The quote is from the Leviathan, where he starts to talk about monarchies and commonwealths. I wonder why you assume that a liberal minded person should take account of Hobbes. Hitler might have thought spam was evidence of a Jewish consipracy, but I don't see that Katz is under any obligation to show that he has read Mein Kampf.
Well, there is no guarantee that any of the helpers knows anything about the story, and it would delay the time that news takes to surface, kind of defeating the purpose of this kind of site.
In the current case, what would have made a difference would have been if Justin had asked Corel whether or not this affected their plans for supporting WINE. Slashdot really should establish relationships with open-source friendly companies to ensure they can get quick responses to these kinds of questions.
Well, the BBC Sci/Tech news site gets cited pretty frequently. I don't think the UK does so badly, unlike continental Europe whose representation is really dire, especially considering what a high proportion of Linux development goes on in Germany.
Bruce Schneier was talking about symmetric key cryptography. Quantum cryptography can be used to render the factorisation problem tractable, and so break RSA encryption. It may not do this for other proposed assymmetric schemes, such as those based upon elliptic curves. (BTW a PGP key is an RSA key).
So far as I am aware the proposed use of quantum cryptography is to use it to pass, say, a 3DES key and then carry out the rest of the protocol using symmetric key encryption.
It is an interesting point, about taxation. It may be intrinsically difficult to formulate any taxation policy that comes up with a workable definition of where a transaction occurs, and so therefore where income or sales tax is to be applied. Already income tax is in trouble, because multinational companies can distort where productive processes take place using transfer pricing, but the internet threatens to turn what were once obscure issues of international taxation into a complete crisis.
Not all tax collection schemes are equally vulnerable, however. Property taxes on concrete objects, especially land and buildings, and to some extent plant and machinery, are not so vulnerable. So the idea that government will be made bankrupt I think is absurd, but they may be forced to fundamentally change the way that they tax. A move from an income to a property tax is also a move from taxing labour to taxing capital, which may lead to interesting political issues.
From a simple `linux benefitting' point of view, a vertical breakup is probably best: a decent version of Office 2000 is probably the best thing that could happen to Linux in terms of defeating its perceived `failure on the desktop'. Horizontal breakup could perversely hurt Linux, by diluting the `you aren't at the mercy of Bill's next strategic volte-face'.
Right, but the UC looks rather like a citadel of the school of thought: there was a rather notorious survey done a couple of years ago that showed how closely the opinions of those finishing various economics graduate school fitted profiles of the schools opinions. UC and Harvard were outliers at opposite ends of the spectrum.
I am familiar with the economic school, but not at all with the legal school. Are they followers of public choice theory?
A judge a `leading advocate of the Chicago school of Economics'? Why do you say that? I would have an expected a member of the school to hold that title...
Win2k is not just WinNT renamed. It is meant to be the successor to the Win3.1 line of OS's as well, and so could be said to compete with them.
If MS was a single company the continued lifespan of NT4 would not be long. But if an NT4 is able to compete with Win2k by drastically undercutting it in terms of price, then it starts to look viable. Win2k will have to argue its superiority over NT4 rather than just being said to be the successor.
A horizontal breakup does not remedy the main fact that MS OS's are a de facto monopoly on the OS. Three competing OS's would remedy that.
Well, I rather missed the fact that it *had* been split off. I only found out about this option an hour ago...
Perhaps there are just the two of us on this thread, so my comments will not have much more audience than a plain email, but I wanted to say that I think the FBI is painting an essentially false picture about the siutation that faces law enforcement. The striking thing about modern technology is the opportunity it offers the surveillance agent, and the destruction of privacy. The destruction of privacy is more reminiscent of 1984 than the picture painted by the FBI.
I don't think this is fair. The fears are real, the article explores them, and with a reasonable caveat, puts them to rest. No FUD, no groundless Redhat bashing.
Richard Hawkins supports horizontal breakup because vertical breakup does not remedy the main sense in which Microsoft is a monopoly. To press for vertical breakup is to say `Yes there is a malicious monoply but we choose to do nothing about it'.
Housing the Win98, WinNT and Win2k development teams in separate, competing companies might be a start.
Good link. After reading it I rather think MS are in the right: they *could* `track' AOL by constantly amending their software if they adopted the buffer overflow error, but they have chosen to bow out rather than deliberately introduce a bud into their code.
As you say, there is a world of difference between being crappy in recognising existing errors, and actually deliberately introducing new errors...
I haven't heard back to my last email, but I did a back of the nvelope calculuation which shows that the Preamble figures are in line with the ILO figures. There is no conflict between the two.
Quite apart from being pointless, it is not feasible using either current or projected methods of implementing public-key cryptography, which depend upon treating the encrypted data arithmetically. Since operations such as base-n exponentiation are not defined on partial data, there can be no public key based streaming encryption without a fundamentally different idea of how to implement it.
Your source on productivity sounds unimpeachable, but I rather trust my own sources as well: the productivity figures are based on figures provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and reported by Preamble centre thinktank. They are partisan, but have pretty solid economic credentials. I have emailed them about the conflict in data, and shall report back their reply.
As for the analysis of the recent productivity spurt, that is provided by the Commerce Department and was widely reported. It seems productivity figures have succumbed to Moore's Law, which I would say undermines their usefulness.
One of the worst things about provision of computer services is the dreadful privacy guarantees that they come with. If an ISP or University has no evidence of illegal activity by a user, then they ought not to examine that users files.
Does anyone know of any organisations campaigning for better user rights. I saw an article at the ACLU complaining about much this same issue, but they don't seem to have made much of a fight out of it. Even a voluntary code as to what consitutes a reasonable conduct by service providers would be something.
The network computer might still happen. The premature announcements of the era of the network computer were wrong because some insignificant technical obstacles turned out to be less insignificant than they first seemed.
Isn't this the conflict the analysis firms are trying to resolve: one wants the analyzation but one doesn't want the paralyzation that comes from doing it yourself?
Another conflict: is the era of the analysis firm a good or a bad thing for the free software movement? It might be a good thing, in that the analysis firm can break the `no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft' mentality of the conservative corporate buyer, but it might be a bad thing because free software lacks the institutional champions of proprietary software, and so might not show up on the analyst firms radars.
My figures are average growth in labour productivity since 1974: US is at 1.1%, Germany 1.9% and continental Europe averages 2.0%. The US *has* been doing rather better over the last 2 1/2 years, but there are reasons to fear the underlying health of this productivity growth: namely it is almost entirely powered by the IT sector (which shows maginificent growth, around 40% year on year for the past 12 months). Apart from IT and agriculture, all sectors of the US economy show *decline*. This profile of growth does not look sustainable to me, pace Moskow.
Wage inequality: between 1945 and 1972 wage differentials between the 90th and 10th percentile varied very little. Since 1980 they have driven apart, and the rate of divergence has been itself been increasing over the past five years. Again such a trend does not look sustainable, but it suggests a permanent shift in the distribution of the rewards of the economy that far more favours the wealthiest than was the case thirty years ago, and without wishing to discuss the justice of this state of affairs, it is a statistic that should be more widely reported. It is also by no means clear that the situation at the bottom of the wage scale is better, if by bottom you mean the lowest 20% which has seen average wealth decline since 1990.
As for the budget deficit, it is extraordinary how little discussion this important figure has seen. It is not merely a result of declining demand in the far east, but naturally is also driven by monetary policy at the Fed. The trade deficit is sitting at about 3.5% of GDP, a level which makes current foreign exchange policy look difficult to sustain by export growth. A sore point with me: my income is in US$ but I carry debt in UKP...
Slashdot Mirror
The quote is from the Leviathan, where he starts to talk about monarchies and commonwealths. I wonder why you assume that a liberal minded person should take account of Hobbes. Hitler might have thought spam was evidence of a Jewish consipracy, but I don't see that Katz is under any obligation to show that he has read Mein Kampf.
In the current case, what would have made a difference would have been if Justin had asked Corel whether or not this affected their plans for supporting WINE. Slashdot really should establish relationships with open-source friendly companies to ensure they can get quick responses to these kinds of questions.
Well, the BBC Sci/Tech news site gets cited pretty frequently. I don't think the UK does so badly, unlike continental Europe whose representation is really dire, especially considering what a high proportion of Linux development goes on in Germany.
It is as yet unknown whether or not digital computers can solve NP hard problems...
Oops, I meant quantum *computation* can be used to render the factorisation problem tractable.
So far as I am aware the proposed use of quantum cryptography is to use it to pass, say, a 3DES key and then carry out the rest of the protocol using symmetric key encryption.
Not all tax collection schemes are equally vulnerable, however. Property taxes on concrete objects, especially land and buildings, and to some extent plant and machinery, are not so vulnerable. So the idea that government will be made bankrupt I think is absurd, but they may be forced to fundamentally change the way that they tax. A move from an income to a property tax is also a move from taxing labour to taxing capital, which may lead to interesting political issues.
What is the relevance of Hobbes? I'm afraid I don't follow.
From a simple `linux benefitting' point of view, a vertical breakup is probably best: a decent version of Office 2000 is probably the best thing that could happen to Linux in terms of defeating its perceived `failure on the desktop'. Horizontal breakup could perversely hurt Linux, by diluting the `you aren't at the mercy of Bill's next strategic volte-face'.
I am familiar with the economic school, but not at all with the legal school. Are they followers of public choice theory?
A judge a `leading advocate of the Chicago school of Economics'? Why do you say that? I would have an expected a member of the school to hold that title...
If MS was a single company the continued lifespan of NT4 would not be long. But if an NT4 is able to compete with Win2k by drastically undercutting it in terms of price, then it starts to look viable. Win2k will have to argue its superiority over NT4 rather than just being said to be the successor.
A horizontal breakup does not remedy the main fact that MS OS's are a de facto monopoly on the OS. Three competing OS's would remedy that.
Perhaps there are just the two of us on this thread, so my comments will not have much more audience than a plain email, but I wanted to say that I think the FBI is painting an essentially false picture about the siutation that faces law enforcement. The striking thing about modern technology is the opportunity it offers the surveillance agent, and the destruction of privacy. The destruction of privacy is more reminiscent of 1984 than the picture painted by the FBI.
I don't think this is fair. The fears are real, the article explores them, and with a reasonable caveat, puts them to rest. No FUD, no groundless Redhat bashing.
Housing the Win98, WinNT and Win2k development teams in separate, competing companies might be a start.
As you say, there is a world of difference between being crappy in recognising existing errors, and actually deliberately introducing new errors...
Is there a real security risk here, or is Microsoft just trying to save face?
As for the analysis of the recent productivity spurt, that is provided by the Commerce Department and was widely reported. It seems productivity figures have succumbed to Moore's Law, which I would say undermines their usefulness.
Does anyone know of any organisations campaigning for better user rights. I saw an article at the ACLU complaining about much this same issue, but they don't seem to have made much of a fight out of it. Even a voluntary code as to what consitutes a reasonable conduct by service providers would be something.
They are not all going to be on one ethernet ring! Something like 16x (16 machine subnets) sounds possible.
The network computer might still happen. The premature announcements of the era of the network computer were wrong because some insignificant technical obstacles turned out to be less insignificant than they first seemed.
Another conflict: is the era of the analysis firm a good or a bad thing for the free software movement? It might be a good thing, in that the analysis firm can break the `no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft' mentality of the conservative corporate buyer, but it might be a bad thing because free software lacks the institutional champions of proprietary software, and so might not show up on the analyst firms radars.
Wage inequality: between 1945 and 1972 wage differentials between the 90th and 10th percentile varied very little. Since 1980 they have driven apart, and the rate of divergence has been itself been increasing over the past five years. Again such a trend does not look sustainable, but it suggests a permanent shift in the distribution of the rewards of the economy that far more favours the wealthiest than was the case thirty years ago, and without wishing to discuss the justice of this state of affairs, it is a statistic that should be more widely reported. It is also by no means clear that the situation at the bottom of the wage scale is better, if by bottom you mean the lowest 20% which has seen average wealth decline since 1990.
As for the budget deficit, it is extraordinary how little discussion this important figure has seen. It is not merely a result of declining demand in the far east, but naturally is also driven by monetary policy at the Fed. The trade deficit is sitting at about 3.5% of GDP, a level which makes current foreign exchange policy look difficult to sustain by export growth. A sore point with me: my income is in US$ but I carry debt in UKP...