The accusation (attack) would be that the images presented as evidence or broadcast had been edited.
This is a rather quicker-paced instance of a class of problems found in for instnace medical record applications.
One solution (developed in one form as part of the GNUMed project, as GNotary) is to generate a hash or each element of the record, ship that over the network to one or several distant servers whose ownership is separate from the originator, and receive back a timestamped hash of the hash.
The distant server can then testify that it received a hash (that can be shown to correspond to the record being presented as original) at a particular time.
If the times of production and receipt are very similar then accusations of editing would be similar to accusations of enormous talent and processing speed.
(Unix geek, radical and English author living in Scotland for anyone who didn't know - you'd enjoy "The Atrocity Archives" if you like/.))
In his novels Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise Suggested that after the Spike/Singularity/quite a while the IETF would be the only vestige of current political institutions and be the UN.
I think it was just a throwaway, like having a door dilate, but it entertained.
The canon of the (UK) National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) http://www.nelh.nhs.uk is that knowledge should be presented in layers.
First a headline - 30 second knowledge - with behind that a brief treatment, to be read in 5 minutes, and behind that a more detailed treatment - an hour's worth.
I wouldn't say it has been achieved, but the idea does inform some parts of the cloud.
I'm not sure what software exists to help people to write in that way, and it may be an actual lack with one consequence being rather monolithic articles that don't easily cater to a range of people.
"My point was simply that Wikipedia, by it's very nature, tends to lend itself to being extremely detailed in specific areas of interest that appeal to it's readership and contributor-ship"
I'm struck by the concept of an encyclopaedia that is most detailed in areas that do not appeal to the {readers|people to whom it is hoped to distribute it}
There is actually quite a good point there, that rather than being about things you are not interested in but would be improved by reading, there is more merit in references about stuff you don't know well than that which you do.
But I still think it would be a very odd book that was made that way.
Lets tell the Audit Commission that FLOSS is one of the key antidotes to lock-in, uncontrolled expense and failure, and then see how much code we can get added to OSCAR-McMaster and GNUMed and VistA to make them UK solutions.
I was involved with Read 3.1 and at one point with the IPU oversight of the Mayo Clinic integration work - Read 3 and the CAPS SNOMED codesets. The intention was that every Read 2 code would be in Read 3, and that all the SNOMED concepts and all the Read concepts would be combined into the finished thing, whatever it is called this week.
That it takes the SNOMED name is less a reflection of its contents than of the embarrassment that the NHS Clinical Coding Centre (where the Read Codes were elaborated) caused to IPU, NHS and gov.uk when they were looked at hard.
The most obvious tactic is to demonstrate to a certain other supplier of desktop IT systems that they are not indispensible.
As Newham (local government in part of London) did.
Newham's anticipated savings and level of support with their eventual systems are reported to have made sharp alterations as a result of that tactic.
These will not be the first Linux desktops in the NHS and its contractors (most GPs are not directly part of the NHS but are contractors to it althoguh the latest Great Idea is to compulsorily outsource our IT to the NHS - an interesting strategy without so far a coherently stated logistical approach to implementing it) - I for one have Linux on several of the machines in the office, but our old clinical automation is Clipper/DOS and mostly won't run under DOSemu at least for me.
Linguistic Inflation and paralysis of thought
The other explanation is linguistic inflation.
The NHS management can't buy things, spend money on services etc, rather they "invest".
Similarly, a sensible idea to follow-up a small trial of an office desktop by putting 5k of them to use wherever people want to use that rather than the insecure legacy system of a competitor noted for its frequent excursions from legal operation in order to see how it goes - an experiment - gets inflated into "tactical deployment".
In Soviet Russia, Kremlin watchers used to decode gnomic utterances, stripping the revolutionary cloaking in order to divine the actual information content. Religion is a bit the same.
As to the act itself, I'm here and I applaud it. I've been working for FLOSS implementation in healthcare for 5 years, including chairing the NHS session of the OSHCA London meeting which the NHS Information Authority sponsored - I would say in a sensible illustration of applying a little attention to trends other than the main line in order to remain knowledgeable about them. During that meeting the head of the NHSIA (who opened it) accepted a post in the Cabinet Office office of the e-envoy.... and a while later that Office produced the UK Policy on F/OSS from work done mainly by QinetiQ.
Oh, and a week or two after it billg had lunch with the Prime Minister and the NHS got a deal on 1E6 copies of Windows - as a tactic IMHO against embarrassment by software audits - nobody knows how many copies of anything are around in a hospital Trust, nor could find the licences.
FLOSS of course offers a strategic approach to avoiding that risk and letting people take a copy home, but governments are not yet entirely comfortable with such loose arrangements.
" Compatability with the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the GPL/LGPL licenses is already in question."
With a move to W2k for machines that need USB kit plugged into them, and I quite like it, and one machine - this one running XP. I keep thinking of putting W2k on this one, but so far it has escaped.
The other working machines have Linux on them, but one DOS application requires we continue with some sort of MS OS for a while longer.
We are small, but in no othr way unusual in being on those older versions.
One Open Source software business model simply accepts that the software has no sale value and no incremental cost. (A CD has an incremental cost, but that isn't latered by changing the pattern of dots on it).
So if the software lies around like leaves on the forest floor and the saleable thing is advice on which ones to pick up and how to use them...
whatever percentage of the sale value a patent-asserter demands is of little relevance, and it is unclear to me that they have any right to prevent the use of the software.
Sale of new software written for money, yes.
Not having software patents over here, yet, I may be misunderstanding something about them?
Good luck to Munich, and I hope the patent issue gets sorted out for the whole EU as a result.
The original article says:-
"Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer interrupted a ski trip in Switzerland a year and a half ago to visit Munich"
I'm curious, or perhpas doubtful is a better word, about whether the account of him interrupting ("it isn't important to us, but while I'm over in Yurrup I'll pop next door and straighten out Munich") a pre-planned trip to a particular resort, hotel etc in Switzerland is accurate, or whether he actually made a specific trip from the USA to Germany for the purpose ("get your ass to Munich and try and head off this disaster Steve").
Does anyone know what flight mr Balmer arrived at Munich on, which he left on, what accomodation in Switzerland he was booked into, when the booking was made, compared to the time of his Munich visit.
Microsoft AIUI made a specific statement that he had interrupted ("no big deal, happened to be nearby, makes it claimable against tax if you can find something business-like to do in your holiday") a pre-planned holiday.
Fact checking...
"What really irks me is that rather than invent new solutions to existing problems, the free software community waits for a commercial vendor to implement a solution, and then copies it. "
You can look it up on NewsForge, but it is in the waiting room of my medical practice.
For economy, safety and my convenience I chose Linux and for convenience and actually speed I chose Opera.
I'd be happy supporting Mozilla on it nowadays, or probably just the browser component when it reaches 1.0, and I see no reason to expect people would have trouble with it, they are not at present.
Fellow of the Royal Society (refer to Neal Stephenson's recent novel for more detail) which he was elected to a year before the knighthood was probably a bigger accolade from his peer group.
A "K" is from government, and more easily understandable by non-techies.
While these relics of a largely vanished empire persist it is desirable that the architects of the technical infrastructure get a share. When we establish a republic or whatever we'll change the names.
In Soviet Russia, you aspire to the Order of Lenin.
In the UK we keep a cradle to grave medical record, until relatively recently in an A5 sized brown cardboard packet named after Lloyd-George.
"Socialised medicine" (except he was a Liberal, but never mind)
However, wherever the record is, and however it is formatted, the people _holding_ it have a need to keep it usable for as long as I said for use, or a shorter time but still often > 25 years for leagla and other uses.
Are you not in the midst of a programme to connect your medical records even now?
to the data (and means to handle it) of patient records, which need to be preserved workably for around 100 years + the age of reproduction of the next generation, which is near enough forever now.
to the medical logic modules. If we keep starting again we are not going to accumulate the rules and templates that are needed, instead we will keep generating the same sets of the obvious ones, again and again.
And paying for the smae thing agian an again.
http://www.oshca.net/ Open Source Healthcare Alliance is quietly encouraging some of this.
I think it would recognise grass plants, and trim them to the preset height (bit taller in the hollow please) and remove anything else - moss, daisies, fish (I live in Devon, it rains a bit).
Inside the house, no longer having to deal with as much gardening clothing, we would find the Laundroid, a development of the automatic washing machine and the artificial nose, which prowls the house making decisions about items of clothing, and carrying them out.
I think the IP traffic will mostly stay within the country because most of us spend most time talking to our familes and friends, who by no conicidence live in the same country as us.
Gateways on the networks are no big deal, but I have been very impressed by how TCP/IP has become a generic way of networking. Even to Mars I gather.
Slashdot Mirror
The accusation (attack) would be that the images presented as evidence or broadcast had been edited.
This is a rather quicker-paced instance of a class of problems found in for instnace medical record applications.
One solution (developed in one form as part of the GNUMed project, as GNotary) is to generate a hash or each element of the record, ship that over the network to one or several distant servers whose ownership is separate from the originator, and receive back a timestamped hash of the hash.
The distant server can then testify that it received a hash (that can be shown to correspond to the record being presented as original) at a particular time.
If the times of production and receipt are very similar then accusations of editing would be similar to accusations of enormous talent and processing speed.
It spread to the USSR.
Europe has a tradition of war that had left us more relaxed about it.
Why the first thing? Because ICBMs gave the capacty for nation-states to strike at home.
Why now? 11/9 (as we would say here)
In his novels Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise Suggested that after the Spike/Singularity/quite a while the IETF would be the only vestige of current political institutions and be the UN.
I think it was just a throwaway, like having a door dilate, but it entertained.
Addition to language noted.
Rather like naming the 13th butcher's shop...
Mr Smith's mail client
Mr Jones' mail client.
Too simple?
The canon of the (UK) National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) http://www.nelh.nhs.uk is that knowledge should be presented in layers.
First a headline - 30 second knowledge - with behind that a brief treatment, to be read in 5 minutes, and behind that a more detailed treatment - an hour's worth.
I wouldn't say it has been achieved, but the idea does inform some parts of the cloud.
I'm not sure what software exists to help people to write in that way, and it may be an actual lack with one consequence being rather monolithic articles that don't easily cater to a range of people.
"My point was simply that Wikipedia, by it's very nature, tends to lend itself to being extremely detailed in specific areas of interest that appeal to it's readership and contributor-ship"
I'm struck by the concept of an encyclopaedia that is most detailed in areas that do not appeal to the {readers|people to whom it is hoped to distribute it}
There is actually quite a good point there, that rather than being about things you are not interested in but would be improved by reading, there is more merit in references about stuff you don't know well than that which you do.
But I still think it would be a very odd book that was made that way.
I was involved with Read 3.1 and at one point with the IPU oversight of the Mayo Clinic integration work - Read 3 and the CAPS SNOMED codesets. The intention was that every Read 2 code would be in Read 3, and that all the SNOMED concepts and all the Read concepts would be combined into the finished thing, whatever it is called this week.
That it takes the SNOMED name is less a reflection of its contents than of the embarrassment that the NHS Clinical Coding Centre (where the Read Codes were elaborated) caused to IPU, NHS and gov.uk when they were looked at hard.
As Newham (local government in part of London) did.
Newham's anticipated savings and level of support with their eventual systems are reported to have made sharp alterations as a result of that tactic.
These will not be the first Linux desktops in the NHS and its contractors (most GPs are not directly part of the NHS but are contractors to it althoguh the latest Great Idea is to compulsorily outsource our IT to the NHS - an interesting strategy without so far a coherently stated logistical approach to implementing it) - I for one have Linux on several of the machines in the office, but our old clinical automation is Clipper/DOS and mostly won't run under DOSemu at least for me.
Linguistic Inflation and paralysis of thought The other explanation is linguistic inflation.
The NHS management can't buy things, spend money on services etc, rather they "invest".
Similarly, a sensible idea to follow-up a small trial of an office desktop by putting 5k of them to use wherever people want to use that rather than the insecure legacy system of a competitor noted for its frequent excursions from legal operation in order to see how it goes - an experiment - gets inflated into "tactical deployment".
In Soviet Russia, Kremlin watchers used to decode gnomic utterances, stripping the revolutionary cloaking in order to divine the actual information content. Religion is a bit the same.
As to the act itself, I'm here and I applaud it. I've been working for FLOSS implementation in healthcare for 5 years, including chairing the NHS session of the OSHCA London meeting which the NHS Information Authority sponsored - I would say in a sensible illustration of applying a little attention to trends other than the main line in order to remain knowledgeable about them. During that meeting the head of the NHSIA (who opened it) accepted a post in the Cabinet Office office of the e-envoy.... and a while later that Office produced the UK Policy on F/OSS from work done mainly by QinetiQ.
Oh, and a week or two after it billg had lunch with the Prime Minister and the NHS got a deal on 1E6 copies of Windows - as a tactic IMHO against embarrassment by software audits - nobody knows how many copies of anything are around in a hospital Trust, nor could find the licences.
FLOSS of course offers a strategic approach to avoiding that risk and letting people take a copy home, but governments are not yet entirely comfortable with such loose arrangements.
" Compatability with the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the GPL/LGPL licenses is already in question."
With a move to W2k for machines that need USB kit plugged into them, and I quite like it, and one machine - this one running XP. I keep thinking of putting W2k on this one, but so far it has escaped.
The other working machines have Linux on them, but one DOS application requires we continue with some sort of MS OS for a while longer.
We are small, but in no othr way unusual in being on those older versions.
One Open Source software business model simply accepts that the software has no sale value and no incremental cost. (A CD has an incremental cost, but that isn't latered by changing the pattern of dots on it).
So if the software lies around like leaves on the forest floor and the saleable thing is advice on which ones to pick up and how to use them...
whatever percentage of the sale value a patent-asserter demands is of little relevance, and it is unclear to me that they have any right to prevent the use of the software.
Sale of new software written for money, yes.
Not having software patents over here, yet, I may be misunderstanding something about them?
Good luck to Munich, and I hope the patent issue gets sorted out for the whole EU as a result. The original article says:- "Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer interrupted a ski trip in Switzerland a year and a half ago to visit Munich" I'm curious, or perhpas doubtful is a better word, about whether the account of him interrupting ("it isn't important to us, but while I'm over in Yurrup I'll pop next door and straighten out Munich") a pre-planned trip to a particular resort, hotel etc in Switzerland is accurate, or whether he actually made a specific trip from the USA to Germany for the purpose ("get your ass to Munich and try and head off this disaster Steve"). Does anyone know what flight mr Balmer arrived at Munich on, which he left on, what accomodation in Switzerland he was booked into, when the booking was made, compared to the time of his Munich visit. Microsoft AIUI made a specific statement that he had interrupted ("no big deal, happened to be nearby, makes it claimable against tax if you can find something business-like to do in your holiday") a pre-planned holiday. Fact checking...
The Data Protection Act required no such thing.
There was quite a long gap between the gas being cut off and winter though.
"What really irks me is that rather than invent new solutions to existing problems, the free software community waits for a commercial vendor to implement a solution, and then copies it. "
Relax. It didn't happen.
SPF came from the OSS community and is in use.
Its proposed merged form came later.
The arguments over whether security can only come from obscurity are old, and need not be rehashed.
And this is very unlike the GPL.
RMS does seem to understand the GPL...
You can look it up on NewsForge, but it is in the waiting room of my medical practice.
For economy, safety and my convenience I chose Linux and for convenience and actually speed I chose Opera.
I'd be happy supporting Mozilla on it nowadays, or probably just the browser component when it reaches 1.0, and I see no reason to expect people would have trouble with it, they are not at present.
It gets used, lightly.
Crazy not to adopt that attitude.
Fellow of the Royal Society (refer to Neal Stephenson's recent novel for more detail) which he was elected to a year before the knighthood was probably a bigger accolade from his peer group.
A "K" is from government, and more easily understandable by non-techies.
While these relics of a largely vanished empire persist it is desirable that the architects of the technical infrastructure get a share. When we establish a republic or whatever we'll change the names.
In Soviet Russia, you aspire to the Order of Lenin.
In the UK we keep a cradle to grave medical record, until relatively recently in an A5 sized brown cardboard packet named after Lloyd-George. "Socialised medicine" (except he was a Liberal, but never mind) However, wherever the record is, and however it is formatted, the people _holding_ it have a need to keep it usable for as long as I said for use, or a shorter time but still often > 25 years for leagla and other uses. Are you not in the midst of a programme to connect your medical records even now?
It applies in two areas:-
to the data (and means to handle it) of patient records, which need to be preserved workably for around 100 years + the age of reproduction of the next generation, which is near enough forever now.
to the medical logic modules. If we keep starting again we are not going to accumulate the rules and templates that are needed, instead we will keep generating the same sets of the obvious ones, again and again.
And paying for the smae thing agian an again.
http://www.oshca.net/ Open Source Healthcare Alliance is quietly encouraging some of this.
I think it would recognise grass plants, and trim them to the preset height (bit taller in the hollow please) and remove anything else - moss, daisies, fish (I live in Devon, it rains a bit).
Inside the house, no longer having to deal with as much gardening clothing, we would find the Laundroid, a development of the automatic washing machine and the artificial nose, which prowls the house making decisions about items of clothing, and carrying them out.
Gateways on the networks are no big deal, but I have been very impressed by how TCP/IP has become a generic way of networking. Even to Mars I gather.
However, few of us have relatives on Mars, yet.
writes Flash, does it not?
Agreed, Flash is only good for a few things, and is commonly used for things it is not good for.
and how else could it do that?