The guy tried to get a job with Tata Consulting, an Indian-owned firm operating in the USA that places staff at USA-based clients. They apparently refused to hire him for this work in the USA because they do not hire Americans. Only then did he try to work in India, which is the less interesting aspect.
Then he should contact the INS and they will revoke Tata's ability to apply for visas with immediate effect.
On the other hand what Tata might have said (particularly since they certainly know what they must never say even if it were true) is something like 'you don't have the skills we need'.
Part of getting an H1B visa is a process where the job position has to be advertised so that US citizens can apply for it. You also need to perform a survey of salaries and show that the candidate is being paid 15% above the going rate.
There are some ludicrous parts to the process. For example there are plenty of US citizens who would like to work in the UK for a short time and vice versa. Yet both countries throw masses of beuracracy in peoples faces.
It is also quite amusing the way that died in the wool Ayn Rand acolytes can put down their copies of Atlas Shrugged and rant for hours on how the govt. is allowing foreign workers to take their jobs.
The PWR isn't an ideal design, and especially not when coupled with the low safety standards used at the time in the USA. Compare the PWR at TMI with Sizewell B.
Which is exactly what I was arguing. You make general claims that what I am saying is incorrect but you fail to give specifics. Then you write more attacks in which you actually accept the main point I was making.
Pebble bed may be a viable design, we will have to see how things turn out in South Africa. But even if that experiment is successful there will be a big hill for the nuclear industry to climb, one that they have made for themselves through their past behavior.
Confrontational behavior and calling opponents of nuclear power names is not going to help the situation. Pebble bed still has no answer to the problem of disposing of nuclear waste. The nuclear industry is not going to help itself by attempting agenda denial tactics on its opponents. The nuclear industry has to accept the fact that they lost this argument twenty years ago and that they are the ones that now have to make their case. You are not going to find many politicians of either party willing to stick their neck out for the nuclear lobby.
It is rather strange that someone who refuses to actually answer any of the questions put to him should think he has the right to interrogate so.
Having made the assertion that I have lied it is up to 'turgid' to substantiate that allegation or withdraw it before he deserves further consideration. The ability to google a bunch of questions laden with acronyms does not imply that the author has any knowledge of the subject matter in question.
As for the lies of the nuclear industry, you simply do not build any kind of dangerous plant at Three Mile Island if safety is your first concern. A populated island with limited scope for evacuation in an emergency is not a suitable site for a chemical factory, let alone a nuclear facility.
Tony Benn the UK minister of technology who was responsible for the building of the majority of the nuclear plants in the UK said several years later that he had come to believe that he had been lied to repeatedly by the nuclear industry and that had he known the true costs involved he would never have made the decisions he did. He is not the only person to have become disillusioned. The UK Conservative party came to the same conclusion when they tried to privatise the UK electricitry industry. They started from the presmise that nuclear power was the cheapest way to go. As their bean counters crunched the numbers they discovered that the cost accounting had been deliberately deceptive and that the nuclear plants were costing more to run than the coal ones - even before capital costs of building and decommissioning were taken into account. That is why they abandonded that part of their program despite being very committed to it at the start.
The then chair of the electricity industry, Lord Marshall lied to me in person when he claimed that the nuclear power plants were cheaper to run. That statement was untrue, a fact that has since been acknowledged to me, again in person by a senior cabinet minister in Thatcher's government.
The technical issues are irrelevant at this point, nobody is going to trust the nuclear industry until they come clean and admit their history of lies.
That's the biggest load of ill-informed, scare-mongering nonsense I've heard in quite a while.
I am a chartered engineer and I have a docrotrate from a nuclear physics lab. I worked at DESY and I was a CERN fellow.
The safety issues in the nuclear power industry are certainly not identical to the safety issues in high energy physics, but there is a large degree of crossover. I know several professors at very prestigeous universities, one of whom has a Nobel prize who hold similar opinions - they were the people that convinced me on the technical issues in the first place.
What would be the basis for your unsupported assertion?
The reason why Chernobyl blew was because of extremely poor design, even with 2D simulations of reactor beds. It also doesn't have the sort of defense-in-depth that US reactors have. It doesn't even have a proper containment dome over the reactor core like a modern reactor.
Is that your opinion or are you repeating the view of the US nuclear industry.
I have a doctorate from a nuclear physics lab and a first degree in engineering, I have extensive experience in simulation work. I have also worked with Russian nuclear physicists.
I really don't think that there is very much to your argument other than wrap it in the flag rhetoric. If safety had been the first concern in either the US or the USSR they would have built a true failsafe design. Light water reactors are not a failsafe design, if the safety systems fail the reactor will meltdown. CANDU on the other hand is a true failsafe design, if the reactor overheats the reactor vessel breaks and the heavy water moderator drains away almost instantaneously.
The fundamental problem here is that the nuclear industry has lied and lied. The public is entirely right not to trust them, they would be fools to trust an industry that has the history of lies that the nuclear industry has. The question is whether we are going to have to turn to nuclear for future power generation. There is certainly a significant probability. The eventuality I want to avoid is that we end up replacing the dangerous Chernobyl design light water reactors with another generation of light water reactors.
End result? IMO, there's a reasonable chance that the U.S. economy will collapse in a crash at least as bad as the Great Depression, because the very people who are needed to support the economy will be unable to do so because they're unemployed.
Err, the guy works at Kodak so you don't need to bother with the full on ecconomy goes into depression story. 35mm film is dead, it won't be long before there is no mass market for film cameras. There will still be some professionals who use film, but that market will look like the medium format camera market. Kodak may sell some paper for glossy prints but this market will be much smaller than the present print market. Whichever way you look at it Kodak revenues will be declining steeply for years.
As for the wider problems with the economy, even Japan isn't in that bad a state. Nor is it impossible to fix as Clinton proved. As soon as the market is convinced that the debt is going to be addressed seriously long term interest rates, the rates the US pays for its debt will reduce. In 1993/94 that created a positive feedback cycle that quickly brought the budget back into balance under Clinton.
At this point there is only one way to close the budget deficit, tax increases. Well, what do you expect when there is a war on?
Most folk realize that when there is a war their taxes will increase. That is why wars that last more than a few months tend to be unpopular. Tough, get over it. Either there will be a modest tax increase this year imposed by the senate as the cost of passing the supplemental budget or interest rates will jump two to three points (don't just take my word for this, Sorros predicts the same thing). I doubt that will help Bush's already slim chances of being elected. Dean has already made it clear that he will raise taxes to reduce the Bush deficit.
It is not too late to avoid a depression if there is action this year or next. Wait until 2008 and the US will be in the same position as Japan. It is not easy for a politician to oppose a popular war or to propose tax increases, particularly as an election platform. But there are times when those are the right remedy for the country. It takes character and leadership to propose hard choices. Bush has no character and has shown no leadership. Let us hope he will soon be replaced by someone who does.
BTW: Bill Joy would make a pretty good cyber-security Czar in a Dean administration, don't you think?
I've never understood why reprocessing is never discussed in the US when it comes to nuclear power.
Because the Brits tried it at Windscale (renamed Sellafield) and it has been an economic disaster. The problem is that before reprocessing your waste is a relatively stable solid. After reprocessing you have a toxic liquid sludge that is highly radioactive.
The original plan at THORPE was 'vitrificatio', turning the sludge into class. The problem here being that the levels of radioactivity kept causing the machinery to breakdown.
Reprocessing makes no sense, there is no shortage of uranium. Uranium is the reason the center of the earth is molten after all.
The reason the nuclear industry was mad on reprocessing was that it was another excuse to re-apply technology they had originally developed for making bombs. Gas centrifuges accumulate enriched uranium an atom at a time. The quick route to the bomb was to irradiate uranium to create plutonium which could be separated by chemical process.
Reuse of bomb technology is the reason we have the ridiculous light water reactor designs. The design is essentially to accumulate a sub-critical mass of uranium and then try to keep it from going critical. It is a highly unstable design.
Technically the problem can be solved with technology like the Canadian CANDU scheme or the MIT carbon balls scheme. Politically this is hard because the nuclear industry has spent fifty years lying like George W Bush about how safe their designs are. We found that out at Windscale (numerous accidents that were covered up), Three Mile island (build a nuclear bomb upwind of manhattan and say you are safety conscious) and Chernobyl (tried to cover up but it was just too big).
Actually the US nuclear industry is still covering up Chernobyl when it claims it could not happen in the US. The problem is that every single one of the plants running in the US today was designed in the 1970s when there simply wasn't the computing power to simulate reactor beds in 3d. So you would simulate in 2d and then 'extrapolate'. The real reason Chernobyl blew is not that it was operated out of limits - the tests were well within the design guidelines. The problem was that there was a region in which the reactor could be made to go into positive feedback which the 2d simulations had not picked up.
Why, in this supposedly enlightened and civillised age, do we resort to slanging matches about the imperialist past which bear absolutely no relevance to today's population, in order to be racially derisive?
Racial? I think it is pretty well established that Britain and France are identical race wise. In any case my family originally came from France under William I. I think it is pretty clear you are grasping at straws here.
As for the past having no relevance to the present, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. In this case it is the profound ignorance of the Bushies as to what imperialism was about that is leading them to behave like 19th century imperialists, right down to the jingoism and the claims that anyone opposed to their schemes hates their country.
How else can Rumsfeld's comment about 'old Europe' be interpreted except as saying that France and Germany are not up to militarist adventures any more?
You and I might think the age of imperialism is dead, but the Whitehouse neo-cons do not. The invasion of Iraq was exactly the type of adventure that Britain or France would have engaged in at the height of imperial fever in 1800 or so, even down to the excuse and the claim that it was merely a punitive expedition.
The maps that showed large splotches of red for the British empire, empire day and even the declaration of the empire itself did not start to appear until 1880 or so when Imperial power was already in decline. The Iraqi 'governing council' is exactly the sort of arrangement that the British prefered as a means of controlling a place. Direct rule was always considered inferior, not least because of the cost.
Cheney's sweetheart contracts with Halliburton are exactly the type of arrangement that the British empire was fought for. Clive of India made himself rich by looting and by extracting punitive taxes from the population. Cecil Rhodes likewise. The Cheney arrangement under which the US taxpayer will bear the cost of occupation while Halliburton will get rich from 'no-bid' contracts and take the lions share of profits from Iraq's oil are exactly the type of deal that empire was all about. The fact that they think this way is demonstrated by the fact that they are now throwing in the possibility of similar treatment in their approach to other nations to try to get them to join the US occupation .
What the hell has Napoleon got to do with the sale of Compact Discs and the occupation of Iraq?
Vanity, French is one of Europe's great cultures, but the political culture is still wedded to the glory of a man who was the Saddam hussein of his day. Napoleon was every bit as evil and tyranical as Saddam.
I have no idea at all where the compact discs came in, they seem to be a somewhat minor issue compared to say, the future of democracy and the republic. Why do you think they are such an important issue to discuss? We discuss the topic of Compact Discs here about three times a week. What do you believe is left to say on the topic? Would you rather continue to discuss the topics decided by the corporation or discuss the real issues of the day, like the reasons that one of our boys is getting killed each day in Iraq and another ten seriously wounded?
There are none so blind as those who cannot see. If you cannot even accept the fact that the US won the cold war I don't know that there is a whole lot I or anyone can do for you.
Lets see, how many square km of USSR territory does the US occupy today? Not one.
As I said, the USSR lost the cold war. That does not mean that the US won. There are very few wars in which either side can be said to have 'won'. The best you can usually hope for is to avoid loosing.
In the case of the US actions in the cold war very few can be said to be a great success. Take the 1953 coup in Iran to replace the democratically elected Prime Minister with a dictatorship friendly to UK/US oil industry interests under the Shah. Short term this was a success, but it was not very long before the inevitable happened and the Iranians threw out both the Shah and the US oil companies and became a major threat to US interests. The long term effect of the 1953 coup was to replace a democratic regime which was generally friendly to US interests with a theocracy where the US is still called the great Satan.
Almost without exception meddling in other countries affairs uder the guise of defeating communism has had nothing but bad effects for both the US and the people of the countries being 'helped'. US cold war meddling in Guatelmala led to a civil war and 400,000 dead. Chile the loss of a democratic regime, replacement with a dictatorship and at least 50,000 murdered.
The US lost the cold war because it surrendered its core values, its founding principles to fight an enemy that has since turned out to be nothing but a paper tiger. Instead of spreading democracy the fear of communism caused the cold warriors to fear it.
So now the neo-cons have made exactly the same mistake again in Iraq. They have started a war without an exit strategy. The only power in the region that can stop Iraq sliding into anarchy if the US withdraws is Iran. Opposing the US invasion has not weakened the UN security council, it has strengthened it. This was all predictable from the start of the war. The US is in a far, far worse position today than it was twelve months ago.
Fox news might keep telling you that the US won the cold war, Bill O'Reilly won a Peabody and George W Bush is respected internationally, but that does not make them true. Nor does it mean that people who disagree with the Fox news analysis hate America and what it stands for. As should be obvious to anyone who reads history it is the neo-cons who hate democracy and everything the founders of the US stood for.
People who wrap themselves in the flag and worship monuments to the ten commandments are most likely to turn out to believe in the values of neither, particularly the part about worshiping graven images.
I assume you've talked to the Vietnamese on how they felt too? And I know about 1/2 dozen Vietnamese who would like to give France the one-fingered salute for the mess.
At the time the advice was given the French themselves, even the arch-colonialist deGaulle had come to the same conclusion that they had completely bolloxed the situation beyond repair and there was absolutely no good that would come from further western intervention.
They were right on that point, between one and two million Vietnamese were killed during the US invasion, that being the usual name for an event where one country sends huge numbers of troops in an attempt to occupy another country.
Frequently right.. about what?
The French are frequently right on subjects such as vinticulture, cuisine, not starting land wars in Indo-china, coiture, and cinematography.
You are absolutely correct on most points. I'm not sure however that the US will choose not to maintain its costly military. I think it needs to realize that winning war is easy with such materiel and good soldiers, but that winning the peace is a different kettle of fish. Possibly just as much money must be spent on it.
I don't think there will be much of a choice. By 2015 the economy of China will be larger than the US economy in dollar terms. It is already larger if you look at manufacturing capacity. China has about five times the population. When you start to look at what it will take to be the number one superpower at that point there is simply no way the US is going to be able to afford it.
This does not have to be a disaster, the US can still be primus inter pares amongst the free world. The problem (if you want to see it that way) is that the US is simply not going to be able to act unilateraly in the way the neo-cons want to.
It is just as well that the Bush administration seems to be concluding that the UN is a good thing after all. Six months ago the neo-cons and the press were telling us that the French had done lasting damage to the UN and the UN would never be taken seriously again. Today it looks like rather the revers is going to be the result. I don't think that the US public would accept a neo-con push to invade Iran unilaterally without UN sanction at this point. Even the rabidly pro-Bush US media is starting to get the message that it is damned easy to start wars and pretty difficult to stop them.
Oh yes, the RIAA thing, perhaps if the dopey slashdot editors got a clue and started a section with political stories they might have a bigger business opportunity. Linux was hot news eight years ago, but face it, the tech community cares about a lot more than just technology. We have been debating the RIAA story for four years now, I don't know anything to say on the topic that has not been said already and looking at the other posts nobody else does either.
The next stage in slashdot evolution should be to fire the editors and replace them with code.
Having commander taco and co decide what news is important is not the secret of Slashdot success. Better still VA-Linux should sell slashdot to Google and then google could hook up slashdot to google news. Adapt or die guys, if you don't make the imaginative leap others will.
I think it is now time to tell SCO employees that they are simply never going to work in this industry again. I certainly would not hire someone who worked for a company with the business ethics that SCO is displaying. Nor would I advise any of the VC companies I work with to fund a company that involved any of these people in senior positions.
I have always believed that personal integrity is one of the biggest indicators of likely success. A few years ago that was an unfashionable position to take, today in the wake of Enron, Haliburton, Sunbeam etc. more people seem to take my point of view.
I remember back when the Cantor and Segal thing hit telling Laurence Canter that the Hi Tech industry was a small pond and that most of the people who got rich from it did so by being a part of the right circles, playing the inside game. Few people can have realized the potential of the internet as early as Canter and Segal did and ended up worse off than they started as a result.
I think it will turn out the same way for the SCO folk. It is not like they have skills that are exactly sought after in the Windows world. It is going to be interesting seeing these chuckleheads trying to get jobs at IBM and Red Hat in a years time.
Okay, so France does not have a whole many military victories to be proud of in its history, but at least they have a few brain cells left that tell them that a war often is the worst possible solution in any conflict.
Unless of course they are the ones wanting to start the war in question... Yep, that was the point France might well have been speaking from experience when it warned Bush not to start an unnecessary war. Things often turn out unexpectedly
Overall, the comment seems quite pro-France to me. I'd give it a '+1 Funny' rating.
It was pretty pro-french, but anti-french militarism. The same goes for my posts wrt the US. You can be pro-US without being in favor of a US Empire. In fact if you believe in the values of the founders of the US you might well consider the neo-con militarist faction of Cheney, Perle and co who spend so much time wrapping themselves arround the flag to be the ones who are really anti-US.
The whole point of the post was that the US militarists are as ridiculous as the french militarists and being anti both sets of militarists is in no way unpatriotic.
Witness their love of Jerry Lewis, witness their recent decision to use Woody Allen to promote tourism in France. Witness the whole history of France.
Err are you saying that the French are wrong to admire Woody Allen and Jerry Lewis? I think these are motre occasions that prove them right.
Witness the whole history of France. And as for French advice on 'Vietnam'- um you do know enough history to realize that Vietnam was a French colony don't you?
All the more reason to have taken notice of de Gaulle's warning. The French did not leave Vietnam from choice and they understood that the situation was unwinnable.
You do know some little thing about the Cold War perhaps? You know, the one the US won in the end by specifically not taking any advice from France. But that would involve knowing some history I think. You are wrong.
Oh dear, I don't know who won Vietnam according to Fox news but according to most of the mainstream news sources the US lost that one.
On the off-chance that you were referring to the US 'winning' the cold war, I fail to see the relevance of the claim which is dubious in any case. The USSR certainly lost the cold war, but Vietnam was backed by China, not the USSR and according to the news sources I read Vietnam and China are still communist. I don't know about Fox news, their coverage of China tends to be decided by Rupert's need to keep in well with the communist dictatorship so they will let him continue to broadcast star TV.
The only reason the US became involved in Vietnam is because of the French. They should've ignored the French and backed Ho Chi Minh after WWII. Instead the US supported the French reclaiming their former colony and then when the French pulled out moved in to prop up the South.
Hey, I was merely repeating what the French ambassador said on NPR:-)
Actually De Gaule did tell the US not to bother trying to replace them in Vietnam when they abandoned their former colony. France did not withdraw from choice, they withdrew for the same reasons the US withdrew later, the place was a quagmire.
Incidentally some posters have been criticisng me for 'buying into right wing criticism of France'. Err, not really, when the whole Iraq thing started I observed that the one good thing that could come out of it was that the right wing neo-cons would discover exactly how grateful France was to the US for rescuing it from the Nazis. Britain learned that a long time ago when de Gaulle vetoed Britain's application to join the common market.
France is very grateful to the US and British people for freeing France from the Nazis, however that does not mean they believe any gratitude is due to George 'AWOL draft dodger' Bush and his administration.
As for joining in to help in the war on terror, err well France is actually a state sponsor of terrorism as the folk at Greenpeace can tell you.
France's bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a state sponsored terrorist act. France's own neo-cons ordered the attack and then connived to get the terrorists who got caught out of jail. Last I heard Greenpeace had still not received compensation from France for the bombing and murder.
The real point of the post is that at this point the imperial pretensions of France are a complete joke. France simply does not have the military capacity to sustain an empire, behaving the way it often does simply makes them look ridiculous.
But fast forward a few years. You cannot be a military superpower without being an economic superpower. The Bushies are spending the country into the ground. When the baby boomers retire in ten years time and there is a choice between maintaining the militarism budget and paying social security they will choose to keep their pensions.
I think the most likely result of the invasion of Iraq is the emergence of Iran as the regional power and the rapid decline of the US as a military power as the US taxpayer is unable to afford a military budget larger than the whole of the rest of the world combined.
In other words, get those French jokes in quick. In a few years the US is likely to find itself in the same situation. Don't worry though, contrary to what the neo-cons would have you beleive it is probably not such a bad thing if the US does not have to play globo-cop all the time.
I find it somewhat bizare that EMI would even littigate the case. The product was clearly defective as manufactured and so under EU law the consumer has an absolute right to a full refund. No pissy-US '90 day' guarantees here. If you sell something that is broke the consumer gets a refund, period.
As for the wider political context, don't forget what the French Ambassador to the UN said on the subject of Iraq, basically that France belives it is not opposing US interests, just that it believes it has a better idea of what those interests are. The US came to regret not taking French advice in Vietnam and according to Paris will come to regret not taking their advice on the subject of invading Iraq.
From this we can deduce two things, first that the French can be insufferably arrogant for such a small country whose military success under Napoleon turned out to be what the music industry would call a 'one hit wonder', being followed by flop after flop. The only recent successes being in the consolation prize category of 'quickest surrender'. And no Jaques, the magnificent conquest of the Sahara desert does not qualify a country as an empire. The test of an empire is not merely the acreage under occupation, the locals have to actually be at least aware of the occupation.
The other thing we may deduce is that despite the fact they are frequently arrogant and obnoxious the French are frequently right, particularly when it comes to the 'stop the US from pig-headed self defeating policy blunder' category.
Except that the appeals court did not overturn *any* of his findings. The only thing that was overturned was his sentence.
They made it very clear that Jackson was toast. Although they left many of his findings of fact intact they did overturn most of his conclusions based on those facts. In the US appelate court tradition there is usually a lot of deference paid to the district court on issues of fact. In this case the appeals court accused Jackson of attempting to prevent them overtuning his conclusions by describing them as fact.
When you look at the particular issues that were overturned and the ones that were left standing about the only significant finding of fact of Jacksons that was left standing was that Microsoft is a monopoly. Well duuhhh!
When you look at what the appeals court did it is pretty clear that Jackson's attempt to railroad the trial through on a short schedule killed any chance of the DoJ winning in the long haul. It would have been better for the DoJ if the whole thing had started from scratch.
Even though the appeals court had not ordered a new trial they had found Jackson to be guilty of inexcusable bias forcing the second half of the trial to be negated. It does not take a genius to see that Microsoft would have had a pretty good case in the Supreme court to get the whole case thrown out and retried.
At the end of the day, companies like Microsoft and SCO won't be stopped by the US. The best we can do is waste a couple hundred million in tax dollars on a useless court case that is headed by a puppet judge.
Jackson a puppet of Microsoft? What are you on? Can I get some?
Jackson was the best thing that happened to Microsoft, Boies was the next best, but not by intention. Jackson was so gratuitously biased that there was no way the appeals court could possibly have backed his decision.
Having watched David Boies in action in the Microsoft, Florida and Napster cases I am convinced that his reputation is vastly over-rated. He was responsible for botching the Microsoft case, he fought the case on the weakest complaints, not the strongest ones. In Florida he let the Bushies roll right over him. His arguments in Napster were profoundly unconvincing.
Tell me where in Windows XP I can find:
C compiler
Email server
Office suite
SQL database server
C++ IDE
Windows alone has many, many times the number of lines of code that Red hat 9 has. Also if you install Windows 2003 and know where to look you can actually find a C# compiler, email server, SQL database engine, etc. etc.
The high rate of patches for Windows XP also reflects the fact that Microsoft closed up shop for a month to go on a security bug hunt. Yet another reason is that XP contains an emulator for applications that were written to run under Windows 95. Emulators are notorious for requiring tweaks.
Yet another explanation could be that more people use XP so more people find code paths that have bugs.
Basically the number of patches issued is about as meaningless an indicator of code quality as number of lines of code per day is a measure of productivity.
That said, what I am saying is that this is not a solution. This is, rather, a tool. The supposition that ISP good grace is the one final answer seems naive to me.
What is needed is a way to hold ISPs accountable. I don't accept the Nadarite 'corporations baaad' ideology you are spouting but the problem is one of accountability.
That is why the answer has to be at the message level and not the transport layer. We need non-repudiation. We need a means of holding the ISPs accountable.
No doubt MS is capable of this, but I'm perplexed: assuming at least a few of the missing emails were between MS employees and burst.com employees, wouldn't the burst.com folks still have a copy?
The emails they would want would be the internal ones that were between the Microsoft employees.
I strongly suspect that Cringely has not investigated much further than asking Burst.com's opinion on the matter. It does not seem very likely that a judge would order Microsoft to produce documents in this way and for the only person to report it to be Cringely.
What I suspect the judge actually ordered was that Microsoft must either produce the emails in question or show that the offsite backup copies do not exist for the period in question. Of course Cringely being the Bill O'Really of tech journalism automatically believes that Microsoft must be lying and so he omits the last part, or maybe he did not bother to question burst on the point.
I don't think that folk like Cringely and O'Really do any service to anyone long term. Their statements just come out as a stream of pure opinionated hysteria. Although to be fair to Cringely he has not (yet) insisted that his publisher take Al Franken to court for calling him a liar.
I'd hardly call it end-to-end. Here we have the mail server poking its nose into what type of mail is being delivered.
The end to end principle is vastly overrated. If you read the actual design documents written by David Clark on the end to end principal you will not find the dogmatism that has since surrounded it.
The Internet works in large part because the end to end principle has been applied in the right places. But that has a corrolary most of the problems with the Internet are cases where the end to end principle has been applied in thewrong places.
Nobody advocates that IP routers should inspect each packet to see if it contains spam.
No but almost everyone is advocating that ISPs should take action to make sure their users do not spam. The principal here is perimeter security, just as every enterprise should have a firewall every enterprise should be responsible for their spammy customers.
The problem I see with AMTP is that TLS only provides transport layer security. A much more robust approach is to apply message layer security.
The issue is not technology, it is politics. To get a change like AMTP to stick you have to have the political clout to effect a change in the Internet infrastructure. Bill Weinman does not have that clout. In a perfect world the IETF would, unfortunately the IETF has spent much of the last twenty years systematically pissing off every corporate developer and most of the open source ones as well.
That leaves us with the big ISPs as the way to deploy changes to the email infrastructure to fight spam. So far they have announced that they are talking and nothing have been heard from them. In fact there are quite a few folk associated with those companies who have gone very quiet all of a sudden.
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
This is probably the biggest mistake in the constitution. The reason it was included is that at the time there was a big fear of judicial corruption - a fair concern given the context of the time.
The problem today is that juries are simply incapable of understanding a lot of the issues that regularly appear in civil trials. Cases are more likely to be decided on Johnnie Cochran style attorney hysterics of the type that got OJ off the hook for murdering Nichole and Ron.
Burst.com have no technology, they have a bunch of bogus patents that describe techniques that have been taught in comp arch classes for twenty years (see DMA). They know they can't win through the law so they get rubes like Cringely to shill for them.
Another big problem with the jury trial clause is the 'no fact decided by a jury' part. This is responsible for a lot of miscarriages of justice as courts insist that they cannot overturn a conviction because of a 'fact' decided by a jury no matter how much proof there is that the decision was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when did *any* O/S show files based on their physical location. Letssee I'll just go to cylinder 34, track 32, block 23 and pull up my pr0n...
Then he should contact the INS and they will revoke Tata's ability to apply for visas with immediate effect.
On the other hand what Tata might have said (particularly since they certainly know what they must never say even if it were true) is something like 'you don't have the skills we need'.
Part of getting an H1B visa is a process where the job position has to be advertised so that US citizens can apply for it. You also need to perform a survey of salaries and show that the candidate is being paid 15% above the going rate.
There are some ludicrous parts to the process. For example there are plenty of US citizens who would like to work in the UK for a short time and vice versa. Yet both countries throw masses of beuracracy in peoples faces.
It is also quite amusing the way that died in the wool Ayn Rand acolytes can put down their copies of Atlas Shrugged and rant for hours on how the govt. is allowing foreign workers to take their jobs.
Which is exactly what I was arguing. You make general claims that what I am saying is incorrect but you fail to give specifics. Then you write more attacks in which you actually accept the main point I was making.
Pebble bed may be a viable design, we will have to see how things turn out in South Africa. But even if that experiment is successful there will be a big hill for the nuclear industry to climb, one that they have made for themselves through their past behavior.
Confrontational behavior and calling opponents of nuclear power names is not going to help the situation. Pebble bed still has no answer to the problem of disposing of nuclear waste. The nuclear industry is not going to help itself by attempting agenda denial tactics on its opponents. The nuclear industry has to accept the fact that they lost this argument twenty years ago and that they are the ones that now have to make their case. You are not going to find many politicians of either party willing to stick their neck out for the nuclear lobby.
Having made the assertion that I have lied it is up to 'turgid' to substantiate that allegation or withdraw it before he deserves further consideration. The ability to google a bunch of questions laden with acronyms does not imply that the author has any knowledge of the subject matter in question.
As for the lies of the nuclear industry, you simply do not build any kind of dangerous plant at Three Mile Island if safety is your first concern. A populated island with limited scope for evacuation in an emergency is not a suitable site for a chemical factory, let alone a nuclear facility.
Tony Benn the UK minister of technology who was responsible for the building of the majority of the nuclear plants in the UK said several years later that he had come to believe that he had been lied to repeatedly by the nuclear industry and that had he known the true costs involved he would never have made the decisions he did. He is not the only person to have become disillusioned. The UK Conservative party came to the same conclusion when they tried to privatise the UK electricitry industry. They started from the presmise that nuclear power was the cheapest way to go. As their bean counters crunched the numbers they discovered that the cost accounting had been deliberately deceptive and that the nuclear plants were costing more to run than the coal ones - even before capital costs of building and decommissioning were taken into account. That is why they abandonded that part of their program despite being very committed to it at the start.
The then chair of the electricity industry, Lord Marshall lied to me in person when he claimed that the nuclear power plants were cheaper to run. That statement was untrue, a fact that has since been acknowledged to me, again in person by a senior cabinet minister in Thatcher's government.
The technical issues are irrelevant at this point, nobody is going to trust the nuclear industry until they come clean and admit their history of lies.
I am a chartered engineer and I have a docrotrate from a nuclear physics lab. I worked at DESY and I was a CERN fellow.
The safety issues in the nuclear power industry are certainly not identical to the safety issues in high energy physics, but there is a large degree of crossover. I know several professors at very prestigeous universities, one of whom has a Nobel prize who hold similar opinions - they were the people that convinced me on the technical issues in the first place.
What would be the basis for your unsupported assertion?
Is that your opinion or are you repeating the view of the US nuclear industry.
I have a doctorate from a nuclear physics lab and a first degree in engineering, I have extensive experience in simulation work. I have also worked with Russian nuclear physicists.
I really don't think that there is very much to your argument other than wrap it in the flag rhetoric. If safety had been the first concern in either the US or the USSR they would have built a true failsafe design. Light water reactors are not a failsafe design, if the safety systems fail the reactor will meltdown. CANDU on the other hand is a true failsafe design, if the reactor overheats the reactor vessel breaks and the heavy water moderator drains away almost instantaneously.
The fundamental problem here is that the nuclear industry has lied and lied. The public is entirely right not to trust them, they would be fools to trust an industry that has the history of lies that the nuclear industry has. The question is whether we are going to have to turn to nuclear for future power generation. There is certainly a significant probability. The eventuality I want to avoid is that we end up replacing the dangerous Chernobyl design light water reactors with another generation of light water reactors.
Err, the guy works at Kodak so you don't need to bother with the full on ecconomy goes into depression story. 35mm film is dead, it won't be long before there is no mass market for film cameras. There will still be some professionals who use film, but that market will look like the medium format camera market. Kodak may sell some paper for glossy prints but this market will be much smaller than the present print market. Whichever way you look at it Kodak revenues will be declining steeply for years.
As for the wider problems with the economy, even Japan isn't in that bad a state. Nor is it impossible to fix as Clinton proved. As soon as the market is convinced that the debt is going to be addressed seriously long term interest rates, the rates the US pays for its debt will reduce. In 1993/94 that created a positive feedback cycle that quickly brought the budget back into balance under Clinton.
At this point there is only one way to close the budget deficit, tax increases. Well, what do you expect when there is a war on?
Most folk realize that when there is a war their taxes will increase. That is why wars that last more than a few months tend to be unpopular. Tough, get over it. Either there will be a modest tax increase this year imposed by the senate as the cost of passing the supplemental budget or interest rates will jump two to three points (don't just take my word for this, Sorros predicts the same thing). I doubt that will help Bush's already slim chances of being elected. Dean has already made it clear that he will raise taxes to reduce the Bush deficit.
It is not too late to avoid a depression if there is action this year or next. Wait until 2008 and the US will be in the same position as Japan. It is not easy for a politician to oppose a popular war or to propose tax increases, particularly as an election platform. But there are times when those are the right remedy for the country. It takes character and leadership to propose hard choices. Bush has no character and has shown no leadership. Let us hope he will soon be replaced by someone who does.
BTW: Bill Joy would make a pretty good cyber-security Czar in a Dean administration, don't you think?
Because the Brits tried it at Windscale (renamed Sellafield) and it has been an economic disaster. The problem is that before reprocessing your waste is a relatively stable solid. After reprocessing you have a toxic liquid sludge that is highly radioactive.
The original plan at THORPE was 'vitrificatio', turning the sludge into class. The problem here being that the levels of radioactivity kept causing the machinery to breakdown.
Reprocessing makes no sense, there is no shortage of uranium. Uranium is the reason the center of the earth is molten after all.
The reason the nuclear industry was mad on reprocessing was that it was another excuse to re-apply technology they had originally developed for making bombs. Gas centrifuges accumulate enriched uranium an atom at a time. The quick route to the bomb was to irradiate uranium to create plutonium which could be separated by chemical process.
Reuse of bomb technology is the reason we have the ridiculous light water reactor designs. The design is essentially to accumulate a sub-critical mass of uranium and then try to keep it from going critical. It is a highly unstable design.
Technically the problem can be solved with technology like the Canadian CANDU scheme or the MIT carbon balls scheme. Politically this is hard because the nuclear industry has spent fifty years lying like George W Bush about how safe their designs are. We found that out at Windscale (numerous accidents that were covered up), Three Mile island (build a nuclear bomb upwind of manhattan and say you are safety conscious) and Chernobyl (tried to cover up but it was just too big).
Actually the US nuclear industry is still covering up Chernobyl when it claims it could not happen in the US. The problem is that every single one of the plants running in the US today was designed in the 1970s when there simply wasn't the computing power to simulate reactor beds in 3d. So you would simulate in 2d and then 'extrapolate'. The real reason Chernobyl blew is not that it was operated out of limits - the tests were well within the design guidelines. The problem was that there was a region in which the reactor could be made to go into positive feedback which the 2d simulations had not picked up.
Racial? I think it is pretty well established that Britain and France are identical race wise. In any case my family originally came from France under William I. I think it is pretty clear you are grasping at straws here.
As for the past having no relevance to the present, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. In this case it is the profound ignorance of the Bushies as to what imperialism was about that is leading them to behave like 19th century imperialists, right down to the jingoism and the claims that anyone opposed to their schemes hates their country.
How else can Rumsfeld's comment about 'old Europe' be interpreted except as saying that France and Germany are not up to militarist adventures any more?
You and I might think the age of imperialism is dead, but the Whitehouse neo-cons do not. The invasion of Iraq was exactly the type of adventure that Britain or France would have engaged in at the height of imperial fever in 1800 or so, even down to the excuse and the claim that it was merely a punitive expedition.
The maps that showed large splotches of red for the British empire, empire day and even the declaration of the empire itself did not start to appear until 1880 or so when Imperial power was already in decline. The Iraqi 'governing council' is exactly the sort of arrangement that the British prefered as a means of controlling a place. Direct rule was always considered inferior, not least because of the cost.
Cheney's sweetheart contracts with Halliburton are exactly the type of arrangement that the British empire was fought for. Clive of India made himself rich by looting and by extracting punitive taxes from the population. Cecil Rhodes likewise. The Cheney arrangement under which the US taxpayer will bear the cost of occupation while Halliburton will get rich from 'no-bid' contracts and take the lions share of profits from Iraq's oil are exactly the type of deal that empire was all about. The fact that they think this way is demonstrated by the fact that they are now throwing in the possibility of similar treatment in their approach to other nations to try to get them to join the US occupation .
What the hell has Napoleon got to do with the sale of Compact Discs and the occupation of Iraq?
Vanity, French is one of Europe's great cultures, but the political culture is still wedded to the glory of a man who was the Saddam hussein of his day. Napoleon was every bit as evil and tyranical as Saddam.
I have no idea at all where the compact discs came in, they seem to be a somewhat minor issue compared to say, the future of democracy and the republic. Why do you think they are such an important issue to discuss? We discuss the topic of Compact Discs here about three times a week. What do you believe is left to say on the topic? Would you rather continue to discuss the topics decided by the corporation or discuss the real issues of the day, like the reasons that one of our boys is getting killed each day in Iraq and another ten seriously wounded?
Lets see, how many square km of USSR territory does the US occupy today? Not one.
As I said, the USSR lost the cold war. That does not mean that the US won. There are very few wars in which either side can be said to have 'won'. The best you can usually hope for is to avoid loosing.
In the case of the US actions in the cold war very few can be said to be a great success. Take the 1953 coup in Iran to replace the democratically elected Prime Minister with a dictatorship friendly to UK/US oil industry interests under the Shah. Short term this was a success, but it was not very long before the inevitable happened and the Iranians threw out both the Shah and the US oil companies and became a major threat to US interests. The long term effect of the 1953 coup was to replace a democratic regime which was generally friendly to US interests with a theocracy where the US is still called the great Satan.
Almost without exception meddling in other countries affairs uder the guise of defeating communism has had nothing but bad effects for both the US and the people of the countries being 'helped'. US cold war meddling in Guatelmala led to a civil war and 400,000 dead. Chile the loss of a democratic regime, replacement with a dictatorship and at least 50,000 murdered.
The US lost the cold war because it surrendered its core values, its founding principles to fight an enemy that has since turned out to be nothing but a paper tiger. Instead of spreading democracy the fear of communism caused the cold warriors to fear it.
So now the neo-cons have made exactly the same mistake again in Iraq. They have started a war without an exit strategy. The only power in the region that can stop Iraq sliding into anarchy if the US withdraws is Iran. Opposing the US invasion has not weakened the UN security council, it has strengthened it. This was all predictable from the start of the war. The US is in a far, far worse position today than it was twelve months ago.
Fox news might keep telling you that the US won the cold war, Bill O'Reilly won a Peabody and George W Bush is respected internationally, but that does not make them true. Nor does it mean that people who disagree with the Fox news analysis hate America and what it stands for. As should be obvious to anyone who reads history it is the neo-cons who hate democracy and everything the founders of the US stood for.
People who wrap themselves in the flag and worship monuments to the ten commandments are most likely to turn out to believe in the values of neither, particularly the part about worshiping graven images.
At the time the advice was given the French themselves, even the arch-colonialist deGaulle had come to the same conclusion that they had completely bolloxed the situation beyond repair and there was absolutely no good that would come from further western intervention.
They were right on that point, between one and two million Vietnamese were killed during the US invasion, that being the usual name for an event where one country sends huge numbers of troops in an attempt to occupy another country.
Frequently right.. about what?
The French are frequently right on subjects such as vinticulture, cuisine, not starting land wars in Indo-china, coiture, and cinematography.
I don't think there will be much of a choice. By 2015 the economy of China will be larger than the US economy in dollar terms. It is already larger if you look at manufacturing capacity. China has about five times the population. When you start to look at what it will take to be the number one superpower at that point there is simply no way the US is going to be able to afford it.
This does not have to be a disaster, the US can still be primus inter pares amongst the free world. The problem (if you want to see it that way) is that the US is simply not going to be able to act unilateraly in the way the neo-cons want to.
It is just as well that the Bush administration seems to be concluding that the UN is a good thing after all. Six months ago the neo-cons and the press were telling us that the French had done lasting damage to the UN and the UN would never be taken seriously again. Today it looks like rather the revers is going to be the result. I don't think that the US public would accept a neo-con push to invade Iran unilaterally without UN sanction at this point. Even the rabidly pro-Bush US media is starting to get the message that it is damned easy to start wars and pretty difficult to stop them.
Oh yes, the RIAA thing, perhaps if the dopey slashdot editors got a clue and started a section with political stories they might have a bigger business opportunity. Linux was hot news eight years ago, but face it, the tech community cares about a lot more than just technology. We have been debating the RIAA story for four years now, I don't know anything to say on the topic that has not been said already and looking at the other posts nobody else does either.
The next stage in slashdot evolution should be to fire the editors and replace them with code. Having commander taco and co decide what news is important is not the secret of Slashdot success. Better still VA-Linux should sell slashdot to Google and then google could hook up slashdot to google news. Adapt or die guys, if you don't make the imaginative leap others will.
I have always believed that personal integrity is one of the biggest indicators of likely success. A few years ago that was an unfashionable position to take, today in the wake of Enron, Haliburton, Sunbeam etc. more people seem to take my point of view.
I remember back when the Cantor and Segal thing hit telling Laurence Canter that the Hi Tech industry was a small pond and that most of the people who got rich from it did so by being a part of the right circles, playing the inside game. Few people can have realized the potential of the internet as early as Canter and Segal did and ended up worse off than they started as a result.
I think it will turn out the same way for the SCO folk. It is not like they have skills that are exactly sought after in the Windows world. It is going to be interesting seeing these chuckleheads trying to get jobs at IBM and Red Hat in a years time.
Unless of course they are the ones wanting to start the war in question... Yep, that was the point France might well have been speaking from experience when it warned Bush not to start an unnecessary war. Things often turn out unexpectedly
Overall, the comment seems quite pro-France to me. I'd give it a '+1 Funny' rating. It was pretty pro-french, but anti-french militarism. The same goes for my posts wrt the US. You can be pro-US without being in favor of a US Empire. In fact if you believe in the values of the founders of the US you might well consider the neo-con militarist faction of Cheney, Perle and co who spend so much time wrapping themselves arround the flag to be the ones who are really anti-US.
The whole point of the post was that the US militarists are as ridiculous as the french militarists and being anti both sets of militarists is in no way unpatriotic.
Err are you saying that the French are wrong to admire Woody Allen and Jerry Lewis? I think these are motre occasions that prove them right.
Witness the whole history of France. And as for French advice on 'Vietnam'- um you do know enough history to realize that Vietnam was a French colony don't you?
All the more reason to have taken notice of de Gaulle's warning. The French did not leave Vietnam from choice and they understood that the situation was unwinnable.
You do know some little thing about the Cold War perhaps? You know, the one the US won in the end by specifically not taking any advice from France. But that would involve knowing some history I think. You are wrong.
Oh dear, I don't know who won Vietnam according to Fox news but according to most of the mainstream news sources the US lost that one.
On the off-chance that you were referring to the US 'winning' the cold war, I fail to see the relevance of the claim which is dubious in any case. The USSR certainly lost the cold war, but Vietnam was backed by China, not the USSR and according to the news sources I read Vietnam and China are still communist. I don't know about Fox news, their coverage of China tends to be decided by Rupert's need to keep in well with the communist dictatorship so they will let him continue to broadcast star TV.
Hey, I was merely repeating what the French ambassador said on NPR:-)
Actually De Gaule did tell the US not to bother trying to replace them in Vietnam when they abandoned their former colony. France did not withdraw from choice, they withdrew for the same reasons the US withdrew later, the place was a quagmire.
Incidentally some posters have been criticisng me for 'buying into right wing criticism of France'. Err, not really, when the whole Iraq thing started I observed that the one good thing that could come out of it was that the right wing neo-cons would discover exactly how grateful France was to the US for rescuing it from the Nazis. Britain learned that a long time ago when de Gaulle vetoed Britain's application to join the common market.
France is very grateful to the US and British people for freeing France from the Nazis, however that does not mean they believe any gratitude is due to George 'AWOL draft dodger' Bush and his administration.
As for joining in to help in the war on terror, err well France is actually a state sponsor of terrorism as the folk at Greenpeace can tell you. France's bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a state sponsored terrorist act. France's own neo-cons ordered the attack and then connived to get the terrorists who got caught out of jail. Last I heard Greenpeace had still not received compensation from France for the bombing and murder.
The real point of the post is that at this point the imperial pretensions of France are a complete joke. France simply does not have the military capacity to sustain an empire, behaving the way it often does simply makes them look ridiculous.
But fast forward a few years. You cannot be a military superpower without being an economic superpower. The Bushies are spending the country into the ground. When the baby boomers retire in ten years time and there is a choice between maintaining the militarism budget and paying social security they will choose to keep their pensions.
I think the most likely result of the invasion of Iraq is the emergence of Iran as the regional power and the rapid decline of the US as a military power as the US taxpayer is unable to afford a military budget larger than the whole of the rest of the world combined.
In other words, get those French jokes in quick. In a few years the US is likely to find itself in the same situation. Don't worry though, contrary to what the neo-cons would have you beleive it is probably not such a bad thing if the US does not have to play globo-cop all the time.
I find it somewhat bizare that EMI would even littigate the case. The product was clearly defective as manufactured and so under EU law the consumer has an absolute right to a full refund. No pissy-US '90 day' guarantees here. If you sell something that is broke the consumer gets a refund, period.
As for the wider political context, don't forget what the French Ambassador to the UN said on the subject of Iraq, basically that France belives it is not opposing US interests, just that it believes it has a better idea of what those interests are. The US came to regret not taking French advice in Vietnam and according to Paris will come to regret not taking their advice on the subject of invading Iraq.
From this we can deduce two things, first that the French can be insufferably arrogant for such a small country whose military success under Napoleon turned out to be what the music industry would call a 'one hit wonder', being followed by flop after flop. The only recent successes being in the consolation prize category of 'quickest surrender'. And no Jaques, the magnificent conquest of the Sahara desert does not qualify a country as an empire. The test of an empire is not merely the acreage under occupation, the locals have to actually be at least aware of the occupation.
The other thing we may deduce is that despite the fact they are frequently arrogant and obnoxious the French are frequently right, particularly when it comes to the 'stop the US from pig-headed self defeating policy blunder' category.
They made it very clear that Jackson was toast. Although they left many of his findings of fact intact they did overturn most of his conclusions based on those facts. In the US appelate court tradition there is usually a lot of deference paid to the district court on issues of fact. In this case the appeals court accused Jackson of attempting to prevent them overtuning his conclusions by describing them as fact.
When you look at the particular issues that were overturned and the ones that were left standing about the only significant finding of fact of Jacksons that was left standing was that Microsoft is a monopoly. Well duuhhh!
When you look at what the appeals court did it is pretty clear that Jackson's attempt to railroad the trial through on a short schedule killed any chance of the DoJ winning in the long haul. It would have been better for the DoJ if the whole thing had started from scratch.
Even though the appeals court had not ordered a new trial they had found Jackson to be guilty of inexcusable bias forcing the second half of the trial to be negated. It does not take a genius to see that Microsoft would have had a pretty good case in the Supreme court to get the whole case thrown out and retried.
Jackson a puppet of Microsoft? What are you on? Can I get some?
Jackson was the best thing that happened to Microsoft, Boies was the next best, but not by intention. Jackson was so gratuitously biased that there was no way the appeals court could possibly have backed his decision.
Having watched David Boies in action in the Microsoft, Florida and Napster cases I am convinced that his reputation is vastly over-rated. He was responsible for botching the Microsoft case, he fought the case on the weakest complaints, not the strongest ones. In Florida he let the Bushies roll right over him. His arguments in Napster were profoundly unconvincing.
Windows alone has many, many times the number of lines of code that Red hat 9 has. Also if you install Windows 2003 and know where to look you can actually find a C# compiler, email server, SQL database engine, etc. etc.
The high rate of patches for Windows XP also reflects the fact that Microsoft closed up shop for a month to go on a security bug hunt. Yet another reason is that XP contains an emulator for applications that were written to run under Windows 95. Emulators are notorious for requiring tweaks.
Yet another explanation could be that more people use XP so more people find code paths that have bugs.
Basically the number of patches issued is about as meaningless an indicator of code quality as number of lines of code per day is a measure of productivity.
What is needed is a way to hold ISPs accountable. I don't accept the Nadarite 'corporations baaad' ideology you are spouting but the problem is one of accountability.
That is why the answer has to be at the message level and not the transport layer. We need non-repudiation. We need a means of holding the ISPs accountable.
The emails they would want would be the internal ones that were between the Microsoft employees.
I strongly suspect that Cringely has not investigated much further than asking Burst.com's opinion on the matter. It does not seem very likely that a judge would order Microsoft to produce documents in this way and for the only person to report it to be Cringely.
What I suspect the judge actually ordered was that Microsoft must either produce the emails in question or show that the offsite backup copies do not exist for the period in question. Of course Cringely being the Bill O'Really of tech journalism automatically believes that Microsoft must be lying and so he omits the last part, or maybe he did not bother to question burst on the point.
I don't think that folk like Cringely and O'Really do any service to anyone long term. Their statements just come out as a stream of pure opinionated hysteria. Although to be fair to Cringely he has not (yet) insisted that his publisher take Al Franken to court for calling him a liar.
Of course this is MS so....
Microsoft also supports S/MIME. In fact you can send an encrypted email from a Microsoft email client to a user of Netscape or Lotus email clients.
The end to end principle is vastly overrated. If you read the actual design documents written by David Clark on the end to end principal you will not find the dogmatism that has since surrounded it.
The Internet works in large part because the end to end principle has been applied in the right places. But that has a corrolary most of the problems with the Internet are cases where the end to end principle has been applied in thewrong places.
Nobody advocates that IP routers should inspect each packet to see if it contains spam.
No but almost everyone is advocating that ISPs should take action to make sure their users do not spam. The principal here is perimeter security, just as every enterprise should have a firewall every enterprise should be responsible for their spammy customers.
The problem I see with AMTP is that TLS only provides transport layer security. A much more robust approach is to apply message layer security.
The issue is not technology, it is politics. To get a change like AMTP to stick you have to have the political clout to effect a change in the Internet infrastructure. Bill Weinman does not have that clout. In a perfect world the IETF would, unfortunately the IETF has spent much of the last twenty years systematically pissing off every corporate developer and most of the open source ones as well.
That leaves us with the big ISPs as the way to deploy changes to the email infrastructure to fight spam. So far they have announced that they are talking and nothing have been heard from them. In fact there are quite a few folk associated with those companies who have gone very quiet all of a sudden.
This is probably the biggest mistake in the constitution. The reason it was included is that at the time there was a big fear of judicial corruption - a fair concern given the context of the time.
The problem today is that juries are simply incapable of understanding a lot of the issues that regularly appear in civil trials. Cases are more likely to be decided on Johnnie Cochran style attorney hysterics of the type that got OJ off the hook for murdering Nichole and Ron.
Burst.com have no technology, they have a bunch of bogus patents that describe techniques that have been taught in comp arch classes for twenty years (see DMA). They know they can't win through the law so they get rubes like Cringely to shill for them.
Another big problem with the jury trial clause is the 'no fact decided by a jury' part. This is responsible for a lot of miscarriages of justice as courts insist that they cannot overturn a conviction because of a 'fact' decided by a jury no matter how much proof there is that the decision was wrong.