"Sir, would you like a window, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, aisle, aisle, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, or window?"
Personally, if I can't at least *see* a window somewhere, it makes me want to throw up; supposedly, I would be immune to space sickness. Given my 'druthers, it's an acceptable trade-off.
"Sir... for another $50, we can make the LCD in front of you show a view outside the plane, instead of commercials for the entire flight... will that be cash, or charge?"
Personally, I think it'll catch on the same way paid public transportation has caught on -- with the downside that people ride that because they're poor, and poor people don't fly. Or to put it another way, "Not at all".
(2) For the purpose of this section, the term "assist in intercepting or receiving" shall include the manufacture or distribution of equipment intended by the manufacturer or distributor (as the case may be) for unauthorized reception of any communications service offered over a cable system in violation of subparagraph (1).
Does this mean that Lucent, Cisco, and other Wi-Fi equipment manufacturers are aiding and abetting when they sell a Wi-Fi capable cable modem?
You might be right about Carpenter
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 1
You might be right about Carpenter. Though it pains me to say that.
Lynch did OK with "Dune"; "Twin Peaks" still pains me, particularly near the end, when he was laughing at himself.
I really liked "Lord of the Rings", but Tolkien is really far away from Dick, so I think Jackson is more suited to Bradbury, too.
I haven't seen enough of Nolan's work (there *isn't* enough of Nolan's work yet) to say whether he'd be good or not. He may be too young, actually.
Maybe I can substitute Robert Zemeckis -- though "What Lies Beneath" is probably his best work so far, and he did do all those "Tales From The Crypt". I guess if we're going to discard Carpenter's early work, to his loss, we can discard Zemeckis', to his gain.
I guess, other than movies around Phillip K. Dick stories, there isn't really a lot of hard science fiction film out there that treats science fiction as the social commentary/criticism that it's supposed to be, so it's hard to pick someone to do the job.
Most science fiction ends up being all about the special effects, since you always end up with special effects any time you set a story in the future. Or it ends up being a formula story in a slightly different setting (e.g. "Alien Nation" was just a "buddy cop + racism" movie, "Starship Troopers" was just "war movie in space", "Outland" was just "High Noon in Space", etc.).
Maybe Wolfgang Peterson as a second runner up? Ron Howard would be my third runner up; it sounds like a bizarre matchup, but Howard is all about social commentary these days.
This is the third time in a week or so we have seen people talking about Vocera and their 802.11b based "communicators" on Slashdot. This might have been news the first and second time, but at the third time, it pretty much stops being news.
I guess that Vocera's marketing is working... nice to know that the money they are spending on it is paying off for them (I guess).
Just like last time, though, I'll point out that they are not a UNIX shop, and mostly not interested in hiring people from this neck of the woods, to the point that their "careers" page won't load in many versions of Netscape.
"What made them stand out was their communal decemtralized mind."
Yes, but then you have to factor in locking overhead, and distributed cache coherency. After you've done that, the entire Borg collective is about as intelligent as Congress.
Which kind of explains why individual humans have always been able to outsmart them.
I love this idea. I've loved it since the first time I had it in 1988.
But unfortunately, the implementation doesn't appear to work at all with Netscape 4.7.
I'd be willing to run a client program as a plug-in to get this feature. Unfortunately, I can't find any plug-in for this.
-- Terry
The missing element
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have to admit that, after his learning experience of walking in Kubrick's shoes to finish A.I., Speilberg now has at least a small idea of what it takes to have "an edge".
However, he failed to achieve with "Minority Report" the same level of sympatico that Ridley Scott was able to achieve with "Blade Runner", or even what Paul Verhoeven was able to do with "Total Recall".
In other words, Speilberg may know where the edge is, now, but he's afraid to go to it and look over, for fear of falling.
THe absolute worst movie ever made would be a Spielberg version of a Clive Barker short story.
Gary Fleder ("Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead") is more likely than not to turn in a morbid showing on "Imposter", due to be released later this year.
"Imposter" will probably suck. REmember that you heard it here first. My reasoning is that all of the other good Phillip K. Dick adaptations have been short stories. It will likely be impossible to cover an entire book in just one movie.
Frankly, I wish Ridley Scott had done "Minortiy Report"; I guess he's too busy producing the likes of "Blackhawk Down" to direct, though.
Given my choice of everyone, I'd like to see John Carpenter direct a Phillip K. Dick based movie; he did such a good job with "The Thing" (an adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s -- former editor of Analog Magazine -- story), and "They Live", even though it was a comedy (written by Ray Nelson). He, like Kubrick, also has a good track record in science fiction (as opposed to Spielberg, who's science fantasy, through and through).
I don't mind Spielberg trying to stretch; but hiding in safety is not my idea of stretching, and if he can't bring himself to take the risk, he should stick with bringing us the next Indiana Jones installment, and if he wants to do science fantasy, then pick a science fantasy author whose stories are better suited to his talents. Now that Jack Clayton ("Something Wicked This Way Comes") is dead, maybe he could cover some of the other Ray Bradbury short stories? His talents would mesh well with many of the "The Autumn People" mileu, where you are supposed to be sympathetic to "the monsters".
It's the logical extension of a hardware digital rights management system that will not let a piece of information exist in two places simultaneously.
This is particularly true for a system where they are concerned enough with non-repudiation and verification to laser their predictions onto wooden balls for the value of wood grain as a one time pad, in order to establish an unrefutable chain of evidence.
THe people that IBM hired to do their "Guerilla Marketing" were *supposed* tu use a chalk powder; instead, they used paint.
The cities that got upset did so because of the use of *paint*.
They might be able to nail you for getting the building instead of the sidewalk, without banning Toys-R-Us from selling "sidewalk chalk", but woe to the little kid who draws on the side of his tenament, if that happens.
Basically, chalk is "mostly harmless".
"Contributory theft of services" might be an option... but it'd have to wait until after theft of services resulted from the marking (and they'd have to prove it was the marking, not just "war driving", that identified the victim).
There are actually a couple of obvious legal arguments on both sides (e.g. "I thought they put up the markings themselves" vs. "I was warning the admin"), wich could confuse things immensely.
"The source will be available publically for all to build their own."
Yes. But if someone compiles it on their own, are they permitted to call it "RedHat Advnaced Server"?
The answer is "no".
This is the same branding play that UnitedLinux is trying to sell. IMO, it's a direct response to the effective RedHat monopoly as a third party Linux applications platform.
The reason for no binaries is obviously to control the brand "UnitedLinux".
Say I wanted a preinstalled "UnitedLinux" system, or I wanted a prepackaged "UnitedLinux" distribution.
What this does is prevent "Bob Schmoe's UnitedLinux distribution", since Bob is not able to legally use the trademark on a binary release compiled from their sources. Only binaries from the participating companies can use the trademark. Bob would have to "buy in" to obtain the same rights (Ransome said as much).
This puts UnitedLinux in relative the same boat as the UNIX trademark, where use of the trademark is controlled by licensing fees and/or buy-in to the club. The main difference appears to be that the base system is, in fact, compatible -- at least until you load on the vendor "value add" or try and load software from a third party that depends on a particular vendors value add (this is the same problem all non-RedHat Linux distributions already face today, since RedHat has used the same embrace-and-extend technique).
The consumer benefit to this is that if a software package that depends only on the UnitedLinux base system is shipped by a software company, they are guaranteed that the software will run on any UnitedLinux system.
The LSB fails to provide the extended features of UnitedLinux, and therefore there is a barrier to entry for LSB compliant systems, and even systems derived from the UnitedLinux code base, in the corporate market.
Or, in one sentence: it is a marketing play.
I actually rather doubt that there is a liability issue involved for UnitedLinux vendors, unless they (some day) pool their technical support services. The only liability left is on the part of software vendors, who want to guarantee that their applications will "run on UnitedLinux". If each vendor guarantees that, then a third party hacked up version could potentially fail to run the tvendor's application. So it's also a minor amount of risk mitigation for the vendors they hope to attract to get them to port software to the combined platform.
Most likely, what will happen instead, is that each vendor will have it's own support services for their product, and each vendor will embrace-and-extend UnitedLinux -- the same way that the UnitedLinux vendors have done the same thing in regard to the LSB.
Unfortunately, "standard, plus extensions" is, by definition, non-standard.
I don't think this is really a reesclation of "the UNIX wars"; GNU already lit that fuse when they started embracing and extending command like "tar" and "gprof", etc., with options that are not present in POSIX, and with more than single character options, and with expression reevaluation in GNU Make, etc..
What this works out to is a shot across the RedHat bow. It says that RedHat is not going to be permitted to own the distribution standards for Linux.
Frankly, someone needs to shoot at FreeBSD the same way (IMO).
Everone knows about that it was originally a novel by Stanislaw Lem. What they may not know is that it was originally written in Polish.
The Russian version of the film was directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. What you may not know is that he also co-wrote the screenplay, along with Friedrich Gorenstein. Tarkovsky only ever directed two films he didn't also at least partially write (at the beginning of his directorial career).
Gorenstein died in March of this year. There has been some suggestion that the reason the film is being remade in English now, as opposed to earlier, is that film rights were tied up until his death.
The synthesizer composer Isao Tomita was so impressed by the Russian version of this film that he composed music based on his impressions of the work. The track "The Sea Named Solaris" was used as the theme music for the Carl Sagan PBS Television series "Cosmos".
You have to wonder if the symbolism of the novel figured into the name of the OS... or if it's totally coincidental.
I thought that it had to do with printing. "Palladium" is the name of the printing model out of MIT and DEC's "Project Athena", and was adopted as the standard print model by POSIX.
"Cool!", I thought, "Finally, we are going to get an ubiquitous, cross-patform printing service!".
Then I find out that it's a plan to turn your entire PC into a "Winmodem". Ugh! 8-(.
Has anyone else noticed that any time someone has problems, they tend to blame some evil, external agency for their woes?
RIAA does the same thing all the time: they blame the inability of their business model to change with the times on the changing times, rather than the business model.
I realize this is probably not a popular view, but, hey, what can you do: I'm a product of society and my parents, so it's not my fault, right?
It says that many of these are illegal; I think that this has to be municipal law. I'm pretty sure that the state run telecommunications are probably aware of where they are dropping their high speed lines. If the state didn't condone them, they could just turn them off.
Most likely, the "illegality" is a municipal use tax issue; though, if you're the BBC, it's probably a lot more of a news story if you imply that the government is locking dissidents in buildings and torching them.
We used to call the products that filled this application niche "cell phones".
I wasn't going to plug their site, since this story seems to me to be an engineered plug, anyway, to coincide with their being hyped on Rafe Needleman's "Catch Of The Day" site. It's a little too coincidental.
I went looking to see who the were hiring, to see what they were doing, and then dropped them a note when their "Careers" page wouldn't display, except in Internet Explorer ("UNIX Geeks Need Not Apply"). This image is reinforced by the web server they are running.
According to Netcraft, they are running "Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000", so I rather expect that their slashdotting will end up being fatal.
Viewing the page source (rather than booting the necessary OS and starting IE) shows that they are looking for a V.P. of Sales, an IT/Admin, a Pre/Post Sales support person, a Product Manager, a QA Generalist, and a "Senior Quality Engineer/Manager" (now *that* will run off the right side of your business card).
Personally, I think it's an OK idea, if a bit of a niche play. Going after medical is OK, but being the communications link in a hospital probably puts you at significant legal risk, since it most likely makes you a compnent in a life support system.
Like when the software want the servo to move from one position to another instantaneously, and the pesky servo is limited to the speed of sound?
Clearly, the fault lies in the servo...
Liability is always predicated on percentages, so even if you could "blame the hardware", that doesn't mean that you're going to get away with no damages, since everyone knows that "software is for fixing problems with hardware".
The problem with OpenNIC, and, in fact, all existing registrars, is that they can't turn around a domain registration request within a browser timeout.
OpenNIC adds to this problem by codifying a non-realtime protocol, such that it's impossible to use their API, and build an interactive application on top of it. Their API *expects* high latency, and won't expose low latency, even if it exists.
Further, they want you to give them an email address they can use to contact you... and it's not permitted to be an email address at the domain you are registering -- so that you have an email address. Read "Catch-22" lately?
If what is being offered here is software that can *really* turn around a registration in realtime, then it would be a *huge* step forward over what OpenNIC, etc., is offering.
Thanks for the update; I haven't really followed his career, other than to read his publications.
The Brookings Institute is also well known for research in the area; I have a personal bias towards the Sante Fe Institute, specifically that they do a lot with Complexity theory.
Paul Vixie already runs a number of root servers. Therefore "only if they're best qualified to do the job" is a specious argument. Paul already meets that criteria in spades.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sir, would you like a window, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, aisle, aisle, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, center, or window?"
Personally, if I can't at least *see* a window somewhere, it makes me want to throw up; supposedly, I would be immune to space sickness. Given my 'druthers, it's an acceptable trade-off.
"Sir... for another $50, we can make the LCD in front of you show a view outside the plane, instead of commercials for the entire flight... will that be cash, or charge?"
Personally, I think it'll catch on the same way paid public transportation has caught on -- with the downside that people ride that because they're poor, and poor people don't fly. Or to put it another way, "Not at all".
-- Terry
Switch to dialup. Then you will have even more choices!
Oh... wait... NOW it's about bandwidth?
-- Terry
(2) For the purpose of this section, the term "assist in intercepting or receiving" shall include the manufacture or distribution of equipment intended by the manufacturer or distributor (as the case may be) for unauthorized reception of any communications service offered over a cable system in violation of subparagraph (1).
Does this mean that Lucent, Cisco, and other Wi-Fi equipment manufacturers are aiding and abetting when they sell a Wi-Fi capable cable modem?
You might be right about Carpenter. Though it pains me to say that.
Lynch did OK with "Dune"; "Twin Peaks" still pains me, particularly near the end, when he was laughing at himself.
I really liked "Lord of the Rings", but Tolkien is really far away from Dick, so I think Jackson is more suited to Bradbury, too.
I haven't seen enough of Nolan's work (there *isn't* enough of Nolan's work yet) to say whether he'd be good or not. He may be too young, actually.
Maybe I can substitute Robert Zemeckis -- though "What Lies Beneath" is probably his best work so far, and he did do all those "Tales From The Crypt". I guess if we're going to discard Carpenter's early work, to his loss, we can discard Zemeckis', to his gain.
I guess, other than movies around Phillip K. Dick stories, there isn't really a lot of hard science fiction film out there that treats science fiction as the social commentary/criticism that it's supposed to be, so it's hard to pick someone to do the job.
Most science fiction ends up being all about the special effects, since you always end up with special effects any time you set a story in the future. Or it ends up being a formula story in a slightly different setting (e.g. "Alien Nation" was just a "buddy cop + racism" movie, "Starship Troopers" was just "war movie in space", "Outland" was just "High Noon in Space", etc.).
Maybe Wolfgang Peterson as a second runner up? Ron Howard would be my third runner up; it sounds like a bizarre matchup, but Howard is all about social commentary these days.
-- Terry
This is the third time in a week or so we have seen people talking about Vocera and their 802.11b based "communicators" on Slashdot. This might have been news the first and second time, but at the third time, it pretty much stops being news.
I guess that Vocera's marketing is working... nice to know that the money they are spending on it is paying off for them (I guess).
Just like last time, though, I'll point out that they are not a UNIX shop, and mostly not interested in hiring people from this neck of the woods, to the point that their "careers" page won't load in many versions of Netscape.
-- Terry
"What made them stand out was their communal decemtralized mind."
Yes, but then you have to factor in locking overhead, and distributed cache coherency. After you've done that, the entire Borg collective is about as intelligent as Congress.
Which kind of explains why individual humans have always been able to outsmart them.
-- Terry
I love this idea. I've loved it since the first time I had it in 1988.
But unfortunately, the implementation doesn't appear to work at all with Netscape 4.7.
I'd be willing to run a client program as a plug-in to get this feature. Unfortunately, I can't find any plug-in for this.
-- Terry
I have to admit that, after his learning experience of walking in Kubrick's shoes to finish A.I., Speilberg now has at least a small idea of what it takes to have "an edge".
However, he failed to achieve with "Minority Report" the same level of sympatico that Ridley Scott was able to achieve with "Blade Runner", or even what Paul Verhoeven was able to do with "Total Recall".
In other words, Speilberg may know where the edge is, now, but he's afraid to go to it and look over, for fear of falling.
THe absolute worst movie ever made would be a Spielberg version of a Clive Barker short story.
Gary Fleder ("Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead") is more likely than not to turn in a morbid showing on "Imposter", due to be released later this year.
"Imposter" will probably suck. REmember that you heard it here first. My reasoning is that all of the other good Phillip K. Dick adaptations have been short stories. It will likely be impossible to cover an entire book in just one movie.
Frankly, I wish Ridley Scott had done "Minortiy Report"; I guess he's too busy producing the likes of "Blackhawk Down" to direct, though.
Given my choice of everyone, I'd like to see John Carpenter direct a Phillip K. Dick based movie; he did such a good job with "The Thing" (an adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s -- former editor of Analog Magazine -- story), and "They Live", even though it was a comedy (written by Ray Nelson). He, like Kubrick, also has a good track record in science fiction (as opposed to Spielberg, who's science fantasy, through and through).
I don't mind Spielberg trying to stretch; but hiding in safety is not my idea of stretching, and if he can't bring himself to take the risk, he should stick with bringing us the next Indiana Jones installment, and if he wants to do science fantasy, then pick a science fantasy author whose stories are better suited to his talents. Now that Jack Clayton ("Something Wicked This Way Comes") is dead, maybe he could cover some of the other Ray Bradbury short stories? His talents would mesh well with many of the "The Autumn People" mileu, where you are supposed to be sympathetic to "the monsters".
-- Terry
It's the logical extension of a hardware digital rights management system that will not let a piece of information exist in two places simultaneously.
This is particularly true for a system where they are concerned enough with non-repudiation and verification to laser their predictions onto wooden balls for the value of wood grain as a one time pad, in order to establish an unrefutable chain of evidence.
-- Terry
THe people that IBM hired to do their "Guerilla Marketing" were *supposed* tu use a chalk powder; instead, they used paint.
The cities that got upset did so because of the use of *paint*.
They might be able to nail you for getting the building instead of the sidewalk, without banning Toys-R-Us from selling "sidewalk chalk", but woe to the little kid who draws on the side of his tenament, if that happens.
Basically, chalk is "mostly harmless".
"Contributory theft of services" might be an option... but it'd have to wait until after theft of services resulted from the marking (and they'd have to prove it was the marking, not just "war driving", that identified the victim).
There are actually a couple of obvious legal arguments on both sides (e.g. "I thought they put up the markings themselves" vs. "I was warning the admin"), wich could confuse things immensely.
-- Terry
Guess you learn something new every day...
I thought those marks were "this road sign best if used by" dates.
-- Terry
"The source will be available publically for all to build their own."
Yes. But if someone compiles it on their own, are they permitted to call it "RedHat Advnaced Server"?
The answer is "no".
This is the same branding play that UnitedLinux is trying to sell. IMO, it's a direct response to the effective RedHat monopoly as a third party Linux applications platform.
-- Terry
The reason for no binaries is obviously to control the brand "UnitedLinux".
Say I wanted a preinstalled "UnitedLinux" system, or I wanted a prepackaged "UnitedLinux" distribution.
What this does is prevent "Bob Schmoe's UnitedLinux distribution", since Bob is not able to legally use the trademark on a binary release compiled from their sources. Only binaries from the participating companies can use the trademark. Bob would have to "buy in" to obtain the same rights (Ransome said as much).
This puts UnitedLinux in relative the same boat as the UNIX trademark, where use of the trademark is controlled by licensing fees and/or buy-in to the club. The main difference appears to be that the base system is, in fact, compatible -- at least until you load on the vendor "value add" or try and load software from a third party that depends on a particular vendors value add (this is the same problem all non-RedHat Linux distributions already face today, since RedHat has used the same embrace-and-extend technique).
The consumer benefit to this is that if a software package that depends only on the UnitedLinux base system is shipped by a software company, they are guaranteed that the software will run on any UnitedLinux system.
The LSB fails to provide the extended features of UnitedLinux, and therefore there is a barrier to entry for LSB compliant systems, and even systems derived from the UnitedLinux code base, in the corporate market.
Or, in one sentence: it is a marketing play.
I actually rather doubt that there is a liability issue involved for UnitedLinux vendors, unless they (some day) pool their technical support services. The only liability left is on the part of software vendors, who want to guarantee that their applications will "run on UnitedLinux". If each vendor guarantees that, then a third party hacked up version could potentially fail to run the tvendor's application. So it's also a minor amount of risk mitigation for the vendors they hope to attract to get them to port software to the combined platform.
Most likely, what will happen instead, is that each vendor will have it's own support services for their product, and each vendor will embrace-and-extend UnitedLinux -- the same way that the UnitedLinux vendors have done the same thing in regard to the LSB.
Unfortunately, "standard, plus extensions" is, by definition, non-standard.
I don't think this is really a reesclation of "the UNIX wars"; GNU already lit that fuse when they started embracing and extending command like "tar" and "gprof", etc., with options that are not present in POSIX, and with more than single character options, and with expression reevaluation in GNU Make, etc..
What this works out to is a shot across the RedHat bow. It says that RedHat is not going to be permitted to own the distribution standards for Linux.
Frankly, someone needs to shoot at FreeBSD the same way (IMO).
-- Terry
Everone knows about that it was originally a novel by Stanislaw Lem. What they may not know is that it was originally written in Polish.
The Russian version of the film was directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. What you may not know is that he also co-wrote the screenplay, along with Friedrich Gorenstein. Tarkovsky only ever directed two films he didn't also at least partially write (at the beginning of his directorial career).
Gorenstein died in March of this year. There has been some suggestion that the reason the film is being remade in English now, as opposed to earlier, is that film rights were tied up until his death.
The synthesizer composer Isao Tomita was so impressed by the Russian version of this film that he composed music based on his impressions of the work. The track "The Sea Named Solaris" was used as the theme music for the Carl Sagan PBS Television series "Cosmos".
You have to wonder if the symbolism of the novel figured into the name of the OS... or if it's totally coincidental.
-- Terry
...about "mad clone" disease?
-- Terry
I thought that it had to do with printing. "Palladium" is the name of the printing model out of MIT and DEC's "Project Athena", and was adopted as the standard print model by POSIX.
"Cool!", I thought, "Finally, we are going to get an ubiquitous, cross-patform printing service!".
Then I find out that it's a plan to turn your entire PC into a "Winmodem". Ugh! 8-(.
-- Terry
Is taste-savvy-fans, not tech-savvy-fans.
Has anyone else noticed that any time someone has problems, they tend to blame some evil, external agency for their woes?
RIAA does the same thing all the time: they blame the inability of their business model to change with the times on the changing times, rather than the business model.
I realize this is probably not a popular view, but, hey, what can you do: I'm a product of society and my parents, so it's not my fault, right?
-- Terry
Catch-22 was first published in 1964. Memoirs was first published in 1961.
Though I rather doubt that Heller reads Polish, so he would have had to wait until 1971, which was when the first English version was published. 8-).
-- Terry
Gotta ask it... everyone's thniking it:
"From the inside?"
My guess? Yes.
It says that many of these are illegal; I think that this has to be municipal law. I'm pretty sure that the state run telecommunications are probably aware of where they are dropping their high speed lines. If the state didn't condone them, they could just turn them off.
Most likely, the "illegality" is a municipal use tax issue; though, if you're the BBC, it's probably a lot more of a news story if you imply that the government is locking dissidents in buildings and torching them.
-- Terry
They are at http://www.vocera.com/ .
We used to call the products that filled this application niche "cell phones".
I wasn't going to plug their site, since this story seems to me to be an engineered plug, anyway, to coincide with their being hyped on Rafe Needleman's "Catch Of The Day" site. It's a little too coincidental.
I went looking to see who the were hiring, to see what they were doing, and then dropped them a note when their "Careers" page wouldn't display, except in Internet Explorer ("UNIX Geeks Need Not Apply"). This image is reinforced by the web server they are running.
According to Netcraft, they are running "Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000", so I rather expect that their slashdotting will end up being fatal.
Viewing the page source (rather than booting the necessary OS and starting IE) shows that they are looking for a V.P. of Sales, an IT/Admin, a Pre/Post Sales support person, a Product Manager, a QA Generalist, and a "Senior Quality Engineer/Manager" (now *that* will run off the right side of your business card).
Personally, I think it's an OK idea, if a bit of a niche play. Going after medical is OK, but being the communications link in a hospital probably puts you at significant legal risk, since it most likely makes you a compnent in a life support system.
Like when the software want the servo to move from one position to another instantaneously, and the pesky servo is limited to the speed of sound?
Clearly, the fault lies in the servo...
Liability is always predicated on percentages, so even if you could "blame the hardware", that doesn't mean that you're going to get away with no damages, since everyone knows that "software is for fixing problems with hardware".
-- Terry
Aren't disclaimers illegal in Zimbabwe? And "hold Harmless" clauses?
I'm pretty sure being British or American is illegal there too...
The problem with OpenNIC, and, in fact, all existing registrars, is that they can't turn around a domain registration request within a browser timeout.
OpenNIC adds to this problem by codifying a non-realtime protocol, such that it's impossible to use their API, and build an interactive application on top of it. Their API *expects* high latency, and won't expose low latency, even if it exists.
Further, they want you to give them an email address they can use to contact you... and it's not permitted to be an email address at the domain you are registering -- so that you have an email address. Read "Catch-22" lately?
If what is being offered here is software that can *really* turn around a registration in realtime, then it would be a *huge* step forward over what OpenNIC, etc., is offering.
-- Terry
Thanks for the update; I haven't really followed his career, other than to read his publications.
The Brookings Institute is also well known for research in the area; I have a personal bias towards the Sante Fe Institute, specifically that they do a lot with Complexity theory.
-- Terry
Paul Vixie already runs a number of root servers. Therefore "only if they're best qualified to do the job" is a specious argument. Paul already meets that criteria in spades.