Taxation is the governments way of invoking compulsory financial support to fund the development and maintenance of societal infrastructure, i.e. roads, schools, hospitals etc. that are required to support the
physical presence of brick and mortar merchants, employers, employees and customers.
But it's *not* just the business itself - it's also the physical presence of all of the component pieces of the e-conomy as well. There's the legal and economic infrastructure which protects business owners, the legal system that provides rule-of-law that allows them to operate, the education system that provides (well, in theory anyway) computer-literate people to e-shop at the stores... etc. And it also provides for the "physical presence" of the real brick-and-mortar companies that provide the raw components that comprise the items these online stores sell, without which these companies wouldn't have merchandise to peddle in the first place. And their employees are real people with real government-impacting expenses (healthcare, SS, whatever) too. It all comes back to meatspace sooner or later, and somebody has to pay for keeping it all together in general. You can't just say that it's magically in the internet, so it doesn't cost anything any more - there's still a real cost associated with it.
And incidentally, if someone can create a TellMe extension that will read HotMail, they may instantly be promoted to NetGod. Talk about a killer app. Just a thought...
Well, I'm sure someone has already mentioned it somewhere (Bob's Corollary to Murphy's Law: all possible useful comments you can make have already been posted to Slashdot), but I didn't see it in this thread: Slashdot is available over one of TellMe's user-created extensions. In particular, extension 1-19789 seems to work fairly well. I just "read" the headline and description of this topic over my phone.:-)
And if you scroll to the bottom of the TellMe Extensions site, you'll see their slogan: "Hack the Phone". I'm waiting until someone creates an interface to a Kevin Mitnick site. *g* There's something wonderfully self-referential about that....
Back in it's day, this was truly a clever hack. I mean, setting up
a camera on the communal coffee pot rocks; you don't have to drag
your butt halfway across the building just to find an empty coffee pot.
Reminds me of the (even older, I believe) CMU Coke Machine. As far back as 1982 they had a finger interface set up to check the status of the Coke machine on the 3rd floor of Wean hall. The machine could tell you not only which buttons currently had soda, but how relatively cold they were based on when sodas had been dispensed out of each column. Unfortunately it looks like they're in the process of moving the machine right now, but it certainly was convenient back in the day.
As AC said above, and speaking as a DC-area resident myself, I'd bet that the Smithsonian would love to get their hands on some of this memorabilia. If the PTB at MIT can't find another home for this material, and soon, then they ought to contact the Smithsonian. Some of those hacks are hilarious, and it's too bad they aren't more widely known - and, it would be a real shame if people never got the chance.
> I find it interesting how these scientists have "cracked the code"
> of the human genome and yet none of them can produce anything truly
> useful from this knowledge.
I hope you're just trolling, because it's difficult to imagine how someone could refer to the foundation of all future genetic work as "[nothing] truly useful". Why not just say Darwin's theory wasn't "truly useful" either? After all, it didn't solve any human problems either, at least not directly. If the scientific revolution of the past century has taught us anything, it should have taught us that understanding and knowledge of reality is *always* useful, even if there isn't an immediate application.
And besides that, useful (functional) applications of the genome knowledge *have* already appeared. Aside from the obvious (genetic therapies, recents insights into Alzheimer's, and on and on), the anthropological knowledge revealed by what's in the genome is giving a fascinating window into the history of human evolution. Consider: we've found that two people of different "races" commonly have less genetic differentiation than two people of the same "race". Given the history of prejudice, racism, genocide, and other horrors that one population of men has inflicted on another in our history for no better reason than the color of their hair or the shape of their nose, the genome is giving us an education in ourselves that we've desperately needed for centuries. If that isn't "useful" knowledge, then I don't know what is.
I wonder how many people really understand the significance of this event, assuming the evidence holds up. The first verifiable evidence of life beyond Earth - most everything else kind of pales in comparison. If nothing else, hopefully this news will renew people's interest in the Mars missions, and particularly (!) the sample return mission scheduled for later this decade.
For those interested in getting more involved, by the way, the National Space Society lobbies Congress for more political and financial backing for NASA. They're always holding letter writing drives and needing new participants.
Can someone explain the difference between what this company is doing and the research from this story? They both seem to involve reverting adult differentiated cells back into stem cells. Granted this would be a wonderful boon, but it seems like just a month ago peer journals were doubtful the research was even correct....
I'm not sure why an editorial - which this article obviously is - rates posting on/., unless it's just to spark debate. For a serious scientist to say "you can't question this" is pretty flaky. And even his "arguments", such as they were, weren't presented particularly well. Yes, there's plenty of evidence for long-term human evolution hidden in the genes - see Matt Ridley's "Genome" for some really good examples. However, the author of this article doesn't provide any examples at all, or anything else to back up his views, other than saying "you can't argue with me". Gee, how convincing.
In fact, the one scientific claim the author does try to appeal to is that we must have "descended from bacteria", because we carry "clumps of genes" from them. However, my understanding of those clumps - assuming he's talking about transposons and the like - is that those DNA sequences simply "invaded" our own DNA en masse, and have been hitchhiking along ever since. Yes, that's a form of evolution, but it isn't the same as saying we "descended" from them, as he claims to do.
In short, there is plenty of exciting evidence in the genome that shows how humanity has evolved over the eons. Too bad this article doesn't contain any of that. I can save people the trouble of reading the article by summarizing it for them here: "Darwin was right. I say so. Other scientists all say so. See, I must be right. You can't argue with it. Therefore, Darwin was right."
Maybe I'm just getting too cynical in my old age, but I expect better from scientists, even in the mass media, than this.
Given the usability issues raised with e-books, and the fact that the technology affecting them hasn't significantly changed in recent memory, it's doubtful they will replace books as a medium. And Napster is the proof. Both books and music contain digital information, and both are easily represented and recreated via computers or other devices. But for music, whole technologies have risen up to threaten the very existence of the retail and wholesale distribution chains traditionally used for them. It's practically a cottage industry.
Has that happened for books? Not at all. Sure, Amazon has changed the distribution chain somewhat, and there are more independent publishers today. But has the traditional distribution chain for books been significantly threatened? No way. Even for techie books, where it would make sense for things to be in electronic-only form, far more people prefer good old books over e-only formats.
When hax0rz start ripping copies of the latest Harry Potter, then we'll know something has changed. For now, books look pretty secure.
Heh... Ironically, I knew this. We had to work with several of NYNEX's old legacy systems, and their data (and often implementation) was internally divided up between New York and New England. Mea culpa.
Ironically, it was also credited by an unknown author to King Solomon, under the guise "There is nothing new under the sun" - but he also never said it.
>>These numbers are before the FCC right now and
>>investigations are underway into the Bell's
>>attempts to destroy the three major DSL
>>companies. Why do you think Verizon dropped
>>their long distance application in New England?
I used to work for Verizon (Bell Atlantic at the time). I was team lead for a software project team that implemented one of their gateway systems, i.e. the systems outside organizations - CLECs, whatever - have to call to access the ordering and preordering facilities. I can just about guarantee you that DSL has either marginal or no relationship with why VZ dropped their LD bid in New England.
According to FCC whim, VZ has to pay huge - literally humungous - per day fines if they miss performance penalties on any of a couple dozen possible transactions they support. Those fines are per state. VZ has had serious internal problems meeting those requirements - and not due to anything sinister either, it's just very hard to meet the performance requirements in particular. God knows we all worked our asses off day and night trying to get our systems in shape to get LD in New York. Believe me, most of the folks there *want* to compete - in fact they're quite eager for it. But the requirements change so fast and are so stringent that it has been next to impossible to get it all done. In some cases, the requirements have just capriciously changed with next to no notice. You try meeting dot-com-style deadlines - court-imposed ones, no less - in a Baby-Bell-style bureaucracy. Good luck!
Fortunately for them, those fines I mentioned don't get activated until the day the FCC gives final approval in that state. In some cases, that means that if their LD applications *had* been approved, they'd suddenly be liable for, oh, say a couple million per week in fines, regardless of whether they were actually in business there or not. Needless to say, they've yanked some of the applications. Gee, go figure. DSL does play into that, but it isn't just the provisioning that's the problem; the IT side of it, from where I sat, was even worse.
Incidentally, LD applications are done by state, and "New England" isn't a state, so where are you referring to - Massachusetts, perhaps? VZ already has LD in one New England state, New York; the system I helped develop helped them meet the requirements to get that.
You know that at some point, after human "electronics" start coming into vogue, that they will start being affected by the same issues that all other electronic devices are going through right now. To wit: how much are you going to enjoy your ocular implants after the manufacturer starts installing DRM protection on them? And you thought all that hard drive encryption crap was going to be bad....
Maybe this time, before we go all gaga over the latest techno whiz-bang, we ought to think out these issues before committing to their use. I shudder to think about the possible abuses of sensory perception on a subscription basis.
The article makes good mention of the link between security and openness. I have to say, I haven't always been a big fan of announcing security holes in software. I was a student at CMU at the time SATAN was released several years back. At the time, I and several others wondered what the heck the folks at CERT (some of whom I knew) were doing. In retrospect, of course, it was one of the most constructive tools ever created for increasing system security. So when CERT announced they were no longer going to arbitrarily delay their announcements of new security holes, I cheered.
Which is all to say that the more tools there are for opening up software and exposing those security holes, the better it will be for everyone. Goodness knows that full discovery and disclosure can make software vendors jump higher and faster than they ever would normally. Remember the big read-anyone's-Hotmail fiasco last year? Man that made the rounds fast - and so did the fix, within a day. How many Microsoft problems can you say that about?
So here's to reverse engineering - DMCA be damned. Keep on peeking and poking.
Since the top marginal rate for individual taxpayers is *higher* than the rate that the corporations would have paid on the same earnings, the government actually winds up collecting *more* of the money in taxes after the distribution than they would have otherwise. So... where's the down side here?
Of course, that's ignoring the fact that corporations never pay taxes anyway. Corporations simply hike their prices to accomodate the revenue drain from the government. Individuals pay *all* taxes, corporate and individual, and nobody should forget that. The whole concept of "corporate welfare" is inane - whoever came up with that phrase should get a boot to the head.
Yes, 602P is a fake - but that doesn't stop our good samaritans on Capitol Hill from fighting against it just the same. Our stalwart guardians of justice, as reported in the Washington Post back in May, have introduced a bill to prohibit the FCC from even possibly imposing Internet access charges, even though the FCC has said repeatedly that would never happen in the first place. According to sponsor Fred Upton (R-MI), though, his bill, the Internet Access Charge Prohibition Act, "soothes the fears" of those thousands of people who have written him and other representatives because, frankly, they got bamboozled by the hoax. Upton's bill (HR1291) is still pending committee review before the House.
So don't be too hard on Clinton and Lazio - at least they only talked about the fake; others are actually wasting real legislative time on it. Sigh... and you wonder why it takes so long to get anything useful done on Capitol Hill.
Carnegie Mellon University's Distance Learning program may offer some of what you're looking for. They have courses on videotape and the Web, as well as teleconference classes you can participate in. My own master's degree was in CMU's Software Engineering program, and I know the people who teach some of their classes, and they're all top notch. (As if there would be any doubt about CMU's faculty!) They even offer teleconference links to some of the classes.
In addition to software engineering, you can also take classes in the Heinz Business School, which is also one of the best in the country in its subject matter. CMU is expensive, but if you can get your business to foot part of the bill, it's well worth it. What I don't know about is whether you can transfer your credits in there or not. Even if you can't, some of their courses might be transferrable elsewhere, or they might have recommendations about another good distance program you could finish with.
It's too bad there's no way to feed the cards automatically to a flatbed scanner. Most punch cards had a printed copy of the characters the punches represented across the top of each card. If you could feed them to a scanner in some automated way, then you could use OCR software and a simple script to strip out the text and assemble it all together fairly quickly.
Alternatively, there may be some way to either a) contact the original author (Wilhelm Ott), or b) find a copy of the work in a German library, and get an inter-library loan. When I entered the following search into Google...
"Metrische Analysen zu Vergil" "wilhelm ott"
...I was auto-forwarded to the following page on Amazon.de:
From the looks of things, it may well be that some, or even all, of the volumes in this series are still in print. It looks like it would be expensive to spring for the entire series (several hundred US$), but if they're still in print, then it's likely there are copies available in a German library somewhere as well. If it's that important, you could try working with your advisor on getting an inter-library loan. As with most software tasks, it's better to find an existing solution (i.e. another copy of the books in print) than to create a new one (all that scanning work) yourself.:-)
I attended the debate Tuesday evening - it was held at Booz-Allen, not far from Tyson's Mall, just a few miles from my home. As you can imagine, there were some terrific bits that didn't all make it into the reviewer's version.
Lessig framed the debate about software patents (really business method patents) as being 3 separate debates: 1) Is there really property involved, i.e. should the patent office even be involved? 2) Is the property being properly administered, i.e. the way in which the patent office is handling things. And 3) should there be a separate class of property defined for business methods?
When Jeff Bezos asked Tim O'Reilly whether he [Tim] thought Amazon was justified in pursuing its patents, Tim told Jeff that he was "pissing in the well", because he was angering both his core customer base and the very people that provide the technology Amazon's business is based on.
At one point, Lessig remarked on the '97 change in business practice patent law by quoting Norman Mailer: "Being evil is doing something you know is wrong. Being wicked is upping the ante without knowing the consequences."
Dickinson started out the night by stating that his staff had researched the earliest relevant business patent they could find. It was from the 1860's, and covered the process of creating a hotel registry book which had advertising down the margins. The patent included a hand-drawn picture of such a register, which Dickinson held up for people to see. That drew a lot of laughs, because the register looked *strikingly* like a web page.
Dickinson stated that a new "18-month publication" rule will be in effect soon, whereby the review process will be shortened. He also indicated that, starting sometime next year, they will change the rules so that applicants can apply for legal relief from the time they submit a patent for review, rather than having to wait until the end of the review process.
O'Reilly's comment about farmers and ranchers was actually the very last comment of the night, given as Vint Cerf was about to dismiss the crowd. In context it was a conciliatory remark that he made to try and explain to Dickinson and Walker why there was such emotion from O'Reilly's and Lessig's side of the debate. The comment drew the biggest applause of the night, and my companions thought O'Reilly had been pretty shrewd to nab the last remark as he did.
At one point, Walker stated that Priceline's business method patents were a driver of innovation across the industry, because people had to "find ways to work around" his patents, instead of copying his methods of doing things.
In contrast, Vint Cerf jumped in at one point to state that he felt the "View Source" option in web browsers, and the fact that it was easy to copy someone else's methods, was one of the primary reasons the Web had grown so fast.
Lessig at one point suggested a compromise: allow patents, but forbid lawsuits to enforce them until a comprehensive review of the effects of business method patents could be conducted. This struck me as remarkably naive, especially for a law professor. Walker was just about apoplectic - "You want Microsoft to take my property? You think Microsoft should take my property?"
Walker: "The burden of proof is not on those who say that property should be, but on those who say that property should not be."
Walker: "Property drives innovation [because] humans are economic animals. Except for economists."
O'Reilly: "That work [having to file and defend against patents] is a tax on innovation." Walker: "All property is a tax."
Dickinson stated that an NSF study has been started to determine the effect that IP laws are having on not just the software industry, but technological ventures in general.
Dickinson stated that Congress had passed a law in November of '99 that explicitly forbade him to solicit or accept outside criticism of patents under review. To wit: "The Director shall make no provision for pre-grant opposition."
I'm sure I'm leaving some out - the evening was chock full of quotey goodness. It was quite entertaining, and educational. Kudos to the Internet Society for putting on the debate.
With due respect to Bruce Campbell's smugness, I think William Shatner would be outstanding as Die Fledermaus. And with the amount of self-parody he's been doing lately, he might just go for it. I can't believe nobody has come up with a decent suggestion for Arthur though. How about Neil Patrick Harris? Granted he's already in a series, and not quite pudgy enough, but his current role on Stark Raving Mad practically *is* Arthur...
Slashdot Mirror
And incidentally, if someone can create a TellMe extension that will read HotMail, they may instantly be promoted to NetGod. Talk about a killer app. Just a thought...
And if you scroll to the bottom of the TellMe Extensions site, you'll see their slogan: "Hack the Phone". I'm waiting until someone creates an interface to a Kevin Mitnick site. *g* There's something wonderfully self-referential about that....
Reminds me of the (even older, I believe) CMU Coke Machine. As far back as 1982 they had a finger interface set up to check the status of the Coke machine on the 3rd floor of Wean hall. The machine could tell you not only which buttons currently had soda, but how relatively cold they were based on when sodas had been dispensed out of each column. Unfortunately it looks like they're in the process of moving the machine right now, but it certainly was convenient back in the day.
As AC said above, and speaking as a DC-area resident myself, I'd bet that the Smithsonian would love to get their hands on some of this memorabilia. If the PTB at MIT can't find another home for this material, and soon, then they ought to contact the Smithsonian. Some of those hacks are hilarious, and it's too bad they aren't more widely known - and, it would be a real shame if people never got the chance.
Reminds me of the classic SNL parody - "the little car that's ma-ade out of clay..."
I hope you're just trolling, because it's difficult to imagine how someone could refer to the foundation of all future genetic work as "[nothing] truly useful". Why not just say Darwin's theory wasn't "truly useful" either? After all, it didn't solve any human problems either, at least not directly. If the scientific revolution of the past century has taught us anything, it should have taught us that understanding and knowledge of reality is *always* useful, even if there isn't an immediate application.
And besides that, useful (functional) applications of the genome knowledge *have* already appeared. Aside from the obvious (genetic therapies, recents insights into Alzheimer's, and on and on), the anthropological knowledge revealed by what's in the genome is giving a fascinating window into the history of human evolution. Consider: we've found that two people of different "races" commonly have less genetic differentiation than two people of the same "race". Given the history of prejudice, racism, genocide, and other horrors that one population of men has inflicted on another in our history for no better reason than the color of their hair or the shape of their nose, the genome is giving us an education in ourselves that we've desperately needed for centuries. If that isn't "useful" knowledge, then I don't know what is.
>>...who or what formed that face on the Martian surface?
*I* formed that face on Mars. And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids.
I wonder how many people really understand the significance of this event, assuming the evidence holds up. The first verifiable evidence of life beyond Earth - most everything else kind of pales in comparison. If nothing else, hopefully this news will renew people's interest in the Mars missions, and particularly (!) the sample return mission scheduled for later this decade.
For those interested in getting more involved, by the way, the National Space Society lobbies Congress for more political and financial backing for NASA. They're always holding letter writing drives and needing new participants.
Can someone explain the difference between what this company is doing and the research from this story? They both seem to involve reverting adult differentiated cells back into stem cells. Granted this would be a wonderful boon, but it seems like just a month ago peer journals were doubtful the research was even correct....
> Of course, the creationists will not drop their
:-)
> case (no evidence imaginable would disprove
> it to them)
Oh come now, give them a little credit. After all, they've dropped their claim about the Sun revolving around the Earth, haven't they?
...well, most of them, anyway.
I'm not sure why an editorial - which this article obviously is - rates posting on /., unless it's just to spark debate. For a serious scientist to say "you can't question this" is pretty flaky. And even his "arguments", such as they were, weren't presented particularly well. Yes, there's plenty of evidence for long-term human evolution hidden in the genes - see Matt Ridley's "Genome" for some really good examples. However, the author of this article doesn't provide any examples at all, or anything else to back up his views, other than saying "you can't argue with me". Gee, how convincing.
In fact, the one scientific claim the author does try to appeal to is that we must have "descended from bacteria", because we carry "clumps of genes" from them. However, my understanding of those clumps - assuming he's talking about transposons and the like - is that those DNA sequences simply "invaded" our own DNA en masse, and have been hitchhiking along ever since. Yes, that's a form of evolution, but it isn't the same as saying we "descended" from them, as he claims to do.
In short, there is plenty of exciting evidence in the genome that shows how humanity has evolved over the eons. Too bad this article doesn't contain any of that. I can save people the trouble of reading the article by summarizing it for them here: "Darwin was right. I say so. Other scientists all say so. See, I must be right. You can't argue with it. Therefore, Darwin was right."
Maybe I'm just getting too cynical in my old age, but I expect better from scientists, even in the mass media, than this.
Given the usability issues raised with e-books, and the fact that the technology affecting them hasn't significantly changed in recent memory, it's doubtful they will replace books as a medium. And Napster is the proof. Both books and music contain digital information, and both are easily represented and recreated via computers or other devices. But for music, whole technologies have risen up to threaten the very existence of the retail and wholesale distribution chains traditionally used for them. It's practically a cottage industry.
Has that happened for books? Not at all. Sure, Amazon has changed the distribution chain somewhat, and there are more independent publishers today. But has the traditional distribution chain for books been significantly threatened? No way. Even for techie books, where it would make sense for things to be in electronic-only form, far more people prefer good old books over e-only formats.
When hax0rz start ripping copies of the latest Harry Potter, then we'll know something has changed. For now, books look pretty secure.
Heh... Ironically, I knew this. We had to work with several of NYNEX's old legacy systems, and their data (and often implementation) was internally divided up between New York and New England. Mea culpa.
Ironically, it was also credited by an unknown author to King Solomon, under the guise "There is nothing new under the sun" - but he also never said it.
>>These numbers are before the FCC right now and
>>investigations are underway into the Bell's
>>attempts to destroy the three major DSL
>>companies. Why do you think Verizon dropped
>>their long distance application in New England?
I used to work for Verizon (Bell Atlantic at the time). I was team lead for a software project team that implemented one of their gateway systems, i.e. the systems outside organizations - CLECs, whatever - have to call to access the ordering and preordering facilities. I can just about guarantee you that DSL has either marginal or no relationship with why VZ dropped their LD bid in New England.
According to FCC whim, VZ has to pay huge - literally humungous - per day fines if they miss performance penalties on any of a couple dozen possible transactions they support. Those fines are per state. VZ has had serious internal problems meeting those requirements - and not due to anything sinister either, it's just very hard to meet the performance requirements in particular. God knows we all worked our asses off day and night trying to get our systems in shape to get LD in New York. Believe me, most of the folks there *want* to compete - in fact they're quite eager for it. But the requirements change so fast and are so stringent that it has been next to impossible to get it all done. In some cases, the requirements have just capriciously changed with next to no notice. You try meeting dot-com-style deadlines - court-imposed ones, no less - in a Baby-Bell-style bureaucracy. Good luck!
Fortunately for them, those fines I mentioned don't get activated until the day the FCC gives final approval in that state. In some cases, that means that if their LD applications *had* been approved, they'd suddenly be liable for, oh, say a couple million per week in fines, regardless of whether they were actually in business there or not. Needless to say, they've yanked some of the applications. Gee, go figure. DSL does play into that, but it isn't just the provisioning that's the problem; the IT side of it, from where I sat, was even worse.
Incidentally, LD applications are done by state, and "New England" isn't a state, so where are you referring to - Massachusetts, perhaps? VZ already has LD in one New England state, New York; the system I helped develop helped them meet the requirements to get that.
You know that at some point, after human "electronics" start coming into vogue, that they will start being affected by the same issues that all other electronic devices are going through right now. To wit: how much are you going to enjoy your ocular implants after the manufacturer starts installing DRM protection on them? And you thought all that hard drive encryption crap was going to be bad....
Maybe this time, before we go all gaga over the latest techno whiz-bang, we ought to think out these issues before committing to their use. I shudder to think about the possible abuses of sensory perception on a subscription basis.
The correct answer to this question is:
"Nobody knows; Triangle Man."
The article makes good mention of the link between security and openness. I have to say, I haven't always been a big fan of announcing security holes in software. I was a student at CMU at the time SATAN was released several years back. At the time, I and several others wondered what the heck the folks at CERT (some of whom I knew) were doing. In retrospect, of course, it was one of the most constructive tools ever created for increasing system security. So when CERT announced they were no longer going to arbitrarily delay their announcements of new security holes, I cheered.
Which is all to say that the more tools there are for opening up software and exposing those security holes, the better it will be for everyone. Goodness knows that full discovery and disclosure can make software vendors jump higher and faster than they ever would normally. Remember the big read-anyone's-Hotmail fiasco last year? Man that made the rounds fast - and so did the fix, within a day. How many Microsoft problems can you say that about?
So here's to reverse engineering - DMCA be damned. Keep on peeking and poking.
Since the top marginal rate for individual taxpayers is *higher* than the rate that the corporations would have paid on the same earnings, the government actually winds up collecting *more* of the money in taxes after the distribution than they would have otherwise. So... where's the down side here?
Of course, that's ignoring the fact that corporations never pay taxes anyway. Corporations simply hike their prices to accomodate the revenue drain from the government. Individuals pay *all* taxes, corporate and individual, and nobody should forget that. The whole concept of "corporate welfare" is inane - whoever came up with that phrase should get a boot to the head.
Yes, 602P is a fake - but that doesn't stop our good samaritans on Capitol Hill from fighting against it just the same. Our stalwart guardians of justice, as reported in the Washington Post back in May, have introduced a bill to prohibit the FCC from even possibly imposing Internet access charges, even though the FCC has said repeatedly that would never happen in the first place. According to sponsor Fred Upton (R-MI), though, his bill, the Internet Access Charge Prohibition Act, "soothes the fears" of those thousands of people who have written him and other representatives because, frankly, they got bamboozled by the hoax. Upton's bill (HR1291) is still pending committee review before the House.
So don't be too hard on Clinton and Lazio - at least they only talked about the fake; others are actually wasting real legislative time on it. Sigh... and you wonder why it takes so long to get anything useful done on Capitol Hill.
Carnegie Mellon University's Distance Learning program may offer some of what you're looking for. They have courses on videotape and the Web, as well as teleconference classes you can participate in. My own master's degree was in CMU's Software Engineering program, and I know the people who teach some of their classes, and they're all top notch. (As if there would be any doubt about CMU's faculty!) They even offer teleconference links to some of the classes.
In addition to software engineering, you can also take classes in the Heinz Business School, which is also one of the best in the country in its subject matter. CMU is expensive, but if you can get your business to foot part of the bill, it's well worth it. What I don't know about is whether you can transfer your credits in there or not. Even if you can't, some of their courses might be transferrable elsewhere, or they might have recommendations about another good distance program you could finish with.
It's too bad there's no way to feed the cards automatically to a flatbed scanner. Most punch cards had a printed copy of the characters the punches represented across the top of each card. If you could feed them to a scanner in some automated way, then you could use OCR software and a simple script to strip out the text and assemble it all together fairly quickly.
Alternatively, there may be some way to either a) contact the original author (Wilhelm Ott), or b) find a copy of the work in a German library, and get an inter-library loan. When I entered the following search into Google...
"Metrische Analysen zu Vergil" "wilhelm ott"
...I was auto-forwarded to the following page on Amazon.de:
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/external-sear ch/028-6615 460-4707748?tag=artvisitwww&keyword=Wilhelm+Ott&mo de=books
From the looks of things, it may well be that some, or even all, of the volumes in this series are still in print. It looks like it would be expensive to spring for the entire series (several hundred US$), but if they're still in print, then it's likely there are copies available in a German library somewhere as well. If it's that important, you could try working with your advisor on getting an inter-library loan. As with most software tasks, it's better to find an existing solution (i.e. another copy of the books in print) than to create a new one (all that scanning work) yourself. :-)
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Lessig framed the debate about software patents (really business method patents) as being 3 separate debates: 1) Is there really property involved, i.e. should the patent office even be involved? 2) Is the property being properly administered, i.e. the way in which the patent office is handling things. And 3) should there be a separate class of property defined for business methods?
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When Jeff Bezos asked Tim O'Reilly whether he [Tim] thought Amazon was justified in pursuing its patents, Tim told Jeff that he was "pissing in the well", because he was angering both his core customer base and the very people that provide the technology Amazon's business is based on.
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At one point, Lessig remarked on the '97 change in business practice patent law by quoting Norman Mailer: "Being evil is doing something you know is wrong. Being wicked is upping the ante without knowing the consequences."
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Dickinson started out the night by stating that his staff had researched the earliest relevant business patent they could find. It was from the 1860's, and covered the process of creating a hotel registry book which had advertising down the margins. The patent included a hand-drawn picture of such a register, which Dickinson held up for people to see. That drew a lot of laughs, because the register looked *strikingly* like a web page.
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Dickinson stated that a new "18-month publication" rule will be in effect soon, whereby the review process will be shortened. He also indicated that, starting sometime next year, they will change the rules so that applicants can apply for legal relief from the time they submit a patent for review, rather than having to wait until the end of the review process.
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O'Reilly's comment about farmers and ranchers was actually the very last comment of the night, given as Vint Cerf was about to dismiss the crowd. In context it was a conciliatory remark that he made to try and explain to Dickinson and Walker why there was such emotion from O'Reilly's and Lessig's side of the debate. The comment drew the biggest applause of the night, and my companions thought O'Reilly had been pretty shrewd to nab the last remark as he did.
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At one point, Walker stated that Priceline's business method patents were a driver of innovation across the industry, because people had to "find ways to work around" his patents, instead of copying his methods of doing things.
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In contrast, Vint Cerf jumped in at one point to state that he felt the "View Source" option in web browsers, and the fact that it was easy to copy someone else's methods, was one of the primary reasons the Web had grown so fast.
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Lessig at one point suggested a compromise: allow patents, but forbid lawsuits to enforce them until a comprehensive review of the effects of business method patents could be conducted. This struck me as remarkably naive, especially for a law professor. Walker was just about apoplectic - "You want Microsoft to take my property? You think Microsoft should take my property?"
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Walker: "The burden of proof is not on those who say that property should be, but on those who say that property should not be."
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Walker: "Property drives innovation [because] humans are economic animals. Except for economists."
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O'Reilly: "That work [having to file and defend against patents] is a tax on innovation." Walker: "All property is a tax."
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Dickinson stated that an NSF study has been started to determine the effect that IP laws are having on not just the software industry, but technological ventures in general.
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Dickinson stated that Congress had passed a law in November of '99 that explicitly forbade him to solicit or accept outside criticism of patents under review. To wit: "The Director shall make no provision for pre-grant opposition."
I'm sure I'm leaving some out - the evening was chock full of quotey goodness. It was quite entertaining, and educational. Kudos to the Internet Society for putting on the debate.With due respect to Bruce Campbell's smugness, I think William Shatner would be outstanding as Die Fledermaus. And with the amount of self-parody he's been doing lately, he might just go for it. I can't believe nobody has come up with a decent suggestion for Arthur though. How about Neil Patrick Harris? Granted he's already in a series, and not quite pudgy enough, but his current role on Stark Raving Mad practically *is* Arthur...