I wouldn't mind some sort of middle ground like that, provided there were some stipulations -- no exclusivity agreements from journals that charge access fees, and some sort of common OA repository for all articles which are based on research funded by tax dollars. I find it a little obnoxious/offensive that my tax dollars fund scientific research that I then have to buy back from a publishing company at exorbitant cost if I want to, you know, actually use or see. I'm not going so far as to say that all publicly-funded research has to be in the public domain (I've seen that argument made, and it has its own merits, but it's a different discussion) but if the public pays for it to get done, it shouldn't end up as the exclusive intellectual property of some for-profit publishing company.
There's definitely room for for-profit journals, in order to provide peer review and provide "prestige outlets" that encourage high-quality research, but there's also a market for repositories that just make stuff available to the public and other researchers. (Meaning, of course, that there's no guarantee of quality or that it represents consensus.)
Beyond that, a mandatory OA-repository submission would help improve accountability to the public of their scientific funding. Want to know what someone did with a particular grant? Run a search on it and find out. Even if it didn't make the cut for Nature or Lancet, you'd still be able to see what they were doing.
We have to be careful not to upset the balance within academics that keeps quality (generally) high, but at the same time the entire process could use a lot more transparency, both to other researchers (perhaps the ones without the cash for expensive subscription services, including many students) and to the public.
That's definitely a risk, however I think there's a certain assumption of technological superiority. (Which has been the case at least recently, although I suppose it's dangerous to project that assumption too far into the future.)
But actually, using a little network of micro-repeaters like this makes life somewhat safer for individual soldiers, since their personal radios don't have to transmit with nearly as much power (since it just has to hit the nearest repeater, not the destination station). Also, if you have 5-10 of these little mobile repeaters for every human soldier, an enemy that's homing in on radio transmissions would have a lot more targets than if you just have the soldiers themselves equipped with radios. They essentially act as decoys, taking attention away from human troops. And given attitudes in the U.S., trading equipment for friendly lives is usually more than acceptable.
Actually, the postal model works quite well. While the gov't can't just decide to rifle through your mail, I believe there are procedures for postal services to inspected and/or open-to-inspect suspicious mail. The only problem with this in the e-world is that the volume of email in a minute amount of time might be much greater than snail-mail, which if there is a "permission" process could become a bottleneck.
It's called a warrant [1]. Antiquated concept in this day and age, but it's worked fairly well for a long time. I've never been completely convinced by the "internet exceptionalism" arguments, i.e. that because now things are on computers, we need to toss out all the rules and just start everything over, build up an entirely new legal framework. That, quite simply, is crap. If it's taking too long for the police to get warrants, than we need to look at the warrant-issuance process, and make it faster, not eliminate the requirement altogether. There's good reasons for having a quasi-disinterested person (a judge) in the loop when Authority Figures are rifling through citizens' stuff, and that doesn't change because it's electronic rather than paper.
[1] There are other court orders that can have the same effect, too, probably varying with jurisdiction.
I invite you to try this in the UK... if you like a firm frisking. Here in the UK the gate detectors are pinging on your watch strap... let alone golf tools. And just like the US, our border officials leave their sense of humour at home. Rich
They make hard plastic and fiberglass knives now, too. Not sure what the metal detectors are supposed to do about them.
Sure, they're not as sturdy as metal knives -- I wouldn't want to use one as a pocketknife, because it would get dull -- but you can make a hell of a single- or few-use stiletto out of one.
The crap at the airports is just security theater. They go around confiscating people's pen-knives and soda cups, because for some strange reason people feel safer when their pen-knives and soda cups are confiscated. The real terrorists have lots of ways of getting instruments of mayhem through, if they want to.
If we wanted real airline security, we'd stop putting all our faith in expensive gadgets and employ more (and pay substantially more, so we can stop getting idiots) human beings, so that every single passenger gets an interview before they get on the plane. People are substantially better at detecting the intentions of other people than machines are, based on many more possible factors. The Israelis have had lots of luck with approaches like this, but the fact is in the West, we really don't want security, we want the appearance of, and feeling of, security.
Not having to pay a monthly fee to automatically record shows you watched previously
Well, it did offer this, but it seems like it may not in the future, because it was depending on the charity of one organization to provide the data feed that makes it work.
I have a MythTV box and love it (and so does the S.O.), but I've always thought that the guide data was a massive failure point.
Doesn't seem like that would be too hard to do. It might be something as simple as only storing the encryption key in volatile memory, so that when the batteries run out, the key evaporates. You're left with the hardware, but it won't handshake with the rest of the network or do anything else particularly useful.
Plus, if you're an adversary trying to avoid being killed by U.S. forces, picking up a U.S. radio and transmitting on it is probably unhealthy. As in, once detected, it could lead to serious HARM. (Obviously the AGM-88 is overkill for someone on a low-power radio, but conceptually you could do the same thing on a smaller scale; build some sort of micro-HARM that would home in on a low-power transmitter.)
That's just not true. The DMCA is so overbroad that it explicitly covers breaking anyone who can afford millions of dollars in lawyers' fees' encryption without their permission for any reason or creating or distributing a system that breaks the encryption. Ownership of the content is completely relevant, because it was a law bought and paid for by a small number of extremely wealthy entertainment companies.
I don't know much about telecoms, but I do know about small-town business:) One thing that is certain is that the more people get frustrated with a big service provider, the more likely they are to switch to a smaller, friendlier provider. That's why small-time ISPs are still doing well, because they build their business around the customer, not the other way around.
I'd like to believe you, but I'm not sure how these "independent ISPs" are going to work. There used to be 'small town' ISPs for dialup, because all you needed to be a dialup ISP was a bank of modems and a suitably fast leased backhaul connection to a bigger ISP. You could set it up pretty much anywhere you could get a fractional T1 or ATM line.
But that doesn't work for broadband. Since the FCC got rid of Local Loop Unbundling, whoever owns the lines running out to the customers' house effectively owns those customers (regardless of all the public land that they use to run those lines). The startup costs of becoming a new broadband ISP are enormous: you'd have to literally drag around fiber (or coax, or TWP) to every customer you wanted to serve. Not only is that prohibitively expensive, but you'd have to fight the combined forces of the existing telco and cableco monopoly, who will do whatever they can to kill you -- either economically or politically.
Perhaps there's some room for local ISPs if big chunks of the old UHF TV band become available (and aren't immediately sold off as a national block to the highest bidder, so in other words, fat chance) and were licensed locally; depending on the geography it might be practical to have a single transmitter in town providing high-speed data service to everyone within a certain radius. But color me skeptical on that one.
The best shot we had at bringing competition to broadband was when the FCC was forcing ILECs to lease last-mile TWP lines out to independent DSL providers. But since they reneged on that -- due, I'm sure, to lots and lots of cash from the big telcos -- a user's options are always going to be limited to the pipes coming into their house, and for the foreseeable future that's the telephone company (ILEC) and the cable company.
Well, some people might decide not to get their format/communications-protocol/whatever made into a standard, and instead patent it and try to make it a de facto standard, but I think the last few years have shown that there is a benefit to open standards, and that given the opportunity, people like to implement them.
So it would work something like this: there are two companies which have different technologies. Let's just say they're video-compression technologies, for the hell of it.
One company, Foo Inc., decides that they're going to patent the hell out of theirs, and they're not going to give up those patents for anything. Their competitor, Bar Co., takes the other route -- they submit their technology to the IEEE (or whatever), knowing that to get it made a standard, they have to agree to let anyone use their patents for free. They do this, because even though anyone else will be able to compete with them in the long term, in the very short term, they'll have a big advantage -- they'll have a functioning implementation and a lot of experience, and thus a big leg up if they don't screw everything up.
Foo's technology is a proprietary "standard" that they charge lots of money for, and which you as an implementor have to pay lots of money per-unit in order to use in your products. Bar's, on the other hand, is an open standard which you can buy from the standards body for a nominal charge, and implement at no charge. But if you don't want to actually engineer the implementation yourself, the actual makers of the specification will be happy to sell you a tested and working implementation -- without any vendor lock-in later. That's a pretty attractive proposition.
In a situation like that (where the two companies basically enter at the same time), Foo's technology would never even have a chance against the royalty-free standard, they'd be crushed. (Assuming, of course, that they're not rabid monopolists who can arm-twist everyone into using it anyway.) And the free standard would have a tendency to snowball on itself, becoming more and more attractive as more people use it, causing more people to use it (a nice positive-feedback loop).
Would a mandate like this, from the big standards organizations, probably discourage some big companies that are basically propped up by patent royalties from submitting standards? Probably. But there's a lot of technology that's currently becoming commoditized, and there are a lot of small firms around who would surely submit standards, just for the short leg-up that being the standard-creator would give them.
Agree completely. Having it move around seems stupid, unless it has some sort of other purpose besides what's being disclosed. (Anyone remember the little slow-crawling bombs from Total Annihilation?) I think they're just there for the "wow" (or perhaps "WTF") factor.
Seems like, if you had enough money to spend on the design, you could make a wifi (or similar UHF/microwave) repeater that was really tiny. Use custom ASICs, and I bet you could get something that was less than an inch in diameter and a few inches long, including batteries. Harden them appropriately, and you could drop them from planes over a target area, and even if you took substantial losses, would still have a functioning mesh network on the ground.
What you really want isn't a miniature tank with a Wifi AP strapped to it, what you want is an overgrown self-powered RFID tag with transmit/receive and basic routing capabilities.
I think the point is they would just have non-replacable batteries, work for 14 days (or whatever) by managing that power very closely, and then die.
I strongly suspect that they're considered disposable -- you place them out to get communications coverage for one particular operation, and then just abandon them in place afterwards.
Seriously, the little guy running with a rifle icon, that has to be from some grade school art contest.
It's from a clip-art collection. I swear to god I've seen it before.
I think the "green cloud" is intentional -- if you look at it, it's not just a cloud, it's an overlapping of circles with radial gradients surrounding each of the nodes, presumably indicating their range or effective coverage area. Or maybe because it just looks cool.
Anyway, this is DARPA -- what do you expect? They're too busy thinking about stuff to make slick reports.
In 20 years you can get "The Perfect Phone of 2007."
In 20 years, there will be a host of new technologies around, all encumbered with patents, that people will want to have in a 'perfect phone.' The stuff that's under patent now will be like pulse-dial rotary POTS equipment. If you're lucky it's still use-able, in the most basic sense, but it doesn't do much of what people want.
The problem is that innovation is now moving so much faster than it was when the patent term was set at two decades -- by the time something works its way out of patent protection now, it's generally pretty obsolete. And this will only get worse as the pace of innovation continues to quicken.
Try building a phone that works with the CDMA cellular network, and doesn't violate Qualcomm's patent. It's not going to happen. They've patented too much stuff that's too fundamental to making an interoperable device.
If you piss them off, or if they decide for some reason not to license their patent(s) to you (e.g., you want to make a multi-network phone and their other customers -- the telcos -- don't like the idea), you're S.O.L. as far as most of the U.S. cellphone market is concerned.
Video compression is the same way. Try to build an MPEG-4 encoder that doesn't violate the MPEGLA's patents; it's not going to happen. Sure, you could build some completely unrelated video encoder, but that's of extremely limited utility in a world where standards matter.
What's next....banning books that have too much violent, sadistic content? Sure its not as flashy as the video game, but, it still promotes the same messages....
They already do. Even in the U.S., it's possible to produce "child porn" using a word processor and your imagination, at least according to the Justice Department. The way the obscenity statutes are written, if something isn't artistic enough, it can be banned as obscene, on its content and regardless of medium alone.
I thought arresting people just for text was something we'd left in the past, but a few years ago there was a case about some woman (I think it was a woman) who was arrested for operating a website that had stories, of a sexual nature, featuring 'underage' participants (meaning the fictitious characters in the stories were underage). They were judged to be obscene, and thus illegal, even though no minors were ever involved in their production.
The argument for banning actual underage pornography is pretty clear -- you have to eliminate the market for the stuff, to prevent children from being sucked in and abused in order to produce it. No argument for me (or pretty much anyone else) there.
However, the evidence for banning 'simulated' pornography, either computer-generated rasters, or text descriptions, seems very spurious. Okay, so there may be some evidence that the availability of even certain kinds of simulated pornography encourages violent behavior. But to begin with, the evidence seems thin and mostly driven by emotion and rhetoric, not rational argument. Second, that entire line of thinking is a terrible idea, because it undermines the concept of absolute individual responsibility.
Once you start letting people escape absolute responsibility for their actions, by blaming it on pornography, or violent video games, or movies, or just "society" in general, you've lost. Even if you can demonstrate that the availability of porn/games/movies/whatever motivates certain already-sick people to action, that's still not a justification for banning them from everyone. (If anything, it suggests that we need to do a better job ferreting these people out before they can act, and dealing with them.) If a small uptick in crime and violence are the price we have to pay for individualism, then we need to suck it up, because that's the basis for our entire civilization.
My question is this: aren't patents on the public record? Aren't things like Ubuntu/Red Hat open source? How hard is it for M$ to say "Look at patent 5,656,565 and lines 1-3,000 of kernel.c. This is a violation of our IP rights."
This is exactly why a lot of people are very suspicious that Microsoft doesn't do this. Instead, they just make vague statements, e.g. "Linux violates x Microsoft patents" and never specify which ones.
Although the patents are public, Microsoft has so many of them, and many of them are so crappy/broad, that it's nearly impossible for anyone to work backwards to find the ones that they're talking about and might, by some stretch of someone's imagination, apply to Linux.
So basically, it's a totally opaque threat, and I'm similarly at a loss as to why anyone would negotiate with them without first demanding to see the goods.
Sure I understand games are not the cause, but with the great majority of people suffering more and more mental illnesses for whatever reason, do you want someone already on the edge to have this material?
I'm honestly not sure I care. I don't want my society being made into some sort of padded room for the "fragile" people. If some people can't take certain forms of entertainment, then they, or their caretakers if they're not competent to care for themselves, need to steer themselves away from it. It's that simple.
If you're offended by something, or worse, if something makes you more likely to do something bad/violent/criminal, then you have a responsibility to keep yourself away from it. People do stupid shit when they're intoxicated, but they don't get a free pass because they're drunk -- they chose to ingest alcohol, and are still responsible for their actions. Similarly, "the videogame made me do it" isn't an excuse, either. (Actually, it's far less of one than even the alcohol is.)
Society shouldn't be censored for children or the mentally ill.
So despite the fact that the murderer never owned or played the game, the parents of the victim still blame the game for their son's death.
Well, yeah. I mean, the alternative is the truth, which is that their little angel got killed in a drug deal gone bad, when he was presumably still living in their house, under their care. Oops.
Much easier to blame it on the big bad video games.
You're confusing a "private" meeting with a "secret" one.
If I have a 'private function,' of any sort, then it just means that it's not open to anyone who wants to come in. Generally, this means you have to be invited, or there's some other precondition for attendance. E.g., a wedding reception is usually a private or semi-private event. A private meeting would be one where the doors are closed, and only certain people can get in.
This is different from a "secret" meeting, where the very existence of the meeting itself was not disclosed.
The W3C was engaging in a private meeting, not a secret one.
It requires one (presumably Linux-based) server to run the PHP and MySQL "backend"... that's where the rootkits/malware are actually hosted.
Then, you go out and hack a whole bunch of other sites -- in this case, all apparently IIS-based, for reasons I won't speculate on -- and add the bad IFRAME, which points to the backend server.
Joe User visits the compromised site, which has the bad IFRAME. It points his browser to the backend, which has the rootkit-delivery software, which uses one of many known browser vulnerabilities to do the deed.
It's not clear to me from TFA or other things that I've read, whether the Linux-based "backend" server in these operations is usually a hacked Linux box somewhere, or whether it's a server actually set up and run (very indirectly) by the attackers themselves, in some neutral territory (e.g. Russia). Since it's a SPOF, you don't want (if you're the botnet-operator) it to be taken down too easily.
Anyway, point is, you have one PHP/MySQL server running the rootkit-delivery payload server, and then you hack lots and lots of high-traffic sites with bad IFRAMEs in order to drive victims to it.
I can understand what they're doing, but calling it "public" is a load of crock. It's a closed session. They should call it that.
If you want to bar the press, bar the press -- but don't say it's a "public" meeting, because that's a bald-faced lie. (Anyone know how to translate that concept into Washingtonese?)
Still, it's disadvantageous (if you're a student who does drugs and just wants to be left alone) to respond to the surveys honestly.
If answering "yes, I use drugs" causes the people giving the survey to spend more time or money investigating who's using drugs, making the respondent's life difficult, then there's no reason for them to respond that way.
More generally: why should one person, who knows that their goals are diametrically opposed to someone else's, ever help that other person accomplish something, when they know it'll only come at their own expense?
You'd never get a supermajority in the Senate to do that.
I mean, it's stretching the bounds of credibility to imagine that the Senate would ever vote to impeach G.W. -- short of catching him in the act of sodomizing another man, there are a lot of Senators who are just not going to vote that way. Imagining that they'd vote to impeach both Bush and Cheney, and hand the Presidency over to the Speaker of the House... it's beyond ridiculous. It doesn't matter what he did, he's a Republican and that means there are always going to be Republicans who are going to favor him over a Democrat, because they see Democrats as some sort of alien species, a sort of talking vermin. (And there are Democrats who feel the same way, let's be clear.)
Now, I could see, under certain circumstances, Cheney being impeached and Bush staying in power -- basically Cheney taking "one for the team" and retiring to his house next to Rumsfield's. But it's still not realistic, after the way the immigration debacle is playing out, there is a significant block of Republicans who dislike Bush (but not to the point where they'd trade him for Pelosi) and don't want to remove the foil that they believe Cheney represents against his "liberal" domestic agenda.
There was a time, before the FCC reneged on Local Loop Unbundling, when some of the "premium" DSL services (e.g. Speakeasy) would sell you 'naked' DSL service, without a POTS line, I'm pretty sure. I think there was a price premium for it over bundled service, but it wasn't as bad as POTS service in some cases, if you had zero need for local dialtone. I looked into it, because I was in a house for a while that had copper running out to it, but no local service. (I would have been a good candidate, but unfortunately after a lot of hemming and hawing with the local telco, they said they couldn't do it. Somehow the line-foot estimates were off and it was just too far.)
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't mind some sort of middle ground like that, provided there were some stipulations -- no exclusivity agreements from journals that charge access fees, and some sort of common OA repository for all articles which are based on research funded by tax dollars. I find it a little obnoxious/offensive that my tax dollars fund scientific research that I then have to buy back from a publishing company at exorbitant cost if I want to, you know, actually use or see. I'm not going so far as to say that all publicly-funded research has to be in the public domain (I've seen that argument made, and it has its own merits, but it's a different discussion) but if the public pays for it to get done, it shouldn't end up as the exclusive intellectual property of some for-profit publishing company.
There's definitely room for for-profit journals, in order to provide peer review and provide "prestige outlets" that encourage high-quality research, but there's also a market for repositories that just make stuff available to the public and other researchers. (Meaning, of course, that there's no guarantee of quality or that it represents consensus.)
Beyond that, a mandatory OA-repository submission would help improve accountability to the public of their scientific funding. Want to know what someone did with a particular grant? Run a search on it and find out. Even if it didn't make the cut for Nature or Lancet, you'd still be able to see what they were doing.
We have to be careful not to upset the balance within academics that keeps quality (generally) high, but at the same time the entire process could use a lot more transparency, both to other researchers (perhaps the ones without the cash for expensive subscription services, including many students) and to the public.
That's definitely a risk, however I think there's a certain assumption of technological superiority. (Which has been the case at least recently, although I suppose it's dangerous to project that assumption too far into the future.)
But actually, using a little network of micro-repeaters like this makes life somewhat safer for individual soldiers, since their personal radios don't have to transmit with nearly as much power (since it just has to hit the nearest repeater, not the destination station). Also, if you have 5-10 of these little mobile repeaters for every human soldier, an enemy that's homing in on radio transmissions would have a lot more targets than if you just have the soldiers themselves equipped with radios. They essentially act as decoys, taking attention away from human troops. And given attitudes in the U.S., trading equipment for friendly lives is usually more than acceptable.
Actually, the postal model works quite well. While the gov't can't just decide to rifle through your mail, I believe there are procedures for postal services to inspected and/or open-to-inspect suspicious mail. The only problem with this in the e-world is that the volume of email in a minute amount of time might be much greater than snail-mail, which if there is a "permission" process could become a bottleneck.
It's called a warrant [1]. Antiquated concept in this day and age, but it's worked fairly well for a long time. I've never been completely convinced by the "internet exceptionalism" arguments, i.e. that because now things are on computers, we need to toss out all the rules and just start everything over, build up an entirely new legal framework. That, quite simply, is crap. If it's taking too long for the police to get warrants, than we need to look at the warrant-issuance process, and make it faster, not eliminate the requirement altogether. There's good reasons for having a quasi-disinterested person (a judge) in the loop when Authority Figures are rifling through citizens' stuff, and that doesn't change because it's electronic rather than paper.
[1] There are other court orders that can have the same effect, too, probably varying with jurisdiction.
I invite you to try this in the UK... if you like a firm frisking. Here in the UK the gate detectors are pinging on your watch strap... let alone golf tools. And just like the US, our border officials leave their sense of humour at home. Rich
They make hard plastic and fiberglass knives now, too. Not sure what the metal detectors are supposed to do about them.
Sure, they're not as sturdy as metal knives -- I wouldn't want to use one as a pocketknife, because it would get dull -- but you can make a hell of a single- or few-use stiletto out of one.
The crap at the airports is just security theater. They go around confiscating people's pen-knives and soda cups, because for some strange reason people feel safer when their pen-knives and soda cups are confiscated. The real terrorists have lots of ways of getting instruments of mayhem through, if they want to.
If we wanted real airline security, we'd stop putting all our faith in expensive gadgets and employ more (and pay substantially more, so we can stop getting idiots) human beings, so that every single passenger gets an interview before they get on the plane. People are substantially better at detecting the intentions of other people than machines are, based on many more possible factors. The Israelis have had lots of luck with approaches like this, but the fact is in the West, we really don't want security, we want the appearance of, and feeling of, security.
no need for coffee when one have perfected a "half-sleep" state.
I keep telling my boss the same thing...
Not having to pay a monthly fee to automatically record shows you watched previously
Well, it did offer this, but it seems like it may not in the future, because it was depending on the charity of one organization to provide the data feed that makes it work.
I have a MythTV box and love it (and so does the S.O.), but I've always thought that the guide data was a massive failure point.
Doesn't seem like that would be too hard to do. It might be something as simple as only storing the encryption key in volatile memory, so that when the batteries run out, the key evaporates. You're left with the hardware, but it won't handshake with the rest of the network or do anything else particularly useful.
Plus, if you're an adversary trying to avoid being killed by U.S. forces, picking up a U.S. radio and transmitting on it is probably unhealthy. As in, once detected, it could lead to serious HARM. (Obviously the AGM-88 is overkill for someone on a low-power radio, but conceptually you could do the same thing on a smaller scale; build some sort of micro-HARM that would home in on a low-power transmitter.)
That's just not true. The DMCA is so overbroad that it explicitly covers breaking anyone who can afford millions of dollars in lawyers' fees' encryption without their permission for any reason or creating or distributing a system that breaks the encryption. Ownership of the content is completely relevant, because it was a law bought and paid for by a small number of extremely wealthy entertainment companies.
Fixed that for you.
I don't know much about telecoms, but I do know about small-town business :) One thing that is certain is that the more people get frustrated with a big service provider, the more likely they are to switch to a smaller, friendlier provider. That's why small-time ISPs are still doing well, because they build their business around the customer, not the other way around.
I'd like to believe you, but I'm not sure how these "independent ISPs" are going to work. There used to be 'small town' ISPs for dialup, because all you needed to be a dialup ISP was a bank of modems and a suitably fast leased backhaul connection to a bigger ISP. You could set it up pretty much anywhere you could get a fractional T1 or ATM line.
But that doesn't work for broadband. Since the FCC got rid of Local Loop Unbundling, whoever owns the lines running out to the customers' house effectively owns those customers (regardless of all the public land that they use to run those lines). The startup costs of becoming a new broadband ISP are enormous: you'd have to literally drag around fiber (or coax, or TWP) to every customer you wanted to serve. Not only is that prohibitively expensive, but you'd have to fight the combined forces of the existing telco and cableco monopoly, who will do whatever they can to kill you -- either economically or politically.
Perhaps there's some room for local ISPs if big chunks of the old UHF TV band become available (and aren't immediately sold off as a national block to the highest bidder, so in other words, fat chance) and were licensed locally; depending on the geography it might be practical to have a single transmitter in town providing high-speed data service to everyone within a certain radius. But color me skeptical on that one.
The best shot we had at bringing competition to broadband was when the FCC was forcing ILECs to lease last-mile TWP lines out to independent DSL providers. But since they reneged on that -- due, I'm sure, to lots and lots of cash from the big telcos -- a user's options are always going to be limited to the pipes coming into their house, and for the foreseeable future that's the telephone company (ILEC) and the cable company.
Well, some people might decide not to get their format/communications-protocol/whatever made into a standard, and instead patent it and try to make it a de facto standard, but I think the last few years have shown that there is a benefit to open standards, and that given the opportunity, people like to implement them.
So it would work something like this: there are two companies which have different technologies. Let's just say they're video-compression technologies, for the hell of it.
One company, Foo Inc., decides that they're going to patent the hell out of theirs, and they're not going to give up those patents for anything. Their competitor, Bar Co., takes the other route -- they submit their technology to the IEEE (or whatever), knowing that to get it made a standard, they have to agree to let anyone use their patents for free. They do this, because even though anyone else will be able to compete with them in the long term, in the very short term, they'll have a big advantage -- they'll have a functioning implementation and a lot of experience, and thus a big leg up if they don't screw everything up.
Foo's technology is a proprietary "standard" that they charge lots of money for, and which you as an implementor have to pay lots of money per-unit in order to use in your products. Bar's, on the other hand, is an open standard which you can buy from the standards body for a nominal charge, and implement at no charge. But if you don't want to actually engineer the implementation yourself, the actual makers of the specification will be happy to sell you a tested and working implementation -- without any vendor lock-in later. That's a pretty attractive proposition.
In a situation like that (where the two companies basically enter at the same time), Foo's technology would never even have a chance against the royalty-free standard, they'd be crushed. (Assuming, of course, that they're not rabid monopolists who can arm-twist everyone into using it anyway.) And the free standard would have a tendency to snowball on itself, becoming more and more attractive as more people use it, causing more people to use it (a nice positive-feedback loop).
Would a mandate like this, from the big standards organizations, probably discourage some big companies that are basically propped up by patent royalties from submitting standards? Probably. But there's a lot of technology that's currently becoming commoditized, and there are a lot of small firms around who would surely submit standards, just for the short leg-up that being the standard-creator would give them.
Agree completely. Having it move around seems stupid, unless it has some sort of other purpose besides what's being disclosed. (Anyone remember the little slow-crawling bombs from Total Annihilation?) I think they're just there for the "wow" (or perhaps "WTF") factor.
Seems like, if you had enough money to spend on the design, you could make a wifi (or similar UHF/microwave) repeater that was really tiny. Use custom ASICs, and I bet you could get something that was less than an inch in diameter and a few inches long, including batteries. Harden them appropriately, and you could drop them from planes over a target area, and even if you took substantial losses, would still have a functioning mesh network on the ground.
What you really want isn't a miniature tank with a Wifi AP strapped to it, what you want is an overgrown self-powered RFID tag with transmit/receive and basic routing capabilities.
I think the point is they would just have non-replacable batteries, work for 14 days (or whatever) by managing that power very closely, and then die.
I strongly suspect that they're considered disposable -- you place them out to get communications coverage for one particular operation, and then just abandon them in place afterwards.
Seriously, the little guy running with a rifle icon, that has to be from some grade school art contest.
It's from a clip-art collection. I swear to god I've seen it before.
I think the "green cloud" is intentional -- if you look at it, it's not just a cloud, it's an overlapping of circles with radial gradients surrounding each of the nodes, presumably indicating their range or effective coverage area. Or maybe because it just looks cool.
Anyway, this is DARPA -- what do you expect? They're too busy thinking about stuff to make slick reports.
In 20 years you can get "The Perfect Phone of 2007."
In 20 years, there will be a host of new technologies around, all encumbered with patents, that people will want to have in a 'perfect phone.' The stuff that's under patent now will be like pulse-dial rotary POTS equipment. If you're lucky it's still use-able, in the most basic sense, but it doesn't do much of what people want.
The problem is that innovation is now moving so much faster than it was when the patent term was set at two decades -- by the time something works its way out of patent protection now, it's generally pretty obsolete. And this will only get worse as the pace of innovation continues to quicken.
CDMA.
Try building a phone that works with the CDMA cellular network, and doesn't violate Qualcomm's patent. It's not going to happen. They've patented too much stuff that's too fundamental to making an interoperable device.
If you piss them off, or if they decide for some reason not to license their patent(s) to you (e.g., you want to make a multi-network phone and their other customers -- the telcos -- don't like the idea), you're S.O.L. as far as most of the U.S. cellphone market is concerned.
Video compression is the same way. Try to build an MPEG-4 encoder that doesn't violate the MPEGLA's patents; it's not going to happen. Sure, you could build some completely unrelated video encoder, but that's of extremely limited utility in a world where standards matter.
What's next....banning books that have too much violent, sadistic content? Sure its not as flashy as the video game, but, it still promotes the same messages....
They already do. Even in the U.S., it's possible to produce "child porn" using a word processor and your imagination, at least according to the Justice Department. The way the obscenity statutes are written, if something isn't artistic enough, it can be banned as obscene, on its content and regardless of medium alone.
I thought arresting people just for text was something we'd left in the past, but a few years ago there was a case about some woman (I think it was a woman) who was arrested for operating a website that had stories, of a sexual nature, featuring 'underage' participants (meaning the fictitious characters in the stories were underage). They were judged to be obscene, and thus illegal, even though no minors were ever involved in their production.
The argument for banning actual underage pornography is pretty clear -- you have to eliminate the market for the stuff, to prevent children from being sucked in and abused in order to produce it. No argument for me (or pretty much anyone else) there.
However, the evidence for banning 'simulated' pornography, either computer-generated rasters, or text descriptions, seems very spurious. Okay, so there may be some evidence that the availability of even certain kinds of simulated pornography encourages violent behavior. But to begin with, the evidence seems thin and mostly driven by emotion and rhetoric, not rational argument. Second, that entire line of thinking is a terrible idea, because it undermines the concept of absolute individual responsibility.
Once you start letting people escape absolute responsibility for their actions, by blaming it on pornography, or violent video games, or movies, or just "society" in general, you've lost. Even if you can demonstrate that the availability of porn/games/movies/whatever motivates certain already-sick people to action, that's still not a justification for banning them from everyone. (If anything, it suggests that we need to do a better job ferreting these people out before they can act, and dealing with them.) If a small uptick in crime and violence are the price we have to pay for individualism, then we need to suck it up, because that's the basis for our entire civilization.
My question is this: aren't patents on the public record? Aren't things like Ubuntu/Red Hat open source? How hard is it for M$ to say "Look at patent 5,656,565 and lines 1-3,000 of kernel.c. This is a violation of our IP rights."
This is exactly why a lot of people are very suspicious that Microsoft doesn't do this. Instead, they just make vague statements, e.g. "Linux violates x Microsoft patents" and never specify which ones.
Although the patents are public, Microsoft has so many of them, and many of them are so crappy/broad, that it's nearly impossible for anyone to work backwards to find the ones that they're talking about and might, by some stretch of someone's imagination, apply to Linux.
So basically, it's a totally opaque threat, and I'm similarly at a loss as to why anyone would negotiate with them without first demanding to see the goods.
Sure I understand games are not the cause, but with the great majority of people suffering more and more mental illnesses for whatever reason, do you want someone already on the edge to have this material?
I'm honestly not sure I care. I don't want my society being made into some sort of padded room for the "fragile" people. If some people can't take certain forms of entertainment, then they, or their caretakers if they're not competent to care for themselves, need to steer themselves away from it. It's that simple.
If you're offended by something, or worse, if something makes you more likely to do something bad/violent/criminal, then you have a responsibility to keep yourself away from it. People do stupid shit when they're intoxicated, but they don't get a free pass because they're drunk -- they chose to ingest alcohol, and are still responsible for their actions. Similarly, "the videogame made me do it" isn't an excuse, either. (Actually, it's far less of one than even the alcohol is.)
Society shouldn't be censored for children or the mentally ill.
So despite the fact that the murderer never owned or played the game, the parents of the victim still blame the game for their son's death.
Well, yeah. I mean, the alternative is the truth, which is that their little angel got killed in a drug deal gone bad, when he was presumably still living in their house, under their care. Oops.
Much easier to blame it on the big bad video games.
That doesn't make sense.
You're confusing a "private" meeting with a "secret" one.
If I have a 'private function,' of any sort, then it just means that it's not open to anyone who wants to come in. Generally, this means you have to be invited, or there's some other precondition for attendance. E.g., a wedding reception is usually a private or semi-private event. A private meeting would be one where the doors are closed, and only certain people can get in.
This is different from a "secret" meeting, where the very existence of the meeting itself was not disclosed.
The W3C was engaging in a private meeting, not a secret one.
It requires one (presumably Linux-based) server to run the PHP and MySQL "backend" ... that's where the rootkits/malware are actually hosted.
Then, you go out and hack a whole bunch of other sites -- in this case, all apparently IIS-based, for reasons I won't speculate on -- and add the bad IFRAME, which points to the backend server.
Joe User visits the compromised site, which has the bad IFRAME. It points his browser to the backend, which has the rootkit-delivery software, which uses one of many known browser vulnerabilities to do the deed.
It's not clear to me from TFA or other things that I've read, whether the Linux-based "backend" server in these operations is usually a hacked Linux box somewhere, or whether it's a server actually set up and run (very indirectly) by the attackers themselves, in some neutral territory (e.g. Russia). Since it's a SPOF, you don't want (if you're the botnet-operator) it to be taken down too easily.
Anyway, point is, you have one PHP/MySQL server running the rootkit-delivery payload server, and then you hack lots and lots of high-traffic sites with bad IFRAMEs in order to drive victims to it.
I can understand what they're doing, but calling it "public" is a load of crock. It's a closed session. They should call it that.
If you want to bar the press, bar the press -- but don't say it's a "public" meeting, because that's a bald-faced lie. (Anyone know how to translate that concept into Washingtonese?)
Still, it's disadvantageous (if you're a student who does drugs and just wants to be left alone) to respond to the surveys honestly.
If answering "yes, I use drugs" causes the people giving the survey to spend more time or money investigating who's using drugs, making the respondent's life difficult, then there's no reason for them to respond that way.
More generally: why should one person, who knows that their goals are diametrically opposed to someone else's, ever help that other person accomplish something, when they know it'll only come at their own expense?
You'd never get a supermajority in the Senate to do that.
... it's beyond ridiculous. It doesn't matter what he did, he's a Republican and that means there are always going to be Republicans who are going to favor him over a Democrat, because they see Democrats as some sort of alien species, a sort of talking vermin. (And there are Democrats who feel the same way, let's be clear.)
I mean, it's stretching the bounds of credibility to imagine that the Senate would ever vote to impeach G.W. -- short of catching him in the act of sodomizing another man, there are a lot of Senators who are just not going to vote that way. Imagining that they'd vote to impeach both Bush and Cheney, and hand the Presidency over to the Speaker of the House
Now, I could see, under certain circumstances, Cheney being impeached and Bush staying in power -- basically Cheney taking "one for the team" and retiring to his house next to Rumsfield's. But it's still not realistic, after the way the immigration debacle is playing out, there is a significant block of Republicans who dislike Bush (but not to the point where they'd trade him for Pelosi) and don't want to remove the foil that they believe Cheney represents against his "liberal" domestic agenda.
There was a time, before the FCC reneged on Local Loop Unbundling, when some of the "premium" DSL services (e.g. Speakeasy) would sell you 'naked' DSL service, without a POTS line, I'm pretty sure. I think there was a price premium for it over bundled service, but it wasn't as bad as POTS service in some cases, if you had zero need for local dialtone. I looked into it, because I was in a house for a while that had copper running out to it, but no local service. (I would have been a good candidate, but unfortunately after a lot of hemming and hawing with the local telco, they said they couldn't do it. Somehow the line-foot estimates were off and it was just too far.)
So I'm stuck with Comcast.