Unfortunately for the Open Group, their failure to strongly police casual trade use of the term Unix tends to militate against their claim. BSD, for example, is not a licensed Unix (though some BSDs are licensed), but the Bach book certainly considers it so (c. 1986), calling it a Unix "variant." Indeed, were I to purchase a Unix book -- say, the Big Red Book -- and it didn't cover BSD and BSD-derived Unices, regardless of whether they're Open Group certified or not, I'd be much put out indeed, and I think most people would as well.
A longstanding failure to vigorously ensure that those third-party products only cover licensed Unices or otherwise make clear that unlicensed products are not Unix makes the Open Group's case a tough one to win. Just like asprin, kerosene and the thermos, Unix has arguably long been a generic term for a specific class of operating systems.
To put it another way, when you hear that an OS is Unix, do you immediately think, "Ah-hah, it's passed the UNIX 93, 95, 98 or Base conformance criteria administered by the Open Group! I can now use the T_TCO_TRANSFAILPROB QoS flag without fear!"
In any case, nothing can be more ironic than the X/Open version of the famous license plate: "Live Free Or Die: UNIX. (UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.)"
Universities love online classes; by keeping students off-campus and out of classrooms, marginal costs are lowered and professors can theoretically be overloaded with classes, though that rarely happens due to faculty senate pressure at most universities.
Professors are rarely so enthusiastic, and it shows -- online courses aren't really thought of as "real" classes by many profs, and so they use them as excuses to skip out of the kind of preparation required of real-life classes. (It doesn't help that, in my opinion, the WebCT software, a staple at most universities, is decidedly sub-par in terms of usability and functionality.)
Even in the optimal case, I think that you lose the intangible value of human communication in distance learning -- imagine the impossibility of doing law or medical school over the Internet, for example. By killing off the ability to engage in direct dialog, online classes don't even rise to the level of a single lecture.
raider_red rebuked an Anonymous Coward thus: If you're going to throw that out, would you care to explain to those of us who aren't quantum mechanics experts what Lamarck's theorum is, you stupid socially inept person.
I believe that would be the "I'm an Anonymous Coward with a brittle understanding of quantum physics and a chip on my shoulder" theorem. But perhaps I'm mistaken, and I doubt he'll be checking back in to clear up his post. *shrug*
Einstein did believe that black holes were physically impossible, but -- drawing on my own very brittle understanding of quantum physics (push too hard and it collapses) -- his reasoning was based on the idea that stars could not collapse to a stable point just above the Schwarzschild radius; the problem with his thesis is that a black hole (according to theory, below) collapses beyond that point , rendering his correct observation irrelevant. (The radius of the singularity explains why a black hole is black -- ejecta from the hole, emitted below the Schwarzschild radius, can't escape the gravitational distortion.)
In any case, Einstein's paper on this subject, published in or around 1939, happened to coincide with and was generally superseded by the work of Oppenheimer and Snyder, who used general relativity to show the effects of mass collapsing through the Schwarzschild radius. It wasn't until the 1950s that Wheeler actually coined the term "black hole," but the theory was set.
Since then, we've seen a fair amount of observational evidence that suggests that black holes exist, but, although most scientists (and laypeople) accept their existence,the jury is still out.
I'm unaccountably reminded of the "red scare" of the 1950s, when ordinary people had the power (and often the incentive) to turn in their neighbors and co-workers for the smallest of reasons: the recently-released transcripts of the McCarthy hearings include one factory worker who was monitored by the FBI because his shop foreman noticed him reading a library book on Siberia.
Naturally, it's not the monitoring of restricted areas that I fear so much as the next step. Government expanding to fill all adjacent spaces, I can't help but believe that the next iteration of that technology would be to begin monitoring public areas for suspicious behavior. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I imagine there's more to this story than is told; in America, the "right to publicity" is fairly well-established in a large number of states (and is mentioned in the Second Restatement of Torts as "appropriation of name or likeness"). For example, in a case involving an Oklahoma statute protecting publicity rights, the 10th Circuit defined those rights under the statute as "a form of property protection that allows people to profit from the full commercial value of their identities." Cardtoons L.C. v. Major League Baseball Players' Association, 95 F.3d 959 (10th Cir., 1997)
Furthermore, although Germany has only a limited statutory right of publicity insofar as photographs are concerned, it has at times based a tentative right to publicity on Constitutional grounds, and is known for a more expansive definition of "commercial activity" than U.S. courts (for example, where news reportage would be prima facie protected in the States, it is treated as a commercial activity in Germany).
I find it surprising and unlikely that EA would attempt to sell a video game using the likeness of a sports star without some kind of licensing deal, since otherwise they could be found liable in a wide range of venues. Either somebody really screwed up (and, hey, it could have been in-house counsel!), or else there's something more to this dispute.
A deal in which a retailer agrees not to operate an e-commerce site in exchange for the ability to purchase the supplier's goods -- part of a class of contracts broadly known as "non-price vertical restraints" -- is subject to the "rule of reason:" the proscription is examined in conjunction with the competitive state of the market to determine if the activity is illegal.
Generally speaking, these contracts have been upheld; see, e.g., O.S.C. v. Apple, 792 F.2d 1464, 1469-70 (9th Cir. 1986) and H.L. Hayden Co. v. Siemens, 879 F.2d 1005, 1014 (10th Cir., 1989), both upholding the ability of suppliers to contractually foreclose dealers' ability to sell products via mail-order.
However, there is a caveat: since GW operates its own e-commerce site, it's in horizontal competition with its dealers. This doesn't automatically mean that the restraint becomes horizontal (and, indeed, the penumbra of antitrust law suggests it does not), but it does give some squeaking room for lawyers who want to challenge those restrictions.
Nonetheless, the preponderance of the law is on GW's side, especially since (unless things have changed in the decade or so since I last played a tabletop game) the market is very competitive. It's very unlikely to my mind that a successful challenge to this restraint could be mounted.
Yes, it's a snide title to the post (and for that I apologize). I've spent some time in Africa -- not a great amount of time, but almost all of it was spent "en buisson," out in the tiny villages beyond the hub cities. I think that anyone who insists that indoor plumbing be piped to every village and town is ignoring the fact that developing nations need engines of growth, not creature comforts.
Folks who say "let's get infant mortality below 20% first" may think they're being hard-headed (Senegal has an infant mortality of 62/1000, just to clear up that point), but the truth is that they're woefully behind the times in development economics.
Developing nations are hardly the hellholes we often think them to be: life there isn't as pleasant as our own upper-middle-class lives, but it's not a constant struggle for survival in most nations. (Places like Sierra Leone excepted, of course.) People in developing nations may not have every modern convenience known to Americans, but -- thanks in no small part to the Peace Corps and other NGOs -- they at least have acceptable levels of sanitation available to them. (And am I the only one who hears the faint strains of "Rule Britannia" in those statements -- a kind of disdain for those poor savage souls who can't even be relied upon to clean themselves properly?)
What developing nations need is capital for their domestic entrepreneurs, and telecommunications is a critical part of that. One of the great success stories in development economics is the Grameen Bank, a microcredit bank that lends to impoverished rural dwellers. One of their success stories was a loan to a group of women who created a cell cooperative: they would rent celltime to other villagers, allowing the locals access to telecommunications without having to purchase unnecessary private lines.
For another example, in the West African nation of Mali, the Peace Corps has helped set up a trading cooperative for artisans across the nation -- artists ship their goods to a store that caters to both walk-in trade (mostly from French tourists) and international dealers. They even have a website (which, of course, I don't have the URL to ATT) that you can order from. Imagine how much more effective such networks could be if locals could communicate immediately across the region.
Furthermore, telecommunications give developing nations access to services not easily available -- local businesspeople could not only use Excel to keep track of their cash flows (as opposed to having to hand-rule ledger books in many rural areas), but they could get immediate access to groups and individuals to help them with their businesses. Instead of PCVs spending their two years giving lectures on basic accounting principles, small businesspeople could get that information over the Web, leaving the Peace Corps to stay hands-on.
Finally, anytime you can expand opportunities for people in the villages, you're doing a service. The traditional Harris-Todaro migration model effectively demonstrates how unemployed underclasses and grey markets develop in urban areas within developing nations. If you can increase educational and economic opportunities for people in rural areas, you decrease the wage disparity between the two sectors, and lower the explosive demographic pressure that characterizes so many developing-world cities. Arguably, technology can also have a feedback effect: as literacy and basic education is necessary to take advantage of the benefits of the telecommunications centers, the incentive to obtain that education grows.
So, there you go: some perfectly rational, hard-headed, economically-grounded reasons to give the developing world computers. It comes down to simply giving these people the power to effect change in their own lives: they're as capable and able as any of us, they just need the infrastructure to take advantage of it.
This is particularly ironic, given that Apple Computer once claimed that it would never do anything that might compete with Apple Records (the label the Beatles were on).
Remember that the dispute was over the "Apple" trademark, not over any competitiveness issues. Although the terms of the last settlement (in the '90s) were never disclosed, it's inconceivable that AAPL's lawyers would concede that AAPL couldn't compete with Apple Corps under any circumstance.
In the original agreement between the two companies, AAPL agreed that it wouldn't use its logo or name in connection with any musical product, including but not limited to software used to record or distribute music. I suspect that the last settlement was kinder to Apple's interests, since otherwise neither iTunes nor the iPod could use the AAPL brand.
Bearing this theory out, the AAPL trademark guidelines include a "music software exception," which contains, inter alia, this requirement:
Music software may not use the name "Apple Computer, Inc., the word "Apple" or the "Apple Logo" in credit lines or in any referential manner on the music software, its packaging, labels, advertising and/or promotional materials, and the like.
Under the Exception, "music software" includes "'end user' directed * * * media whose intended purpose and prerecorded content is (or is about) primarily music" (e.g., any music CD). As I read the definition, it seems to be strictly limited to software involving recorded music, not music-recording software.
Admittedly, these guidlines apply to third-party software, but I suspect AAPL could issue its own products under roughly equivalent strictures.
Nonetheless, this only applies to the use of AAPL's name and logo, not any activities of the company itself. (Again, if AAPL couldn't compete at all, then iTunes and iPod would probably be verboten.) In the current instance, you'll never see AAPL's logo on a single music product, but they can arguably still compete under the Universal Music name and remain faithful to the first agreement, to say nothing of whatever later deal was brokered.
Of course, Apple Corps could still conceivably sue for injunctive relief under the trademark dilution statute, but as long as AAPL is careful about where its logo lands, I think they'll be okay. I'd still seek either an agreement with Apple Corps or declarative relief if I were AAPL, though.
They propose using polonium-210, which is a strong alpha emitter that can be used as a strong heat source (.5 grams of po-210 can reach 500 degrees Celsius -- nearly a thousand degrees Farenheit!). Frank Spedding proposed using po-210 to power aircraft back in the 1940s and '50s.
Four problems: First, po-210 is rare; in the early days, tons of pitchblende had to be refined to get microgram amounts. Today, we let bismuth-210 beta-decay, which lets us get milligram amounts reasonably cost-effectively, but we're a long way from getting the thousands of kilos that would be needed to power these rifles. It might be cheaper just to build that army of giant robot samurai Bechtel's got on the drawing board.
Second, polonium is toxic, really toxic. Imagine ensuring safety at every point in a battlefield logistics chain, no mean feat -- and now consider what you'd do with all this toxic, radioactive waste after the 60-day powerspan cited in the article.
Third, of course, is the heat issue: how do you effectively shield the troops from the massive heat source sitting literally in their hands? One of the things that scotched the radioisotope-powered plane was the necessity of constantly ducting away waste energy.
Fourth is the terrific intensity of the alpha emissions of po-210. Alpha radiation is, of course, low-hazard, but po-210 is powerful enough to degrade virtually all materials it comes into proximity to -- you can work around that when designing a power system for a satellite, but I'm not sure what the ramifications would be for a handheld weapon.
In short, the contractor basically has proposed a weapons system that works great, except for all these massive technical hurdles that have to be dealt with first. I think we're a long way from Star Wars here.
It's good to see them charged for something, even if they have never had to atone for the thousands of customer dollars they have stolen.
This is the same logic recently used by NOW and several other abortion-rights groups in Scheidler v. National Organization for Women: sure, using RICO to prosecute anti-abortion protestors was an unprecedented expansion of racketeering laws, but at least they're using that unprecedented expansion against the right kinds of people.
The logic was flawed then, and it's flawed now: if PATRIOT gets a successful prosecution, or even plea-bargain, out of PayPal, then the feds will be emboldened to prosecute more PATRIOT violations. Each prosecution feeds upon itself, until, like conspiracy or wire-fraud laws, PATRIOT will be "low-hanging fruit," attached to a great many cases with only tenuous ties to the ostensible goals of PATRIOT.
You may not like PayPal, you may even have legally-actionable issues with them -- but file a class-action if you do. Don't cheer them getting prosecuted under a vague section of an overly-broad statute, because the next time they issue an indictment, it could be for you.
Well, that's amusing -- I worked for one of the dot-coms purchased by Luminant; during the due diligence process, they told me roughly what they were ready to pay, and I told them they were insane -- we had lackluster management, overstaffed departments, a poor sales record, and our clients were hiring away our own programmers and project managers to take their sites in-house. And yet they bought us anyway, with predictably dismal results.
To me, combining that kind of incisive decisionmaking with the geniuses at EDS who allowed the geeks-gone-wild environment of Chaos2Order to flourish ("Mister accountant dude, you know what we need? A car! In our ninth-floor office! And we need, like, a crane to get it in here!") means that I should either dump my stock, or offer to let them buy my consulting business.
Not being a neurologist myself, take with salt, but I think the NS article glosses over (surprise!) the important aspects. A better, general-public article is here. There's also a fair amount of peer-reviewed literature on the project; see, for example, Chian, M., V.Z. Marmarelis & T.W. Berger. "Decomposition of neural systems with nonlinear feedback using stimulus-response data." Neurocomputing, 26-27:641-654, 1999.
You'd be far, far better equipped than I to review their work (having just read the Neurocomputing paper, I could use an artificial hippocampus right about now!), but it seems that their "black box" modeling is limited to specific subprocesses, and rather than a static lookup table (as per the NS article), they've used nonparametric analysis to derive a set of functions to simulate the various processes in question.
That, at least, makes sense to me; I'm used to modeling things we don't really understand. Unfortunately, if their artificial brain works twice as well as my econometric models, their research project is doomed to a very short life.
Or, that is to say, evidently didn't consider it enough of a success to keep the education sales team around; according to a friend who ran sales engineering at Informix (where most of the now-departed Apple edu-sales team came from), Apple eighty-sixed the fellow in charge of educational sales (and who inked the Maine deal).
Perhaps it's unsurprising; the education market, with its red tape and long depreciation times (if you used an Apple ][ in high school, raise your hand!), has turned out to be a less-than-stellar place for Apple to concentrate funds. Still, a rather ironic coda.
Ah, you like LVM for AIX? Then you'll love LVM for Linux! Sistina's LVM, which seems to be functionally and conceptually equivalent to AIX's LVM, will be incorporated into the 2.6 kernel. In the meantime, you can grab the source from CVS and roll your own. (IBM article here.)
Personally, I've always found LVM to be a bit disconcerting -- but I'm an admitted Sun bigot who's simply used to Veritas. Everyone's mileage may vary.
"What's good for America, is good for General Motors, and
vice versa."
- GM President Charlie Wilson, 1953
Although I've always felt that "cyberwar" scenarios were rather overblown attempts at giving backroom geeks frontline roles, the military certainly takes it seriously; one well-received military paper a few years ago warned that America's IT defenses were on a par with the ability of Task Force Smith (whose ignominious retreat from Korean forces showed how woefully unprepared America was for the Korean conflict).
As we know, China has been touted as the first great cyberwar enemy; allegedly, China does have a "hacker brigade" tasked with disrupting American networks and computer systems in times of war, to rectify the strategic imbalance between the two nations. Now, Microsoft plans to open to a strategic rival of the U.S. the internal code that will power the Navy's upcoming CVN-77 aircraft carrier, plus other "smart ships."
This raises an interesting question for the Administration: although, as Vann H. Van Diepen (Director of the Office of Chemical, Biological, and Missile Nonproliferation) told Congress, export controls to China are not enforced in "areas where the technology is widely available as commodity items... such as low-level computers," the source code to a mission-critical operating system used by military C4 systems is certainly not a "commodity item," nor is it "widely available." Will the White House put national security over Microsoft's profits? Les Kinsolving, call your office!
Religious wars aside, they're both perfectly fine development environments: Cocoa (nee OpenStep) provides a lot of encapsulated bang for the development buck, but Carbon has both familiarity for old Mac developers and access to deprecated but still-vital functionality. (N.B., I use Cocoa with small amounts of Core and Carbon for functions like getKeys() and the CoreGraphics suite -- but, then, I was never a Mac developer before OSX. YM, as they say, MV.)
Apple keeps going the extra mile with each OSX point release to improve each environment -- the goal at this point is functional parity (though ease-of-use will always differ). Choose whichever one appeals to you, and don't be afraid that one environment is "inferior" to the other.
The Myth 3 "Lazarus" (as in "the dead guy'll look a whole lot better once we get these bandages off") project page is here. (They have a Hotline server for build access, a nice, Mac-centric touch.) It seems that former Mumbo Jumbo developers are involved in the project, so hopefully M3 will emerge from the "beta-quality with a golden-master price" limbo it labored in for so long.
As provocative as the book's thesis seems to be -- and I must admit that my information on it comes entirely from this review -- it's not new. In the 1970s, Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street posited that market fluctuations are mutually independent, though the market follows a general upwards trend, and thus it's impossible (ceteris paribus) to make any bets on short-term stock performance. The upshot is that the only way to beat benchmark indexes is to assume additional risk: trying to beat the market in most cases is nothing more than gambling on an upmarket roulette wheel.
I can't say I'm impressed by the article -- but then, professors do tend to take their disciplines a bit too seriously.
After all, his thesis seems to be that, were it not for those portrayals of misfit geniuses, CS programs would attract fewer "brilliant, socially awkward young people who code on the fly, think they can singlehandedly develop ultracomplex systems, and are interested in breaking into computers" and more people "who socialize well in groups, are team players, are articulate, and are able to give coherent oral presentations."
Some of you may remember the programs that attract those people: business and BCIS. Others may also remember CS classes like VAX assembler and discrete math, courses that are far more likely to scare off those who aren't introverted misfits. (Hell, I've got a thousand-page algorithms text sitting on my bookshelf that by itself scares me!)
This isn't to say that those courses aren't profitable for computer scientists -- but the discipline, like mathematics or certain hard sciences, does tend to attract and maintain a particular kind of person.
In any case, if Dr. Harrison is perturbed by the media's portrayal of programmers, imagine how lawyers feel! Try an episode of Perry Mason in a real court:
PERRY MASON: Your Honor, I call to the stand Diane Steele --
who is in this very courtroom today!
(Zoom in on DIANE STEELE. BG: Ominous music.)
PROSECUTOR: Objection, your Honor. Ms. Steele is not on the witness list provided to this court by opposing counsel.
JUDGE: Counselor, did you read my order of November 12 directing that no witnesses be added after 10 days before the trial?
MASON: Er, yes, your Honor.
JUDGE: Were you aware at the time that you might call Ms. Steele as a witness?
MASON: Um, yes, your Honor.
JUDGE: Have you filed a motion requesting that Ms. Steele be added to the witness list?
MASON: Um, no, your Honor. Not at this time.
JUDGE: Why not, counselor?
MASON: (Garbled)
JUDGE: I'm sorry, Mr. Mason?
MASON: I said, "dramatic effect," your Honor.
JUDGE: Right. Save it for the appeal, counselor. Objection sustained.
And don't get me started on The Agency. God alone knows how many disguntled wannabe James Bonds are trapped as GS-10s in the Community....
Now, this doesn't necessarily obviate his concerns, but Brandt is a veteran conspiracy-watcher whose obsessions include mind-control projects and secret cults amongst the elite -- and this tendency to indulge in, as Wm. Gibson would put it, "apophenia" is certainly likely to color his view of Google.
To my eye, his concerns display a kind of parochial paranoia: obviously, we're all aware of the uses and limitations of cookies, none of us want to see the cache (or the Wayback Machine) go away, and his comments about Google's "monopoly" and the "[y]oung, stupid script kiddies" who "think Google is 'way kool'" are just inexplicable.
Telling, I think, is his concern about Google having a former NSA developer on staff -- I've worked with a fairly large number of former spooks from the NSA, CIA and civilian contractors, and to suggest that having the NSA on your resume makes you some kind of Coder in Black is absurd. But, of course, YMMV.
Any phrase like ""Self-governance [is] an alternative to government review of forthcoming journal articles" is almost calculated to leave me cold -- but it's important to note that the people behind this release include not only editors, but also research scientists and activists such as the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.
The official AAAS release, including a list of signatories, is here.
Or the predicted chain of events according to Marx
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
Let me give you a quick reworking of your argument:
1) American corporations employ machines to increase worker productivity. This means local workers are out of work.
2) People who are out of work cannot buy things made by corps who are using machines.
3) No profit! No company!
4) Repeat until the workers of the world cast off their chains.
Let me give you another example. Say that I create The Mystical Magical Programming Machine, or MMPM. All you have to do is feed in a UML diagram and a set of test cases into the MMPM, and a compiled executable comes out the other side. Is this A Bad Thing? If so, why is it any worse than an auto factory robot, or a supermarket self-scanner, or a cotton gin? Increased corporate profits and increased customer savings don't just vanish into Scrooge McDuck's vault; they become part of the growth engine of the economy.
In economic terms, cheap overseas labor is the same thing as the MMPM. It's disruptive for those folks -- like us -- who find themselves replaced by the machine, but the net gain will be realized across the economy.
Doesn't mean the procecure won't hurt, but it certainly won't kill.
At least, if you accept the Ricardian premises underlying trade theory; using cheaper foreign labor for engineering and software development is no different than buying inexpensive foreign steel. In most cases (ignoring price-setting monopolists like Microsoft), the result will be cheaper software and cheaper services for Americans. Of course, assuming that productivity rates aren't markedly higher here, the result will also be cheaper Americans, so the question is whether the loss in American tech jobs will be offset by savings gained by Americans in other sectors.
If you remember your Snow Crash, this is the sort of thing Neal Stephenson was talking about:
"When it gets down to it, talking trade balances here, once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tajhikistan and selling them here, once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant, once the invisible hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakastani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity...You know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
"music
"movies
"software
"and high-speed pizza delivery."
Is the use of inexpensive intellectual labor abroad a bad thing? Depends on who you talk to: to a telecom engineer in Dallas who's trying to make payments on a $500,000 house, it is. To someone who can buy cheaper software or services because developer rates went from $150,000/year to $5,000/year, it may not be. And to the population of India, of course, it's a different story entirely.
Really, this is the way the game has to be played for the developing world to proceed. After all, the manufacturing and commodity export sectors in the developing world are so competitive across nations that they can't serve as engines for fast growth. The most effective way to move from sweatshop to smartshop is to change the competitive balance and make the developed world compete for their own jobs: the same market forces that give us cheap steel, fossil fuel, and agricultural imports cane be turned back on the markets in which we've previously held both absolute and comparative advantages. Eventually -- and the key here is "eventually" -- this will result in increased prosperity for all, but it's not at all clear that the short-run result will be increased prosperity for us.
This isn't to say that I'm happy about this in terms of my own career (though it is why I'm moving from tech to law), but if the alternative is an ever-larger, increasingly impoverished, and restless population in the developing world -- just the sort of populations attracted to radical terrorist movements -- I'll take the salary hit.
Of course, they're carefully choosing small firms with shallow pockets as their test cases, because those companies won't have the ability to fight the matter in court -- and the more prior decisions on their side, the easier it'll be to squeeze larger players.
Not that they're bad guys. They're just prosecuting a questionable patent claim against tiny players. I'm still reading the claim, but my first reaction -- and please remember that IANAPL (thank God) -- is that the patent applies to SGML or structured language browsers that have buttons mapped to specific parts of structured documents. In the claim summary:
One common characteristic of many browsers is that the links to information are presented solely within documents.
The links may take the user to other documents or to locations within the same document, but typically, the elements that provide the link control are within the documents.
Having the control to the information links within the documents themselves is adequate where the documents are short and where the purpose is to obtain information in brief, concise statements. But where a document is long, it becomes difficult to browse the document since the only potential access to other destinations are in whatever part of the document is currently being displayed.
(Emphasis added)
So, it seems that webpages, which are themselves documents that contain "links [that] may take the user to other documents or to locations within the same document," seem to be specifically disclaimed by the patent authors.
Furthermore, from a functional perspective, the purpose of the invention is to allow people to "browse[e] documents according to their structure instead of their contents," whereas a frameset navigation layout either uses links to documents or anchor tags within documents.
This seems to be a case where the problem addressed by the patent solved itself, and now the patent owners want to squeeze money from a better, but irrelevant, mousetrap (to hack a metaphor to death). Perhaps one of the lurking patent lawyers would care to discuss this further?
Slashdot Mirror
A longstanding failure to vigorously ensure that those third-party products only cover licensed Unices or otherwise make clear that unlicensed products are not Unix makes the Open Group's case a tough one to win. Just like asprin, kerosene and the thermos, Unix has arguably long been a generic term for a specific class of operating systems.
To put it another way, when you hear that an OS is Unix, do you immediately think, "Ah-hah, it's passed the UNIX 93, 95, 98 or Base conformance criteria administered by the Open Group! I can now use the T_TCO_TRANSFAILPROB QoS flag without fear!"
In any case, nothing can be more ironic than the X/Open version of the famous license plate: "Live Free Or Die: UNIX. (UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.)"
Professors are rarely so enthusiastic, and it shows -- online courses aren't really thought of as "real" classes by many profs, and so they use them as excuses to skip out of the kind of preparation required of real-life classes. (It doesn't help that, in my opinion, the WebCT software, a staple at most universities, is decidedly sub-par in terms of usability and functionality.)
Even in the optimal case, I think that you lose the intangible value of human communication in distance learning -- imagine the impossibility of doing law or medical school over the Internet, for example. By killing off the ability to engage in direct dialog, online classes don't even rise to the level of a single lecture.
I believe that would be the "I'm an Anonymous Coward with a brittle understanding of quantum physics and a chip on my shoulder" theorem. But perhaps I'm mistaken, and I doubt he'll be checking back in to clear up his post. *shrug*
Einstein did believe that black holes were physically impossible, but -- drawing on my own very brittle understanding of quantum physics (push too hard and it collapses) -- his reasoning was based on the idea that stars could not collapse to a stable point just above the Schwarzschild radius; the problem with his thesis is that a black hole (according to theory, below) collapses beyond that point , rendering his correct observation irrelevant. (The radius of the singularity explains why a black hole is black -- ejecta from the hole, emitted below the Schwarzschild radius, can't escape the gravitational distortion.)
In any case, Einstein's paper on this subject, published in or around 1939, happened to coincide with and was generally superseded by the work of Oppenheimer and Snyder, who used general relativity to show the effects of mass collapsing through the Schwarzschild radius. It wasn't until the 1950s that Wheeler actually coined the term "black hole," but the theory was set.
Since then, we've seen a fair amount of observational evidence that suggests that black holes exist, but, although most scientists (and laypeople) accept their existence,the jury is still out.
Naturally, it's not the monitoring of restricted areas that I fear so much as the next step. Government expanding to fill all adjacent spaces, I can't help but believe that the next iteration of that technology would be to begin monitoring public areas for suspicious behavior. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Furthermore, although Germany has only a limited statutory right of publicity insofar as photographs are concerned, it has at times based a tentative right to publicity on Constitutional grounds, and is known for a more expansive definition of "commercial activity" than U.S. courts (for example, where news reportage would be prima facie protected in the States, it is treated as a commercial activity in Germany).
I find it surprising and unlikely that EA would attempt to sell a video game using the likeness of a sports star without some kind of licensing deal, since otherwise they could be found liable in a wide range of venues. Either somebody really screwed up (and, hey, it could have been in-house counsel!), or else there's something more to this dispute.
A deal in which a retailer agrees not to operate an e-commerce site in exchange for the ability to purchase the supplier's goods -- part of a class of contracts broadly known as "non-price vertical restraints" -- is subject to the "rule of reason:" the proscription is examined in conjunction with the competitive state of the market to determine if the activity is illegal.
Generally speaking, these contracts have been upheld; see, e.g., O.S.C. v. Apple, 792 F.2d 1464, 1469-70 (9th Cir. 1986) and H.L. Hayden Co. v. Siemens, 879 F.2d 1005, 1014 (10th Cir., 1989), both upholding the ability of suppliers to contractually foreclose dealers' ability to sell products via mail-order.
However, there is a caveat: since GW operates its own e-commerce site, it's in horizontal competition with its dealers. This doesn't automatically mean that the restraint becomes horizontal (and, indeed, the penumbra of antitrust law suggests it does not), but it does give some squeaking room for lawyers who want to challenge those restrictions.
Nonetheless, the preponderance of the law is on GW's side, especially since (unless things have changed in the decade or so since I last played a tabletop game) the market is very competitive. It's very unlikely to my mind that a successful challenge to this restraint could be mounted.
Folks who say "let's get infant mortality below 20% first" may think they're being hard-headed (Senegal has an infant mortality of 62/1000, just to clear up that point), but the truth is that they're woefully behind the times in development economics.
Developing nations are hardly the hellholes we often think them to be: life there isn't as pleasant as our own upper-middle-class lives, but it's not a constant struggle for survival in most nations. (Places like Sierra Leone excepted, of course.) People in developing nations may not have every modern convenience known to Americans, but -- thanks in no small part to the Peace Corps and other NGOs -- they at least have acceptable levels of sanitation available to them. (And am I the only one who hears the faint strains of "Rule Britannia" in those statements -- a kind of disdain for those poor savage souls who can't even be relied upon to clean themselves properly?)
What developing nations need is capital for their domestic entrepreneurs, and telecommunications is a critical part of that. One of the great success stories in development economics is the Grameen Bank, a microcredit bank that lends to impoverished rural dwellers. One of their success stories was a loan to a group of women who created a cell cooperative: they would rent celltime to other villagers, allowing the locals access to telecommunications without having to purchase unnecessary private lines.
For another example, in the West African nation of Mali, the Peace Corps has helped set up a trading cooperative for artisans across the nation -- artists ship their goods to a store that caters to both walk-in trade (mostly from French tourists) and international dealers. They even have a website (which, of course, I don't have the URL to ATT) that you can order from. Imagine how much more effective such networks could be if locals could communicate immediately across the region.
Furthermore, telecommunications give developing nations access to services not easily available -- local businesspeople could not only use Excel to keep track of their cash flows (as opposed to having to hand-rule ledger books in many rural areas), but they could get immediate access to groups and individuals to help them with their businesses. Instead of PCVs spending their two years giving lectures on basic accounting principles, small businesspeople could get that information over the Web, leaving the Peace Corps to stay hands-on.
Finally, anytime you can expand opportunities for people in the villages, you're doing a service. The traditional Harris-Todaro migration model effectively demonstrates how unemployed underclasses and grey markets develop in urban areas within developing nations. If you can increase educational and economic opportunities for people in rural areas, you decrease the wage disparity between the two sectors, and lower the explosive demographic pressure that characterizes so many developing-world cities. Arguably, technology can also have a feedback effect: as literacy and basic education is necessary to take advantage of the benefits of the telecommunications centers, the incentive to obtain that education grows.
So, there you go: some perfectly rational, hard-headed, economically-grounded reasons to give the developing world computers. It comes down to simply giving these people the power to effect change in their own lives: they're as capable and able as any of us, they just need the infrastructure to take advantage of it.
Remember that the dispute was over the "Apple" trademark, not over any competitiveness issues. Although the terms of the last settlement (in the '90s) were never disclosed, it's inconceivable that AAPL's lawyers would concede that AAPL couldn't compete with Apple Corps under any circumstance.
In the original agreement between the two companies, AAPL agreed that it wouldn't use its logo or name in connection with any musical product, including but not limited to software used to record or distribute music. I suspect that the last settlement was kinder to Apple's interests, since otherwise neither iTunes nor the iPod could use the AAPL brand.
Bearing this theory out, the AAPL trademark guidelines include a "music software exception," which contains, inter alia, this requirement:
Under the Exception, "music software" includes "'end user' directed * * * media whose intended purpose and prerecorded content is (or is about) primarily music" (e.g., any music CD). As I read the definition, it seems to be strictly limited to software involving recorded music, not music-recording software.Admittedly, these guidlines apply to third-party software, but I suspect AAPL could issue its own products under roughly equivalent strictures.
Nonetheless, this only applies to the use of AAPL's name and logo, not any activities of the company itself. (Again, if AAPL couldn't compete at all, then iTunes and iPod would probably be verboten.) In the current instance, you'll never see AAPL's logo on a single music product, but they can arguably still compete under the Universal Music name and remain faithful to the first agreement, to say nothing of whatever later deal was brokered.
Of course, Apple Corps could still conceivably sue for injunctive relief under the trademark dilution statute, but as long as AAPL is careful about where its logo lands, I think they'll be okay. I'd still seek either an agreement with Apple Corps or declarative relief if I were AAPL, though.
Four problems: First, po-210 is rare; in the early days, tons of pitchblende had to be refined to get microgram amounts. Today, we let bismuth-210 beta-decay, which lets us get milligram amounts reasonably cost-effectively, but we're a long way from getting the thousands of kilos that would be needed to power these rifles. It might be cheaper just to build that army of giant robot samurai Bechtel's got on the drawing board.
Second, polonium is toxic, really toxic. Imagine ensuring safety at every point in a battlefield logistics chain, no mean feat -- and now consider what you'd do with all this toxic, radioactive waste after the 60-day powerspan cited in the article.
Third, of course, is the heat issue: how do you effectively shield the troops from the massive heat source sitting literally in their hands? One of the things that scotched the radioisotope-powered plane was the necessity of constantly ducting away waste energy.
Fourth is the terrific intensity of the alpha emissions of po-210. Alpha radiation is, of course, low-hazard, but po-210 is powerful enough to degrade virtually all materials it comes into proximity to -- you can work around that when designing a power system for a satellite, but I'm not sure what the ramifications would be for a handheld weapon.
In short, the contractor basically has proposed a weapons system that works great, except for all these massive technical hurdles that have to be dealt with first. I think we're a long way from Star Wars here.
This is the same logic recently used by NOW and several other abortion-rights groups in Scheidler v. National Organization for Women : sure, using RICO to prosecute anti-abortion protestors was an unprecedented expansion of racketeering laws, but at least they're using that unprecedented expansion against the right kinds of people.
The logic was flawed then, and it's flawed now: if PATRIOT gets a successful prosecution, or even plea-bargain, out of PayPal, then the feds will be emboldened to prosecute more PATRIOT violations. Each prosecution feeds upon itself, until, like conspiracy or wire-fraud laws, PATRIOT will be "low-hanging fruit," attached to a great many cases with only tenuous ties to the ostensible goals of PATRIOT.
You may not like PayPal, you may even have legally-actionable issues with them -- but file a class-action if you do. Don't cheer them getting prosecuted under a vague section of an overly-broad statute, because the next time they issue an indictment, it could be for you.
To me, combining that kind of incisive decisionmaking with the geniuses at EDS who allowed the geeks-gone-wild environment of Chaos2Order to flourish ("Mister accountant dude, you know what we need? A car! In our ninth-floor office! And we need, like, a crane to get it in here!") means that I should either dump my stock, or offer to let them buy my consulting business.
You'd be far, far better equipped than I to review their work (having just read the Neurocomputing paper, I could use an artificial hippocampus right about now!), but it seems that their "black box" modeling is limited to specific subprocesses, and rather than a static lookup table (as per the NS article), they've used nonparametric analysis to derive a set of functions to simulate the various processes in question.
That, at least, makes sense to me; I'm used to modeling things we don't really understand. Unfortunately, if their artificial brain works twice as well as my econometric models, their research project is doomed to a very short life.
Perhaps it's unsurprising; the education market, with its red tape and long depreciation times (if you used an Apple ][ in high school, raise your hand!), has turned out to be a less-than-stellar place for Apple to concentrate funds. Still, a rather ironic coda.
Personally, I've always found LVM to be a bit disconcerting -- but I'm an admitted Sun bigot who's simply used to Veritas. Everyone's mileage may vary.
Although I've always felt that "cyberwar" scenarios were rather overblown attempts at giving backroom geeks frontline roles, the military certainly takes it seriously; one well-received military paper a few years ago warned that America's IT defenses were on a par with the ability of Task Force Smith (whose ignominious retreat from Korean forces showed how woefully unprepared America was for the Korean conflict).
As we know, China has been touted as the first great cyberwar enemy; allegedly, China does have a "hacker brigade" tasked with disrupting American networks and computer systems in times of war, to rectify the strategic imbalance between the two nations. Now, Microsoft plans to open to a strategic rival of the U.S. the internal code that will power the Navy's upcoming CVN-77 aircraft carrier, plus other "smart ships."
This raises an interesting question for the Administration: although, as Vann H. Van Diepen (Director of the Office of Chemical, Biological, and Missile Nonproliferation) told Congress, export controls to China are not enforced in "areas where the technology is widely available as commodity items ... such as low-level computers," the source code to a mission-critical operating system used by military C4 systems is certainly not a "commodity item," nor is it "widely available." Will the White House put national security over Microsoft's profits? Les Kinsolving, call your office!
Religious wars aside, they're both perfectly fine development environments: Cocoa (nee OpenStep) provides a lot of encapsulated bang for the development buck, but Carbon has both familiarity for old Mac developers and access to deprecated but still-vital functionality. (N.B., I use Cocoa with small amounts of Core and Carbon for functions like getKeys() and the CoreGraphics suite -- but, then, I was never a Mac developer before OSX. YM, as they say, MV.)
Apple keeps going the extra mile with each OSX point release to improve each environment -- the goal at this point is functional parity (though ease-of-use will always differ). Choose whichever one appeals to you, and don't be afraid that one environment is "inferior" to the other.
The Myth 3 "Lazarus" (as in "the dead guy'll look a whole lot better once we get these bandages off") project page is here. (They have a Hotline server for build access, a nice, Mac-centric touch.) It seems that former Mumbo Jumbo developers are involved in the project, so hopefully M3 will emerge from the "beta-quality with a golden-master price" limbo it labored in for so long.
As provocative as the book's thesis seems to be -- and I must admit that my information on it comes entirely from this review -- it's not new. In the 1970s, Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street posited that market fluctuations are mutually independent, though the market follows a general upwards trend, and thus it's impossible (ceteris paribus) to make any bets on short-term stock performance. The upshot is that the only way to beat benchmark indexes is to assume additional risk: trying to beat the market in most cases is nothing more than gambling on an upmarket roulette wheel.
After all, his thesis seems to be that, were it not for those portrayals of misfit geniuses, CS programs would attract fewer "brilliant, socially awkward young people who code on the fly, think they can singlehandedly develop ultracomplex systems, and are interested in breaking into computers" and more people "who socialize well in groups, are team players, are articulate, and are able to give coherent oral presentations."
Some of you may remember the programs that attract those people: business and BCIS. Others may also remember CS classes like VAX assembler and discrete math, courses that are far more likely to scare off those who aren't introverted misfits. (Hell, I've got a thousand-page algorithms text sitting on my bookshelf that by itself scares me!)
This isn't to say that those courses aren't profitable for computer scientists -- but the discipline, like mathematics or certain hard sciences, does tend to attract and maintain a particular kind of person.
In any case, if Dr. Harrison is perturbed by the media's portrayal of programmers, imagine how lawyers feel! Try an episode of Perry Mason in a real court:
And don't get me started on The Agency. God alone knows how many disguntled wannabe James Bonds are trapped as GS-10s in the Community....Now, this doesn't necessarily obviate his concerns, but Brandt is a veteran conspiracy-watcher whose obsessions include mind-control projects and secret cults amongst the elite -- and this tendency to indulge in, as Wm. Gibson would put it, "apophenia" is certainly likely to color his view of Google.
To my eye, his concerns display a kind of parochial paranoia: obviously, we're all aware of the uses and limitations of cookies, none of us want to see the cache (or the Wayback Machine) go away, and his comments about Google's "monopoly" and the "[y]oung, stupid script kiddies" who "think Google is 'way kool'" are just inexplicable.
Telling, I think, is his concern about Google having a former NSA developer on staff -- I've worked with a fairly large number of former spooks from the NSA, CIA and civilian contractors, and to suggest that having the NSA on your resume makes you some kind of Coder in Black is absurd. But, of course, YMMV.
The official AAAS release, including a list of signatories, is here.
In economic terms, cheap overseas labor is the same thing as the MMPM. It's disruptive for those folks -- like us -- who find themselves replaced by the machine, but the net gain will be realized across the economy.
Doesn't mean the procecure won't hurt, but it certainly won't kill.
If you remember your Snow Crash, this is the sort of thing Neal Stephenson was talking about:
Is the use of inexpensive intellectual labor abroad a bad thing? Depends on who you talk to: to a telecom engineer in Dallas who's trying to make payments on a $500,000 house, it is. To someone who can buy cheaper software or services because developer rates went from $150,000/year to $5,000/year, it may not be. And to the population of India, of course, it's a different story entirely.Really, this is the way the game has to be played for the developing world to proceed. After all, the manufacturing and commodity export sectors in the developing world are so competitive across nations that they can't serve as engines for fast growth. The most effective way to move from sweatshop to smartshop is to change the competitive balance and make the developed world compete for their own jobs: the same market forces that give us cheap steel, fossil fuel, and agricultural imports cane be turned back on the markets in which we've previously held both absolute and comparative advantages. Eventually -- and the key here is "eventually" -- this will result in increased prosperity for all, but it's not at all clear that the short-run result will be increased prosperity for us.
This isn't to say that I'm happy about this in terms of my own career (though it is why I'm moving from tech to law), but if the alternative is an ever-larger, increasingly impoverished, and restless population in the developing world -- just the sort of populations attracted to radical terrorist movements -- I'll take the salary hit.
Not that they're bad guys. They're just prosecuting a questionable patent claim against tiny players. I'm still reading the claim, but my first reaction -- and please remember that IANAPL (thank God) -- is that the patent applies to SGML or structured language browsers that have buttons mapped to specific parts of structured documents. In the claim summary:
(Emphasis added)So, it seems that webpages, which are themselves documents that contain "links [that] may take the user to other documents or to locations within the same document," seem to be specifically disclaimed by the patent authors.
Furthermore, from a functional perspective, the purpose of the invention is to allow people to "browse[e] documents according to their structure instead of their contents," whereas a frameset navigation layout either uses links to documents or anchor tags within documents.
This seems to be a case where the problem addressed by the patent solved itself, and now the patent owners want to squeeze money from a better, but irrelevant, mousetrap (to hack a metaphor to death). Perhaps one of the lurking patent lawyers would care to discuss this further?
I'm sorry, but "Stove Logs" isn't an appropriate choice for a president.
Thank you for that rousing silence! I'll be here all week.