The US Patent Office does not keep track of ownership of patents; they merely record inventors and who the patent is assigned to intially (from the application).
Actually a change of ownership of the patent is usually registered with the Patent Office. I can't recall if it is a legal requirement.
But changes of ownership are actually pretty rare. Most times that a patent is 'sold' by a company that is still in business you instead keep ownership of the actual patent and sell the resale and enforcement rights.
Novell is almost certainly right in its claim it still 'owns' the patents, although AT&T may well still hold title. The issue is what rights have been transferred. Clearly SCO holds a very substantial interest but it is unlikely to affect IBM since IBM has a prior contract with the original owners of the patents.
IBM are pointing out a very basic principle of patent law. IBM signed a contract with AT&T. That cannot be affected by subsequent contracts signed with Novell and now SCO.
IBM is also pointing out a very basic fact of the computer industry, if you get into patent disputes with a company that sells the same stuff you do the guy with the longest patent portfolio wins. I was very surprised that the countersuit mentions only 4 patents, I had expected more like 40, or perhaps this is only the start.
Someone must be benefitting if they can afford to make me this kind of offer.
There are a number of possibilities. The most likely one being that the guy is either a crank or a hacker with a wierd sense of humor.
Another possibility is that there is some form of steganographic message being broadcast. This could be a signaling mechanism used to provide deniable communications from an 'owned' computer. Alternatively it might well be a genuine request for some form of parts. If you wanted to buy parts for some form of illegal weapon you might use this type of cimmunication to tell a quartermaster what is required.
The advantage of using a message that appears to bee from a kook is that people tend not to take kooks seriously (unless they get elected to office but that is another matter). On the other hand if you are serious about anti-terrorism you listen to so many kooks that it becomes a warning sign. The type of people who stick a bomb in a litter bin outside a McDonalds tend to be whacko jobs.
Show me one unbloody revolution please.
Revolution has always been bloody and it always will be, anything else is not revolution but evolution.
Lenin (unlike Stalin) I think was an idealist.
The 'velvet revolution' in Chzechsolvakia, the revolutions in East Germany, Poland. Even the Romanian revolution that deposed the communists only resulted in about 250 casualties.
But you are ignoring history. The original Russian revolution was essentially bloodless. The Tsar was not deposed by the Bolshevics, it was the Menchevicks who did that in a relatively bloodless coup.
The civil war was entirely due to Lenin's intervention and the failure of the Mencheviks to call an immediate end to the war. If Lenin had not acted Russia would have emerged from WWI in pretty much the same situation as Germany, a discredited monarchy replaced by a democratic republic.
Moreover without the threat of Russian Bolshevism Hitler's rise to power would have been impossible. His principal campaign platform was fear of communist invasion.
Whichever way you look at it extreeme idealogues like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao are dangerous. I don't think that Libertarian or Fundamentalist Christian idealogues are any less dangerous either. So far President Showboat has started two wars and finished neither of them. I don't think a libertarian idealogue would be any better.
The problem is ideology, not the details of the ideology.
Newton and Liebnitz get cocredit for inventing the calculus at the same time. What's more, everybody uses Liebnitz's because Newton's sucked.
That is not quite true.
Liebnitz developed a calculus notation but he certainly was not 'independent' of Newton. The issue is somewhat clouded because of the whitewash report put out by the Royal society on who should get the credit which Newton actually wrote.
Even so, Liebnitz was working from Newton's scientific papers. Newton did not include the invention of calculus in the paper describing universal gravitation. That would be rather too much at one go. Instead he uses a series of arguments about infintesimals.
In effect the gravity paper provides a worked example of applying calculus but does not provide the notation or state that it can be generalized. We know however that Liebnitz used Newton's paper as the basis for his formulation of calculus because that is exactly what the papers he wrote says he is doing.
On the subject of the notation I went to an English public school that taught both of them. The Liebnitz notation certainly has a number of advantages but the Newtonian notation certainly does not 'suck'. It is somewhat limited if you want to do mechanics problems but it does has its uses.
Incidentally, Feynman's main contribution to the field of particle physics may well have been his notational innovations.
One of my big frustrations with the web is that the math markup never took off. I think that an open source version of mathematica could provide a tremendous value to high schools. Advanced mathematics is simply too much of a chore without power tools to do the drudge work. Anyone want to learn all about the Groebner basis? Actually it would not be hard to do better than mathematica, the lack of a type system is a real pain. I want to deal in meters and seconds and divide one by the other to get speed. Anyone know if that has been added since Steve W. gave me my last copy?
>>>According to Lackey the problem was that HavenCo failled to realize the pure vision of the founders. He pretty much sounds like one of those unreconstructed 1960s communists that claim that the reason the USSR failled is because it was not communist enough.
Well, the USSR never was communist, they were Stalinists, the idea of communism went right out of the door the moment Stalin came into the room.
The sort of folk who claim the USSR was not 'communist enough' tend to be the ones who think that Stalin was on the right track.
In any case Lenin was not much better than Stalin. He did not manage to murder as many people as Stalin, but he certainly murdered many in his persuit of personal power.
The reality is that they probably haven't got a clue who Robert Lackey is. He flashed his US passport at customs. The only record of who he is and how long he's been here will be in his passport.
On the contrary, I have discussed the HavenCo situation with law enforcement officials in the UK. They are fully aware of the situation.
I think much of British prosperity comes down to the incompetence of our politicians allowing business to go on relatively unencumbered.
Hah! a long time since I heard that phrase. Last time I heard it Harold Wilson was PM. The UK is way down the list of prosperous nations. It got clobbered in the 70s with the strikes and oil shocks, then 30% of our manufacturing industry went bankrupt in the first 18 months of the Thatcher period before they finally realised that Milton Friedman is a snake oil salesman and did a U turn. If it wasn't for the invasion of Iraq^h^h^h^hthe Falklands Thatcher would have been a one term PM. Things have been improving since we fell out of the EMU under Major and the economy is a damn sight better than that of the US, but it is not exactly a role model at this point.
And whatever sort of model it is, hands off government is not the cause because the UK does not have that. What it does have is a very competent civil service.
And international law specifically states that when you increase your territorial waters you cannot gain any "land" claimed by other countries.
Where do you think it says that?
'Sealand' is not a party to any international treaty, it is not a member of any international treaty organization.
The UK does not recognize 'sealand' as a country, nor does any other country grant it recognition. As such any claims it makes are about as credible as OJ's attempts to find 'the real killers'.
It was however outside of UK territorial waters at the time it was claimed. And as such was not under UK law. The UK extender their territorial waters around it when it was claimed. The legal/political position is a little unclear, however a UK judge has previously declared he had no authority over it as it wasn't part of the UK.
There is not the slightest doubt as to the legal situation.
The lawsuit occurred at a time when the platform was outside UK territorial waters.
Under international law, free-standing man made structures do not create territorial claims.
Under UK law the platform is a ship. The fact that it does not move is irrelevant. The court judgement did not recognize the platform as a country, it stated that the UK did not have jurisdiction on a ship that was outside UK territorial waters.
The platform is now inside UK territorial waters and therefore subject to UK law.
...it's the more the fact the company only had a whopping six customers.
According to Lackey the problem was that HavenCo failled to realize the pure vision of the founders. He pretty much sounds like one of those unreconstructed 1960s communists that claim that the reason the USSR failled is because it was not communist enough.
The fact that they only had 6 customers would explain why the UK authorities appear to have shown so little interest. The platform is inside UK teritorial waters - period. The UK government does not recognize 'Prince Roy' and in this case it is the opinion of the executive and not the judiciary that is relevant. Extreeme ideologues like Lackey can believe what they want, the scheme was doomed from the start because they were not immune to UK law.
The US citizens were certainly not immune from US law. The US has in recent years exported a large number of its laws. For that matter so has the UK.
Under UK law the platform as a man made object is therefore a ship. Ships do not have territorial claims. A ship that does not carry the flag of a recognized nationality is subject to the law of any country that cares to exercise jurisdiction.
There are plenty of real countries where the authorities will turn a bloind eye to any enterprise - at a price. Nigeria for example where the government tollerates the advance fee fraud spammers who have them on the payroll.
The HavenCo employees all went to and from the platfom through Heathrow airport. They could have been arrested by the UK authorities any time they wanted to. Lackey was working in the UK without a work permit.
I believe the major parties IRT enterprise email would be Microsoft, _Lotus_, Sendmail, and maybe Novell (GroupWise).
In terms of deployment you need MSN, AOL, Yahoo and perhaps Earthlink.
Going to the IETF does not help much. The process there takes years which nobody is going to wait for and at the end of the process you often end up with less buy in from the stakeholders than you started with.
While "everyone" is out rewriting the SMTP protocol, why don't we rewrite FTP and POP3 while we're at it?
SMTP is a rewrite of FTP. The original MTP was actually just a feature of FTP. You moved email in those days as if it was a file.
FTP is itself actually written as a feature set for telnet. You would log into the remote machine and then tell it to move files about.
FTP has been rewritten, it is called HTTP. The only reason HTTP exists is that FTP is horribly inefficient if you only want to move one file and provides no metadata to describe what the file might contain.
There is plenty of cruft that could be removed from SMTP, features that should never have been there. There are also features that could be usefully added, like ways to reliably authenticate senders at the transport layer. And no, STARTTLS and RMX do not meet that need, PGP and S/MIME are message layer and both require the full message to be read before any decision is made to accept or reject.
But none of this requires a complete ditching of SMTP and start again protocol. If the industry did think it should go that way it would choose a Web Service based protocol layered on the WS-Security stack.
Sure folk can write their own mail protocol, just like anyone can write their own programming language. Just don't expect anyone to use it unless you start off with a commitment to implement from the major mail server vendors. That would be Microsoft and Notes.
Making changes to the email protocols is very hard. The IETF has been completely unable to take any sort of lead in this respect. In twenty five years they have only revised the basic mail protocols once and that working group started with a mandate not to actually change anything. RFC2821 is an improvement but nobody is actually listening at this stage. The ASRG group is not even in the IETF it is in the IRTF, the R is research. At this stage the group has alienated every major vendor that has ever participated.
There is actually one change to the mail infrastructure that is emerging but it is not a rewrite of SMTP, more a sort of supplement. One of the things that SMTP does worst is management of mailing lists. Sure it is great if you want a mailing list, but what is really going on in a mailing list is push publishing. A dedicated push publishing protocol could eliminate a lot of the pain in mailing lists that comes from the fact that there is no real concept of a 'subscription' in SMTP. But again, that is not necessarily another protocol, probably just adding SMTP support for RSS.
It would be interesting to see how many of those listed actually use their addressable space. ARIN, RIPE, and APNIC provide subdivided blocks of addresses to Europe, Asia, and North America. Net 34 (inet-hou.com) appears to be the personal property of a Houston resident named Richard Harrison.
This is one of the reasons why statements like 'the US owns 70% of the allocated IP addresses' have to be taken with some skepticism.
People and companies in the US have 70% of the allocated addresses. That does not mean that the US has an advantage over other countries when it comes to new allocations. The Asian NICs have made it very plain that they consider the pool of unallocated addresses to be a common pool.
A small number of US companies are well placed and have a lot of unallocated addresses that they can allocate for internal use. But that does not mean that you are better off simply by being in the US. Its a bit like the fact that there are huge numbers of diamonds in South Africa, the fact that deBeers and the Oppenheimer familly have a lot of diamonds does not mean that the average South African has any more than the planetary average.
The reason the Asians are more concerned about IPv6 has nothing to do with the address shortage. That will screw everyone equally at the same time. The Asians are concerned because they want to deploy a bunch of new IP based technologies such as Voice over IP, IP capable cell phones etc. Those will suck millions of addresses a month. There are more cell phones in service than remaining IPv4 addresses.
So yes there is an issue, but the reason the US has its head embedded in its posterior on this issue is not because of any surplus of resources.
We've never had MCI. Once they called, and told me wife that they were going to give us $20 to make up for all of the long distance phone problems we'd been having. When the verifier comes on the line [to verify that we wanted to switch to MCI], just say yes to all the questions
That would have been a scam by the contractor. It does not excuse MCI of responsibility of course but you are quite likely to get a call from the same contractor to get you to switch to AT&T.
What a lot of contractors used to do was keep a list of people who would switch over the phone. Then they would call them continuously getting them to switch from one company to annother each month.
I have friends who never paid for their long distance because they were always on some intro offer or another.
I currently have Qwest long distance. They screwed up the billing for 18 months, didn't send me a single bill. This despite me calling to tell them that they had a problem. Their customer service refused to sort out the problem with the local carrier because both had a policy of not waiting more than five rings...
PGP + tar is not particularly good prior art. I suspect that the PK claim would be for a file format that allows individual files to be extracted without having to unencrypt each one.
A much better source of prior art IMNSHO opinion would be the XML Encryption standard which does allow for independent decryption of components. Also IBM has prior art with its 'cryptolopes' scheme.
Another source of prior art would be Matt Blaze's encrypting file system for UNIX and the Windows NT implementation.
Of course if the USPTO was not so corrupt it would be possible to raise this prior art with the examiner - the same way you can with every other patent system in the world.
Not very long ago people were complaining that Microsoft was somehow treading on PK by implementing integrated zip technology in Windows. I guess folks may want to reconsider that now. The fact is that the zip technology should always have had encryption.
That brings me to the point I wanted to make. Until he sued, I didn't think badly of him. He got access to a camera and wanted to see if his moves were as smooth as he imagined. Frankly, they weren't completely clumsy.
No No! what should happen at this point is that the kids send the video of Cartman in to the America's stupidest video program so they can win the $10,000 that Cartman needs for the DNA tests to find out who his father is. Then Cartman sends in the video of Kenny getting run over by a truck instead.
I don't remember anything in the script about a lawsuit over the video. Thats not till a later episode when Cartman's mum sues to try to get a 54th trimester abortion (or something like that).
Like the name says, its a bondage parlor. Prostitution is illegal in the US but bondage is perfectly OK. If a New York businessman feels like a bit of bondage in the afternoon they just go down to their local Kinkos.
ATM replacing bank tellers. eTickets replacing airport personnel. Self checkout at the grocery store.
The reason that people accepted ATMs and eTickets was that they were a heck of a lot more convenient for the customer. You could get your cash any time, day or night. In the days before eTickets you had to actually receive the tickets. If you wanted to fly at short notice you could easily end up waiting for FedEx to deliver your ticket the day before you flew, or have to collect the tickets from an airport service counter.
Aside from businesses trying to reduce costs, the government will be trying to create jobs elsewhere.
Buddy, where do you live? Your government might try to create jobs, here in the USA job creation is at best through fiscal policy - and there the real objective seems to be tax cuts for the richest using job creation as an excuse to sell the policy to the press.
Technology has reduced the cost of manufacture steadily over the past couple of centuries. With a few exceptions employment has actually increased. We are currently living through one of the very rare periods of a decrease in actual employment. Nobody is attributing the cause to technology. The main reason for the decrease in employment is the business cycle, in this case made worse by the faith-based economic policy (give money to the rich and hope).
The reason technology does not create unemployment is that there is a vast reservoir of need, both real and artificial. As technology has expanded production people's living standards have increased to match.
If humanoid robots are built then we can be sure that the first application will be in the house to do housework. Only a small proportion of the population can afford to employ cleaners. The manufacture of the household robot for the masses will create considerably more jobs than are lost.
The same goes for the robot attended fast food outlet. I did a study a while back on how much it would cost to run such an operation. The idea was to have an automated expresso bar as a piece of installation art. Cost wise it is certainly do-able. You can buy the parts required off the shelf from automation companies. The problem is the maintenance staff required to keep the system going. It is easy and cheap to hire someone to stand behind a counter and make lates all day. It is much harder to find people capable of tinkering with complicated machinery to keep it running. For automation to work you have to be able to replace a lot of workers. Otherwise you end up replacing a minimum wage position with a technician who costs as much as an electrician or plumber.
If Linus doesnt fear the SCO trolls, why should I? We're putting linux on our networks for free, and SCO wants a part of it.
Well Linus is only providing a part of the Linux O/S and one that is least likely to actually infringe. So Linus is perhaps not the best test.
A better test would be IBM who seems to be completely unphased by the situation and has racks of the best IP lawyers that money can buy.
SCO faces a big problem trying to make its case. This is not a normal copyright infringement case where the ownership of the copyright is beyond doubt. Proving SCO's case will take many years - if that is actually possible at all. In the process SCO will be forced to specify exactly the portions of the code that are alleged to infringe. It is beyond doubt that by the time any case came to court for a judgement that any infringing components would have been removed.
That is before any consideration of the GPL. SCO continued to distribute Linux under the GPL long after they acquired the rights to UnixWare. Even if their Linux claim were true they have licensed the relevant code under the GPL.
This is nothing but the death throes of a dying company that has gambled on one last chance to show a return. They could well keep the stock price high for some time while the management sell out their shares.
Since CDs are such a terribly expensive part compared to the cost of a laptop. This seems like a really silly way to cut costs, if you ask me.
It is another piece of software that has to be kept in sync with the hardware. It is much easier to simply copy the specific version of the software required onto the hard drive than mess arround making CDRoms of particular installs.
If you are buying laptops 20 at a time as many IBM thinkpad customers do, the cost of 19 CDROMS that will never be used is nothing but an anoyance. The end customer is going to reimage the machine anyway.
So when those emails come in, I guess they go in either one of two mailboxes. "With us" or "Against Us".
Well having worked on the original Whitehouse email system I seem to recall discussing this at length.
Some people did want to simply register approval or disapproval of some issue, which is completely OK. But in many cases people wanted to do something different, like bring to attention some problem that they did not feel was being addressed. Very often the emails would be questions about policy, in particular how a policy would be applied in a particular circumstance.
Sorting into 'for' and 'against' is absolutely the last thing the Clinton people wanted to do. You certainly don't want to force someone to make up their mind like that, they will probably go the opposite way to the one you want.
There seems to be a very different philosophy behind today's WH site and the Clinton site. In the Clinton era the whole site was about empowerment and giving people their information. The idea was that the press had become privilleged filters of the news and that the people had an equal the right to see press releases and all the other information given to the media. The current site is a product of standard corporate PR think, it is all about controlling the information flow - yuk!
If you want to know what happened to the people behind the original Whitehouse site look at the Dean campaign.
::smacks head:: So thats why I see the queen of england walking on the streets of london so often, because there are no guns in england, so the Queen is more accessable.
Well Brenda does not get out as often as she might, but that is more a matter of choice than of security. It is not unusual to see a minor royal walking arround London with only a couple of special branch officers accompanying them.
> Yes, brilliant. I can just see the Brits executing Winston Churchill at the conclusion of WWII.
Well, they DID throw him out of office...
Actually his party was thrown out of office. It was not really a reflection on Churchill personaly. The country was sick of the Tory party whose appeasement policy had led to the war. Churchill was not the Tory leader when the war began, he didn't even have much support in the party. The reason that he became leader was that he was the only leading Tory party figure who had got it right on the subject of Hitler.
The War government was a coalition of Labour and Tories. The country did not want to return to the same state as before the war. They wanted rapid change in social conditions. That is what they got with the National Health Service and the welfare state.
Clinton was also the Commander in Chief.
Maybe he was also skipping out on military service so he'd be around to be President.
There was a difference. Bush and Clinton both dodged the draft. Bush got daddy to pull strings to get him into a National Guard program he simply wasn't qualified for. Clinton got a scholarship to go to the UK to study.
The difference was that Clinton actively opposed the war, he did not want to fight in a war he did not believe in. Bush on the other hand fully supported the war, thought that the US should be fighting it. The one detail that Bush had a problem with was he thought that other people should go and fight his war for him.
Fans of the 'liberal media'. compare and contrast the amount of coverage the Clinton draft-doger non-story got compared with the Bush AWOL story. Even today the AWOL episode is only refered to in the Internet press on sites like Slate and Salon.
Israel is no more a Theocracy than the US. The US is a democracy yet at some stage it had slavery, women couldn't vote and the idea of a female or non-white president is still a joke. Israel is the only jewish country in a sense that it protects the jewish people.
So a 'white people's state' would be merely a state that protected white people? But who from?
The problem with this 'oh its just a special state for us' story is that in the process of making special laws for one group of people everyone else automatically gets pushed down.
The Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is very much like that of the native americans by the US. First land would be taken from the Indians using force. Then the inevitable violent response would be used to justify the original theft.
When special privileges start to include who can live where, who can buy what and who can get planning permission and who cannot they cease to be 'privileges' and start to be human rights that are systematically withheld from the arab population.
Of course the Iraeli Apartheid does not justify terrorism, but it goes a long way to explain it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually a change of ownership of the patent is usually registered with the Patent Office. I can't recall if it is a legal requirement.
But changes of ownership are actually pretty rare. Most times that a patent is 'sold' by a company that is still in business you instead keep ownership of the actual patent and sell the resale and enforcement rights.
Novell is almost certainly right in its claim it still 'owns' the patents, although AT&T may well still hold title. The issue is what rights have been transferred. Clearly SCO holds a very substantial interest but it is unlikely to affect IBM since IBM has a prior contract with the original owners of the patents.
IBM are pointing out a very basic principle of patent law. IBM signed a contract with AT&T. That cannot be affected by subsequent contracts signed with Novell and now SCO.
IBM is also pointing out a very basic fact of the computer industry, if you get into patent disputes with a company that sells the same stuff you do the guy with the longest patent portfolio wins. I was very surprised that the countersuit mentions only 4 patents, I had expected more like 40, or perhaps this is only the start.
There are a number of possibilities. The most likely one being that the guy is either a crank or a hacker with a wierd sense of humor.
Another possibility is that there is some form of steganographic message being broadcast. This could be a signaling mechanism used to provide deniable communications from an 'owned' computer. Alternatively it might well be a genuine request for some form of parts. If you wanted to buy parts for some form of illegal weapon you might use this type of cimmunication to tell a quartermaster what is required.
The advantage of using a message that appears to bee from a kook is that people tend not to take kooks seriously (unless they get elected to office but that is another matter). On the other hand if you are serious about anti-terrorism you listen to so many kooks that it becomes a warning sign. The type of people who stick a bomb in a litter bin outside a McDonalds tend to be whacko jobs.
But you are ignoring history. The original Russian revolution was essentially bloodless. The Tsar was not deposed by the Bolshevics, it was the Menchevicks who did that in a relatively bloodless coup.
The civil war was entirely due to Lenin's intervention and the failure of the Mencheviks to call an immediate end to the war. If Lenin had not acted Russia would have emerged from WWI in pretty much the same situation as Germany, a discredited monarchy replaced by a democratic republic.
Moreover without the threat of Russian Bolshevism Hitler's rise to power would have been impossible. His principal campaign platform was fear of communist invasion.
Whichever way you look at it extreeme idealogues like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao are dangerous. I don't think that Libertarian or Fundamentalist Christian idealogues are any less dangerous either. So far President Showboat has started two wars and finished neither of them. I don't think a libertarian idealogue would be any better.
The problem is ideology, not the details of the ideology.
That is not quite true.
Liebnitz developed a calculus notation but he certainly was not 'independent' of Newton. The issue is somewhat clouded because of the whitewash report put out by the Royal society on who should get the credit which Newton actually wrote.
Even so, Liebnitz was working from Newton's scientific papers. Newton did not include the invention of calculus in the paper describing universal gravitation. That would be rather too much at one go. Instead he uses a series of arguments about infintesimals.
In effect the gravity paper provides a worked example of applying calculus but does not provide the notation or state that it can be generalized. We know however that Liebnitz used Newton's paper as the basis for his formulation of calculus because that is exactly what the papers he wrote says he is doing.
On the subject of the notation I went to an English public school that taught both of them. The Liebnitz notation certainly has a number of advantages but the Newtonian notation certainly does not 'suck'. It is somewhat limited if you want to do mechanics problems but it does has its uses.
Incidentally, Feynman's main contribution to the field of particle physics may well have been his notational innovations.
One of my big frustrations with the web is that the math markup never took off. I think that an open source version of mathematica could provide a tremendous value to high schools. Advanced mathematics is simply too much of a chore without power tools to do the drudge work. Anyone want to learn all about the Groebner basis? Actually it would not be hard to do better than mathematica, the lack of a type system is a real pain. I want to deal in meters and seconds and divide one by the other to get speed. Anyone know if that has been added since Steve W. gave me my last copy?
Well, the USSR never was communist, they were Stalinists, the idea of communism went right out of the door the moment Stalin came into the room.
The sort of folk who claim the USSR was not 'communist enough' tend to be the ones who think that Stalin was on the right track.
In any case Lenin was not much better than Stalin. He did not manage to murder as many people as Stalin, but he certainly murdered many in his persuit of personal power.
On the contrary, I have discussed the HavenCo situation with law enforcement officials in the UK. They are fully aware of the situation.
I think much of British prosperity comes down to the incompetence of our politicians allowing business to go on relatively unencumbered.
Hah! a long time since I heard that phrase. Last time I heard it Harold Wilson was PM. The UK is way down the list of prosperous nations. It got clobbered in the 70s with the strikes and oil shocks, then 30% of our manufacturing industry went bankrupt in the first 18 months of the Thatcher period before they finally realised that Milton Friedman is a snake oil salesman and did a U turn. If it wasn't for the invasion of Iraq^h^h^h^hthe Falklands Thatcher would have been a one term PM. Things have been improving since we fell out of the EMU under Major and the economy is a damn sight better than that of the US, but it is not exactly a role model at this point.
And whatever sort of model it is, hands off government is not the cause because the UK does not have that. What it does have is a very competent civil service.
Where do you think it says that?
'Sealand' is not a party to any international treaty, it is not a member of any international treaty organization.
The UK does not recognize 'sealand' as a country, nor does any other country grant it recognition. As such any claims it makes are about as credible as OJ's attempts to find 'the real killers'.
There is not the slightest doubt as to the legal situation.
The lawsuit occurred at a time when the platform was outside UK territorial waters.
Under international law, free-standing man made structures do not create territorial claims.
Under UK law the platform is a ship. The fact that it does not move is irrelevant. The court judgement did not recognize the platform as a country, it stated that the UK did not have jurisdiction on a ship that was outside UK territorial waters.
The platform is now inside UK territorial waters and therefore subject to UK law.
According to Lackey the problem was that HavenCo failled to realize the pure vision of the founders. He pretty much sounds like one of those unreconstructed 1960s communists that claim that the reason the USSR failled is because it was not communist enough.
The fact that they only had 6 customers would explain why the UK authorities appear to have shown so little interest. The platform is inside UK teritorial waters - period. The UK government does not recognize 'Prince Roy' and in this case it is the opinion of the executive and not the judiciary that is relevant. Extreeme ideologues like Lackey can believe what they want, the scheme was doomed from the start because they were not immune to UK law.
The US citizens were certainly not immune from US law. The US has in recent years exported a large number of its laws. For that matter so has the UK.
Under UK law the platform as a man made object is therefore a ship. Ships do not have territorial claims. A ship that does not carry the flag of a recognized nationality is subject to the law of any country that cares to exercise jurisdiction.
There are plenty of real countries where the authorities will turn a bloind eye to any enterprise - at a price. Nigeria for example where the government tollerates the advance fee fraud spammers who have them on the payroll.
The HavenCo employees all went to and from the platfom through Heathrow airport. They could have been arrested by the UK authorities any time they wanted to. Lackey was working in the UK without a work permit.
In terms of deployment you need MSN, AOL, Yahoo and perhaps Earthlink.
Going to the IETF does not help much. The process there takes years which nobody is going to wait for and at the end of the process you often end up with less buy in from the stakeholders than you started with.
SMTP is a rewrite of FTP. The original MTP was actually just a feature of FTP. You moved email in those days as if it was a file.
FTP is itself actually written as a feature set for telnet. You would log into the remote machine and then tell it to move files about.
FTP has been rewritten, it is called HTTP. The only reason HTTP exists is that FTP is horribly inefficient if you only want to move one file and provides no metadata to describe what the file might contain.
There is plenty of cruft that could be removed from SMTP, features that should never have been there. There are also features that could be usefully added, like ways to reliably authenticate senders at the transport layer. And no, STARTTLS and RMX do not meet that need, PGP and S/MIME are message layer and both require the full message to be read before any decision is made to accept or reject.
But none of this requires a complete ditching of SMTP and start again protocol. If the industry did think it should go that way it would choose a Web Service based protocol layered on the WS-Security stack.
Sure folk can write their own mail protocol, just like anyone can write their own programming language. Just don't expect anyone to use it unless you start off with a commitment to implement from the major mail server vendors. That would be Microsoft and Notes.
Making changes to the email protocols is very hard. The IETF has been completely unable to take any sort of lead in this respect. In twenty five years they have only revised the basic mail protocols once and that working group started with a mandate not to actually change anything. RFC2821 is an improvement but nobody is actually listening at this stage. The ASRG group is not even in the IETF it is in the IRTF, the R is research. At this stage the group has alienated every major vendor that has ever participated.
There is actually one change to the mail infrastructure that is emerging but it is not a rewrite of SMTP, more a sort of supplement. One of the things that SMTP does worst is management of mailing lists. Sure it is great if you want a mailing list, but what is really going on in a mailing list is push publishing. A dedicated push publishing protocol could eliminate a lot of the pain in mailing lists that comes from the fact that there is no real concept of a 'subscription' in SMTP. But again, that is not necessarily another protocol, probably just adding SMTP support for RSS.
This is one of the reasons why statements like 'the US owns 70% of the allocated IP addresses' have to be taken with some skepticism.
People and companies in the US have 70% of the allocated addresses. That does not mean that the US has an advantage over other countries when it comes to new allocations. The Asian NICs have made it very plain that they consider the pool of unallocated addresses to be a common pool.
A small number of US companies are well placed and have a lot of unallocated addresses that they can allocate for internal use. But that does not mean that you are better off simply by being in the US. Its a bit like the fact that there are huge numbers of diamonds in South Africa, the fact that deBeers and the Oppenheimer familly have a lot of diamonds does not mean that the average South African has any more than the planetary average.
The reason the Asians are more concerned about IPv6 has nothing to do with the address shortage. That will screw everyone equally at the same time. The Asians are concerned because they want to deploy a bunch of new IP based technologies such as Voice over IP, IP capable cell phones etc. Those will suck millions of addresses a month. There are more cell phones in service than remaining IPv4 addresses.
So yes there is an issue, but the reason the US has its head embedded in its posterior on this issue is not because of any surplus of resources.
That would have been a scam by the contractor. It does not excuse MCI of responsibility of course but you are quite likely to get a call from the same contractor to get you to switch to AT&T.
What a lot of contractors used to do was keep a list of people who would switch over the phone. Then they would call them continuously getting them to switch from one company to annother each month.
I have friends who never paid for their long distance because they were always on some intro offer or another.
I currently have Qwest long distance. They screwed up the billing for 18 months, didn't send me a single bill. This despite me calling to tell them that they had a problem. Their customer service refused to sort out the problem with the local carrier because both had a policy of not waiting more than five rings...
A much better source of prior art IMNSHO opinion would be the XML Encryption standard which does allow for independent decryption of components. Also IBM has prior art with its 'cryptolopes' scheme.
Another source of prior art would be Matt Blaze's encrypting file system for UNIX and the Windows NT implementation.
Of course if the USPTO was not so corrupt it would be possible to raise this prior art with the examiner - the same way you can with every other patent system in the world.
Not very long ago people were complaining that Microsoft was somehow treading on PK by implementing integrated zip technology in Windows. I guess folks may want to reconsider that now. The fact is that the zip technology should always have had encryption.
No No! what should happen at this point is that the kids send the video of Cartman in to the America's stupidest video program so they can win the $10,000 that Cartman needs for the DNA tests to find out who his father is. Then Cartman sends in the video of Kenny getting run over by a truck instead.
I don't remember anything in the script about a lawsuit over the video. Thats not till a later episode when Cartman's mum sues to try to get a 54th trimester abortion (or something like that).
The rule for costs in Canada is loser pays. So a frivolous lawsuit is a pretty risky proposition.
I don't know if they still have jury trials for civil actions. I can't see a judge awarding a jackpot payout for this type of damages.
Like the name says, its a bondage parlor. Prostitution is illegal in the US but bondage is perfectly OK. If a New York businessman feels like a bit of bondage in the afternoon they just go down to their local Kinkos.
The reason that people accepted ATMs and eTickets was that they were a heck of a lot more convenient for the customer. You could get your cash any time, day or night. In the days before eTickets you had to actually receive the tickets. If you wanted to fly at short notice you could easily end up waiting for FedEx to deliver your ticket the day before you flew, or have to collect the tickets from an airport service counter.
Aside from businesses trying to reduce costs, the government will be trying to create jobs elsewhere.
Buddy, where do you live? Your government might try to create jobs, here in the USA job creation is at best through fiscal policy - and there the real objective seems to be tax cuts for the richest using job creation as an excuse to sell the policy to the press.
Technology has reduced the cost of manufacture steadily over the past couple of centuries. With a few exceptions employment has actually increased. We are currently living through one of the very rare periods of a decrease in actual employment. Nobody is attributing the cause to technology. The main reason for the decrease in employment is the business cycle, in this case made worse by the faith-based economic policy (give money to the rich and hope).
The reason technology does not create unemployment is that there is a vast reservoir of need, both real and artificial. As technology has expanded production people's living standards have increased to match.
If humanoid robots are built then we can be sure that the first application will be in the house to do housework. Only a small proportion of the population can afford to employ cleaners. The manufacture of the household robot for the masses will create considerably more jobs than are lost.
The same goes for the robot attended fast food outlet. I did a study a while back on how much it would cost to run such an operation. The idea was to have an automated expresso bar as a piece of installation art. Cost wise it is certainly do-able. You can buy the parts required off the shelf from automation companies. The problem is the maintenance staff required to keep the system going. It is easy and cheap to hire someone to stand behind a counter and make lates all day. It is much harder to find people capable of tinkering with complicated machinery to keep it running. For automation to work you have to be able to replace a lot of workers. Otherwise you end up replacing a minimum wage position with a technician who costs as much as an electrician or plumber.
Well Linus is only providing a part of the Linux O/S and one that is least likely to actually infringe. So Linus is perhaps not the best test.
A better test would be IBM who seems to be completely unphased by the situation and has racks of the best IP lawyers that money can buy.
SCO faces a big problem trying to make its case. This is not a normal copyright infringement case where the ownership of the copyright is beyond doubt. Proving SCO's case will take many years - if that is actually possible at all. In the process SCO will be forced to specify exactly the portions of the code that are alleged to infringe. It is beyond doubt that by the time any case came to court for a judgement that any infringing components would have been removed.
That is before any consideration of the GPL. SCO continued to distribute Linux under the GPL long after they acquired the rights to UnixWare. Even if their Linux claim were true they have licensed the relevant code under the GPL.
This is nothing but the death throes of a dying company that has gambled on one last chance to show a return. They could well keep the stock price high for some time while the management sell out their shares.
It is another piece of software that has to be kept in sync with the hardware. It is much easier to simply copy the specific version of the software required onto the hard drive than mess arround making CDRoms of particular installs.
If you are buying laptops 20 at a time as many IBM thinkpad customers do, the cost of 19 CDROMS that will never be used is nothing but an anoyance. The end customer is going to reimage the machine anyway.
Well having worked on the original Whitehouse email system I seem to recall discussing this at length.
Some people did want to simply register approval or disapproval of some issue, which is completely OK. But in many cases people wanted to do something different, like bring to attention some problem that they did not feel was being addressed. Very often the emails would be questions about policy, in particular how a policy would be applied in a particular circumstance.
Sorting into 'for' and 'against' is absolutely the last thing the Clinton people wanted to do. You certainly don't want to force someone to make up their mind like that, they will probably go the opposite way to the one you want.
There seems to be a very different philosophy behind today's WH site and the Clinton site. In the Clinton era the whole site was about empowerment and giving people their information. The idea was that the press had become privilleged filters of the news and that the people had an equal the right to see press releases and all the other information given to the media. The current site is a product of standard corporate PR think, it is all about controlling the information flow - yuk!
If you want to know what happened to the people behind the original Whitehouse site look at the Dean campaign.
Well Brenda does not get out as often as she might, but that is more a matter of choice than of security. It is not unusual to see a minor royal walking arround London with only a couple of special branch officers accompanying them.
Well, they DID throw him out of office... Actually his party was thrown out of office. It was not really a reflection on Churchill personaly. The country was sick of the Tory party whose appeasement policy had led to the war. Churchill was not the Tory leader when the war began, he didn't even have much support in the party. The reason that he became leader was that he was the only leading Tory party figure who had got it right on the subject of Hitler.
The War government was a coalition of Labour and Tories. The country did not want to return to the same state as before the war. They wanted rapid change in social conditions. That is what they got with the National Health Service and the welfare state.
Maybe he was also skipping out on military service so he'd be around to be President.
There was a difference. Bush and Clinton both dodged the draft. Bush got daddy to pull strings to get him into a National Guard program he simply wasn't qualified for. Clinton got a scholarship to go to the UK to study.
The difference was that Clinton actively opposed the war, he did not want to fight in a war he did not believe in. Bush on the other hand fully supported the war, thought that the US should be fighting it. The one detail that Bush had a problem with was he thought that other people should go and fight his war for him.
Fans of the 'liberal media'. compare and contrast the amount of coverage the Clinton draft-doger non-story got compared with the Bush AWOL story. Even today the AWOL episode is only refered to in the Internet press on sites like Slate and Salon.
So a 'white people's state' would be merely a state that protected white people? But who from?
The problem with this 'oh its just a special state for us' story is that in the process of making special laws for one group of people everyone else automatically gets pushed down.
The Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is very much like that of the native americans by the US. First land would be taken from the Indians using force. Then the inevitable violent response would be used to justify the original theft.
When special privileges start to include who can live where, who can buy what and who can get planning permission and who cannot they cease to be 'privileges' and start to be human rights that are systematically withheld from the arab population.
Of course the Iraeli Apartheid does not justify terrorism, but it goes a long way to explain it.