I'm interested in hearing exactly what complaints you have about the lemelson-mit inventor's program. Got any links?
Lemelson is the guy who claimed to have a patent on the bar-code, despite having precisely nothing to do with the invention of it. Back in 1946 or so he filed a patent 'machine vision' which basically claimed the idea of having a camera watch a manufacturing line. He then submarined it for 30 odd years and when bar codes appeared he filed a continuation in part claiming them on the grounds, well that the USPTO would let him.
There is plenty about his scam on the web I found this with 5 minutes googling. Typical of the judgement is ""Mr. Lemelson systematically extended the pendency of his applications by sitting on his rights, and sequentially filing one application at a time so that he could maintain copendency while waiting for viable commercial systems to be designed and marketed,". It is hard to think of a way the patents were not invalidated.
The MIT-Lemelson prize for invention is awarded anually. The idea is to burnish his unlamented memory and try to make it look like Lemelson invented stuff. In fact he made a huge pile of money from the bogus bar code patent when a group of manufacturers paid him over a billion dollars.
>If George W. Bush is against 'same sex marriage' he should watch >a video and learn a new technique like the rest of us.
What on earth does that mean?
they'll continue to only reject patents owned by individuals when they annoy a multibillion dollar corporation
Actually this is the main pain point.
Patents held by companies that do business are not generally a problem. IBM and Microsoft both own a metric shit-load of patents and they don't cause a tenth of the problems that Doyle/Eolas type individual 'inventors' do.
OK Microsoft has a patent on encoding document files in XML format. Does anyone really think that they would try to enforce it? The prior art is called HTML. The only logical reason for filing that patent and many of the other recent ones is to stop a would-be Doyle doing the same.
If you think the Eolas situation is sick take a look at Lemelson, over a billion dollars extorted through a completely worthless claim. The old crook's widow bribed MIT to start an 'inventor's prize' to burnish his name. To their everlasting shame MIT took the cash.
It would be much better if the USPTO would do its job and reject the crap. One of the issues I face as an architect is that a patent holder can often play stupid games when we are agreeing a standard. It gives unfair leverage. So I end up having to file patents to stop other people doing the same to me, now I have the unfair leverage.
In about two months time there is going to be a slashdot story accusing me of all sorts of stuff because I patented every idea I could think of to stop spam. But it is the only tool I have to stop some other person doing it.
At least I know that my employer has a big interest in making the ideas unencumbered and is in no danger of being taken over or going under. But there is always the danger of a SCO type situation. SCO would never have tried the desperation suit against IBM if they still had a viable business.
But that's the complete opposite of the truth. It needs the fingerprint of whoever owns the vault, not whoever owns the original credit card.
This is the real problem. These guys sound like they have done a great job of protecting the consumer. In the process they have completely ignored the fact that they have created a method of forging credit cards that requires no expertise or special tools.
I think it will not be very long before the card associations tell their merchants that they must not accept these cards.
Re:Use an NP-hard problem
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
Coming up with a problem is the least of our worries, just pick a problem that's NP-complete or at least NP-hard. Let's pick an example problem you've heard of: factoring is believed to be NP-hard, and would work fine for this purpose.
Or you could read the Microsoft documents and see that they propose using a modified form of SHA-1. The modification is to stop people using hardware accelerators to build spam farms.
Folk are being somewhat reactionary here. Microsoft offered CallerID with free and open licensing. A guy who is involved with a rival technology is spreading FUD about the licensing regime. Yeah right Redmond must be the bad guys here...
Nobody with a clue thinks that they can pull a RAMBUS here. What Microsoft want to do here is to make sure that the spec stays open. If they don't come up with an acceptable license to get the spec into standard process we all go use SPF instead.
Somehow, I doubt this. Do you really think that the "craftsmen" who copied (even very well or perfect) Michael Angelo's David were of a "highest form" of regard, even above the original artist?
I said craftsman's art. Artists were considered slightly differently, but not all that much. Caravaggio's work was admired because of his technique and the skill with which he produced sculpture in the Greek-Roman tradition.
In his day the innovative elements of his work were not considered in the same light we consider them today. And for the next couple of centuries artists were judged by their ability to replicate the techniques and subjects of Carravaggio, Raphael, da Vinci et. al.
The example you give 'David' was admired because it represented a 'hero' of the old testament in the style of a Greek Hercules. It was the mastery of the Greek heroic that won praise at the time. The innovative homerotic theme was not admired in the same light. In any case Carravagio is being praised for his ability to copy the human form, not for innovating a new form.
The idea of pure originality without any demonstration of skill or technique only appears in the Modernist movement 1890 or so. Duchamp certainly could not have got away with his ready-mades any earlier. Even the idea that art could represent sensation rather than merely depict nature was controvertial when Turner started to show his abstract sea scenes. In his day the innovation was dismissed as 'soap suds and white wash'. It hurt his career and the career of Ruskin.
So no, I don't think you do manage to show that innovation was appreciated as a good in itself prior to the industrial revolution. If you look at some of the loopier pieces of modern art (the unmade bed) I think it is time to consider innovation for its own sake as probably overrated. The shock of being invited to consider something new as art wears thin after a while. The day that Damian Hirst exhibits one of his own turds pickled in his own urine is not far off, beat that one.
I think the false underlying assumptions here are that originality is always good and that if two people have the same idea one must have copied from the other.
The idea that copying is bad is a recent one. Prior to the industrial revolution the highest form of the craftsman's art was often considered to be the ability to create perfect copies of other people's work. Innovation is a relatively new idea. If you go to recently industrialized countries the bias for originality is often absent.
Several people have the same idea all the time. Whit Diffie was not the first to think up public key cryptography, but nobody claims he copied it off Cocks at GCHQ. I often take apart other people's schemes and find they have had ideas that are similar to my own.
Invention is not just originality, it is also reuse of existing ideas, improving where necessary and useful. In many case it is the circumstances that lead to the result.
Take a look at the Cagle cartoons on Slate. They have all the editorial cartoons from 40 odd papers across the country. The number of times that the same cartoon idea appears again and again is uncanny. These people might be copying to a small extent, but it simply isn't possible for them to all come out with the same idea in such a short time.
I am probably not the only person who thinks that the latest '24x7' hunt for Bin Laden is something we should have been doing for the past two years. If you read the blogs you will find page after page of people outraged that the start of the hunt for Bin Laden seems to have been timed to coincide with the first Bush election ads. I doubt many of them have seen my slashdot.sig. Clearly much of this is independent thought.
Blogs are an entertainment and a political movement. They are not academic journals or treatises. Not that there is much of importance or originality in the academic litterature. Sure people lift ideas but thats why most people are putting them out there.
For years people have been asking if I am angry that Microsoft has copied many of my ideas. Oddly enough nobody has ever asked me if I minded other people copying my ideas (and passing them off as their own which Microsoft has never done), but that is another story. The fact is that I want people to use my ideas, they are useless unless they are put into action. Microsoft use a lot of my ideas because I spend a lot of time persuading them to use them. My principal complaint about Netscape is that they just shut themselves off from the Web community, they got the idea that they were the only people who had the good ideas.
I only really see this being useful for teenagers and people whose companies don't depend on secrecy at their level.
Yeah, like nobody ever made money from selling tech to teenage Japanese girls. Who do you think bought all those camera phones and sent all those DOCOMO messages?
I don't think there would be a problem finding a market for this. Also if you look at the pictures it would be pretty easy to hide. Looks to me like it would fit in a breast pocket fairly easily.
So I would expect there would be objections to folk taking them into movie theatres and such.
You won't. Because you can't short SCO. I order to short a stock there has to be stock out there to short. And companies with few shares out there aren't "shortable," therefore, if the price goes up, it's got nothing to do with people trying to cover their short positions or creating short positions.
You can borrow stock in pretty much any company out there. The reason you should not borrow SCO stock is that all the borowable stock has been shorted longsince.
This creates a situation called a short interest trap. If the stock kicks up for any reason, or the amount of stock available to borrow suddenly decreases the shorts are forced to buy the stock back at market. This can lead to a stock bubble that is entirely due to the shorts being squeezed.
SCO does have one remaining asset of value, the rights to UNIX. Quite what those rights is will likely be significantly reduced as a result of the case, but the value will not reach zero. Of course in the meantime lawyers fees will probably outweigh the remaining assets.
Mike Dell is really following intelligent business. The jobs of CEO and Chairman, while it looks good on your resume to hold both, are really two jobs with completely different responsibilities, and unless its a really small corp, they should really be done by two separate people.
The problem being that to do the job of chairman effectively you usually have to have been the ex-CEO. So michael Dell is only following the normal practice for a founder, giving up the day to day running of the business and keeping the long term governance position.
The dotcom startups were not really abberations here. There is not much point in having a chairman in a company that is only a few years old. if the management team are crooks or jerks then the truck is going to hit the wall and all the investors will lose their money in any case.
What was an abberation was when the long established companies started running themselves in this way. Michael Eisener did not create Disney, he should not have unfettered control. He should not be paid so much for such mediocre results.
Uh, don't be so sure about that. RH dug their heels in the ground and told us in no uncertain terms "no way" when we asked for indemnification against SCO suing us (a community college district) for using RH in our RedHat Academy.
Thats quite interesting because if you think about it RH or the supplier is on the hook and there is no way they can avoid liability due to their own negligence.
One of the peculiarities of contract law is that you cannot avoid liability due to negligence. Sure you can put a term in the contract that says you are not liable, but these are not enforcable.
This is why peculiar instruments like Bills of Lading or Letters of Credit cannot be constructed out of contractual arrangements. The idea there is to explicitly avoid negligence issues. So you end up with the completely bizare situation that a letter of credit has to be discharged even if the documents presented are clearly fraudulent.
In this particular case it would appear that there is a pretty strong claim. I would not give much for the chances of RH paying out much. But IBM is clearly good for it.
Not that I think that there is any chance that SCO would win. I think there is a slightly better chance that Ralph Nader will replace Cheney as Bush's official running mate.
The most likely course of action, I would think, is that AutoZone will get both the injunction and the rest of the lawsuit put on hold pending the outcome of the IBM/SCO wrangle. In the meantime, it will merely act as a potential financial risk of minimal severity
It is very unlikely that even if SCO won that it would recover more than the $699 per server license fee they are attempting to charge. I doubt that this will cover the legal fees. Sure Autozone will be out some legal fees as well, but every major company is the target of crank lawsuits.
Sure there are huge penalties for copyright infringement, but the courts have never applied them against consumers in the way that the RIAA would like them to be applied.
Very few plaintifs ever get trebble damages awarded. I don't think it is very likely that punitive damages would be awarded against a defendant that very clearly and entirely reasonably believes it was acting within the law. Autozone is not Napster, their belief that they are acting within the law is not based on a literal interpretation of a suspect legal opinion.
I don't recall any case where punitive damages were awarded without either negligence or intent. The whole point of punitive damages is deterrence and you that does not apply in this case.
Finally, it is very clear that the only reason that any infringement continues is SCO's refusal to state the scope of the claimed infringement with precision. I believe that the $699 is a cap on the maximum damages that SCO is likely to receive, I expect actual damages were the case to be proved would be much less.
Isn't it going to be a top 1000 company... and not an Internet related business?
Its Irving Tonks, a 16 year old high school student in North Dakota. He downloaded Linux off the net and he is currently using it to write code for a class project in perl on a PentiumPro machine his Dad gave him from work.
Things could be grim in the Tonks household - after Dad lost his job and mum died of cancer they have been living off Gran's social security. It is not clear that they can afford the billion dollars SCO is claiming in damages.
Support from a guy with a two-digit Slashdot User ID... what more could you ask for?
Support from a guy with a slashdot ID that is a 1024 bit RSA encryption key?
I have been doing crypto for a long time now. One of the points that Eric Rescorla raised with me when we were speaking at the RSA show was that more email has been secured with SSL in the first year of deployment than has ever been encrypted with S/MIME and PGP combined.
We all screwed up, Bruce said so in secrets and lies, but he still only half gets it. Almost all the crypto 'truth' turned out to be bogus. End to end crypto is a crock for a start, especially when you try to retrofit to a legacy protocol.
We spent years deplying S/MIME in almost every email reader, but we never made it easy to distribute certs. We also wasted time getting people to implement S/MIME when it would have been better to get them to start by simply not doing harm - if someone gets a multipart/signed message that they don't understand the mail reader should present the signed text without any complaint, just the same as any other unauthenticated content. Same with a message from a person with an invalid or expired cert.
The big screw was messing up the policy aspect. We need an infrastructure to tell people the security that an Internet server supports. DNS is fine for this, as folk point out DNS is secure enough unless there is a pretty difficult active attack.
My criticism of the inanities of the IETF wrt DNSSEC still stand. They just do not understand security there. it would have been better to have deployed DNSSEC with OPTIN two years ago than to continue to wait for all parties to agree on perfection.
PVR does sound like a killer dual-functionality that would move 10s of millions of units, as DVD playback did for the PS2. However, if Sony doesn't try to do PVR in the PS3, then that functionality wouldn't be required to beat be competitive. So again, it's all a matter of necessary cost.
I think that this still misses the opportunity here. Does a VCR come with one VHS tape that is built in when you buy it? Of course not, you have a whole stack of them. So why build the disk into the XBox? The way to create the killer pvr is to be the first one with removable storage.
Think about it, hard drive storage is already competative with VHS tape. I can get a hard drive for $120 with 160Gb, that s less than a buck an hour of recording time. Its not that long since VHS cost that kind of price and in any case I will pay a premium for smaller form factor, 40 tapes in the space of one.
None of the current PVRs have anything like the storage I would want. I have about 200 VHS tapes and I would have more if they were not so idiotically huge. I want at least 1Tb of storage, thats only 6 drives. But more than any PVR will support.
Let's see. Yesterday on Slashdot we had Microsoft adding anti-viral features into the next generation of Windows and today the anti-malware industry comes up with a lobbist group. Somehow, I think this has more to do of the security of their businesses from Microsoft's strengths than the security of any computers from Microsoft's weaknesses.
I doubt that this is an anti-Microsoft group as people are conspiricizing. It would make sense to join if you are a small to medium size business player and you don't run a policy office direct.
Its not just Microsoft thats missing, VeriSign and IBM are not there either, but they don't need this type of group.
Membership fees are pretty rich $150K or $60K. Thats not chump change. But it is much less than what a full DC policy setup would cost to run.
So are you going to leave us in suspense or are you going to tell us how you came to be exchanging e-mails with Timothy McVeigh?
Timothy McVeigh and fellow loonies went on what became known as the 'gun nut road show' on Usenet back in 91/92. They got bored talking to each other so they went off to anoy the rest of Usenet with posts into various culture groups.
McVeigh did not come across as any loonier than any of the other members of the group.
While I mostly agree with you, you have the Ruby Ridge situation a little wrong. The US 9th circuit court of appeals decided that Idaho COULD prosecute the FBI sniper who shot Randy Weaver's wife, but the new Boundary county prosecutor decided not to.
And lets face it jury verdicts are never wrong and it is only a matter of time before O.J. finds the real killers
As an aside, if you think it's Castro that's still in power in Cuba, you're very naive. Look at the recent events there and you'll see it's clear that those close to him are taking steps to retain power when the man himself is gone. Then again, perhaps you're just one of those left wing cranks (whatever the hell a crank is) that comes to conclusions about what US foreign policy should be based on feelings instead of the painful facts.
It was Reagan that kept telling us that sanctions would not work in South Africa. Only they did work, apartheid is gone.
Forty years later sanctions and the image of Fidel and Che are the only things keeping the Cuban communist party propped up. Castro uses sanctions the same way that Bush uses Al Qaeda, as an excuse for every failure of domestic policy.
The Cuban sanctions have failled because they have the exact wrong psychology. The only thing Cubans have that they can feel pride about is that they have taken on the greatest superpower and won. Kinda stupid thing to be proud of but that is what is keeping the bastards in power.
Open the floodgates to tourism and there is simply no way the communist party is going to last more than a few years. They will go the same way that the USSR went, their people will just get fed up.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the FBI has been doing this in computer crime cases since the last few years of the Clinton administration under that bastion of civil liberties (nevermind Waco, Ruby Ridge, or Elian Gonzalez) Janet Reno, and it didn't require several TB of potential evidence to make it happen
I remember exchanging emails with Timothy McVeigh who murdered 270 people in Oaklahoma. He murdered those people because of this type of crank theory. We have put up with this right wing crank politics for too long.
The fact is that the Waco loonies killed themselves, the Ruby Ridge guy was responsible for everything that happened and Elian Gonzalez should be back with his father. Castro is almost 80, not many dictators make it to 90 and are still in power. By the time Elian leaves school Castro will be dead. But I can see why a bunch of right wing cranks who talk big about the importance of family would think it would be better that he is kidnapped by a bunch of his relatives looking to exploit him for political purposes than grow up with his father.
Sure the FBI has done a lot of things that are stupid or outright corrupt. Hoover used the FBI to persue his own vendettas, he refused to prosecute the mafia. That does not mean that the federal government is at fault in every case and it certainly does not mean that the events cited by right wing cranks are proof of abuse. The persecution of Charlie Chaplin and John Lenon were abuses. If some nut gets some guns, holes himself up someplace and threatens to shoot members of law enforcement who might be looking to arrest him, well anyone who gets shot is primarily their responsibility, same way that 9/11 is primarily the responsibiliy of Al Zawahiri and his frat boy friend Bin-Laden. Sure the CIA and FBI screwed up big with 9-11, Freah's people thought the war on drugs was a higher priority than terrorism. But keep perspective here.
Believe me, the last thing some poor special agent wants to do is sift through TBs of customer crap and put a company out of business or under financial hardship.
Absolutely right, unless there is an ulterior motive. That is not very likely in this case. If the FBI were investigating planned parenthood or another group that John Ashcroft is opposed to politically there might be an issue. There has been a lot of suspicious uses of the IRS against political opponents under Bush II. Ashcroft has endorsed a lot of extra-constitutional activites but so far the FBI under Muller does not seem to be a problem.
I suspect what happened in this particular case is that the agents thought that the hosting provider were simply not interested in complying. They probably met a sysadmin that gave them some attitude.
What we need here is a better way of serving this type of intercept warrant so that the parameters of the search are predetermined and understood by the court. We have this for IM intercepts so it should be possible to define it for IRC
Isn't this going to just push VoIP companies overseas where there won't be as tight regulation? It doesn't matter to the end user in the long run where the physical servers are located afterall.
If you think about it you will soon see that this suggestion is -1 clueless, not +1 insightfull.
Sure you can offer telephone service overseas, but to reach that service from an ordinary US landline or wireless phone you now have to make an international call. I don't think vonage would be quite so popular if you can's connect to the legacy telco systems without paying a fee.
The 911 regulation is no big deal to implement. All you have to do is to use SS7 to route the call, just like any other. OK so there are some problems knowing exactly where the VOIP service is, but this does not have to be 100% accurate and billing address will be close enough in most cases.
Sure it is pretty easy for someone to bypass this and give 911 false info. But relatively few people will do that and the error rate will be much less than the error rate for wireless phones.
It is possible to go from an IP address to a physical location for most broadband connections. You can even do it internationaly if you really need to - as some of the guys sending phishing spam have learned.
Why on earth would someone want to pay $250 so that they can smell their spam mail?
Why on earth would someone want to pay $0.25 so that they can smell any of their mail?
There is simply no point to this idea, in the first place the only people who would ever send you stinkmail would be other gits who were clueless enough to buy the system. And just what is an attachment of some cheap scent going to do for the recipient in any case?
The takeup of video email is pitiful enough and that is an application where lots of people have cameras and lots of people can receive the messages.
I am trying to work out what all this has to do with Apple. I had a SCSI interface on my VAX workstation long before Apple sold them in the consumer market.
Sure Apple has a history of adopting high end technologies in their machines, but this has more to do with the fact that Apple has to work hard to justify the 50% or more price markup their machines have over a PC with equivalent specs. They have to be a bit more aggressive on adoption of high end tech.
If Apple had gone under in 1998 rather than getting rescued by his Steveship we would still have PCs with SCSI disk controllers and we would still have video cameras that could connect up to a PC.
The problem with the Apple/bluetooth argument is that when you look at the reason people are junking bluetooth it is the lack of interoperability. The standard is not. That is not something Steve tends to tollerate, the selling point of the Mac is that it is plug and play.
Sure Apple can stick bluetooth in a laptop, but they don't have the industry pull to get everyone else to sync to their standard. Nokia and the phone manufacturers have already sold more phones that Apple will ever sell computers.
Let's put this in perspective, I paid $17,000 last year in federal income tax alone. All by myself. Even a 1% tax cut is $170 in my pocket, or about 15 bucks a month.
Cry me a river, Over the past four years I paid over half a million dollars in taxes. But I would rather see the tax cuts repealled and the economy doing better than continue with a stagnant economy and $50,000 off my taxes.
During the Clinton boom the economy grew 4% year on year, that means the economy grew by almost a fifth in each term. That means far more to me than any amount I might pay in taxes. During the Bush recession the economy was stagnant, there was one quarter where it grew by 2% (reported in the press as 8% anualized) and a second when it grew by 1% (reported in the press as 5% anualized). But we still havent had one year that comes close to matching the Clinton performance.
Sure Bush had some bad luck, but all President's do. Bush has made no good luck. That is the problem. He is also responsible for the bulk of the deficit, he has not vetoed a single one of the pork filled spending bills from the Republican Congress. He pushed through irresponsible tax cuts which in many cases will only start to take effect after the recession is over. That means that long term interest rates, the rates businesses borrow money at and the rates that determine economic growth are much too high. The markets know there is a big increase in borrowing comming.
The falloff of tax revenues and the $250 billion cost of the war in Iraq are part of the reason for the deficit, but they are not the biggest reason and they are not part of the forward planning estimates that are predicting $400 billion dollar deficits for the next ten years.
So no, a four year tax cut does not impress me in the slightest. It is clearly not going to last. Regardless of who is President next year taxes are going to return to their pre-Bush level and then some extra will be added on top. Read my lips, Tax rises are inevitable.
No politician deserves credit for tax cuts unless they can cut spending or raise revenues by enough to pay for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Lemelson is the guy who claimed to have a patent on the bar-code, despite having precisely nothing to do with the invention of it. Back in 1946 or so he filed a patent 'machine vision' which basically claimed the idea of having a camera watch a manufacturing line. He then submarined it for 30 odd years and when bar codes appeared he filed a continuation in part claiming them on the grounds, well that the USPTO would let him.
There is plenty about his scam on the web I found this with 5 minutes googling. Typical of the judgement is ""Mr. Lemelson systematically extended the pendency of his applications by sitting on his rights, and sequentially filing one application at a time so that he could maintain copendency while waiting for viable commercial systems to be designed and marketed,". It is hard to think of a way the patents were not invalidated.
The MIT-Lemelson prize for invention is awarded anually. The idea is to burnish his unlamented memory and try to make it look like Lemelson invented stuff. In fact he made a huge pile of money from the bogus bar code patent when a group of manufacturers paid him over a billion dollars.
Looks like actual notice to me.
What on earth does that mean?
OK I'll rewrite it...
Actually this is the main pain point.
Patents held by companies that do business are not generally a problem. IBM and Microsoft both own a metric shit-load of patents and they don't cause a tenth of the problems that Doyle/Eolas type individual 'inventors' do.
OK Microsoft has a patent on encoding document files in XML format. Does anyone really think that they would try to enforce it? The prior art is called HTML. The only logical reason for filing that patent and many of the other recent ones is to stop a would-be Doyle doing the same.
If you think the Eolas situation is sick take a look at Lemelson, over a billion dollars extorted through a completely worthless claim. The old crook's widow bribed MIT to start an 'inventor's prize' to burnish his name. To their everlasting shame MIT took the cash.
It would be much better if the USPTO would do its job and reject the crap. One of the issues I face as an architect is that a patent holder can often play stupid games when we are agreeing a standard. It gives unfair leverage. So I end up having to file patents to stop other people doing the same to me, now I have the unfair leverage.
In about two months time there is going to be a slashdot story accusing me of all sorts of stuff because I patented every idea I could think of to stop spam. But it is the only tool I have to stop some other person doing it.
At least I know that my employer has a big interest in making the ideas unencumbered and is in no danger of being taken over or going under. But there is always the danger of a SCO type situation. SCO would never have tried the desperation suit against IBM if they still had a viable business.
This is the real problem. These guys sound like they have done a great job of protecting the consumer. In the process they have completely ignored the fact that they have created a method of forging credit cards that requires no expertise or special tools.
I think it will not be very long before the card associations tell their merchants that they must not accept these cards.
Or you could read the Microsoft documents and see that they propose using a modified form of SHA-1. The modification is to stop people using hardware accelerators to build spam farms.
Folk are being somewhat reactionary here. Microsoft offered CallerID with free and open licensing. A guy who is involved with a rival technology is spreading FUD about the licensing regime. Yeah right Redmond must be the bad guys here...
Nobody with a clue thinks that they can pull a RAMBUS here. What Microsoft want to do here is to make sure that the spec stays open. If they don't come up with an acceptable license to get the spec into standard process we all go use SPF instead.
I said craftsman's art. Artists were considered slightly differently, but not all that much. Caravaggio's work was admired because of his technique and the skill with which he produced sculpture in the Greek-Roman tradition.
In his day the innovative elements of his work were not considered in the same light we consider them today. And for the next couple of centuries artists were judged by their ability to replicate the techniques and subjects of Carravaggio, Raphael, da Vinci et. al.
The example you give 'David' was admired because it represented a 'hero' of the old testament in the style of a Greek Hercules. It was the mastery of the Greek heroic that won praise at the time. The innovative homerotic theme was not admired in the same light. In any case Carravagio is being praised for his ability to copy the human form, not for innovating a new form.
The idea of pure originality without any demonstration of skill or technique only appears in the Modernist movement 1890 or so. Duchamp certainly could not have got away with his ready-mades any earlier. Even the idea that art could represent sensation rather than merely depict nature was controvertial when Turner started to show his abstract sea scenes. In his day the innovation was dismissed as 'soap suds and white wash'. It hurt his career and the career of Ruskin.
So no, I don't think you do manage to show that innovation was appreciated as a good in itself prior to the industrial revolution. If you look at some of the loopier pieces of modern art (the unmade bed) I think it is time to consider innovation for its own sake as probably overrated. The shock of being invited to consider something new as art wears thin after a while. The day that Damian Hirst exhibits one of his own turds pickled in his own urine is not far off, beat that one.
The idea that copying is bad is a recent one. Prior to the industrial revolution the highest form of the craftsman's art was often considered to be the ability to create perfect copies of other people's work. Innovation is a relatively new idea. If you go to recently industrialized countries the bias for originality is often absent.
Several people have the same idea all the time. Whit Diffie was not the first to think up public key cryptography, but nobody claims he copied it off Cocks at GCHQ. I often take apart other people's schemes and find they have had ideas that are similar to my own.
Invention is not just originality, it is also reuse of existing ideas, improving where necessary and useful. In many case it is the circumstances that lead to the result.
Take a look at the Cagle cartoons on Slate. They have all the editorial cartoons from 40 odd papers across the country. The number of times that the same cartoon idea appears again and again is uncanny. These people might be copying to a small extent, but it simply isn't possible for them to all come out with the same idea in such a short time.
I am probably not the only person who thinks that the latest '24x7' hunt for Bin Laden is something we should have been doing for the past two years. If you read the blogs you will find page after page of people outraged that the start of the hunt for Bin Laden seems to have been timed to coincide with the first Bush election ads. I doubt many of them have seen my slashdot .sig. Clearly much of this is independent thought.
Blogs are an entertainment and a political movement. They are not academic journals or treatises. Not that there is much of importance or originality in the academic litterature. Sure people lift ideas but thats why most people are putting them out there.
For years people have been asking if I am angry that Microsoft has copied many of my ideas. Oddly enough nobody has ever asked me if I minded other people copying my ideas (and passing them off as their own which Microsoft has never done), but that is another story. The fact is that I want people to use my ideas, they are useless unless they are put into action. Microsoft use a lot of my ideas because I spend a lot of time persuading them to use them. My principal complaint about Netscape is that they just shut themselves off from the Web community, they got the idea that they were the only people who had the good ideas.
Yeah, like nobody ever made money from selling tech to teenage Japanese girls. Who do you think bought all those camera phones and sent all those DOCOMO messages?
I don't think there would be a problem finding a market for this. Also if you look at the pictures it would be pretty easy to hide. Looks to me like it would fit in a breast pocket fairly easily.
So I would expect there would be objections to folk taking them into movie theatres and such.
You can borrow stock in pretty much any company out there. The reason you should not borrow SCO stock is that all the borowable stock has been shorted longsince.
This creates a situation called a short interest trap. If the stock kicks up for any reason, or the amount of stock available to borrow suddenly decreases the shorts are forced to buy the stock back at market. This can lead to a stock bubble that is entirely due to the shorts being squeezed.
SCO does have one remaining asset of value, the rights to UNIX. Quite what those rights is will likely be significantly reduced as a result of the case, but the value will not reach zero. Of course in the meantime lawyers fees will probably outweigh the remaining assets.
The problem being that to do the job of chairman effectively you usually have to have been the ex-CEO. So michael Dell is only following the normal practice for a founder, giving up the day to day running of the business and keeping the long term governance position.
The dotcom startups were not really abberations here. There is not much point in having a chairman in a company that is only a few years old. if the management team are crooks or jerks then the truck is going to hit the wall and all the investors will lose their money in any case.
What was an abberation was when the long established companies started running themselves in this way. Michael Eisener did not create Disney, he should not have unfettered control. He should not be paid so much for such mediocre results.
Thats quite interesting because if you think about it RH or the supplier is on the hook and there is no way they can avoid liability due to their own negligence.
One of the peculiarities of contract law is that you cannot avoid liability due to negligence. Sure you can put a term in the contract that says you are not liable, but these are not enforcable.
This is why peculiar instruments like Bills of Lading or Letters of Credit cannot be constructed out of contractual arrangements. The idea there is to explicitly avoid negligence issues. So you end up with the completely bizare situation that a letter of credit has to be discharged even if the documents presented are clearly fraudulent.
In this particular case it would appear that there is a pretty strong claim. I would not give much for the chances of RH paying out much. But IBM is clearly good for it.
Not that I think that there is any chance that SCO would win. I think there is a slightly better chance that Ralph Nader will replace Cheney as Bush's official running mate.
It is very unlikely that even if SCO won that it would recover more than the $699 per server license fee they are attempting to charge. I doubt that this will cover the legal fees. Sure Autozone will be out some legal fees as well, but every major company is the target of crank lawsuits.
Sure there are huge penalties for copyright infringement, but the courts have never applied them against consumers in the way that the RIAA would like them to be applied.
Very few plaintifs ever get trebble damages awarded. I don't think it is very likely that punitive damages would be awarded against a defendant that very clearly and entirely reasonably believes it was acting within the law. Autozone is not Napster, their belief that they are acting within the law is not based on a literal interpretation of a suspect legal opinion.
I don't recall any case where punitive damages were awarded without either negligence or intent. The whole point of punitive damages is deterrence and you that does not apply in this case.
Finally, it is very clear that the only reason that any infringement continues is SCO's refusal to state the scope of the claimed infringement with precision. I believe that the $699 is a cap on the maximum damages that SCO is likely to receive, I expect actual damages were the case to be proved would be much less.
Its Irving Tonks, a 16 year old high school student in North Dakota. He downloaded Linux off the net and he is currently using it to write code for a class project in perl on a PentiumPro machine his Dad gave him from work.
Things could be grim in the Tonks household - after Dad lost his job and mum died of cancer they have been living off Gran's social security. It is not clear that they can afford the billion dollars SCO is claiming in damages.
Support from a guy with a slashdot ID that is a 1024 bit RSA encryption key?
I have been doing crypto for a long time now. One of the points that Eric Rescorla raised with me when we were speaking at the RSA show was that more email has been secured with SSL in the first year of deployment than has ever been encrypted with S/MIME and PGP combined.
We all screwed up, Bruce said so in secrets and lies, but he still only half gets it. Almost all the crypto 'truth' turned out to be bogus. End to end crypto is a crock for a start, especially when you try to retrofit to a legacy protocol.
We spent years deplying S/MIME in almost every email reader, but we never made it easy to distribute certs. We also wasted time getting people to implement S/MIME when it would have been better to get them to start by simply not doing harm - if someone gets a multipart/signed message that they don't understand the mail reader should present the signed text without any complaint, just the same as any other unauthenticated content. Same with a message from a person with an invalid or expired cert.
The big screw was messing up the policy aspect. We need an infrastructure to tell people the security that an Internet server supports. DNS is fine for this, as folk point out DNS is secure enough unless there is a pretty difficult active attack.
My criticism of the inanities of the IETF wrt DNSSEC still stand. They just do not understand security there. it would have been better to have deployed DNSSEC with OPTIN two years ago than to continue to wait for all parties to agree on perfection.
Think about it, hard drive storage is already competative with VHS tape. I can get a hard drive for $120 with 160Gb, that s less than a buck an hour of recording time. Its not that long since VHS cost that kind of price and in any case I will pay a premium for smaller form factor, 40 tapes in the space of one.
None of the current PVRs have anything like the storage I would want. I have about 200 VHS tapes and I would have more if they were not so idiotically huge. I want at least 1Tb of storage, thats only 6 drives. But more than any PVR will support.
I doubt that this is an anti-Microsoft group as people are conspiricizing. It would make sense to join if you are a small to medium size business player and you don't run a policy office direct.
Its not just Microsoft thats missing, VeriSign and IBM are not there either, but they don't need this type of group.
Membership fees are pretty rich $150K or $60K. Thats not chump change. But it is much less than what a full DC policy setup would cost to run.
Timothy McVeigh and fellow loonies went on what became known as the 'gun nut road show' on Usenet back in 91/92. They got bored talking to each other so they went off to anoy the rest of Usenet with posts into various culture groups.
McVeigh did not come across as any loonier than any of the other members of the group.
And lets face it jury verdicts are never wrong and it is only a matter of time before O.J. finds the real killers
It was Reagan that kept telling us that sanctions would not work in South Africa. Only they did work, apartheid is gone.
Forty years later sanctions and the image of Fidel and Che are the only things keeping the Cuban communist party propped up. Castro uses sanctions the same way that Bush uses Al Qaeda, as an excuse for every failure of domestic policy.
The Cuban sanctions have failled because they have the exact wrong psychology. The only thing Cubans have that they can feel pride about is that they have taken on the greatest superpower and won. Kinda stupid thing to be proud of but that is what is keeping the bastards in power.
Open the floodgates to tourism and there is simply no way the communist party is going to last more than a few years. They will go the same way that the USSR went, their people will just get fed up.
I remember exchanging emails with Timothy McVeigh who murdered 270 people in Oaklahoma. He murdered those people because of this type of crank theory. We have put up with this right wing crank politics for too long.
The fact is that the Waco loonies killed themselves, the Ruby Ridge guy was responsible for everything that happened and Elian Gonzalez should be back with his father. Castro is almost 80, not many dictators make it to 90 and are still in power. By the time Elian leaves school Castro will be dead. But I can see why a bunch of right wing cranks who talk big about the importance of family would think it would be better that he is kidnapped by a bunch of his relatives looking to exploit him for political purposes than grow up with his father.
Sure the FBI has done a lot of things that are stupid or outright corrupt. Hoover used the FBI to persue his own vendettas, he refused to prosecute the mafia. That does not mean that the federal government is at fault in every case and it certainly does not mean that the events cited by right wing cranks are proof of abuse. The persecution of Charlie Chaplin and John Lenon were abuses. If some nut gets some guns, holes himself up someplace and threatens to shoot members of law enforcement who might be looking to arrest him, well anyone who gets shot is primarily their responsibility, same way that 9/11 is primarily the responsibiliy of Al Zawahiri and his frat boy friend Bin-Laden. Sure the CIA and FBI screwed up big with 9-11, Freah's people thought the war on drugs was a higher priority than terrorism. But keep perspective here.
Believe me, the last thing some poor special agent wants to do is sift through TBs of customer crap and put a company out of business or under financial hardship.
Absolutely right, unless there is an ulterior motive. That is not very likely in this case. If the FBI were investigating planned parenthood or another group that John Ashcroft is opposed to politically there might be an issue. There has been a lot of suspicious uses of the IRS against political opponents under Bush II. Ashcroft has endorsed a lot of extra-constitutional activites but so far the FBI under Muller does not seem to be a problem.
I suspect what happened in this particular case is that the agents thought that the hosting provider were simply not interested in complying. They probably met a sysadmin that gave them some attitude.
What we need here is a better way of serving this type of intercept warrant so that the parameters of the search are predetermined and understood by the court. We have this for IM intercepts so it should be possible to define it for IRC
If you think about it you will soon see that this suggestion is -1 clueless, not +1 insightfull.
Sure you can offer telephone service overseas, but to reach that service from an ordinary US landline or wireless phone you now have to make an international call. I don't think vonage would be quite so popular if you can's connect to the legacy telco systems without paying a fee.
The 911 regulation is no big deal to implement. All you have to do is to use SS7 to route the call, just like any other. OK so there are some problems knowing exactly where the VOIP service is, but this does not have to be 100% accurate and billing address will be close enough in most cases.
Sure it is pretty easy for someone to bypass this and give 911 false info. But relatively few people will do that and the error rate will be much less than the error rate for wireless phones.
It is possible to go from an IP address to a physical location for most broadband connections. You can even do it internationaly if you really need to - as some of the guys sending phishing spam have learned.
Why on earth would someone want to pay $0.25 so that they can smell any of their mail?
There is simply no point to this idea, in the first place the only people who would ever send you stinkmail would be other gits who were clueless enough to buy the system. And just what is an attachment of some cheap scent going to do for the recipient in any case?
The takeup of video email is pitiful enough and that is an application where lots of people have cameras and lots of people can receive the messages.
Sure Apple has a history of adopting high end technologies in their machines, but this has more to do with the fact that Apple has to work hard to justify the 50% or more price markup their machines have over a PC with equivalent specs. They have to be a bit more aggressive on adoption of high end tech.
If Apple had gone under in 1998 rather than getting rescued by his Steveship we would still have PCs with SCSI disk controllers and we would still have video cameras that could connect up to a PC.
The problem with the Apple/bluetooth argument is that when you look at the reason people are junking bluetooth it is the lack of interoperability. The standard is not. That is not something Steve tends to tollerate, the selling point of the Mac is that it is plug and play.
Sure Apple can stick bluetooth in a laptop, but they don't have the industry pull to get everyone else to sync to their standard. Nokia and the phone manufacturers have already sold more phones that Apple will ever sell computers.
Cry me a river, Over the past four years I paid over half a million dollars in taxes. But I would rather see the tax cuts repealled and the economy doing better than continue with a stagnant economy and $50,000 off my taxes.
During the Clinton boom the economy grew 4% year on year, that means the economy grew by almost a fifth in each term. That means far more to me than any amount I might pay in taxes. During the Bush recession the economy was stagnant, there was one quarter where it grew by 2% (reported in the press as 8% anualized) and a second when it grew by 1% (reported in the press as 5% anualized). But we still havent had one year that comes close to matching the Clinton performance.
Sure Bush had some bad luck, but all President's do. Bush has made no good luck. That is the problem. He is also responsible for the bulk of the deficit, he has not vetoed a single one of the pork filled spending bills from the Republican Congress. He pushed through irresponsible tax cuts which in many cases will only start to take effect after the recession is over. That means that long term interest rates, the rates businesses borrow money at and the rates that determine economic growth are much too high. The markets know there is a big increase in borrowing comming.
The falloff of tax revenues and the $250 billion cost of the war in Iraq are part of the reason for the deficit, but they are not the biggest reason and they are not part of the forward planning estimates that are predicting $400 billion dollar deficits for the next ten years.
So no, a four year tax cut does not impress me in the slightest. It is clearly not going to last. Regardless of who is President next year taxes are going to return to their pre-Bush level and then some extra will be added on top. Read my lips, Tax rises are inevitable.
No politician deserves credit for tax cuts unless they can cut spending or raise revenues by enough to pay for them.