If the article is accurate, then no, this is not about examination.
The point of this initiative is to get information about innovations that exist in the wild and document it ("publish" it for statutory purposes) -- and make it easy for examiners to locate it if they want to.
This is about creating prior art that will serve as a bar under 35 USC 102(a). Examiners may find it, or they may not, but if nothing else, the publication will be sitting there for someone to assert in litigation / reexamination -- and quite possibly able to invalidate a bad patent.
...the oldtimers are still keeping the dream alive at (www.dtss.org. Tom Kurtz and others have coded up emulators for the original system software (DTSS, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System), and the site has a repository of old docs, including the Dartmouth BASIC compiler source (warning, PDF). There's a trove of historical info there on the birth of BASIC, too.
Kemeny himself was largely responsible for the revolution in computing, at least at Dartmouth, and his influence went way beyond developing BASIC. The man went from being a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist to being a brilliant mathematician/CS prof/president of the college. He saw that computing would be ubiquitous -- someday -- and issued every student a network ID. In the mid-70s. There were teletypes all over campus (in the performing arts center, even!) where everyone was invited to log on.
Sidenote, as related to me by a Dartmouth math/philosophy prof: Kemeny led the school into the era of coeducation, and expanded student enrollment by about a third when women came. Problem was, this put the college way over its housing capacity. So, being who he was, he ran a series of simulations on the mainframe to figure out how to cram 1.3n where there had previously been n students -- staggering schedules, stretching semesters, you name it. The result was the strange/unique Dartmouth program where all sophomores attend for the summer quarter, and are forced off campus/abroad during the "regular" school year. I can't help but admire the guy's approach to the knapsack problem in a different context...
Having held an active license to practice law within the last ten years should automatically disqualify you from being a legislator.
Um, you do know what legislators do, right? They make laws. You know who spends a lot of time looking at what statutes say and applying it in practice, day in and day out? Lawyers. (Well, lawyers writ broadly -- which includes judges, prosecutors, and a whole bunch of other people who aren't part of the plaintiff's bar [i.e. John Edwards and pals]). There's a reason so many lawyers end up in Congress, and it's not (purely) self-interest. One needs, at the least, a working knowledge of how the American legal system works in order to craft a worthwhile law to be applied in it. (Any decent law school student can look at a law that says "no spam with misleading subject lines", and see there's a world of difficulty waiting in the courts.)
Look, I realize that lawyers are more than a little out of control in this country, but they are necessary players in the legislature.
A lot of analysts are certain Google's not bidding to win, just to make sure they hit the reserve price and ensure openness provisions kick in. Everybody's sure Google doesn't want to be a network operator.
And they may well be right on that count -- but who says they don't want to be a network *architect*? Google has, as TFA points out, $13b in cash. They could easily afford the final sticker price on the licenses, then lease the spectrum to players who have to play on *precisely* their terms (which probably entails not just open access, but a dumb pipe -- just providing bandwidth, instead of mobile phone service.) That pushes the buildout cost away from GOOG, but still might allow for a hellacious ROI.
I can't take credit for these insights/speculations myself -- check out Harold Feld's take and a great deal more detail.
because they're legally obligated to under US law. once you get sued, if you start destroying incriminating evidence, you're doing very bad things as far as the law is concerned.
even if you haven't yet been served with a lawsuit, if you know you've been behaving badly and suddenly dump a truckload of backup tapes in a swamp or something, that will come out -- and looks very, very bad before a judge/arbitrator/jury once a case develops.
Why is Congress fighting anything? They are a legislative branch, not a law enforcement branch! Yes, sure, they have to be informed to create appropriate legislative action, but NO NEW LAWS are required.
Setting aside for the moment the efficacy of this bill (questionable at best, idiotic at worst), Congress has every right (and duty) to fight crime. Who do you think makes penal statutes? Defines civil infractions? That'd be the legislature. They're not a law enforcement branch--that's the executive--but they do a lot of agenda setting.
If they want to fight piracy, authorize some more money.
Uh...you know how Congress allocates funds? By passing laws. They legislate it; it's what they do.
That said, I don't know if I'd bet on this to pass. The lone sponsor is a junior Republican -- which is to say, the only support this bill has is from a low-ranking minority rep. Congress is unwieldy, but at least that stops junk like this from making it onto the books as law sometimes.
Some of these are valid criticisms (noise floor, etc.)...
However:
-Modern day vinyl quality is NOT all "abysmal." A number of labels release 180gm vinyl (which is heavier than most mainstream releases from vinyl's heyday.) Unless you're buying cheapo reissue-45s or some such, it's not a huge deal.
-Current albums are often more than 40-50 minutes--but in general, it's not being crammed onto 2 sides. 4-side and 3-side(!) issues are quite common for the vinyl releases of recent albums. (Aside--the article here is about 7" singles, aka 45s, not albums, anyway.)
-...and yes, there's equalization that's done on these albums, but in my experience, it's no worse than the complete lack of dynamic range that's found on most CDs today.
The subcommittee in question is the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, chaired by Rep. Fred Upton (R, MI-6). Upton's not a terrible rep, but he is basically beholden to the telcos. (Check where his lobbying dollars come from. Tons of telco money.)
Rep. Ed Markey (author of the amendment) sits on this subcommittee, and has been one of the guys in Congress who has pretty consistently sided with the/. crowd on telco issues, privacy issues, etc.
On the whole, it's not too surprising that you'd get Dems crossing the lines to support this one. Telecom is an industry where EVERYbody gets paid, regardless of political affiliation.
I agree, in general, speaking as an ex-CS major. However, the CS program at my school *did* prepare you quite well for graduate study and/or academia in computer science.
Maybe Edsger Dijkstra was right, and CS really is just a branch of mathematics, as he argues in his paper "The Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science." If that's the case, it's unsurprising that you don't necessarily learn how to use $version_control_system or $Windowing_API or whatever people expect in the working world as a CS undergrad.
I bailed because I knew I didn't want to pursue graduate studies (and, let's face it, I'm not a stellar mathematician.) I'm (like many others) now doing interdisciplinary study: CS + law/public policy. If nothing else, this country seems to need more lawyers, if not good developers.
Dartmouth's wired network is fast enough. All the dorms / academic buildings are switched 100Mbit internally (except for a few Gbit labs), and the backbone is all GigE fiber.
Of course, the old cable pulls are all still there from the Cat3 Appletalk network, too...
So yeah, to some extent, it's overkill / flashiness.
See, that's the thing--we haven't really been first on a lot of these things, but we were covered / promoted better. (Wired named us the "most wired college" in like 1999. We've fallen a long way since.)
As for research institution, that's debatable. The administration is pushing hard for that, but we're still mostly undergrad-focused...
...and I work at the helpdesk, no less. I've beta-tested the VOIP rollout and supported the rest.
My personal opinion is that the wireless network will NOT hold up well under heavy load once all these services go into widespread use. As it stands now, things slow to a crawl during finals, etc, when people swarm the library and the APs. This is, after all, an 802.11b campuswide network. The backbone is there, but I don't know how the APs will deal with all these latency-sensitive streams.
Side note: they've been promoting the VOIP option in the media for months now, but students aren't allowed to get extensions. A little disingenuous, no? Hell, I'd just be happy if the "100% coverage" actually ever gave me a signal in my room.
There's some content, and prospects, for this--but so far, it's just PR-fluff.
I don't consider myself "clever" for the choice--I'm just attempting to be pragmatic. I'm working with limited resources. I don't have the funding available to pay for W2K3 + SQL server, RHEL, etc. I'm doing what I can with what I have. Small businesses don't necessarily have a lot of resources at their disposal--if they did, why would they hire CS students?
FC3 is, admittedly, not "stable" like, say, BSD is stable. It's also not unstable like a -test branch is unstable. It's a production distro, albeit one with less-seasoned packages. Its performance for us so far has been flawless.
And, more importantly, it's an OS that is known and understood by the people who will support it after I'm gone . There's a huge userbase--and knowledgebase--accessible for no cost. There's a massive collection of easily-managed packages. (And the people who will tend this db server know how to use it all.)
I openly admit there may be better options for this deployment. But remember, with a CS undergrad, you're not getting a seasoned professional. You're getting someone who, to some extent, learns the ropes as they go. I'd be willing to bet you were one yourself, one day.
...I can say that Linux and FOSS in general have been a godsend for my development.
We've got ~30 users, and our main business is data entry for financial / real estate transactions. That adds up to a lot of database hits, and a lot of data, period, for such a small shop.
Our main database server (which was recently deployed) runs Fedora Core 3 and Postgres. Setup was a breeze, and it's been rock solid. Postgres has a lot of the features you'll see in higher-end databases (PL/pgsql is similar to Oracle's PL/SQL). The main thing it lacks, IMO, is built-in auditing support. It does have a richer featureset than MySQL and some things that are better suited to business needs.
Our implementation uses httpd & php as the client interface. Report generation is done via PDF or postscript. PHP is relatively easy to pick up and seems to make for relatively fast development, too.
I can't speak for CRM/ SCM uses, but for our moderate demands, Linux+Apache+PHP+Postgres gets it done quickly and quite cheaply.
for the 1956 presidential race, the results were fed into Dartmouth College's mainframe. (I forget make/model). The process was tended by John Kemeny (one of the inventors of BASIC.)
Results / predictions were reported via the campus radio station (WDCR), which passed their results on to other stations in New England.
This was in the days before most news organizations had major forecasting...
As I understand Novell's intent here, the patent portfolio is more like a shield than a sword.
If BigAggressiveCorporation X has a big portfolio, they can use it to attack anyone else who could even vaguely be construed as infringing, and thus some small-timers opt to steer clear of what might otherwise be a great idea because of the risk of litigation.
Novell, on the other hand, is basically saying "Hey, all this stuff we've got patented is OK to use in open source. We'll defend that it is, too." Note the "dictated by the actions of others" comment they make.
You're telling me. For a long time, I'd been using PHP + MySQL for web-based data-entry programs for my company. (Because, well, I basically have zero budget.)
I just started playing with Postgres a few weeks ago, and it's a godsend. The databases I work with are spaghetti-piles, even after normalization, that have lots of relationships that must be maintained between tables. Foreign keys + cascades = serenity. Not to mention stored procs, triggers... for my purposes, there's not much comparison.
I TA'ed a survey CS course (concepts in computing kinda stuff) a while back. One of the assignments given to all the students was to go create a Wikipedia article on a topic they knew something about. So we (collectively) ended up with articles about high schools, small towns, and minor celebrities.
That information *is* relevant to people, if not a ton of them.
The greatest part? Out of those 100 kids, I'd say around half of them are still using/ contributing to wikipedia...and these are art history majors, english majors, philosophy kids...wikipedia's big enough to appeal to them all.
Well, at least in Detroit, there seems to be a sense of humor (or at least, wit.)
A year or two back Marshall Mathers (aka recording artist Eminem) was sued by a childhood bully for defamation. The judge delivered a standard legalese ruling, and also, a
rap of the ruling.
I should probably post this AC, but oh well--I work in user support at a fairly major college in the northeast. Basically, my team is who gets stuck enforcing RIAA/MPAA/BSA enforcement requests on students. Our network guys know all about i2hub (it's kinda hard not to notice the traffic, after all) and honestly, I'm surprised we haven't been ordered to crack down already.
Anyway, rumors are floating around (and coming down from above) that the RIAA has a few machines on i2hub just watching traffic...
Remember, kiddies: I2 has corporate customers too, not just.edu's. It's probably not too hard to convince one business or one college let you run a few sniffers...
Either you're a prof or you've gotten extremely lucky housing assignments.:) Two years, three rooms, and lousy, lousy wireless reception in all of them. Also, key places like the 4th floor of Berry (main library) have big holes.
We do have an assload of APs, though, and a lot of ground covered in theory. Probably makes for a strong ranking.
Of course, our wireless network is COMPLETELY unsecure here, too...as in, no WEP, no nothing. You know the SSID, you're on the network, and all traffic is out in the open.
Rivers (that enigmatic, endearingly geeky Weezer frontman) has been doing this for years, by himself. He has notebooks and notebooks filled with his mathematical analyses of many of the biggest pop and rock hits ever written.
Appears to work (or at least teach him a pattern)--Weezer's damn catchy.
Slashdot Mirror
If the article is accurate, then no, this is not about examination.
The point of this initiative is to get information about innovations that exist in the wild and document it ("publish" it for statutory purposes) -- and make it easy for examiners to locate it if they want to.
This is about creating prior art that will serve as a bar under 35 USC 102(a). Examiners may find it, or they may not, but if nothing else, the publication will be sitting there for someone to assert in litigation / reexamination -- and quite possibly able to invalidate a bad patent.
...the oldtimers are still keeping the dream alive at (www.dtss.org. Tom Kurtz and others have coded up emulators for the original system software (DTSS, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System), and the site has a repository of old docs, including the Dartmouth BASIC compiler source (warning, PDF). There's a trove of historical info there on the birth of BASIC, too.
Kemeny himself was largely responsible for the revolution in computing, at least at Dartmouth, and his influence went way beyond developing BASIC. The man went from being a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist to being a brilliant mathematician/CS prof/president of the college. He saw that computing would be ubiquitous -- someday -- and issued every student a network ID. In the mid-70s. There were teletypes all over campus (in the performing arts center, even!) where everyone was invited to log on.
Sidenote, as related to me by a Dartmouth math/philosophy prof: Kemeny led the school into the era of coeducation, and expanded student enrollment by about a third when women came. Problem was, this put the college way over its housing capacity. So, being who he was, he ran a series of simulations on the mainframe to figure out how to cram 1.3n where there had previously been n students -- staggering schedules, stretching semesters, you name it. The result was the strange/unique Dartmouth program where all sophomores attend for the summer quarter, and are forced off campus/abroad during the "regular" school year. I can't help but admire the guy's approach to the knapsack problem in a different context...
Having held an active license to practice law within the last ten years should automatically disqualify you from being a legislator.
Um, you do know what legislators do, right? They make laws. You know who spends a lot of time looking at what statutes say and applying it in practice, day in and day out? Lawyers. (Well, lawyers writ broadly -- which includes judges, prosecutors, and a whole bunch of other people who aren't part of the plaintiff's bar [i.e. John Edwards and pals]). There's a reason so many lawyers end up in Congress, and it's not (purely) self-interest. One needs, at the least, a working knowledge of how the American legal system works in order to craft a worthwhile law to be applied in it. (Any decent law school student can look at a law that says "no spam with misleading subject lines", and see there's a world of difficulty waiting in the courts.)
Look, I realize that lawyers are more than a little out of control in this country, but they are necessary players in the legislature.
A lot of analysts are certain Google's not bidding to win, just to make sure they hit the reserve price and ensure openness provisions kick in. Everybody's sure Google doesn't want to be a network operator.
And they may well be right on that count -- but who says they don't want to be a network *architect*? Google has, as TFA points out, $13b in cash. They could easily afford the final sticker price on the licenses, then lease the spectrum to players who have to play on *precisely* their terms (which probably entails not just open access, but a dumb pipe -- just providing bandwidth, instead of mobile phone service.) That pushes the buildout cost away from GOOG, but still might allow for a hellacious ROI.
I can't take credit for these insights/speculations myself -- check out Harold Feld's take and a great deal more detail.
short answer why people keep them?
because they're legally obligated to under US law. once you get sued, if you start destroying incriminating evidence, you're doing very bad things as far as the law is concerned.
even if you haven't yet been served with a lawsuit, if you know you've been behaving badly and suddenly dump a truckload of backup tapes in a swamp or something, that will come out -- and looks very, very bad before a judge/arbitrator/jury once a case develops.
Setting aside for the moment the efficacy of this bill (questionable at best, idiotic at worst), Congress has every right (and duty) to fight crime. Who do you think makes penal statutes? Defines civil infractions? That'd be the legislature. They're not a law enforcement branch--that's the executive--but they do a lot of agenda setting.
If they want to fight piracy, authorize some more money.
Uh...you know how Congress allocates funds? By passing laws. They legislate it; it's what they do.
That said, I don't know if I'd bet on this to pass. The lone sponsor is a junior Republican -- which is to say, the only support this bill has is from a low-ranking minority rep. Congress is unwieldy, but at least that stops junk like this from making it onto the books as law sometimes.
Some of these are valid criticisms (noise floor, etc.)...
However:
-Modern day vinyl quality is NOT all "abysmal." A number of labels release 180gm vinyl (which is heavier than most mainstream releases from vinyl's heyday.) Unless you're buying cheapo reissue-45s or some such, it's not a huge deal.
-Current albums are often more than 40-50 minutes--but in general, it's not being crammed onto 2 sides. 4-side and 3-side(!) issues are quite common for the vinyl releases of recent albums. (Aside--the article here is about 7" singles, aka 45s, not albums, anyway.)
-...and yes, there's equalization that's done on these albums, but in my experience, it's no worse than the complete lack of dynamic range that's found on most CDs today.
Rep. Ed Markey (author of the amendment) sits on this subcommittee, and has been one of the guys in Congress who has pretty consistently sided with the /. crowd on telco issues, privacy issues, etc.
On the whole, it's not too surprising that you'd get Dems crossing the lines to support this one. Telecom is an industry where EVERYbody gets paid, regardless of political affiliation.
Maybe Edsger Dijkstra was right, and CS really is just a branch of mathematics, as he argues in his paper "The Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science." If that's the case, it's unsurprising that you don't necessarily learn how to use $version_control_system or $Windowing_API or whatever people expect in the working world as a CS undergrad.
I bailed because I knew I didn't want to pursue graduate studies (and, let's face it, I'm not a stellar mathematician.) I'm (like many others) now doing interdisciplinary study: CS + law/public policy. If nothing else, this country seems to need more lawyers, if not good developers.
Sigh.
I mean, there's something to be said for learning data structures and operating systems from a guy who helped invent the idea of pipes.
McIlroy's homepage.
Dartmouth's wired network is fast enough. All the dorms / academic buildings are switched 100Mbit internally (except for a few Gbit labs), and the backbone is all GigE fiber. Of course, the old cable pulls are all still there from the Cat3 Appletalk network, too... So yeah, to some extent, it's overkill / flashiness.
As for research institution, that's debatable. The administration is pushing hard for that, but we're still mostly undergrad-focused...
...and I work at the helpdesk, no less. I've beta-tested the VOIP rollout and supported the rest. My personal opinion is that the wireless network will NOT hold up well under heavy load once all these services go into widespread use. As it stands now, things slow to a crawl during finals, etc, when people swarm the library and the APs. This is, after all, an 802.11b campuswide network. The backbone is there, but I don't know how the APs will deal with all these latency-sensitive streams. Side note: they've been promoting the VOIP option in the media for months now, but students aren't allowed to get extensions. A little disingenuous, no? Hell, I'd just be happy if the "100% coverage" actually ever gave me a signal in my room. There's some content, and prospects, for this--but so far, it's just PR-fluff.
FC3 is, admittedly, not "stable" like, say, BSD is stable. It's also not unstable like a -test branch is unstable. It's a production distro, albeit one with less-seasoned packages. Its performance for us so far has been flawless. And, more importantly, it's an OS that is known and understood by the people who will support it after I'm gone . There's a huge userbase--and knowledgebase--accessible for no cost. There's a massive collection of easily-managed packages. (And the people who will tend this db server know how to use it all.)
I openly admit there may be better options for this deployment. But remember, with a CS undergrad, you're not getting a seasoned professional. You're getting someone who, to some extent, learns the ropes as they go. I'd be willing to bet you were one yourself, one day.
...I can say that Linux and FOSS in general have been a godsend for my development.
We've got ~30 users, and our main business is data entry for financial / real estate transactions. That adds up to a lot of database hits, and a lot of data, period, for such a small shop.
Our main database server (which was recently deployed) runs Fedora Core 3 and Postgres. Setup was a breeze, and it's been rock solid. Postgres has a lot of the features you'll see in higher-end databases (PL/pgsql is similar to Oracle's PL/SQL). The main thing it lacks, IMO, is built-in auditing support. It does have a richer featureset than MySQL and some things that are better suited to business needs.
Our implementation uses httpd & php as the client interface. Report generation is done via PDF or postscript. PHP is relatively easy to pick up and seems to make for relatively fast development, too.
I can't speak for CRM/ SCM uses, but for our moderate demands, Linux+Apache+PHP+Postgres gets it done quickly and quite cheaply.
for the 1956 presidential race, the results were fed into Dartmouth College's mainframe. (I forget make/model). The process was tended by John Kemeny (one of the inventors of BASIC.)
Results / predictions were reported via the campus radio station (WDCR), which passed their results on to other stations in New England.
This was in the days before most news organizations had major forecasting...
Well, it's not quite the same tactic...
As I understand Novell's intent here, the patent portfolio is more like a shield than a sword.
If BigAggressiveCorporation X has a big portfolio, they can use it to attack anyone else who could even vaguely be construed as infringing, and thus some small-timers opt to steer clear of what might otherwise be a great idea because of the risk of litigation.
Novell, on the other hand, is basically saying "Hey, all this stuff we've got patented is OK to use in open source. We'll defend that it is, too." Note the "dictated by the actions of others" comment they make.
ianal, ymmv, bbq.
You're telling me. For a long time, I'd been using PHP + MySQL for web-based data-entry programs for my company. (Because, well, I basically have zero budget.)
I just started playing with Postgres a few weeks ago, and it's a godsend. The databases I work with are spaghetti-piles, even after normalization, that have lots of relationships that must be maintained between tables. Foreign keys + cascades = serenity. Not to mention stored procs, triggers... for my purposes, there's not much comparison.
I TA'ed a survey CS course (concepts in computing kinda stuff) a while back. One of the assignments given to all the students was to go create a Wikipedia article on a topic they knew something about. So we (collectively) ended up with articles about high schools, small towns, and minor celebrities.
That information *is* relevant to people, if not a ton of them.
The greatest part? Out of those 100 kids, I'd say around half of them are still using/ contributing to wikipedia...and these are art history majors, english majors, philosophy kids...wikipedia's big enough to appeal to them all.
-------Philip Jose Farmer
A year or two back Marshall Mathers (aka recording artist Eminem) was sued by a childhood bully for defamation. The judge delivered a standard legalese ruling, and also, a rap of the ruling.
I shit you not.
Further case details here.
You're more right than you know.
.edu's. It's probably not too hard to convince one business or one college let you run a few sniffers...
I should probably post this AC, but oh well--I work in user support at a fairly major college in the northeast. Basically, my team is who gets stuck enforcing RIAA/MPAA/BSA enforcement requests on students. Our network guys know all about i2hub (it's kinda hard not to notice the traffic, after all) and honestly, I'm surprised we haven't been ordered to crack down already.
Anyway, rumors are floating around (and coming down from above) that the RIAA has a few machines on i2hub just watching traffic...
Remember, kiddies: I2 has corporate customers too, not just
Guaranteed signal? 100% of campus?
:) Two years, three rooms, and lousy, lousy wireless reception in all of them. Also, key places like the 4th floor of Berry (main library) have big holes.
Either you're a prof or you've gotten extremely lucky housing assignments.
We do have an assload of APs, though, and a lot of ground covered in theory. Probably makes for a strong ranking.
Of course, our wireless network is COMPLETELY unsecure here, too...as in, no WEP, no nothing. You know the SSID, you're on the network, and all traffic is out in the open.
Needless to say, I use SSH a lot...
Dartmouth researcher poisoned by 2 droplets.
Odd that this happened (semi-recently) at my school, and nobody's ever mentioned it in ANY of the chem classes I've taken...
Appears to work (or at least teach him a pattern)--Weezer's damn catchy.