You hit the nail on the head. The interns were put on separate problems so there was no need for much communication.
In addition, the article notes that the company was "a bit spoiled" by being in a position to hire from a large pool of MIT students, many of whom they knew personally. I like the subtle understatement here.
Not only did they put the target practically in front of the gun (by having an embarrassingly parallel problem), they also employed an embarrassingly high-calibre gun (i.e. hand-picked MIT students). Scoring has therefore been high. Surprise!
This experiment didn't do anything at all to bust the mythical man-month. Who came up with that title anyway? Must have been some slashdot editor...
I have some suggestions for this school on how to best focus its surveillance efforts.
Following the logic of their stated reasons for using the on-board camera to take a peek at student's private lives, I respectfully submit that the individuals which are most at risk are therefore those most in need of the kind of protective surveillance this school offers. Right? Now it is common knowledge that attractive females are, more than most other groups, at risk. Both in school and outside.
It therefore follows, with an elegant inevitability, that surveillance should focus on the 5% most attractive females of the school. We are then talking about continuous surveillance of course.
I recommend enhancing security by also enabling the laptops' microphone. Besides, are those laptop cameras any good for taking infra-red pictures?
On the one hand I'm very glad that mere facts aren't patentable, but on the other hand if this means that anyone can slurp down your entire database and then resell it or even export it then it's less of a boon. This is why e.g. the EU came up with their "database directive" which expressly provides databases with copyright protection if they are "collections of facts that took significant effort to compile".
Not that that's ideal, because it e.g. lets public transport providers claim copyright on timetables (which they promptly abused in the EU until court-cases established that public transport providers had to draw uptime-tables anyway in order to make their networks run, and that it required negligible effort to put that stuff into a database afterwards). Likewise with ZIP codes in the EU: it may seem ridiculous but ZIP code databases are copyrighted there.
So what is the legal status of databases here? Does anyone know?
Specifically limiting yourself to "reading code" and relying the likes of "grep" is (as far as I'm concerned) behaviour of a Code Monkey, not a Software Engineer.
The EU grew something resembling a spine. Fine. Well done. You've got to start somewhere.
Now the remaining question is: how do we make sure that EU banking data is adequately mined for leads and clues and that the US is warned the instant something is detected? Because it just so happens that the US is the party that's most at risk, and the EU is the party with porous borders to Islamic nations around the Mediterranean, and an indigenous Muslim population numbering several million which demonstrably contains radical elements. So it's fine if the EU wants to do the data-mining for itself, but it has to be done.
The EU will now probably find that it needs a "federal" investigation agency because letting 23-odd governments in on what queries are run is a recipe for leakage. So it needs to be one agency that's capable of keeping a secret. In case they already had one, now is the time to give it some manpower and computers and let it cooperate with whoever is doing the profiling in the US, because sharing data on *suspect* individuals and *suspect* transactions is well within the scope of conventional police cooperation.
As an interim measure we can probably agree on a few queries with at least one "bogus" query which, if leaked, will cause visible changes in shady people's banking. If the new hopefully-soon-to-be-operational "EU FBI" passes that test they may actually be a help.
Much as I admire South-Carolina's unexpected, wise and brilliant move in requiring groups bent on overthrowing the US government to register themselves, I have one question.
Does this mean that groups who are properly registered will actually be able to get a license to "Detonate explosives, release poisonous, virulent, or radio-active substances in urban areas, means of public transport, or public meeting places with the intent to inflict injuries or casualties on the general populace"?
Just asking. You just never know with geniuses like that.
The key issues are: reciprocity and "subsidiarity" versus trust.
Reciprocity is easy to understand: it isn't there in the current agreements. As in: the US can look at any financial transaction in the EU it likes, the EU cannot do the same thing with financial transactions in the US. If I were on a EU committee like the one described, I'd nix any data-sharing agreement on that ground alone. Can you imagine the US allowing a foreign power to rifle through its citizen's private financial records without getting the same powers in return? No? Then why should the EU?
"Subsidiarity" is a code-word coined by the EU bureaucracy which basically means that responsibility for something should be put at the lowest possible level: if something can be handled at national level, the EU has no business with it. Sort of like the division of powers between individual states and federal government (guess where they found the inspiration for this one). The same idea applies between nations / states. If some state / nation is capable of fishing for terrorists, then it ought to do so instead of sending off the raw data to another entity for processing, analysis, and monitoring. So why not let the EU trawl through its own stuff (e.g. according to algorithms we provide) and put an agreement in place that they alert us the instant they find anything? That's how policing works (and often doesn't work).
The "trust" angle is what makes things difficult. Basically the US are developing ways of data-mining financial transactions for traces of unlawful activity (terrorist, drugs-related, or otherwise). That's currently a research area (not in the least because our opponents are very much moving targets and you therefore need to tweak such searches all the time) and it simply doesn't want to let 23 other parties (all EU member states, the EU commission, and one or two EU agencies) know the exact nature of its analyses. That makes absolute sense because with so many parties involved there are bound to be leaks, so the US might as well publish its algorithms on the web if it did. If it does, then any terrorist organization worth its salt will move quickly to hide the exact patterns the search is looking for, rendering the whole exercise rather pointless.
The next question of course is why the US doesn't want to make its internal financial transactions available to the EU on the same basis. That would remove the pain for the EU. Legal obstacles apart, it's not as if the EU and its members are likely to abuse that. The problem however is that if the EU gets such rights, then *every* other party that's ever approached with a request for data will demand the same. Would you like all your financial transactions to be visible to e.g. China, Russia, India, Japan, Korea, Australia, Indonesia and any other nation we need data from? No? You don't want China to know that you flew to Taipei or that your company sold stuff there? I wouldn't either. So it's best not to put anything like that on the table. Ever. Right?
So there's the catch-22. We can't afford to offer the EU reasonable (for them) terms for data-access, and if they grow a pair they won't just give us the data either (which they seem to be currently doing).
Where the Supremes found in 1995 that anonymous freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment that's apparently not the case Down Under.
The most vexing part of this affair to me is that Australia is usually accounted as part of the "Western" world. You know, that part of the world where people have freedom of speech. Now how can you have freedom of speech if you don't have freedom of anonymous speech? Australia is really "ruining the neighborhood" and "letting the side down" on this.
Now what was that again about China trampling on free speech on the Internet?
Oh yes... still have a proposal to combat bush-fires in Australia that's been unfairly sat upon I feel. Since about 50% of all bush-fires are reported (by the Australian authorities) to be lit on purpose I propose to ban the sale of matches in Australia to any Australian over the age of 5.
If you're a "guest" in a country ruled by a one-party dictatorship that doesn't like people to see (legitimate) views that aren't necessarily the ones the state-controlled news agencies and state-approved opinion leaders dish up, then yes.
They will naturally take a dim view of you if you allow their citizens to learn about those dissenting opinions. You have to abide by their "house" rules that you don't let their citizens have access to uncontrolled information.
Oh yes, of course any rumours about systematic, large-scale, well-coordinated cyberwarfare dressed up as "random hacker activity" are just samples of malicious slander, yep? And if you're hosting an e-mail service and find your systems subjected to systematic attack from "hackers" (who just happen to target email accounts of regime critics), that too is no more than a big spiky everyday coincidence, yep? And making noise about being hacked like that is impolite, yep?
You've gotta be soooo careful to "abide by their rules". We all understand that, don't we? Yep Yep !
On the one hand it's difficult not to be a bit gleeful in the face of the recommendations from France and Germany. On the other hand, none of the evidence on the (lack of) security in MS Explorer is exactly new, is it?
So... should we conclude that this new advice is based on nothing more than some official reading the headlines on the Google hack with his breakfast, choking, getting egg all over his trousers, and wanting to explain why he had to change his trousers and was therefore late for work? Or is it really a case of someone finally seeing an opportunity to get support for a long-intended measure? I'd like to know, but I'm not optimistic.
Unfortunately they also seem to have overlooked a much bigger security hole: MS Windows itself. Especially older versions, unpatched, un-firewalled, and incautiously administrated (in my guess this means about in 95% of all home installations).
If they are at all serious about their "security warning", then why not set their mandatory ISP-snooping infrastructure to scanning for viruses, trojans, and malware too? That might actually help their citizens a lot more than scanning for child pornography or coded Bin-Laden C3 traffic.
And what about themselves? Why not mandate Open Source code vetting for any OS to be considered for government use? After all, they wouldn't buy proprietary encryption schemes either, would they? And why not institute a government-wide preference (not a mandate) for Open Source Office applications? And spend, say, 10% of what they spend now on proprietary software on awarding contracts for supporting, maintaining, and improving said Open Source software so as to meet every last demand made on it in government? They would be looking at huge savings and very high returns.
The crux is to use "Magnetically coupled resonance" to achieve efficient power transfer to prevent the vast majority of power from being broadcast into space (read wasted) when no receiver is present to absorb it. Unfortunately that very feature seems to severely limit the transmission range.
So I wouldn't worry about long-distance power transmission through the air just yet.
I'm more worried about plans for space-based power transmission which were recently green-lighted in California. For example, what happens when the beam from such satellites shifts from the intended receiver area to, say, a residential block?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#cite_note-intensity-41 at the center of the downward beam, we would be looking at 23 mW/cm2 (and 1 mW/cm2 outside the center), compared to OSHA workplace exposure limits for microwaves, which are 10 mW/cm2. Not bad, but not good either. Suppose someone goofs and directs the beam onto a kindergarten and leaves it there for a week. What then?
Those 23 mW might not look like much, but it's still 230 W/m2, and it's radio-frequency which penetrates far deeper than visible light. I simply don't know how detrimental that is, but I'd like to be sure of the potential long-term effects before anything like that is built, let alone switched on. I'm certainly no Luddite, but in the light of e.g. findings like these (see http://www.isracast.com/article.aspx?id=57) about the detrimental effects of 2mW of 1.1GHz radiation on eye lenses I feel we ought to be careful. Signal-level transmission at 2mW is one thing, but power level transmission at 23mW/cm2 is something else.
To a certain extent I agree with the article, even if it strikes a needlessly shrill tone. Programmers are Software Engineers at best, not Statisticians or Mathematicians, and they just shouldn't mess in areas they're not schooled for. And then lots of programmers aren't even Software Engineers, but just "Code Monkeys".
Each of the above 3 professionals have their own areas of expertise. And Statistics (such as needed in performance estimation or dimensioning of processing capacity) simply isn't part of the average software's engineer's background (let alone that of a code monkey). You wouldn't want a Statistician to code up a decent interpreter, right? I mean: just look at the R interpreter. How about letting a Mathematician design and code your GUI? No takers?
By the same token you wouldn't want a programmer to design a Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. That's because programmers know nothing about Markov chains, the length of startup periods, periodicity of a chain, absorbing states, or invariant distributions. Worse yet, they have no way of knowing if their code spouts nonsense or the right answer with a lot of noise. It's not their area of expertise. You also don't want a mere programmer set up a numerical approximation. I mean: just look at the jackasses that coded up the Patriot timer and made the most elementary mistake in the book of numerical analysis by using a floating-point value as a loop counter and allowed it to accumulate roundoff error. That's a mistake first-year undergraduate engineering and maths students make before they are marked down for it.
So what does that mean? Well, one approach would be to shout: "HECK Programmers Don't Know Jack About Statistics And Need To Be Educated In A Hurry". That's the approach the author of the article takes. I don't believe that's a very fruitful approach though.
Another approach (the one I prefer) is to note that some engineering projects are of necessity TEAM efforts. Where you have a project lead who knows where the problem areas are, who is qualified to solve them, and how the team effort must be managed.
And yes, that means that sometimes programmers get to work under the direction (as in "are told what to do") of a specialist like a Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical, or Civil Engineer. Or a Statistician or a Mathematician for that matter.
On the other hand those specialists needn't be heard when it comes to things like database design, semaphores, inter-process communication, communication protocols, pre- and post-conditions, latency, cache filling, access control and the need for encryption and suchlike.
Om still other aspects you may expect specialists and programmers to work together and talk to each other.
So, while the problems mentioned in the article are recognizable (and indeed well known), they don't necessarily mean that programmers should get educated. They should be part of a team, and be professional enough to realize that they are members of the team, not in charge of it.
Do we really need to have the legal freedom to download any digital work without paying the creator of said work? I know whenever I post this I get moderated as a troll but it is a legitimate question. Should we really do away with all IP laws and let people copy and distribute as they see fit?
Well... you pose two very different questions here, which I agree are entirely reasonable questions to ask:
(1) should we have the freedom to commit copyright infringement?
(2) Should we abolish copyright altogether?.
I believe the answer to question (1) is "Yes" and to question (2) "No".
Here's why.
Under current law, copyright infringement is a civil (not a criminal !) matter, and moreover one that only becomes actionable after the infringement takes place. When I drive my car I have the physical freedom to enter one-way streets from the wrong side, to drive on the pavement or in pedestrian zones, or even to drive on the wrong side of the road. But if I do there will likely be trouble.
To me that's the essence of freedom. The system is designed for people with common sense, but it still *does* allow me to break the rules in an emergency or for what I consider sufficient reason. I know I may face a fine (or the loss of my drivers license) if I do, but it's still my decision to make, not someone else's. What's proposed now is to shackle data-transmission and computer so that they can no longer even commit a copyright infringement. That's equivalent to creating cars that will automatically override drivers whenever they attempt to break a rule.
I can, to a certain extent, agree with monitoring data-transmissions by the FBI and NSA when it's about spotting potential terrorists. It's probably the worst single effect that terrorists have had, and in a sense they have won. The Western world is under a lot more surveillance today than it was 20 years ago. Or when the Cold War was on. I hate that, but I can't change it.
What I find totally unpalatable is to see the same intrusive powers that were granted to the guardians of state security to protect us from attacks under the current (extreme) conditions re-purposed to protect the financial interests of the Mickey Mouse industry. I simply do not believe that is worth it.
So yes. I think we should at least have have the _technical_ ability to infringe any copyrights we want for whatever reason we can think of. But of course that doesn't mean we should have immunity from legal action and being sued for damages if we do.
That brings me to question (2). By and large I believe that copyright law serves a purpose and should be upheld. Even if copyright laws are routinely exploited to their maximum extent (and even irresponsibly extended and abused) by all and sundry to protect all sorts of financial interests or business models that include and often supersede the effect that copyright laws were designed to have.
The RIAA for example doesn't seem to need any new powers to serve as a strong deterrent. Existing rules (and the existing standard of proof in court !) by and large seem adequate. Of course it's still possible for the system to grossly misfire (see e.g. the idiotic verdict plus damages in the Jammie Thomas case). Besides I personally think that "damages" awarded should be in reasonable proportion to the value of the infringement (in cases of people committing copyright infringement for private use and not for commercial gain) plus the cost of detection and prosecution plus a reasonable deterrent (say 1% of someone's annual income with a minimum of 250$).
I'm more comfortable with the burden of detection and prosecution being placed on the copyright holders and not the State. I know it's far from ideal, but I think it's better than alternatives such as criminalizing copyright infringement. We need the Police for far more important things to oblige them to go out and detect and prosecute 15$ copyright infringement offenses.
As other posts noted, patent examination isn't about verifying whether a patent application is in fact novel.
Instead it's about seeing if a patent examiner, who must approve a certain number of patents per week or be fired (!), can spot any obvious prior art (read: "previous patents on the same subject") in the time budgeted for examination. Which is about 10-30 minutes apart from doing the paperwork retrieve and to file a patent claim and scan for existing patents.
The USPTO largely relies on the public to conduct in-depth tests of patents (through court action).
This probably isn't by malicious design, but it's a direct consequence of the USPTO being self-financing (and indeed a profit center) from patent application fees and being mandated by congress to remain that way. Our collective wisdom has probed the alternatives and settled for this particular solution.
Of course the USPTO could be instructed to change its priorities and conduct rigorous and in-depth patent examinations. Only... we (or our elected representatives) aren't willing to pay the price, which is a few billion $ extra per year from here on out to employ large swathes of new patent examiners.
If you find that strange, I'm with you. Only don't tell me it's by an act of God that all kinds of stupid patents are granted. We're doing that to ourselves (if only by proxy).
What "crime" are you talking about? Even though this is Slashdot, it helps to pay a little attention to how you formulate your posts.
Downloading copyrighted material never was a "crime". At most it's an actionable infringement of someone's copyright. Actionable by the copyright holder that is, not the State. It's not even a misdemeanor.
Besides, torrent sites in and by themselves were never "criminal", as they only facilitate an exchange of information which, among many other things, allows people to infringe copyrights.
Knowing a thing or two about Italy and its love for byzantine legal constructs, I fear that the effectiveness of such measures isn't their primary purpose. Their PR effect, however, is.
Italy has plenty of laws that would totally paralyze every aspect of public and private life, were they to be rigorously enforced. Such laws look terrific on paper but don't have any practical effect except in lawsuits where they can be (and are) routinely used to club people over the head with. Anyone who has ever driven a car in an Italian city South of Rome (Naples for example, or tried to cross the street in the same city at a pedestrian crossing that's showing a green light for pedestrians) knows all about the practical value of laws in Italy.
This little decision will satisfy officials who can now tout it as a bold step towards curbing piracy. This is important. Just remember that their prime minister, Berlusconi, owns a whole chain of content-creating enterprises. He can't afford to look "soft on piracy" and retain his credibility in business circles.
As one or two nerdish forum members may already have figured out, blocking a torrent site or two won't necessarily stop people from finding or downloading torrents. To put it mildly.
The only thing it *will* do is to slowly erode yet another form of legal freedom in Italy and afterwards in the rest of Europe.
The "advancedness" of military hardware has absolutely nothing to do with the problems sketched in the article.
As long as the hardware has basic floating point support it's possible to design software that will get the right answer, and usually fast enough. It's all down to the software.
I remain very much unimpressed by the article, due mainly to it's rather sensationalist focus on missile systems and Ariane but also to it's apparent ignorance of a now 50-year old branch of applied Mathematics: Numerical Analysis (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis) and its failure to distinguish between the root causes of both system failures. The Ariane failure (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501 ) was interesting in that the software itself was Numerically sound, but it only failed to watch for overflow:
Efficiency considerations had led to the disabling of the software handler (in Ada code) for this error trap, although other conversions of comparable variables in the code remained protected. This led to a cascade of problems, culminating in destruction of the entire flight.
The Patriot case was simply unsound from a numerical point of view because it used an approximation which accumulated errors to the point where they seriously compromised the end result, which is a whole thing altogether (and mathematically speaking much simpler and more fundamental).
Numerical analysis is basically about "How can we make sure that a computer algorithm on such-and-such hardware will always produce an answer to this-and-this mathematical problem with such-and-such error bounds.". This really isn't something like "coding well", but it can require complicated and careful mathematics to get right, which is something programmers usually haven't a clue about. Instead, and provided the effort is warranted by the application, one needs to have a competent Numerical Analyst (a fancy title for a Mathematician specialized in this particular field) check (if not actually design) the software. Coders can then do the rest, provided there is sufficient communication between the architect (the numerical analyst) and the builders (the coders) about all the quirks of the hardware and how they are accounted for and dealt with.
Every CS graduate is supposed to know that advanced numerical work with computers (like those in the Patriot system, where the 0.3 second error is a fine example of negligence) falls under the domain of Numerical Analysis and require specialist attention. This is why some jobs should be undertaken by software engineers, not coders.
I don't really understand the excitement about this, even if the measure comes across as a tad heavy-handed.
First off, from a public health point of view it's perfectly reasonable to insist that *all* nurses, MDs, and hospital support staff are vaccinated against most diseases that hospitals are likely to encounter, and against *all* diseases that threaten to become a pandemic (and for which vaccines are available).
The reason is very simple: health-care workers will get into contact with large numbers of weakened patients (old, infirm, very young, diseased, suffering from trauma etc.) and you don't want them to:
- (a) become infected themselves (because they weren't vaccinated) and then infect scores of vulnerable patients because they are carriers
- (b) become unavailable for work due to illness right when they are needed most.
So, by and large and taking one thing with another, we are better off without health-care workers who don't wish to be vaccinated. This simple consideration consideration is enough to warrant *mandatory* vaccination for all health-care workers.
The risk to at-risk individuals (and health-care workers) from the disease itself is much greater than the risk from a vaccine, so (statistically speaking) the only rational course of action is to take the vaccine.
The only thing that I think might be done differently is to dismiss such health-care workers as refuse vaccination. But then again, what do you do with people who can't be kept in their present function?
For once I am wholly in favor of a patent: the one just obtained by Apple on limiting the functionality of mobile devices.
In my opinion, the license fees for the monetization of this proud piece of Intellectual Property cannot be set too high. A license fee of 15$ per appliance for any other manufacturers wishing to license this remarkable piece of Intellectual Property seems wholly appropriate.
Incidentally, I do not own an iPhone or any other mobile communication device manufactured by Apple and I definitely have no plans to acquire one. I am quite happy with my 3-year-old mobile telephone, which is a prepaid model, and I have no plans to convert to a subscription. Thanks.
There might be another, less charitable, explanation for Microsoft's decision. I know nothing certain about Microsoft's real motives so I will be speculating a bit as follows.
Everyone knows that MS Windows is the main host of botnets, zombies, and general malware on the Internet. Hardly a month passes without Microsoft patching yet another "critical vulnerability". Unfortunately there are reasons why MS Windows is more vulnerable than e.g. MacOs, Unix, FreeBSD, or Linux. For one thing, MS Windows (until Vista) was never designed from the ground up for multi-user operation, security was ever tacked on as an afterthought, the architecture of MS Windows with its miriad add-on's (that tend to carry out _system_ tasks) and the (deliberately) tight coupling between MS Windows and MS applications conveniently makes for multiple points of attack, and once a process is suborned by an attacker there is nothing in MS Windows architecture that's designed to contain it or stand in its way. That's why we see so many infected Windows PC's on the Internet.
Oh yes, there are those who hold that e.g. Linux would suffer the same level of penetration had it had the same level of penetration on the desktop but the fact that about 60% of all Internet traffic is handled by Linux machines (which are far less often compromised) pleads against that. It's not exposure that does it but architecture (and the quality of administration, but that's another issue).
So that being the case, what would benefit Microsoft more than to be able to cast doubt on tales of machines being infected and taken over as "Probably pirated copies; legal Windows versions are protected by MS security updates."?
That would give Microsoft a good reply when called out over the insecurity of MS Windows (e.g. when a large organization is considering what OS it should use in the next 10 years).
What do you think? Might I be anywhere near the mark?
In its general form it's called road pricing. It allows you to price the use of roads by location and time of day. This is necessary, if less than popular.
Here's why.
During the peak, there is more travel demand than roads can handle. The result is called congestion. In congestion *everyone* pays. Not only through wasted gasoline, but also through wasted time.
One might assume that the answer is to put down more asphalt, but this isn't the case. Why not? For three reasons.
1 Roads are part of a network. If the whole network is strained (as is generally the case between 08:00 and 19:00 hr) increasing the capacity if individual links doesn't help. Only if there are clear bottlenecks (pieces of road that are of lower capacity than the surrounding network) does building roads help, but such cases are rare.
2 Widening roads in an urban environment can be prohibitively expensive because of all the buildings you need to knock down.
3 Last but not least, if the price of travel during the peak drops, more people will want it. E.g. people who leave before or after the peak will then return to it, and in doing so destroy the relief brought by widening the roads.
So by and large we're stuck with a mismatch between demand and supply, and the only thing that we can do is to find an economically optimal distribution of road access.
Now some people's time is worth more money than other people's, depending on their travel motive, personal circumstances etc.. Sorry, but that's the way it is. The economically optimal distribution of road access would be to auction "road slots" so that people can choose: pay with time or pay with money. Since allocating road slots technically feasible (yet), electronic road pricing is the next best thing.
So that's why it's needed (and fairly unavoidable), despite being unpopular.
I agree about the privacy aspects, but it's possible to build systems that toll but don't collect personal information.
With legal chicanery I mean e.g. leveling a barrage of nuisance lawsuits at an opponent with the objective of bankrupting the victim by forcing him to expend ruinous sums on legal counsel, or alternatively by securing unfounded convictions against the victim where he has been unable to mount an adequate legal defense (See e.g. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Fishman/Declaration/exhibg.html).
Of course the wave of counter-harassment and even threats (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology) goes too far. But what the Cult now pleads for is to introduce a totally ambiguous definition of "Websites created with primary purpose of inciting religious vilification" (read: "anybody who says something to the effect that the Scientology sect is a nasty, dangerous, for-profit outfit") and strip those of anonymity or even the right to exist at all. In plain text: anyone who writes anything against the Scientology cult will now be exposed to harassment lawsuits, career wrecking, and intimidation (see the Fishman affidavit in one of the links above).
The full text of the "recommendations" I reproduce below:
SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS
Recommendation 1: The implementation of Criminal and Civil Restrictions on Religious Vilification.
Recommendation 2: Restriction on Anonymity on acts of Religious
Vilification:
2.1 Websites created with primary purpose of inciting religious vilification shall be removed or their access to the Australian public restricted.
2.2 Creators of websites whose primary purpose is the incitement of religious vilification shall be prevented from concealing their identity.
Recommendation 3: Restriction on Religious Misinformation and
Misrepresentation known or reasonably known to be untruthful in the Media
Recommendation 4: Include a form of Bill or Charter of Rights into the Australian Constitution, which prevents the Commonwealth from making any law, which 'directly, indirectly or incidentally' prohibits the free exercise of religion to the extent of such prohibition
What part of this looks as if it provides any safeguards against the most appalling abuse? Where are the checks and balances? Who determines what is "misinformation", or "incitement of religious vilification"? Would quoting court documents that state the Scientology sect pr
I mean, just look at MS Windows. Throughout its history it has always been "good enough" in a technological sense of the word, but superior in terms of accessibility and convenience.
And what about Henry Ford's T-model? It most certainly wasn't anything to brag about, technology-wise. It most certainly wasn't any better than the competition, but yet gaain it was "good enough" and accessible (in the sense of affordable).
Now what was that about "the future of technology" again?
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, the article notes that the company was "a bit spoiled" by being in a position to hire from a large pool of MIT students, many of whom they knew personally. I like the subtle understatement here.
Not only did they put the target practically in front of the gun (by having an embarrassingly parallel problem), they also employed an embarrassingly high-calibre gun (i.e. hand-picked MIT students). Scoring has therefore been high. Surprise!
This experiment didn't do anything at all to bust the mythical man-month. Who came up with that title anyway? Must have been some slashdot editor ...
Following the logic of their stated reasons for using the on-board camera to take a peek at student's private lives, I respectfully submit that the individuals which are most at risk are therefore those most in need of the kind of protective surveillance this school offers. Right? Now it is common knowledge that attractive females are, more than most other groups, at risk. Both in school and outside.
It therefore follows, with an elegant inevitability, that surveillance should focus on the 5% most attractive females of the school. We are then talking about continuous surveillance of course.
I recommend enhancing security by also enabling the laptops' microphone. Besides, are those laptop cameras any good for taking infra-red pictures?
For example ... Lexis-Nexus? And big chemical databases (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_database) like the Beilstein database (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beilstein_database)?
On the one hand I'm very glad that mere facts aren't patentable, but on the other hand if this means that anyone can slurp down your entire database and then resell it or even export it then it's less of a boon. This is why e.g. the EU came up with their "database directive" which expressly provides databases with copyright protection if they are "collections of facts that took significant effort to compile".
Not that that's ideal, because it e.g. lets public transport providers claim copyright on timetables (which they promptly abused in the EU until court-cases established that public transport providers had to draw uptime-tables anyway in order to make their networks run, and that it required negligible effort to put that stuff into a database afterwards). Likewise with ZIP codes in the EU: it may seem ridiculous but ZIP code databases are copyrighted there.
So what is the legal status of databases here? Does anyone know?
Specifically limiting yourself to "reading code" and relying the likes of "grep" is (as far as I'm concerned) behaviour of a Code Monkey, not a Software Engineer.
Now the remaining question is: how do we make sure that EU banking data is adequately mined for leads and clues and that the US is warned the instant something is detected? Because it just so happens that the US is the party that's most at risk, and the EU is the party with porous borders to Islamic nations around the Mediterranean, and an indigenous Muslim population numbering several million which demonstrably contains radical elements. So it's fine if the EU wants to do the data-mining for itself, but it has to be done.
The EU will now probably find that it needs a "federal" investigation agency because letting 23-odd governments in on what queries are run is a recipe for leakage. So it needs to be one agency that's capable of keeping a secret. In case they already had one, now is the time to give it some manpower and computers and let it cooperate with whoever is doing the profiling in the US, because sharing data on *suspect* individuals and *suspect* transactions is well within the scope of conventional police cooperation.
As an interim measure we can probably agree on a few queries with at least one "bogus" query which, if leaked, will cause visible changes in shady people's banking. If the new hopefully-soon-to-be-operational "EU FBI" passes that test they may actually be a help.
Does this mean that groups who are properly registered will actually be able to get a license to "Detonate explosives, release poisonous, virulent, or radio-active substances in urban areas, means of public transport, or public meeting places with the intent to inflict injuries or casualties on the general populace"?
Just asking. You just never know with geniuses like that.
Reciprocity is easy to understand: it isn't there in the current agreements. As in: the US can look at any financial transaction in the EU it likes, the EU cannot do the same thing with financial transactions in the US. If I were on a EU committee like the one described, I'd nix any data-sharing agreement on that ground alone. Can you imagine the US allowing a foreign power to rifle through its citizen's private financial records without getting the same powers in return? No? Then why should the EU?
"Subsidiarity" is a code-word coined by the EU bureaucracy which basically means that responsibility for something should be put at the lowest possible level: if something can be handled at national level, the EU has no business with it. Sort of like the division of powers between individual states and federal government (guess where they found the inspiration for this one). The same idea applies between nations / states. If some state / nation is capable of fishing for terrorists, then it ought to do so instead of sending off the raw data to another entity for processing, analysis, and monitoring. So why not let the EU trawl through its own stuff (e.g. according to algorithms we provide) and put an agreement in place that they alert us the instant they find anything? That's how policing works (and often doesn't work).
The "trust" angle is what makes things difficult. Basically the US are developing ways of data-mining financial transactions for traces of unlawful activity (terrorist, drugs-related, or otherwise). That's currently a research area (not in the least because our opponents are very much moving targets and you therefore need to tweak such searches all the time) and it simply doesn't want to let 23 other parties (all EU member states, the EU commission, and one or two EU agencies) know the exact nature of its analyses. That makes absolute sense because with so many parties involved there are bound to be leaks, so the US might as well publish its algorithms on the web if it did. If it does, then any terrorist organization worth its salt will move quickly to hide the exact patterns the search is looking for, rendering the whole exercise rather pointless.
The next question of course is why the US doesn't want to make its internal financial transactions available to the EU on the same basis. That would remove the pain for the EU. Legal obstacles apart, it's not as if the EU and its members are likely to abuse that. The problem however is that if the EU gets such rights, then *every* other party that's ever approached with a request for data will demand the same. Would you like all your financial transactions to be visible to e.g. China, Russia, India, Japan, Korea, Australia, Indonesia and any other nation we need data from? No? You don't want China to know that you flew to Taipei or that your company sold stuff there? I wouldn't either. So it's best not to put anything like that on the table. Ever. Right?
So there's the catch-22. We can't afford to offer the EU reasonable (for them) terms for data-access, and if they grow a pair they won't just give us the data either (which they seem to be currently doing).
Anyone got any bright ideas?
The most vexing part of this affair to me is that Australia is usually accounted as part of the "Western" world. You know, that part of the world where people have freedom of speech. Now how can you have freedom of speech if you don't have freedom of anonymous speech? Australia is really "ruining the neighborhood" and "letting the side down" on this.
Now what was that again about China trampling on free speech on the Internet?
Oh yes ... still have a proposal to combat bush-fires in Australia that's been unfairly sat upon I feel. Since about 50% of all bush-fires are reported (by the Australian authorities) to be lit on purpose I propose to ban the sale of matches in Australia to any Australian over the age of 5.
If you're a "guest" in a country ruled by a one-party dictatorship that doesn't like people to see (legitimate) views that aren't necessarily the ones the state-controlled news agencies and state-approved opinion leaders dish up, then yes.
They will naturally take a dim view of you if you allow their citizens to learn about those dissenting opinions. You have to abide by their "house" rules that you don't let their citizens have access to uncontrolled information.
Oh yes, of course any rumours about systematic, large-scale, well-coordinated cyberwarfare dressed up as "random hacker activity" are just samples of malicious slander, yep? And if you're hosting an e-mail service and find your systems subjected to systematic attack from "hackers" (who just happen to target email accounts of regime critics), that too is no more than a big spiky everyday coincidence, yep? And making noise about being hacked like that is impolite, yep?
You've gotta be soooo careful to "abide by their rules". We all understand that, don't we? Yep Yep !
So ... should we conclude that this new advice is based on nothing more than some official reading the headlines on the Google hack with his breakfast, choking, getting egg all over his trousers, and wanting to explain why he had to change his trousers and was therefore late for work? Or is it really a case of someone finally seeing an opportunity to get support for a long-intended measure? I'd like to know, but I'm not optimistic.
Unfortunately they also seem to have overlooked a much bigger security hole: MS Windows itself. Especially older versions, unpatched, un-firewalled, and incautiously administrated (in my guess this means about in 95% of all home installations).
If they are at all serious about their "security warning", then why not set their mandatory ISP-snooping infrastructure to scanning for viruses, trojans, and malware too? That might actually help their citizens a lot more than scanning for child pornography or coded Bin-Laden C3 traffic.
And what about themselves? Why not mandate Open Source code vetting for any OS to be considered for government use? After all, they wouldn't buy proprietary encryption schemes either, would they? And why not institute a government-wide preference (not a mandate) for Open Source Office applications? And spend, say, 10% of what they spend now on proprietary software on awarding contracts for supporting, maintaining, and improving said Open Source software so as to meet every last demand made on it in government? They would be looking at huge savings and very high returns.
Or would that be too radical?
The crux is to use "Magnetically coupled resonance" to achieve efficient power transfer to prevent the vast majority of power from being broadcast into space (read wasted) when no receiver is present to absorb it. Unfortunately that very feature seems to severely limit the transmission range.
So I wouldn't worry about long-distance power transmission through the air just yet.
I'm more worried about plans for space-based power transmission which were recently green-lighted in California. For example, what happens when the beam from such satellites shifts from the intended receiver area to, say, a residential block?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#cite_note-intensity-41 at the center of the downward beam, we would be looking at 23 mW/cm2 (and 1 mW/cm2 outside the center), compared to OSHA workplace exposure limits for microwaves, which are 10 mW/cm2. Not bad, but not good either. Suppose someone goofs and directs the beam onto a kindergarten and leaves it there for a week. What then?
Those 23 mW might not look like much, but it's still 230 W/m2, and it's radio-frequency which penetrates far deeper than visible light. I simply don't know how detrimental that is, but I'd like to be sure of the potential long-term effects before anything like that is built, let alone switched on. I'm certainly no Luddite, but in the light of e.g. findings like these (see http://www.isracast.com/article.aspx?id=57) about the detrimental effects of 2mW of 1.1GHz radiation on eye lenses I feel we ought to be careful. Signal-level transmission at 2mW is one thing, but power level transmission at 23mW/cm2 is something else.
Each of the above 3 professionals have their own areas of expertise. And Statistics (such as needed in performance estimation or dimensioning of processing capacity) simply isn't part of the average software's engineer's background (let alone that of a code monkey). You wouldn't want a Statistician to code up a decent interpreter, right? I mean: just look at the R interpreter. How about letting a Mathematician design and code your GUI? No takers?
By the same token you wouldn't want a programmer to design a Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. That's because programmers know nothing about Markov chains, the length of startup periods, periodicity of a chain, absorbing states, or invariant distributions. Worse yet, they have no way of knowing if their code spouts nonsense or the right answer with a lot of noise. It's not their area of expertise. You also don't want a mere programmer set up a numerical approximation. I mean: just look at the jackasses that coded up the Patriot timer and made the most elementary mistake in the book of numerical analysis by using a floating-point value as a loop counter and allowed it to accumulate roundoff error. That's a mistake first-year undergraduate engineering and maths students make before they are marked down for it.
So what does that mean? Well, one approach would be to shout: "HECK Programmers Don't Know Jack About Statistics And Need To Be Educated In A Hurry". That's the approach the author of the article takes. I don't believe that's a very fruitful approach though.
Another approach (the one I prefer) is to note that some engineering projects are of necessity TEAM efforts. Where you have a project lead who knows where the problem areas are, who is qualified to solve them, and how the team effort must be managed.
And yes, that means that sometimes programmers get to work under the direction (as in "are told what to do") of a specialist like a Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical, or Civil Engineer. Or a Statistician or a Mathematician for that matter.
On the other hand those specialists needn't be heard when it comes to things like database design, semaphores, inter-process communication, communication protocols, pre- and post-conditions, latency, cache filling, access control and the need for encryption and suchlike.
Om still other aspects you may expect specialists and programmers to work together and talk to each other.
So, while the problems mentioned in the article are recognizable (and indeed well known), they don't necessarily mean that programmers should get educated. They should be part of a team, and be professional enough to realize that they are members of the team, not in charge of it.
Well ... you pose two very different questions here, which I agree are entirely reasonable questions to ask:
(1) should we have the freedom to commit copyright infringement?
(2) Should we abolish copyright altogether?.
I believe the answer to question (1) is "Yes" and to question (2) "No".
Here's why.
Under current law, copyright infringement is a civil (not a criminal !) matter, and moreover one that only becomes actionable after the infringement takes place. When I drive my car I have the physical freedom to enter one-way streets from the wrong side, to drive on the pavement or in pedestrian zones, or even to drive on the wrong side of the road. But if I do there will likely be trouble.
To me that's the essence of freedom. The system is designed for people with common sense, but it still *does* allow me to break the rules in an emergency or for what I consider sufficient reason. I know I may face a fine (or the loss of my drivers license) if I do, but it's still my decision to make, not someone else's. What's proposed now is to shackle data-transmission and computer so that they can no longer even commit a copyright infringement. That's equivalent to creating cars that will automatically override drivers whenever they attempt to break a rule.
I can, to a certain extent, agree with monitoring data-transmissions by the FBI and NSA when it's about spotting potential terrorists. It's probably the worst single effect that terrorists have had, and in a sense they have won. The Western world is under a lot more surveillance today than it was 20 years ago. Or when the Cold War was on. I hate that, but I can't change it.
What I find totally unpalatable is to see the same intrusive powers that were granted to the guardians of state security to protect us from attacks under the current (extreme) conditions re-purposed to protect the financial interests of the Mickey Mouse industry. I simply do not believe that is worth it.
So yes. I think we should at least have have the _technical_ ability to infringe any copyrights we want for whatever reason we can think of. But of course that doesn't mean we should have immunity from legal action and being sued for damages if we do.
That brings me to question (2). By and large I believe that copyright law serves a purpose and should be upheld. Even if copyright laws are routinely exploited to their maximum extent (and even irresponsibly extended and abused) by all and sundry to protect all sorts of financial interests or business models that include and often supersede the effect that copyright laws were designed to have.
The RIAA for example doesn't seem to need any new powers to serve as a strong deterrent. Existing rules (and the existing standard of proof in court !) by and large seem adequate. Of course it's still possible for the system to grossly misfire (see e.g. the idiotic verdict plus damages in the Jammie Thomas case). Besides I personally think that "damages" awarded should be in reasonable proportion to the value of the infringement (in cases of people committing copyright infringement for private use and not for commercial gain) plus the cost of detection and prosecution plus a reasonable deterrent (say 1% of someone's annual income with a minimum of 250$).
I'm more comfortable with the burden of detection and prosecution being placed on the copyright holders and not the State. I know it's far from ideal, but I think it's better than alternatives such as criminalizing copyright infringement. We need the Police for far more important things to oblige them to go out and detect and prosecute 15$ copyright infringement offenses.
Instead it's about seeing if a patent examiner, who must approve a certain number of patents per week or be fired (!), can spot any obvious prior art (read: "previous patents on the same subject") in the time budgeted for examination. Which is about 10-30 minutes apart from doing the paperwork retrieve and to file a patent claim and scan for existing patents.
The USPTO largely relies on the public to conduct in-depth tests of patents (through court action).
This probably isn't by malicious design, but it's a direct consequence of the USPTO being self-financing (and indeed a profit center) from patent application fees and being mandated by congress to remain that way. Our collective wisdom has probed the alternatives and settled for this particular solution.
Of course the USPTO could be instructed to change its priorities and conduct rigorous and in-depth patent examinations. Only ... we (or our elected representatives) aren't willing to pay the price, which is a few billion $ extra per year from here on out to employ large swathes of new patent examiners.
If you find that strange, I'm with you. Only don't tell me it's by an act of God that all kinds of stupid patents are granted. We're doing that to ourselves (if only by proxy).
Downloading copyrighted material never was a "crime". At most it's an actionable infringement of someone's copyright. Actionable by the copyright holder that is, not the State. It's not even a misdemeanor.
Besides, torrent sites in and by themselves were never "criminal", as they only facilitate an exchange of information which, among many other things, allows people to infringe copyrights.
Italy has plenty of laws that would totally paralyze every aspect of public and private life, were they to be rigorously enforced. Such laws look terrific on paper but don't have any practical effect except in lawsuits where they can be (and are) routinely used to club people over the head with. Anyone who has ever driven a car in an Italian city South of Rome (Naples for example, or tried to cross the street in the same city at a pedestrian crossing that's showing a green light for pedestrians) knows all about the practical value of laws in Italy.
This little decision will satisfy officials who can now tout it as a bold step towards curbing piracy. This is important. Just remember that their prime minister, Berlusconi, owns a whole chain of content-creating enterprises. He can't afford to look "soft on piracy" and retain his credibility in business circles.
As one or two nerdish forum members may already have figured out, blocking a torrent site or two won't necessarily stop people from finding or downloading torrents. To put it mildly.
The only thing it *will* do is to slowly erode yet another form of legal freedom in Italy and afterwards in the rest of Europe.
That's all folks.
As long as the hardware has basic floating point support it's possible to design software that will get the right answer, and usually fast enough. It's all down to the software.
The Patriot case was simply unsound from a numerical point of view because it used an approximation which accumulated errors to the point where they seriously compromised the end result, which is a whole thing altogether (and mathematically speaking much simpler and more fundamental).
Numerical analysis is basically about "How can we make sure that a computer algorithm on such-and-such hardware will always produce an answer to this-and-this mathematical problem with such-and-such error bounds.". This really isn't something like "coding well", but it can require complicated and careful mathematics to get right, which is something programmers usually haven't a clue about. Instead, and provided the effort is warranted by the application, one needs to have a competent Numerical Analyst (a fancy title for a Mathematician specialized in this particular field) check (if not actually design) the software. Coders can then do the rest, provided there is sufficient communication between the architect (the numerical analyst) and the builders (the coders) about all the quirks of the hardware and how they are accounted for and dealt with.
Every CS graduate is supposed to know that advanced numerical work with computers (like those in the Patriot system, where the 0.3 second error is a fine example of negligence) falls under the domain of Numerical Analysis and require specialist attention. This is why some jobs should be undertaken by software engineers, not coders.
First off, from a public health point of view it's perfectly reasonable to insist that *all* nurses, MDs, and hospital support staff are vaccinated against most diseases that hospitals are likely to encounter, and against *all* diseases that threaten to become a pandemic (and for which vaccines are available).
The reason is very simple: health-care workers will get into contact with large numbers of weakened patients (old, infirm, very young, diseased, suffering from trauma etc.) and you don't want them to:
- (a) become infected themselves (because they weren't vaccinated) and then infect scores of vulnerable patients because they are carriers
- (b) become unavailable for work due to illness right when they are needed most.
So, by and large and taking one thing with another, we are better off without health-care workers who don't wish to be vaccinated. This simple consideration consideration is enough to warrant *mandatory* vaccination for all health-care workers.
The risk to at-risk individuals (and health-care workers) from the disease itself is much greater than the risk from a vaccine, so (statistically speaking) the only rational course of action is to take the vaccine.
The only thing that I think might be done differently is to dismiss such health-care workers as refuse vaccination. But then again, what do you do with people who can't be kept in their present function?
In my opinion, the license fees for the monetization of this proud piece of Intellectual Property cannot be set too high. A license fee of 15$ per appliance for any other manufacturers wishing to license this remarkable piece of Intellectual Property seems wholly appropriate.
Incidentally, I do not own an iPhone or any other mobile communication device manufactured by Apple and I definitely have no plans to acquire one. I am quite happy with my 3-year-old mobile telephone, which is a prepaid model, and I have no plans to convert to a subscription. Thanks.
Just to sum up the thread, can we say that Americans will get loads and loads of targeted ads because "The Market" wants it?
Everyone knows that MS Windows is the main host of botnets, zombies, and general malware on the Internet. Hardly a month passes without Microsoft patching yet another "critical vulnerability". Unfortunately there are reasons why MS Windows is more vulnerable than e.g. MacOs, Unix, FreeBSD, or Linux. For one thing, MS Windows (until Vista) was never designed from the ground up for multi-user operation, security was ever tacked on as an afterthought, the architecture of MS Windows with its miriad add-on's (that tend to carry out _system_ tasks) and the (deliberately) tight coupling between MS Windows and MS applications conveniently makes for multiple points of attack, and once a process is suborned by an attacker there is nothing in MS Windows architecture that's designed to contain it or stand in its way. That's why we see so many infected Windows PC's on the Internet.
Oh yes, there are those who hold that e.g. Linux would suffer the same level of penetration had it had the same level of penetration on the desktop but the fact that about 60% of all Internet traffic is handled by Linux machines (which are far less often compromised) pleads against that. It's not exposure that does it but architecture (and the quality of administration, but that's another issue).
So that being the case, what would benefit Microsoft more than to be able to cast doubt on tales of machines being infected and taken over as "Probably pirated copies; legal Windows versions are protected by MS security updates."?
That would give Microsoft a good reply when called out over the insecurity of MS Windows (e.g. when a large organization is considering what OS it should use in the next 10 years).
What do you think? Might I be anywhere near the mark?
Here's why.
During the peak, there is more travel demand than roads can handle. The result is called congestion. In congestion *everyone* pays. Not only through wasted gasoline, but also through wasted time.
One might assume that the answer is to put down more asphalt, but this isn't the case. Why not? For three reasons.
1 Roads are part of a network. If the whole network is strained (as is generally the case between 08:00 and 19:00 hr) increasing the capacity if individual links doesn't help. Only if there are clear bottlenecks (pieces of road that are of lower capacity than the surrounding network) does building roads help, but such cases are rare.
2 Widening roads in an urban environment can be prohibitively expensive because of all the buildings you need to knock down.
3 Last but not least, if the price of travel during the peak drops, more people will want it. E.g. people who leave before or after the peak will then return to it, and in doing so destroy the relief brought by widening the roads.
So by and large we're stuck with a mismatch between demand and supply, and the only thing that we can do is to find an economically optimal distribution of road access.
Now some people's time is worth more money than other people's, depending on their travel motive, personal circumstances etc.. Sorry, but that's the way it is. The economically optimal distribution of road access would be to auction "road slots" so that people can choose: pay with time or pay with money. Since allocating road slots technically feasible (yet), electronic road pricing is the next best thing.
So that's why it's needed (and fairly unavoidable), despite being unpopular.
I agree about the privacy aspects, but it's possible to build systems that toll but don't collect personal information.
With legal chicanery I mean e.g. leveling a barrage of nuisance lawsuits at an opponent with the objective of bankrupting the victim by forcing him to expend ruinous sums on legal counsel, or alternatively by securing unfounded convictions against the victim where he has been unable to mount an adequate legal defense (See e.g. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Fishman/Declaration/exhibg.html).
An additional form of chicanery is to drop charges against a victim who does mount an adequate defense in order to avoid unfavorable precedents from being set against the sect (see http://www.rechtspraak.nl/Gerechten/HogeRaad/Actualiteiten/Hoge+Raad+verwerpt+het+cassatieberoep+in+de+zaak+Scientology+providers+en+Spaink.htm (in Dutch)).
Of course the wave of counter-harassment and even threats (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology) goes too far. But what the Cult now pleads for is to introduce a totally ambiguous definition of "Websites created with primary purpose of inciting religious vilification" (read: "anybody who says something to the effect that the Scientology sect is a nasty, dangerous, for-profit outfit") and strip those of anonymity or even the right to exist at all. In plain text: anyone who writes anything against the Scientology cult will now be exposed to harassment lawsuits, career wrecking, and intimidation (see the Fishman affidavit in one of the links above).
The full text of the "recommendations" I reproduce below:
What part of this looks as if it provides any safeguards against the most appalling abuse? Where are the checks and balances? Who determines what is "misinformation", or "incitement of religious vilification"? Would quoting court documents that state the Scientology sect pr
And what about Henry Ford's T-model? It most certainly wasn't anything to brag about, technology-wise. It most certainly wasn't any better than the competition, but yet gaain it was "good enough" and accessible (in the sense of affordable).
Now what was that about "the future of technology" again?