This is actually a very interesting and far reaching proposal. I very much like some aspects of this proposal, however, in practice I think that the idea suffers from some critical flaws.
What is most attractive about this proposal is the potential to separate fixed portions of the spectrum from specific uses. I would love to see a system in which bandwidth, be it wired or wireless, was used to carry undifferentiated data. End users should have the option to download whatever they bloody well pleased over their pipes. Freeing up spectrum from fixed broadcasts towards undifferentiated pipes is intuitively attractive to me. At the same time, this type of analysis presupposes that media companies have migrated towards new business models that are no longer based on âoebroadcastingâ uniform data to the public at defined intervals; but rather customers are able to download whatever content they want from the great TIVO in the sky.
My expectation is that we there will be a gradual shift in spectrum allocation. Some data such as stock quotes, breaking news, sporting events, etc has value in real time. If large numbers of users require simultaneous access to this class of data, then there may be a sustained requirement for broadcast portions of the spectrum such as conventional TV/Radio. Over time, as progressively larger shares of information becomes time insensitive, we should expect to see more spectrum shifting towards undifferentiated usage.
Voice over IP is already standard part of corporate IT. It is rapidly leaking into the consumer space.
Historically, Big Dumb Pipes have continually displaced managed bandwidth type systems. Voice over IP is just the latest example.
I did a consulting project for Qualcomm as part of my classwork last semester studying whether 802.11b has the potential to disrupt CDMA networks. People might find the paper interesting, since it indirectly addresses many of the same issues.
I had the opportunity to visit Google during a class trip to the Valley last month. We had the opportunity to meet with some interesting and highly intelligent people. I liked a lot of things about the company and the culture.
None-the-less, I don't think that Google is a place that I would want to work long term. I certainly would never put my own money into it.
Google does not have a sustainable long term revenue model. I agree with the Google CEO. The company has a lot of infrastructure built up arround search. It will be difficult for competitors to duplicate this capacity. What Google has faile to consider is whether structured languages such as XML will be able to lower the barrier to entry for search applications. XML is deliberately designed to simplify search by adding structure.
I had the opportunity to ask some of the executives regarding whether they viewed XML as a strategic threat. I received a partial answer that even with structured markup languages thee would still be plenty of unstructured information that would require classification. What this fails to consider is that Google's revenue is almost completely derived from advertizing. These are the market segments that will be the first to adopt XML, with potentially devastating effects on the company's revenue stream.
The company is welcome to sort all the unstructured information it wants, but without a revenue stream...
"HOW 'BOUT A SERVICE THAT JUST ADDS UP MICROPAYMENTS AND BILLS YOU WHEN THEY HIT A LIMIT LIKE $10.00?"
This assumes that individuals will necessarily do repeat business with the same vendor.
It requires a [potentially lengthy] float.
It requires maintaining state on transactions.
Want to try again?
[I think that an earlier poster hit the nail on the head when they suggested this might be designed for billing for networking services such as Messaging]
Funny. I was over in Paris in January meeting with France Telecom. They tried [pretty much] the same pitch.
It was stupid then, its stupid now.
There is a basic flaw with this model in that it assumes a 1:1 mapping between end users and Internet accounts.
Personally, I access the Internet at home through an ISP, at school through MIT, at work through my provider, and at a variety of 802.11 hotspots.
In a similar fashion, my DSL line is being used by me, my friends, my parents (when they're visiting), and - most likely - the folks down the hall.
The telecom billing model is [at best] applicable for a subset of the population. Accordingly, it is going to be swamped by a sysem that offers similar functionality with universal converage.
Merchants need to check every token they receive to determine whether the token's are valuable or not. This process can be automated and has [virtually] 0 marginal cost.
Merchant's only redeem those tokens which have positive value. It is this redemption process that is relatively expensive. The main motivation behind peppercoin is avoiding this expense.
After reading Bray's article, I have a few comments to make:
First, payment to end users must be deterministic. As many other have commented, end users will not adopt a system where they are exposed to statistical payment schemes.
Payment to vendors is stochastics. Each peppercoin has the same expected value as the good being sold. Vendors only redeem "winning" tokens. I would expect [but do not know] that the standard deviation of the the peppercoin's value is configurable. There should be a relationship between the processing fee and the standard deviation of valuation.
Validation of Peppercoins is fairly simple. The same sampling mechanism that are used with physical inventory can be applied. However, since validation cost is much less, I'd have much more faith that I'm not receiving "bogus" peppercoins.
One point that no one has mentioned: Peppercoin.com will need to maintain a "slush fund" to protect against a run of bad luck. This has the potential to have a significant effect on operating costs.
All in all, this sounds like a fairly elegent solution to a real user problem. I like its.
Call me simple or old fashioned, however, I have an intrinsic distaste for technical solutions that require intermediate system to do real time monitoring of packet flows. Even if you are using some type of stochastic sampling, this type of implementation is still going to have a significant effect on forwarding performance. Its worth noting that 99% of all the routers out there do NOT support basic IP options. For all intents and purposes, options such as "Source Quench" or "Source Route" or "Record Route" are theoretical constructs. They are not enabled or supported in the control/management plane.
I've always been a proponent of big dumb pipes and inteligent end nodes. I probably always will be. The overhead associated with supporting intelligent intermediate nodes is simply too high.
Uh, not sure how to say this but...
I think that you're a little off on your time scale. I don't know when the art of Damascus Stell was lost, but I am guessing that this was contemporaneous with the Seljuk Turks rather than the Ottomans.
The earliest possible date for the foundation of the Ottoman Empire is 1326 when Orhan declared himself Sultan after capturing Bursa [originally named Proussa]
This is a couple centuries after the 1st - 3rd Crusades.
I think that this type of business model has the potential of being revolutionary. Do you fully understand the implications of this type of effort? If United Devices succeeds, they will be creating a commodity market for processing power. Its difficult to under estimate the potential.
In many cases, supply creates its own demand. In this case, the existence of low cost processing power will enable any number of new projects ranging from weather modeling to video imaging.
Do I believe that it will be possible to popularize a business model based completely on philanthropy? Probably not. [If it were my company I build in a lottery system. Kick back 1% of revenue to a prize pool. Weight the lottery based on the number of work units contributed. This should create a good incentive for end users.] However, I think the UD has some real potential and I wish them a lot of luck.
Carnivore is significantly more than a packet sniffer. Hell, packet sniffers are now significantly more than packet sniffers. A traditional sniffer like NAI's Sniffer or W&G's Domino line stored all of their date into a flat file format.
Modern Network analysers parse packets and stream off the distinct fields into a relational database. Typically, this functionality is used for traffic analysis. (For example, you can take a single connection, normalize the sequence number space, and graph the TCP sequence numbers versus time. This is an excellent tool to visual analyze the performance of the TCP connection).
However, it is possible to do much more complicated analysis. For example, its pretty easy to build a TCP state machine. This can be used to reassemble of the application layer data passed along a connection.
Prior to these developments, you needed pretty sophisticated end users to read a trace file. The new tools are designed to allow anyone to read the email you send or web pages you are looking at.
I used to be the product manager for GN Nettest's line of protocol analyzers. The most frequent request that we'd get from law enforcement officials was software that could automatically reconstruct application layer data.
I think that many participants in this thread are focusing too much on the storage capabilities of the actual appliance. The long term solution to this type of problem is not to increase the size of the Tivo/Show Stopper hard driver.
Rather, the goal should be to link the appliance into a large storage device on your home's LAN. We're migrating to a model where your stereo equivalent, your VCR equivalent, and your PC - equivalent will all share storage on some mucking big hard driver located in the basement somewhere.
Its only a matter of a couple years.
Its NOT porn thats bad in the minds of these folks. Most of them believe that anything that can be remotely construed to suggest sex in any way shape or form should be banned as well.
Krogers (one of the largest supermarket chains in the country) is no longer displaying the covers of Cosmopolitan in its stores due to its highly sexually charged nature.
Just for the record, there is a great deal of work going on already in building Internet 2. Internet 2 is specifically being reserved for research and acadmic oriented activities. Much of the recent commercially oriented traffic that consumes much of the bandwidth on the original Internet is deliberately excluded.
This new network is often referred to as the next generation Internet. You might want to be a bit more cautious in the vocabulary your using in this article. Some of it already has some well defined connotations in the industry.
It is important to note that many of the elaborate procedures that have been implemented at polling stations were designed to prevent individuals from being able to sell their votes.
Specifically, individuals are constrained to vote in physical enclosures that provide them with the ability to cast their votes anonymously.
My biggest concern with online voting is not with individuals maliciously cracking the system. Rather I worry that it would become practical to purchase votes en-mass.
With an online voting system, it becomes possible for the local ward boss to watch people as they cast their votes. (In a worst case scenario, the boss provides a computer, individuals line up to vote, and are paid $25 dollars a head for making the "proper choice")
Look at the enormous amount of money that the candidates have been spending during the caucuses and the days leading up to the primaries. Candidates such as Forbes are rumored to be spending upwards of a 100 dollars per vote on this event. I'm willing to bet that it would be MUCH cheaper to bribe the populace directly.
Earlier this month, there was a Slashdot article which mentioned that consumer reports was been sued by Suzuki. I don't have all the details on the lawsuit, but Suzuki is claiming that Consumer Reports subjected the Suzuki Sidekick to a biased test which was specifically designed such that the Sidekick would fail.
I think that this case might have some extremely interesting legs. Most of us who work in the industry are well aware that there are testing houses that can be relied on to bias there testing processes. This is by no means restricted to the high tech industry (ever wonder about some of those "quotes" that movie advertizements include? What about the unbiased research conducted by the Tobacco Institute or some of the more interested funded research into global warming these days)
If Suzuki is able to successful sue Consumer Reports, this might set a very interesting precedent that could be extended to other potentially biased studies and reports.
Please note, I don't think that there is necessarily anything wrong with presenting a strong arguement in favor of a particular point of view. In my mind, the probalem comes about when individual bodies are supposedly acting as dispassionate observers when, in fact, they clearly have an institutional bias.
This topic has generated one of the better discussions that I've seen on slashdot. Like everyone else, I have some strong feelings about the Department of Justice case. I believe pretty strongly that that some type of legal action is required to limit Microsoft's influence. For me, however, the big problem is that while I believe that Microsoft has undue influence in the market, I'm not sure what the best way is to curb the company's power. For any specific remedy that has been proposed here on slashdot, other poster have been able to show hi-lite specific problems. (Then again, its always easier to be a critic)
I think that it is somewhat premature to discuss a specific set of sanctions that the government should impose. Rather, I think that the debate should be initially framed by identifying a specific set of desired changes in the market for operating systems and applications. Once we have a better understanding of what we want to accomplish, deciding how to get there might be a little bit more manageable. From my perspective, the primary change that I would want to effect is to provide more competition in the operating system / application market. With respect to operating systems, Windows 98 suffers from a number of defects, primarily related to size and stability. When considering personal productivity applications, my primary complaints are related to cost and resource requirements. I do not use the majority of the functions provided with MS Office. The application suite is bloated in terms of price, system requirements, and hard-drive / memory footprints. None-the-less, when I get a new computer system here at work, I will choose Win98 and Office because of the lack of acceptable alternatives. Office will be dictated by the requirement that other users be able to read to documents I produce. Win98 will be dictated by the need to run Office.
I would prefer to see a more open and competitive environment in which I had a choice between 3 - 4 operating systems, all of which could support the same productivity suites. In a similar fashion, I would prefer to be able to choose between multiple productivity suites, all of which support the same file underlying file formats. Such an environment would provide me with the ability to optimize my personal working environment based on my own personal preferences between parameters such as price, performance, system requirements,... In short, I want substitutes to be available. I believe that a competitive market environment will produce better products. I don't want to live in a world where only a Honda authorized battery will work with my Accord.
The question becomes, how do we design a system that encourages this type of competitive system? How do we ensure that a thriving market develops where-by multiple independent vendors will compete to provide different flavors of operating systems and application suites?
I beleive that for such a scheme to work, open standards are required. If multiple vendors are going to successfully compete in the market for Office productivity software, we need to ensure that there is a common and documented set of hooks between Operating Systems and Application Suites. Furthermore, we need to find a way to discourage providers from choosing to use proprietary linkages between these two types of system components. In short, we need a way to discourage both the use of performance enhancing undocumented hooks as well as the embrace and extend tactics that Microsoft loves so dearly. (Obviously, this idea is very similar to the open API proposal that has already been circulated here on Slashdot)
As part of the on-going legal action, the government could try to force Microsoft to publish specifications for its APIs. I would like to suggest that this type of legal recourse is something of a distraction from the main issue. A far more significant step for the government to take would be to sponsor the development of an open standard describing an Application Programming Interface. Equally important, once such a standard was developed, the government should refuse to purchase software that does not abide by this standard. State and Federal governments spend a lot of money each year. In and of itself, government purchasing might provide a large enough market to attract developers. This same government standard could very well be adopted by other consumers, providing even more weight.
I'm modeling this pipe dream after the early development work associated with TCP/IP. ARPA sponsored most of the original development work. The US government insisted that the specifications for the protocol suite were freely available. The US government subsidized porting TCP/IP over to the UNIX operating environment. The government's reasoning was that they wanted to ensure that they would always be able to enjoy a competitive bidding environment for networking equipment.
Hence, here are the steps that I would like to see from the government. A rough time line is implied.
First and foremost, force Microsoft to document the existing API and file formats. Use this information to develop an open standard.
Split the Microsoft's OS and Application groups. Require that existing applications interact with the OS using ONLY the published API specification.
Split the OS group into between three and five competition entities. Provide each of these new companies with the Windows OS code. By forcing the OS providers to live within the API suite, they would be forced to compete based on parameters such as price, stability, and performance.
Over time it will be necessary to extend the API. Hit Microsoft with a significant fine. Use the money to fund a new standards organization devoted to maintaining and extending this standard.
Specify that all future government software purchases must support the commercial standard. Work to promote this standard with other large organizations.
Over time, I would hope to see other Operating Systems extend themselves to support the specified API. Ideally, from the perspective of an end user who is playing a game or editing a file, the underlying operating system should be completely transparent.
I live outside of Boston Mass. We have fairly cold winters and hot, humid summers. I spend a fair amount of money on climate control during the course of a year.
It would find it advantageous to be able to start up the AC / heat automatically when I log off at work and head out for home.
The different reports on the Munich Conference have generated an enormous number of comments. Most of the individuals posting have expressed their strong displeasure with the system being suggested. Many other people are expressing their desire to protest the implementation that has been described.
From my perspective, the wedding cake model that is being proposed does not seem particularly onerous. So long as I have the individual option of receiving unfiltered data, I am not overly concerned with the implementation of this type of system. If this type of system is put in place, I will still have the option of customizing a filter routine to suit my own personal preferences.
There are two separate cases in which the adoption of this type of system might start having real effects on the information that I am able to view. The first would be when an upstream provider such as my local ISP or a local school board chose to implement a filter using a templating system different from the one that I would normally chose. My expectation is that unless a local government chose to legislate the mandatory adoption of a restrictive filter, most ISP's would not have any interest in implementing this type of system. The only exception might be an ISP that was attempting to brand itself based on a specific ideological bent such as a "Baptist Net", or something similar. The case of a school board or a library council is more difficult to second guess. My belief, however, is that having these issues out in the open where they can attract frank and open debate is probably for the best.
A second potential problem would be that of self censorship. I can not say with certainty whether content providers would chose to "tone down" the information that they present in order to reach a wider potential audience. However, if they do chose to do so, then that is their choice to make.
The important thing to note is that the system that has been proposed so far is completely voluntary. The choice of whether or not to use a filter or whether or not to rate a site is left completely to the discretion of individuals. What we are seeing on slashdot is a backlash from so called libertarians computer geeks who are opposing the development of an open standard for ratings technologies. This seems somewhat incongruous to me. YMMV
In any case, launching a massive protest against this type of project isn't going to go anywhere. I consider myself pretty liberal on issues such as privacy, ratings, and the like. However, I fail to see the danger in the system that is being suggested. My guess is that any dramatic protests are only likely to get the participants dismissed as cranks and tarring more moderate supporters by association. The time to protest is if/when the government chooses to mandate a nationwide filtering system to clamp down on unacceptable ideas.
Here in the US, thankfully, we don't have to worry too much about this. Subscribers in other parts of the world have a lot more pressing concerns in this area. I apologize for a somewhat US centric bias to this posting.
The New York Times web site has a decent article on this subject. anyone who is really interested in this topic might want to check out the following link
This is one of four different documents being presented on internet rating systems at the conference. The paper addresses a number of the subjects that posters have begun to question. In particular, I like the ratings model in which multiple different ideologically biased groups are able to release competing ratings criteria.
Regardless, it might make sense to try to seperate this discussion into a couple broad areas. The first might be whether or not any type of rating system is desirable. The second topic being "Assuming that it is necessary to have some form of ratings system imposed, what is the best way to implement such a beast".
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I have seen lawsuits brought against handgun manufacturers for contributory negligence:
R ec ord=459
http://www.bradycampaign.org/press/release.asp?
This is actually a very interesting and far reaching proposal. I very much like some aspects of this proposal, however, in practice I think that the idea suffers from some critical flaws.
What is most attractive about this proposal is the potential to separate fixed portions of the spectrum from specific uses. I would love to see a system in which bandwidth, be it wired or wireless, was used to carry undifferentiated data. End users should have the option to download whatever they bloody well pleased over their pipes. Freeing up spectrum from fixed broadcasts towards undifferentiated pipes is intuitively attractive to me. At the same time, this type of analysis presupposes that media companies have migrated towards new business models that are no longer based on âoebroadcastingâ uniform data to the public at defined intervals; but rather customers are able to download whatever content they want from the great TIVO in the sky.
My expectation is that we there will be a gradual shift in spectrum allocation. Some data such as stock quotes, breaking news, sporting events, etc has value in real time. If large numbers of users require simultaneous access to this class of data, then there may be a sustained requirement for broadcast portions of the spectrum such as conventional TV/Radio. Over time, as progressively larger shares of information becomes time insensitive, we should expect to see more spectrum shifting towards undifferentiated usage.
I beg to differ.
Voice over IP is already standard part of corporate IT. It is rapidly leaking into the consumer space.
Historically, Big Dumb Pipes have continually displaced managed bandwidth type systems. Voice over IP is just the latest example.
I did a consulting project for Qualcomm as part of my classwork last semester studying whether 802.11b has the potential to disrupt CDMA networks. People might find the paper interesting, since it indirectly addresses many of the same issues.
http://web.mit.edu/~rwilley/www/Qualcomm.pdf
I had the opportunity to visit Google during a class trip to the Valley last month. We had the opportunity to meet with some interesting and highly intelligent people. I liked a lot of things about the company and the culture.
None-the-less, I don't think that Google is a place that I would want to work long term. I certainly would never put my own money into it.
Google does not have a sustainable long term revenue model. I agree with the Google CEO. The company has a lot of infrastructure built up arround search. It will be difficult for competitors to duplicate this capacity. What Google has faile to consider is whether structured languages such as XML will be able to lower the barrier to entry for search applications. XML is deliberately designed to simplify search by adding structure.
I had the opportunity to ask some of the executives regarding whether they viewed XML as a strategic threat. I received a partial answer that even with structured markup languages thee would still be plenty of unstructured information that would require classification. What this fails to consider is that Google's revenue is almost completely derived from advertizing. These are the market segments that will be the first to adopt XML, with potentially devastating effects on the company's revenue stream.
The company is welcome to sort all the unstructured information it wants, but without a revenue stream
"HOW 'BOUT A SERVICE THAT JUST ADDS UP MICROPAYMENTS AND BILLS YOU WHEN THEY HIT A LIMIT LIKE $10.00?"
This assumes that individuals will necessarily do repeat business with the same vendor.
It requires a [potentially lengthy] float.
It requires maintaining state on transactions.
Want to try again?
[I think that an earlier poster hit the nail on the head when they suggested this might be designed for billing for networking services such as Messaging]
Funny. I was over in Paris in January meeting with France Telecom. They tried [pretty much] the same pitch.
It was stupid then, its stupid now.
There is a basic flaw with this model in that it assumes a 1:1 mapping between end users and Internet accounts.
Personally, I access the Internet at home through an ISP, at school through MIT, at work through my provider, and at a variety of 802.11 hotspots.
In a similar fashion, my DSL line is being used by me, my friends, my parents (when they're visiting), and - most likely - the folks down the hall.
The telecom billing model is [at best] applicable for a subset of the population. Accordingly, it is going to be swamped by a sysem that offers similar functionality with universal converage.
Merchants need to check every token they receive to determine whether the token's are valuable or not. This process can be automated and has [virtually] 0 marginal cost.
Merchant's only redeem those tokens which have positive value. It is this redemption process that is relatively expensive. The main motivation behind peppercoin is avoiding this expense.
Hi All
After reading Bray's article, I have a few comments to make:
First, payment to end users must be deterministic. As many other have commented, end users will not adopt a system where they are exposed to statistical payment schemes.
Payment to vendors is stochastics. Each peppercoin has the same expected value as the good being sold. Vendors only redeem "winning" tokens. I would expect [but do not know] that the standard deviation of the the peppercoin's value is configurable. There should be a relationship between the processing fee and the standard deviation of valuation.
Validation of Peppercoins is fairly simple. The same sampling mechanism that are used with physical inventory can be applied. However, since validation cost is much less, I'd have much more faith that I'm not receiving "bogus" peppercoins.
One point that no one has mentioned: Peppercoin.com will need to maintain a "slush fund" to protect against a run of bad luck. This has the potential to have a significant effect on operating costs.
All in all, this sounds like a fairly elegent solution to a real user problem. I like its.
Call me simple or old fashioned, however, I have an intrinsic distaste for technical solutions that require intermediate system to do real time monitoring of packet flows. Even if you are using some type of stochastic sampling, this type of implementation is still going to have a significant effect on forwarding performance. Its worth noting that 99% of all the routers out there do NOT support basic IP options. For all intents and purposes, options such as "Source Quench" or "Source Route" or "Record Route" are theoretical constructs. They are not enabled or supported in the control/management plane.
I've always been a proponent of big dumb pipes and inteligent end nodes. I probably always will be. The overhead associated with supporting intelligent intermediate nodes is simply too high.
Richard
Uh, not sure how to say this but ...
I think that you're a little off on your time scale. I don't know when the art of Damascus Stell was lost, but I am guessing that this was contemporaneous with the Seljuk Turks rather than the Ottomans.
The earliest possible date for the foundation of the Ottoman Empire is 1326 when Orhan declared himself Sultan after capturing Bursa [originally named Proussa]
This is a couple centuries after the 1st - 3rd Crusades.
Quick comment:
I think that this type of business model has the potential of being revolutionary. Do you fully understand the implications of this type of effort? If United Devices succeeds, they will be creating a commodity market for processing power. Its difficult to under estimate the potential.
In many cases, supply creates its own demand. In this case, the existence of low cost processing power will enable any number of new projects ranging from weather modeling to video imaging.
Do I believe that it will be possible to popularize a business model based completely on philanthropy? Probably not. [If it were my company I build in a lottery system. Kick back 1% of revenue to a prize pool. Weight the lottery based on the number of work units contributed. This should create a good incentive for end users.] However, I think the UD has some real potential and I wish them a lot of luck.
Still not quite correct.
The TCP sequence number is based on the first byte of data in a packet.
This segment would have the same sequence number regardless of the number of bytes of data contained in the packet.
the sequence number for future segments would be incremented, however.
Carnivore is significantly more than a packet sniffer. Hell, packet sniffers are now significantly more than packet sniffers. A traditional sniffer like NAI's Sniffer or W&G's Domino line stored all of their date into a flat file format.
Modern Network analysers parse packets and stream off the distinct fields into a relational database. Typically, this functionality is used for traffic analysis. (For example, you can take a single connection, normalize the sequence number space, and graph the TCP sequence numbers versus time. This is an excellent tool to visual analyze the performance of the TCP connection).
However, it is possible to do much more complicated analysis. For example, its pretty easy to build a TCP state machine. This can be used to reassemble of the application layer data passed along a connection.
Prior to these developments, you needed pretty sophisticated end users to read a trace file. The new tools are designed to allow anyone to read the email you send or web pages you are looking at.
I used to be the product manager for GN Nettest's line of protocol analyzers. The most frequent request that we'd get from law enforcement officials was software that could automatically reconstruct application layer data.
I think that many participants in this thread are focusing too much on the storage capabilities of the actual appliance. The long term solution to this type of problem is not to increase the size of the Tivo/Show Stopper hard driver.
Rather, the goal should be to link the appliance into a large storage device on your home's LAN. We're migrating to a model where your stereo equivalent, your VCR equivalent, and your PC - equivalent will all share storage on some mucking big hard driver located in the basement somewhere.
Its only a matter of a couple years.
richard
Its NOT porn thats bad in the minds of these folks. Most of them believe that anything that can be remotely construed to suggest sex in any way shape or form should be banned as well.
Krogers (one of the largest supermarket chains in the country) is no longer displaying the covers of Cosmopolitan in its stores due to its highly sexually charged nature.
Just for the record, there is a great deal of work going on already in building Internet 2. Internet 2 is specifically being reserved for research and acadmic oriented activities. Much of the recent commercially oriented traffic that consumes much of the bandwidth on the original Internet is deliberately excluded.
This new network is often referred to as the next generation Internet. You might want to be a bit more cautious in the vocabulary your using in this article. Some of it already has some well defined connotations in the industry.
It is important to note that many of the elaborate procedures that have been implemented at polling stations were designed to prevent individuals from being able to sell their votes.
Specifically, individuals are constrained to vote in physical enclosures that provide them with the ability to cast their votes anonymously.
My biggest concern with online voting is not with individuals maliciously cracking the system. Rather I worry that it would become practical to purchase votes en-mass.
With an online voting system, it becomes possible for the local ward boss to watch people as they cast their votes. (In a worst case scenario, the boss provides a computer, individuals line up to vote, and are paid $25 dollars a head for making the "proper choice")
Look at the enormous amount of money that the candidates have been spending during the caucuses and the days leading up to the primaries. Candidates such as Forbes are rumored to be spending upwards of a 100 dollars per vote on this event. I'm willing to bet that it would be MUCH cheaper to bribe the populace directly.
Richard
Earlier this month, there was a Slashdot article which mentioned that consumer reports was been sued by Suzuki. I don't have all the details on the lawsuit, but Suzuki is claiming that Consumer Reports subjected the Suzuki Sidekick to a biased test which was specifically designed such that the Sidekick would fail.
I think that this case might have some extremely interesting legs. Most of us who work in the industry are well aware that there are testing houses that can be relied on to bias there testing processes. This is by no means restricted to the high tech industry (ever wonder about some of those "quotes" that movie advertizements include? What about the unbiased research conducted by the Tobacco Institute or some of the more interested funded research into global warming these days)
If Suzuki is able to successful sue Consumer Reports, this might set a very interesting precedent that could be extended to other potentially biased studies and reports.
Please note, I don't think that there is necessarily anything wrong with presenting a strong arguement in favor of a particular point of view. In my mind, the probalem comes about when individual bodies are supposedly acting as dispassionate observers when, in fact, they clearly have an institutional bias.
Richard
This topic has generated one of the better discussions that I've seen on slashdot. Like everyone else, I have some strong feelings about the Department of Justice case. I believe pretty strongly that that some type of legal action is required to limit Microsoft's influence. For me, however, the big problem is that while I believe that Microsoft has undue influence in the market, I'm not sure what the best way is to curb the company's power. For any specific remedy that has been proposed here on slashdot, other poster have been able to show hi-lite specific problems. (Then again, its always easier to be a critic)
... In short, I want substitutes to be available. I believe that a competitive market environment will produce better products. I don't want to live in a world where only a Honda authorized battery will work with my Accord.
I think that it is somewhat premature to discuss a specific set of sanctions that the government should impose. Rather, I think that the debate should be initially framed by identifying a specific set of desired changes in the market for operating systems and applications. Once we have a better understanding of what we want to accomplish, deciding how to get there might be a little bit more manageable.
From my perspective, the primary change that I would want to effect is to provide more competition in the operating system / application market. With respect to operating systems, Windows 98 suffers from a number of defects, primarily related to size and stability. When considering personal productivity applications, my primary complaints are related to cost and resource requirements. I do not use the majority of the functions provided with MS Office. The application suite is bloated in terms of price, system requirements, and hard-drive / memory footprints. None-the-less, when I get a new computer system here at work, I will choose Win98 and Office because of the lack of acceptable alternatives. Office will be dictated by the requirement that other users be able to read to documents I produce. Win98 will be dictated by the need to run Office.
I would prefer to see a more open and competitive environment in which I had a choice between 3 - 4 operating systems, all of which could support the same productivity suites. In a similar fashion, I would prefer to be able to choose between multiple productivity suites, all of which support the same file underlying file formats. Such an environment would provide me with the ability to optimize my personal working environment based on my own personal preferences between parameters such as price, performance, system requirements,
The question becomes, how do we design a system that encourages this type of competitive system? How do we ensure that a thriving market develops where-by multiple independent vendors will compete to provide different flavors of operating systems and application suites?
I beleive that for such a scheme to work, open standards are required. If multiple vendors are going to successfully compete in the market for Office productivity software, we need to ensure that there is a common and documented set of hooks between Operating Systems and Application Suites. Furthermore, we need to find a way to discourage providers from choosing to use proprietary linkages between these two types of system components. In short, we need a way to discourage both the use of performance enhancing undocumented hooks as well as the embrace and extend tactics that Microsoft loves so dearly. (Obviously, this idea is very similar to the open API proposal that has already been circulated here on Slashdot)
As part of the on-going legal action, the government could try to force Microsoft to publish specifications for its APIs. I would like to suggest that this type of legal recourse is something of a distraction from the main issue. A far more significant step for the government to take would be to sponsor the development of an open standard describing an Application Programming Interface. Equally important, once such a standard was developed, the government should refuse to purchase software that does not abide by this standard. State and Federal governments spend a lot of money each year. In and of itself, government purchasing might provide a large enough market to attract developers. This same government standard could very well be adopted by other consumers, providing even more weight.
I'm modeling this pipe dream after the early development work associated with TCP/IP. ARPA sponsored most of the original development work. The US government insisted that the specifications for the protocol suite were freely available. The US government subsidized porting TCP/IP over to the UNIX operating environment. The government's reasoning was that they wanted to ensure that they would always be able to enjoy a competitive bidding environment for networking equipment.
Hence, here are the steps that I would like to see from the government. A rough time line is implied.
First and foremost, force Microsoft to document the existing API and file formats. Use this information to develop an open standard.
Split the Microsoft's OS and Application groups. Require that existing applications interact with the OS using ONLY the published API specification.
Split the OS group into between three and five competition entities. Provide each of these new companies with the Windows OS code. By forcing the OS providers to live within the API suite, they would be forced to compete based on parameters such as price, stability, and performance.
Over time it will be necessary to extend the API. Hit Microsoft with a significant fine. Use the money to fund a new standards organization devoted to maintaining and extending this standard.
Specify that all future government software purchases must support the commercial standard. Work to promote this standard with other large organizations.
Over time, I would hope to see other Operating Systems extend themselves to support the specified API. Ideally, from the perspective of an end user who is playing a game or editing a file, the underlying operating system should be completely transparent.
Oh well, I can dream.
I live outside of Boston Mass.
We have fairly cold winters and hot, humid summers. I spend a fair amount of money on climate control during the course of a year.
It would find it advantageous to be able to start up the AC / heat automatically when I log off at work and head out for home.
The different reports on the Munich Conference have generated an enormous number of comments. Most of the individuals posting have expressed their strong displeasure with the system being suggested. Many other people are expressing their desire to protest the implementation that has been described.
From my perspective, the wedding cake model that is being proposed does not seem particularly onerous. So long as I have the individual option of receiving unfiltered data, I am not overly concerned with the implementation of this type of system. If this type of system is put in place, I will still have the option of customizing a filter routine to suit my own personal preferences.
There are two separate cases in which the adoption of this type of system might start having real effects on the information that I am able to view. The first would be when an upstream provider such as my local ISP or a local school board chose to implement a filter using a templating system different from the one that I would normally chose. My expectation is that unless a local government chose to legislate the mandatory adoption of a restrictive filter, most ISP's would not have any interest in implementing this type of system. The only exception might be an ISP that was attempting to brand itself based on a specific ideological bent such as a "Baptist Net", or something similar. The case of a school board or a library council is more difficult to second guess. My belief, however, is that having these issues out in the open where they can attract frank and open debate is probably for the best.
A second potential problem would be that of self censorship. I can not say with certainty whether content providers would chose to "tone down" the information that they present in order to reach a wider potential audience. However, if they do chose to do so, then that is their choice to make.
The important thing to note is that the system that has been proposed so far is completely voluntary. The choice of whether or not to use a filter or whether or not to rate a site is left completely to the discretion of individuals. What we are seeing on slashdot is a backlash from so called libertarians computer geeks who are opposing the development of an open standard for ratings technologies. This seems somewhat incongruous to me. YMMV
In any case, launching a massive protest against this type of project isn't going to go anywhere. I consider myself pretty liberal on issues such as privacy, ratings, and the like. However, I fail to see the danger in the system that is being suggested. My guess is that any dramatic protests are only likely to get the participants dismissed as cranks and tarring more moderate supporters by association. The time to protest is if/when the government chooses to mandate a nationwide filtering system to clamp down on unacceptable ideas.
Here in the US, thankfully, we don't have to worry too much about this. Subscribers in other parts of the world have a lot more pressing concerns in this area. I apologize for a somewhat US centric bias to this posting.
richard
The New York Times web site has a decent article on this subject. anyone who is really interested in this topic might want to check out the following link
r ing_report.html
http://webserver.law.yale.edu/infosociety/filte
This is one of four different documents being presented on internet rating systems at the conference. The paper addresses a number of the subjects that posters have begun to question. In particular, I like the ratings model in which multiple different ideologically biased groups are able to release competing ratings criteria.
Regardless, it might make sense to try to seperate this discussion into a couple broad areas. The first might be whether or not any type of rating system is desirable. The second topic being "Assuming that it is necessary to have some form of ratings system imposed, what is the best way to implement such a beast".
richard