The issue here isn't what's right, but what patent law currently states. It's entirely possible the Supremes will uphold the appelate court.
Despite the protestations of various litigious losers, the court system, including the Supreme Court, generally prefers to interpret existing laws than make law themselves. The problem is that where the law is unclear or nonexistent, if behavior doesn't violate some constitutional principle the courts essentially say: "This is not explicitly prohibited, so it is allowed. If you want to prohibit it, seek a legislative change."
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., stated: "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."
Much of this happened before the Web was mature enough to capture and document the discussion. There's good link in one of the other replies, but here are a few more:
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=283 96
Link to a new item about a lawsuit Novell filed in 2004 alleging OS-level sabotage. It does point out that WordPerfect's main problem was lack of a Windows version, but it also alleges Microsoft indulged in some software sabotage.
http://www3.gripe2ed.com/scoop/comments/2005/10/24 /9814/8315/20?mode=alone;showrate=1
An anonymous posting to Ed Foster's Gripelog by someone who claims his wife was a WP beta tester. Mentions the undocumented API issue but does point out it has never been proven sufficiently to allow companies to sue MS for damages. Blames a lot of the troubles with both MS Word and Wordperfect on memory management issues, which is a valid shot.
But the most interesting is this analysis of the MS anti-trust trial written by Ralph Nader (admittedly no friend of any monopolist, but a guy who does his homework): http://www.cptech.org/ms/harm.html. When you get far enough down in the article, you'll find this quote:
But, as Judge Jackson points out, and as most computer experts know, not all of the quality problems are innocent. In its internal emails and by countless examples, Microsoft has demonstrated that it believes it benefits when consumers cannot make competitor's products work correctly. Microsoft has a range of methods to undermine its competitor's products. When it does not use deliberate sabotage, it can withhold important technical information or refuse to license technology to its competitors, such as when it refused to permit Netscape to distribute a utility to log-on to Internet Service Providers, or when it withholds or unexpectedly changes applications programming interfaces and data file formats.
The reason Novell included intentional sabotage in their suit was becuase of evidence submitted from the anti-trust trial. Again, there are only indirect references to the practice in the trial evidence, not explicit evidence from the OS code itself, but when has anyone who hasn't signed a non-disclosure agreement really gotten a good look at what's under Windows' hood?
Does it pass the test for "beyond resonable doubt" -- probably not. However, "preponderance of evidence" only requires 51% certainty. There are quite a few people who will look at the trial evidence and Microsoft's behavior in other areas and pass that 51% mark.
This brings to mind something that Microsoft did in the mid 1990's. When MS Word was trying to wrest market share from Wordperfect, Microsoft apparently coded speed bumps into Windows that only their programmers knew how to avoid. Microsoft then claimed that MS applications were "better" becuase they were faster, though we didn't understand that it was because of intentional handicapping of their rivals' software until they'd pretty much crushed WordPerfect in the market.
It kind of makes me wonder if they'll try the same approach to make ODF look "slower," by optimizing MS apps to work with Open XML and fumble around with ODF files.
There is a simple reason these hardware companies are asking Congress not to legislate net-neutrality. If telcos are allowed to charge providers for "premium" service (essentially the service we have now before they start throttling back the non-compliant), they will need extensive and expensive upgrades to their networks. Guess who they'll have to buy them from?
At the moment, the growth curve for hardware revenue has been hitting a plateau as most networks mature. Refreshment is like treading water, which is death to your stock price. Network hardware providers must be positively salivating at the prospect that telcos will buy lots of new hardware (and software) to support pay-for-delivery service.
Telcos charge us for access to content and now they want to charge content providers to send it to us. Isn't that a bit like both a car buyer and a car manufacturer paying the dealership to sell someone a car?
Vacating the conviction doesn't challenge the law, just the individual action. Looks like the company wanted the publicity from the conviction to reinforce their non-disclosure agreement but didn't want to take the risk that the law would be rolled back later on appeal.
Cable companies are simply looking for revenue growth. They probably feel it's easier to try and milk content providers than to raise rates on consumers. However, it's not the content providers causing the bandwidth use, but the end users who make the sites popular.
What I'm curious about is how telecom companies will decide which content providers have to pay for "special favors." Will they track the amount of content being accessed by users for each site or will they just charge sites belonging to companies with lots of money (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) without doing any real metering?
I played Gemstone III via GEnie for six years and worked as an associate sysop for the GEnie Multi-Player Games Roundtable for almost that long. I remember Elonka and the folks at Simutronics as one of the main driving forces behind establishing online gaming in the early '90s. Everquest and World of Warcraft owe Simutronics and other early online gaming pioneers like Kesmai a great debt for getting the ball rolling.
Fifteen years ago, Gemstone had a top simultaneaous limit of 60 players and was apparently only allowed as much memory on the server as a word processing application took on a PC. MMOGs have come a long way since then.
(Gemstone Trivia and In-Joke Alert: The "TLR" in my sig stands for "The Lost Ranger." Old Gemstone III players and GMs may remember who I was in game.);)
I can see patenting a cash register. That's technology someone had to develop and produce. But isn't claiming a patent on "buy it now" a bit like patenting the use of a cash register instead of the register itself?
If you can "patent" a method of doing business, isn't the first company to ever use a cash register entitled to receive business method patent royalties from all the copycats who started using them later?
Most discussion here seems to be about the cultural/religious conflict between Islam and the West. There's another "religious" war this applies to, like what network OS and Web management software were the defaced sites running? Does anyone have any data on how many were Microsoft IIS vs. Apache or NT vs. Linux?
1. This particular "activist judge" was appointed by President G.W. Bush in 2002.
2. It's unlikely that the current Dover school board will appeal the decision, making it unlikely that this particular case will ever get to the Supreme Court.
3. That leaves the "sticker" case in Georgia, with it's more narrowly expressed disapproval of evolution as the case most likely to get to the Supremes. At last report, it appeared the appeals court might be inclined to overturn the Federal court decision against the stickers (http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/12/16/evolution .debate.ap/index.html).
4. Some ID proponents advised against the former Dover school board pressing this case, as they felt it didn't have a good chance. Other school boards, however, will now simply become more careful about how they attempt to introduce ID into the classroom.
While Dover was a slam dunk for science, this particular fight is far from over.
There are more kids walking around with $350 than you might think. There are kids driving cars like Audi's and BMWs to high school nowadays -- brand new ones, at that. Even a 16-year old with a part-time minimum wage job can scrape the money together in a month or two. The cost of a game console and some games is within reach.
The real issue is parenting. With both parents working or distracted by other personal concerns, kids are left to regulate themselves. In single-parent homes, self-regulation may be even more likely. Then someone produces studies that claim large numbers of teenagers smoke, do drugs, or engage in sexual activity, even "Christian" kids. Rather than blame themselves, parents and their advocates seem to look for something else to blame, like Grand Theft Auto or Dungeons & Dragons.
Maybe the NIMF action is as much a cry for help regulating their own children (whom they ignored while crusading) as it is an attempt to legislate the behavior of others.
While it's easy to criticize the religious right for trying to poison science's well, I find it disturbingly easy to understand their motivation.
An earlier poster noted that "smart kids" can be stigmitized as "not cool" in school. My 12 year old son's suffering through that now. Perhaps some other Slashdotters have been on the receiving end over the years, too. My observation is that a significant percentage of the 80% of the population that are of average or below intelligence really resent the top 20% for being (as they see it) smug, arrogant know-it-alls who talk about a lot of stuff that doesn't really matter to the rest of the world. We (I like to think I'm in that top 20%) tell them that even though they don't understand the math to trust us.
This is, ironically, what religious people tell everyone else about faith in God.
Now let's look at the messages. A good priest or minister will tell you that believing in God will bring you Jesus's love and eternal life.
Scientists, on the other hand, will describe how cosmically insignificant you are, that the Universe is a cold and souless place, your existence was an accident of fate and that when you die you're gone forever.
Rationality aside, which message do you think most people will choose given half a chance?
The phrase "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" unfortunately applies to a lot of current science and much of the world's population.
Galbraith's Law of Human Nature:Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
The problem with defending beliefs based on faith is that if one part of a belief system becomes invalidated by empirical evidence, it may undermine the entire belief system.
Religion, however, has adapted successfully to this type of upheaval in the past, most noteably when astronomers introduced the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun a few centuries ago. After denying the evidence for a while and threatening to burn a few people at the stake, the various religions managed to adapt to a universal instead of a world-centered view of existence. In a masterful application of spin, religious leaders eventually began pointing to the size of the Universe as additional proof of God's omnipotence in creating such an incomprehensibly vast realm. Intelligent design is simply the latest attempt to spin similar empirical evidence that cannot be ignored to support a faith-based belief system.
Frankly, knowing whether or not we evolved by accident or through intervention doesn't change the essential fact of what and who we are at present. We could be part of a purpose. We could be an accident. We could be an experiment. We could be a seed planted and someday whoever planted it will come back to harvest us as a food source.
Personally, while it may be an interesting investigation, I don't really care if we find out the answer. (Especially if it's the last option.)
I've seen a few comments along the lines of, "who is this guy and why do we care that he switched from PCs to Macs?" While he may be to security what Alvin Toffler is to science, Schwartau has been in the info security business for long time and has a fair amount of credibility, at least at the boardroom and executive level. So, if/.ers are going to take potshots, let's at least know something about the guy before we shoot.
(Of course, why should we change now?):)
Here's some background on Winn Schwartau:
Founder and CEO GetInsightU, Inc., www.GetInsightU.Com
President and founder of Interpact, Inc., The Security Awareness Company. Interpact develops information security awareness programs for private, public and government organizations.
He is the author of "Internet and Computer Ethics for Kids (and Parents and Teachers Without a Clue)" (2001/2002).
In 2002, he was honored as a "Power Thinker" and one of the 50 most powerful people in networking by Network World.
Founder of the InfowarCon conference, www.infowarcon.com.
Has been referred to as "the civilian architect of information warfare," he coined the term "Electronic Pearl Harbor" and was the Project Lead of the Manhattan Cyber Project Information Warfare and Electronic Civil Defense Team.
Books include: Pearl Harbor Dot Com (2002) Terminal Compromise (1991) Cybershock (2000, 2001) Time Based Security (1999, 2001) General Abdication (2003) Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway (1994, 1996, 1997) Information Warfare: Cyberterrorism, Second Edition," (1997/1998)
He has called for the creation of a National Information Policy, a Constitution in Cyberspace and an Electronic Bill of Rights. He was a contributor to all three of AFCEA's Cyberwar Books (Ethical Conundra of Information Warfare, Something Other Than War and The Carbon Unit as Target) and several international works on CyberWar and Espionage. "The Complete Internet Business Toolkit" (1996) is one of the first books to ever be banned from export out of the United States. His other writings include "CyberChrist Meets Lady Luck" and "CyberChrist Bites the Big Apple," "The Toaster Rebellion of '08", "Firewalls 101" (DPI Press), Information Warfare, (Schaffer/Poeschel, Germany), "Introduction to Internet Security" (DGI/ MecklerMedia), and chapters for Internet and Internetworking Security Handbook (Auerbach). His writing, interviews and profiles have appeared in Orbis, Wired, NY Times, Information Week, Network World, ComputerWorld, Network Security, St. Petersburg Times, Internet World, Virus Bulletin, Security Management, Infoworld, PC Week, plus dozens of magazines around the world. Although not a hacker, he has been the popular host of DefCon's Hacker Jeopardy for nine years. - Adjunct Professor: Norwich University - Board of Advisors: ISAW, Information Security Awareness Week - Board of Advisors: St. Petersburg College - Contributing Editor: Infosecurity Magazine - Contributing Editor: Journal of Information Warfare - Advisory Board Member: CipherTrust www.ciphertrust.com - Advisory Board Member: SSI, www.SecureSoftSystems.com - Editorial Board Advisor: Network Security Magazine, (Elsevier), U.K. - Contributor and Columnist: Network World (1994 - present) - Consulting Security Expert: Giga Information Group - Advisory Board Member: Milcom Technologies - Advisory Board Member: 1GlobalCity.Com, Inc - Member, Editorial Board of Advisors: InfoSecurity News. 1990 - present - Advisory Board Member: Click2Send - Contributing Editor: CartaCapital, Brazil - Contributing Editor: Availability.Com - Publisher and Founder: Security Insider Report (1992 - sold 1997) - Contributing Editor: Secure Computing Online http://www.secure-computing.com/ - Contributing Columnist: PlanetIT, CMP Publications - Former Member, Board of Directors: Tritheum Technologies, (company sol
I'm lucky: we live in Vermont, so we're 36 miles from the Canadian border. We get a couple of Canadian channels in our cable package so I've been watching Doctor Who on Canadian TV on Tuesday nights.
I don't think they're being broadcast on any American channels yet and I haven't seen them advertised on BBC America, which would be the first place they'll probably show up here for the rest of the country.
How many and what type of plants would it take to convert the carbon dioxide exhaled by the astronauts and convert it to enough oxygen for them to survive? Would they still need periodic deliveries of fresh oxygen or would the plants provide enough? Can they keep enough plants alive in space to do this?
One of my favorite old science fiction films is Silent Running, with Bruce Dern. The premise was a little implausible, but the idea that we could be completely self-sufficient in space using biodomes (minus Pauly Shore) is still pretty cool.
The study describes the filtering as "effectcive," but then points out that most American media, human rights, and anonymizer sites are still reachable. Given those apparently contradictory statements:
1. Is the filtering truly effective, or only the most effective filtering currently in use?
2. How long can the government of China sustain this level of filtering before it either shuts off most of the Internet to its citizens or has to give it up as unmanageble?
3. How long will it be before some politician or group in the U.S. will attempt to impose the "effective" Chinese filtering system here?
RIAA: "Your service has huge bandwidth and seems to be transmitting a lot of data. Since the only content in that quantity worth transmitting is our copyrighted music, you must be aiding and abetting copyright theft."
ISP: "What our customers send through our service is their business, not ours. And it can't be your stuff, because most of your music sucks. Pigs will not only have to fly before we sign up to this, they'll have to break the sound barrier."
RIAA: "Well, with enough baked beans, anything is possible. Load up the lawyers...er, pigs and let 'em fly!"
This is a first shot across the bow. The bill will probably undgergo substantial debate and amendment as it moves through Congress, but I expect this has a chance to become law.
I've met Sen. Leahy. He's an old-school Vermont Democrat who's held pretty much every state-level elected office except governor and lieutenant governor. I've had a couple of e-mail exchanges with him on CAN-SPAM. When that law first passed, he was cautiously backing it as a reasonable first step. He's realized lately, however, that it's been largely ineffective. The anti-phishing bill is his first real leading charge at cyber-scamming and it reflects some of his earlier frustration with Congress's inability to deal effectively with Internet issues.
(Or much else, in many people's opinion.)
Leahy ruffled some feathers in the online community by supporting RIAA-sponsored legislation on copyrights. It's possible this is a canny political attempt to balance the books a bit. Then again, he's a decent guy with 80% support in a state that's 33% Republican. Even in the minority, he's got a lot of clout. On this issue he'll probably get bi-partisan support, so it's likely this bill will, in some form, eventualy become law.
Besides, anyone high on Dick Cheney's hate list can't be all bad.
Slashdot Mirror
The only choice for Master Chief is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Anyone else cool enough is too old for the role.
(Sorry, Samuel L. Jackson.)
...Zune of Borg. Lower your firewalls and prepare to be accessed. Your audio and video uniqueness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
The issue here isn't what's right, but what patent law currently states. It's entirely possible the Supremes will uphold the appelate court.
Despite the protestations of various litigious losers, the court system, including the Supreme Court, generally prefers to interpret existing laws than make law themselves. The problem is that where the law is unclear or nonexistent, if behavior doesn't violate some constitutional principle the courts essentially say: "This is not explicitly prohibited, so it is allowed. If you want to prohibit it, seek a legislative change."
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., stated: "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."
$600? Since when do state senators cost more than Congressmen?
Much of this happened before the Web was mature enough to capture and document the discussion. There's good link in one of the other replies, but here are a few more:
3 96
4 /9814/8315/20?mode=alone;showrate=1
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=28
Link to a new item about a lawsuit Novell filed in 2004 alleging OS-level sabotage. It does point out that WordPerfect's main problem was lack of a Windows version, but it also alleges Microsoft indulged in some software sabotage.
http://www3.gripe2ed.com/scoop/comments/2005/10/2
An anonymous posting to Ed Foster's Gripelog by someone who claims his wife was a WP beta tester. Mentions the undocumented API issue but does point out it has never been proven sufficiently to allow companies to sue MS for damages. Blames a lot of the troubles with both MS Word and Wordperfect on memory management issues, which is a valid shot.
But the most interesting is this analysis of the MS anti-trust trial written by Ralph Nader (admittedly no friend of any monopolist, but a guy who does his homework): http://www.cptech.org/ms/harm.html. When you get far enough down in the article, you'll find this quote:
But, as Judge Jackson points out, and as most computer experts know, not all of the quality problems are innocent. In its internal emails and by countless examples, Microsoft has demonstrated that it believes it benefits when consumers cannot make competitor's products work correctly. Microsoft has a range of methods to undermine its competitor's products. When it does not use deliberate sabotage, it can withhold important technical information or refuse to license technology to its competitors, such as when it refused to permit Netscape to distribute a utility to log-on to Internet Service Providers, or when it withholds or unexpectedly changes applications programming interfaces and data file formats.
The reason Novell included intentional sabotage in their suit was becuase of evidence submitted from the anti-trust trial. Again, there are only indirect references to the practice in the trial evidence, not explicit evidence from the OS code itself, but when has anyone who hasn't signed a non-disclosure agreement really gotten a good look at what's under Windows' hood?
Does it pass the test for "beyond resonable doubt" -- probably not. However, "preponderance of evidence" only requires 51% certainty. There are quite a few people who will look at the trial evidence and Microsoft's behavior in other areas and pass that 51% mark.
This brings to mind something that Microsoft did in the mid 1990's. When MS Word was trying to wrest market share from Wordperfect, Microsoft apparently coded speed bumps into Windows that only their programmers knew how to avoid. Microsoft then claimed that MS applications were "better" becuase they were faster, though we didn't understand that it was because of intentional handicapping of their rivals' software until they'd pretty much crushed WordPerfect in the market.
It kind of makes me wonder if they'll try the same approach to make ODF look "slower," by optimizing MS apps to work with Open XML and fumble around with ODF files.
There is a simple reason these hardware companies are asking Congress not to legislate net-neutrality. If telcos are allowed to charge providers for "premium" service (essentially the service we have now before they start throttling back the non-compliant), they will need extensive and expensive upgrades to their networks. Guess who they'll have to buy them from?
At the moment, the growth curve for hardware revenue has been hitting a plateau as most networks mature. Refreshment is like treading water, which is death to your stock price. Network hardware providers must be positively salivating at the prospect that telcos will buy lots of new hardware (and software) to support pay-for-delivery service.
Telcos charge us for access to content and now they want to charge content providers to send it to us. Isn't that a bit like both a car buyer and a car manufacturer paying the dealership to sell someone a car?
Vacating the conviction doesn't challenge the law, just the individual action. Looks like the company wanted the publicity from the conviction to reinforce their non-disclosure agreement but didn't want to take the risk that the law would be rolled back later on appeal.
(IANAL, but my uncle is.)
Cable companies are simply looking for revenue growth. They probably feel it's easier to try and milk content providers than to raise rates on consumers. However, it's not the content providers causing the bandwidth use, but the end users who make the sites popular.
What I'm curious about is how telecom companies will decide which content providers have to pay for "special favors." Will they track the amount of content being accessed by users for each site or will they just charge sites belonging to companies with lots of money (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) without doing any real metering?
Given past practice, I'm betting the latter.
I played Gemstone III via GEnie for six years and worked as an associate sysop for the GEnie Multi-Player Games Roundtable for almost that long. I remember Elonka and the folks at Simutronics as one of the main driving forces behind establishing online gaming in the early '90s. Everquest and World of Warcraft owe Simutronics and other early online gaming pioneers like Kesmai a great debt for getting the ball rolling.
;)
Fifteen years ago, Gemstone had a top simultaneaous limit of 60 players and was apparently only allowed as much memory on the server as a word processing application took on a PC. MMOGs have come a long way since then.
(Gemstone Trivia and In-Joke Alert: The "TLR" in my sig stands for "The Lost Ranger." Old Gemstone III players and GMs may remember who I was in game.)
I can see patenting a cash register. That's technology someone had to develop and produce. But isn't claiming a patent on "buy it now" a bit like patenting the use of a cash register instead of the register itself?
If you can "patent" a method of doing business, isn't the first company to ever use a cash register entitled to receive business method patent royalties from all the copycats who started using them later?
Most discussion here seems to be about the cultural/religious conflict between Islam and the West. There's another "religious" war this applies to, like what network OS and Web management software were the defaced sites running? Does anyone have any data on how many were Microsoft IIS vs. Apache or NT vs. Linux?
1. This particular "activist judge" was appointed by President G.W. Bush in 2002.
n .debate.ap/index.html).
2. It's unlikely that the current Dover school board will appeal the decision, making it unlikely that this particular case will ever get to the Supreme Court.
3. That leaves the "sticker" case in Georgia, with it's more narrowly expressed disapproval of evolution as the case most likely to get to the Supremes. At last report, it appeared the appeals court might be inclined to overturn the Federal court decision against the stickers (http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/12/16/evolutio
4. Some ID proponents advised against the former Dover school board pressing this case, as they felt it didn't have a good chance. Other school boards, however, will now simply become more careful about how they attempt to introduce ID into the classroom.
While Dover was a slam dunk for science, this particular fight is far from over.
There are more kids walking around with $350 than you might think. There are kids driving cars like Audi's and BMWs to high school nowadays -- brand new ones, at that. Even a 16-year old with a part-time minimum wage job can scrape the money together in a month or two. The cost of a game console and some games is within reach.
The real issue is parenting. With both parents working or distracted by other personal concerns, kids are left to regulate themselves. In single-parent homes, self-regulation may be even more likely. Then someone produces studies that claim large numbers of teenagers smoke, do drugs, or engage in sexual activity, even "Christian" kids. Rather than blame themselves, parents and their advocates seem to look for something else to blame, like Grand Theft Auto or Dungeons & Dragons.
Maybe the NIMF action is as much a cry for help regulating their own children (whom they ignored while crusading) as it is an attempt to legislate the behavior of others.
While it's easy to criticize the religious right for trying to poison science's well, I find it disturbingly easy to understand their motivation.
An earlier poster noted that "smart kids" can be stigmitized as "not cool" in school. My 12 year old son's suffering through that now. Perhaps some other Slashdotters have been on the receiving end over the years, too. My observation is that a significant percentage of the 80% of the population that are of average or below intelligence really resent the top 20% for being (as they see it) smug, arrogant know-it-alls who talk about a lot of stuff that doesn't really matter to the rest of the world. We (I like to think I'm in that top 20%) tell them that even though they don't understand the math to trust us.
This is, ironically, what religious people tell everyone else about faith in God.
Now let's look at the messages. A good priest or minister will tell you that believing in God will bring you Jesus's love and eternal life.
Scientists, on the other hand, will describe how cosmically insignificant you are, that the Universe is a cold and souless place, your existence was an accident of fate and that when you die you're gone forever.
Rationality aside, which message do you think most people will choose given half a chance?
The phrase "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" unfortunately applies to a lot of current science and much of the world's population.
Galbraith's Law of Human Nature: Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
The problem with defending beliefs based on faith is that if one part of a belief system becomes invalidated by empirical evidence, it may undermine the entire belief system.
Religion, however, has adapted successfully to this type of upheaval in the past, most noteably when astronomers introduced the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun a few centuries ago. After denying the evidence for a while and threatening to burn a few people at the stake, the various religions managed to adapt to a universal instead of a world-centered view of existence. In a masterful application of spin, religious leaders eventually began pointing to the size of the Universe as additional proof of God's omnipotence in creating such an incomprehensibly vast realm. Intelligent design is simply the latest attempt to spin similar empirical evidence that cannot be ignored to support a faith-based belief system.
Frankly, knowing whether or not we evolved by accident or through intervention doesn't change the essential fact of what and who we are at present. We could be part of a purpose. We could be an accident. We could be an experiment. We could be a seed planted and someday whoever planted it will come back to harvest us as a food source.
Personally, while it may be an interesting investigation, I don't really care if we find out the answer. (Especially if it's the last option.)
- TLR -
I've seen a few comments along the lines of, "who is this guy and why do we care that he switched from PCs to Macs?" While he may be to security what Alvin Toffler is to science, Schwartau has been in the info security business for long time and has a fair amount of credibility, at least at the boardroom and executive level. So, if /.ers are going to take potshots, let's at least know something about the guy before we shoot.
:)
(Of course, why should we change now?)
Here's some background on Winn Schwartau:
Founder and CEO GetInsightU, Inc., www.GetInsightU.Com
President and founder of Interpact, Inc., The Security Awareness Company. Interpact develops information security awareness programs for private, public and government organizations.
He is the author of "Internet and Computer Ethics for Kids (and Parents and Teachers Without a Clue)" (2001/2002).
In 2002, he was honored as a "Power Thinker" and one of the 50 most powerful people in networking by Network World.
Founder of the InfowarCon conference, www.infowarcon.com.
Has been referred to as "the civilian architect of information warfare," he coined the term "Electronic Pearl Harbor" and was the Project Lead of the Manhattan Cyber Project Information Warfare and Electronic Civil Defense Team.
Books include:
Pearl Harbor Dot Com (2002)
Terminal Compromise (1991)
Cybershock (2000, 2001)
Time Based Security (1999, 2001)
General Abdication (2003)
Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway (1994, 1996, 1997)
Information Warfare: Cyberterrorism, Second Edition," (1997/1998)
He has called for the creation of a National Information Policy, a Constitution in Cyberspace and an Electronic Bill of Rights. He was a contributor to all three of AFCEA's Cyberwar Books (Ethical Conundra of Information Warfare, Something Other Than War and The Carbon Unit as Target) and several international works on CyberWar and Espionage. "The Complete Internet Business Toolkit" (1996) is one of the first books to ever be banned from export out of the United States. His other writings include "CyberChrist Meets Lady Luck" and "CyberChrist Bites the Big Apple," "The Toaster Rebellion of '08", "Firewalls 101" (DPI Press), Information Warfare, (Schaffer/Poeschel, Germany), "Introduction to Internet Security" (DGI/ MecklerMedia), and chapters for Internet and Internetworking Security Handbook (Auerbach). His writing, interviews and profiles have appeared in Orbis, Wired, NY Times, Information Week, Network World, ComputerWorld, Network Security, St. Petersburg Times, Internet World, Virus Bulletin, Security Management, Infoworld, PC Week, plus dozens of magazines around the world.
Although not a hacker, he has been the popular host of DefCon's Hacker Jeopardy for nine years.
- Adjunct Professor: Norwich University
- Board of Advisors: ISAW, Information Security Awareness Week
- Board of Advisors: St. Petersburg College
- Contributing Editor: Infosecurity Magazine
- Contributing Editor: Journal of Information Warfare
- Advisory Board Member: CipherTrust www.ciphertrust.com
- Advisory Board Member: SSI, www.SecureSoftSystems.com
- Editorial Board Advisor: Network Security Magazine, (Elsevier), U.K.
- Contributor and Columnist: Network World (1994 - present)
- Consulting Security Expert: Giga Information Group
- Advisory Board Member: Milcom Technologies
- Advisory Board Member: 1GlobalCity.Com, Inc
- Member, Editorial Board of Advisors: InfoSecurity News. 1990 - present
- Advisory Board Member: Click2Send
- Contributing Editor: CartaCapital, Brazil
- Contributing Editor: Availability.Com
- Publisher and Founder: Security Insider Report (1992 - sold 1997)
- Contributing Editor: Secure Computing Online http://www.secure-computing.com/
- Contributing Columnist: PlanetIT, CMP Publications
- Former Member, Board of Directors: Tritheum Technologies, (company sol
I'm lucky: we live in Vermont, so we're 36 miles from the Canadian border. We get a couple of Canadian channels in our cable package so I've been watching Doctor Who on Canadian TV on Tuesday nights.
I don't think they're being broadcast on any American channels yet and I haven't seen them advertised on BBC America, which would be the first place they'll probably show up here for the rest of the country.
How many and what type of plants would it take to convert the carbon dioxide exhaled by the astronauts and convert it to enough oxygen for them to survive? Would they still need periodic deliveries of fresh oxygen or would the plants provide enough? Can they keep enough plants alive in space to do this?
One of my favorite old science fiction films is Silent Running, with Bruce Dern. The premise was a little implausible, but the idea that we could be completely self-sufficient in space using biodomes (minus Pauly Shore) is still pretty cool.
The study describes the filtering as "effectcive," but then points out that most American media, human rights, and anonymizer sites are still reachable. Given those apparently contradictory statements:
1. Is the filtering truly effective, or only the most effective filtering currently in use?
2. How long can the government of China sustain this level of filtering before it either shuts off most of the Internet to its citizens or has to give it up as unmanageble?
3. How long will it be before some politician or group in the U.S. will attempt to impose the "effective" Chinese filtering system here?
RIAA: "Your service has huge bandwidth and seems to be transmitting a lot of data. Since the only content in that quantity worth transmitting is our copyrighted music, you must be aiding and abetting copyright theft."
ISP: "What our customers send through our service is their business, not ours. And it can't be your stuff, because most of your music sucks. Pigs will not only have to fly before we sign up to this, they'll have to break the sound barrier."
RIAA: "Well, with enough baked beans, anything is possible. Load up the lawyers...er, pigs and let 'em fly!"
Sorry...I meant DMCA and managed to mistype it. Twice. :/
"If nothing else, it simply indicates that you can issue a DMCA takedown notice for GPL'd code someone else is using without obeying the GPL license."
Somehow, the thought of using the DCMA to defend the GPL just seems highly ironic, as well as downright unclean.
Exactly. I'd give this an insightful mod, but I've already posted in this topic. Somebody pat wingspan on the back for me, please. :)
This is a first shot across the bow. The bill will probably undgergo substantial debate and amendment as it moves through Congress, but I expect this has a chance to become law.
I've met Sen. Leahy. He's an old-school Vermont Democrat who's held pretty much every state-level elected office except governor and lieutenant governor. I've had a couple of e-mail exchanges with him on CAN-SPAM. When that law first passed, he was cautiously backing it as a reasonable first step. He's realized lately, however, that it's been largely ineffective. The anti-phishing bill is his first real leading charge at cyber-scamming and it reflects some of his earlier frustration with Congress's inability to deal effectively with Internet issues.
(Or much else, in many people's opinion.)
Leahy ruffled some feathers in the online community by supporting RIAA-sponsored legislation on copyrights. It's possible this is a canny political attempt to balance the books a bit. Then again, he's a decent guy with 80% support in a state that's 33% Republican. Even in the minority, he's got a lot of clout. On this issue he'll probably get bi-partisan support, so it's likely this bill will, in some form, eventualy become law.
Besides, anyone high on Dick Cheney's hate list can't be all bad.