Declan's point is not about just writing code for your job and ignoring political activism (as implied by some of the posters who are only reading the summary and assuming Declan is being condescending). His article is about using your coding skills as your best weapon of activism. Zimmermann, Fanning, Berners-Lee, Fielding--all these guys took their skills and wrote the kind of West Coast Code that Lessig talks about. Each had an impact many orders of magnitude greater than the sum of all internet petition drives and email campaigns combined.
The question we should be asking is what are the next set of disruptive pieces of code we should be writing (while we still have the chance)?
Gurnett and Pseudorandom Behavior Story
on
Space Music
·
· Score: 1
I had Professor Gurnett for an astronomy class once, many moons ago. Our TA told us a little secret: if you ever had to guess on a multiple choice answer on his test, there was a certain letter he had a proclivity to choose as an answer. While the TA didn't tell us which letter, it didn't take too much to figure out that nearly 80% of the time, on every test and quiz he gave, "B" was the answer to choose.
So it doesn't surprise me he finds meaningful patterns in supposedly random data.
Your clients wouldn't even get to see the filenames of their search results -- they would have to trust that the hash system worked properly and that all of their search results are valid.
Maybe I should continue this discussion over at infoanarchy, but couldn't you associate a "title file" with each "content file"? The title file would be protected in the same way that the content file was, and indexed accordingly, such that as results are returned, they have references to the small quick downloads of the titles? You could maybe even write a client that went out and "translated" (downloaded, unpacked and displayed) the title files on the fly in a threaded fashion so as to give you a hint as to the contents.
Legally and conceptually, I don't see this bringing about any less plausible deniability on the part of the index providers. It definitely increases the traffic, but there might be a similar way to break up the title files among index servers such that no single index server knows the content, but the client can decrypt and determine the contents of the link.
How's the gesture recognition interface in the game? Is it intuitive? How many gestures does it support? Anyone know what techniques they use, or if there are any open source resources for gesture recognition?
Here's my modest proposal for an architecture that might work within these constraints. What about creating a plug-in architecture for the Napster-like client that permits non-infringing legitimate components shipped with the client to be replaced by other components that might be considered infringing? In other words, I build a Napster server/service that allows P2P file sharing, but I take great pains to distance it from infringing uses (such as removing the MP3 player and stripping out anything that is music specific.) However, I make all these pieces open to replacement by plug-ins with an open API I publish. Then some independent entity creates replacement plug-ins that do things such as marshall mangled file names into and out of the system in human readable form.
My search service provider is simply providing servers for P2P indexing (perhaps I cast my entire business as a Bookmark exchange site or a dating service or something non-infringing that merely lives off ad revenues); the user is the one then that has to take a more active approach to circumvent my intent (seek and download the filename obfuscator, add the MP3 plug-in, etc.) No one participant is doing anything infringing, but the assembly of the tool by the end user creates the capacity to infringe.
In that case, I think my Napster-like servers and services should be as safe within the DMCA as an ISP. However, I've architected the system to allow the clueful to assume the risk of their definition fair use.
This sounds like a government program. God forbid they give an instant rebate at the point-of-sale, cut out all the paperwork, and eliminate the fraud. I don't even consider buying anything with a rebate attached, particularly if it involves Best Buy. I'd rather wait until the price drops for real, or find something else to buy that doesn't involve me having to do 3 hours work to justify my payback.
This clearly has to be for anti-terrorist purposes, especially given a high-profile event like the Superbowl--so they catch a check-bouncer or a carjacker--big deal. Ever since Black Sunday and on through Clancy's Sum of all Fears, I've been amazed that we've made it this long without some kind of terrorist act at a major sporting event.
At the risk of being a little paranoid or reading too much into the story, it wouldn't surprise me if this isn't something being encouraged by the feds (and perhaps a not-so-subtle reminder to terrorist groups) as America flexing it's anti-terrorist muscles.
Does anyone know if they use this on a large scale in U.S. Customs, or in airports? I'm sure the much bigger risk is in foreign terrorists slipping across the border undetected, but this could close off one avenue (except for the guy who's not in the system to begin with).
And who's to say that Microsoft won't yank it from submission after a couple of years just like Sun did? It seems as though they are using every other idea from Sun in creating this...
For example, I value the chicken in the supermarket and as the chicken is currently the store's property I must pay them to acquire it and consume it. You may not value chicken and thus do not have to acquire it.
Weak, weak chicken analogy.
What if I value the chicken enough to want it, but decide that I don't want to have to pay for the packaging or the ambient Muzak in the grocery store? I have the means of going straight to the farm and stealing chickens directly. My only true marginal cost is my time and effort to seek out and steal^H^H^H^H^Hacquire chickens. I would be willing to pay a business to make this process of appropriation easier for me. Saving me time and effort has value.
But what about the chicken farmer? Clearly they have invested countless hours and dollars in the raising of the chickens that I value. Should I be forced at gunpoint (forced by law) to compensate them with my money? Should the business that helped me save time in the acquisition process be forced by law to compensate them?
I think the answer is clearly NO. But then how can the chicken farmer possibly make any money by creating chicken?
Several ways. First they can use the chickens as a loss-leader (open up your marketing 101 books) to bring more and more people to their farm for hoe-downs and square dancing festivals. A live performance is still valued by most chicken-eating fans and is a unique once in a lifetime service (either you were there or you were not, and no watching it on pay-perview is not just as good (unless the farm stinks--in which case pay-per-view can't capture that special essence)). Besides performance the farmer can hold other special events (e.g., cockfights) and charge for admission. If they truly want to be compensated for their chicken then they can release their chicks serially and demand a ransom to release the next one (e.g., buy this chicken or the eggs get smashed) (or next egg, whatever they want to). Basically this is the farm hand protocol and would work well.
This is long-winded, but my point is that times are changing and the internet allows for the traffic of chickens between people for virtually no marginal cost. Business models based on government enforcement of poultry monopolies will not last as people will find a way to get what they want.
My company instituted a war room for about 3 years. My advice is that if your company is doing this, or you're looking at joining a company that does this, find out why. More often than not, it's a quick fix to make up for lack of process and the ability to manage a healthy work environment. It reminds me of the "All in the Family" episode where Archie puts a penny in the fuse box instead of going to the store to get a new fuse. Sure, the lights come back on but a day or so later, the house catches on fire. Always make sure the root causes are addressed first.
A few comments:
Our management loved it, because it "improved communication" and "we never would have finished the product if we hadn't done it." I think this is a less than honest assessment. More precisely stated, it allowed them to avoid dealing with a complete lack of project management. The fact is, that even with the war room, the software was delivered 4 years late. (But if they keep saying it was a success long enough, the CEO and COO believe it and it becomes fact. And who cares about all those people who quit!)
There are certain people who thrive in the environment, but in my experience, they're less-experienced developers who would benefit more from a good mentoring program (which was sorely lacking). My observations are that you actually get productivity loss from the most skilled 20% of developers. In the aggregate and for the short term, this may pay off, because the middle 50% of developers see the bulk of the increase, offsetting other losses. To me, this indicates that the amount of benefit a company sees from a war room is proportional to the poor quality of their hiring practices and training programs. How dysfunctional is a company that sees an eight-fold increase in productivity due to a change in seating arrangements? Reverse it and think how you could make developers 8x less productive. There has to be some other stupid stuff going on at these shops.
Unfortunately for us, the skilled 20% are the ones most likely to leave. Turnover rates increased dramatically, from around 12% annually to 25% during this time. It's also not always the 20% teaching the other 80% and helping them--there's no law that says that only good practices are shared when everyone is face-to-face. In fact, hundreds of bad ideas are perpetuated even faster because of the "improved" communication. Ignorance breeds ignorance.
Face time certainly increases, which looks good to out-of-touch execs who focus on weekly overtime numbers as a measure of what they are getting for their engineering dollar. But it magnifies personnel problems. I've seen people put in 54-60 hours of face time in these situations because they're pressured into it, even though they're doing the same amount of work as when they were only working 40-45 hours.
Worst of all, the quality of our software suffered greatly from this practice. Just because more code appears to be getting slung, and OT goes up, engineering management feels it doesn't need to learn even the basics of software engineering practices. To wit, in the year after the war room effort ended, nearly 65% of the effort of engineering involved bug fixes. Put this in perspective: 4 years late, and after it was put into production, 2/3 of engineering dollars were spent correcting bugs introduced in the process. And yet they pronounced it a success!
We were clearly an SEI Level 1 shop during this time period, and it wasn't until we put away the folding tables and started treating developers like professionals instead of cattle that we actually saw any meaningful productivity improvement (meaning, factoring out the 2/3rds of the company now having to do bug fixes and support, the 1/3 actually met most of their projected targets. But of course, with no history of project management to compare to, the engineering management geniuses can still claim war room victory.)
And it sucks to constantly bang your knees on those damn folding table braces!
It reminds me of a comment someone once made about faculty meetings. "Faculty meetings are so contentious because the stakes are so low." Your average rabid Tickle Me Elmo buyer probably has a lower income, lower education and greater susceptibility to scarcity behavior than the average PS2 buyer.
Then again, the average PS2 buyer in the first couple of weeks after launch was a soccer mom who also happened to be on a waiting list to pay a 20% premium on a PT Cruiser, so consumerism comes in many dysfunctional flavors.
You nailed it, and contrary to what some of the replies suggested you did not make this a sweeping generalization of geeks. There are a significant number who have completely undeveloped senses when it comes to literature, art or cinema.
I recall being stuck in a car with two of them once. These were fairly successful engineers in our company. One had just purchased some painting at some sort of Tupperware of Art party the other had hosted.
"I bought the only picture there that looked like something real. It has to be a picture of something real to be worth anything." Okay, no problem, everyone has their own preferences.
Then the other guy chimed in: "Yeah, those paintings that you have to look at for awhile and figure out--they're awful. It reminds me of this literature class I had to take once. Everyone sits around analyzing the story and seeing stuff that isn't there. It's a stupid waste of time."
"Yeah, just a bunch of art fags."
Ah well, the benefits of a purely technical education...
Ugggh. I hate software patents as much as the next person, but your idea has a few holes in it.
Letting "free software" violate the notion of software patents is impossible without trashing patent law altogether. Say I patent a software design for "half-click shopping". As part of my patent application, I'm required to provide enough detail so that one reasonably skilled in the art of software development can implement a half-click shopping software package (essentially open sourcing the idea while retaining the rights). When I'm granted the patent, I'm given a 17-20 year monopoly to prevent others from implementing half-click shopping software. Meanwhile, I lay waste to the industry, putting Amazon out of business by licensing the patent rights to Barnes and Noble and others. Fame, fortune and derision follow.
If your proposed law was enacted, Apache could decide that what this world really needs is halfclick.apache.org, the Open Source Half-Click Project. There are all these mom-n-pop storefronts out there on the web who can't compete and license my patent (or afford my companies license fees for the software), so we'll just build them a free version that they can run to circumvent my government-granted monopoly. Since there's no charge for it, even my normal customer base (B&N) could go hire a few developers to contribute to this open source project and tailor a version for their needs. No money changes hands, but I clearly lose the one right I'm granted with the patent, which is the ability to decide who can use the patent.
A more direct approach would be to fix software patents in the first place, and not drag open source into it. A cheaper, more streamlined way of resolving disputes without involving lawyers is the key step.
That's not to say that open source doesn't have a role to play in regards to software patents. As the half-click shopping originator, I might find it useful to grant Apache a license to my patent, because innovations that arise from their work might themselves be patentable, and that only adds to the value of my patent (since derivative patents ultimately require licensing the original patent).
IMHO, open source may become a very valuable weapon if combined with a streamlined arbitration approach to resolving the quagmire of software patent lawsuits. Open source the creation and registration of prior art, instead of the implementation of existing ideas. It's been discussed before, but it supports the ideals of the open source community as well, if not better, than free code. For example, we create an open "shadow PTO" that open source contributors can submit patentable ideas to in order to stake out ground we want to protect from the lawyers. By patentable idea, I mean a proposal that has enough detail that someone reasonably skilled in the art can construct it, and something that is novel. That would be a much better way of using the open source culture to thwart software patent abuses, and it would still protect the valuable aspects of patent law. A battle of the minds.
Actually, Burger King is an all-Coke business. Just like McDonald's.
From the FuzzySummarizer 0.33 release notes:
The FuzzySummarizer is not responsible for errors in the original content. Summaries of bad information may in fact contain bad information. See our website for FuzzyAutoCorrect 0.21(beta) which includes a patch to correct fast food beverage references made by washed up VJs.
Yuck. Maybe someone could do us the service of grabbing the actual three sentences of content, wherever they are, and sticking them up on a page somewhere.
At your service, the FuzzySummarizer's analysis:
My credentials are better than yours because I'm older, and I had more jobs than you. So listen here you whippersnappers as I dispense my wisdom:
Formats go like this: McDonalds--Coke/Big Mac. Burger King--Pepsi/Whopper. My years in the business have led me to this brilliant insight.
MTV. Napster. I'm not a programmer, but I can spell XML. I was a DJ. I can spell DJ too.
XML is good.
Someone should use XML for playlists like this one dude did.
Having worked in the defense industry as well, part of the game was that in taking the job, you elected to give up some of your rights for the purpose of national defense. I could have been required to take a lie detector test to keep my job at any time, something a private employer couldn't do legally. I never for once felt that my communications were truly private, same as with my current non-defense employer. What applies in the world of employment and to contractors associated with the DoD is going up against different rules than what a private citizen can expect.
Having been on the receiving end of such a wiretap notification (not of my personal communications, but having innocently stumbled into someone else's wiretap), I can tell you that it is disturbing to receive one. But it was good to know that the FBI, at least, did follow the law in that case.
The laws governing seizures in the US have been so eroded by local law enforcement and the DEA that people not even charged with a crime are having their property taken without any recourse. The drug forfeiture laws, which were in many states, passed to generate revenues for education, have in fact become a way that local agencies can bypass due process and build their own arsenals. When a drug bust occurs involving a substantial amount of property, the local authorities call in the DEA, and by getting the feds involved, are allowed to split the proceeds, circumventing their obligation to education.
The court cases all have intriguing names like US Government vs. 1981 Cadillac El Dorado or US Government vs. $83,000 cash. Even if the charges are dropped against the property owners (or even if the property owners weren't involved in the alleged crime), the government keeps the loot.
If any of your email was intercepted by the feds, it's their responsibility under the law to notify you that they intercepted your electronic transmissions. (Whether it is over a phone line, a message on an answering machine, a caller ID entry or an email.) So the fact that you didn't receive such a notification either means they weren't tracing his emails to you, or that you'd have to believe the feds violated the law.
MCSE certification is largely an indoctrination program that happens to be an effective profit center. It indicates to me someone more impressed with titles and buying status than competence. Every MCSE that I know at my company has already wised up to Microsoft's scam, seeing no reason to hand over even more money to Microsoft to learn about products that don't work as advertised. The real experience of doing something difficult with the products is far more valuable.
Unfortunately, some of the same ex-MCSE's are hopping on the Cisco Certification bandwagon. And in a year or two they'll be just as disillusioned. It seems reminiscent of $cientology to me.
Great link. It makes me wonder what happened to them afterwards.
I like to imagine that without enough food for the return trip, Stand By Me's Vern ate Cheadle and Delaney, while Sinise grew gills in his suspension bath and came back as Aquaman for the sequel (including a suitable number of flashbacks--just in case you didn't remember how much the movie sucked the first time.)
At least when Starship Troopers had sucky dialogue, it was done with a sense of humor and a sense of irony. This screenplay had all the subtlety of The Young and the Restless on a bad day. How the hell could Robbins and Cheadle exchange some of those lines and not call for a rewrite?
Best part of the movie: the 12 oz. boxes of Budweiser, the 2020 eco-friendly replacement for aluminum cans. (I assume that it was ounces--given the success rate of the Mars missions in the flick, I don't think NASA had learned from its past unit of conversion errors yet and gone all metric.)
Interestingly enough, a lot of the SOAP development happened outside of Microsoft. Don Box of Developmentor is listed as the lead author on the RFC.
Isn't Box the guy making money from the Microsoft gravy train every time another one of his COM books sells? Doesn't the history of XMLRPC show that they both worked closely with Microsoft engineers at Microsoft during the early development of what would be soap? To invoke these names as proof that the development happened outside Microsoft is misleading. The article itself is quite humorous--SOAP being a shot across the bow of Java and CORBA? Give me a break.
First Rule of Fight Club: No one trusts Microsoft. Second Rule of Fight Club: No one trusts Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
The question we should be asking is what are the next set of disruptive pieces of code we should be writing (while we still have the chance)?
So it doesn't surprise me he finds meaningful patterns in supposedly random data.
Maybe I should continue this discussion over at infoanarchy, but couldn't you associate a "title file" with each "content file"? The title file would be protected in the same way that the content file was, and indexed accordingly, such that as results are returned, they have references to the small quick downloads of the titles? You could maybe even write a client that went out and "translated" (downloaded, unpacked and displayed) the title files on the fly in a threaded fashion so as to give you a hint as to the contents.
Legally and conceptually, I don't see this bringing about any less plausible deniability on the part of the index providers. It definitely increases the traffic, but there might be a similar way to break up the title files among index servers such that no single index server knows the content, but the client can decrypt and determine the contents of the link.
How's the gesture recognition interface in the game? Is it intuitive? How many gestures does it support? Anyone know what techniques they use, or if there are any open source resources for gesture recognition?
Excellent summary.
Here's my modest proposal for an architecture that might work within these constraints. What about creating a plug-in architecture for the Napster-like client that permits non-infringing legitimate components shipped with the client to be replaced by other components that might be considered infringing? In other words, I build a Napster server/service that allows P2P file sharing, but I take great pains to distance it from infringing uses (such as removing the MP3 player and stripping out anything that is music specific.) However, I make all these pieces open to replacement by plug-ins with an open API I publish. Then some independent entity creates replacement plug-ins that do things such as marshall mangled file names into and out of the system in human readable form.
My search service provider is simply providing servers for P2P indexing (perhaps I cast my entire business as a Bookmark exchange site or a dating service or something non-infringing that merely lives off ad revenues); the user is the one then that has to take a more active approach to circumvent my intent (seek and download the filename obfuscator, add the MP3 plug-in, etc.) No one participant is doing anything infringing, but the assembly of the tool by the end user creates the capacity to infringe.
In that case, I think my Napster-like servers and services should be as safe within the DMCA as an ISP. However, I've architected the system to allow the clueful to assume the risk of their definition fair use.
This sounds like a government program. God forbid they give an instant rebate at the point-of-sale, cut out all the paperwork, and eliminate the fraud. I don't even consider buying anything with a rebate attached, particularly if it involves Best Buy. I'd rather wait until the price drops for real, or find something else to buy that doesn't involve me having to do 3 hours work to justify my payback.
Congress shall make no law requiring jokes to be spelled out for the benefit of the humor-impaired.
--Amendment 42 of The New and Improved Constitution o' the United States of America©
This clearly has to be for anti-terrorist purposes, especially given a high-profile event like the Superbowl--so they catch a check-bouncer or a carjacker--big deal. Ever since Black Sunday and on through Clancy's Sum of all Fears, I've been amazed that we've made it this long without some kind of terrorist act at a major sporting event.
At the risk of being a little paranoid or reading too much into the story, it wouldn't surprise me if this isn't something being encouraged by the feds (and perhaps a not-so-subtle reminder to terrorist groups) as America flexing it's anti-terrorist muscles.
Does anyone know if they use this on a large scale in U.S. Customs, or in airports? I'm sure the much bigger risk is in foreign terrorists slipping across the border undetected, but this could close off one avenue (except for the guy who's not in the system to begin with).
And who's to say that Microsoft won't yank it from submission after a couple of years just like Sun did? It seems as though they are using every other idea from Sun in creating this...
For example, I value the chicken in the supermarket and as the chicken is currently the store's property I must pay them to acquire it and consume it. You may not value chicken and thus do not have to acquire it.
Weak, weak chicken analogy.
What if I value the chicken enough to want it, but decide that I don't want to have to pay for the packaging or the ambient Muzak in the grocery store? I have the means of going straight to the farm and stealing chickens directly. My only true marginal cost is my time and effort to seek out and steal^H^H^H^H^Hacquire chickens. I would be willing to pay a business to make this process of appropriation easier for me. Saving me time and effort has value.
But what about the chicken farmer? Clearly they have invested countless hours and dollars in the raising of the chickens that I value. Should I be forced at gunpoint (forced by law) to compensate them with my money? Should the business that helped me save time in the acquisition process be forced by law to compensate them?
I think the answer is clearly NO. But then how can the chicken farmer possibly make any money by creating chicken?
Several ways. First they can use the chickens as a loss-leader (open up your marketing 101 books) to bring more and more people to their farm for hoe-downs and square dancing festivals. A live performance is still valued by most chicken-eating fans and is a unique once in a lifetime service (either you were there or you were not, and no watching it on pay-perview is not just as good (unless the farm stinks--in which case pay-per-view can't capture that special essence)). Besides performance the farmer can hold other special events (e.g., cockfights) and charge for admission. If they truly want to be compensated for their chicken then they can release their chicks serially and demand a ransom to release the next one (e.g., buy this chicken or the eggs get smashed) (or next egg, whatever they want to). Basically this is the farm hand protocol and would work well.
This is long-winded, but my point is that times are changing and the internet allows for the traffic of chickens between people for virtually no marginal cost. Business models based on government enforcement of poultry monopolies will not last as people will find a way to get what they want.
A few comments:
Our management loved it, because it "improved communication" and "we never would have finished the product if we hadn't done it." I think this is a less than honest assessment. More precisely stated, it allowed them to avoid dealing with a complete lack of project management. The fact is, that even with the war room, the software was delivered 4 years late. (But if they keep saying it was a success long enough, the CEO and COO believe it and it becomes fact. And who cares about all those people who quit!)
There are certain people who thrive in the environment, but in my experience, they're less-experienced developers who would benefit more from a good mentoring program (which was sorely lacking). My observations are that you actually get productivity loss from the most skilled 20% of developers. In the aggregate and for the short term, this may pay off, because the middle 50% of developers see the bulk of the increase, offsetting other losses. To me, this indicates that the amount of benefit a company sees from a war room is proportional to the poor quality of their hiring practices and training programs. How dysfunctional is a company that sees an eight-fold increase in productivity due to a change in seating arrangements? Reverse it and think how you could make developers 8x less productive. There has to be some other stupid stuff going on at these shops.
Unfortunately for us, the skilled 20% are the ones most likely to leave. Turnover rates increased dramatically, from around 12% annually to 25% during this time. It's also not always the 20% teaching the other 80% and helping them--there's no law that says that only good practices are shared when everyone is face-to-face. In fact, hundreds of bad ideas are perpetuated even faster because of the "improved" communication. Ignorance breeds ignorance.
Face time certainly increases, which looks good to out-of-touch execs who focus on weekly overtime numbers as a measure of what they are getting for their engineering dollar. But it magnifies personnel problems. I've seen people put in 54-60 hours of face time in these situations because they're pressured into it, even though they're doing the same amount of work as when they were only working 40-45 hours.
Worst of all, the quality of our software suffered greatly from this practice. Just because more code appears to be getting slung, and OT goes up, engineering management feels it doesn't need to learn even the basics of software engineering practices. To wit, in the year after the war room effort ended, nearly 65% of the effort of engineering involved bug fixes. Put this in perspective: 4 years late, and after it was put into production, 2/3 of engineering dollars were spent correcting bugs introduced in the process. And yet they pronounced it a success!
We were clearly an SEI Level 1 shop during this time period, and it wasn't until we put away the folding tables and started treating developers like professionals instead of cattle that we actually saw any meaningful productivity improvement (meaning, factoring out the 2/3rds of the company now having to do bug fixes and support, the 1/3 actually met most of their projected targets. But of course, with no history of project management to compare to, the engineering management geniuses can still claim war room victory.)
And it sucks to constantly bang your knees on those damn folding table braces!
It reminds me of a comment someone once made about faculty meetings. "Faculty meetings are so contentious because the stakes are so low." Your average rabid Tickle Me Elmo buyer probably has a lower income, lower education and greater susceptibility to scarcity behavior than the average PS2 buyer.
Then again, the average PS2 buyer in the first couple of weeks after launch was a soccer mom who also happened to be on a waiting list to pay a 20% premium on a PT Cruiser, so consumerism comes in many dysfunctional flavors.
You nailed it, and contrary to what some of the replies suggested you did not make this a sweeping generalization of geeks. There are a significant number who have completely undeveloped senses when it comes to literature, art or cinema.
I recall being stuck in a car with two of them once. These were fairly successful engineers in our company. One had just purchased some painting at some sort of Tupperware of Art party the other had hosted.
"I bought the only picture there that looked like something real. It has to be a picture of something real to be worth anything." Okay, no problem, everyone has their own preferences.
Then the other guy chimed in: "Yeah, those paintings that you have to look at for awhile and figure out--they're awful. It reminds me of this literature class I had to take once. Everyone sits around analyzing the story and seeing stuff that isn't there. It's a stupid waste of time."
"Yeah, just a bunch of art fags."
Ah well, the benefits of a purely technical education...
Ugggh. I hate software patents as much as the next person, but your idea has a few holes in it.
Letting "free software" violate the notion of software patents is impossible without trashing patent law altogether. Say I patent a software design for "half-click shopping". As part of my patent application, I'm required to provide enough detail so that one reasonably skilled in the art of software development can implement a half-click shopping software package (essentially open sourcing the idea while retaining the rights). When I'm granted the patent, I'm given a 17-20 year monopoly to prevent others from implementing half-click shopping software. Meanwhile, I lay waste to the industry, putting Amazon out of business by licensing the patent rights to Barnes and Noble and others. Fame, fortune and derision follow.
If your proposed law was enacted, Apache could decide that what this world really needs is halfclick.apache.org, the Open Source Half-Click Project. There are all these mom-n-pop storefronts out there on the web who can't compete and license my patent (or afford my companies license fees for the software), so we'll just build them a free version that they can run to circumvent my government-granted monopoly. Since there's no charge for it, even my normal customer base (B&N) could go hire a few developers to contribute to this open source project and tailor a version for their needs. No money changes hands, but I clearly lose the one right I'm granted with the patent, which is the ability to decide who can use the patent.
A more direct approach would be to fix software patents in the first place, and not drag open source into it. A cheaper, more streamlined way of resolving disputes without involving lawyers is the key step.
That's not to say that open source doesn't have a role to play in regards to software patents. As the half-click shopping originator, I might find it useful to grant Apache a license to my patent, because innovations that arise from their work might themselves be patentable, and that only adds to the value of my patent (since derivative patents ultimately require licensing the original patent).
IMHO, open source may become a very valuable weapon if combined with a streamlined arbitration approach to resolving the quagmire of software patent lawsuits. Open source the creation and registration of prior art, instead of the implementation of existing ideas. It's been discussed before, but it supports the ideals of the open source community as well, if not better, than free code. For example, we create an open "shadow PTO" that open source contributors can submit patentable ideas to in order to stake out ground we want to protect from the lawyers. By patentable idea, I mean a proposal that has enough detail that someone reasonably skilled in the art can construct it, and something that is novel. That would be a much better way of using the open source culture to thwart software patent abuses, and it would still protect the valuable aspects of patent law. A battle of the minds.
From the FuzzySummarizer 0.33 release notes:
The FuzzySummarizer is not responsible for errors in the original content. Summaries of bad information may in fact contain bad information. See our website for FuzzyAutoCorrect 0.21(beta) which includes a patch to correct fast food beverage references made by washed up VJs.
Yuck. Maybe someone could do us the service of grabbing the actual three sentences of content, wherever they are, and sticking them up on a page somewhere.
At your service, the FuzzySummarizer's analysis:
My credentials are better than yours because I'm older, and I had more jobs than you. So listen here you whippersnappers as I dispense my wisdom:
Formats go like this: McDonalds--Coke/Big Mac. Burger King--Pepsi/Whopper. My years in the business have led me to this brilliant insight.
MTV. Napster. I'm not a programmer, but I can spell XML. I was a DJ. I can spell DJ too.
XML is good.
Someone should use XML for playlists like this one dude did.
Something about ID3 tags fitting into XML.
Discuss.
How was what you were doing breaking the law?
Having worked in the defense industry as well, part of the game was that in taking the job, you elected to give up some of your rights for the purpose of national defense. I could have been required to take a lie detector test to keep my job at any time, something a private employer couldn't do legally. I never for once felt that my communications were truly private, same as with my current non-defense employer. What applies in the world of employment and to contractors associated with the DoD is going up against different rules than what a private citizen can expect.
Having been on the receiving end of such a wiretap notification (not of my personal communications, but having innocently stumbled into someone else's wiretap), I can tell you that it is disturbing to receive one. But it was good to know that the FBI, at least, did follow the law in that case.
The laws governing seizures in the US have been so eroded by local law enforcement and the DEA that people not even charged with a crime are having their property taken without any recourse. The drug forfeiture laws, which were in many states, passed to generate revenues for education, have in fact become a way that local agencies can bypass due process and build their own arsenals. When a drug bust occurs involving a substantial amount of property, the local authorities call in the DEA, and by getting the feds involved, are allowed to split the proceeds, circumventing their obligation to education.
The court cases all have intriguing names like US Government vs. 1981 Cadillac El Dorado or US Government vs. $83,000 cash. Even if the charges are dropped against the property owners (or even if the property owners weren't involved in the alleged crime), the government keeps the loot.
If any of your email was intercepted by the feds, it's their responsibility under the law to notify you that they intercepted your electronic transmissions. (Whether it is over a phone line, a message on an answering machine, a caller ID entry or an email.) So the fact that you didn't receive such a notification either means they weren't tracing his emails to you, or that you'd have to believe the feds violated the law.
Unfortunately, some of the same ex-MCSE's are hopping on the Cisco Certification bandwagon. And in a year or two they'll be just as disillusioned. It seems reminiscent of $cientology to me.
I like to imagine that without enough food for the return trip, Stand By Me's Vern ate Cheadle and Delaney, while Sinise grew gills in his suspension bath and came back as Aquaman for the sequel (including a suitable number of flashbacks--just in case you didn't remember how much the movie sucked the first time.)
Best part of the movie: the 12 oz. boxes of Budweiser, the 2020 eco-friendly replacement for aluminum cans. (I assume that it was ounces--given the success rate of the Mars missions in the flick, I don't think NASA had learned from its past unit of conversion errors yet and gone all metric.)
Interestingly enough, a lot of the SOAP development happened outside of Microsoft. Don Box of Developmentor is listed as the lead author on the RFC.
Isn't Box the guy making money from the Microsoft gravy train every time another one of his COM books sells? Doesn't the history of XMLRPC show that they both worked closely with Microsoft engineers at Microsoft during the early development of what would be soap? To invoke these names as proof that the development happened outside Microsoft is misleading.
The article itself is quite humorous--SOAP being a shot across the bow of Java and CORBA? Give me a break.
First Rule of Fight Club: No one trusts Microsoft.
Second Rule of Fight Club: No one trusts Microsoft.