I don't mean this as flamebait, but I think everybody is misreading the CNN article.
The article does not say that IBM is endorsing Linux, or embracing Linux, or even suggesting Linux. What the article does say is that some analyst from Giga thinks that IBM is going to promote Linux.
Now--how credible is the analyst? He suggests that IBM is going to be OS-neutral in selling Linux vs. AIX, OS/400, or OS/390. He states that IBM will be superior to Dell because they'll support all "the major flavors."
Right.
IBM is going to offer Linux on an equal footing with OS/390 and OS/400? Whoever believes that hasn't ordered an upgrade of OS/400--the money IBM charges is unbelievable. "Want to update your disk drives? Sorry--the update only comes with an update to the OS. And that's a mere thousand bucks." IBM may pay lip service to Linux (their "support" may only amount to offering to preload it)--but they make a bunch of money off of operating system sales, and they're not going to just write that revenue off.
A 300-person IBM group is little more than a market study. When IBM decided to launch the Aptiva PCs (trying to compete with Dell) they had more than 1200 people--and Aptiva lasted less than 2 years.
If IBM were to truly back Linux, that would certainly be newsworthy. But this article is simply regurgitating a not-very-up-to-speed analyst's opinion, and I don't think his assertions pass the smell test.
No--I'm not writing flame bait. I'm stating brutal, legal, fact in U.S. law.
Everybody got all kinds of enthused a few weeks back when Red Hat did an IPO. Yeah, things got kind of funky about who could get pre-IPO shares and so forth, but Red Hat did the right thing and lots of deserving people got in on the bottom floor.
But guess what? Red Hat is now a publicly-traded company. And the directors of a publicly-traded company have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize revenue. Let me re-phrase that in a different way: the directors of a publicly-traded company must always view the interests of their shareholders as being more important than the views of any group--employees, customers, community--anybody.
So it is entirely fair to assume that Red Hat is moving into Europe intent on dominating the European marketplace for Linux. (Note, BTW, that the Red Hat official doesn't say, "for our distro of Linux"--he says, "for Linux.") Red Hat has to fight for market dominance, and defend their marketplace dominance, or else they're going to join the long list of technology companies that get clobbered by shareholder rights suits.
We might all agree that the people at Red Hat are worthy folks. We might all agree that they are noble of heart, and true of purpose. But once they become a publicly-traded company, they have to constantly increase their share value, or their stock will be hammered. And if their stock price is hammered, and a plaintiff can demonstrate that the directors acted on behalf of another group to the detriment of the shareholders, Red Hat can lose a huge chunk of money. In other words, Red Hat cannot act "for the good of the Linux community" if that means that Red Hat revenues--in this quarter--will suffer.
My little company develops large-scale software projects--but we also develop components for database vendors. Two of our clients have been through this process--when you go public, the rules suddenly change. No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more whim-of-the-boss perks like Free Pizza Day or flying the staff to Bermuda for lunch. And all of a sudden there is no more visiting back and forth with industry chums, no more collegiality, no more "hey, we're all in this together." Suddenly the view--driven by all those guys in ties that Wall Street required you to hire--is that if we're all in this together, "this" must be a knife fight. (More or less verbatim quote from a finance guy--with really good hair--at a client's.)
Red Hat's going to wipe the floor with SUSE--and SUSE won't know what hit 'em. It's not that Red Hat is Evil--it is simply that Red Hat has moved up to a different league, and in that league that's how the game is played.
I don't think Singer is great--I think he is a charlatan. He assumes the mantle of moral superiority by "making people think."
Piffle.
He isn't proposing anything new--"euthanizing" the disabled was done in Germany in the early 1930s--well before the Nazis went after the Jews. What he's doing is making a career out of being controversial. He's identifying hot buttons in society and pressing them. He's not alone--there are lots of academics that have discovered that one route to fame and fortune is to consistently be outrageous. (For that matter, Liberace, Elton John, Iggy Pop, and Robert Mapplethorpe all made the same discovery.) That doesn't make him a genius or even particularly memorable.
Except that the hot button he's pressing, the "outre" that makes him outrageous, happens to also be my daughter's life.
I'm entirely willing to support a charlatan's right to be a shameless self-promoter. It's when that shameless self-promotion advocates killing my child that I draw the line.
You might respond by pointing out that he's "only" advocating "allowing" parents to euthanize their children. But stay tuned--when this controversy dies down, he'll write something else to regain the public spotlight.
There are a million different things that I want to write--a million different ways in which I want to respond to what Professor Singer proposes and what I think Princeton University effectively endorses by giving him a platform from which to preach. And I will write a logical response to what he's proposing in another post to this topic.
But in this post I want to deep-drill one key point of this entire discussion: the concept of suffering.
Look at the list of posts on this topic already. As I write this there are more than 400--and I'd bet money that at least 50% of them use the word "suffering" at least once. Singer has cast his views in terms of suffering, and cloaks himself in mantle of righteousness by saying that he's working for a world with less suffering. The entire debate is cast in terms of suffering--the poor baby is suffering; the poor family is suffering; society is suffering; everybody is suffering. We can all make the world a little bit better by reducing the suffering--all we have to do is off this child over here.
There's just this one little problem. Who says that severely disabled children, or severely disabled adults, are suffering at all?
I've worked with handicapped children for years. Twenty-eight years ago I taught handicapped children how to swim in Washington, D.C. Nine years ago I wrote my first Windows program for non-verbal children. Eight years ago I wrote a communications program for profoundly handicapped children, permitting a 12-year-old boy to go from a vocabulary of 0 words to 400 words over a weekend.
And seven years ago I heard the most ominous question you can ever hear: "Um, by any chance...did you have amniocentesis done?" My youngest daughter has Down Syndrome. She's one of the "severely handicapped" that Peter Singer advocates "euthanizing" in the first month after birth.
By all accounts Annie is severely disabled. There are a long list of "features" in Down Syndrome, including mental retardation, poor respiratory systems (Annie is a regular at the Emergency Room), a tendency to have spinal cord problems, and of course the obvious visible symptoms of Down Syndrome. As a Down Syndrome child, Annie has another burden: as she matures she will have to justify her continued existence in the face of people (not including, but morally dependent upon, Peter Singer) who point out that since Annie does not have 46 chromosomes (she has 47), she is not part of homo sapiens sapiens, and thus is not human.
Since Annie was born I have been involved with handicapped kids in a variety of different ways--in official capacities on state and local agencies; on boards and committees of social service agencies; and as a volunteer in a therapeutic riding program--a program where we use horses to provide physical therapy and other kinds of instruction to kids with a wide range of "feature sets". Between the kids I've worked with and the parents I've worked with, I dare say I've seen pretty much all of it. I know the rules for admission to Children's Hospital in Philadelphia (the baby must survive 24 hours before admission will be approved--the helicopter cannot take off until CHOP radios approval). I know lots of people who've stayed at Ronald McDonald House, hoping that their child will live through this series of treatments. I know lots of parents who came home from Ronald McDonald House to make funeral arrangements. More than half of Annie's preschool class have died.
Which is to say, I have a pretty good handle on what having a handicapped child means.
Does Annie suffer? Not any more than any of her sisters suffers. Or than you suffer. She's mentally retarded--but that doesn't mean she doesn't know joy. She has lots of limitations, but that doesn't mean her life doesn't have meaning. If the tragedy of adolescence is the loss of childhood innocence, then perhaps Annie will suffer less than her teenaged sisters--because in all likelihood Annie will always have the mental acuity of a child.
Parents of handicapped kids like to say that having a "special needs" child is like booking a vacation to France. You plan for a trip to France, you read all the books about going to France, perhaps you take a Berlitz course in French. But when your flight lands, the flight attendant says, "we're terribly sorry, but there's been a change in plans. We've landed in Portugal, and you'll have to get off here. We know you planned to go to France, but you're getting your vacation in Portugal, and unfortunately there's no way to change it."
Well, that's quite a blow. You're not prepared for Portugal. You don't have any books on Portugal. You remember that there's some kind of separatist movement in Portugal, so perhaps it could be dangerous. Being in Portugal makes you feel uncomfortable, and frankly, pretty awkward. You don't like being in Portugal. In fact, you really hate being in Portugal. But love it or hate it, you're in Portugal.
After seven years, eight months, and eighteen days in Portugal, I can tell you that you can get used to Portugal. And you can find all sorts of reasons to like Portugal. And you can be extremely proud of being in Portugal.
And you can discover, as I have, that being severely disabled doesn't mean that you suffer--it means that you're different. Annie isn't going to major in Physics at MIT. She isn't going to compete for an Olympic medal. But that doesn't mean she suffers.
There are disabled kids who suffer--but not in the way you might think. In the first few weeks after birth there are a lot of emotional battles to contend with--not the least of which is the whispered question from a well-meaning relative, "does this sort of thing run in her family?" There are lots of people suggesting that having a handicapped child is too much of a burden. There are lots of people suggesting that you can place the child in an institution. And there is bound to be someone, somewhere, who suggests that an "accident" might not be viewed as a tragedy.
Disabled kids also suffer from fathers who cut and run--gravy-sucking pond scum who abandon their wives when it becomes clear that Junior won't ever play second base for the Yankees. (Am I showing my biases here?)
And disabled kids suffer from the nagging fear that someday, somebody is going to come for them. That's why the disabled picketed at Princeton--they're genuinely afraid that artful semanticists like Peter Singer will lay the philosophical foundation for another Kristalnacht.
I worry--I fear--for Annie. Not because she suffers in any sense (well--her bottom sometimes suffers when she crosses the road without permission). But because I am certain that there will come a day when she is threatened by people promising to help her. Annie costs society a lot of money--she costs the school system better than $30,000 per year, and probably costs the welfare system another $5-8,000 a year. Sooner or later that funding stream is going to stop. Sooner or later some well-meaning legislator--schooled in the ideals of Peter Singer--will propose "helping alleviate the suffering" by making euthanasia "a therapeutic option." And then some other well-meaning sort will propose increased help "to those who really need it" by "trimming the rolls" of the system.
And then somebody will come for Annie.
Back in the '60s we had a saying that seems apropos: "Off the pig!" It'll sure alleviate my suffering.
Johan J Ingles-le Nobel is wise to wonder about the credibility of this article. The author is trying to link two entirely different spheres (cyber-terrorism and weapons of mass destruction) into a single subject--he even goes so far as to coin the phrase "weapons of mass disruption." Which is to say, you can draw a parallel between getting nuked and getting a busy signal.
The writer doesn't seem to grasp the impact of computers and technology on terrorism. And the writer also doesn't seem to grasp the concept that terrorists act intelligently--within their own world view. And so the writer focuses inordinately on the feats of prowess of Aum Shinrikyu, a cult of Shinshinto extremists who bumbled their way through a sarin gas attack on the Kasumigaseki and Kamiyacho subway stations in Tokyo in 1995. If Aum Shinrikyu, using a World War I sarin recipe, is the best the new breed of terrorists have to offer we can all rest easy. Would that it were that simple.
The fatal flaw of this article is the writer's complete ignorance of the principle impact of technology on terrorism: computer technology makes the up-to-date (and up-to-speed) terrorist vastly more productive.
Let's examine the writer's linkage of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear terrorism with cyber-terrorism. There's no correlation at all: CBRN warfare involves significant scientific achievement, a fairly high order of precision in manufacturing, a means of storing extremely hazardous materials, finding an anonymous--or at least deniable--means of delivering those weapons, and (for most terrorists) finding an exit strategy for any agents in the vicinity of the attack. As this article points out, there is a lot to it--manufacturing facilities, storage facilities, and testing facilities to start with. There are significant issues involved in transporting the weapons and triggering them. And there is the enormous difficulty of keeping the effort a secret--an oft-repeated maxim in suspense novels is that the likelihood of a secret's being blown is equal to the square of the number of people in on the plot. You can't even try to build a nuclear bomb, store it, and test it without hundreds (even thousands) of staff who have to be housed and fed to stand around in the dark on rainy nights trying to remember why they volunteered for this great assignment. If nothing else, CBRN terrorism pretty much requires having a sympathetic Saudi prince just to bankroll the scheme.
Cyber-terrorism, on the other hand, involves writing a program and running it. One graduate student, Robert Morris, accidentally launched a "worm" virus that shut down most of the Unix-based computers in the U.S. in the 1980s. While such an attack is more difficult today, any such attack would not take any significant amount of manpower. "DOS" (denial of service) attacks are a good example: it is relatively trivial to write a program that will attempt to connect to a remote server, asking for responses to an Internet address that does not exist. Each request takes a certain amount of time to process--you can flood that server with a large number of requests, effectively preventing anybody else from getting in. With the vast increase in affordable Internet bandwidth available today ($169/month for 192kpbs dedicated bandwidth in a residential suburb of New York, for example) it is a relatively trivial exercise for a "cyber-terrorist" with a thousand bucks and three or four talented high school students to become, at the very least, a cyber-annoyance.
But computer technology offers much more to the would-be terrorist. Just as an editor for Jane's can find expert criticism of an article on cyber-terrorism (amidst a stream of childish ranting, one expects) by searching the World Wide Web, a terrorist can find all sorts of useful information. The terrorist can also take advantage of the commercialization of high-end technologies (such as the U.S. Defense Department's vaunted Global Positioning System [GPS]). And the terrorist can take advantage of the computerization of toys (particularly the growth of robotics such as Lego Mindstorms, or radio-controlled cars).
Were I a would-be terrorist, particularly one with a political agenda based on hatred of the Western World, I wouldn't waste my time with nuclear weapons or World War I sarin recipes. Instead I would have a cadre of recruits developing expertise with the most commonly available explosive in the U.S.--the barbeque grill propane cylinder. With very, very little technological sophistication one could fabricate the poor man's Fuel Air Explosive [FAE]: program a Palm Pilot to set off a task on a specified date and time, create a robotic hand with Lego Mindstorms, attach it to the valve on the cylinder, and put the "package" inside a closed room. The Mindstorm "hand" opens the valve and vents the cylinder; a second Mindstorms device sets off a spark, and, well, you get the picture. You can mass produce what little specialized technology you need and transport it on airliners with no worry at all--you will buy the Palm computers at an office supply store, the Lego Mindstorms kits at Toys 'R Us, and the propane cylinder at the nearest convenience store.
I would begin my terrorism campaign by publicly asking the Great Satan to have greater regard for its poor--with all the usual verbiage about the terror inflicted upon the Third World by greedy Wall Street speculators. I would then follow up by using my propane packages at various convenient locations around Wall Street--despite the World Trade Center bombing a few years ago, it is child's play to leave a propane "package" anywhere in the vicinity. (If I had the budget, I'd fabricate brightly-colored trash cans with the "packages" inside. I'd distribute the trash cans, conspicuously empty them for several days, then set them all off at once. Press release: "the garbage of the world, that you throw away like yesterday's sandwich wrappers, will rise up to smite you.")
Then I'd go after the New York transit system, focusing particularly on those parts of it that are heavily-used by the financial community (continuing my Third World Liberation theme). So I'd use Mindstorms robots and GPS units to "crawl" packages into the PATH tubes under the Hudson River. The propane cylinders wouldn't be powerful enough to burst the tunnels and flood them--but that enclosed space would focus the effect of the explosions and do an awful lot of damage. And scare the entire NYC populace out of the subways for a generation. (Press release: "Financial swine, you are not free from the wrath of the people wherever you go--even into holes in the ground.")
Then I'd go after the Internet. It isn't rocket science--all it requires is some skill at title and deed work. Identify the rights of way of AT&T, MCI WorldCom, etc., to identify trunk lines. Most of those lines are on poles--right there along the side of the road. Even the "secure" lines that are buried underground have to surface to cross bridges, railway lines, etc. Spend some time, do a little traveling. The locations of the five major interconnect points in the U.S. are widely known (just look on the World Wide Web). In a month or two you can probably find key trunk lines for a good portion of the major Internet carriers. More propane cylinders, more packages. (Press release: "Witlings of the imperialists--now you have some glimmer of understanding of how your brothers in the Third World must live. Free yourselves from their oppression!")
Want to go whole hog? Really do it right? OK--we'd have to do a little prototyping by testing a package or two against some targets. Aum Shinrikyu tested sarin in the Australian outback for months without arousing undue suspicion. Blowing things up "just for fun"--particularly with a can of beer in hand--is considered Manly Recreation in many parts of the U.S. Then we'd do some planning (using PCs and Microsoft Project, of course) to identify the tasks at hand and the time it will take to plant all of our packages. We could identify task dependencies (frankly, the biggest difficulty would be getting an adequate supply of Lego Mindstorms kits--they are in very short supply) and we could distribute Gantt charts to the entire team. We distribute our packages across a relatively small area in the eastern U.S., and wait for them all to go off. At once. Kill hundreds of people, shut down the NYC transit system, cripple the Great Satan's telecommunications, and prevent a nation full of office workers from downloading pornography; all in one single, simple, coordinated attack. (Press release: "Now do we have your attention, big boy?")
If you're keeping score at home, here's what we're talking about: A Mindstorms kit ($200); a Palm Pilot ($500); a barbeque propane cylinder ($30); and related hardware (wire, spark, etc., figure $20). Add another $250 for boxes and other decoy containers (and to keep the math simple) and you're talking about $1000 per package. For $100,000 to $150,000, including airfare, hotels, meals, and gratuities, you and three or four comrades could conduct a terrorism campaign that would make the FALN and the PIRA look like amateurs.
The economics are undeniable: the ability to create bombs that combine software and robotics for chump change completely alters the question of terrorism. What we might term "legacy" terrorists (understand: in the parlance of computer programmers that is a punishing insult) are trying to win funding from bankrupt former First World spy agencies and hoping to score plutonium on the open market. The avant garde terrorist is the fellow in line in front of you at Toys 'R Us.
The security is undeniable: your chances of finding these guys before they strike is zero. This only requires one person. If the plot involves more than four or five people it gets overly complicated. None of the components can be characterized as a weapon--so even if you are questioned by the police ("you're correct, officer--I do not have a license for this Lego kit") there's no rational basis for suspicion. And once you do wreak havoc on the target country you will be practically impossible to find: just the kind of simple precaution you learn from reading John Le Carre novels (wipe the propane cylinders for fingerprints) is enough to prevent anybody from ever finding you.
And the politics are undeniable as well: the legacy terrorists help fund the day-to-day payroll by running guns, smuggling drugs, and generally operating like gangsters. It is difficult to gain the support of the oppressed when the selfsame oppressed also recognize you as the local drug dealers. Our high-tech robot-wielding terrorist, on the other hand, doesn't need to support a huge payroll--so he doesn't need to run guns, smuggle drugs, rob banks, or anything else. With some creativity and perhaps a slightly smaller budget he could literally do the entire project on credit cards.
Press release: "We have smote the Great Satan in his lair--we have left him wounded, bleeding, alone, and in the dark. We have deprived him of his filthy pictures of oppressed women. And we have done it with the products of his own depravity--the computer toys of his pampered children and the office toys of his fattened bourgoisie, fueled by explosives from his so-called convenience stores. And we financed the entire operation using the Evil Oppressor's own credit cards."
This writer is totally wrong: the impact of technology on terrorism doesn't mean that we have to add a new letter or suffix to the "CBRN" acronym. The impact of technology radically changes how productive, and how anonymous, the would-be terrorist can be. Ultimately, technology obviates CBRN terrorism--the terrorist doesn't need to be that extravagant, and doesn't need to take the risks of handling those materials. With a little bit of applied thought, and off-the-shelf technology (and off of shopping mall shelves at that), the avant garde terrorist can scare the daylights out of any country on the face of the earth.
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Of all the likely nuclear scenarios, I think the two most likely are these:
North Korea nukes Japan
Sound crazy? Understand this--the history of Korea can essentially be defined by alternating periods of subjugation by the Chinese and the Japanese. The centuries of Chinese rule were generally benign--the decades or centuries of Japanese rule (including 1914-1945) were characterized by incredible brutality interspersed by periodic episodes of unbelievable brutality. It may sound nuts to Westerners--but North Korea would be viewed sympathetically by many South Koreans if they could plausibly launch a nuke at the Japanese.
China flips a nuke at the U.S. over Taiwan
The Chinese have already threatened to do this. In 1996 a Chinese military official--in an astonishly blunt statement--pointed out that the PRC had the capability to deliver nuclear warheads on Los Angeles. (Digression: in Asia you only speak this directly to inferiors or to people you have absolute command over. The statement is regarded by many who are knowledgeable about Asian affairs as strong evidence that the Chinese have compromising information on the Clinton Administration, and speak in this tone to remind everybody of the fact.) The PRC goes nuts any time anybody even talks to the Taiwanese--they continually object to U.S. airlines flying to Taipei, and they harass travelers entering the PRC if they also have a lot of Taiwanese visa stamps. (A lot of Asian travelers "lose" their passports and get replacements, so they have one passport for the PRC and Hong Kong, and a different passport for Taiwan.) How nuts are they? The "diplomatic incident in 1996" that the NY Times refers to in the article was the attempt by President Lee of Taiwan to attend an alumni reunion at Cornell. Yup--Lee was permitted entry into the U.S. only by a resolution of Congress, and the Chinese baldly hinted at nuclear war.
Why would either the NKs or the Chinese do this? Both countries have leaders that are contemptuous of American politics and American public opinion. They believe (and they may be correct) that they could "accidently" flip a nuke and start apologizing up one side and down the other. And they believe that the U.S. does not have the political resolve to respond with nukes. It's all well and good to talk about "anybody launching an ICBM would quickly be glowing in the dark"--but I doubt that it is true. I don't think the U.S. military has what used to be called "independent launch authority" any more--nobody can launch without permission from "National Command Authority." And the "National Command Authority," in case anybody has forgotten, is a sex-crazed dipstick who is regarded as spineless by the leaders of every other nation in the world.
An Exercise:
Taiwan declares independence. China attempts to launch an invasion flotilla. Taiwanese subs and torpedo boats ravage the armada--but suspicions rise that some of those submarines are actually U.S. Navy boats, or perhaps E-3 Sentry aircraft provide tactical information to the Taiwanese. China "accidentally" launches a nuke at Los Angeles--and fortunately, it turns out to be a dud. It destroys a block of downtown L.A., but that's the extent of it. They apologize profusely, and they mention in passing that accidents can happen--just as the U.S. discovered in the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Pretend you're "National Command Authority." Do you nuke back? Or do you quietly get the hint, pull the U.S. assets out of the theater, and let the Chinese take Taiwan--with nukes, if need be?
The amazing thing about nukes is that they are one of the only weapons systems in history that have practically never been used. The more countries that have them, the greater the likelihood that somebody, somewhere, will decide it is worth the risk to push the button. I'm all in favor of humanitarian aid and economic development. But to ignore the very real likelihood of ICBMs being used in the future is unrealistic in a SlashDot reader. In a U.S. politician it is simply criminal.
I won't comment on the rest of your post, but your references to Aum Shinrikyu aren't correct.
First, they weren't trying to attack Tokyo in general--they were specifically trying to attack the National Police Agency in Kasumigaseki. They were depending upon the legendary reliability of the Tokyo subways to deliver all the nerve gas (sarin) to the proper parts of Kasumigaseki at the same time. (Don't laugh--there is a entire form of fiction in Japanese literature devoted to the precise scheduling of the Japanese railway system.) They pretty much succeeded--all but one of the trains arrived in Kasumigaseki at the right time. The one train that did not arrive in Kasumigaseki on time was inbound on the Hibiya Line--the sarin was released in the Kamiyacho station (the station before) instead.
As I mentioned above, they used a form of sarin gas, not anthrax. This was a chemical attack, not a biological attack.
How do I know? I was there. I was living in Japan for most of 1994 and 1995, and worked in an office adjacent to Kamiyacho station. My major client in Japan imports a form of phosphene trichloride (a feedstock of sarin) into Japan (it is used to make LCD displays). The Ministry of Social Welfare, in the aftermath of the accident, noted that an importer of POCL3 was adjacent to one of the sites where the gas was released. They were all over us. We were able to demonstrate that we could account for every drop that we had imported--but that was definitely the most tension-filled meeting of my entire career.
Good question. And a question that, in the early days of online communities, caused a lot of debate and legal wrangling.
If you post something on an electronic bulletin board (be it an old-style BBS, SlashDot, or a private fee-paid system like CompuServe) you can be held liable for anything you say. So, for example, if you were to state that IBM was secretly funding the development of Little Black Helicopters for future use by U.N. shock troops, you just might hear from IBM's lawyers. (This isn't as big a deal as it sounds--in general a question cannot be libelous, so nobody can touch you if you post a message asking, "has anybody else heard rumors to the effect that IBM is secretly funding Little Black Helicopters...?" Just remember to use the question mark.)
As to the question of who owns the copyright on what you have written: this gets complicated. There generally is not a single entity that has a "copyright" on any published work. If you write a book and get it published you own the copyright (with some exceptions we'll ignore). But the publisher also has rights to the work--the publisher contributed to the work by paying editors and proofreaders, typesetters and designers, and may have paid for indexing, illustration, or photography. You own the words, but you probably do not have absolute ownership of the entire work. (About the only time you do have absolute ownership of the work is when you "publish" through a "vanity press," where you pay all the print and production costs up front.)
Similarly, SlashDot has rights to the collection of opinions expressed here. SlashDot's original contribution is the creation of software and the maintenance of hardware that permit (even encourage) the expression of ideas posted here. That, the courts have ruled, is enough to give SlashDot some rights to the aggregate collection of text that we all read. (If that sounds confusing, think of it like this: if you're thunderstruck by this comment and quote it in a research paper, you would cite me as the author, and SlashDot as the publisher.)
There is another angle to this: suppose somebody posts a comment here that is legally actionable. Can SlashDot and Andover.net be held liable for libelous (or seditious) posts that appear here.
There have been two views on this subject. The first, and the view that has prevailed in the courts, is that software-driven forums, like CompuServe (who fought all these battles in the 1980s) cannot reasonably edit messages before they appear. The volume of messages is too great, and the format of the service is such that it is obvious to any user than content is originated by specific people, not by the service provider (CompuServe). The courts (rightly) viewed CompuServe (and later AOL) as equivalent to a magazine distributor--even if the distributor carries an issue of Hustler that is later deemed to be pornographic, the distributor is free from liability. It is unreasonable to expect a magazine distributor to read every magazine in advance of placing orders--that isn't how the magazine business works. In the same way, when IBM's lawyers come looking to sue your sorry buns for those comments you made about Little Black Helicopters they will not have a claim against Rob, SlashDot, or Andover.net.
Digression:
An interesting question that has not been litigated is this: whose laws apply to content you read on SlashDot? Back in 1993 Corel bought Ventura Software from Xerox (Ventura developed Ventura Publisher, then the dominant DTP package on PCs). Ventura had a forum on CompuServe, led by a staff of volunteer sysops. Corel added a paid staffer to the sysop list. The actual physical location of the hardware was in Columbus, Ohio. All but one of the staffers lived in the United States (I was living in Japan then). But Corel is located in Ottawa, Ontario--in Canada. The legal construction is that CompuServe was the distributor, forum members were the authors, but Corel (the owner of the forum contract) was the publisher.
There was a gory murder trial in Ontario, and the judge issued a gag order prohibiting publishers from publishing anything about the trial. Canadian newspapers don't have a First Amendment to protect them, so they didn't publish a word. But the judge also required Canadian authorities to seize any newspapers or magazines coming into the country that made reference to the trial. The NY Times and Newsweek both ran articles on the trial to test this, and both publications were seized at the border and destroyed.
So, we wondered, what would happen if we discussed this on CompuServe? If I, in Japan, posted a message to user in the U.K., using hardware and software in Ohio--would the Corel staff guy in Ontario go to jail?
In less than an hour I got an email from Corel's staff attorney: "let's not find out."
I believe them when they say they've been overwhelmed with responses--and I'm not being sarcastic. The Open Source community may view Microsoft as the incarnation of Evil, but all the programmers I know generally like Microsoft. Some of us, including me, are Microsoft fans. I think the DOJ lawsuit is a put-up job led by Microsoft opponents who got blown out of the water due to their own market problems, not Microsoft hegemony. Unless you consider charging lower prices to be hegemony.
I find SlashDot (and UserFriendly) to be very interesting for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the a priori assumption that Microsoft is Evil. It seems, and I may not be correct, that the people who really hate Microsoft tend to be system admins. Programmers I work with generally want to work on projects with Microsoft tools, because you can do cooler stuff, and for the most part the cool new features actually work.
So, frankly, I signed up. I'm the president of a small development house, and we've consistently found that Microsoft's development tools work, while other tools generally don't work as well.
Funny thing? We love the Knowledge Base. I have wondered before if Microsoft is better focused on meeting the needs of developers than they are at meeting the needs of system admins. Could this be an indication?
I don't mean to be a syncophant--but I do want to make a point to the seemingly vast number of people who have ways to "improve" SlashDot.
The moderation system is reasonably sophisticated. The M2 system is reasonably sophisticated. The Karma values are reasonably sophisticated. The end result, to paraphrase a client of mine, is a system that is perfectly understandable--so long as the end user has an IQ of 140. [smile]
Rather than tweak the existing moderation system, it might be best to let it gel for a bit--let users spend time as moderators, and let other users spend time doing M2. We're all geeks--and one of our common traits is a tendency to explore. So when we get moderator points or an invitation to M2 we have a tendency to say, "hmm--what happens if I do this?" Those tendencies don't go away right away--it might be weeks before we give up noticing how clever Rob's moderation scheme is and get back to writing comments.
So my suggestion is this: don't do anything. Don't change anything about the moderation system for a good 30 days or more, and wait and see. If something needs to be changed, make the changes and wait another 30 days. Don't rush through a bunch of changes--the end users (us) will focus more on the changes than on what we're doing. (Business schools call this "the Hawthorne effect.")
The Ancient Geek
P.S.: Take it from me. Kiss Rob's posterior in your messages, and you get extra Karma points.
Internet voting is a lovely use of the technology--and a very bad idea for the country. (Apologies to SlashDot members from outside the U.S.A. If your nation chooses to adopt Internet voting, that's your problem.)
Two issues: First, there is the technology. You can cheat. Second, and more importantly, it permits ballots to be cast in private.
What? you say--don't we decide elections by secret ballot? Yes--but that secret ballot must be cast in a *public* place. And the reason that the vote is cast in a public place is so that representatives from all the political parties can be in that public place to object if you are not who you say you are. Or more to the point, if you claim to be somebody that they think does not exist.
Further, those political party representatives are present when the votes are tallied--and the votes are tallied by hand. Everyone present has to agree on the totals--if the process was not completely open to review, someone would cheat.
In recent years some political entities (notably Oregon, with their let's-bring-back-ballot-box-stuffing initiative to hold elections by mail) have either lost sight of the concept of vote fraud, or have tacitly decided that a little bit of good ol' vote fraud might be a good thing. I'd suggest that the latter is the case: lots and lots of elections can be (and are) stolen because nobody's looking.
The Ancient Geek (formerly a Republican committeeman for 12 years, and an area chairman for 4 years. I've been a poll worker almost every year since 1978.)
The "max penalty" for this is 3 years in prison. However, this is a violation of copyright laws, not drug dealing. Nobody goes to prison for violating copyright laws.
Years ago, when the dry-toner xerography process first appears, lots of "photocopy shops" appeared around every college campus. They would duplicate any book you wanted, and nobody asked questions about whether you had the right to repro the book. Eventually publishers pushed Congress to do something about it, and some copy shops got raided. A pattern of sentencing quickly emerged: the "pirate" loses the equipment used for the copying, and pays a per-copy fee for each work duplicated. (This was stiff--a high-speed Xerox duplicator could run more than $20,000.) If sentencing for this guy is any different, his attorney will have an automatic appeal issue. By rights he'll lose the computer, router, CSU/DSU, etc., and he'll pay a fine. But the feds are just as cognizant of the cost of housing a prisoner as anybody else, and they aren't likely to want to pay the money to put this guy up in the Big House.
That said, there's an interesting quesion: why *this* guy? Of the zillions of web sites out there with MP3s of 'N Sync and videos of Pamela & Tommy Lee, what did this particular guy do to appear on the federal radar screen?
If this signals the start of a Justice Department crackdown on bootleg software, then a number of people on the Internet might want to worry (or at least move to a server co-hosted offshore). But this might also be a case like Al Capone's--he was not sent to prison for racketeering, murder, smuggling, or even tax evasion. He was sent to prison for *mailing a false tax return*. The feds nailed him with both barrels for a trivial offense, because the feds had decided to nail him, and just needed an excuse. (The civil liberties questions here, of course, are legion.)
If this guy gets a Kevin Mitnick sentence, rest assured--the feds think he's responsible for something else but don't want to (or can't) make the charge stick.
Unless you're writing device drivers, I wonder at how you're having trouble getting apps written on Win9x to run on NT and vice versa. We routinely develop applications on 95, 98, and NT4. We're not doing any development in Japanese Windows at present, but we've done quite a bit of that, too. I have personally written 16-bit apps on Japanese DOS that run today, unchanged, on U.S. Windows NT 4. I developed a suite of applications on U.S. DOS and Japanese DOS that have subsequently moved to native-language versions of Windows (both 16- and 32-bit) in Japanese, Chinese (both versions), and Korean.
IMHO, if you're not using the DDK, there's no excuse for 95/NT code conflicts.
I'm one of those over-the-hill guys, and yes--I have "domain experience" that is particularly useful. I've written for tech magazines for years, and I can spot a "plant" article a mile away.
Go back and read the article--this isn't investigative journalism. The guy with the "registry" of over-35 techies hired a PR firm who pitched the article to Wired. For balance the writer went out and got a couple of additional quotes. What you have is two or three anecdotes and a startup business with something to sell issuing a press release. It isn't the start of a trend.
That said, some older geeks do have trouble finding jobs. Generally, as your career progresses, you can specialize in technology or a specific industry or company. I work with a number of clients who have specialized with a particular company--they have bet their careers and their family's finances that the company will grow, thrive, and not get taken over.
Personally, I feel safer with technology. I may be older than you, but I'm confident that I'm at least as smart, and can learn at least as quickly. I recognize that technology changes, so I have to continually learn. Peers of mine who have not continued to upgrade their skills are the guys with problems finding a job. Back in 1974 COBOL was all you needed to know. In 1997 COBOL was *the* hottest ticket in New York. But now that the Y2K crisis is over you can't even find COBOL maintenance work--the language is just plain dead. Guys who never bothered to progress are now scratching their heads, wondering why they can't get jobs with all their "experience."
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. And I don't know which is worse--that the U.N. proposed this silliness; or that Wired, Slashdot, and all the Slashdot netizens missed the absolutely glaring error in the proposal.
Ms. Kate Raworth projects that this 1-cent per hundred "lengthy" Emails (not just any Email, but "lengthy" E-mails) would have raised $70 billion in the U.S. alone in 1996.
DO THE MATH!!!!!
That's 700,000,000,000,000 (7.0e14) Email messages. Seven hundred trillion Email messages. Figure the U.S. population as 245 million--that would mean that every man, woman, and child in the U.S. sent a "lengthy" Email every 11 seconds for the entire year. Oh--and only 15% of the U.S. population had access to Email, in any form, in 1996.
This U.N. economist pulled a cockamamy number completely out of thin air, and everybody has bought it. The U.N. bought it; Oxford University Press (who actually published the report) bought it; Wired magazine bought it. I fully expect that the mainstream Web media will buy it next, and sometime around the end of the week it will make the New York Times.
We don't need to sweat this. Instead, we should take up a collection to send this idiot to Math Camp for the summer.
You are confusing tangible property rights and intellectual property rights. When you buy a car, you own the physical collection of objects. You do not own the design, engineering, or reproduction rights to those objects. If you try to duplicate any one of those objects and sell it, you can be certain that DaimlerChrysler's lawyers will appear on your doorstep and haul you down to the federal courthouse where a judge will spank you with an injunction followed by penalties. Then die Daimlersharksmitlawdegreesensuiten will sue you for damages. And the judge will spank you again.
[Digression] wait, you say--what about "after-market" auto parts? These fall into two categories: functional equivalents, like Midas Mufflers, achieve the same end, but bear no resemblance to the OEM part; and licensed parts, which are typically sold in the aftermarket by the contract manufacturers who made them for the OEM in the first place. The manufacturers of licensed parts pay a royalty to the OEM for each unit they produce or sell. Manufacturers of functional equivalents generally do not pay a royalty, unless the basic part (such as a catalytic converter) is still covered by a patent. [/Digression]
How does this apply to device drivers? If what you do is to carefully monitor the electrical impulses generated by a machine, and write a piece of software that controls those impulses in a manner essentially identical to the manufacturer's device driver, then you have created a functional equivalent. (Sometimes this is known as a "clean room" reverse-engineer.) If what you do is to decompile the code, examine the source, make changes and re-compile, you have committed blatant infringement. The copyright holder (who probably is not the manufacturer--it is probably an outside firm, like mine, that develops that software for the OEM) won't bother to sue you. He will go into federal court and get an injunction, enjoining you from infringing on his intellectual property rights. That permits him to prevent your using any device (that is, the actual computer) until you and he stand in court in front of the judge. So you lose the use of the computer for a couple of years, and then you get spanked by the judge. Then I sue you, and the judge spanks you again.
This, in short, is why no company with any brains at all would even think of bootlegging a proprietary device driver.
You're mistaken. That was his evil twin. This is the Petreley who insisted that OpenDoc would the be the death of Microsoft. And that CORBA would be the death of Microsoft. And that StarOffice would be the death of Microsoft. And that thin-client would be the death of Microsoft.
"I can only wonder whether he has no clue about Linux, or he really counts the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Linux hackers who have done a kernel recompile over the years as "very few."
Um--note that the puff at the bottom of the column mentioned that he's recompiled an operating system. Which is a lot more than recompiling the Linux kernel.
You might also note that the puff is entirely in gest--its a joke. InfoWorld loves to do clever bio puffs to get readers to respond--as dozens here have.
Metcalfe isn't that out of touch. Remember that way back when 3Com sold an NOS, while Metcalfe was still CEO, you didn't just install the OS. You actually linked the OS from bunches of floppies. (The same thing was true with Netware before Netware 386. You linked the object code. Netware 86 shipped with 22 360K floppies and a *very* long install procedure.) So anybody who bought LanMan from 3Com in those days, at theoretically, compiled the OS.
That said, I just peeked at the LWHS web site, and looked at the student listings. All this happened before you were born. So maybe you don't remember. [smile]
He was yanking your chain. It appears he succeeded.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean this as flamebait, but I think everybody is misreading the CNN article.
The article does not say that IBM is endorsing Linux, or embracing Linux, or even suggesting Linux. What the article does say is that some analyst from Giga thinks that IBM is going to promote Linux.
Now--how credible is the analyst? He suggests that IBM is going to be OS-neutral in selling Linux vs. AIX, OS/400, or OS/390. He states that IBM will be superior to Dell because they'll support all "the major flavors."
Right.
IBM is going to offer Linux on an equal footing with OS/390 and OS/400? Whoever believes that hasn't ordered an upgrade of OS/400--the money IBM charges is unbelievable. "Want to update your disk drives? Sorry--the update only comes with an update to the OS. And that's a mere thousand bucks." IBM may pay lip service to Linux (their "support" may only amount to offering to preload it)--but they make a bunch of money off of operating system sales, and they're not going to just write that revenue off.
A 300-person IBM group is little more than a market study. When IBM decided to launch the Aptiva PCs (trying to compete with Dell) they had more than 1200 people--and Aptiva lasted less than 2 years.
If IBM were to truly back Linux, that would certainly be newsworthy. But this article is simply regurgitating a not-very-up-to-speed analyst's opinion, and I don't think his assertions pass the smell test.
The term 'FUD' originated at IBM.
No--I'm not writing flame bait. I'm stating brutal, legal, fact in U.S. law.
Everybody got all kinds of enthused a few weeks back when Red Hat did an IPO. Yeah, things got kind of funky about who could get pre-IPO shares and so forth, but Red Hat did the right thing and lots of deserving people got in on the bottom floor.
But guess what? Red Hat is now a publicly-traded company. And the directors of a publicly-traded company have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize revenue. Let me re-phrase that in a different way: the directors of a publicly-traded company must always view the interests of their shareholders as being more important than the views of any group--employees, customers, community--anybody.
So it is entirely fair to assume that Red Hat is moving into Europe intent on dominating the European marketplace for Linux. (Note, BTW, that the Red Hat official doesn't say, "for our distro of Linux"--he says, "for Linux.") Red Hat has to fight for market dominance, and defend their marketplace dominance, or else they're going to join the long list of technology companies that get clobbered by shareholder rights suits.
We might all agree that the people at Red Hat are worthy folks. We might all agree that they are noble of heart, and true of purpose. But once they become a publicly-traded company, they have to constantly increase their share value, or their stock will be hammered. And if their stock price is hammered, and a plaintiff can demonstrate that the directors acted on behalf of another group to the detriment of the shareholders, Red Hat can lose a huge chunk of money. In other words, Red Hat cannot act "for the good of the Linux community" if that means that Red Hat revenues--in this quarter--will suffer.
My little company develops large-scale software projects--but we also develop components for database vendors. Two of our clients have been through this process--when you go public, the rules suddenly change. No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more whim-of-the-boss perks like Free Pizza Day or flying the staff to Bermuda for lunch. And all of a sudden there is no more visiting back and forth with industry chums, no more collegiality, no more "hey, we're all in this together." Suddenly the view--driven by all those guys in ties that Wall Street required you to hire--is that if we're all in this together, "this" must be a knife fight. (More or less verbatim quote from a finance guy--with really good hair--at a client's.)
Red Hat's going to wipe the floor with SUSE--and SUSE won't know what hit 'em. It's not that Red Hat is Evil--it is simply that Red Hat has moved up to a different league, and in that league that's how the game is played.
Hi Isileth!
I don't think Singer is great--I think he is a charlatan. He assumes the mantle of moral superiority by "making people think."
Piffle.
He isn't proposing anything new--"euthanizing" the disabled was done in Germany in the early 1930s--well before the Nazis went after the Jews. What he's doing is making a career out of being controversial. He's identifying hot buttons in society and pressing them. He's not alone--there are lots of academics that have discovered that one route to fame and fortune is to consistently be outrageous. (For that matter, Liberace, Elton John, Iggy Pop, and Robert Mapplethorpe all made the same discovery.) That doesn't make him a genius or even particularly memorable.
Except that the hot button he's pressing, the "outre" that makes him outrageous, happens to also be my daughter's life.
I'm entirely willing to support a charlatan's right to be a shameless self-promoter. It's when that shameless self-promotion advocates killing my child that I draw the line.
You might respond by pointing out that he's "only" advocating "allowing" parents to euthanize their children. But stay tuned--when this controversy dies down, he'll write something else to regain the public spotlight.
There are a million different things that I want to write--a million different ways in which I want to respond to what Professor Singer proposes and what I think Princeton University effectively endorses by giving him a platform from which to preach. And I will write a logical response to what he's proposing in another post to this topic.
But in this post I want to deep-drill one key point of this entire discussion: the concept of suffering.
Look at the list of posts on this topic already. As I write this there are more than 400--and I'd bet money that at least 50% of them use the word "suffering" at least once. Singer has cast his views in terms of suffering, and cloaks himself in mantle of righteousness by saying that he's working for a world with less suffering. The entire debate is cast in terms of suffering--the poor baby is suffering; the poor family is suffering; society is suffering; everybody is suffering. We can all make the world a little bit better by reducing the suffering--all we have to do is off this child over here.
There's just this one little problem. Who says that severely disabled children, or severely disabled adults, are suffering at all?
I've worked with handicapped children for years. Twenty-eight years ago I taught handicapped children how to swim in Washington, D.C. Nine years ago I wrote my first Windows program for non-verbal children. Eight years ago I wrote a communications program for profoundly handicapped children, permitting a 12-year-old boy to go from a vocabulary of 0 words to 400 words over a weekend.
And seven years ago I heard the most ominous question you can ever hear: "Um, by any chance...did you have amniocentesis done?" My youngest daughter has Down Syndrome. She's one of the "severely handicapped" that Peter Singer advocates "euthanizing" in the first month after birth.
By all accounts Annie is severely disabled. There are a long list of "features" in Down Syndrome, including mental retardation, poor respiratory systems (Annie is a regular at the Emergency Room), a tendency to have spinal cord problems, and of course the obvious visible symptoms of Down Syndrome. As a Down Syndrome child, Annie has another burden: as she matures she will have to justify her continued existence in the face of people (not including, but morally dependent upon, Peter Singer) who point out that since Annie does not have 46 chromosomes (she has 47), she is not part of homo sapiens sapiens, and thus is not human.
Since Annie was born I have been involved with handicapped kids in a variety of different ways--in official capacities on state and local agencies; on boards and committees of social service agencies; and as a volunteer in a therapeutic riding program--a program where we use horses to provide physical therapy and other kinds of instruction to kids with a wide range of "feature sets". Between the kids I've worked with and the parents I've worked with, I dare say I've seen pretty much all of it. I know the rules for admission to Children's Hospital in Philadelphia (the baby must survive 24 hours before admission will be approved--the helicopter cannot take off until CHOP radios approval). I know lots of people who've stayed at Ronald McDonald House, hoping that their child will live through this series of treatments. I know lots of parents who came home from Ronald McDonald House to make funeral arrangements. More than half of Annie's preschool class have died.
Which is to say, I have a pretty good handle on what having a handicapped child means.
Does Annie suffer? Not any more than any of her sisters suffers. Or than you suffer. She's mentally retarded--but that doesn't mean she doesn't know joy. She has lots of limitations, but that doesn't mean her life doesn't have meaning. If the tragedy of adolescence is the loss of childhood innocence, then perhaps Annie will suffer less than her teenaged sisters--because in all likelihood Annie will always have the mental acuity of a child.
Parents of handicapped kids like to say that having a "special needs" child is like booking a vacation to France. You plan for a trip to France, you read all the books about going to France, perhaps you take a Berlitz course in French. But when your flight lands, the flight attendant says, "we're terribly sorry, but there's been a change in plans. We've landed in Portugal, and you'll have to get off here. We know you planned to go to France, but you're getting your vacation in Portugal, and unfortunately there's no way to change it."
Well, that's quite a blow. You're not prepared for Portugal. You don't have any books on Portugal. You remember that there's some kind of separatist movement in Portugal, so perhaps it could be dangerous. Being in Portugal makes you feel uncomfortable, and frankly, pretty awkward. You don't like being in Portugal. In fact, you really hate being in Portugal. But love it or hate it, you're in Portugal.
After seven years, eight months, and eighteen days in Portugal, I can tell you that you can get used to Portugal. And you can find all sorts of reasons to like Portugal. And you can be extremely proud of being in Portugal.
And you can discover, as I have, that being severely disabled doesn't mean that you suffer--it means that you're different. Annie isn't going to major in Physics at MIT. She isn't going to compete for an Olympic medal. But that doesn't mean she suffers.
There are disabled kids who suffer--but not in the way you might think. In the first few weeks after birth there are a lot of emotional battles to contend with--not the least of which is the whispered question from a well-meaning relative, "does this sort of thing run in her family?" There are lots of people suggesting that having a handicapped child is too much of a burden. There are lots of people suggesting that you can place the child in an institution. And there is bound to be someone, somewhere, who suggests that an "accident" might not be viewed as a tragedy.
Disabled kids also suffer from fathers who cut and run--gravy-sucking pond scum who abandon their wives when it becomes clear that Junior won't ever play second base for the Yankees. (Am I showing my biases here?)
And disabled kids suffer from the nagging fear that someday, somebody is going to come for them. That's why the disabled picketed at Princeton--they're genuinely afraid that artful semanticists like Peter Singer will lay the philosophical foundation for another Kristalnacht.
I worry--I fear--for Annie. Not because she suffers in any sense (well--her bottom sometimes suffers when she crosses the road without permission). But because I am certain that there will come a day when she is threatened by people promising to help her. Annie costs society a lot of money--she costs the school system better than $30,000 per year, and probably costs the welfare system another $5-8,000 a year. Sooner or later that funding stream is going to stop. Sooner or later some well-meaning legislator--schooled in the ideals of Peter Singer--will propose "helping alleviate the suffering" by making euthanasia "a therapeutic option." And then some other well-meaning sort will propose increased help "to those who really need it" by "trimming the rolls" of the system.
And then somebody will come for Annie.
Back in the '60s we had a saying that seems apropos: "Off the pig!" It'll sure alleviate my suffering.
Johan J Ingles-le Nobel is wise to wonder about the credibility of this article. The author is trying to link two entirely different spheres (cyber-terrorism and weapons of mass destruction) into a single subject--he even goes so far as to coin the phrase "weapons of mass disruption." Which is to say, you can draw a parallel between getting nuked and getting a busy signal.
The writer doesn't seem to grasp the impact of computers and technology on terrorism. And the writer also doesn't seem to grasp the concept that terrorists act intelligently--within their own world view. And so the writer focuses inordinately on the feats of prowess of Aum Shinrikyu, a cult of Shinshinto extremists who bumbled their way through a sarin gas attack on the Kasumigaseki and Kamiyacho subway stations in Tokyo in 1995. If Aum Shinrikyu, using a World War I sarin recipe, is the best the new breed of terrorists have to offer we can all rest easy. Would that it were that simple.
The fatal flaw of this article is the writer's complete ignorance of the principle impact of technology on terrorism: computer technology makes the up-to-date (and up-to-speed) terrorist vastly more productive.
Let's examine the writer's linkage of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear terrorism with cyber-terrorism. There's no correlation at all: CBRN warfare involves significant scientific achievement, a fairly high order of precision in manufacturing, a means of storing extremely hazardous materials, finding an anonymous--or at least deniable--means of delivering those weapons, and (for most terrorists) finding an exit strategy for any agents in the vicinity of the attack. As this article points out, there is a lot to it--manufacturing facilities, storage facilities, and testing facilities to start with. There are significant issues involved in transporting the weapons and triggering them. And there is the enormous difficulty of keeping the effort a secret--an oft-repeated maxim in suspense novels is that the likelihood of a secret's being blown is equal to the square of the number of people in on the plot. You can't even try to build a nuclear bomb, store it, and test it without hundreds (even thousands) of staff who have to be housed and fed to stand around in the dark on rainy nights trying to remember why they volunteered for this great assignment. If nothing else, CBRN terrorism pretty much requires having a sympathetic Saudi prince just to bankroll the scheme.
Cyber-terrorism, on the other hand, involves writing a program and running it. One graduate student, Robert Morris, accidentally launched a "worm" virus that shut down most of the Unix-based computers in the U.S. in the 1980s. While such an attack is more difficult today, any such attack would not take any significant amount of manpower. "DOS" (denial of service) attacks are a good example: it is relatively trivial to write a program that will attempt to connect to a remote server, asking for responses to an Internet address that does not exist. Each request takes a certain amount of time to process--you can flood that server with a large number of requests, effectively preventing anybody else from getting in. With the vast increase in affordable Internet bandwidth available today ($169/month for 192kpbs dedicated bandwidth in a residential suburb of New York, for example) it is a relatively trivial exercise for a "cyber-terrorist" with a thousand bucks and three or four talented high school students to become, at the very least, a cyber-annoyance.
But computer technology offers much more to the would-be terrorist. Just as an editor for Jane's can find expert criticism of an article on cyber-terrorism (amidst a stream of childish ranting, one expects) by searching the World Wide Web, a terrorist can find all sorts of useful information. The terrorist can also take advantage of the commercialization of high-end technologies (such as the U.S. Defense Department's vaunted Global Positioning System [GPS]). And the terrorist can take advantage of the computerization of toys (particularly the growth of robotics such as Lego Mindstorms, or radio-controlled cars).
Were I a would-be terrorist, particularly one with a political agenda based on hatred of the Western World, I wouldn't waste my time with nuclear weapons or World War I sarin recipes. Instead I would have a cadre of recruits developing expertise with the most commonly available explosive in the U.S.--the barbeque grill propane cylinder. With very, very little technological sophistication one could fabricate the poor man's Fuel Air Explosive [FAE]: program a Palm Pilot to set off a task on a specified date and time, create a robotic hand with Lego Mindstorms, attach it to the valve on the cylinder, and put the "package" inside a closed room. The Mindstorm "hand" opens the valve and vents the cylinder; a second Mindstorms device sets off a spark, and, well, you get the picture. You can mass produce what little specialized technology you need and transport it on airliners with no worry at all--you will buy the Palm computers at an office supply store, the Lego Mindstorms kits at Toys 'R Us, and the propane cylinder at the nearest convenience store.
I would begin my terrorism campaign by publicly asking the Great Satan to have greater regard for its poor--with all the usual verbiage about the terror inflicted upon the Third World by greedy Wall Street speculators. I would then follow up by using my propane packages at various convenient locations around Wall Street--despite the World Trade Center bombing a few years ago, it is child's play to leave a propane "package" anywhere in the vicinity. (If I had the budget, I'd fabricate brightly-colored trash cans with the "packages" inside. I'd distribute the trash cans, conspicuously empty them for several days, then set them all off at once. Press release: "the garbage of the world, that you throw away like yesterday's sandwich wrappers, will rise up to smite you.")
Then I'd go after the New York transit system, focusing particularly on those parts of it that are heavily-used by the financial community (continuing my Third World Liberation theme). So I'd use Mindstorms robots and GPS units to "crawl" packages into the PATH tubes under the Hudson River. The propane cylinders wouldn't be powerful enough to burst the tunnels and flood them--but that enclosed space would focus the effect of the explosions and do an awful lot of damage. And scare the entire NYC populace out of the subways for a generation. (Press release: "Financial swine, you are not free from the wrath of the people wherever you go--even into holes in the ground.")
Then I'd go after the Internet. It isn't rocket science--all it requires is some skill at title and deed work. Identify the rights of way of AT&T, MCI WorldCom, etc., to identify trunk lines. Most of those lines are on poles--right there along the side of the road. Even the "secure" lines that are buried underground have to surface to cross bridges, railway lines, etc. Spend some time, do a little traveling. The locations of the five major interconnect points in the U.S. are widely known (just look on the World Wide Web). In a month or two you can probably find key trunk lines for a good portion of the major Internet carriers. More propane cylinders, more packages. (Press release: "Witlings of the imperialists--now you have some glimmer of understanding of how your brothers in the Third World must live. Free yourselves from their oppression!")
Want to go whole hog? Really do it right? OK--we'd have to do a little prototyping by testing a package or two against some targets. Aum Shinrikyu tested sarin in the Australian outback for months without arousing undue suspicion. Blowing things up "just for fun"--particularly with a can of beer in hand--is considered Manly Recreation in many parts of the U.S. Then we'd do some planning (using PCs and Microsoft Project, of course) to identify the tasks at hand and the time it will take to plant all of our packages. We could identify task dependencies (frankly, the biggest difficulty would be getting an adequate supply of Lego Mindstorms kits--they are in very short supply) and we could distribute Gantt charts to the entire team. We distribute our packages across a relatively small area in the eastern U.S., and wait for them all to go off. At once. Kill hundreds of people, shut down the NYC transit system, cripple the Great Satan's telecommunications, and prevent a nation full of office workers from downloading pornography; all in one single, simple, coordinated attack. (Press release: "Now do we have your attention, big boy?")
If you're keeping score at home, here's what we're talking about: A Mindstorms kit ($200); a Palm Pilot ($500); a barbeque propane cylinder ($30); and related hardware (wire, spark, etc., figure $20). Add another $250 for boxes and other decoy containers (and to keep the math simple) and you're talking about $1000 per package. For $100,000 to $150,000, including airfare, hotels, meals, and gratuities, you and three or four comrades could conduct a terrorism campaign that would make the FALN and the PIRA look like amateurs.
The economics are undeniable: the ability to create bombs that combine software and robotics for chump change completely alters the question of terrorism. What we might term "legacy" terrorists (understand: in the parlance of computer programmers that is a punishing insult) are trying to win funding from bankrupt former First World spy agencies and hoping to score plutonium on the open market. The avant garde terrorist is the fellow in line in front of you at Toys 'R Us.
The security is undeniable: your chances of finding these guys before they strike is zero. This only requires one person. If the plot involves more than four or five people it gets overly complicated. None of the components can be characterized as a weapon--so even if you are questioned by the police ("you're correct, officer--I do not have a license for this Lego kit") there's no rational basis for suspicion. And once you do wreak havoc on the target country you will be practically impossible to find: just the kind of simple precaution you learn from reading John Le Carre novels (wipe the propane cylinders for fingerprints) is enough to prevent anybody from ever finding you.
And the politics are undeniable as well: the legacy terrorists help fund the day-to-day payroll by running guns, smuggling drugs, and generally operating like gangsters. It is difficult to gain the support of the oppressed when the selfsame oppressed also recognize you as the local drug dealers. Our high-tech robot-wielding terrorist, on the other hand, doesn't need to support a huge payroll--so he doesn't need to run guns, smuggle drugs, rob banks, or anything else. With some creativity and perhaps a slightly smaller budget he could literally do the entire project on credit cards.
Press release: "We have smote the Great Satan in his lair--we have left him wounded, bleeding, alone, and in the dark. We have deprived him of his filthy pictures of oppressed women. And we have done it with the products of his own depravity--the computer toys of his pampered children and the office toys of his fattened bourgoisie, fueled by explosives from his so-called convenience stores. And we financed the entire operation using the Evil Oppressor's own credit cards."
This writer is totally wrong: the impact of technology on terrorism doesn't mean that we have to add a new letter or suffix to the "CBRN" acronym. The impact of technology radically changes how productive, and how anonymous, the would-be terrorist can be. Ultimately, technology obviates CBRN terrorism--the terrorist doesn't need to be that extravagant, and doesn't need to take the risks of handling those materials. With a little bit of applied thought, and off-the-shelf technology (and off of shopping mall shelves at that), the avant garde terrorist can scare the daylights out of any country on the face of the earth.
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Hi All!
Of all the likely nuclear scenarios, I think the two most likely are these:
North Korea nukes Japan
Sound crazy? Understand this--the history of Korea can essentially be defined by alternating periods of subjugation by the Chinese and the Japanese. The centuries of Chinese rule were generally benign--the decades or centuries of Japanese rule (including 1914-1945) were characterized by incredible brutality interspersed by periodic episodes of unbelievable brutality. It may sound nuts to Westerners--but North Korea would be viewed sympathetically by many South Koreans if they could plausibly launch a nuke at the Japanese.
China flips a nuke at the U.S. over Taiwan
The Chinese have already threatened to do this. In 1996 a Chinese military official--in an astonishly blunt statement--pointed out that the PRC had the capability to deliver nuclear warheads on Los Angeles. (Digression: in Asia you only speak this directly to inferiors or to people you have absolute command over. The statement is regarded by many who are knowledgeable about Asian affairs as strong evidence that the Chinese have compromising information on the Clinton Administration, and speak in this tone to remind everybody of the fact.) The PRC goes nuts any time anybody even talks to the Taiwanese--they continually object to U.S. airlines flying to Taipei, and they harass travelers entering the PRC if they also have a lot of Taiwanese visa stamps. (A lot of Asian travelers "lose" their passports and get replacements, so they have one passport for the PRC and Hong Kong, and a different passport for Taiwan.) How nuts are they? The "diplomatic incident in 1996" that the NY Times refers to in the article was the attempt by President Lee of Taiwan to attend an alumni reunion at Cornell. Yup--Lee was permitted entry into the U.S. only by a resolution of Congress, and the Chinese baldly hinted at nuclear war.
Why would either the NKs or the Chinese do this? Both countries have leaders that are contemptuous of American politics and American public opinion. They believe (and they may be correct) that they could "accidently" flip a nuke and start apologizing up one side and down the other. And they believe that the U.S. does not have the political resolve to respond with nukes. It's all well and good to talk about "anybody launching an ICBM would quickly be glowing in the dark"--but I doubt that it is true. I don't think the U.S. military has what used to be called "independent launch authority" any more--nobody can launch without permission from "National Command Authority." And the "National Command Authority," in case anybody has forgotten, is a sex-crazed dipstick who is regarded as spineless by the leaders of every other nation in the world.
An Exercise:
Taiwan declares independence. China attempts to launch an invasion flotilla. Taiwanese subs and torpedo boats ravage the armada--but suspicions rise that some of those submarines are actually U.S. Navy boats, or perhaps E-3 Sentry aircraft provide tactical information to the Taiwanese. China "accidentally" launches a nuke at Los Angeles--and fortunately, it turns out to be a dud. It destroys a block of downtown L.A., but that's the extent of it. They apologize profusely, and they mention in passing that accidents can happen--just as the U.S. discovered in the "accidental" bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Pretend you're "National Command Authority." Do you nuke back? Or do you quietly get the hint, pull the U.S. assets out of the theater, and let the Chinese take Taiwan--with nukes, if need be?
The amazing thing about nukes is that they are one of the only weapons systems in history that have practically never been used. The more countries that have them, the greater the likelihood that somebody, somewhere, will decide it is worth the risk to push the button. I'm all in favor of humanitarian aid and economic development. But to ignore the very real likelihood of ICBMs being used in the future is unrealistic in a SlashDot reader. In a U.S. politician it is simply criminal.
Hi!
I won't comment on the rest of your post, but your references to Aum Shinrikyu aren't correct.
First, they weren't trying to attack Tokyo in general--they were specifically trying to attack the National Police Agency in Kasumigaseki. They were depending upon the legendary reliability of the Tokyo subways to deliver all the nerve gas (sarin) to the proper parts of Kasumigaseki at the same time. (Don't laugh--there is a entire form of fiction in Japanese literature devoted to the precise scheduling of the Japanese railway system.) They pretty much succeeded--all but one of the trains arrived in Kasumigaseki at the right time. The one train that did not arrive in Kasumigaseki on time was inbound on the Hibiya Line--the sarin was released in the Kamiyacho station (the station before) instead.
As I mentioned above, they used a form of sarin gas, not anthrax. This was a chemical attack, not a biological attack.
How do I know? I was there. I was living in Japan for most of 1994 and 1995, and worked in an office adjacent to Kamiyacho station. My major client in Japan imports a form of phosphene trichloride (a feedstock of sarin) into Japan (it is used to make LCD displays). The Ministry of Social Welfare, in the aftermath of the accident, noted that an importer of POCL3 was adjacent to one of the sites where the gas was released. They were all over us. We were able to demonstrate that we could account for every drop that we had imported--but that was definitely the most tension-filled meeting of my entire career.
Good question. And a question that, in the early days of online communities, caused a lot of debate and legal wrangling.
If you post something on an electronic bulletin board (be it an old-style BBS, SlashDot, or a private fee-paid system like CompuServe) you can be held liable for anything you say. So, for example, if you were to state that IBM was secretly funding the development of Little Black Helicopters for future use by U.N. shock troops, you just might hear from IBM's lawyers. (This isn't as big a deal as it sounds--in general a question cannot be libelous, so nobody can touch you if you post a message asking, "has anybody else heard rumors to the effect that IBM is secretly funding Little Black Helicopters...?" Just remember to use the question mark.)
As to the question of who owns the copyright on what you have written: this gets complicated. There generally is not a single entity that has a "copyright" on any published work. If you write a book and get it published you own the copyright (with some exceptions we'll ignore). But the publisher also has rights to the work--the publisher contributed to the work by paying editors and proofreaders, typesetters and designers, and may have paid for indexing, illustration, or photography. You own the words, but you probably do not have absolute ownership of the entire work. (About the only time you do have absolute ownership of the work is when you "publish" through a "vanity press," where you pay all the print and production costs up front.)
Similarly, SlashDot has rights to the collection of opinions expressed here. SlashDot's original contribution is the creation of software and the maintenance of hardware that permit (even encourage) the expression of ideas posted here. That, the courts have ruled, is enough to give SlashDot some rights to the aggregate collection of text that we all read. (If that sounds confusing, think of it like this: if you're thunderstruck by this comment and quote it in a research paper, you would cite me as the author, and SlashDot as the publisher.)
There is another angle to this: suppose somebody posts a comment here that is legally actionable. Can SlashDot and Andover.net be held liable for libelous (or seditious) posts that appear here.
There have been two views on this subject. The first, and the view that has prevailed in the courts, is that software-driven forums, like CompuServe (who fought all these battles in the 1980s) cannot reasonably edit messages before they appear. The volume of messages is too great, and the format of the service is such that it is obvious to any user than content is originated by specific people, not by the service provider (CompuServe). The courts (rightly) viewed CompuServe (and later AOL) as equivalent to a magazine distributor--even if the distributor carries an issue of Hustler that is later deemed to be pornographic, the distributor is free from liability. It is unreasonable to expect a magazine distributor to read every magazine in advance of placing orders--that isn't how the magazine business works. In the same way, when IBM's lawyers come looking to sue your sorry buns for those comments you made about Little Black Helicopters they will not have a claim against Rob, SlashDot, or Andover.net.
Digression:
An interesting question that has not been litigated is this: whose laws apply to content you read on SlashDot? Back in 1993 Corel bought Ventura Software from Xerox (Ventura developed Ventura Publisher, then the dominant DTP package on PCs). Ventura had a forum on CompuServe, led by a staff of volunteer sysops. Corel added a paid staffer to the sysop list. The actual physical location of the hardware was in Columbus, Ohio. All but one of the staffers lived in the United States (I was living in Japan then). But Corel is located in Ottawa, Ontario--in Canada. The legal construction is that CompuServe was the distributor, forum members were the authors, but Corel (the owner of the forum contract) was the publisher.
There was a gory murder trial in Ontario, and the judge issued a gag order prohibiting publishers from publishing anything about the trial. Canadian newspapers don't have a First Amendment to protect them, so they didn't publish a word. But the judge also required Canadian authorities to seize any newspapers or magazines coming into the country that made reference to the trial. The NY Times and Newsweek both ran articles on the trial to test this, and both publications were seized at the border and destroyed.
So, we wondered, what would happen if we discussed this on CompuServe? If I, in Japan, posted a message to user in the U.K., using hardware and software in Ohio--would the Corel staff guy in Ontario go to jail?
In less than an hour I got an email from Corel's staff attorney: "let's not find out."
I believe them when they say they've been overwhelmed with responses--and I'm not being sarcastic. The Open Source community may view Microsoft as the incarnation of Evil, but all the programmers I know generally like Microsoft. Some of us, including me, are Microsoft fans. I think the DOJ lawsuit is a put-up job led by Microsoft opponents who got blown out of the water due to their own market problems, not Microsoft hegemony. Unless you consider charging lower prices to be hegemony.
I find SlashDot (and UserFriendly) to be very interesting for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the a priori assumption that Microsoft is Evil. It seems, and I may not be correct, that the people who really hate Microsoft tend to be system admins. Programmers I work with generally want to work on projects with Microsoft tools, because you can do cooler stuff, and for the most part the cool new features actually work.
So, frankly, I signed up. I'm the president of a small development house, and we've consistently found that Microsoft's development tools work, while other tools generally don't work as well.
Funny thing? We love the Knowledge Base. I have wondered before if Microsoft is better focused on meeting the needs of developers than they are at meeting the needs of system admins. Could this be an indication?
Hi!
I don't mean to be a syncophant--but I do want to make a point to the seemingly vast number of people who have ways to "improve" SlashDot.
The moderation system is reasonably sophisticated. The M2 system is reasonably sophisticated. The Karma values are reasonably sophisticated. The end result, to paraphrase a client of mine, is a system that is perfectly understandable--so long as the end user has an IQ of 140. [smile]
Rather than tweak the existing moderation system, it might be best to let it gel for a bit--let users spend time as moderators, and let other users spend time doing M2. We're all geeks--and one of our common traits is a tendency to explore. So when we get moderator points or an invitation to M2 we have a tendency to say, "hmm--what happens if I do this?" Those tendencies don't go away right away--it might be weeks before we give up noticing how clever Rob's moderation scheme is and get back to writing comments.
So my suggestion is this: don't do anything. Don't change anything about the moderation system for a good 30 days or more, and wait and see. If something needs to be changed, make the changes and wait another 30 days. Don't rush through a bunch of changes--the end users (us) will focus more on the changes than on what we're doing. (Business schools call this "the Hawthorne effect.")
The Ancient Geek
P.S.: Take it from me. Kiss Rob's posterior in your messages, and you get extra Karma points.
Internet voting is a lovely use of the technology--and a very bad idea for the country. (Apologies to SlashDot members from outside the U.S.A. If your nation chooses to adopt Internet voting, that's your problem.)
Two issues: First, there is the technology. You can cheat. Second, and more importantly, it permits ballots to be cast in private.
What? you say--don't we decide elections by secret ballot? Yes--but that secret ballot must be cast in a *public* place. And the reason that the vote is cast in a public place is so that representatives from all the political parties can be in that public place to object if you are not who you say you are. Or more to the point, if you claim to be somebody that they think does not exist.
Further, those political party representatives are present when the votes are tallied--and the votes are tallied by hand. Everyone present has to agree on the totals--if the process was not completely open to review, someone would cheat.
In recent years some political entities (notably Oregon, with their let's-bring-back-ballot-box-stuffing initiative to hold elections by mail) have either lost sight of the concept of vote fraud, or have tacitly decided that a little bit of good ol' vote fraud might be a good thing. I'd suggest that the latter is the case: lots and lots of elections can be (and are) stolen because nobody's looking.
The Ancient Geek
(formerly a Republican committeeman for 12 years, and an area chairman for 4 years. I've been a poll worker almost every year since 1978.)
The "max penalty" for this is 3 years in prison. However, this is a violation of copyright laws, not drug dealing. Nobody goes to prison for violating copyright laws.
Years ago, when the dry-toner xerography process first appears, lots of "photocopy shops" appeared around every college campus. They would duplicate any book you wanted, and nobody asked questions about whether you had the right to repro the book. Eventually publishers pushed Congress to do something about it, and some copy shops got raided. A pattern of sentencing quickly emerged: the "pirate" loses the equipment used for the copying, and pays a per-copy fee for each work duplicated. (This was stiff--a high-speed Xerox duplicator could run more than $20,000.) If sentencing for this guy is any different, his attorney will have an automatic appeal issue. By rights he'll lose the computer, router, CSU/DSU, etc., and he'll pay a fine. But the feds are just as cognizant of the cost of housing a prisoner as anybody else, and they aren't likely to want to pay the money to put this guy up in the Big House.
That said, there's an interesting quesion: why *this* guy? Of the zillions of web sites out there with MP3s of 'N Sync and videos of Pamela & Tommy Lee, what did this particular guy do to appear on the federal radar screen?
If this signals the start of a Justice Department crackdown on bootleg software, then a number of people on the Internet might want to worry (or at least move to a server co-hosted offshore). But this might also be a case like Al Capone's--he was not sent to prison for racketeering, murder, smuggling, or even tax evasion. He was sent to prison for *mailing a false tax return*. The feds nailed him with both barrels for a trivial offense, because the feds had decided to nail him, and just needed an excuse. (The civil liberties questions here, of course, are legion.)
If this guy gets a Kevin Mitnick sentence, rest assured--the feds think he's responsible for something else but don't want to (or can't) make the charge stick.
Unless you're writing device drivers, I wonder at how you're having trouble getting apps written on Win9x to run on NT and vice versa. We routinely develop applications on 95, 98, and NT4. We're not doing any development in Japanese Windows at present, but we've done quite a bit of that, too. I have personally written 16-bit apps on Japanese DOS that run today, unchanged, on U.S. Windows NT 4. I developed a suite of applications on U.S. DOS and Japanese DOS that have subsequently moved to native-language versions of Windows (both 16- and 32-bit) in Japanese, Chinese (both versions), and Korean.
IMHO, if you're not using the DDK, there's no excuse for 95/NT code conflicts.
I'm one of those over-the-hill guys, and yes--I have "domain experience" that is particularly useful. I've written for tech magazines for years, and I can spot a "plant" article a mile away.
Go back and read the article--this isn't investigative journalism. The guy with the "registry" of over-35 techies hired a PR firm who pitched the article to Wired. For balance the writer went out and got a couple of additional quotes. What you have is two or three anecdotes and a startup business with something to sell issuing a press release. It isn't the start of a trend.
That said, some older geeks do have trouble finding jobs. Generally, as your career progresses, you can specialize in technology or a specific industry or company. I work with a number of clients who have specialized with a particular company--they have bet their careers and their family's finances that the company will grow, thrive, and not get taken over.
Personally, I feel safer with technology. I may be older than you, but I'm confident that I'm at least as smart, and can learn at least as quickly. I recognize that technology changes, so I have to continually learn. Peers of mine who have not continued to upgrade their skills are the guys with problems finding a job. Back in 1974 COBOL was all you needed to know. In 1997 COBOL was *the* hottest ticket in New York. But now that the Y2K crisis is over you can't even find COBOL maintenance work--the language is just plain dead. Guys who never bothered to progress are now scratching their heads, wondering why they can't get jobs with all their "experience."
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. And I don't know which is worse--that the U.N. proposed this silliness; or that Wired, Slashdot, and all the Slashdot netizens missed the absolutely glaring error in the proposal.
Ms. Kate Raworth projects that this 1-cent per hundred "lengthy" Emails (not just any Email, but "lengthy" E-mails) would have raised $70 billion in the U.S. alone in 1996.
DO THE MATH!!!!!
That's 700,000,000,000,000 (7.0e14) Email messages. Seven hundred trillion Email messages. Figure the U.S. population as 245 million--that would mean that every man, woman, and child in the U.S. sent a "lengthy" Email every 11 seconds for the entire year. Oh--and only 15% of the U.S. population had access to Email, in any form, in 1996.
This U.N. economist pulled a cockamamy number completely out of thin air, and everybody has bought it. The U.N. bought it; Oxford University Press (who actually published the report) bought it; Wired magazine bought it. I fully expect that the mainstream Web media will buy it next, and sometime around the end of the week it will make the New York Times.
We don't need to sweat this. Instead, we should take up a collection to send this idiot to Math Camp for the summer.
You are confusing tangible property rights and intellectual property rights. When you buy a car, you own the physical collection of objects. You do not own the design, engineering, or reproduction rights to those objects. If you try to duplicate any one of those objects and sell it, you can be certain that DaimlerChrysler's lawyers will appear on your doorstep and haul you down to the federal courthouse where a judge will spank you with an injunction followed by penalties. Then die Daimlersharksmitlawdegreesensuiten will sue you for damages. And the judge will spank you again.
[Digression] wait, you say--what about "after-market" auto parts? These fall into two categories: functional equivalents, like Midas Mufflers, achieve the same end, but bear no resemblance to the OEM part; and licensed parts, which are typically sold in the aftermarket by the contract manufacturers who made them for the OEM in the first place. The manufacturers of licensed parts pay a royalty to the OEM for each unit they produce or sell. Manufacturers of functional equivalents generally do not pay a royalty, unless the basic part (such as a catalytic converter) is still covered by a patent. [/Digression]
How does this apply to device drivers? If what you do is to carefully monitor the electrical impulses generated by a machine, and write a piece of software that controls those impulses in a manner essentially identical to the manufacturer's device driver, then you have created a functional equivalent. (Sometimes this is known as a "clean room" reverse-engineer.) If what you do is to decompile the code, examine the source, make changes and re-compile, you have committed blatant infringement. The copyright holder (who probably is not the manufacturer--it is probably an outside firm, like mine, that develops that software for the OEM) won't bother to sue you. He will go into federal court and get an injunction, enjoining you from infringing on his intellectual property rights. That permits him to prevent your using any device (that is, the actual computer) until you and he stand in court in front of the judge. So you lose the use of the computer for a couple of years, and then you get spanked by the judge. Then I sue you, and the judge spanks you again.
This, in short, is why no company with any brains at all would even think of bootlegging a proprietary device driver.
You're mistaken. That was his evil twin. This is the Petreley who insisted that OpenDoc would the be the death of Microsoft. And that CORBA would be the death of Microsoft. And that StarOffice would be the death of Microsoft. And that thin-client would be the death of Microsoft.
Give the guy credit--he's persistent.
Wrong--but persistent.
"I can only wonder whether he has no clue about Linux, or he really counts the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Linux hackers who have done a kernel recompile over the years as "very few."
Um--note that the puff at the bottom of the column mentioned that he's recompiled an operating system. Which is a lot more than recompiling the Linux kernel.
You might also note that the puff is entirely in gest--its a joke. InfoWorld loves to do clever bio puffs to get readers to respond--as dozens here have.
Metcalfe isn't that out of touch. Remember that way back when 3Com sold an NOS, while Metcalfe was still CEO, you didn't just install the OS. You actually linked the OS from bunches of floppies. (The same thing was true with Netware before Netware 386. You linked the object code. Netware 86 shipped with 22 360K floppies and a *very* long install procedure.) So anybody who bought LanMan from 3Com in those days, at theoretically, compiled the OS.
That said, I just peeked at the LWHS web site, and looked at the student listings. All this happened before you were born. So maybe you don't remember. [smile]
He was yanking your chain. It appears he succeeded.