt the manifest.
If you are a company distributing software updates by email you should learn about a neat new technology called the World Wide Web that does it very nicely. There is also a somewhat older technology called FTP that is designed for the same purpose.
SMTP was never intended as a mechanism for software distribution.
Traditional virus scanning based on a blacklist of known bad code is hopeless. By the time a new piece of trojan code has been identified a hundred million copies have been blasted out from a botnet. There is almost no legitimate use of email to send executable code, way over 99% of all executable attachments are malicious.
ISPs should block executable attachments by default and offer the people who really really think that they can't live without it the option of turning delivery back on. AIDS awareness campaigns have saved millions of lives by persuading people to use condoms even though some people think that they just have to have casual sex without one. Accepting code in email is like having casual unprotected sex, its idiotic.
There is a very small, largely theoretical problem with non-executable content. Any data that is transferred from one machine to another could be used to exploit a code vulnerability in theory. The use of anti-virus style malicious data lists will still be necessary but the problem is much, much smaller. It is a much easier signal to spot. AV systems spend huge numbers of cycles recursively unpacking program loaders. With a data exploit we know the shape of the lock it fits into.
Or maybe the whole outfit is nothing but a front to promote wingnut propaganda for some corporate interests that have reasons for making nice with Bejing.
It might just be a mistake in configuring their moreover feed, but their terms of use which try to prohibit quoting or satire are not.
The site appears to be a carbon copy of the Huffington Post, only with right wing pundits instead of left and minus the reader comments. They have missed their moment for that, there is no shortage of right wing portal blogs without comments. What there is a growing shortage of is right wing fanatics wanting to endlessly debate why George W. Bush is absolutely right on everything.
What would make a lot more sense would be to set up a straight news and politics blog which does not have an eggregious tilt to either side. The right wing blogs play the Fox news game of pretending to be straight while delivering GOP talking points of the day verbatim. The left wing blogs make no bones about being partisan, the stated purpose of DailyKos is to campaign for Democratic candidates, Americablog makes no bones about being gay rights activism.
If you have any doubt about the right wingnut slant here just read the blogroll. Americablog? Kos? Huffington Post? Crooks and Liars? Nope. How about the commercial blogs, Salon? OK Slate, official blog of the WaPo? Nope, Nope. But pretty much every right wingnut blog you can imagine.
The cleverest thing Matt Drudge did was to put links to right and left wing media and blogs onto his home page. A lot of people still use him as a portal because the links are comprehensive. Of course that started back in the days when Drudge thought he could be a bipartisan bottomfeeder
So given the rest of the nonsense I don't see anything suprising about the deliberately misleading use of 'open source'. Clearly OSM is not open source, they don't even allow fair use of their stuff! (Like they have a choice).
Christopher Lydon appears to be refering to a different, older definition of 'open source', a term used by journalists that means publicly available information, like minutes of congress, stuff published in other media, etc. But the wingnuts are clearly using the term in the geek sense.
Fixed rate mortgage, 20% inflation with cost of living increases equals bliss for most.
I don't think the survey is particularly significant. IT people have had huge rises in recent years and they are still relatively well paid. There is unfortunately a huge surplus of certain types of IT 'skills' from the dotcom days when everyone wanted to be in the business.
Coding is no longer a premium skill unless you are actually good at it. On one contract I was on I was doing a subcontract. The holder of the master contract had a 'programer' who didn't know C. Or Basic. Or Java. Or well anything other than Delphi. Not much use when he was meant to be writing as ISAPI filter.
The other huge problem are the people peddling their own political agendas. There are people who think that any page is 'biased' if it does not follow the editorial line of Fox News.
Sure Mitnick got a trial, when he was arrested he was already a parole violator, so he went straight back to jail to complete his sentence. He could have got a quicker trial but his attorney was negotiating a plea bargain - he eventually pled guilty.
Mitnick was adept at social engineering, he appears to have socialy engineered you into thinking that he was somehow hard done by. He got the five year sentence for his sxith conviction, not his first (three of his convictions were as a juvenile).
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
You mean she has all the skills necessary to deal dope or run a numbers racket?
Actually her brand management is pretty slick, she has got to the position where she can charge $100K just to attend a party for a couple of hours. Much more of that image was created by Paris than you might imagine.
On the other hand the doctors involved are interestingly similar. They are all promoting elective surgery for cosmetic or quality of life reasons, one at least is a heavily advertised brand that does frequent infomercials. These are not your usual doctors.
Folk who bring libel suits often have something to hide. Robert Maxwell successfully supressed criticism of his theft-in-progress of the Mirror group pension fund using libel writs. Only after he committed suicide did the massive fraud come out. Jeffry Archer got away with millions until he was found out and jailed for perjury. The US libel laws are not quite as idiotic but a successful defendant can't get costs of the plaintif and so the SLAPP potential of libel suits is much higher.
Absolutely no chance, which is a way of saying that the system is working, or would be working in that respect. The problem with NASA is that its real product is not much different to a high tech version of reality TV. It is NOT doing real science and the engineering value is somewhat questionable.
If NASA's first priority was science then it would have scrapped the shuttle long ago. The only scientific justification for the shuttle is to repair Hubble and thats something NASA refuses to do.
Better than repairing Hubble would be to reclaim the mirror from the Hubble copy in the Smithsonian - its actually a better mirror than the one in space, Kodak did the job right, put together a copy of Hubble from the original blueprints and launch that using the Russian rocket.
NASA is unfortunately going the way of Star Trek. TOS was good, so were the mercury missions. TNG was better (Appolo). Deep Space 9 was good in parts (unamanned mars exploration). Voyager and Enterprise sucked (the space station fiasco).
Its time to shut the manned program down and concentrate on the unmanned side for the next century or so. Until the space elevator works there is no point in doing any more.
So? Is this Slashdot home of the net libertarians or has someone pharmed the site and redirected me to the Teamsters site?
Computer driven automation puts hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers out of jobs each year, far more than are put out of work due to outsourcing. So now the boot is on the other foot and jobs are somewhat tight we have computer nerds demanding protectionism???
Microsoft has a worldwide sales base. Most of its employees are concentrated in the US. That is not a sustainable situation. It is not simply a question of the balance of payments, the principle concern of India and China is to establish their own indigenous high tech industries.
Outsourcing is simply an arbitrage game and arbitrage rarely lasts for very long. In the medium term there will be a re-alignment of the currencies and the cost benefits to outsourcing will diminish.
Well I would still want to get the basic system working first before testing that theory. It is easier to add features than remove them.
Your idea of volume is rather different to the RFID scheme idea of volume. Even if you have 100,000 people in a marathon that is only of the order of the number of items bought in one store in one day.
The preliminary orders for RFID tags are in the millions of items, the expectation is that these will be churned out by the billion by third and fourth tier fabs using old processes.
Well thats what I would do, test out the scheme in isolation, then allow for peering.
The big problem in the IM world is how to establish an open system without getting spammed. I don't think that Google will have missed the fact that their product is way behind the established networks. It is in Google's interest to be open here.
Nope, production prices are of the order of a few cents, that is the whole point.
Current prices are utterly irrelevant, RFID is based on the principle the tags will be cheap. If that is not true then the whole system falls apart.
The real issues here are inventory management and management of the supply chain. Its not about conveyor belts or even about unloading trucks. Its all about knowing what is on the truck, what is in the warehouse and what has been pilfered.
Over the 1990s real wages rose at an astonishing rate without significant inflation. The reason that was possible was that the wage increases were paid for by increases in productivity and in particular significant reductions in retail profit margins.
The most profitable retailer at this point is actually CostCo, a company whose shareholders have sued it for giving overly generous wages and benefits to the weekly paid staff. The way they make money off small margins is a very fast stock turnover rate. Typical turnover rate for retail is 3 times a year, CostCo turns over stock about four times faster.
If you know precisely what is in your inventory you don't need as much of it to maintain the same sales volume. So your turn over rate goes up.
That is more likely to be based on the IETF ATOM standard though than RSS 3.0. But it really does not matter which one Microsoft picks, just that they pick one and only one. Google made a good choice when they went with ATOM.
RSS is a mess, it became a mess because people refused to go to a standards forum and the result was a whole slew of incompatible ad-hoc extensions. There should be one syndication format and that should be a standard maintained by W3C or IETF.
Renaming RSS Web feeds makes a lot of sense, just as renaming the 802.11b WiFi made sense. RSS is underspecified and fragmented, just like 802.11b was. The point of WiFi was you knew stuff would work together. So renaming RSS Web Feeds makes a great deal of sense.
The real problem here is not technology companies, they all have a stake in the industry. The real problem is patent trolls whose only asset is their patent portfolio and their only goal is to squeeze as much out of it as possible.
Most of the assanine patents that cause real issues have been bought from bankrupt dotcoms by lawyers.
Of course what is really going on here is a massive competence violation on the part of Commander Buritto
Actually no, I think what will happen is that SCO will eventually be forced to identify some code areas or loose the case immediately. These will then be instantly replaced. Within a week or two there will be pretty good evidence produced that the code areas are not infringing.
I just wonder what sort of emails Eric Hughes, well known cryptopunk and RMS buddy is getting as a result of this slashdot story about Erik Hughes.