You're right about a lot, however you overstate the effect of legacy admissions. Most legacies admitted to Harvard are just as qualified as non-legacies
Then why not do away with the affirmative action for the children of the rich and make it equal opportunities for everyone?
It is very difficult to measure the 'qualifications' of candidates in the US because unlike most countries there is no national test of academic achievement. The SAT quizes used in the US are designed to test 'aptitude'. When I was at MIT we didn't use them for admissions, there was simply no correlation between SAT scores and how well the kids did - although there is a slot on the application for the score because folk who take them tend to want to add it.
A more interesting question than whether legacies are as qualified as the other entrants would be whether they achieve as much.
I'm aware that MIT and CalTech don't preference legacies in admission, and I commend them for it. But they're unique in that respect.
No they are not, I can't think of a single international class institution that has a formal bias in their admissions system in favor of legacies. Certainly not Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester or any of the UK Universities.
I did a bit of research into some of the Ivy league schools. It appears that the press comments on the fact that Bush only got into Yale as a legacy has caused some recent changes.
Harvard's policy has changed, it now states that "Q: Are a student's chances of admission enhanced if a relative has attended Harvard? A:The application process is the same for all candidates. Among a group of similarly distinguished applicants, the daughters and sons of alumni/ae may receive an additional look". Interestingly the question is not actually answered, the Yale system which admitted Bush used the same admissions ?process for all applicants, it was just that legacies got in with much lower grades. Basically Harvard are trying to play both sides of the fence, they want to claim to be equal opportunity while also telling their allumni donors that their child can expect special treatment.
According to the Asian American Political Coalition The average combined SAT score of Harvard legacies was 35% lower
than for all those admitted, and legacies were more than twice as likely
to get in. Thirty-six (36%) percent of Harvard legacy applicants were
admitted versus only 17 percent of all applicants.
I did quite a bit of searching on the Yale site and could not find any mention of the lecacy issue whatsoever. This is kinda curious since one would expect that if the college was now selecting on merit it would want to say so in the wake of all the media criticism.
However even with reform in student selection Yale and Harvard will take much longer to erase the long term consequences of their other discriminatory policies - in particular not hiring jewish faculty. MIT became a research powerhouse in Engineering in the 60s and 70s because it was the only first rank university in the area who would give Jewish faculty tenure at the time.
Unfortunately it appears that the only way that people can get upset about this particular type of discrimination is by viewing it through the prism of race. Certainly there is a racial dimension - the legacy quotas and preferences are also effectively discrimination against minorities. Harvard's attempts to keep 'affirmative action' appear to be motivated in part by the realisation that if they cannot use affirmative action to correct the imbalances caused by their bias towards legacies their affirmative action for legacies might become an illegal racial bias.
However it is also notable that people such as the failure in the Whitehouse who benefited from this type of discrimination in their favor can be so opposed to affirmative action.
Re:how is this different from the earlier story?
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Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 2
Again, my point is, it's just a better-linked version of the original post.
Two slashdot stories in 18 years on the deaths of 800 people caused by corporate negligence does not appear unreasonable to me.
Unfortunately Slashdot is still stuck in a very limited niche despite the clear poitential to do more. I doubt that the majority of slashdot readers have such narrow interests as the editors.
OK I can take the slashcode and put up my own slashdot to discuss political issues, but slashdot is not the code base it is the community.
A way to address the repeated stories problem and the focus problem would be to create a kind of hybrid of slashdot and google news. Instead of the idiosyncratic and duplicative story selection by the slashcrew the stories could be choosen automatically in the same way as the google news stories are.
This would also reduce the number of tedious 'Microsoft is ssooooooo evil' rants where a story that has nothing to do with Microsoft is posted but the editor feels obliged to tell us what he thinks Microsoft would do in that situation. This type of behavior was more acceptable when slashdot was independent rather than run by a Microsoft competitor.
Another scheme which might be interesting would be to throw the editor queue open for inspection (but not comment) and moderation. Perhaps readers at karma cap or close could get moderation points for this purpose.
Slashdot talks a great line about decentralization etc. but really when it comes down to it the whole thing is a corporate dictatorship, one with a friendly face but not something that meets the game they talk.
It evolved over time but yes it was in Article 2, Section 1. We should pass another amendment disbanding the College or, as someone else pointed out, mandate that the electoral votes be split according to the popular vote, rather than the winner-take-all system.
Ok waaaay offtopic but yet to see much ontopic.
The electoral college system does have one redeeming feature. It means that in general it is very difficult for electoral fraud in an isolated part of the country to affect the outcome.
So the police stop and searches used to prevent black voters going to the polls in the Florida panhandle, North Carolina etc would only affect the vote if they took place in a swing state. Since the Dixicrat states where this type of thing goes on tend to be sold Republican it has less effect. If there was an absolute majority system then states like North Carolina could stuff the ballot and affect the national count.
The counter argument is that states would have a much greater incentive to ensure people voted if there was a simple majority system. It would end attempts to disenfranchise voters by taking away voting rights from convicted criminals and as happened in Florida under Katherine Harris, disenfranchising voters who happened to have the same name as someone who was convicted of a crime - Jeb would have had a much harder time getting reelected if Florida had not waited till after the mid term elections to reinstate voters whose voting rights had been stolen.
In the wake of Lott's racist gaffe more people realise that Klan sympathies are still present in souther politics and that Nixon's 'Southern strategy' was largely an appeal for racist votes through coded support for symbols of seggregation such as the confederate flag and Bob Jones University. Before the election however I watched a group of washington reporters on TV laughing at a report of a GOP dirty trick used to keep black voters from the polls, a notice saying that the vote was on a different day.
The Florida mess and the GOP desperation to stop the votes being counted was not an abberation, it was simply a demonstration of the contempt they hold for the ideals of democracy and the US constitution, the same contempt that they show on as Bill Clinon put it 'the back roads of the south' at every election.
Repeat this to *yourself*: the Internet would most likely be here in the same form, with or without Gore
I was there, you are wrong, we could have ended up with something that is much less.
The Internet was very different in structure to the 'information highway' plans laid by the international telcos and the cable companies. Under their model the cable companies and big business would be the content providers. You me and everyone else would be mere 'consumers'.
The 'Interactive TV' pushed by these interests consisted of nothing more than a huge projection TV where the interactivity consisted of the ability to buy stuff while watching the screen. There was no keyboard, no slashdot, no google and definitely no personal web pages.
As soon as the Gore folk like Tom Kalil and Jock Gill saw the Web they helped put a spike into the mouldering OSI plans and went full bore promoting the Internet as the future. Gore himself led the charge to get the US federal govt. up online and the Whitehouse. The Whitehouse site was actually one of the very first to be created, however Gore decided that the Whitehouse should not go online until every other agency had, thus forcing even the NSA to have a Web site.
OK folk were thinking about the Internet long before Gore and Gingrich. However they both deserve a considerable amount of credit for the contribution they made. The 'Gore invents internet' media moment was creatd for the sole purpose of denying Gore a campaign theme on which he could speak with considerable authority, it was a deliberate calculated smear.
At the same time that Gore was helping us create the Internet the failure in the Whitehouse was pleading no contest to a DUI charge. Which would you pick?
I'll stop making that joke if you leftist radicals will stop saying Bush "stole" the election.
OK Bush didn't steal the election. Renquist, Scalia, Thomas and the other traitors on the Supreme Court stole the election for him.
Regardless of which we now know that Bush told repeated lies for the sole purpose of getting elected. He clearly never meant to keep his repeated environment pledges. He clearly never intended to keep his repeated pledges to balance the budget. He has even continued lying after the election, remember the 'trifecta' claim?
Al Qaeda murdered 3,000 people in New York and are still at large. North Koreat has torn up the agreed framework and is building nuclear weapons. so of course we are going to start a war with Iraq even though the UN arms inspectors have found nothing.
Using the Presidency to persue a personal family vendetta when there are far more serious threats to national security is beneath contempt, it is certainly not 'leadership'.
Of course because of the Internet I can say things like that and reach a very large audience. More importantly you, me and everyone else in this thread can come to our own assesment fo the merits of the failure in the Whitehouse, we don't have to simply sit back and accept the views fed us by the mainstream media and its Republican echo chamber.
During the first gulf war people were using the Internet to find out the news that the mainstream media was not telling. That cut both ways, people in Europe and the US could see the stuff that CNN and ABC didn't broadcast, but equally people in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq were findign out information their news services were not reporting. It will be interesting to see how the US media reports stories of the inevitable attrocities that result from war this time around. Will Bush's popularity rating survive bombing a couple of schools and hospitals when the pictures of the injured and dead children being carried out are circulating the Internet?
Re:how is this different from the earlier story?
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Dow vs. Parody
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· Score: 5, Insightful
There's really nothing new here, other than to say 'wired picked up a story that we did two weeks ago.'
The news that Dow is suing the Bopahl survivors to try to silence their protests over Dows failure to clean up is news to me.
The Union Carbide disaster at Bopahl was due to sheer negligence and greed. Dow still refuses to clean up the site of the disaster and has yet to pay compensation to most of the victims.
Perhaps if students stopped and considered the wisdom of joining a company that could kill 800 people with its negligence and not care a damn Dow might have a lot more difficulty recruiting on campus.
If you are choosing an employer in the chemical business their safety record should be your first concern. If you work for a company like Dow that is saying that they can kill 800 people, create pollution that will kill even more and they just don't care you are quite litteraly putting your own life on the line for their corporate profits.
The same goes for communities that have Dow installations near them, or planned to be built near them. Make sure that your representatives are aware that Dow cannoit be trusted.
Most Microsoft applications use the concept of resource to separate the text from the application,
For a while I have been trying to prod the Microsoft people to make a bigger commitment to being an open platform. Having the source code is not that big a deal for me, I would much rather someone designed a system that allowed me to extend it without having to rewrite existing code than have someone just dump source on me.
This is one of the reasons why Apache has been such a success, it is Open Source, sure, but the real benefit is you can extend Apache with modules and you don't have to grovell through every arcane detail of Apache to write 'em.
There are plenty of tools for editing resource files. If Microsoft provided some documentation they could make it possible for people to develop their own language customized versions of Office etc.
Harvard is not selling anything. Its mission is to be the world's premier academic institution
Pity then that the entrance criteria condem it to be second rate at best. A third of the places are still reserved for children of Alumni.
The advantages of going to the 'top schools' in the past used to be that you would meet the right people to help with your career. These days senior management tends to come from the MBA schools and so your undergrad school does not matter as much as where you did your MBA.
Better teaching can help you succeed, but as far as teaching goes Harvard does not impress me. Harvard shops for big names whose best work is generally behind them. The actual teaching tends to get done as often as not by grad students. I know as my wife TA'd a Harvard course.
Of course the one redeeming feature of Harvard is that you can take classes at MIT so you can still get a world class education.
It will be hard to get done. At an individual level everyone needs to get the right software and keys. This won't be easy. Nor will it be easy to get governments
People already have 90% of the software they need. Every major email client has supported S/MIMe for 5 years.
The main missing piece is filters that use the fact an email is signed as a means of authentication (authorization will also be needed once the spammers catch on).
The remaining piece is a certificate (or more accurately key) lookup mechanism that uses the DNS as the index rather than the broken schemes based on "directories" that key of an X.500 infrastructure that will never exist.
There is no way for a subscriber to know what IP address our e-mails will come from, they change dynamically based on load. If there were a standard way to digitally sign our e-mails, we'd implement it in a flash.
For your particular application (sending messages from a newspaper) I would suggest that you go to a Certification authority such as VeriSign and pay the $20 a year it costs to register for an S/MIME email certificate.
I am not suggesting that as a general solution to spam since any 'solution' that depends on senders spending $20 is going to have takeup problems. However for that application you should do the job properly with an email certificate that is going to be automatically recognized by the email clients.
S/MIME is an IETF standard and is supported by Lotus, Microsoft and Netscape and has been for 6 years now. It works fine for signing content. If you send a signed message the recipient's email client will display a little seal.
The only major client this does not work with is Eudora where the problem is that the provider appears to have completely abandoned further development efforts 5 years ago. I can't do anything about that, sorry.
The part that is not quite finished on the standards track at the moment is a mechanism for locating certificates so that you can send an encrypted email. This is a little tricky since you need the recipient's certificate before you send the message. I have been promoting a scheme called DNS linked PKI which uses the DNS SRV record as a means of finding the certificate repository that can provide you with a key for the relevant email address. This is very close to done and since SRV is already deployed is not an infrastructure issue.
Note you can also do the same with PGP (I describe how to do that in the XKMS spec). However PGP is pretty good privacy and not very good authentication. The problem is that I don't have very strict criteria for choosing an encryption key when the alternative is to sent the message en-clair. If I really care about confidentiality in a particular instance I will authenticate the key directly. That does not really hold when it comes to authentication since the point of the authentication is that I will take a different action as a result. So there is a threshold effect.
For the purposes of blocking SPAM a self signed certificate with the minimal authentication that retrival through a dns-linked pki confers is adequate.
I think they will talk a lot about using Bayes, which I don't think has been widely tried with respect to email filtering.
It does not matter what content inspection approach you try. They all suffer from the fact that as the number of people who have access to your filter grows so does the incentive to test against the filter and shape their content to get through.
There is an exact analogy here to email viruses. The virus writers are constantly counter-gaming the scanners. The only reason the system works is that writing a virus is a relatively high cost, low incentive operation and the virus fingerprints are updated in realtime.
The solution to the virus problem is not better virus detection. The solution is email clients that do not blindly execute active content.
SMTP already has a good way of authenticating who you are receiving email from. It is called the IP address of the machine that is contacting you and the IP sequence numbers of the packets that have to travel between you. All you need is a list of the IP addresses of the people who you want to receive email from and a list of ones you don't.
Actually this approach is regularly proposed but actually it is more complex than that. The problem is that there is no single model for using SMTP and SMTP certainly does not provide one.
In particular a large amount of email is sent from machines that have no connection to the host name the email is purported to be from. Most unix mailers simply send the mail direct.
Any email authentication system is going to run into most, if not all, of the same problems that DNSBLs run into. They are also going to have the problem of trying to get the entire world to change.
I have helped do that before, your posting to slashdot is demonstration.
What is needed is a scheme such that the incentive to opt-in is greater than the cost of opting in for all network sizes. I believe that there are ways of promoting the authentication approach that have this property.
The problem with network effects is that they cut both ways. Whenever someone talks about viral marketing I short their stock unless they can show that there is a significant benefit to opting in before the network exists. Otherwise your 'network effect' is really a chicken and egg problem.
Executive Summary: Any measure for stopping spam must ensure that all non-spam messages reach their intended recipients.
The problem with the vast majority of psuedo-solutions to spam is that the promoters simply will not listen to any ideas other than the one they first thought of and they simply won't listen to people who point out that blocking good mail is a serious problem.
The 'cry me a river' response is as idiotic as it is arrogant. SPAM is a problem, failure to deliver email is a bigger problem.
That does not mean that we don't address the problem of SPAM, it just means that we have to approach the problem from both ends, identifying the good signal as well as eliminating the bad.
The MIT conference is likely to be a failure because the organizers are only presenting the tried and failed filtering approaches of the past. Those approaches are now well understood, they can mitigate the problem but can never do more than that. Filters suffer from reverse network effects, the more widely used they are the greater the incentive to program arround them.
Blacklists fail for many reasons, not least complete lack of accountability. As the paper reports the operator of one blacklist that claimed to only list open relays actually listed sites for other reasons. Ultimately a blacklist that does not have some robust accountability structure is simply a vigilante operation. Vigilantes are frequently popular with people who think they are victims of crime regardless of whether they create more problems than they solve.
The tools we need to start applying are digital signatures and email authentication in combination with whitelists. This follows sound business process, if you want to talk to someone well known their secretary will use a two step process, first ask who you are and check to see if you match the access criteria (e.g. to set up a cold call meeting with a Fortune 100 CEO you had better be a Fortune 500 CEO), then check to see if you really are who you claim to be.
Authentication and Authorization requires no heuristics and there is no feasible counter-strategy for the spammers.
I believe that the way to stop spam in the long term is to deploy signed email ubiquitously. Self signed certificates are sufficient for this purpose if we can provide a lightweight authentication via a DNS-linked PKI.
For example consider the problem of stopping spam to email lists. These are a prime target for spammers as the email server does most of the work. As a result most email lists are now filtered so that only subscribed readers can post. This has in turn been gamed by the spammers who use automated tools to scan the archives of an email list and send emails with forged headers purporting to come from another subscriber. Authentication and authorization prevents this mode of attack.
The counter-argument to using authentication is that the spammers can get their own credentials. If you spend some time analysing SPAM however you will find out that this is unlikely. Almost every spam has forged or obscured headers. While this does not prove that this is a requirement it is certainly indicative of the fact that the spamers do not want this type of visibility.
Even if a spammer can get a credential they are most unlikely to get a credential that would match my personal whitelist which would consist of the signing keys of the email lists I subscribe to and the domain names of the member companies of W3C and OASIS.
Tell EVERYONE you know never to click on any spam links, or buy spamvertised products. People spam because it WORKS. The only real way to stop it is to STOP BUYING SPAMMED PRODUCTS.
The problem is that you are in a global network. It is like the problem of eating whale meat, you can persuade 99.999% of the world population that eating whale meat is a bad idea but the other 0.0001% that is left can eat the endangered species to extinction within a matter of months.
It only takes a vanishingly small number of businesses out there to SPAM and you have a massive problem.
SPAM does not have to even be profitable for people to do it. If I wanted to launder a lot of drug cash I would set up a spam house and bombard people with ads for herbal viagra..
There was a time not so long ago when the majority of the SPAM being sent out was adverts for spam software. SPAM does not have to work as a marketing method for creeps to get rich charging others to spam. The pitch line they use to haul in suckers is 'it must work or why would people do it', well no, it does not have to get one single end customer for it to work for the spammer.
The patent only becomes free for any type of use if it is submitted as a standard. It only becomes a standard if accepted by the primary body recognized as responsible for making standards. Today this is the W3C.
You vastly over-rate the influence of W3C here. A standard is what people use. The decisions of the IETF and W3C are only influential if they meet real needs.
To take an example, W3C spent a lot of time and political capital on the PICS project that failled. It is a 'standard' but a standard that is ignored by practically everyone.
Encumbered technology is not good in a standard because the market does not in general adopt encumbered standards. So the worrying about the W3C patent policy is in many ways misguided, you don't have to worry about the W3C making a standard that depends on encumbered technology since if it did so without a reason compelling enough for the market (e.g. no other way to solve the problem) then the standard would not be adopted.
As I mentioned a lot of work has been moving from W3C to OASIS. This is happening for many reasons, the IP policy being only one. The main complaint about the W3C IP policy is that it has been undecided for so long. If you submit a spec to W3C at the moment you don't know what the IP terms you will be required to comply with are. Bruce is absolutely right about the need for closure on this issue.
But don't think that people are leaving W3C for OASIS because they want to peddle encumbered technology. The main issues are the ridiculous amount of process that W3C has created and the cost of membership. Getting a group started in W3C took over a year, in that same time all the major vendors in the space were shipping a product.
Members are paying $57K a year to join W3C and being told that there are insufficient resources when they want to start a group. OASIS are much more reasonable, they give me a decision within a month.
W3C is not the only standards group in trouble. IETF is in a worse mess. The alleged 'openness' is largely a sham, when you try to actually do stuff you find that there is a hidden old boys network that is quite prepared to play dirty in persuit of personal agendas.
That is why NAT boxes break the Internet rather than co-exist. The IESG decided they did not like them as they 'broke their model'. So now we have lots of NAT boxes deployed that use the most brain dead strategy imaginable.
What I don't see in either IETF or W3C is what the logic of all the mechanism would suggest, a group that pro-actively looks at how the standards work together and identifies problems that have to be fixed in advance. There are plenty of boards whose names imply this is what they would do but without exception they tend to end up interferring in existing work instead.
We explicitly wanted browsers to be included with computers as a cost free part of the basic operating system
Hey I told the MS people they should have presented that stuff but they weren't listening.
Even wierder they spent a lot of time and money propagating the wierd claim that network effects do not exist, the QWERTY keyboard was best and VHS won on the merits. They paid the "Independent Institute", a crank tank $100,000 to try to give that idea credibility.
The bit I could never understand about that strategy was that denying network effects exist only makes sense if you think you can persuade the court that Microsoft is not a monopoly. Fat chance. Instead of trying that on they should have embraced the network effect and told the court that their O/S won because of it, i.e. was established legally.
The connection between the anti-trust suit and the W3C IP position is that Sun made an IP claim against Microsoft wrt Java which resulted in a $20million settlement. The argument that Sun has been making is 'Java is open, only we have the sole right to decide its future', in other words Java is not open and the whole community process is a sham. Java is only open in the limited sense that you can implement the standard without extensions, extending the standard lands you in a lawsuit.
So don't be suprised that other companies are now less willing to allow free and unencumbered use of their IP. After all Sun has been allowed a free ride on this front, they have proved that the open/proprietary model can work. So expect others to try it. Also expect others to make sure that they have plenty of IP in reserve so that if they are attacked they have material for a possible countersuit.
The W3C policy is the best that can be achieved in the current circumstances where Sun is using IP as a strategic lever wrt a purported "open" standard.
Patents are supposed to describe the invention. Many of them are poorly written or are deliberately written to be obtuse or over-general, and thus fail to describe the invention. Try reading some of them.
The 20-year term is too long for the software industry, in that there is no quid-pro-quo for the public - a patent is no longer useful by the time it enters the public domain.
Right on target Bruce! I think that the same applies to a lot of the problematic genome patents. Someone sequences a gene, on that basis they patent the invention of using the gene for a standard collection of 200 odd uses. They don't know what the gene does or even what part of the body it affects but they will claim the 'invention' of using the gene to cure everything from HIV to halitosis. It is a completely sterile act devoid of any inventive step.
Several of the software patents have the same basic approach. Intertrust filed a piece of garbage with 2000 claims. About the best that can be said for the patent is that they are effectively preventing the use of DRM technology through their grasping licensing policies.
Well, bloody well good for you. Might I suggest that the standards process should be designed for the good of users and developers and not to make the architect's job easy?
Who do you think decides which body to send the specification to?
There is a buyers market for standards groups. If I can't get what I want from one group I will take my work to another, if there is no group that is acceptable I'll start another.
What I am looking for from a standards group is an open process with as little overhead as possible that produces a competent, interoperable and widely supported standard. In most cases that is going to mean 'unencumbered'.
Your description of the software IP problem is simply cluless. Yes there are garbage patents out there, but those are simple if you know the prior art. The problematic patents are the ones where there might be a valid claim.
The software patent lunacy has got to the point where people object to any clever stuff in my designs, not because there is a patent it infringes but because there might be an application in, so by default do everything a stupid as possible. It gets worse, there are people who read my designs and then file a perjured patent application claiming they invented them.
The problem is if a standard requires use of a patented algorithm that's licensed "for Web use only", all GPL'd code must be excluded from any implementation of that standard.
If that is the case (I doubt it is) the solution is for the FSF to rev the GPL so that it works in a sane manner or for folk to choose a license that does not have that effect.
What we are talking about is open, royalty free Web standards. If the FSF can't live with an open royalty free web standard that uses technology that is encumbered for other purposes then that is their funeral.
Bruce is completely correct about the politics here, the W3C has already tried people's patience on many fronts, they simply cannot throw the IP policy into confusion yet again.
Every politician does this... But because of Nadar's big mouth you and the media mostly accuse gore of this.
It is a question of degree.
Consider for a moment the subjects that Gore was accused of lying about - going to Texas with the FEMA head, the love canal thing, the love story thing. Imagine for the sake of argument that they were actually true rather than the Republican fabrications they really are.
Compare those to the lies Bush told on matters of policy - a uniter not a divider who was so divisive he split his own party and lost the senate majority, the tax cuts won't create a budget deficit - they are the single biggest factor in the deficit, no nuclear dumping in Nevada - not until after the inauguration that is.
Bush lied repeatedly about policy issues and was allowed to get away with it. It was not even a matter of failing to keep a promise - it was obvious when the promises were made that they were made in bad faith.
The republican echo chamber created the 'gore liar' meme for a reason. They knew from the start that they would have to lie their asses off to win. If they got the 'gore liar' story going nobody would accuse Bush of the same.
Ummm acctually something did shoot at a US ship in the Gulf on Tonkin it just missed
The radar on the Turner Joy showed 'fast approaching craft', the radar on the Maddox did not. Nobody knows if anything was shot at the US boats and nothing could know given their firing rate.
However that particular issue is irrelevant since the claim made by the administration was that the North made an 'unprovoked attack' against the US ship. The fact is that the OPLAN 34A raiders shelled Hon Me and Hon Ngu, two islands controlled by the North on the 30th and 31st of July, several days before the Tonkin incident on the 4th.
Far from being an unprovoked attack the US had done everthing it could to provoke the Vietnamese by shelling them repeatedly.
It's interesting to think that Tim Berners-Lee at one time was pushing CERN to release all of the code for the World Wide Web (like http and html) under the GPL.
That is not quite right, we never relased any code under the GPL. We released the libwww code as public domain, it is not GPL, it is not BSD, it is public domain.
When GPL was being discussed it was in the context of 'make it free', the GPL was rejected because it did not make the cern code free in the ways we wanted it to be free. We explicitly wanted browsers to be included with computers as a cost free part of the basic operating system. Remember that at the time (91) Mosaic had not even appeared, let alone Netscape. The point is that Tim never wanted the viral aspect and dropped the GNU angle as soon as it was explained to him.
In the end the public domain route was in large part dictated by political expediency. Explaining GPL or BSD to cern management would have taken a lot more time and led to more opportunity for confusion. Putting the code in the public domain was something they could understand - it had already been done with much of the CERN libraries.
The mistake that was made was public domain rather than BSD. If we had gone BSD then Mosaic would have been required to state that it used CERN code (60% of the Mosaic code was code from CERN used without attribution). That in turn would have meant that IE would have a credit. As it was the mainstream media did not recognize Tim as the true father of the Web until about 1996, and then only as a result of a major PR campaign led by MIT.
I would certainly advise researchers to use the BSD license in their code. I would strongly advise against the GPL if you want your ideas to be taken up by industry.
Contrary to what the FSF is saying the issue is neither trivial nor a bug.
This Item allows for a supposedly free grant to use a patent to be so restricted that a piece of Web infrastructure software might be encumbered if used for some non-Web use.
The issue for me as an architect (I have written IETF, W3C and OASIS standards) is that I don't necessarily own all the IP that I need to address a problem. If I need to get an IP owner to donate their property for the common good my job is easiest if I have to ask for as little as is necessary for the particular purpose.
Equally when I hold the IP I see little point in giving away more than I need to for the purpose of the Web specification even though my company does not regard patent licensing as a revenue stream. The point is that I might need some IP held by a party that deals in the non-Internet world. I will have an easier time negotiating a license for Internet use if I have some bargaining chips.
The FSF reading on the situation is 100% about their ideology and has nothing to do with real needs as far as I am concerned. Open Source software is not imune to the patent system. If you modify any open source software sufficiently you will run into a patent infringement.
If you apply the FSF "logic" you would have to stop distributing gzip because someone could modify it so that it infringed the Unisys LZ patents.
The W3C does not have a monopoly on standards making and in fact is already seeing a lot of the standards work migrating from to OASIS. Dealing with the cumbersome W3C process and formatting conventions is bad enough without additional IP roadblocks being errected.
At the end of the day the IP policy is utterly irrelevant since nobody is going to use the specification unless the IP terms are acceptable and they are going to determine what is acceptable, not Tim and certainly not RMS. To date that has generally meant 'free as in beer' however there are many applications where that is simply not achievable, if you want to do voice browsing you will run into IP issues and your choice will be do something encumbered or don't do it at all.
Don't do it at all may be the FSF answer, but he does not pay $57,500 a year for W3C membership dues. The point that Tim has missed is that the W3C membership is already annoyed on the value for money front, W3C is way more expensive to join than OASIS where we pay $10K. We are also far from happy on the bogus process front, it took me almost a year to get a W3C working group started. I am not happy with a set of document publication rules that are 'standards based' but turn out to mean that you can only edit standards with one editor.
The last thing W3C needs to do at this stage is to reopen the IP issue with the membership.
It is a parody, and a pretty funny one. The ironic part is, if you truely beileved in the cause, you wouldn't be able to tell the diffrence.
There is a difference, albeit a pretty subtle one. The family friendly crusaders talk about the harm done by violence but without exception attempt to control sex instead.
This was certainly the case with Mary Whitehouse who was the 'keep sex and violence off TV' harpie in the UK. The porn site whitehouse.com is actually named after her, not the building on Penn Ave.
The anti-sex crusaders talk about violence because that is something most parents are worried about, they don't want their brat beating up the other kids. Violence on TV is a reasonable thing to be concerned about when you are dealing with 12 year olds.
Once talk turns to censorship however violence is completely forgotten, the real issue is controlling all access to sexual material, especially material that suggests its ok to be gay or sleep arround or generally have fun in ways not authorized by the social mores.
That is why people will put more effort into controling images of violence on TV than stopping violence. If it was really about violence those people would be upset at the idea of bombing civilians in Iraq etc. But its not about violence, never was, its about sex and their inability to handle their own sexual hangups (like being caught in flagrente delicto with Gary Hart!)
Of course the problem with hoaxes like these is that they can end up being used as political ammunition. It does not matter to the censorship brigade, they have no qualms about using material they know to be bogus. The infamous CMU 'cyberporn' study was used to prove that the Internet was full of porn in Congress long after it had been proved to be faked.
The US started the Vietnam war as a result of a hoax, the infamous 'Battle of Tonkin Bay' that never was. LBJ used that as causus belli even though he knew at the time it was fake.
There is somebody tailgating you because you leave way too much space in front of you. Yes 200 yards is enough to go from 90 to 0. When will this ever happen?
Your theory about the car in front is complete nonsense and the reason why so many multi car pile ups happen.
And lastly, if I am already travelling at 10mph over the speed limit then you have no business tailgating me you complete asshole. If there is a car up in front of me that I can't get past the gap I leave in front is no business of yours.
If you have equal braking abilities of the car in front of you,
The chances that your SUV pile of crap can stop in four times the distance I can stop is not that good. I have 18" brake disks that can stop the car dead in 80" at 80mph without losing control of the car. They are the same type of brake as fitted to the XKR that won the Trans Am the other year. So I can stop dead in less space than you think is sufficient.
The reason I am leaving 200 yards in front of me is because there is an asshole with an SUV tailgating me, so I have to leave at least enough room in front of me to stop while applying the brakes slowly enough that the SUV-asshole does not end up embedded in my tail pipe.
Conclusion: People are tailgating you because of your poor driving. You are causing frustration in general, and I pray that you are NOT in the left lane when doing this (it is ILLEGAL). This will only increase road rage and accidents behind you. A general rule is to be able to count 2-3 seconds between the time the car in front of you passes a landmark, and you do. This is usually 2-4 car lengths at highway speeds. Of course adjust for the type of car you drive and the car in front.
2-3 seconds is the thinking time. If the car in front hits a stationary vehicle you are leaving no time for braking, let alone error.
Tailgating is always illegal and dangerous. Leaving sufficient room to stop before you hit the car in front is not only not legal, it is a requirement, you are the one breaking the law if you don't.
Conclusion, if you are tailgating a Jaguar XK8 and it is going slower in response rather than faster it is because I have been trained on the police driving course and I know what I am doing, I am slowing down because there is a potentially dangerous situation, you are the potentially dangerous situation so if you keep your distance the way it says in the highway code you might find I go faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why not do away with the affirmative action for the children of the rich and make it equal opportunities for everyone?
It is very difficult to measure the 'qualifications' of candidates in the US because unlike most countries there is no national test of academic achievement. The SAT quizes used in the US are designed to test 'aptitude'. When I was at MIT we didn't use them for admissions, there was simply no correlation between SAT scores and how well the kids did - although there is a slot on the application for the score because folk who take them tend to want to add it.
A more interesting question than whether legacies are as qualified as the other entrants would be whether they achieve as much.
I'm aware that MIT and CalTech don't preference legacies in admission, and I commend them for it. But they're unique in that respect.
No they are not, I can't think of a single international class institution that has a formal bias in their admissions system in favor of legacies. Certainly not Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester or any of the UK Universities.
I did a bit of research into some of the Ivy league schools. It appears that the press comments on the fact that Bush only got into Yale as a legacy has caused some recent changes.
Harvard's policy has changed, it now states that "Q: Are a student's chances of admission enhanced if a relative has attended Harvard? A:The application process is the same for all candidates. Among a group of similarly distinguished applicants, the daughters and sons of alumni/ae may receive an additional look". Interestingly the question is not actually answered, the Yale system which admitted Bush used the same admissions ?process for all applicants, it was just that legacies got in with much lower grades. Basically Harvard are trying to play both sides of the fence, they want to claim to be equal opportunity while also telling their allumni donors that their child can expect special treatment.
According to the Asian American Political Coalition The average combined SAT score of Harvard legacies was 35% lower than for all those admitted, and legacies were more than twice as likely to get in. Thirty-six (36%) percent of Harvard legacy applicants were admitted versus only 17 percent of all applicants.
I did quite a bit of searching on the Yale site and could not find any mention of the lecacy issue whatsoever. This is kinda curious since one would expect that if the college was now selecting on merit it would want to say so in the wake of all the media criticism.
However even with reform in student selection Yale and Harvard will take much longer to erase the long term consequences of their other discriminatory policies - in particular not hiring jewish faculty. MIT became a research powerhouse in Engineering in the 60s and 70s because it was the only first rank university in the area who would give Jewish faculty tenure at the time.
Unfortunately it appears that the only way that people can get upset about this particular type of discrimination is by viewing it through the prism of race. Certainly there is a racial dimension - the legacy quotas and preferences are also effectively discrimination against minorities. Harvard's attempts to keep 'affirmative action' appear to be motivated in part by the realisation that if they cannot use affirmative action to correct the imbalances caused by their bias towards legacies their affirmative action for legacies might become an illegal racial bias.
However it is also notable that people such as the failure in the Whitehouse who benefited from this type of discrimination in their favor can be so opposed to affirmative action.
Two slashdot stories in 18 years on the deaths of 800 people caused by corporate negligence does not appear unreasonable to me.
Unfortunately Slashdot is still stuck in a very limited niche despite the clear poitential to do more. I doubt that the majority of slashdot readers have such narrow interests as the editors.
OK I can take the slashcode and put up my own slashdot to discuss political issues, but slashdot is not the code base it is the community.
A way to address the repeated stories problem and the focus problem would be to create a kind of hybrid of slashdot and google news. Instead of the idiosyncratic and duplicative story selection by the slashcrew the stories could be choosen automatically in the same way as the google news stories are.
This would also reduce the number of tedious 'Microsoft is ssooooooo evil' rants where a story that has nothing to do with Microsoft is posted but the editor feels obliged to tell us what he thinks Microsoft would do in that situation. This type of behavior was more acceptable when slashdot was independent rather than run by a Microsoft competitor.
Another scheme which might be interesting would be to throw the editor queue open for inspection (but not comment) and moderation. Perhaps readers at karma cap or close could get moderation points for this purpose.
Slashdot talks a great line about decentralization etc. but really when it comes down to it the whole thing is a corporate dictatorship, one with a friendly face but not something that meets the game they talk.
Ok waaaay offtopic but yet to see much ontopic.
The electoral college system does have one redeeming feature. It means that in general it is very difficult for electoral fraud in an isolated part of the country to affect the outcome.
So the police stop and searches used to prevent black voters going to the polls in the Florida panhandle, North Carolina etc would only affect the vote if they took place in a swing state. Since the Dixicrat states where this type of thing goes on tend to be sold Republican it has less effect. If there was an absolute majority system then states like North Carolina could stuff the ballot and affect the national count.
The counter argument is that states would have a much greater incentive to ensure people voted if there was a simple majority system. It would end attempts to disenfranchise voters by taking away voting rights from convicted criminals and as happened in Florida under Katherine Harris, disenfranchising voters who happened to have the same name as someone who was convicted of a crime - Jeb would have had a much harder time getting reelected if Florida had not waited till after the mid term elections to reinstate voters whose voting rights had been stolen.
In the wake of Lott's racist gaffe more people realise that Klan sympathies are still present in souther politics and that Nixon's 'Southern strategy' was largely an appeal for racist votes through coded support for symbols of seggregation such as the confederate flag and Bob Jones University. Before the election however I watched a group of washington reporters on TV laughing at a report of a GOP dirty trick used to keep black voters from the polls, a notice saying that the vote was on a different day.
The Florida mess and the GOP desperation to stop the votes being counted was not an abberation, it was simply a demonstration of the contempt they hold for the ideals of democracy and the US constitution, the same contempt that they show on as Bill Clinon put it 'the back roads of the south' at every election.
I was there, you are wrong, we could have ended up with something that is much less.
The Internet was very different in structure to the 'information highway' plans laid by the international telcos and the cable companies. Under their model the cable companies and big business would be the content providers. You me and everyone else would be mere 'consumers'.
The 'Interactive TV' pushed by these interests consisted of nothing more than a huge projection TV where the interactivity consisted of the ability to buy stuff while watching the screen. There was no keyboard, no slashdot, no google and definitely no personal web pages.
As soon as the Gore folk like Tom Kalil and Jock Gill saw the Web they helped put a spike into the mouldering OSI plans and went full bore promoting the Internet as the future. Gore himself led the charge to get the US federal govt. up online and the Whitehouse. The Whitehouse site was actually one of the very first to be created, however Gore decided that the Whitehouse should not go online until every other agency had, thus forcing even the NSA to have a Web site.
OK folk were thinking about the Internet long before Gore and Gingrich. However they both deserve a considerable amount of credit for the contribution they made. The 'Gore invents internet' media moment was creatd for the sole purpose of denying Gore a campaign theme on which he could speak with considerable authority, it was a deliberate calculated smear.
At the same time that Gore was helping us create the Internet the failure in the Whitehouse was pleading no contest to a DUI charge. Which would you pick?
OK Bush didn't steal the election. Renquist, Scalia, Thomas and the other traitors on the Supreme Court stole the election for him.
Regardless of which we now know that Bush told repeated lies for the sole purpose of getting elected. He clearly never meant to keep his repeated environment pledges. He clearly never intended to keep his repeated pledges to balance the budget. He has even continued lying after the election, remember the 'trifecta' claim?
Al Qaeda murdered 3,000 people in New York and are still at large. North Koreat has torn up the agreed framework and is building nuclear weapons. so of course we are going to start a war with Iraq even though the UN arms inspectors have found nothing.
Using the Presidency to persue a personal family vendetta when there are far more serious threats to national security is beneath contempt, it is certainly not 'leadership'.
Of course because of the Internet I can say things like that and reach a very large audience. More importantly you, me and everyone else in this thread can come to our own assesment fo the merits of the failure in the Whitehouse, we don't have to simply sit back and accept the views fed us by the mainstream media and its Republican echo chamber.
During the first gulf war people were using the Internet to find out the news that the mainstream media was not telling. That cut both ways, people in Europe and the US could see the stuff that CNN and ABC didn't broadcast, but equally people in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq were findign out information their news services were not reporting. It will be interesting to see how the US media reports stories of the inevitable attrocities that result from war this time around. Will Bush's popularity rating survive bombing a couple of schools and hospitals when the pictures of the injured and dead children being carried out are circulating the Internet?
The news that Dow is suing the Bopahl survivors to try to silence their protests over Dows failure to clean up is news to me.
The Union Carbide disaster at Bopahl was due to sheer negligence and greed. Dow still refuses to clean up the site of the disaster and has yet to pay compensation to most of the victims.
Perhaps if students stopped and considered the wisdom of joining a company that could kill 800 people with its negligence and not care a damn Dow might have a lot more difficulty recruiting on campus.
If you are choosing an employer in the chemical business their safety record should be your first concern. If you work for a company like Dow that is saying that they can kill 800 people, create pollution that will kill even more and they just don't care you are quite litteraly putting your own life on the line for their corporate profits.
The same goes for communities that have Dow installations near them, or planned to be built near them. Make sure that your representatives are aware that Dow cannoit be trusted.
For a while I have been trying to prod the Microsoft people to make a bigger commitment to being an open platform. Having the source code is not that big a deal for me, I would much rather someone designed a system that allowed me to extend it without having to rewrite existing code than have someone just dump source on me.
This is one of the reasons why Apache has been such a success, it is Open Source, sure, but the real benefit is you can extend Apache with modules and you don't have to grovell through every arcane detail of Apache to write 'em.
There are plenty of tools for editing resource files. If Microsoft provided some documentation they could make it possible for people to develop their own language customized versions of Office etc.
Pity then that the entrance criteria condem it to be second rate at best. A third of the places are still reserved for children of Alumni.
The advantages of going to the 'top schools' in the past used to be that you would meet the right people to help with your career. These days senior management tends to come from the MBA schools and so your undergrad school does not matter as much as where you did your MBA.
Better teaching can help you succeed, but as far as teaching goes Harvard does not impress me. Harvard shops for big names whose best work is generally behind them. The actual teaching tends to get done as often as not by grad students. I know as my wife TA'd a Harvard course.
Of course the one redeeming feature of Harvard is that you can take classes at MIT so you can still get a world class education.
People already have 90% of the software they need. Every major email client has supported S/MIMe for 5 years.
The main missing piece is filters that use the fact an email is signed as a means of authentication (authorization will also be needed once the spammers catch on).
The remaining piece is a certificate (or more accurately key) lookup mechanism that uses the DNS as the index rather than the broken schemes based on "directories" that key of an X.500 infrastructure that will never exist.
For your particular application (sending messages from a newspaper) I would suggest that you go to a Certification authority such as VeriSign and pay the $20 a year it costs to register for an S/MIME email certificate.
I am not suggesting that as a general solution to spam since any 'solution' that depends on senders spending $20 is going to have takeup problems. However for that application you should do the job properly with an email certificate that is going to be automatically recognized by the email clients.
S/MIME is an IETF standard and is supported by Lotus, Microsoft and Netscape and has been for 6 years now. It works fine for signing content. If you send a signed message the recipient's email client will display a little seal.
The only major client this does not work with is Eudora where the problem is that the provider appears to have completely abandoned further development efforts 5 years ago. I can't do anything about that, sorry.
The part that is not quite finished on the standards track at the moment is a mechanism for locating certificates so that you can send an encrypted email. This is a little tricky since you need the recipient's certificate before you send the message. I have been promoting a scheme called DNS linked PKI which uses the DNS SRV record as a means of finding the certificate repository that can provide you with a key for the relevant email address. This is very close to done and since SRV is already deployed is not an infrastructure issue.
Note you can also do the same with PGP (I describe how to do that in the XKMS spec). However PGP is pretty good privacy and not very good authentication. The problem is that I don't have very strict criteria for choosing an encryption key when the alternative is to sent the message en-clair. If I really care about confidentiality in a particular instance I will authenticate the key directly. That does not really hold when it comes to authentication since the point of the authentication is that I will take a different action as a result. So there is a threshold effect.
For the purposes of blocking SPAM a self signed certificate with the minimal authentication that retrival through a dns-linked pki confers is adequate.
It does not matter what content inspection approach you try. They all suffer from the fact that as the number of people who have access to your filter grows so does the incentive to test against the filter and shape their content to get through.
There is an exact analogy here to email viruses. The virus writers are constantly counter-gaming the scanners. The only reason the system works is that writing a virus is a relatively high cost, low incentive operation and the virus fingerprints are updated in realtime.
The solution to the virus problem is not better virus detection. The solution is email clients that do not blindly execute active content.
Actually this approach is regularly proposed but actually it is more complex than that. The problem is that there is no single model for using SMTP and SMTP certainly does not provide one.
In particular a large amount of email is sent from machines that have no connection to the host name the email is purported to be from. Most unix mailers simply send the mail direct.
Any email authentication system is going to run into most, if not all, of the same problems that DNSBLs run into. They are also going to have the problem of trying to get the entire world to change.
I have helped do that before, your posting to slashdot is demonstration.
What is needed is a scheme such that the incentive to opt-in is greater than the cost of opting in for all network sizes. I believe that there are ways of promoting the authentication approach that have this property.
The problem with network effects is that they cut both ways. Whenever someone talks about viral marketing I short their stock unless they can show that there is a significant benefit to opting in before the network exists. Otherwise your 'network effect' is really a chicken and egg problem.
The problem with the vast majority of psuedo-solutions to spam is that the promoters simply will not listen to any ideas other than the one they first thought of and they simply won't listen to people who point out that blocking good mail is a serious problem.
The 'cry me a river' response is as idiotic as it is arrogant. SPAM is a problem, failure to deliver email is a bigger problem.
That does not mean that we don't address the problem of SPAM, it just means that we have to approach the problem from both ends, identifying the good signal as well as eliminating the bad.
The MIT conference is likely to be a failure because the organizers are only presenting the tried and failed filtering approaches of the past. Those approaches are now well understood, they can mitigate the problem but can never do more than that. Filters suffer from reverse network effects, the more widely used they are the greater the incentive to program arround them.
Blacklists fail for many reasons, not least complete lack of accountability. As the paper reports the operator of one blacklist that claimed to only list open relays actually listed sites for other reasons. Ultimately a blacklist that does not have some robust accountability structure is simply a vigilante operation. Vigilantes are frequently popular with people who think they are victims of crime regardless of whether they create more problems than they solve.
The tools we need to start applying are digital signatures and email authentication in combination with whitelists. This follows sound business process, if you want to talk to someone well known their secretary will use a two step process, first ask who you are and check to see if you match the access criteria (e.g. to set up a cold call meeting with a Fortune 100 CEO you had better be a Fortune 500 CEO), then check to see if you really are who you claim to be.
Authentication and Authorization requires no heuristics and there is no feasible counter-strategy for the spammers.
I believe that the way to stop spam in the long term is to deploy signed email ubiquitously. Self signed certificates are sufficient for this purpose if we can provide a lightweight authentication via a DNS-linked PKI.
For example consider the problem of stopping spam to email lists. These are a prime target for spammers as the email server does most of the work. As a result most email lists are now filtered so that only subscribed readers can post. This has in turn been gamed by the spammers who use automated tools to scan the archives of an email list and send emails with forged headers purporting to come from another subscriber. Authentication and authorization prevents this mode of attack.
The counter-argument to using authentication is that the spammers can get their own credentials. If you spend some time analysing SPAM however you will find out that this is unlikely. Almost every spam has forged or obscured headers. While this does not prove that this is a requirement it is certainly indicative of the fact that the spamers do not want this type of visibility.
Even if a spammer can get a credential they are most unlikely to get a credential that would match my personal whitelist which would consist of the signing keys of the email lists I subscribe to and the domain names of the member companies of W3C and OASIS.
The problem is that you are in a global network. It is like the problem of eating whale meat, you can persuade 99.999% of the world population that eating whale meat is a bad idea but the other 0.0001% that is left can eat the endangered species to extinction within a matter of months.
It only takes a vanishingly small number of businesses out there to SPAM and you have a massive problem.
SPAM does not have to even be profitable for people to do it. If I wanted to launder a lot of drug cash I would set up a spam house and bombard people with ads for herbal viagra..
There was a time not so long ago when the majority of the SPAM being sent out was adverts for spam software. SPAM does not have to work as a marketing method for creeps to get rich charging others to spam. The pitch line they use to haul in suckers is 'it must work or why would people do it', well no, it does not have to get one single end customer for it to work for the spammer.
You vastly over-rate the influence of W3C here. A standard is what people use. The decisions of the IETF and W3C are only influential if they meet real needs.
To take an example, W3C spent a lot of time and political capital on the PICS project that failled. It is a 'standard' but a standard that is ignored by practically everyone.
Encumbered technology is not good in a standard because the market does not in general adopt encumbered standards. So the worrying about the W3C patent policy is in many ways misguided, you don't have to worry about the W3C making a standard that depends on encumbered technology since if it did so without a reason compelling enough for the market (e.g. no other way to solve the problem) then the standard would not be adopted.
As I mentioned a lot of work has been moving from W3C to OASIS. This is happening for many reasons, the IP policy being only one. The main complaint about the W3C IP policy is that it has been undecided for so long. If you submit a spec to W3C at the moment you don't know what the IP terms you will be required to comply with are. Bruce is absolutely right about the need for closure on this issue.
But don't think that people are leaving W3C for OASIS because they want to peddle encumbered technology. The main issues are the ridiculous amount of process that W3C has created and the cost of membership. Getting a group started in W3C took over a year, in that same time all the major vendors in the space were shipping a product.
Members are paying $57K a year to join W3C and being told that there are insufficient resources when they want to start a group. OASIS are much more reasonable, they give me a decision within a month.
W3C is not the only standards group in trouble. IETF is in a worse mess. The alleged 'openness' is largely a sham, when you try to actually do stuff you find that there is a hidden old boys network that is quite prepared to play dirty in persuit of personal agendas.
That is why NAT boxes break the Internet rather than co-exist. The IESG decided they did not like them as they 'broke their model'. So now we have lots of NAT boxes deployed that use the most brain dead strategy imaginable.
What I don't see in either IETF or W3C is what the logic of all the mechanism would suggest, a group that pro-actively looks at how the standards work together and identifies problems that have to be fixed in advance. There are plenty of boards whose names imply this is what they would do but without exception they tend to end up interferring in existing work instead.
Hey I told the MS people they should have presented that stuff but they weren't listening.
Even wierder they spent a lot of time and money propagating the wierd claim that network effects do not exist, the QWERTY keyboard was best and VHS won on the merits. They paid the "Independent Institute", a crank tank $100,000 to try to give that idea credibility.
The bit I could never understand about that strategy was that denying network effects exist only makes sense if you think you can persuade the court that Microsoft is not a monopoly. Fat chance. Instead of trying that on they should have embraced the network effect and told the court that their O/S won because of it, i.e. was established legally.
The connection between the anti-trust suit and the W3C IP position is that Sun made an IP claim against Microsoft wrt Java which resulted in a $20million settlement. The argument that Sun has been making is 'Java is open, only we have the sole right to decide its future', in other words Java is not open and the whole community process is a sham. Java is only open in the limited sense that you can implement the standard without extensions, extending the standard lands you in a lawsuit.
So don't be suprised that other companies are now less willing to allow free and unencumbered use of their IP. After all Sun has been allowed a free ride on this front, they have proved that the open/proprietary model can work. So expect others to try it. Also expect others to make sure that they have plenty of IP in reserve so that if they are attacked they have material for a possible countersuit.
The W3C policy is the best that can be achieved in the current circumstances where Sun is using IP as a strategic lever wrt a purported "open" standard.
The 20-year term is too long for the software industry, in that there is no quid-pro-quo for the public - a patent is no longer useful by the time it enters the public domain.
Right on target Bruce! I think that the same applies to a lot of the problematic genome patents. Someone sequences a gene, on that basis they patent the invention of using the gene for a standard collection of 200 odd uses. They don't know what the gene does or even what part of the body it affects but they will claim the 'invention' of using the gene to cure everything from HIV to halitosis. It is a completely sterile act devoid of any inventive step.
Several of the software patents have the same basic approach. Intertrust filed a piece of garbage with 2000 claims. About the best that can be said for the patent is that they are effectively preventing the use of DRM technology through their grasping licensing policies.
Who do you think decides which body to send the specification to?
There is a buyers market for standards groups. If I can't get what I want from one group I will take my work to another, if there is no group that is acceptable I'll start another.
What I am looking for from a standards group is an open process with as little overhead as possible that produces a competent, interoperable and widely supported standard. In most cases that is going to mean 'unencumbered'.
Your description of the software IP problem is simply cluless. Yes there are garbage patents out there, but those are simple if you know the prior art. The problematic patents are the ones where there might be a valid claim.
The software patent lunacy has got to the point where people object to any clever stuff in my designs, not because there is a patent it infringes but because there might be an application in, so by default do everything a stupid as possible. It gets worse, there are people who read my designs and then file a perjured patent application claiming they invented them.
If that is the case (I doubt it is) the solution is for the FSF to rev the GPL so that it works in a sane manner or for folk to choose a license that does not have that effect.
What we are talking about is open, royalty free Web standards. If the FSF can't live with an open royalty free web standard that uses technology that is encumbered for other purposes then that is their funeral.
Bruce is completely correct about the politics here, the W3C has already tried people's patience on many fronts, they simply cannot throw the IP policy into confusion yet again.
It is a question of degree.
Consider for a moment the subjects that Gore was accused of lying about - going to Texas with the FEMA head, the love canal thing, the love story thing. Imagine for the sake of argument that they were actually true rather than the Republican fabrications they really are.
Compare those to the lies Bush told on matters of policy - a uniter not a divider who was so divisive he split his own party and lost the senate majority, the tax cuts won't create a budget deficit - they are the single biggest factor in the deficit, no nuclear dumping in Nevada - not until after the inauguration that is.
Bush lied repeatedly about policy issues and was allowed to get away with it. It was not even a matter of failing to keep a promise - it was obvious when the promises were made that they were made in bad faith.
The republican echo chamber created the 'gore liar' meme for a reason. They knew from the start that they would have to lie their asses off to win. If they got the 'gore liar' story going nobody would accuse Bush of the same.
The radar on the Turner Joy showed 'fast approaching craft', the radar on the Maddox did not. Nobody knows if anything was shot at the US boats and nothing could know given their firing rate.
However that particular issue is irrelevant since the claim made by the administration was that the North made an 'unprovoked attack' against the US ship. The fact is that the OPLAN 34A raiders shelled Hon Me and Hon Ngu, two islands controlled by the North on the 30th and 31st of July, several days before the Tonkin incident on the 4th.
Far from being an unprovoked attack the US had done everthing it could to provoke the Vietnamese by shelling them repeatedly.
That is not quite right, we never relased any code under the GPL. We released the libwww code as public domain, it is not GPL, it is not BSD, it is public domain.
When GPL was being discussed it was in the context of 'make it free', the GPL was rejected because it did not make the cern code free in the ways we wanted it to be free. We explicitly wanted browsers to be included with computers as a cost free part of the basic operating system. Remember that at the time (91) Mosaic had not even appeared, let alone Netscape. The point is that Tim never wanted the viral aspect and dropped the GNU angle as soon as it was explained to him.
In the end the public domain route was in large part dictated by political expediency. Explaining GPL or BSD to cern management would have taken a lot more time and led to more opportunity for confusion. Putting the code in the public domain was something they could understand - it had already been done with much of the CERN libraries.
The mistake that was made was public domain rather than BSD. If we had gone BSD then Mosaic would have been required to state that it used CERN code (60% of the Mosaic code was code from CERN used without attribution). That in turn would have meant that IE would have a credit. As it was the mainstream media did not recognize Tim as the true father of the Web until about 1996, and then only as a result of a major PR campaign led by MIT.
I would certainly advise researchers to use the BSD license in their code. I would strongly advise against the GPL if you want your ideas to be taken up by industry.
This Item allows for a supposedly free grant to use a patent to be so restricted that a piece of Web infrastructure software might be encumbered if used for some non-Web use.
The issue for me as an architect (I have written IETF, W3C and OASIS standards) is that I don't necessarily own all the IP that I need to address a problem. If I need to get an IP owner to donate their property for the common good my job is easiest if I have to ask for as little as is necessary for the particular purpose.
Equally when I hold the IP I see little point in giving away more than I need to for the purpose of the Web specification even though my company does not regard patent licensing as a revenue stream. The point is that I might need some IP held by a party that deals in the non-Internet world. I will have an easier time negotiating a license for Internet use if I have some bargaining chips.
The FSF reading on the situation is 100% about their ideology and has nothing to do with real needs as far as I am concerned. Open Source software is not imune to the patent system. If you modify any open source software sufficiently you will run into a patent infringement.
If you apply the FSF "logic" you would have to stop distributing gzip because someone could modify it so that it infringed the Unisys LZ patents.
The W3C does not have a monopoly on standards making and in fact is already seeing a lot of the standards work migrating from to OASIS. Dealing with the cumbersome W3C process and formatting conventions is bad enough without additional IP roadblocks being errected.
At the end of the day the IP policy is utterly irrelevant since nobody is going to use the specification unless the IP terms are acceptable and they are going to determine what is acceptable, not Tim and certainly not RMS. To date that has generally meant 'free as in beer' however there are many applications where that is simply not achievable, if you want to do voice browsing you will run into IP issues and your choice will be do something encumbered or don't do it at all.
Don't do it at all may be the FSF answer, but he does not pay $57,500 a year for W3C membership dues. The point that Tim has missed is that the W3C membership is already annoyed on the value for money front, W3C is way more expensive to join than OASIS where we pay $10K. We are also far from happy on the bogus process front, it took me almost a year to get a W3C working group started. I am not happy with a set of document publication rules that are 'standards based' but turn out to mean that you can only edit standards with one editor.
The last thing W3C needs to do at this stage is to reopen the IP issue with the membership.
There is a difference, albeit a pretty subtle one. The family friendly crusaders talk about the harm done by violence but without exception attempt to control sex instead.
This was certainly the case with Mary Whitehouse who was the 'keep sex and violence off TV' harpie in the UK. The porn site whitehouse.com is actually named after her, not the building on Penn Ave.
The anti-sex crusaders talk about violence because that is something most parents are worried about, they don't want their brat beating up the other kids. Violence on TV is a reasonable thing to be concerned about when you are dealing with 12 year olds.
Once talk turns to censorship however violence is completely forgotten, the real issue is controlling all access to sexual material, especially material that suggests its ok to be gay or sleep arround or generally have fun in ways not authorized by the social mores.
That is why people will put more effort into controling images of violence on TV than stopping violence. If it was really about violence those people would be upset at the idea of bombing civilians in Iraq etc. But its not about violence, never was, its about sex and their inability to handle their own sexual hangups (like being caught in flagrente delicto with Gary Hart!)
Of course the problem with hoaxes like these is that they can end up being used as political ammunition. It does not matter to the censorship brigade, they have no qualms about using material they know to be bogus. The infamous CMU 'cyberporn' study was used to prove that the Internet was full of porn in Congress long after it had been proved to be faked.
The US started the Vietnam war as a result of a hoax, the infamous 'Battle of Tonkin Bay' that never was. LBJ used that as causus belli even though he knew at the time it was fake.
Not according to my copy of the highway code:
80mph thinking distance 88 feet braking distance 478 feet overall stopping distance 566 feet 4.8 secs
Your theory about the car in front is complete nonsense and the reason why so many multi car pile ups happen.
And lastly, if I am already travelling at 10mph over the speed limit then you have no business tailgating me you complete asshole. If there is a car up in front of me that I can't get past the gap I leave in front is no business of yours.
If you have equal braking abilities of the car in front of you,
The chances that your SUV pile of crap can stop in four times the distance I can stop is not that good. I have 18" brake disks that can stop the car dead in 80" at 80mph without losing control of the car. They are the same type of brake as fitted to the XKR that won the Trans Am the other year. So I can stop dead in less space than you think is sufficient.
The reason I am leaving 200 yards in front of me is because there is an asshole with an SUV tailgating me, so I have to leave at least enough room in front of me to stop while applying the brakes slowly enough that the SUV-asshole does not end up embedded in my tail pipe.
Conclusion: People are tailgating you because of your poor driving. You are causing frustration in general, and I pray that you are NOT in the left lane when doing this (it is ILLEGAL). This will only increase road rage and accidents behind you. A general rule is to be able to count 2-3 seconds between the time the car in front of you passes a landmark, and you do. This is usually 2-4 car lengths at highway speeds. Of course adjust for the type of car you drive and the car in front.
2-3 seconds is the thinking time. If the car in front hits a stationary vehicle you are leaving no time for braking, let alone error. Tailgating is always illegal and dangerous. Leaving sufficient room to stop before you hit the car in front is not only not legal, it is a requirement, you are the one breaking the law if you don't.
Conclusion, if you are tailgating a Jaguar XK8 and it is going slower in response rather than faster it is because I have been trained on the police driving course and I know what I am doing, I am slowing down because there is a potentially dangerous situation, you are the potentially dangerous situation so if you keep your distance the way it says in the highway code you might find I go faster.