I really do not understand about how finding porn relates, but perhaps if you understood how this situation came about, it woould help.
Congresspeople have a number of constituencies that are very anti PRC, multidenominational Christian Churches, for example. At the start of election season earlier this year, a group of Republican congresspeople went to China to meet with the Chinese leadership to "voice their concern" over suppression of speech, especially religious speech...the people their constituencies cared about.
It really was meant to be not much more than a photo op to placate their constituents, they would meet with Chinese leaders, make a statement, and go home. Harmless, in their eyes.
Unfortunately, they got snubbed by the Chinese leadership, only a low ranking member would even meet with them. Partially, it was a misunderstanding, the Chinese take photo ops a lot more seriously than Americans, and didn't realize it meant nothing.
It was't a "Mind you own business, great white father" (which would have been justified) as many believe, it was part of an internal chinese power struggle over how to handle the peasant revolution due in 2010.
However, getting between a Congresperson and their photo op is a vary bad mistake, and when they came back, they help hearings to make sure that at least the American companies heard them...and get another photo op. (Congresspeople pursue photo ops like Pepe Le Peu pursues cats)
However, the rest of the American government had to deal with the consequences of a major snub of the ruling party (If they had been democrats, it would have been different). Not a particularly small event in a city where there is no shortage of massive egos.
So at this point, the American government wants to make it clear to the Chinese government that you don't deal with American companies without dealing with American leadership, even if those companies are multinationals. The Chinese leadership have essentially told the State Department they are irrelevant, and thats not something that can be ignored.
More significantly, there is a growing suspicion that at least part of the problem is that the multinationals don't take the American government seriously either. Coupled with the growing realization of how much damage the search engine companies could do if left unsupervised, lead to the the recent spate of requests for various pieces of information about thier operations. All the American Government is trying to do is scope out the problem before it blows up in everyones faces.
If you think this is some sort of unnecessary alarmism, consider this. Eight years ago, something similar happened, and it got to the point where several European and Asian Governments were raiding multiple Americam companies in retaliation before the offending multinationals were forced to back down and make restitution. In part, at least, that incident is what lead to the much greater interventionism by the American government of the late 90's and 2000's
There is no subpeona, no court case, because this isn't a prosecution. These are regulatory actions pursuant to and authorized by various statutes.
For example, elsewhere in this discussion, somepointed asked why the government might want every URL Google has in persistant store.
I know the answer to that one. In the early days of the internet, occssionally, protections against searchbots were left off for some military and government sites, resulting in classified information appearing in Google search results...and cache. It occasionally still happens, system administrators aren't all knowing, despite what they believe. The government just simply wants to know if that material is still in Google's caches. Do you believe the government doesn't have a right to ask if their security has been compromised?
Lets take some other examples. There used to be this airline called Braniff, that shared a reservation system with several other airlines. Braniff eventually went bankrupt, partially because the reservation system,run by one of the other airlines, always brought up Braniff flights last, so Braniff sold less flights.
We know that Google can alter listing order arbitrarily, they just did so, very publicly, for an large company they whose actions they disapproved of.
For the regulatory agencies protecting the integrity of America's financial markets, and for the governmenatal agencies concerned with economic warfare, this was the equivalent of Iran detonating a nuclear bomb.
There are absolutely no regulatory protections against Google doing the same to any corporation for any reason. What happens if say, a Chinese company decides it wants a bigger share of the market, and gets Google to start listing negative web pages about its competitors first?
Remember, China can offer immensely valuable concessions to access chinese markets to any company it approves of...the key word being approval. This isn't theoretical, it is known that they jailed the president of one middle sized American company until he signed over the company to them. It is also know that certain organizations that promote Chinese/American trade can arrange access to Chinese markets not even large corporations can get. What isn't known is the terms they are asking for offering those deals.
Or lets take stock market manipulation. Google arguable controls a fair amount of information the average consumer recieves. They could easily boost or lower a stock price simply by adjusting their page ranking algorithms...and buy or sell the associated stocks accordingly. You think the possiblity of cheating the small investor isn't something the government should keep a close eye on?
There are many more examples, but what it comes down to is this:
Search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, etc. are in the same class as NRSRO's and Comcast...organizations with immense power to affect the lives of all Americans.
It is the governments responsiblity and obligation to monitor such organizations before something bad happens. Would you rather have another Enron, a Parmalat, or any of a thousand other times goverment oversight was too little, too late?
I do understand your concern about privacy. What I dont understand is why you cannot believe that at least some part of the American Government actually cares about it's citizens, and is doing it's very best to protect them.
They aren't trying to find out anything about the Internet, they are trying to find out about how search engines are being used. I suspect they are also really interested in any descrepancies between that the internet monitoring logs show and googles records.
Competitive intelligence from data mining is only one concern, albeit it should be primary. Traffic from search engines could easily be used to mask more sinister activity by pretending to be from google by spoofing.
THere is a whole host of things about how search engines can be misused that make this a proper and valid line of inquiry for the government. I have only touched on a few things.
I have to admit, since search patterns are anonymous, I am confused as to why why you feel any concern over the goverment investigating them. If the government was interested in any group of people, however big, they would simply goto the ISP's for records of Internet activity. They do it all the time when investigating cases. They certainly wouldn't go to the expense and bother of upsetting a major US asset like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft when there are eaiser alternatives to obtaining that sort of information.
Because of that, I have to conclude that this is not about what individuals are searching, but about usage patterns.
The government doesn't have the resources for blind fishing expeditions; they are looking for something specific. If you listened to Negropontes speech yesterday, the government is pretty short handed as is, they hardly need another non directed task sopping up resources.
I strongly suspect that what the government is looking for is evidence that Google is being used for things that are compromising to national security, for example, industrial espionage. There has been a lot of concern about that in the intelligence community lately.
What really worries me is that Google certainly appears like it has something to hide, the other organizations subpeonaed yield up the information without hesitation. If Google was really concerned, they could easily scrub identity out of the records, anonymizers are a staple of NORA style text mining and easily written.
Google has some other reason to be so defiant over a simple request, and I really don't buy the facile explanation that it would inhibit searching. I mean, anyone with a packet sniffer can find out google search strings, its not as if searching is done encrypted. I have never heard anyone worrying about it, though admittedly I am not that knowlegable in the community of paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Whatever Googles reason, it is not to protect searchers identity, since they don't protect it in normal operations and the government isn't asking for it anyways. What is scary is that Google apparently believes the search patterns would reveal something they don't want known.
And that warrants immediate and aggressive investigation.
Aw comon, do you really think that this is about free speech? The present administration barely tolerates free speech here in the US, why would they care about it elsewhere? And to offend potential large contributors at the start of a difficult election cycle requires something really important.
And is is important. Everyone is familiar with the use of Google, Yahoo, etc. as an index to the web. The US government approves of that purpose, so much so that they exempted intenet companies from taxes just to help them grow.
But Google, Yahoo, etc. also have a potential darker side; they are a unparalelled Competitive Intelligence tool.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, "Competitive intelligence" is the polite name for industrial espionage, which the US, unofficially, also approves of.
But then there is international competitive intelligence, usually referred to as spying.
Happens all the time, in both directions, here in the US. Some of it is tolerated (you have to give something to get something) but only under State Department authorization and oversight...well some governmental agencies oversight, anyhow.
The problem is, Google, Yahoo, etc. blur that distinction. When they start making private deals with other governments, or worse yet, with competitive intelligence agencies that may relay information to other national entities, they have moved from search engine/business intelligence company to an frelance international espionage agency.
Amd thats an action that warrants a lot more than an uncomfortable Wednesday being grilled by a group of congresspeople.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. are highly valuable assets to the United States...noone wants the situation to deteriorate to the point where such actions against them are necessary. I suspect the hearings were just a gentle reminder that almost limitless license to act which big business is offered in the United States does NOT apply to independent action that may interfere with foreign relations. Just because an organization is multinational and has a GNP larger than most coutries does not mean that it can conduct its own foreign policy.
This is a pretty common trick, and used in one form or another on Wall Street for many years.
I have seen ones that scanned EDGAR filings, (got canceled when the company was destroyed in the 9/11 attack), campaign contributions (works wonderfully for the telco and other highly regulated industries). patent filings (generally surprisingly well, though no one knows why), job adss, and many others.
I even heard of one that analyzed free internet porn...(insert your favorite joke here, but it actually was a fairly good predictor. The cognitive psychology behind it was fascinating).
Using search engines and NORA text mining is basically a form of technical investing. If you have a data store of any kind whose contents influenced or are influenced by members of the market niche of a company, it can tell you something about the future of that niche. Thats just plain marketing 101...
Actually, theres an excellent chance it's a brushback.
Those of us amateurs who follow the Chinese-American economic war have been increasingly concerned about the actions of the organizations mentioned.
While it is fairly common that international businesses influence international politics, every so often it is necessary for the American government to remind businesses that the actions of those businesses are getting too close to the line where their actions will no longer be tolerated, no matter how much money they spend lobbying.
I suspect this bill, like the subpeona's a while back, are meant to remind those businesses that American lawmakers and law enforcement organizations are still in charge of foreign policies, and still have the last word on what international actions are tolerated, and can make the lives of the the companies personnel really miserable if that is what it takes.
In this case, it appears that the government is suspecting those organizations may be starting to get involved with things they think it shouldn't, and decided to send them a wake up call. It is not an action the American government takes lightly,(or often, last time was 8 years ago) but when they do, it indicates how serious the government is about the warning.
Can't see anything wrong in University of Michigan putting its books online...
However, I fail to see why US taxpayers should be burdened with the cost of facilitating the cost of educating Chinese students at a time when American students are suffering severe reductions and the American workforce is lagging in educational resources. China can afford to pay to educate its own students.
If the University of Michigan is recieving ANY public funding, ANY information from those books should NOT be available outside the United States and protected territories and the consequences to the University should be very severe if that happens, including a loss of all public funding and requirement to pay back any funding it has already recieved during the period when it was exporting material paid for by US taxpayers.
The real answer is a bit more ocmplicated. For various reasons, America, China, the Arabic people and Bin Ladin have a common interested in breaking up the present power structures in the area.
There has been no equivalent of a "Tet offensive" because, I suspect, there is a tacit understanding that everyone is acheiving their goals under the present conditions.
China faces ethnic unrest for the them, especially in its hardest to govern provinces like Xiang, and would rather face many small groups than one large organized group.
There has been a lively debate from the past several decades among the Arab peoples themselves, that they have somehow "lost their way" over the past 100 years. You have to remember, that for a 1000 years, they were the dominant civilization on the planet. The recent riots are not so much about the cartoons as the loss of status amd power. Many believe that anything is better than the present situation.
The reason for the stasis is that they got caught up in what economists call a "water economy", an economy where control of one resource (oil in this case) dominates. Such economies can only be changed by outside forces, such as the recent American invasion. The strict, monolithic religious structures (like the Christian church in early western civilization) also acted to buttress the stasis of their civilization.
Bin Laden obviously believes that this course of action will move his civilization into growing again. Exactly where he wants to guide it, and whether that conflicts with American interests is unclear. It must be remembered that it hasn't been that long since Britain was a deadly enemy of America. Things change very fast these days.
America also wants this to happen, though the reasons aren't as obvious. Many people believe that the Iraq war is about oil. Nothing could be further from the truth. Western civilization had a very nice efficient system of puppet governments to efficiently extract the oil, and would not go for something this radical without extremely good reasons.
It is not about spreading democracy either. If you listen to CSPAN, the moderates in Congress (a minority) are the only ones that actually believe in a two party system, and more than a few barely believe in a one party system.
The war is about spreading capitalism (which, to Bush, is indistinguishable from democracy). Let me explain.
Every hundred years or so, the financial centers of the world move to the next expanding economy. In the 1600's from the Dutch on up to moving to America in the early 1900's (see OECD's reports by Angus Maddison for details)
In the 2000's, the financial centers are moving from America to the Hong Kong/Singapore area to take advantage of the growing Chinese economy. This doesn't bode well for America. Bush has to offer big business every incentive he can to keep them here until he can find a market to offer them that is as big in potential as the Chinese one.
There is only one other market that fits the bill. The Middle East. Lots of money from the oil, and lots of people needing to buy even the basics.
Problem is, most of the money is tied up in a few families.If in even one country (in this case, Iraq) that money if spread among the general populace, Bush has the market to offer as an incentive for big business to stay loyal to America.
The rest of the countries in the region would soon follow suit, even if America did nothing more. Arab civilization is even more vulnerable to "keeping up with the Jones" than even Western civilization. All they need to know is that it can be done.
Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as the American army strolling in, kicking out the dictators (easily done) and and spreading the wealth. A "king of the hill" game would soon arise and the money would concentrate in a few hands again.
The reason is that it was greek civilization which invented the idea that you could have a stable government where no one was trusted with all t
"it may also be that the American intelligence aparatus has been successful in thwarting al-Qaeda's attempts to do damage. "
Aw comon. Israel, a far smaller country with much tighter security, has several incidents a day. Even ordinary (non terrorist crime) flourishes here in the US. We can't even control ordinary street gangs, let alone far more sophisticated terrorist cells.
It is hard to believe that there is 100% effectiveness in just this one area, when we can't even achieve that level of success in our most tightly controlled and monitored prisons. Just exactly how could even the most efficient law enforcement organization stop someone in advance from taking a box of matches and setting a bunch of forest fires or a few city blocks ablaze?
"Bin Laden has stated that economic disruption is his goal,.." "Bin Laden said that if the U.S. economy suffers enough, Americans will withdraw from those countries mentioned..."
Of course, we wouldn't even BE in the country in the first place if he hadn't acted.
Saying he just wants to destroy America begs the question of why he wants to do so. I suspect that is misdirection on his part. There is an alternative explanation that doesn't depend on irrational, suicidal behaviour that confers no benefits.
Lets assume his real goal is to break the power of both the regional dictators and the traditional religious clergy. In that case, most of his actions make perfect sense without depending on positing any irrational behaviour at all.
His one sucessful attack on America resulting in the American military breaking the power of the worst regional dictator, Iraq. That was not only pretty predictable, but remember, without that attack, the American military refused to take the war from Kuwait to Iraq earlier.
The rest of attacks seem to have the goal of causing chaos in areas where the traditional religous clergy is powerless to stop them. It doesn't seem likely his targets are American audiences, the kill rate of the past four years in Iraq is less than what happened in a few days in wars like Vietnam, WWI and the American civil war. He could do far more damage if his goal was hurting American troops. I think he is playing to local audiences, and trying to tell them the traditional religious structures are unable to protect them.
It seems likely that if his goal was to increase the power of the traditional clergy, that it would have been simple enough to work with them in the attacks. Instead, he seems to be going around them.
It appears that his real goal is to break the traditional religious structures by inducing the formation of small independent groups. If this is the case, he is having great success.
It is uncertain what he intends to do with those groups, but one thing is clear: for the first time in over a thousand years, it is possible for the basic power structures in the middle east to change radically. In the past, the roles always stayed the same, even though the persons occupying those roles, and the geographic areas they controlled changed.
Is his goal to destroy the American economy? Possibly, but what would it gain him? It seems more likely that he would want to consolidate his power first, and he needs oil revenues to do that, which means he doesn't want to particularly disrupt one of his biggest potential customers.
Thats probably why he offered the truce recently. He has eliminated his biggest political rivals, the regional dictators and the influence of the top religious clergy, and now wants to concentrate on consolidating his vistory by controlling the formation of new power structures in the region.
..."It seems obvious that bin Laden wants to do serious damage to the American economy,..."
I give up.. why does it seem obvious? There was one attack on America (9/11) which seemed very carefully designed to avoid any serious damage to the economy. The attack occured just before the markets opened. Can you imagine how much worse it would have been if the attack had occurred during normal trading hours, or worse, just at closing? Bin Laden turned $50 million to $300 million in the stock market in the years before 9/11, he would have to know when the market was most vulnerable.
Furthermore, there are thousand of serious potential targets that require no more preparation that a box of matches to destroy. It would certainly do serious damage to our economy if our cities and forests were burning...but they aren't.
Finally, one sucessful attack in 5 years? There are high security prisons that have poorer safety records. If damage to the American economy were a goal, you think there would have been a lot more attempts.
If Bin Laden's goal is serious damage to the American economy, he certaily seems to be incredibly incompetant.
The problem is, this is the wrong cyber security threat to worry about. It won't do any harm, though, and give everyone a false fuzzy feeling that they are doing their job. There won't be a serious cyberattack against America for the foreseeable future (outside of normal business competition, that is), it would ruin the value of the stocks owned by just about every organization and influential individual on the planet. For example, theres an urban legend that a cyberattack against America in the mid 90's by Indian terrorists was stopped before it started by Chinese warlords fearing for their TBonds. Even Bin Laden had $300 million in US stocks.
The southern border situation won't go critical (as a national security threat, anyways) until 9/09 at least, and it is probably too late to do anything about it, most of the persons of interest have been in the US for years and have no need to cross the border.
What really worries me is the multitier outsourcing threat. There are enough stories floating around about various exploits that it bears serious investigation.
For example, A defense contractor builds the battlefield C4I systems that are going to defend against a Chinese incursion into, say, Afghanistan. The core of their system is a COTS product from a prominent North American Silicon Valley company, which bought it from a smaller Silicon Valley company; which still has the maintenance duties... and since has moved to Shentzen, PRC.
*Sigh* Every year or two for the past ten years, I get into an argument with some European professor about the qualifications of American graduated students, Usually on their knowlege of engineering of computer programs.
Thanks to this discussion, this year, I am going to have a much harder time defending them, I think.
Safety critical systems is a branch of computer science, routinely taught in the better European universities. The book I first learned it from was Safety Critical Computer Systems http://www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/~neil/safebook.htm
The field really got impetus after the Therac-25 failure http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/The rac_1.html where a group of people got radiated to death because of a minor (in a computer sense) error in some code, thus adding new meaning to the term "execution error".
Its a vast field (google "safety critical") with large numbers of interesting published papers and few good books. I really can't remmend a current book, I haven't seen one I liked in years. I don't think you can learn it fast enough to be useful.
You also need to know a fair amount of higher math to be really competant, or at least even understand whats going on... most of the true experts in the field apparently regard english as a required second language (Math being the first language, not that I can blame them, but often it is overused)
The field seems to have suffered since the recession. and fragmented, but there is a good starting point at http://vl.fmnet.info/safety/
It also seems to be rapidly migrating to India as well, because of the resistance of American "cowboy" programmers. This time, it is possible the game of "cowboy and indians" may end up with the Indian's winning, inasmuch as the techniques are going to be essential to the new multicore programming models. (I heard a rumor Herb Sutter is investigating that, but thats just a rumor. If so, however, he would be the person to talk to about safety critical C/C++)
One of the techniques used in the field is formal verification. McGee and Kramer are coming out with a second edition of thier incredible book, Concurrency, http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~jnm/ early this year (last time I emailed them). The book is an gentle introduction to the field of formal verification and model checking, among other things. There are other books (a new one came out on the Spin Model checker, for example) but this is by far the most penetrable.
Much more interesting is the use of model checkers behind UML or BPEL/SOA tools. Most of the really interesting stuff is still behind university walls, but tools should be appearing soon. I am trying to develop an open source grid based one but it's been slow going due to committments and resources.
I knew Jobs back in the early days (and again, several times later in his career.) His one real obvious talent was the ability to focus, stay focused, and keep the people around him also focused on the task at hand.
For some reason, that always seems to disappoint people. They wanted some sort of magic, focusing on any bright shiny slogan or technology associated with the current project. People expect CEO's to put on a great show, it is practically a job definition (no pun intended) these days.
Most CEO's are chosen because they look and act like CEOs. Jobs sets a high bar simply by adding the ability to concentrate on the job to that short list.
Take a look at other CEO's in this class, such as Mark Hurd when he was at NCR. Same thing; FOCUS.
No matter how knowlegable, how micro managing a CEO is, he or she cannot have a significant effect on a corporation directly; there is only 24 hours in a day, and only so much they can do.
But CEO's set the tone for a company. What they value, the company values. And if a company values focus, then the efforts of members of the company are all directed towards the same goal, and thats where success comes from.
Not a magic slogan of "saving the world", not some high fashion techtoy, not some secret mastery of arcane knowledge. Jobs could have as easily been a complete dummy running a company producing coathangers in Nebraska, whose motto was "grab it all, control it all, squeeze it till it bleeds", and he still would have suceeded, because a small army of people, focusing on a goal, will always win against a much larger, unorganized mob.
People forget that CEO's are, first and foremost, leaders, and the job description for a leader is pretty simple... LEAD!(i.e. get everyone going in the same direction.) Every other definition is just smoke and mirrors, no matter how much everyone would like to believe that it is more than that.
Personally, I find it even more interesting that it comes a few days after the passing of the e-annoynance act (section 113 of the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act.) that says anonymous annoying e mail is a crime. (I wonder if that applies to campaign literature?)
I wonder what the odds are that the closing of that blog is going to show up as amicus curia briefs when challenges to the legality of section 113 are heard in court?
I was brought up in a era when journalists were some of the most respected people around. I really miss those times.
When I realize that the most respected journalist today by far is Jon Stewart, I wonder how we can sue the journalism schools for polluting the media. Not that I don't think Jon isn't a great comedian, and, actually, a pretty good journalist, but he and Amoss (whose a publisher, not a journalist) seem to be the only two ones who still believe in journalism.
Journalism has occupied an important place in our society since prehistoric times, it is sad to see it dying so ignomious a death. I would have expected there would be at least a few reporters who still respected thier profession enough to at least go down fighting.
Well, you keep on asserting that there is a theoretical upper limit to the frequencies generated by applying single pulses to materials. Would you care to cite the reference? I can't seem to locate it myself.
You are right about pulse versus square waves...I was trying to make a more visual explanation for the lay audience of slashdot..."single cycle of a square wave" is more accurate than a "pulse", which in lay terms might be taken to mean a short burst of multiple frequencies, The same rationale applies for resulting harmonics.It is the harmonics generated by the pulse that creates the multiple frequencies of ultrawideband.
As far as iron shielding being impenetrable, thats an assertion on the order of a "hummingbird can't fly"...many people have observed that metal simply acts as a reradiator in the real world. I mean, what do you think antenna's are made of?
In this case, however, I have to admit I plaigerized the phrase from a thesis I recently read on theoretical frequency analysis of materials. It has a whole section on complexities of iron.
More importantly, you seem to be totally missing the real point. You only need high field strength if you are going to "punch through" the armor, say, like some science fiction ray gun.
Thats a very simplistic, brute force, approach (which is why you say it is simple).
There are more sophisticated ways to approach the problem. A weapon of this sort would simply generate a pulse and analyze the reflection to generate a constituitive map. Don't tell me that's impossible, there are plenty of imaging devices that do that today, albeit for limited ranges of materials and frequencies. Investigating internal structure of materials is what this technology was invented for.
It would then use the constitutive map to calculate the frequencies that would appear on the far side of the material. Again, thats something we can do today, albeit under very limited circumstances.
Then it would use that information to generate an interference pattern whose nodes had a high enough energy to disrupt an IC chip. Not melt or otherwise destroy it, just simply to interfere with it's functioning. Again, thats something we can do today.
The amount of calculation necessary to do this would take decades to perform under present technology, but it could be done.
Perhaps the attentuation is as bad as you say, though real world experience says it isn't. Even so, the energy required is a LOT less than what is needed to "burn a hole" through the armor, as you keep on suggesting.
The reason I said nodes a meter apart was in analogy to ship based CIWS anti missile systems, that fire in arrays a meter apart. Again, I was just trying for a visual that the lay audience could grasp.
Umm, I think you may be getting confused between current commercial UWB technology and ultrawideband.
UWB technology is indeed limited in range (usually by regulatory decree)
Ultrawideband is simply applying pulses (single cycles of square waves) against an antenna and using the resulting harmonics Using wave shaping and adjusting the nature of the input pulse you can theoretically generate any combination of frequencies you want. I have read of devices that ranged between 50HZ to 50 GHZ, but AFAIK, there is no theoretical limit as to the frequency range.
Actually, I don't think ultrawideband is defined in the frequency range at all, Its a time domain thing and has to theoretically be extended to all frequencies, though practical considerations apply to the maximum frequencies actually worked with.
As far as penetration goes, the interaction of materials with EM radiation is governed by the material itself, the sources, and the constitutive relations (or QED at the microscopic level). The interaction has been thorough investigated, and tends to be pretty complex. We seem to be discussing iron here, so the effects may range from hysterisis to polarization at the microscopic level affected by the crytalline structure of the metal. It's still calculable, though...just more complex.
It has been pretty well established by imaging research that given a specific range of frequencies and materials, you can solve for the constitutive relations and do things like calculating field strength at particular points...actually, that the basis of most imaging devices of any kind.
Nowhere in the theory does it imply you can't penetrate at all... as a matter of fact, at the microscopic level, materials are viewed mostly as a network of loosely connected empty spaces.
Given enough calculating power, there is no theoretical upper limit to exactly how far you can take these sort of calculations. You should be able to calculate the what sources are needed to get a field strength at a particular point or points while still not interacting with any materials in between, and use ultrawideband to generate those sources. The real issue is how far you have to go to get something that is useful as an e weapon.
That's probably something like a electromagnetic CIWS system. In other words, one node every meter or so. Since you can adjust the location billions of times a second, it's pretty inevitable you hit something sooner or later.
Granted, thats way beyond the calculating capability of present day machines, but, well, look at the the difference between a IBM 650 of the 1950's and a ZSeries today. It is believeable that it might be possible in the next 50 years.
It will probably be practical when massively multicore processors become available. If the math involved is decomposible (say, modelling using a Bremmer series) you could distribute it across the cores and possibly a grid.
Japan has been selling these devices as ways of examining building structures for decades, they are mentioned in the FCC dockets.
The ones I have seen used for structural examination are pretty big, about the size of golf carts, but that was back in 2003. They aren't really affected by the structural materials used, though embedded metal acts as a reradiator, and tends to increase the range the devices can see through. (It is only moving metal they have a problem with.)
Wrong assumptions. It is not a focused terabyte beam and it doesn't use brute force to penetrate armor. As a matter of fact, it just ignores the armor.
What I was talking about was the UWB equivalent of a electromagnetic pulse weapon.
Ultrawideband is exactly that... it produces a blast of radiation across the entire spectrum. Nothing absorbs at EVERY frequency, some energy is bound to get through at some frequencies. Granted, superconductors would prove an effective defense, but you don't even need that, just copper plated armor with electicity running though it, like some medium armor does today.
The trick is to get the radiant energy from the UWB to refocus INSIDE the armor as a standing wave node. If you do the math and the wave shaping right, you can produce a node with a significant energy, even though its only a fraction of a micron in size, and even though the individual radiation that got through was insignificant.
The end effect would be as if nano sized static electricity sparks just started materializing all throughout the target area, including inside the electronic devices.
I doubt if you could burn anything with it at a macroscopic level, but just exactly how big a spark for how long would you think it would take to knock out an integrated circuit chip rendering the most sophisticated weapon useless?
You wouldn't need very good accuracy, just keep shotgunning it at billions of times a second until you hit something vital. Think of it as a sort of EMP based CWIS or NMR on steriods. It certainly would be many times more efficient than real life EMP weapons like the Malta bomb announced a few years ago.
Like, I said, the computing power and electrical power necessary to achieve that is way beyond the state of the art, but when you only need micron sized energy nodes, not impossible.
More interesting example is if you can get the polarity of the nodes aligned. In that case, you get a sort of lasered force field. (I saw that one in a theroretical physics paper a few years ago)
Granted, its far weaker than say, the electric field powering those electric ionizer fans that Sharper image sells on tv, but possibly useful for certain nano manipulations. Each node could be enough to contain, say, a single cold fusion reaction in a molecular lattice, or to perform nano surgery.
I wasn't able to access the DefenseLink article for some reason (it came up blank in several browsers), but I thought I would make a couple of comments on UWB imaging.
These UWB based through wall imaging systems have been available, for example, in Japan for 20 years. They were banned in the US until after 9/11 because of political pressure from telco's (Biggest docket the FCC has ever seen).
At that time, they were allowed to the public(with great restrictions) as unlicensed spectrum devices.
The ones I have seen in public just produce a sort of a blob in the viewer when looking at non dense items like humans, produce false shadows, and are easily confused by simple fans running in the area (Basically, its ground penetrating radar, and the fans act like chaff and scatter the reflection).
Given that the missions our warfighters are likely to be engaged in are in high temperature areas where lots of fans are likely, it is unlikely to be very useful except as a general warning device. On the other hand, they need VERY low power and pose no hazard to anybody.
Except maybe the soldiers. While UWB has a LPDI (Low probability of detection and intercept) it is not zero. Quite a few countries (especially Pacific Rim ones) have UWB expertise, and the ability to detect what is basically a moving static emitting source is not beyond the state of the art.
For the devices to be useful, the soldiers have to boost power if moving metal is in the area, and if there isn't any, its probably because the electricity grid is offline, which means it will be little background static to mask someone using these devices.
Soldiers using the device might very well be "painting" themselves as targets. Since the US military has been using UWB devices devices for decades, it is a distinct possibility that arms dealers already have (or can purchase) such detection devices.
The potential of these technologies, however, is incredible. Properly done, UWB and related technologies can also detect distance, shapes and materials. (Theoretically, at high power, you can create an e-weapon that is unimpeded by heavy armor, and even a sort of star trek like force field! )
However, thats just what was predicted from the theoretical math. The level of sophistication to implement something like that is many decades away at least, because the amount of computing power (and electric power) needed is not possible to achieve with present technology.
kpharmer: You are right about the politics killing the process, but not for the reasons you are talking about
Those databases the FBI is federating are the basis for a lot of little empires in the various agencies. They are going to be very jealously protected. I am not certain thats not a good idea, since they are also the basis of a number of successful prosecutions. But those concerns still have to be addressed if the project is going to happen.
Even so, there are no horrific waterfall processes involved, not if they do it right. As I said, its a grid, and the only thing that even touches the remote databases is a small grid agent, managed by the database owner, not the central federator.
The real trick to making this project work is convincing the database owners that the anonymizer in the agent is anonymous enough, since anything that allows a successful query also exposes a LOT of information. That means that there has to be a lot of manual processes intertwined, since LEO's sometimes feel better about exposing things to other LEO's only "off the record". If you don't do that, you will find that the people you need to work with to implement this in the individual databases are "not available".
To achieve that, you need someone with the street cred of a top agent (one of the former heads of the CIA might do the trick), the skills of a master politician, and the creativeness of an Edison, because they isn't anything available that can do this, it is going to require a whole new approach.
Anonymous Coward: believe it or not, they were right in saying your background wasn't right. (And I am amazed they knew enough to understand that.) Let me explain.
This isn't your ordinary database project. No Tera byte databases involved, heck a lot of the data might be in the form of email, spreadsheets, or Word/OpenOffice documents.
The remote databases are connected by a grid (i.e. advanced stateful web services), but understanding Web Services and the grid just gets you in the door, it doesn't help you attain the goal.
You need an distributed agent to ask the right sort of queries at the remote databases. There is, believe it or not, a horrendous amount of math understanding involved in doing that, though using the term calculus is sorta misleading. This isn't your high school calculus, in this case, calculus is used in the sense of "a set of rules for calculating things"
What sort of calculus?
Back a few a few decades ago, a couple of mathematicians (Krohn/Rhodes) determined that you could decompose mathematical entities if they had the right properties. This lead to SQL, finite state machines, and the more advanced programing languages. They used some pretty simplistic (and incorrect) math for that.
Things has advanced quite a bit in math over the decades, especially our understanding of a branch of math known as category theory. To create a successful grid based query mechanism will require designing a query language based on category theory, rather than the set theory stuff that our present database languages are based on. There are only a few labs on the planet (and about 15 companies plus occasional hobbyists like myself) that know enough to do that A lot of them are at least as flaky as a croissant, too. The ones that aren't are either too theoretical or based in a foreign country.
Of course, you also need the ordinary stuff of NORA, which involves Knowledge representation issues in the area of Logic, Language and Mathematics, again a rather esoteric specialty. If you haven't at least heard of GATE, for example, you probably aren't ready to tackle this.
Thats whats needed for an ordinary NORA style distributed query Now you get to add in the information security component, which means you get to add in all the stuff about about advanced information theory and multi level security, two more area of math that are not commonly known.
If you want to read more about this, start with the Category theory area of Wikipedia (which,
I have no first hand knowledge, but I suspect that it probably doesn't have anything to do with a Universal ID. Its a response to the demand that the FBI share information with other LEO 's (Law Enforcement Organizations) and get better at utilizing it's own information.
What the FBI probably wants is Non Obvious Relationship Analysis (NORA) on a set of databases connected by a grid. Other LEO's are trying to build one and the FBI doesn't want to be left out. In addition, after the fiasco's of the past few years, the FBI needs to integrate the information in the various databases they have access to. NORA enables them to do that, it "chains together" information in various databases to detected relationships that are not explicity asked for.
If you think thats important only for privacy, terrorists or criminals, think again. Take the current bugaboo, bird flu virus. If a "patient zero" carry the virus managed to enter the United States, he, she or it could easily get lost and start a small pandemic before the LEO's could track them down. The information would all be there in the databases, but lack of integration would prevent it from being accessed.
There is other things as well. NORA technology could identify white collar crime before it got to Enron or Worldcom porportions. As 9/11 pointed out, the job of the FBI has gotten well beyond it's current capabilities. Not their fault, but the problem certainly has to be addressed
The problem with implementing distributed NORA is that most of that information is under a security regimine that doesn't allow sharing, even with other LEO's or other areas within the FBI itself. Entity anonymization can help to some extent, but it is not yet advanced enough to suit the project, some research will be needed (and one hell of a lot of political negotiation)
The construction of search queries across federated and autonomus databases is also a very difficult one to tackle, and present technology is not really up to it. Again, it is not simply a technical challenge (though even a shared ontology THAT WORKS is difficult) but also a political one.
There is only a few architects on the planet that could pull it off, and they are either
1) currently incredibly busy doing the same thing for DHS, casinos, credit check companies, etc. at even more incredible salaries.
2) citizens of a foreign country.
To add to the fun, if you watch CSPAN, the congressional committees that handle oversight have developed this rather annoying habit of demanding that anyone who fails at projects like this be held accountable. Seriously accountable, as in prosecution. Dunno if the department heads actually took that demand seriously, though.
In short, it is highly unlikely that this one is an attempt to set up "Big Brother" invasions of privacy. It's far more likely the FBI is just trying to correct the shortcomings that a highly embarassing set of nationaly televised hearings have brought out into the open.
I don't think Novell is going to have much in the way of difficulty capturing mindshare among the OSS and Linux user community. There is a few things they need to do (a better Yast, small utilities like service and slocate, etc) but the general feel of Suse 10 is that it is fairly well along to being rock solid itself. The momentum is building, and many of the community that once despised SUSe for releasing their product as source only, now feel that way about Red Hat.
Enterprise managers, however, are a different proposition. Red Hat is the linux "brand name"., and Red Hat legitimately earned that title with their tireless work over the past years. They were the major reason Linux is a serious contender in the industry.
However, Red Hat is coasting on thier reputation, and, outside of that reputation , the competition between Novell and Red Hat is pretty much even. Neither side has serious mindshare among the enterprise managers, who are mostly just experimenting at this stage.
Red Hat will have a lot of serious enterprise implementations to point to soon, they are in a number of companies. However, that won't be convincing to your average manager, since they will see it as one off successes, not a validation.
The deal maker will be a reference implementation, that managers can see as as something they customize, rather than create. Neither side has that yet, though Novell seems much better situated to deliver it.
It isn't simply the wider or more bleeding edge scope of SUSe10 versus RHEL4, it also Novelles Identity Management solutions. Identity Management is at the heart of most major enterprise projects today, and Novell is the "Red Hat" of that industry (rock solid, boring, unadventurous). Identity Management is something that enterprise managers can relate to on their ROI scorecard, unlike OS's, which CFO's don't understand or care about.
So, to summarise, Novell needs to create a reference Enterprise Application, complete with an openly availble (a la Oracle) though not necessarily open source, Identity Management suite, and start demoing that to enterprise managers. Combined with pressure from the techie side, it should be enough to give Novell at least a fighting chance in dominating this still nascent industry niche. In true OSS fashion, they can do it by making alliances with a number of the smaller consulting organizations that have good track records and reputations in these sort of enterprise applications.
The main problem with Linux sales is that risk adverse enterprise managers have little evidence that a serious Linux based project will succeed.
Novell is well positioned to change that view, IF they make the right moves.
Novell has two major assets in the technology space. The first is SUSe 10, and the second is their identity management servers.
Let me explain. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is a rock solid distro, and technically does everything it needs to do, which is why it's leading the market...for now.
It is also 1) boring 2) conservative, 3) requires a lot of work to integrate into a typical large enterprise. This is mainly because Red Hat's wants to keep that "rock solid" reputation, and thus doesn't readily embrace new technology.
Not a bad idea, except that those new technologies are whats needed to integrate into a serious enterprise environment.
Novell's SUSe 10 is a lot more adventurous, and besides not being boring, it has all the technology needed to do a end to end implementation of a large enterprise application right out of the box (well, wire, actually, since you can download it).
All of this software is available in the OSS community, so it is available to Red Hat as well, but it isn't integrated, and therefore requires a LOT of work and expertise to connect together.
Work that doesn't show up as realization of business goals on an enterprise managers ROI scorecard.
Red Hat could duplicate that, but it will take a while. Don't get me wrong, I am aware of the wonderful work being done by say, JPackage with Apache, ObjectWeb, Tigris and other OSS communities , but it is not at the same level that you get with SUSe at the moment. (Installing an RPM is not quite the same as getting it to play nicely with everything else on the machine, which is where most of the work comes in).
The other really good feature is that Novell makes the commercial version of SUSe downloable with no time restrictions (though they call it the evaluation version) This is the major feature that attracted everybody to Redhat initially, and is the other major weakness of RedHat now.
When RedHat branched their free version off to Fedora, they lost most of their momentum to Ubuntu. You can't develop something on Fedora (even if it were stable)and be guaranteed it will work on Red Hat Enterprise, it's diverged too much, so why bother?
Red Hat is coasting on past good will and reputation right now, and SUSe 10 is exciting enough, from a users, developers and managers perspective, that it might easily turn the market around; if they do it right...
(continued in next post... what Novell needs to do.)
The author is right, outsourcing need not be a threat. But he is an educator, not an economist, so he doesn't have the right words to express the answer in non educational terms.
Lets be practical. Protectionism will not work; China's cost of labor is 3% of ours, so we are NOT going to stop outsourcing.
So what will work?
If you read the literature on the competitive advantage of nations, you realize that what really happens is that a "cluster of expertise" on a particular area forms within the nation, and eventually it develops into a national hegemony that makes that nation competitive in that area for a period of time.
We have seen this with Swiss watchmakers and with German cars, even with America's Silicon Valley that grew from the HomeBrew Computer Clubs cluster.
India invested heavily in developing their clusters (the Indian Institute of Technology, for example) and China has done the same (the Shenzen Special Economic Zone, for example). It has paid off handsomely for them.
America has not made a real effort in this area until recently. It isn't enough to just give funding. The J.O.B.S. bill or, say, Utah's Fund of Funds are necessary, but not sufficient.
The investment we need to make is to actively "seed" the creation of clusters of expertise, but that's not being done; so no wonder America's competitive advantage is rapidly slipping away; we aren't investing in our future.
The author of the article is looking to education as a way to seed the clusters.
But that's haphard, indirect, and more importantly, America does not have the time or patience to wait for that to happen.
The federal and state governments have to take an active interest (possibly by issuing contracts) in turning those funds they have made available into projects that cause clusters to form.
So far, there has been little effort in this area.
In the meantime, the US Trade Representative has been trading American jobs for agricultural export advantages. So America gets to sell more GMO soybeans to China, and China gets to sell more IT and telecom services to America. Perfectly reasonable from the USTR's point of view, agriculture is a far less risky proposition than services.
That needs to change. We, as a nation, cannot be reduced to agriculture as our one single major export. That is far too risky.
We, as a nation, need to pick specific areas to develop clusters of expertise in, and then focus on developing those as fast as possible.
But to make that kind of national effort happen takes leadership on the part of the state and national legislatures, or at least in the Department of Labor and in the current atmosphere of political balkanization, that is highly unlikely.
Perhaps after the next election we will get a more activist government.
There is some hope however, since some seeds already exist.
Utah, for example, lead the country in pioneering digital signatures in government. That could develop into a national hegemony where the US is to digital identity what Japan is to consumer electronics. Certainly thats a potential export item in an age where governments all over the world are trying to sort out what citizens get what services.
There are many other examples. Most major governments are facing the same issue as America, the aging of their population and the ensuing medical care crisis. America already exports VISTA, the VA developed open source hospital administration system thats used in hospitals worldwide. It would not take much effort to turn that into another national hegemony that would be a good export item.
Will these and others existing seeds (like the UWB cluster forming in Silicon Valley) be enough?
Unless congress and hte administration gets it's act together, it will have to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I really do not understand about how finding porn relates, but perhaps if you understood how this situation came about, it woould help.
Congresspeople have a number of constituencies that are very anti PRC, multidenominational Christian Churches, for example. At the start of election season earlier this year, a group of Republican congresspeople went to China to meet with the Chinese leadership to "voice their concern" over suppression of speech, especially religious speech...the people their constituencies cared about.
It really was meant to be not much more than a photo op to placate their constituents, they would meet with Chinese leaders, make a statement, and go home. Harmless, in their eyes.
Unfortunately, they got snubbed by the Chinese leadership, only a low ranking member would even meet with them. Partially, it was a misunderstanding, the Chinese take photo ops a lot more seriously than Americans, and didn't realize it meant nothing.
It was't a "Mind you own business, great white father" (which would have been justified) as many believe, it was part of an internal chinese power struggle over how to handle the peasant revolution due in 2010.
However, getting between a Congresperson and their photo op is a vary bad mistake, and when they came back, they help hearings to make sure that at least the American companies heard them...and get another photo op. (Congresspeople pursue photo ops like Pepe Le Peu pursues cats)
However, the rest of the American government had to deal with the consequences of a major snub of the ruling party (If they had been democrats, it would have been different). Not a particularly small event in a city where there is no shortage of massive egos.
So at this point, the American government wants to make it clear to the Chinese government that you don't deal with American companies without dealing with American leadership, even if those companies are multinationals. The Chinese leadership have essentially told the State Department they are irrelevant, and thats not something that can be ignored.
More significantly, there is a growing suspicion that at least part of the problem is that the multinationals don't take the American government seriously either. Coupled with the growing realization of how much damage the search engine companies could do if left unsupervised, lead to the the recent spate of requests for various pieces of information about thier operations. All the American Government is trying to do is scope out the problem before it blows up in everyones faces.
If you think this is some sort of unnecessary alarmism, consider this. Eight years ago, something similar happened, and it got to the point where several European and Asian Governments were raiding multiple Americam companies in retaliation before the offending multinationals were forced to back down and make restitution. In part, at least, that incident is what lead to the much greater interventionism by the American government of the late 90's and 2000's
There is no subpeona, no court case, because this isn't a prosecution. These are regulatory actions pursuant to and authorized by various statutes.
,run by one of the other airlines, always brought up Braniff flights last, so Braniff sold less flights.
For example, elsewhere in this discussion, somepointed asked why the government might want every URL Google has in persistant store.
I know the answer to that one. In the early days of the internet, occssionally, protections against searchbots were left off for some military and government sites, resulting in classified information appearing in Google search results...and cache. It occasionally still happens, system administrators aren't all knowing, despite what they believe. The government just simply wants to know if that material is still in Google's caches. Do you believe the government doesn't have a right to ask if their security has been compromised?
Lets take some other examples. There used to be this airline called Braniff, that shared a reservation system with several other airlines. Braniff eventually went bankrupt, partially because the reservation system
We know that Google can alter listing order arbitrarily, they just did so, very publicly, for an large company they whose actions they disapproved of.
For the regulatory agencies protecting the integrity of America's financial markets, and for the governmenatal agencies concerned with economic warfare, this was the equivalent of Iran detonating a nuclear bomb.
There are absolutely no regulatory protections against Google doing the same to any corporation for any reason. What happens if say, a Chinese company decides it wants a bigger share of the market, and gets Google to start listing negative web pages about its competitors first?
Remember, China can offer immensely valuable concessions to access chinese markets to any company it approves of...the key word being approval. This isn't theoretical, it is known that they jailed the president of one middle sized American company until he signed over the company to them. It is also know that certain organizations that promote Chinese/American trade can arrange access to Chinese markets not even large corporations can get. What isn't known is the terms they are asking for offering those deals.
Or lets take stock market manipulation. Google arguable controls a fair amount of information the average consumer recieves. They could easily boost or lower a stock price simply by adjusting their page ranking algorithms...and buy or sell the associated stocks accordingly. You think the possiblity of cheating the small investor isn't something the government should keep a close eye on?
There are many more examples, but what it comes down to is this:
Search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, etc. are in the same class as NRSRO's and Comcast...organizations with immense power to affect the lives of all Americans.
It is the governments responsiblity and obligation to monitor such organizations before something bad happens. Would you rather have another Enron, a Parmalat, or any of a thousand other times goverment oversight was too little, too late?
I do understand your concern about privacy. What I dont understand is why you cannot believe that at least some part of the American Government actually cares about it's citizens, and is doing it's very best to protect them.
They aren't trying to find out anything about the Internet, they are trying to find out about how search engines are being used. I suspect they are also really interested in any descrepancies between that the internet monitoring logs show and googles records.
Competitive intelligence from data mining is only one concern, albeit it should be primary. Traffic from search engines could easily be used to mask more sinister activity by pretending to be from google by spoofing.
THere is a whole host of things about how search engines can be misused that make this a proper and valid line of inquiry for the government. I have only touched on a few things.
I have to admit, since search patterns are anonymous, I am confused as to why why you feel any concern over the goverment investigating them. If the government was interested in any group of people, however big, they would simply goto the ISP's for records of Internet activity. They do it all the time when investigating cases. They certainly wouldn't go to the expense and bother of upsetting a major US asset like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft when there are eaiser alternatives to obtaining that sort of information.
Because of that, I have to conclude that this is not about what individuals are searching, but about usage patterns.
The government doesn't have the resources for blind fishing expeditions; they are looking for something specific. If you listened to Negropontes speech yesterday, the government is pretty short handed as is, they hardly need another non directed task sopping up resources.
I strongly suspect that what the government is looking for is evidence that Google is being used for things that are compromising to national security, for example, industrial espionage. There has been a lot of concern about that in the intelligence community lately.
What really worries me is that Google certainly appears like it has something to hide, the other organizations subpeonaed yield up the information without hesitation. If Google was really concerned, they could easily scrub identity out of the records, anonymizers are a staple of NORA style text mining and easily written.
Google has some other reason to be so defiant over a simple request, and I really don't buy the facile explanation that it would inhibit searching. I mean, anyone with a packet sniffer can find out google search strings, its not as if searching is done encrypted.
I have never heard anyone worrying about it, though admittedly I am not that knowlegable in the community of paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Whatever Googles reason, it is not to protect searchers identity, since they don't protect it in normal operations and the government isn't asking for it anyways. What is scary is that Google apparently believes the search patterns would reveal something they don't want known.
And that warrants immediate and aggressive investigation.
Aw comon, do you really think that this is about free speech? The present administration barely tolerates free speech here in the US, why would they care about it elsewhere? And to offend potential large contributors at the start of a difficult election cycle requires something really important.
And is is important. Everyone is familiar with the use of Google, Yahoo, etc. as an index to the web. The US government approves of that purpose, so much so that they exempted intenet companies from taxes just to help them grow.
But Google, Yahoo, etc. also have a potential darker side; they are a unparalelled Competitive Intelligence tool.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, "Competitive intelligence" is the polite name for industrial espionage, which the US, unofficially, also approves of.
But then there is international competitive intelligence, usually referred to as spying.
Happens all the time, in both directions, here in the US. Some of it is tolerated (you have to give something to get something) but only under State Department authorization and oversight...well some governmental agencies oversight, anyhow.
The problem is, Google, Yahoo, etc. blur that distinction. When they start making private deals with other governments, or worse yet, with competitive intelligence agencies that may relay information to other national entities, they have moved from search engine/business intelligence company to an frelance international espionage agency.
Amd thats an action that warrants a lot more than an uncomfortable Wednesday being grilled by a group of congresspeople.
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. are highly valuable assets to the United States...noone wants the situation to deteriorate to the point where such actions against them are necessary. I suspect the hearings were just a gentle reminder that almost limitless license to act which big business is offered in the United States does NOT apply to independent action that may interfere with foreign relations. Just because an organization is multinational and has a GNP larger than most coutries does not mean that it can conduct its own foreign policy.
This is a pretty common trick, and used in one form or another on Wall Street for many years.
I have seen ones that scanned EDGAR filings, (got canceled when the company was destroyed in the 9/11 attack), campaign contributions (works wonderfully for the telco and other highly regulated industries). patent filings (generally surprisingly well, though no one knows why), job adss, and many others.
I even heard of one that analyzed free internet porn...(insert your favorite joke here, but it actually was a fairly good predictor. The cognitive psychology behind it was fascinating).
Using search engines and NORA text mining is basically a form of technical investing. If you have a data store of any kind whose contents influenced or are influenced by members of the market niche of a company, it can tell you something about the future of that niche. Thats just plain marketing 101...
Actually, theres an excellent chance it's a brushback.
Those of us amateurs who follow the Chinese-American economic war have been increasingly concerned about the actions of the organizations mentioned.
While it is fairly common that international businesses influence international politics, every so often it is necessary for the American government to remind businesses that the actions of those businesses are getting too close to the line where their actions will no longer be tolerated, no matter how much money they spend lobbying.
I suspect this bill, like the subpeona's a while back, are meant to remind those businesses that American lawmakers and law enforcement organizations are still in charge of foreign policies, and still have the last word on what international actions are tolerated, and can make the lives of the the companies personnel really miserable if that is what it takes.
In this case, it appears that the government is suspecting those organizations may be starting to get involved with things they think it shouldn't, and decided to send them a wake up call. It is not an action the American government takes lightly,(or often, last time was 8 years ago) but when they do, it indicates how serious the government is about the warning.
Can't see anything wrong in University of Michigan putting its books online...
h igan-and-china-history/
However, I fail to see why US taxpayers should be burdened with the cost of facilitating the cost of educating Chinese students at a time when American students are suffering severe reductions and the American workforce is lagging in educational resources. China can afford to pay to educate its own students.
http://www.umich.edu/pres/china/university-of-mic
(or try googling digital library, China, Michigan)
If the University of Michigan is recieving ANY public funding, ANY information from those books should NOT be available outside the United States and protected territories and the consequences to the University should be very severe if that happens, including a loss of all public funding and requirement to pay back any funding it has already recieved during the period when it was exporting material paid for by US taxpayers.
Well, yes and no...
The real answer is a bit more ocmplicated. For various reasons, America, China, the Arabic people and Bin Ladin have a common interested in breaking up the present power structures in the area.
There has been no equivalent of a "Tet offensive" because, I suspect, there is a tacit understanding that everyone is acheiving their goals under the present conditions.
China faces ethnic unrest for the them, especially in its hardest to govern provinces like Xiang, and would rather face many small groups than one large organized group.
There has been a lively debate from the past several decades among the Arab peoples themselves, that they have somehow "lost their way" over the past 100 years. You have to remember, that for a 1000 years, they were the dominant civilization on the planet. The recent riots are not so much about the cartoons as the loss of status amd power. Many believe that anything is better than the present situation.
The reason for the stasis is that they got caught up in what economists call a "water economy", an economy where control of one resource (oil in this case) dominates. Such economies can only be changed by outside forces, such as the recent American invasion. The strict, monolithic religious structures (like the Christian church in early western civilization) also acted to buttress the stasis of their civilization.
Bin Laden obviously believes that this course of action will move his civilization into growing again. Exactly where he wants to guide it, and whether that conflicts with American interests is unclear. It must be remembered that it hasn't been that long since Britain was a deadly enemy of America. Things change very fast these days.
America also wants this to happen, though the reasons aren't as obvious. Many people believe that the Iraq war is about oil. Nothing could be further from the truth. Western civilization had a very nice efficient system of puppet governments to efficiently extract the oil, and would not go for something this radical without extremely good reasons.
It is not about spreading democracy either. If you listen to CSPAN, the moderates in Congress (a minority) are the only ones that actually believe in a two party system, and more than a few barely believe in a one party system.
The war is about spreading capitalism (which, to Bush, is indistinguishable from democracy). Let me explain.
Every hundred years or so, the financial centers of the world move to the next expanding economy. In the 1600's from the Dutch on up to moving to America in the early 1900's (see OECD's reports by Angus Maddison for details)
In the 2000's, the financial centers are moving from America to the Hong Kong/Singapore area to take advantage of the growing Chinese economy. This doesn't bode well for America. Bush has to offer big business every incentive he can to keep them here until he can find a market to offer them that is as big in potential as the Chinese one.
There is only one other market that fits the bill. The Middle East. Lots of money from the oil, and lots of people needing to buy even the basics.
Problem is, most of the money is tied up in a few families.If in even one country (in this case, Iraq) that money if spread among the general populace, Bush has the market to offer as an incentive for big business to stay loyal to America.
The rest of the countries in the region would soon follow suit, even if America did nothing more. Arab civilization is even more vulnerable to "keeping up with the Jones" than even Western civilization. All they need to know is that it can be done.
Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as the American army strolling in, kicking out the dictators (easily done) and and spreading the wealth. A "king of the hill" game would soon arise and the money would concentrate in a few hands again.
The reason is that it was greek civilization which invented the idea that you could have a stable government where no one was trusted with all t
"it may also be that the American intelligence aparatus has been successful in thwarting al-Qaeda's attempts to do damage. "
Aw comon. Israel, a far smaller country with much tighter security, has several incidents a day. Even ordinary (non terrorist crime) flourishes here in the US. We can't even control ordinary street gangs, let alone far more sophisticated terrorist cells.
It is hard to believe that there is 100% effectiveness in just this one area, when we can't even achieve that level of success in our most tightly controlled and monitored prisons. Just exactly how could even the most efficient law enforcement organization stop someone in advance from taking a box of matches and setting a bunch of forest fires or a few city blocks ablaze?
"Bin Laden has stated that economic disruption is his goal,.."
"Bin Laden said that if the U.S. economy suffers enough, Americans will withdraw from those countries mentioned..."
Of course, we wouldn't even BE in the country in the first place if he hadn't acted.
Saying he just wants to destroy America begs the question of why he wants to do so. I suspect that is misdirection on his part. There is an alternative explanation that doesn't depend on irrational, suicidal behaviour that confers no benefits.
Lets assume his real goal is to break the power of both the regional dictators and the traditional religious clergy. In that case, most of his actions make perfect sense without depending on positing any irrational behaviour at all.
His one sucessful attack on America resulting in the American military breaking the power of the worst regional dictator, Iraq. That was not only pretty predictable, but remember, without that attack, the American military refused to take the war from Kuwait to Iraq earlier.
The rest of attacks seem to have the goal of causing chaos in areas where the traditional religous clergy is powerless to stop them. It doesn't seem likely his targets are American audiences, the kill rate of the past four years in Iraq is less than what happened in a few days in wars like Vietnam, WWI and the American civil war. He could do far more damage if his goal was hurting American troops. I think he is playing to local audiences, and trying to tell them the traditional religious structures are unable to protect them.
It seems likely that if his goal was to increase the power of the traditional clergy, that it would have been simple enough to work with them in the attacks. Instead, he seems to be going around them.
It appears that his real goal is to break the traditional religious structures by inducing the formation of small independent groups. If this is the case, he is having great success.
It is uncertain what he intends to do with those groups, but one thing is clear: for the first time in over a thousand years, it is possible for the basic power structures in the middle east to change radically. In the past, the roles always stayed the same, even though the persons occupying those roles, and the geographic areas they controlled changed.
Is his goal to destroy the American economy? Possibly, but what would it gain him? It seems more likely that he would want to consolidate his power first, and he needs oil revenues to do that, which means he doesn't want to particularly disrupt one of his biggest potential customers.
Thats probably why he offered the truce recently. He has eliminated his biggest political rivals, the regional dictators and the influence of the top religious clergy, and now wants to concentrate on consolidating his vistory by controlling the formation of new power structures in the region.
..."It seems obvious that bin Laden wants to do serious damage to the American economy, ..."
I give up.. why does it seem obvious? There was one attack on America (9/11) which seemed very carefully designed to avoid any serious damage to the economy. The attack occured just before the markets opened. Can you imagine how much worse it would have been if the attack had occurred during normal trading hours, or worse, just at closing? Bin Laden turned $50 million to $300 million in the stock market in the years before 9/11, he would have to know when the market was most vulnerable.
Furthermore, there are thousand of serious potential targets that require no more preparation that a box of matches to destroy. It would certainly do serious damage to our economy if our cities and forests were burning...but they aren't.
Finally, one sucessful attack in 5 years? There are high security prisons that have poorer safety records. If damage to the American economy were a goal, you think there would have been a lot more attempts.
If Bin Laden's goal is serious damage to the American economy, he certaily seems to be incredibly incompetant.
The problem is, this is the wrong cyber security threat to worry about. It won't do any harm, though, and give everyone a false fuzzy feeling that they are doing their job. There won't be a serious cyberattack against America for the foreseeable future (outside of normal business competition, that is), it would ruin the value of the stocks owned by just about every organization and influential individual on the planet. For example, theres an urban legend that a cyberattack against America in the mid 90's by Indian terrorists was stopped before it started by Chinese warlords fearing for their TBonds. Even Bin Laden had $300 million in US stocks.
The southern border situation won't go critical (as a national security threat, anyways) until 9/09 at least, and it is probably too late to do anything about it, most of the persons of interest have been in the US for years and have no need to cross the border.
What really worries me is the multitier outsourcing threat. There are enough stories floating around about various exploits that it bears serious investigation.
For example, A defense contractor builds the battlefield C4I systems that are going to defend against a Chinese incursion into, say, Afghanistan. The core of their system is a COTS product from a prominent North American Silicon Valley company, which bought it from a smaller Silicon Valley company; which still has the maintenance duties... and since has moved to Shentzen, PRC.
*Sigh* Every year or two for the past ten years, I get into an argument with some European professor about the qualifications of American graduated students, Usually on their knowlege of engineering of computer programs.
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Thanks to this discussion, this year, I am going to have a much harder time defending them, I think.
Safety critical systems is a branch of computer science, routinely taught in the better European universities. The book I first learned it from was Safety Critical Computer Systems http://www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/~neil/safebook.htm
The field really got impetus after the Therac-25 failure http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Th
where a group of people got radiated to death because of a minor (in a computer sense) error in some code, thus adding new meaning to the term "execution error".
Its a vast field (google "safety critical") with large numbers of interesting published papers and few good books. I really can't remmend a current book, I haven't seen one I liked in years. I don't think you can learn it fast enough to be useful.
You also need to know a fair amount of higher math to be really competant, or at least even understand whats going on... most of the true experts in the field apparently regard english as a required second language (Math being the first language, not that I can blame them, but often it is overused)
The field seems to have suffered since the recession. and fragmented, but there is a good starting point at http://vl.fmnet.info/safety/
It also seems to be rapidly migrating to India as well, because of the resistance of American "cowboy" programmers. This time, it is possible the game of "cowboy and indians" may end up with the Indian's winning, inasmuch as the techniques are going to be essential to the new multicore programming models. (I heard a rumor Herb Sutter is investigating that, but thats just a rumor. If so, however, he would be the person to talk to about safety critical C/C++)
One of the techniques used in the field is formal verification. McGee and Kramer are coming out with a second edition of thier incredible book, Concurrency, http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~jnm/ early this year (last time I emailed them). The book is an gentle introduction to the field of formal verification and model checking, among other things. There are other books (a new one came out on the Spin Model checker, for example) but this is by far the most penetrable.
Much more interesting is the use of model checkers behind UML or BPEL/SOA tools.
Most of the really interesting stuff is still behind university walls, but tools should be appearing soon. I am trying to develop an open source grid based one but it's been slow going due to committments and resources.
I knew Jobs back in the early days (and again, several times later in his career.) His one real obvious talent was the ability to focus, stay focused, and keep the people around him also focused on the task at hand.
For some reason, that always seems to disappoint people. They wanted some sort of magic, focusing on any bright shiny slogan or technology associated with the current project. People expect CEO's to put on a great show, it is practically a job definition (no pun intended) these days.
Most CEO's are chosen because they look and act like CEOs. Jobs sets a high bar simply by adding the ability to concentrate on the job to that short list.
Take a look at other CEO's in this class, such as Mark Hurd when he was at NCR. Same thing; FOCUS.
No matter how knowlegable, how micro managing a CEO is, he or she cannot have a significant effect on a corporation directly; there is only 24 hours in a day, and only so much they can do.
But CEO's set the tone for a company. What they value, the company values. And if a company values focus, then the efforts of members of the company are all directed towards the same goal, and thats where success comes from.
Not a magic slogan of "saving the world", not some high fashion techtoy, not some secret mastery of arcane knowledge. Jobs could have as easily been a complete dummy running a company producing coathangers in Nebraska, whose motto was "grab it all, control it all, squeeze it till it bleeds", and he still would have suceeded, because a small army of people, focusing on a goal, will always win against a much larger, unorganized mob.
People forget that CEO's are, first and foremost, leaders, and the job description for a leader is pretty simple... LEAD!(i.e. get everyone going in the same direction.) Every other definition is just smoke and mirrors, no matter how much everyone would like to believe that it is more than that.
Personally, I find it even more interesting that it comes a few days after the passing of the e-annoynance act (section 113 of the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act.) that says anonymous annoying e mail is a crime. (I wonder if that applies to campaign literature?)
I wonder what the odds are that the closing of that blog is going to show up as amicus curia briefs when challenges to the legality of section 113 are heard in court?
I was brought up in a era when journalists were some of the most respected people around. I really miss those times.
When I realize that the most respected journalist today by far is Jon Stewart, I wonder how we can sue the journalism schools for polluting the media. Not that I don't think Jon isn't a great comedian, and, actually, a pretty good journalist, but he and Amoss (whose a publisher, not a journalist) seem to be the only two ones who still believe in journalism.
Journalism has occupied an important place in our society since prehistoric times, it is sad to see it dying so ignomious a death. I would have expected there would be at least a few reporters who still respected thier profession enough to at least go down fighting.
Well, you keep on asserting that there is a theoretical upper limit to the frequencies generated by applying single pulses to materials. Would you care to cite the reference? I can't seem to locate it myself.
You are right about pulse versus square waves...I was trying to make a more visual explanation for the lay audience of slashdot..."single cycle of a square wave" is more accurate than a "pulse", which in lay terms might be taken to mean a short burst of multiple frequencies, The same rationale applies for resulting harmonics.It is the harmonics generated by the pulse that creates the multiple frequencies of ultrawideband.
As far as iron shielding being impenetrable, thats an assertion on the order of a "hummingbird can't fly"...many people have observed that metal simply acts as a reradiator in the real world. I mean, what do you think antenna's are made of?
In this case, however, I have to admit I plaigerized the phrase from a thesis I recently read on theoretical frequency analysis of materials. It has a whole section on complexities of iron.
More importantly, you seem to be totally missing the real point. You only need high field strength if you are going to "punch through" the armor, say, like some science fiction ray gun.
Thats a very simplistic, brute force, approach (which is why you say it is simple).
There are more sophisticated ways to approach the problem. A weapon of this sort would simply generate a pulse and analyze the reflection to generate a constituitive map. Don't tell me that's impossible, there are plenty of imaging devices that do that today, albeit for limited ranges of materials and frequencies. Investigating internal structure of materials is what this technology was invented for.
It would then use the constitutive map to calculate the frequencies that would appear on the far side of the material. Again, thats something we can do today, albeit under very limited circumstances.
Then it would use that information to generate an interference pattern whose nodes had a high enough energy to disrupt an IC chip. Not melt or otherwise destroy it, just simply to interfere with it's functioning. Again, thats something we can do today.
The amount of calculation necessary to do this would take decades to perform under present technology, but it could be done.
Perhaps the attentuation is as bad as you say, though real world experience says it isn't. Even so, the energy required is a LOT less than what is needed to "burn a hole" through the armor, as you keep on suggesting.
The reason I said nodes a meter apart was in analogy to ship based CIWS anti missile systems, that fire in arrays a meter apart. Again, I was just trying for a visual that the lay audience could grasp.
Umm, I think you may be getting confused between current commercial UWB technology and ultrawideband.
UWB technology is indeed limited in range (usually by regulatory decree)
Ultrawideband is simply applying pulses (single cycles of square waves) against an antenna and using the resulting harmonics Using wave shaping and adjusting the nature of the input pulse you can theoretically generate any combination of frequencies you want. I have read of devices that ranged between 50HZ to 50 GHZ, but AFAIK, there is no theoretical limit as to the frequency range.
Actually, I don't think ultrawideband is defined in the frequency range at all, Its a time domain thing and has to theoretically be extended to all frequencies, though practical considerations apply to the maximum frequencies actually worked with.
As far as penetration goes, the interaction of materials with EM radiation is governed by the material itself, the sources, and the constitutive relations (or QED at the microscopic level). The interaction has been thorough investigated, and tends to be pretty complex. We seem to be discussing iron here, so the effects may range from hysterisis to polarization at the microscopic level affected by the crytalline structure of the metal. It's still calculable, though...just more complex.
It has been pretty well established by imaging research that given a specific range of frequencies and materials, you can solve for the constitutive relations and do things like calculating field strength at particular points...actually, that the basis of most imaging devices of any kind.
Nowhere in the theory does it imply you can't penetrate at all... as a matter of fact, at the microscopic level, materials are viewed mostly as a network of loosely connected empty spaces.
Given enough calculating power, there is no theoretical upper limit to exactly how far you can take these sort of calculations. You should be able to calculate the what sources are needed to get a field strength at a particular point or points while still not interacting with any materials in between, and use ultrawideband to generate those sources. The real issue is how far you have to go to get something that is useful as an e weapon.
That's probably something like a electromagnetic CIWS system. In other words, one node every meter or so. Since you can adjust the location billions of times a second, it's pretty inevitable you hit something sooner or later.
Granted, thats way beyond the calculating capability of present day machines, but, well, look at the the difference between a IBM 650 of the 1950's and a ZSeries today. It is believeable that it might be possible in the next 50 years.
It will probably be practical when massively multicore processors become available. If the math involved is decomposible (say, modelling using a Bremmer series) you could distribute it across the cores and possibly a grid.
Japan has been selling these devices as ways of examining building structures for decades, they are mentioned in the FCC dockets.
The ones I have seen used for structural examination are pretty big, about the size of golf carts, but that was back in 2003. They aren't really affected by the structural materials used, though embedded metal acts as a reradiator, and tends to increase the range the devices can see through. (It is only moving metal they have a problem with.)
Wrong assumptions. It is not a focused terabyte beam and it doesn't use brute force to penetrate armor. As a matter of fact, it just ignores the armor.
What I was talking about was the UWB equivalent of a electromagnetic pulse weapon.
Ultrawideband is exactly that... it produces a blast of radiation across the entire spectrum. Nothing absorbs at EVERY frequency, some energy is bound to get through at some frequencies. Granted, superconductors would prove an effective defense, but you don't even need that, just copper plated armor with electicity running though it, like some medium armor does today.
The trick is to get the radiant energy from the UWB to refocus INSIDE the armor as a standing wave node. If you do the math and the wave shaping right, you can produce a node with a significant energy, even though its only a fraction of a micron in size, and even though the individual radiation that got through was insignificant.
The end effect would be as if nano sized static electricity sparks just started materializing all throughout the target area, including inside the electronic devices.
I doubt if you could burn anything with it at a macroscopic level, but just exactly how big a spark for how long would you think it would take to knock out an integrated circuit chip rendering the most sophisticated weapon useless?
You wouldn't need very good accuracy, just keep shotgunning it at billions of times a second until you hit something vital. Think of it as a sort of EMP based CWIS or NMR on steriods. It certainly would be many times more efficient than real life EMP weapons like the Malta bomb announced a few years ago.
Like, I said, the computing power and electrical power necessary to achieve that is way beyond the state of the art, but when you only need micron sized energy nodes, not impossible.
More interesting example is if you can get the polarity of the nodes aligned. In that case, you get a sort of lasered force field. (I saw that one in a theroretical physics paper a few years ago)
Granted, its far weaker than say, the electric field powering those electric ionizer fans that Sharper image sells on tv, but possibly useful for certain nano manipulations. Each node could be enough to contain, say, a single cold fusion reaction in a molecular lattice, or to perform nano surgery.
Couple of points.
I wasn't able to access the DefenseLink article for some reason (it came up blank in several browsers), but I thought I would make a couple of comments on UWB imaging.
These UWB based through wall imaging systems have been available, for example, in Japan for 20 years. They were banned in the US until after 9/11 because of political pressure from telco's (Biggest docket the FCC has ever seen).
At that time, they were allowed to the public(with great restrictions) as unlicensed spectrum devices.
The ones I have seen in public just produce a sort of a blob in the viewer when looking at non dense items like humans, produce false shadows, and are easily confused by simple fans running in the area (Basically, its ground penetrating radar, and the fans act like chaff and scatter the reflection).
Given that the missions our warfighters are likely to be engaged in are in high temperature areas where lots of fans are likely, it is unlikely to be very useful except as a general warning device. On the other hand, they need VERY low power and pose no hazard to anybody.
Except maybe the soldiers. While UWB has a LPDI (Low probability of detection and intercept) it is not zero. Quite a few countries (especially Pacific Rim ones) have UWB expertise, and the ability to detect what is basically a moving static emitting source is not beyond the state of the art.
For the devices to be useful, the soldiers have to boost power if moving metal is in the area, and if there isn't any, its probably because the electricity grid is offline, which means it will be little background static to mask someone using these devices.
Soldiers using the device might very well be "painting" themselves as targets. Since the US military has been using UWB devices devices for decades, it is a distinct possibility that arms dealers already have (or can purchase) such detection devices.
The potential of these technologies, however, is incredible. Properly done, UWB and related technologies can also detect distance, shapes and materials. (Theoretically, at high power, you can create an e-weapon that is unimpeded by heavy armor, and even a sort of star trek like force field! )
However, thats just what was predicted from the theoretical math. The level of sophistication to implement something like that is many decades away at least, because the amount of computing power (and electric power) needed is not possible to achieve with present technology.
kpharmer: You are right about the politics killing the process, but not for the reasons you are talking about
Those databases the FBI is federating are the basis for a lot of little empires in the various agencies. They are going to be very jealously protected. I am not certain thats not a good idea, since they are also the basis of a number of successful prosecutions. But those concerns still have to be addressed if the project is going to happen.
Even so, there are no horrific waterfall processes involved, not if they do it right. As I said, its a grid, and the only thing that even touches the remote databases is a small grid agent, managed by the database owner, not the central federator.
The real trick to making this project work is convincing the database owners that the anonymizer in the agent is anonymous enough, since anything that allows a successful query also exposes a LOT of information. That means that there has to be a lot of manual processes intertwined, since LEO's sometimes feel better about exposing things to other LEO's only "off the record". If you don't do that, you will find that the people you need to work with to implement this in the individual databases are "not available".
To achieve that, you need someone with the street cred of a top agent (one of the former heads of the CIA might do the trick), the skills of a master politician, and the creativeness of an Edison, because they isn't anything available that can do this, it is going to require a whole new approach.
Anonymous Coward: believe it or not, they were right in saying your background wasn't right. (And I am amazed they knew enough to understand that.) Let me explain.
This isn't your ordinary database project. No Tera byte databases involved, heck a lot of the data might be in the form of email, spreadsheets, or Word/OpenOffice documents.
The remote databases are connected by a grid (i.e. advanced stateful web services), but understanding Web Services and the grid just gets you in the door, it doesn't help you attain the goal.
You need an distributed agent to ask the right sort of queries at the remote databases. There is, believe it or not, a horrendous amount of math understanding involved in doing that, though using the term calculus is sorta misleading. This isn't your high school calculus, in this case, calculus is used in the sense of "a set of rules for calculating things"
What sort of calculus?
Back a few a few decades ago, a couple of mathematicians (Krohn/Rhodes) determined that you could decompose mathematical entities if they had the right properties. This lead to SQL, finite state machines, and the more advanced programing languages. They used some pretty simplistic (and incorrect) math for that.
Things has advanced quite a bit in math over the decades, especially our understanding of a branch of math known as category theory. To create a successful grid based query mechanism will require designing a query language based on category theory, rather than the set theory stuff that our present database languages are based on. There are only a few labs on the planet (and about 15 companies plus occasional hobbyists like myself) that know enough to do that A lot of them are at least as flaky as a croissant, too. The ones that aren't are either too theoretical or based in a foreign country.
Of course, you also need the ordinary stuff of NORA, which involves Knowledge representation issues in the area of Logic, Language and Mathematics, again a rather esoteric specialty. If you haven't at least heard of GATE, for example, you probably aren't ready to tackle this.
Thats whats needed for an ordinary NORA style distributed query Now you get to add in the information security component, which means you get to add in all the stuff about about advanced information theory and multi level security, two more area of math that are not commonly known.
If you want to read more about this, start with the Category theory area of Wikipedia (which,
I have no first hand knowledge, but I suspect that it probably doesn't have anything to do with a Universal ID. Its a response to the demand that the FBI share information with other LEO 's (Law Enforcement Organizations) and get better at utilizing it's own information.
What the FBI probably wants is Non Obvious Relationship Analysis (NORA) on a set of databases connected by a grid. Other LEO's are trying to build one and the FBI doesn't want to be left out. In addition, after the fiasco's of the past few years, the FBI needs to integrate the information in the various databases they have access to. NORA enables them to do that, it "chains together" information in various databases to detected relationships that are not explicity asked for.
If you think thats important only for privacy, terrorists or criminals, think again. Take the current bugaboo, bird flu virus. If a "patient zero" carry the virus managed to enter the United States, he, she or it could easily get lost and start a small pandemic before the LEO's could track them down. The information would all be there in the databases, but lack of integration would prevent it from being accessed.
There is other things as well. NORA technology could identify white collar crime before it got to Enron or Worldcom porportions. As 9/11 pointed out, the job of the FBI has gotten well beyond it's current capabilities. Not their fault, but the problem certainly has to be addressed
The problem with implementing distributed NORA is that most of that information is under a security regimine that doesn't allow sharing, even with other LEO's or other areas within the FBI itself. Entity anonymization can help to some extent, but it is not yet advanced enough to suit the project, some research will be needed (and one hell of a lot of political negotiation)
The construction of search queries across federated and autonomus databases is also a very difficult one to tackle, and present technology is not really up to it. Again, it is not simply a technical challenge (though even a shared ontology THAT WORKS is difficult) but also a political one.
There is only a few architects on the planet that could pull it off, and they are either
1) currently incredibly busy doing the same thing for DHS, casinos, credit check companies, etc. at even more incredible salaries.
2) citizens of a foreign country.
To add to the fun, if you watch CSPAN, the congressional committees that handle oversight have developed this rather annoying habit of demanding that anyone who fails at projects like this be held accountable. Seriously accountable, as in prosecution.
Dunno if the department heads actually took that demand seriously, though.
In short, it is highly unlikely that this one is an attempt to set up "Big Brother" invasions of privacy. It's far more likely the FBI is just trying to correct the shortcomings that a highly embarassing set of nationaly televised hearings have brought out into the open.
I don't think Novell is going to have much in the way of difficulty capturing mindshare among the OSS and Linux user community. There is a few things they need to do (a better Yast, small utilities like service and slocate, etc) but the general feel of Suse 10 is that it is fairly well along to being rock solid itself. The momentum is building, and many of the community that once despised SUSe for releasing their product as source only, now feel that way about Red Hat.
Enterprise managers, however, are a different proposition. Red Hat is the linux "brand name"., and Red Hat legitimately earned that title with their tireless work over the past years. They were the major reason Linux is a serious contender in the industry.
However, Red Hat is coasting on thier reputation, and, outside of that reputation , the competition between Novell and Red Hat is pretty much even. Neither side has serious mindshare among the enterprise managers, who are mostly just experimenting at this stage.
Red Hat will have a lot of serious enterprise implementations to point to soon, they are in a number of companies. However, that won't be convincing to your average manager, since they will see it as one off successes, not a validation.
The deal maker will be a reference implementation, that managers can see as as something they customize, rather than create. Neither side has that yet, though Novell seems much better situated to deliver it.
It isn't simply the wider or more bleeding edge scope of SUSe10 versus RHEL4, it also Novelles Identity Management solutions. Identity Management is at the heart of most major enterprise projects today, and Novell is the "Red Hat" of that industry (rock solid, boring, unadventurous). Identity Management is something that enterprise managers can relate to on their ROI scorecard, unlike OS's, which CFO's don't understand or care about.
So, to summarise, Novell needs to create a reference Enterprise Application, complete with an openly availble (a la Oracle) though not necessarily open source, Identity Management suite, and start demoing that to enterprise managers. Combined with pressure from the techie side, it should be enough to give Novell at least a fighting chance in dominating this still nascent industry niche. In true OSS fashion, they can do it by making alliances with a number of the smaller consulting organizations that have good track records and reputations in these sort of enterprise applications.
The main problem with Linux sales is that risk adverse enterprise managers have little evidence that a serious Linux based project will succeed.
Novell is well positioned to change that view, IF they make the right moves.
Novell has two major assets in the technology space. The first is SUSe 10, and the second is their identity management servers.
Let me explain. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is a rock solid distro, and technically does everything it needs to do, which is why it's leading the market...for now.
It is also 1) boring 2) conservative, 3) requires a lot of work to integrate into a typical large enterprise. This is mainly because Red Hat's wants to keep that "rock solid" reputation, and thus doesn't readily embrace new technology.
Not a bad idea, except that those new technologies are whats needed to integrate into a serious enterprise environment.
Novell's SUSe 10 is a lot more adventurous, and besides not being boring, it has all the technology needed to do a end to end implementation of a large enterprise application right out of the box (well, wire, actually, since you can download it).
All of this software is available in the OSS community, so it is available to Red Hat as well, but it isn't integrated, and therefore requires a LOT of work and expertise to connect together.
Work that doesn't show up as realization of business goals on an enterprise managers ROI scorecard.
Red Hat could duplicate that, but it will take a while. Don't get me wrong, I am aware of the wonderful work being done by say, JPackage with Apache, ObjectWeb, Tigris and other OSS communities , but it is not at the same level that you get with SUSe at the moment. (Installing an RPM is not quite the same as getting it to play nicely with everything else on the machine, which is where most of the work comes in).
The other really good feature is that Novell makes the commercial version of SUSe downloable with no time restrictions (though they call it the evaluation version) This is the major feature that attracted everybody to Redhat initially, and is the other major weakness of RedHat now.
When RedHat branched their free version off to Fedora, they lost most of their momentum to Ubuntu. You can't develop something on Fedora (even if it were stable)and be guaranteed it will work on Red Hat Enterprise, it's diverged too much, so why bother?
Red Hat is coasting on past good will and reputation right now, and SUSe 10 is exciting enough, from a users, developers and managers perspective, that it might easily turn the market around; if they do it right...
(continued in next post... what Novell needs to do.)
The author is right, outsourcing need not be a threat. But he is an educator, not an economist, so he doesn't have the right words to express the answer in non educational terms.
Lets be practical. Protectionism will not work; China's cost of labor is 3% of ours, so we are NOT going to stop outsourcing.
So what will work?
If you read the literature on the competitive advantage of nations, you realize that what really happens is that a "cluster of expertise" on a particular area forms within the nation, and eventually it develops into a national hegemony that makes that nation competitive in that area for a period of time.
We have seen this with Swiss watchmakers and with German cars, even with America's Silicon Valley that grew from the HomeBrew Computer Clubs cluster.
India invested heavily in developing their clusters (the Indian Institute of Technology, for example) and China has done the same (the Shenzen Special Economic Zone, for example). It has paid off handsomely for them.
America has not made a real effort in this area until recently. It isn't enough to just give funding. The J.O.B.S. bill or, say, Utah's Fund of Funds are necessary, but not sufficient.
The investment we need to make is to actively "seed" the creation of clusters of expertise, but that's not being done; so no wonder America's competitive advantage is rapidly slipping away; we aren't investing in our future.
The author of the article is looking to education as a way to seed the clusters.
But that's haphard, indirect, and more importantly, America does not have the time or patience to wait for that to happen.
The federal and state governments have to take an active interest (possibly by issuing contracts) in turning those funds they have made available into projects that cause clusters to form.
So far, there has been little effort in this area.
In the meantime, the US Trade Representative has been trading American jobs for agricultural export advantages. So America gets to sell more GMO soybeans to China, and China gets to sell more IT and telecom services to America. Perfectly reasonable from the USTR's point of view, agriculture is a far less risky proposition than services.
That needs to change. We, as a nation, cannot be reduced to agriculture as our one single major export. That is far too risky.
We, as a nation, need to pick specific areas to develop clusters of expertise in, and then focus on developing those as fast as possible.
But to make that kind of national effort happen takes leadership on the part of the state and national legislatures, or at least in the Department of Labor and in the current atmosphere of political balkanization, that is highly unlikely.
Perhaps after the next election we will get a more activist government.
There is some hope however, since some seeds already exist.
Utah, for example, lead the country in pioneering digital signatures in government. That could develop into a national hegemony where the US is to digital identity what Japan is to consumer electronics. Certainly thats a potential export item in an age where governments all over the world are trying to sort out what citizens get what services.
There are many other examples. Most major governments are facing the same issue as America, the aging of their population and the ensuing medical care crisis. America already exports VISTA, the VA developed open source hospital administration system thats used in hospitals worldwide. It would not take much effort to turn that into another national hegemony that would be a good export item.
Will these and others existing seeds (like the UWB cluster forming in Silicon Valley) be enough?
Unless congress and hte administration gets it's act together, it will have to do.