So patent it, refuse to license it to anyone, and get litigious. After all, these spammers like their anonymity, so they're hardly likely to show up with any prior art; are they?
It's still optional - builds are available, but no release builds yet. If you're on linux, have a look here and to find out more I suggest the firefox forum on mozillazine.
"exploiting children too young to fully understand the consequences of their actions"
It's not so simple a case as "too young to know better", the subject matter here is the physical and sexual abuse of minors too young to defend themselves - i.e. an inability to object to a horrendous crime.
Victims cannot erase the abuse, but over time can distance themselves from it. The knowledge that there is a record of the crimes committed, floating around the internet, may be reinforce the degrading trauma of the original events.
If some web content is illegal in the UK, then it's illegal because the freely elected government has passed a law based on the will of the people. This is self-censorship by society, not an Orwellian conspiracy.
When every one of Earth's 6.4 billion inhabitants get on the net and decide they want their one free speech per user, we'll have approximately 40,960,000,000 messages to get through.
To make the sums as fair as possible, let's consider the most long-lived humans (the Okinawan's) as typical recipients; on average they live a smidge under 80 years (2,522,880,000 seconds).
So that's
40,960,000,000 messages in
2,522,880,000 seconds, which means only
0.06159375 seconds can be allotted per message (assuming the reader doesn't eat, sleep, or need a job to pay for the computer and net access).
QED: Free speech is worthless unless a similar right exists for selective listening.
One problem you might hit is that Licence X is not necessarily compatible with Licenses Y & Z.
This becomes fun if your project needs to be released using License X, but makes use of libraries published under Y & Z.
For example: Depending on how your code binds to each library, you may be required to use the same license as those libraries. e.g. you may be required to use the GPL.
So,
you should check what you already use and see what licenses you are already bound to - they may not be exactly right for your code or your situation, and be aware that
Other licenses in use may not be comatible - i.e. License Z may also require derivative works to adopt it, so you may then have no choice but to find a new library.
Just in case the announcement is unclear. This proposed CC-style license is for UK residents only.
Historically, in the UK, if you owned a television you were legally obliged to have a Television License - the current cost is approximately 80 pounds sterling per year. Even if you didn't watch any BBC channels you were still legally obliged to purchase a license, so since the work of the BBC has technically always been owned by UK Citizens it will soon be made available to those who funded it.
The license for the rest of the world may be something completely different.
Martin Fink, VP of HP - "HP is not running a religious jihad"...
Zonix - "Am I the only one who is concerned about this bad analogy?"
You're not alone; given the current political climate it is a highly insensitive phrase to use, however, my understanding is that jihad literally means struggle. Recently it has become synonymous with holy war, largely due to its adoption by terrorist groups who justify their atrocities through misdirected religious fervour.
Similarly, evangelism has been misappropriated from Christian texts to suggest entirely reasonable and unswerving support.
More enlightened people may wish to speak in terms of a campaign for Linux adoption and steer clear of ill educated religious waffle; this includes Martin Fink, VP of HP.
Bonus point if anyone can find an apology and retraction on the web.
If you take these key points at face value, this appears to be a rather negative read, however each of the points illustrates neatly why metadata that is pervasively authored can work, as discussed here.
"That being said, relying on publisher embedded meta-data to be relevent on the WWW is probabally wrong. Someone, somewhere, is going to try to lie in that metadata as a way of making money."
There is hope.
RDF is not limited to being embedded in web pages - thus if you happen to distrust the information embedded in a page, or if you happen to know it's just plain wrong then you can publish your own RDF files making statements to this effect.
Once those files get picked up by the search engines then very simple tools can aggregate this metadata.
The global effect will not be dissimilar to the moderation and meta-moderation mechanism in/., the important difference being that you get to choose whose moderation you trust.
The (appropriate) capitalisation of the term "GRID" in the parent is for emphasis; for those reading this and just learning about Grid Computing please note that the term "grid" is not an acronym so capialisation is inappropriate.
Similar to the distinction between "internets", "an internet", "internet technology" and "the Internet" when writing about grid computing it is appropriate to discuss "grids", "a grid" and "the Grid". With the capitalised form being used when referring a definite article such as a unified grid of grids.
The processing potential of beyond-petascale grids is still insignificant compared to the atomic-level complexity of your own intestine. Therefore companies that can afford to pay more for resources will help to keep the cost relatively high - for example a pharmacutical company may wish to use myGrid to perform some particularly extensive in-silico experiments regarding intestinal chemistry - consequently the cost of supercomputing in the future will still be beyond most people.
That's not to say the the amount of processing potential for end users will not increse - it just won't increase as a significant percentage of the global total, so "money" will limit grid access for the commons.
What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses? More education, advertisement, prizes, reimbursement?
Grid computing is not aimed at "the masses". Most of the research is concentrating on building systems for solving problems which normal people have no interest in.
That's not to say that we plebs won't benefit from a "cure for X" or "lower oil prices due to better flow models within pipelines" or even "more efficient cars desgined in simulated air tunnels"; we are just very unlikely to be the imediate user of the computing power.
To answer your first question: the grid community exists through several forums and consortiums.
Now, question 2: The machines in today's grid testbeds are typically just cloned machines so if they get compromised they're easy enough to purge.
The risks are many. Should such a powerful system become compromised at a high enough level (through a social or technical attack), then the potential for a brute force attack on other cryptographically secured systems is high.
Also, due to the "webs of trust" that have to exist between machines within these grids, breaking into a grid which exists across multiple organisations may provide strategic attack points from within those organisatiosn firewalls.
Add to this the fact that the early adopters of grid computing are likely to include pharmecutical corporations, oil companies & the defence industry and it may be apparent that the cost of breaking into such a system may be higher than if John Doe's machine gets owned.
In the case of the military, it is possible to enforce security due to the inherent hierarchical nature of the relationships being modeled: witness the structure of X500 and subsequently LDAP based directory services which are derived from X500.
The situation is somewhat more complex with globalized Grid Computing because of the lack of a universally trusted authority. If the ideal of a ubiquitous "on tap" computing resource is to be realised then a model which unifies hierarchical and peer based trust models is needed.
The original post identifies a high level introduction to some of the consortium and forum based research in this area (which everyone is encouraged to contribute to). "It has", as you say, "been some time", however, it's going take significantly more time before the scientists view of grid computing (as opposed to the marketing hype) can be realised.
This is a UK Degree: a Bachelor of Art. What you may read between the lines is very limited.
It's common for UK Uni's to share modules between degree courses. The obvious parallel is a BSc (Bachelor of Science) and because this BA is in a scientific subject it's a possibility that this is the case.
I sit next to someone with a BA in CS who's on his first year of a Distributed Computing PhD, he also helped me through my first stage 1 Gentoo build and is a more than competent coder, so like I say, there's not much you can infer here, and to call it a Bullshit Degree is a mistake.
Bingo on the graph theory. My gut feeling (read: logical extrapolation of probabilities) leaves me pretty certain that over the next 20 years it will become a core factor in understanding, designing and perceiving most application programs - driven in equal measure by increased use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which is core to semantic web markup, increased use of aggregated computer systems based on web services, and the eventual commoditization of Grid services which are still very much at the research stage.
The combination of all of the above will result in the a norm where services can be perceived in the way (code) libraries are today, so designing, building, visualising and proving the completeness of a program becomes "just" an application of graph theory on a very large graph.
The beauty of a graph is that a novice can begin to understand it very quickly, but to know it you need the math. So just as today, people will be able to create simple programs & scripts without requiring too much investment of time, but ultimately, systems architects, designers, programmers and administrators will find their jobs easier if they have the mathematical background to be able to communicate how their systems work.
I'm all for the utility belt approach, but for targets outside walking distance the combination of the suggested jamming with the postroom attack technique could cause repeated* irritation , and be less than simple to avoid.
*assumes commoditization of hardware to the extent that such attacks are trivial in cost.
Slashdot Mirror
So patent it, refuse to license it to anyone, and get litigious. After all, these spammers like their anonymity, so they're hardly likely to show up with any prior art; are they?
It's still optional - builds are available, but no release builds yet. If you're on linux, have a look here and to find out more I suggest the firefox forum on mozillazine.
It's not so simple a case as "too young to know better", the subject matter here is the physical and sexual abuse of minors too young to defend themselves - i.e. an inability to object to a horrendous crime.
Victims cannot erase the abuse, but over time can distance themselves from it. The knowledge that there is a record of the crimes committed, floating around the internet, may be reinforce the degrading trauma of the original events.
If some web content is illegal in the UK, then it's illegal because the freely elected government has passed a law based on the will of the people. This is self-censorship by society, not an Orwellian conspiracy.
So best of all, those of us who don't install Flash because we believe the WWW should be authored using open standards, will not be affected.
...all your Bayes are belong to us.
When every one of Earth's 6.4 billion inhabitants get on the net and decide they want their one free speech per user, we'll have approximately 40,960,000,000 messages to get through.
To make the sums as fair as possible, let's consider the most long-lived humans (the Okinawan's) as typical recipients; on average they live a smidge under 80 years (2,522,880,000 seconds).
So that's
QED: Free speech is worthless unless a similar right exists for selective listening.
One problem you might hit is that Licence X is not necessarily compatible with Licenses Y & Z.
This becomes fun if your project needs to be released using License X, but makes use of libraries published under Y & Z.
For example: Depending on how your code binds to each library, you may be required to use the same license as those libraries. e.g. you may be required to use the GPL.
So,
Don't get too excited...
Just in case the announcement is unclear. This proposed CC-style license is for UK residents only.
Historically, in the UK, if you owned a television you were legally obliged to have a Television License - the current cost is approximately 80 pounds sterling per year. Even if you didn't watch any BBC channels you were still legally obliged to purchase a license, so since the work of the BBC has technically always been owned by UK Citizens it will soon be made available to those who funded it.
The license for the rest of the world may be something completely different.
You're not alone; given the current political climate it is a highly insensitive phrase to use, however, my understanding is that jihad literally means struggle. Recently it has become synonymous with holy war, largely due to its adoption by terrorist groups who justify their atrocities through misdirected religious fervour.
Similarly, evangelism has been misappropriated from Christian texts to suggest entirely reasonable and unswerving support.
More enlightened people may wish to speak in terms of a campaign for Linux adoption and steer clear of ill educated religious waffle; this includes Martin Fink, VP of HP.
Bonus point if anyone can find an apology and retraction on the web.
Shudder. It's both awesome and yet somehow reminiscent of a bad hacker movie.
Their price list is a little blank. Anyone had the benefit of a quote / delivery from these guys? ...or is it just wish-ware?
The open source Clubdata project might be of interest.
If you take these key points at face value, this appears to be a rather negative read, however each of the points illustrates neatly why metadata that is pervasively authored can work, as discussed here.
"That being said, relying on publisher embedded meta-data to be relevent on the WWW is probabally wrong. Someone, somewhere, is going to try to lie in that metadata as a way of making money."
There is hope.
RDF is not limited to being embedded in web pages - thus if you happen to distrust the information embedded in a page, or if you happen to know it's just plain wrong then you can publish your own RDF files making statements to this effect.
Once those files get picked up by the search engines then very simple tools can aggregate this metadata.
The global effect will not be dissimilar to the moderation and meta-moderation mechanism in /., the important difference being that you get to choose whose moderation you trust.
The (appropriate) capitalisation of the term "GRID" in the parent is for emphasis; for those reading this and just learning about Grid Computing please note that the term "grid" is not an acronym so capialisation is inappropriate.
Similar to the distinction between "internets", "an internet", "internet technology" and "the Internet" when writing about grid computing it is appropriate to discuss "grids", "a grid" and "the Grid". With the capitalised form being used when referring a definite article such as a unified grid of grids.
The processing potential of beyond-petascale grids is still insignificant compared to the atomic-level complexity of your own intestine. Therefore companies that can afford to pay more for resources will help to keep the cost relatively high - for example a pharmacutical company may wish to use myGrid to perform some particularly extensive in-silico experiments regarding intestinal chemistry - consequently the cost of supercomputing in the future will still be beyond most people.
That's not to say the the amount of processing potential for end users will not increse - it just won't increase as a significant percentage of the global total, so "money" will limit grid access for the commons.
zoglmannk asked:
Grid computing is not aimed at "the masses". Most of the research is concentrating on building systems for solving problems which normal people have no interest in.
That's not to say that we plebs won't benefit from a "cure for X" or "lower oil prices due to better flow models within pipelines" or even "more efficient cars desgined in simulated air tunnels"; we are just very unlikely to be the imediate user of the computing power.
To answer your first question: the grid community exists through several forums and consortiums.
Now, question 2: The machines in today's grid testbeds are typically just cloned machines so if they get compromised they're easy enough to purge.
The risks are many. Should such a powerful system become compromised at a high enough level (through a social or technical attack), then the potential for a brute force attack on other cryptographically secured systems is high.
Also, due to the "webs of trust" that have to exist between machines within these grids, breaking into a grid which exists across multiple organisations may provide strategic attack points from within those organisatiosn firewalls.
Add to this the fact that the early adopters of grid computing are likely to include pharmecutical corporations, oil companies & the defence industry and it may be apparent that the cost of breaking into such a system may be higher than if John Doe's machine gets owned.
In the case of the military, it is possible to enforce security due to the inherent hierarchical nature of the relationships being modeled: witness the structure of X500 and subsequently LDAP based directory services which are derived from X500.
The situation is somewhat more complex with globalized Grid Computing because of the lack of a universally trusted authority. If the ideal of a ubiquitous "on tap" computing resource is to be realised then a model which unifies hierarchical and peer based trust models is needed.
The original post identifies a high level introduction to some of the consortium and forum based research in this area (which everyone is encouraged to contribute to). "It has", as you say, "been some time", however, it's going take significantly more time before the scientists view of grid computing (as opposed to the marketing hype) can be realised.
This is a UK Degree: a Bachelor of Art. What you may read between the lines is very limited.
It's common for UK Uni's to share modules between degree courses. The obvious parallel is a BSc (Bachelor of Science) and because this BA is in a scientific subject it's a possibility that this is the case.
I sit next to someone with a BA in CS who's on his first year of a Distributed Computing PhD, he also helped me through my first stage 1 Gentoo build and is a more than competent coder, so like I say, there's not much you can infer here, and to call it a Bullshit Degree is a mistake.
Absolutely not, for all the reasons you mention - hence my almost immediate clarification (7 mins after the original post).
Clarification: being ex-SCO could count either way, I'm not throwing stones; I'm just discussing the geology.
Mr. Dawson has a biog page on which it notes that he's ex-SCO.
Bingo on the graph theory. My gut feeling (read: logical extrapolation of probabilities) leaves me pretty certain that over the next 20 years it will become a core factor in understanding, designing and perceiving most application programs - driven in equal measure by increased use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which is core to semantic web markup, increased use of aggregated computer systems based on web services, and the eventual commoditization of Grid services which are still very much at the research stage.
The combination of all of the above will result in the a norm where services can be perceived in the way (code) libraries are today, so designing, building, visualising and proving the completeness of a program becomes "just" an application of graph theory on a very large graph.
The beauty of a graph is that a novice can begin to understand it very quickly, but to know it you need the math. So just as today, people will be able to create simple programs & scripts without requiring too much investment of time, but ultimately, systems architects, designers, programmers and administrators will find their jobs easier if they have the mathematical background to be able to communicate how their systems work.
I'm all for the utility belt approach, but for targets outside walking distance the combination of the suggested jamming with the postroom attack technique could cause repeated* irritation , and be less than simple to avoid.
*assumes commoditization of hardware to the extent that such attacks are trivial in cost.
i think i'm in love.