I think the the phrase in dispute is "all States". Does that mean the treaty applies only to governments, excluding the citizens (in which case this guy does have a case) or does that phrase mean all governments and their citizens?
Suppose a US court did rule that he owned the asteroid, so what? When the Chinese (or whoever else) actually get around to mining it, do you think they'll give a toss what a US court has ruled?
What you said "pour encourage[r] les autres" translates as "to encourage others". I think you mean you want to discourage other people from doing the same thing, right?
It's a quote from Voltaire, and it is meant to be ironic. Voltaire was referring to the British habit at that time of hanging admirals who lost battles. He said that we did it pour encourager les autres...
The full text of the passage is:
En causant ainsi ils aborderent a Portsmouth; une multitude de
peuple couvrait le rivage, et regardait attentivement un assez
gros homme qui etait a genoux, les yeux bandes, sur le tillac
d'un des vaisseaux de la flotte; quatre soldats, postes vis-a-vis
de cet homme, lui tirerent chacun trois balles dans le crane, le
plus paisiblement du monde; et toute l'assemblee s'en retourna
extremement satisfaite[2]. Qu'est-ce donc que tout ceci? dit
Candide; et quel demon exerce partout son empire? Il demanda qui
etait ce gros homme qu'on venait de tuer en ceremonie. C'est un
amiral, lui repondit-on. Et pourquoi tuer cet amiral? C'est,
lui dit-on, parcequ'il n'a pas fait tuer assez de monde; il a
livre un combat a un amiral francais, et on a trouve qu'il
n'etait pas assez pres de lui. Mais, dit Candide, l'amiral
francais etait aussi loin de l'amiral anglais que celui-ci
l'etait de l'autre! Cela est incontestable, lui repliqua-t-on;
mais dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un
amiral pour encourager les autres.
Jokes are never funny when you have to explain them.
From Dave's perspective, this is a an open and shut deal. SCO will get someone to rep them under the law. In most cases that he would take like this he would see no money unless the client wins. This provision is set there to ensure that a lawyer does not throw a case a to try to win a judge/prosecutor/potential client over. In this case though, Dave and his firm are going to have all up front costs covered, he gets a little piece of the action in what might be the most high profile IP law case of the century (certainly one that will decide matters on many fronts for the next 5 to 10 years) and even better, free pub.
Now on to the next question....is this ethical. Let us compare an contrast. Is murder ethical. No. Is defending a murderer ethical? Good question, and one that could spark quite the debate. Is what SCO is doing ethical? Hell no. Is representing SCO ethical? Once again, that is up for debate?
That kind of turns on whether the lawyer is, in fact, a principal in the case. If the lawyer stands to gain by the outcome of the case, then the lawyer is partly a principal, but will only gain if the case proves successful. The lawyer has no motivation to take on a mischievous or mailcious case because he knows he won't win and he knows he won't get paid.
However, this one's different. The lawyer gets paid if he can make the case sufficiently a nuisance to get his client bought out. He doesn't need to have a valid case. He doesn't need to set out his arguments clearly. He doesn't need to bring his case expeditiously. In fact it's to his advantage to obfuscate and delay.
This isn't about - and it clearly isn't about - protecting some poor trembling individual from the power of the state. It's about abusing the legal system to obtain monetary gain by seeking to twist the limits of relatively new legal theory on intellectual property, in favour of people who clearly have done nothing of utility to merit that monetary gain. In other words, it's a stinking, dishonest gambit advanced by a bunch of crooked charlatans.
Now, I grant you, under the legal system as it exists, crooked charlatans have a right to be represented in court, and in many places advocates are obliged to take on any case for anyone who can pay. But there's a difference between taking on a case for pay and taking on a case for a speculative cut of the proceeds of intellectual dishonesty, and it's in that difference that ethics come into play.
There is a far cry, at least to those that set the standard of such things, between torture equipment, WMD's and taking dosh for a lawsuit. Accordingly, the items mentioned in you poor example above have been of an illicit nature and have always been so in the eyes of both US and international law.
On the contrary, all the things I described are legal, have happened, and are still happening. Torture equipment was sold to Pinochet's Chile and to Apartheid South Africa both by UK and be US firms; WMD including Anthrax were sold to Saddam Hussein by US firms with the knowledge and approval of the US government. A number of western firms have been and are in the practice of selling unfit foodstuffs and time-expired medicines to famine areas.
It's all legal and it all happens.
What it isn't is ethical. Similarly, what Boyes and co are doing in this case is legal but not ethical. It's not as unethical, I grant you; but the point I was making is that money is not an excuse for doing unethical things, and neither is the tired old excuse trotted out by the arms trade over and over again, 'but if we didn't someone else would'.
In this case, I cannot say I blame the lawyers. If they did not take that kind of an offer, another firm would.
If I offered you millions of dollars to supply torture equipment to (e.g.) North Korea, or explosives to Al Quaeda, would you do it? If I offered you millions of dollars to supply contaminated food to famine victims, would you do it? If, ten years ago, I had offered you millions of dollars to supply anthrax to Saddam Hussein, would you have done it?
No-one is obliged to do unethical things. Just because there are unethical people who will is no excuse. People who agree to do unethical things are unethical. They can be blamed and they should be blamed.
So, if the lawyers are entitled to part of the settlement, should they get part of the sale?
This case is just one of those things which are so unbelievably sleazy that they're not illegal because no-one ever imagined anyone would stoop that low. Create a nuisance lawsuit on extremely tenuous grounds in the hope someone would buy you out in order to shut you up. I've been thinking up to now that it would be nice if IBM crushed this quickly and put us all out of our misery, but now it's apparent that it would be better for IBM to draw this out as long as possible to make sure they bankrupt the scumbag lawyers.
If they're allowed to win this one we're going to see a spate of similar cases - not necessarily anything to do with software or open source, but small companies with just the minutest possibility of an extremely complicated case against larger companies going to law to, essentially, blackmail money out of them. They need to lose, and lose very badly, pour encourage les autres.
One of the things everyone seems to have missed so far is that Europe's biggest and most successful Linux company is disappearing into the murky nexus of Noorda companies around Salt Lake City. Whatever the relationship between Noorda, SCO and Novell just now, they all swim in the same pool...
This makes Mandrake the only even moderately high profile commercial Linux distribution left in European hands, and as is well known Mandrake's finances are seriously wobbly. And this matters for everyone just now, because the future of Linux in the US is being played out in just that same murky Salt Lake City slime-pool. Fall out from the SCO case will affect all US-owned Linux distributions.
Some companies *try* to hire the top 1-2% of all programmers. Few succeed. We're trying for the top 5-10% and some misfits will always slip through. The secret is to get rid of the misfits as quickly as possible. Many don't even try for A programmers. Many are convinced (with some good numbers behind them), that A programmers are generally more trouble than they're worth and B programmers are where the money is. Many places are convinced that an A architect backed up by B programmers is the amazing combination to shoot for.
I think you're missing the point. Looking back on the twenty years I've been in this game, I would say that all the truly great programmers I've worked with were misfits, either highly eccentric or with real social skills deficits or real psychological dificulties. If you want A class programming you have to set up an environment in which those people are secure, comfortable and adequately supported. If you do, you'll get more work, and very much better work, out of them than you would out of a group of non-misfits. There are brilliant and creative people in this world, and there are steady conformists. But there are no brilliant, creative steady conformists.
I think everyone's missing the point here. I'm not American, so it's not strictly my issue, but as I understand we have here a company whose executives are very closely associated with one particular political party. The company sells voting machines. The voting machine software is 'patched' by the company after it has been certified. The voting machines have no audit trail. In elections in which these machines are used, surprising swings are noted. These swings are in favour of the political party supported by the company executives.
It seems to me that it's irrelevent whether the machines run operating systems by Microsoft, IBM, or Uncle Tom Cobley.
It seems to me that it's irrelevent that the software has security flaws.
These issues are distractions. There's a very good probability on the evidence that I can see that these issues just divert your attention from the probability that the systems are working as their makers intend - to deliver election results in favour of the party they, the makers, support.
I mean, let's face it, if you were going to set out to rig election in this electronic age, how would you do it? You'd take control of the vote collecting and counting process. That's what Diebold have effectively done. This is an issue at the very heart of democracy itself: quis custodiet ipsos voting machines?
I doubt that's a valid criticism. The point (which must be expressed in less than 121 characters) is that there is no intellectual property, just as there are no winged pigs (would a winged pig be a pigasus?). We can of course put pigs on a plane, and we can pass laws creating intellectual property. We can't make pigs into birds, and we can't give IP the same moral standing as property.
All property is a legal abstraction and only a legal abstraction. 'Intellectual property' is not more nor less of a legal abstraction than any other kind of property. No property 'exists in nature', and all property has 'moral standing' only in so far as the community as a whole regards the mechanisms for acquiring and transferring it reasonably just.
None of this should be taken as an argument supporting intellectual property. As far as I am concerned, 'intellectual property' is a legal abstraction too far (as, in my opinion, is enclosure of the commons, which is a very similar issue).
One of the biggest problems which working on a system largely on your own is keeping at it and not getting sidetracked. I have always liked to work on a 'price for the job' basis, because it keeps me focussed and it keeps me honest.
Work out what the next few key targets of your project are, and work out how long you think it should take you to achieve each one. Then, multiply that time by how much you'd like to be paid per hour, plus your overheads; then, add 10% for contingencies. Use that as your fixed price.
Ask to be paid one third up front, one third when you deliver (when you think you've achieved your target) and one third when they're satisfied that the target is achieved (this is known in some places as a 'shipyard contract' and is good because it gives you money to live on while you're working).
This is an arms race, and as soon as you give ground at all, you've lost.
The reason people are implementing things like 'Web Services', overloading port 80 to provide potentially insecure services on a port previously thought reasonably safe, is that they don't understand the need for security and firewalls, they're frustrated by the restrictions you - rightly - put on them, and they want to shortcut around the firewall. If you allow them to, they will. Furthermore, they will employ half trained code-monkeys to point-and-drool together some Visual BASIC abortion with no concept of security or defensive programming. At that point you've basically lost the battle. The temptation is to advance the arms race another twist, by implementing 'application layer' firewalls which can inspect traffic going through. This takes far more computational resources and is far more prone to both false positives and false negatives than simply blocking services deemed to be unsafe, so you've not only spent more money on hardware, you've given yourself a huge and ongoing security headache.
You are right: the only sensible answer is NEVER, and you need to stick to your guns. Otherwise the firewall might as well not exist at all.
Is there an Eco in here? (was Re:Familiar...)
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Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
I have never read anything from Umberto Eco, and saw "The island of the day before" on the bookstore and I'm thinking of giving it a shot, is it a good starting point for Eco?
I love Eco's work, and think The Name of the Rose is the best novel of the twentieth century. But The Island of the Day Before is too tough for me. Eco is always playing games with the reader: that's what he does. But The Name of the Rose has a clear narrative and real narrative drive, which help to carry you through all the mindfucks. I would start there, and if you like it, try Eco's more recent works which are either more brilliant or more self indulgent depending on how you take them.
Mind you the comparison between Eco and Stephenson is an interesting one...
* People are dying because of the artificial monopoly created by patents on drugs.
This artificial monopoly was created by a company using non-artificial money to develop these drugs. They are recouping the costs of R&D, which is quite high. The fact that third world countries can't afford the medicine is not their problem. They need to build an infrastructure that can support education of their people that will then lead to their own scientists discovering their own cures. To borrow an oft used phrase here, these governments "need to change their business model."
Except that this standard parrot fashion argument happens not to be true. The overwhelming majority of new drugs are created/invented/discovered by public Universities and other publicly funded institutions, and by charities such as Cancer Research. We don't actually need private sector firms in this marketplace at all, and they add little or no value. Consequently there's no public policy benefit to protecting their 'Intellectual Property'
* IP Litigation is a huge industry.
Since when was this illegal? I'd rather live in a free nation that allows for oppurtunities like this than one which follows the whims of the mob (which in most cases is the vocal minority), picking anc choosing whenm how and to whom laws shoudl or should not apply
.
There are two points to be made here:
IP litigation adds no value. It is purely parasytic on the creative process. No-one except the lawyers benefits from it at all.
There is, in my opinion, something of a contradiction in terms about a so-called 'free' society in which the rich corporations buy the laws. In the end it becomes necessary for the private citizen to defy a corrupt state: that is, after all, what the US War of Independence was all about. For US (or UK, for that matter) citizens to talk about living in a 'free' society, now shows a remarkable degree of self-delusion.
That was a nice history of languages that compile to a VM. But that's just one part of it. It's like saying Windows XP is no innovation because we used plug boards on an ENIAC for our human interface.
OK, then, what's the rest of it? What single feature of.net is not already present in Java? Just one? Any one?
By funneling the majority of your applications through one client API you could end up staring at "we have to upgrade the browser to make Application X work but Application Y breaks".
The browser is a standard commodity component handling open standard data formats. If either application requires a browser upgrade it's the application that's broken, not the browser.
Re:Application programming is a dying paradigm
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Ford To Move To Linux
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· Score: 1
Yeah, except if it is, its the worst move ever. Compiled programs are still what run mission critical software. They're faster and more reliable.
Compilation does not predicate any particular channel of delivery. The Web is just as good a platform for delivering compiled programs as interpreted ones. You do not have to use PERL or PHP (although, of course, you can if you want).
And its not as if the web still works the same on everyone's PC. Opera and Mozilla and IE6 might give three much different appearances to the same page.
If your application complies with W3C standards, Mozilla (and derivatives), Konqueror/KHTML (and derivatives) and Opera will all give the same presentation and IE6 is only broken in a few very minor ways. If your application doesn't conform to the standards, whose problem is that?
The Web is cheap client-server lego with a ubiquitous client interface which work the same on anything from a cellphone to a high-end engineering workstation. The client may not be as rich as you'd really like but I for one am happy to trade that richness for vendor neutrality, ubiquity and relatively modest bandwidth requirements.
Frankly, in my opinion anyone building a business critical application which users are expected to interact with these days which isn't 100% Web enabled (and 100% standards conformant) ought to be sacked.
I don't think the mono developers care if they're compatible or not. For them, it's an emerging technology with the posiblity to change computing for the better.
It's not an emerging technology and it won't change computing. There's nothing new in.net which isn't already present in Java, very little that wasn't already present in the UCSD p-system in 1973, and not a lot which wasn't already present in BCPLin 1967
The timeline goes like this:
BCPL, 1967: Single source language (BCPL) compiles to CINTCODE, which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
P-System, 1973: Several source languages (including Pascal, Fortran and others) compile to 'P-Code', which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
Java, 1991: Several hundred source languages (including Ada, BASIC, C++, Cobol, Forth, Fortran, JavaScript, LISP, Modula, Oberon, Occam, Pascal, Prolog, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, TCL, and anything which GCC compiles) compile to JVM code, which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries and network transparency; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
.NET, 2000: Innovation! Celebration! Microsoft do more of the same!
You do not persecute a soldier for following orders. While I think that legally, and idealistically, they (Damage Studios) have every right to do it, I think it really is just a childish act. If it were IBM, or a "real" company I would probably complain about it.
You do prosecute a sodier for obeying orders, if those orders are unlawful. That is what the whole Nuremburg process was about. Every soldier in every Western army - including the US Army - has had it drummed into him that he has a duty to refuse unlawful orders, and that nothing can protect him from War Crimes prosecution if he doesn't. The fact that US soldiers can't be tried by the International Criminal Court has nothing to do with this: war crimes are crimes against US law just as much as against international law, and 'I was just obeying orders' is no excuse.
That's a pretty bad attitude there. Don't you think there are alot of talented people who worked for scum companies like Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia and SCO? You have to remember those companies were some of the most prestigious companies in the world right until the went to shit.
That's true up to a point, but only up to a point. When you become aware that the company you are working for is acting unethically, you have two choices: to resign, or have your labour advance unethical ends. If you do the latter, you are tarring yourself with the same brush, and deserve that people should treat you with distrust and disdain. Employees at SCO Group passed that point several months ago.
I could go on and on. The acceptance of TCPA spells the end of the open Internet, and the beginning of a closed network, where all but a few applications are locked out.
I know what I'll do. Whatever it comes to, I will not have a part of this, and I will simply refuse to accept having a computer that is hostile toward me. The reason I argue this so vehemently is because I hope it won't be lonely out here...
I don't believe we (for i'm entirely with you) will be in the least lonely. The open Internet is valuable enough to enough people and organisations that there will be a continuing, mass, market for general purpose computers and for communications systems that allow them to intercommunicate. These may no longer be the machines used by Joe Average, but I think you can be reasonably comfortable that they will continue to be available.
Furthermore, those of us who want to use them are the geeks, and frankly we can carry on using them even if the commercial environment becomes very hostile, both because we have the ability to keep current generation machines running (if new machines come to be locked down so tightly we can't use them) and because we can establish channels of reliable communication over any medium that provides bandwidth.
If there's going to be a line-by-line comparison, this is the tool to do it. Once those lines are identified, *then* it's simply a matter of finding out the origins of them; that's where we can roll it back to a textbook published in 1973 or whatever.
Until the lines that are common are identified, it's impossible to defend against the accusations. Because of that, I bet Darling Darl won't allow it to be used. The question is, how to turn the inevitable refusal into something that shuts him (up|down).
This is an interesting program and a useful move in the game, but it misses the point. (Most of) the code SCO is theirs and is in the kernel is in the kernel. The point is that SCO claim to own anything written by any UN*X licensee ever that's been contributed to Linux. Thus, for example, they claim to own NUMA and RCU code which
they didn't write
they didn't specify, contribute, or pay for
was never a part of any of their products
and which they've never had (apart from in the Linux codebase) the source code of
They're arguing this because the standard UN*X license said something roughly equivalent to 'all your extensions are belong to us'. SCO's claim, essentially, is that anything remotely UN*Xy ever written by IBM or SCO or HP or SGI or... belongs to them, and therefore cannot be contributed to Linux. In the case of the SGI journalled file system I think they may have a case. However, Sequent's work on multiprocessor memory access was not originally written for UN*X, it was written for a proprietary operating system and later ported to UN*X, so I don't believe that SCO can sustain a case to own that; IBM's journalling file system was originally written for OS/2, so I don't believe SCO can sustain a case to own that; and for the rest IBM's side-letter is sufficient protection for everything IBM has contributed.
In other words, the warranty he's referring to isn't one about how the software works, or whether it is supported, but rather whether or not the vendor will assert, when you buy the software from them, that you in fact are not violating anybody elses IP rights by using it.
And is Mr McBride prepared to offer that warranty with respect to UnixWare, or any other of SCO's products? No? Why not, I wonder?
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose a US court did rule that he owned the asteroid, so what? When the Chinese (or whoever else) actually get around to mining it, do you think they'll give a toss what a US court has ruled?
It's a quote from Voltaire, and it is meant to be ironic. Voltaire was referring to the British habit at that time of hanging admirals who lost battles. He said that we did it pour encourager les autres...
The full text of the passage is:
Jokes are never funny when you have to explain them.
That kind of turns on whether the lawyer is, in fact, a principal in the case. If the lawyer stands to gain by the outcome of the case, then the lawyer is partly a principal, but will only gain if the case proves successful. The lawyer has no motivation to take on a mischievous or mailcious case because he knows he won't win and he knows he won't get paid.
However, this one's different. The lawyer gets paid if he can make the case sufficiently a nuisance to get his client bought out. He doesn't need to have a valid case. He doesn't need to set out his arguments clearly. He doesn't need to bring his case expeditiously. In fact it's to his advantage to obfuscate and delay.
This isn't about - and it clearly isn't about - protecting some poor trembling individual from the power of the state. It's about abusing the legal system to obtain monetary gain by seeking to twist the limits of relatively new legal theory on intellectual property, in favour of people who clearly have done nothing of utility to merit that monetary gain. In other words, it's a stinking, dishonest gambit advanced by a bunch of crooked charlatans.
Now, I grant you, under the legal system as it exists, crooked charlatans have a right to be represented in court, and in many places advocates are obliged to take on any case for anyone who can pay. But there's a difference between taking on a case for pay and taking on a case for a speculative cut of the proceeds of intellectual dishonesty, and it's in that difference that ethics come into play.
Domain Name:
hotmail.co.uk
Registrant:
Microsoft Corporation
Registrant's Agent:
Dark Marketing Ltd [Tag = DARKUK]
URL: http://www.darkmarketing.com
Who would have ever believed that Microsoft would go over to the dark side?
On the contrary, all the things I described are legal, have happened, and are still happening. Torture equipment was sold to Pinochet's Chile and to Apartheid South Africa both by UK and be US firms; WMD including Anthrax were sold to Saddam Hussein by US firms with the knowledge and approval of the US government. A number of western firms have been and are in the practice of selling unfit foodstuffs and time-expired medicines to famine areas.
It's all legal and it all happens.
What it isn't is ethical. Similarly, what Boyes and co are doing in this case is legal but not ethical. It's not as unethical, I grant you; but the point I was making is that money is not an excuse for doing unethical things, and neither is the tired old excuse trotted out by the arms trade over and over again, 'but if we didn't someone else would'.
If I offered you millions of dollars to supply torture equipment to (e.g.) North Korea, or explosives to Al Quaeda, would you do it? If I offered you millions of dollars to supply contaminated food to famine victims, would you do it? If, ten years ago, I had offered you millions of dollars to supply anthrax to Saddam Hussein, would you have done it?
No-one is obliged to do unethical things. Just because there are unethical people who will is no excuse. People who agree to do unethical things are unethical. They can be blamed and they should be blamed.
This case is just one of those things which are so unbelievably sleazy that they're not illegal because no-one ever imagined anyone would stoop that low. Create a nuisance lawsuit on extremely tenuous grounds in the hope someone would buy you out in order to shut you up. I've been thinking up to now that it would be nice if IBM crushed this quickly and put us all out of our misery, but now it's apparent that it would be better for IBM to draw this out as long as possible to make sure they bankrupt the scumbag lawyers.
If they're allowed to win this one we're going to see a spate of similar cases - not necessarily anything to do with software or open source, but small companies with just the minutest possibility of an extremely complicated case against larger companies going to law to, essentially, blackmail money out of them. They need to lose, and lose very badly, pour encourage les autres.
This makes Mandrake the only even moderately high profile commercial Linux distribution left in European hands, and as is well known Mandrake's finances are seriously wobbly. And this matters for everyone just now, because the future of Linux in the US is being played out in just that same murky Salt Lake City slime-pool. Fall out from the SCO case will affect all US-owned Linux distributions.
I think you're missing the point. Looking back on the twenty years I've been in this game, I would say that all the truly great programmers I've worked with were misfits, either highly eccentric or with real social skills deficits or real psychological dificulties. If you want A class programming you have to set up an environment in which those people are secure, comfortable and adequately supported. If you do, you'll get more work, and very much better work, out of them than you would out of a group of non-misfits. There are brilliant and creative people in this world, and there are steady conformists. But there are no brilliant, creative steady conformists.
It seems to me that it's irrelevent whether the machines run operating systems by Microsoft, IBM, or Uncle Tom Cobley.
It seems to me that it's irrelevent that the software has security flaws.
These issues are distractions. There's a very good probability on the evidence that I can see that these issues just divert your attention from the probability that the systems are working as their makers intend - to deliver election results in favour of the party they, the makers, support.
I mean, let's face it, if you were going to set out to rig election in this electronic age, how would you do it? You'd take control of the vote collecting and counting process. That's what Diebold have effectively done. This is an issue at the very heart of democracy itself: quis custodiet ipsos voting machines?
All property is a legal abstraction and only a legal abstraction. 'Intellectual property' is not more nor less of a legal abstraction than any other kind of property. No property 'exists in nature', and all property has 'moral standing' only in so far as the community as a whole regards the mechanisms for acquiring and transferring it reasonably just.
None of this should be taken as an argument supporting intellectual property. As far as I am concerned, 'intellectual property' is a legal abstraction too far (as, in my opinion, is enclosure of the commons, which is a very similar issue).
One of the biggest problems which working on a system largely on your own is keeping at it and not getting sidetracked. I have always liked to work on a 'price for the job' basis, because it keeps me focussed and it keeps me honest.
Work out what the next few key targets of your project are, and work out how long you think it should take you to achieve each one. Then, multiply that time by how much you'd like to be paid per hour, plus your overheads; then, add 10% for contingencies. Use that as your fixed price.
Ask to be paid one third up front, one third when you deliver (when you think you've achieved your target) and one third when they're satisfied that the target is achieved (this is known in some places as a 'shipyard contract' and is good because it gives you money to live on while you're working).
This is an arms race, and as soon as you give ground at all, you've lost.
The reason people are implementing things like 'Web Services', overloading port 80 to provide potentially insecure services on a port previously thought reasonably safe, is that they don't understand the need for security and firewalls, they're frustrated by the restrictions you - rightly - put on them, and they want to shortcut around the firewall. If you allow them to, they will. Furthermore, they will employ half trained code-monkeys to point-and-drool together some Visual BASIC abortion with no concept of security or defensive programming. At that point you've basically lost the battle. The temptation is to advance the arms race another twist, by implementing 'application layer' firewalls which can inspect traffic going through. This takes far more computational resources and is far more prone to both false positives and false negatives than simply blocking services deemed to be unsafe, so you've not only spent more money on hardware, you've given yourself a huge and ongoing security headache.
You are right: the only sensible answer is NEVER, and you need to stick to your guns. Otherwise the firewall might as well not exist at all.
I love Eco's work, and think The Name of the Rose is the best novel of the twentieth century. But The Island of the Day Before is too tough for me. Eco is always playing games with the reader: that's what he does. But The Name of the Rose has a clear narrative and real narrative drive, which help to carry you through all the mindfucks. I would start there, and if you like it, try Eco's more recent works which are either more brilliant or more self indulgent depending on how you take them.
Mind you the comparison between Eco and Stephenson is an interesting one...
Except that this standard parrot fashion argument happens not to be true. The overwhelming majority of new drugs are created/invented/discovered by public Universities and other publicly funded institutions, and by charities such as Cancer Research. We don't actually need private sector firms in this marketplace at all, and they add little or no value. Consequently there's no public policy benefit to protecting their 'Intellectual Property'
.There are two points to be made here:
OK, then, what's the rest of it? What single feature of .net is not already present in Java? Just one? Any one?
The browser is a standard commodity component handling open standard data formats. If either application requires a browser upgrade it's the application that's broken, not the browser.
Compilation does not predicate any particular channel of delivery. The Web is just as good a platform for delivering compiled programs as interpreted ones. You do not have to use PERL or PHP (although, of course, you can if you want).
If your application complies with W3C standards, Mozilla (and derivatives), Konqueror/KHTML (and derivatives) and Opera will all give the same presentation and IE6 is only broken in a few very minor ways. If your application doesn't conform to the standards, whose problem is that?
The Web is cheap client-server lego with a ubiquitous client interface which work the same on anything from a cellphone to a high-end engineering workstation. The client may not be as rich as you'd really like but I for one am happy to trade that richness for vendor neutrality, ubiquity and relatively modest bandwidth requirements.
Frankly, in my opinion anyone building a business critical application which users are expected to interact with these days which isn't 100% Web enabled (and 100% standards conformant) ought to be sacked.
It's not an emerging technology and it won't change computing. There's nothing new in .net which isn't already present in Java, very little that wasn't already present in the UCSD p-system in 1973, and not a lot which wasn't already present in BCPLin 1967
The timeline goes like this:
IBM haven't always been benign, aren't everywhere benign, and there's no guarantee at all that they'll always be benign in future.
You do prosecute a sodier for obeying orders, if those orders are unlawful. That is what the whole Nuremburg process was about. Every soldier in every Western army - including the US Army - has had it drummed into him that he has a duty to refuse unlawful orders, and that nothing can protect him from War Crimes prosecution if he doesn't. The fact that US soldiers can't be tried by the International Criminal Court has nothing to do with this: war crimes are crimes against US law just as much as against international law, and 'I was just obeying orders' is no excuse.
That's true up to a point, but only up to a point. When you become aware that the company you are working for is acting unethically, you have two choices: to resign, or have your labour advance unethical ends. If you do the latter, you are tarring yourself with the same brush, and deserve that people should treat you with distrust and disdain. Employees at SCO Group passed that point several months ago.
I don't believe we (for i'm entirely with you) will be in the least lonely. The open Internet is valuable enough to enough people and organisations that there will be a continuing, mass, market for general purpose computers and for communications systems that allow them to intercommunicate. These may no longer be the machines used by Joe Average, but I think you can be reasonably comfortable that they will continue to be available.
Furthermore, those of us who want to use them are the geeks, and frankly we can carry on using them even if the commercial environment becomes very hostile, both because we have the ability to keep current generation machines running (if new machines come to be locked down so tightly we can't use them) and because we can establish channels of reliable communication over any medium that provides bandwidth.
This is an interesting program and a useful move in the game, but it misses the point. (Most of) the code SCO is theirs and is in the kernel is in the kernel. The point is that SCO claim to own anything written by any UN*X licensee ever that's been contributed to Linux. Thus, for example, they claim to own NUMA and RCU code which
They're arguing this because the standard UN*X license said something roughly equivalent to 'all your extensions are belong to us'. SCO's claim, essentially, is that anything remotely UN*Xy ever written by IBM or SCO or HP or SGI or... belongs to them, and therefore cannot be contributed to Linux. In the case of the SGI journalled file system I think they may have a case. However, Sequent's work on multiprocessor memory access was not originally written for UN*X, it was written for a proprietary operating system and later ported to UN*X, so I don't believe that SCO can sustain a case to own that; IBM's journalling file system was originally written for OS/2, so I don't believe SCO can sustain a case to own that; and for the rest IBM's side-letter is sufficient protection for everything IBM has contributed.
And is Mr McBride prepared to offer that warranty with respect to UnixWare, or any other of SCO's products? No? Why not, I wonder?