To anyone familiar with the topic being discussed -- as opposed to a government bureaucrat that couldn't recognize a piece of code if it fell on their head -- it seems obvious that Ken Brown is being disingenuous.
AdTI did not publish Samizdat with the expectation that rabidly pro-Linux developers would embrace it. Its purpose is to provide U.S. leadership with a researched presentation on attribution and intellectual property problems with the hybrid source code model, particularly Linux.
Clearly not, because the pro-Linux developers are aware that the claims, as outlined in this document, are preposterous. "rabidly" is simply a thinly disguised ad hominem attack trying to lend some semblance of credence to claims which deserve none.
The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency which contributes to the worldwide effort to protect and govern intellectual property. In addition, the U.S. government is one of the largest patent holders in the world, owning the rights to 20-30,000 patents.
The USPTO cannot easily be said to be "internationally respected", when in fact huge organizations and a tidal wave of dissatisfcation have arisen, because the USPTO grants 95% of all patents filed, has no manpower to assess the validity of patents and has spawned an industry of patent litigation and manipulation. The government's portfolio is relatively unimpressive; IBM, a single US company, has 23,000 active patents and was granted 3415 in 2003 alone. (And, it should be noted, IBM is one of the largest corporate supported of Linux; funny how they are simultaneously the largest patent 'consumer', but also one of Linux's biggest supporters; that in itself seems to imply a disconnection in the documents conclusions)
The disturbing reality is that the hybrid source model depends heavily upon sponging talent from U.S. corporations and/or U.S. proprietary software. Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporations b) not in the best interest of IT workers in America c) at a serious expense to the investment community, an entity betting on the success of intellectual property in the marketplace.
This is very cute, and the derogatory language immediately gives away the intent. "Sponging"? Linux inspires grateful contributions of improvements from developers excited to be a part of a phenomenon. That's not "sponging". And I'd like to see Ken Brown justify his argument of theft of proprietary software, which sounds slanderous to me. Note that OSRM now offers intellectual property insurance because their EXTENSIVE review of Linux concluded that it was legally unencumbered. I doubt Ken Brown was so thorough.
Moreover, Brown's paragraphs conclusions about 'best interests' is fallacious. Because with respect to: (a) U.S. Corporations like IBM support Linux because it gives them access to powerful technology that they can build services and other revenue models on top of without forcing them to develop it themselves and Linux inspires more confidence than their proprietary products (such as AIX) ever did; (b) IT workers can benefit enormously from cheaper and more accessible software; expensive proprietary products simply allow soaking customers for IP, which does not benefit IT workers who do less work and see corporations charge more for it; moreover, OSS gives independant and small IT shops the ability to build powerful services on top of openly available tools; I make my living this way (and a good one), and (c) the investment community is irrelevent -- their "bet" on the IP marketplace is not one that government policy makers need to hedge for them; if someone betting on an "IP marketplace", if in fact such a bet has been made, th
I forgot to mention - my daughter was born in September of 2001, and so I did this working from home. My wife was full-time at home for nearly the first 18 months as well, not working. Now we both work, although her more by choice than by need; our daughter goes to Montessori preschool now, at 2.5, from 9-4 (2 of which is napping), and spends the rest with us.
Small other note: your kids will want to do as you do, so have a plan for introducing them to computers. If Daddy does it all day, they'll want to also.
Since I left my last full-time job in september of 2001, I've been working as a contract programmer. I've enjoyed steady demand from the same few clients, and that's obviously a nice thing. But I've made as much money as I would working full time, and worked more like 30 hours a week and done so with complete and utter flextime. The panic fire-fighting calls tend to come far less frequently than they did at my full time job, and at worst my clients tend to apologetically ask if I can finish something urgently - they don't demand it, or simply assume it, which is what happened at my last full time job.
So, before you do something radical like changing careers, think about leveraging what you know and changing HOW you do what you do. I'm sure your ability to pull this sort of thing off depends a lot on your ability to soak some short time financial risk, your skill at what you do and the demand there is for it.
I advise that you look strongly at contract-to-hire type work, or just straight contract work, if you're good. If you were better than your peers in school, are more into what you do, etc, then this will likely pay off. Talent, skill, and ability pay. So take a contract job to make yourself low-risk for your employer, and you'll likely find yourself being reeled in as a permanent. Negotiate up.
If you're not good, say under the 75th percentile in skill, this will not work well, and it will be best at the 90th+. But if you're good, think about this.
First, I'm impressed by Avi's candor. His admissions of his own error, his discussion of mitigation of some risks, and so on point to someone, I feel, who is trying their utmost to be forthright and thorough. By the same token, clearly these doing really lessen the great danger of an e-voting machine. We need to stop for a moment and consider the sinister possibilities. When, say, Microsoft buys Diebold, purportedly for technology or such, who's to say they're not buying themselves a congress that will outlaw open source? That's only the most mild of such scenarios.
Second, I wonder if there's a sacraficial lamb out there who'd be willing to hack a Diebold box. If someone could successfully seriously skew the outcome such that people went, "Wait, that's *really* the result?" and then claim credit, that might be the death blow to unaudited evoting.
Third, I'd like to simply point out an analogy that's appropriate when consider that e-voting on super tuesday was "successful". Windows works pretty well when you sit down and use it, most of the time. That doesn't mean it's secure - witness the rash of viruses as of late - and it doesn't mean it isn't *disastrous* when that insecurity is exploited.
Thanks for doing what you can to keep the spotlight on this issue, Avi - America needs you.
Notice that TiVo has not made money, and will not in the near future. They're in a cut-throat business against vicious competition. Recent possible policy changes notwithstanding, they've also used free software, distributed the changes under the GPL in a forthright manner, and tolerated hacking their hardware. All very good things.
I've had my TiVo now since Nov or Dec of '99, when I paid a $199 'lifetime' subscription fee. By my calculations, that means I'm at $4/mo for the fee, and still falling. Doesn't seem too bad, especially given that it calls a toll-free number.
I don't know if you'd call these "Ep 7/8/9", but Timothy Zahn wrote a trilogy that began with "Heir to the Empire", and was a trilogy where a Grand Admiral tries to bring the Empire to power using his control over the remnants. It was a fun to read series, and Grand Admiral Thrawn was a very cool character. It seemed to me to follow the general context of Ep 4-6, with someone picking up the pieces of the empire, as well as following all the other major characters (Luke, Leia, Han Solo, etc).
Call me crazy, but Jackson handled LOTR with about the most love and care and achievement I could ever expect from making it into a Hollywood trilogy.
So, if Lucas doesn't want to do VII-IX himself, that's fine, but how about he let Jackson take over? You end up with a vastly superior sequel trilogy, and we'd probably get the movies 1 year apart instead of 3.
How about just a pre-fab store, period? Maybe by branding it an "E-Music" store it is suddenly worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. Talk about $50 pickaxes.
Feuding and scratching the same itch is merely one form of competition. In the OSS community, you often find a war of ideas, whether that's Gnome vs KDE or Linus insisting on a plaintext/proc.
I much prefer this war of ideas to the way commercial companies operate -- the war of marketing departments. Is it any wonder OSS turns out better?
There's a reason it seems that way. BG2 was expectation-shattering. I mean, BG1 was like: wow, this is a fun game, and nicely nonlinear.
BG2 was like: Wow, this is totally mind-numbingly amazing. It reproduced tons of fun kits, all the crazy spells like limited wish and contingency that we'd never seen in a game before, and the impossible hugeness of the game... you could play it 3 times and not find all the quests or read all the funny comments from the NPCs.
NWN, partially because of the huge success of BG2, had huge expectations attached. It definitely fell short, largely because the OC was just rather weak, partially because of a story that felt somehow mechanical, and partially because there were just too damn many chests... it literally slowed the game down.
Go back and play BG2 now though, and you'll realize without pause, its nearly impossible to control 1 character, let alone 6, and you'll find you REALLY want to rotate the screen around to see things from another angle... I find myself wanting to do that with ToEE all the time.
I would love to know how the sales compared to their expected sales... personally, I'd like to see them build on it. With a graphical update and a bunch of engine enhancements, NWN2 could be to NWN what BG2 was to BG. NWN already has a LOT of staying power: the City Of Doors and Dragonlance Adventures teams are producing projects far more impressive in scope than the OC, and containing more custom content than the first expansion pack. They've released custom modeling tools, creatures, and tilesets already. So there's actually a LOT of longevity left in the game -- because the biggest, best of the third-party projects are only going to start coming out now.
They have 2 new 2da fields -- Divine and Spellcaster level offset in classes.2da, so they say. They allow you to give a +1 spellcaster level to any PrC, and they're using it themselves for Pale Master (which gets +1 every other level per the books).
The custom talk tables are a REALLY big deal, however, since they allow you to add in custom strings, needed for custom classes, spells, etc, without including the 8+ Mb dialog.tlk file in a hak pak (or requiring people to put a new dialog.tlk in their override directory, since it wasn't even hakable before)
But yeah, HotU > Sou, big time. Although SoU had a nice official campaign, IMO -- more fun and better story than the NWN OC -- it was feeble. The PrCs were broken, the spell additions were either dull or unbalancing (say, flare and Isaac's * Missile Storm, respectively), and the 'new tilesets' were rather bare -- totally lacking placables and features that they didn't absolutely need for the SoU OC.
Incidentally, you can run the toolset under Wine, or so I hear. I'm pretty happy they did a linux version at all. In fact, if they'd done it simultaneous release, I'd be using it. (But who could wait a year?!)
like calling a smoking-bashing doctor a smartaleck
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E-Voting Expert Testifies
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Calling Avi Rubin a "smart aleck" after he criticizes e-voting machines is like saying the AMA is a bunch of smart alecks when they decry smoking as cancer-causing. We don't have a 'Security General' like we have a Surgeon General, but if we did, Rubin would be qualified by the job -- and only one of a handful of people I'd want to see in it.
This has really gone from, "Wow, what is that crazy county thinking?" when they selected Diebold e-Tyranny systems to absolute insanity. After so many major vulnerabilities were found and a bevy of absolutely insane catastrophes have occurred (like the number of votes being 10x the number of registered voters?), these systems should be done forever. Fix them? Wrong. Throw them away, and let Diebold make something they're qualified to make, like... bubble gum dispensers.
The shocking thing is that the security experts are raving about how intentional compromises could occur -- but these machines are so pathetic, they can't even function properly due to accidental bugs! If they can't even function when used normally, what happens when we introduce maliciousness?
The ACLU should have lawsuits coming out the wazoo for this. Hanging chad? Hanging chad has nothing on these machines.
You're good with the SPEWS line, there, but there's good reasons why any admin with a clue doesn't use that fucked up list.
(1) SPEWS is ineffective. It might have some effect if your goal is to drive spammers away from a given ISP, or drive customers in general away from a given ISP. But it won't significantly reduce the amount of spam you get compared to using the lists with a philosophy that involves far less collateral damage. But by using SPEWS, you WILL block hundreds or thousands of times more legitimate emails. If you (the list USER) wish to use the inconvenience of your customer base as a means to punish an ISP with spamming customers, then by all means, use SPEWS. However, if you think your first duty is to maximize spam droppage while minimizing false positives, SPEWS is NOT for you.
(2) SPEWS is inaccurate because of how it is organized. For example, one ISP I used had a spammer, and a clueless staff. After the SPEWS listing hit us, we worked with them to clear out their spammers. They did so; but one set up across town with their own space, and had a very similar name to the ISP. SPEWS decided the ISP was "hiding" its spamming on another block, and listed all blocks (the ISP and their former customer) together, despite different names and addresses on their ARIN registrations. To this day, the ISP remains in SPEWS because the other company spams. Of course, since Collateral Damage is SPEWS middle name, this is of no concern.
(3) Run by fanatics. Much like the 'Eat Your Spews' crowd; they're just the shame of all of us who'd like to see spam stop and would like to take reasonable countermeasures. I get over 1000 spams per day to my 8-year-old email address (most of which are oblitterated by spamassassin), and I wouldn't think of using SPEWS.
(4) SPEWS damages the innocent and does so without warning. Even if you're incredibly conscientious about NOT spamming, you may one day discover a horde of bounces because you are on SPEWS. Now without warning or cause, you will now suffer significant economic damages even if you do immediately exactly what SPEWS would like you to do: switch ISPs.
(5) Because of the sudden effect of (4), you probably will not; you will probably begin immediately routing your mail through a third party, thus rendering SPEWs useless, and simply costing you more money, slowing delivery, wasting bandwidth, etc.
(6) Because SPEWS must, by necessity, delist organizations who stop sending spam, the whole process only serves to make spammers be clandestine and move from ISP to ISP. And so they do; they still show up in ALL the same places. They just move on more often. And the problem is never solved. I'm sure you've noticed that there's still no shortage of spam and years of SPEWS listing places hasn't even dented the problem. But it has cost billions of dollars of productivity and other collateral damage trying to deal with the effects of SPEWS.
Basically, SPEWS is the terrorist anti-spam organization. It is threatening to blow up mail delivery if the spammers don't capitulate. Whether SPEWS works or not is really irrelevant; spammers will always move on and find new ISPs, and at best, SPEWS makes them move more often. Meanwhile, the innocent suffer, because the cure is worse than the disease.
Now, one thing I do agree with: you have every right to use SPEWS. But realize that most of your users would never concur with what you're doing, and they only accept it because they are clueless. Almost every ACCOUNTABLE organization (typically, corporations) that tries to use SPEWS stops immediately, because it is UNACCEPTABLE to have a 100:1 ratio of false positives:true positives. The shame is moronic ISPs like pacbell.net signing their servers onto SPEWS and fucking their ignorant customers out of a ton of their legitimate email.
So, it is perfectly accurate to call SPEWS the nuclear bomb of blacklists. It can and does do enormous collateral damage, most of the IPs it blocks are used by responsible or at least innocent net
Policies and procedures? Like SPEWS, "Don't call us, we won't call you either, we'll just blacklist as much collateral damage as possible while being ineffectual."
You paid $80/mo for cable, you had to spend.34 euros/min to call them on the phone (is that because that's just a normal long distance rate in france? Because you can get $.05/min direct dialing in the states now, and $.025/min if you want to dial an access code first), and then you get a customer service person can do... nothing.
Sign me up!
But then again... those tech support people are there for a reason. So there must be a way to call them. Clearly, you didn't know what it was, but if they took no calls, they'd at least fire the support people.
As for them not accessing the internet...well, it is an ISP, but ISPs hire the lowest common denominator for tech support. The only competent people are just those who slip through the cracks -- and trust me, having been there, we escape quickly. That said, the tech support people will only be capable of one thing: following a script. If your problem isn't on it, tough. And you don't need internet access to follow a script.
Initially, I believed it was the machine god acting because of the glowy lights. However, Neo clearly acts with purpose when he lets Smith subsume him -- he groks the message from the Oracle, when Smith says, "I'm supposed to say...'Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo'".
I still think the insane glow was a bit absurd - to show the "Neo Vision" view and have THAT be glowing is plausible, because of the potential for huge data transfer. But to have his physical self glowing with energy? One would think that was the machine 'overloading' Smith via Neo. Or that was my first impression.
I saw it a second time, and I'm more of the belief that it was Neo acting now, mostly because of the way he reacts to the Oracle's message passed through Smith.
Given that Smith tried to consume Neo in Reloaded and Neo stopped it, it may imply that he has some power over it.
From a philosophical perspective, Smith gains rather weak power from his resurrection -- it is almost 'fake'. Unlike Neo's resurrection, where he is clearly enlightened (as he begins to see the Matrix as its construct code). Smith gets enlightened WITH power after he converts the Oracle. But why would she allow it? She's specifically engineering a situation where only Neo can stop Smith. The Oracle's story, in a way, is the interesting one -- how did she come to be, and why did she rebel against the machine authority and engineer the freeing of Zion?
None of the questions in Reloaded are answered. How does Neo really stop the Sentinels? How did Smith enter Bane? How did he get so powerful? It's all explained away with one or two sentences. We're just supposed to accept it because it's "symbolic" of something. Reloaded seemed to treat itself like a bridge to some sort of great explanation for everything in the third movie. Guess what? It never comes! What the fuck?
Neo stops the sentinels because he was enlightened by the process of becoming the One. He sees the Matrix as what it is -- an input/output stream communicating with the senses, and sees it logically instead of allowing his senses to interpret it. It's very Eastern - the idea that the world is not what you simply perceive.
Smith enters Bane by essentially hacking his brain. Realize that Neo empowered smith by destroying him, just as Smith symmetrically empowered Neo by killing him. Neo was a martyr who's death allowed him to transcend the "living" in the Matrix and realize that it was all just input. Neo's slaying of Smith was unorthodox, and showed Smith that people exposed themselves by being part of the system. So Smith uses that knowledge, and his amalgam of knowledge about human biology and such, to hack Bane's brain. It is, on one level, just a machine. They mention brain scarring and cross-synaptic firing in Bane's brain scan -- essentially, Smith rewired him, and it was possible because Bane had his brain wide open jacked into the Matrix. If you can die in the real world because you think you're dead in the Matrix, can't you become Smith in the real world because you think you've become him in the Matrix? If you accept the premise of the linking of those two worlds in the first place, this is not really a stretch.
How did he get powerful? Everyone has boundaries in the Matrix. Neo is enlightened by his virtual death and transcends his senses. It gives him the second sight in full strength. Likewise, Neo destroys Smith's boundaries to 'enter' him. Smith gains the ability to 'enter' others and take them over, becoming a virus. Notice that his Neo-like powers come chronologically after he absorbs the Oracle. This is not coincidence. He needed Neo's enlightenment in full, so he took it from the only person he could get it from. But where Neo earned it, Smith had to steal it, because that's all a virus can do, is absorb. It doesn't evolve or grow or change.
Zion is the focus because its the free world; everything else is 'controlled', whether virtual or real.
Nobody is freed, Trinity and Neo die, and we're left with the same situation we had at the beginning of the first movie. We've invested our attention to these three movies all for nothing. It was pointless. Why even have Trinity live in Reloaded? She should have stayed dead. It would have been more interesting to see how Neo copes with being unable to save her last time.
Trinity isn't human when she says that dying was fine, but she should have been telling Neo how good it was instead of apologizing for dying, and thanks for the second chance to be real? I dunno, I thought that scene was a LOT more touching and a lot less fake than EITHER of the first two movies Trinity-saves-Neo or Neo-saves-Trinity scenes.
The Matrix is a semi-independant network. Think of the Machine God as a mainframe connected to the Internet. It could handle Smith if it could 'connect' to him, but much like you might filter a machine connected to a common network, Smith is only partially open when connected to the Matrix. When Neo surrenders and allows Smith to absorb him, Neo is still directly connected to the Machine God, who then gains full access to the others Smiths via the Neo-Smith. This is why he says, "Stay away from me", because Smith absorbs Neo, but realizes that the Machine God has access to the whole Smith consciousness through the link that Smith has unwittingly formed. In other words, Neo became a back door into Smith, which allowed the Machine God to deal with Smith, and cleanse the Matrix.
Neo was a martyr -- again. The Oracle's final words imply he survived; I had thought he died, but then again, since all the others, including the Oracle herself, were restored, there would seem to be no reason to believe Neo would be any different.
I think the reason that Neo had to fight the fight until the end was to ensure that Smith believed he had 'won' honestly so that he would be open for the Machine's counterattack. Perhaps Smith might not have even tried to absorb Neo if he thought he could just kill him at the end.
Regardless, the passivity of the ending is disappointing -- but it is hardly nonsensical.
The REAL questions that need to be explained have nothing to do with the finale, but how Neo is "seeing" all the machines and affecting them with only his human mind. It would have been nice to hear something about the human-fusion bullshit. And it does seem like a fragile peace -- how does one justify inaction when you know countless other people are being 'grown' still to serve as batteries? But maybe humanity can conclude that their ancestors gave up the right to avoid that fight when they started the war and then lost it. It sort of ruins the moral imperative when you bring it on yourself that way. (They even created the necessity themselves by scorching the sky)
* Pacing is good, you don't feel like the movie gets bogged down (which I felt during the extended Zion scene of Reloaded, even though I liked most of its parts individually)
* The ending is disappointing. I don't mean it's just lame, per se, but it isn't what you're really expecting, and it feels bad at first. If you stop and think things through, I think it actually makes good sense. In a way, it ends how it HAD to end.
* Many things are never explained, and you expect them to be. Don't expect much in the way of logical explanation for a number of discrepancies. After Reloaded, you end up postulating a lot, "Well, it must be true that XXX, but how?" Well, Revolutions has characters saying, "XXX is how it is" plainly, but they don't explain why.
Sadly, I don't think the vision was complete. The Wachowski's probably DON'T have the answers to the tough questions to make the Matrix picture 'fit', and so they fail to achieve the true suspension of disbelief that allows immersion, and that hurts them. It doesn't really matter how absurd your premises are when it is clear they are premises; you need internal consistency. Reloaded and Revolutions, as a unit, fail to delivery that.
Put one way, this is a good movie. It is worth seeing, it has its moments, but it is not the mind-blowing, zen-moment conclusion that fans would have wanted. It does not sate the lust for action OR explanation, and so it comes up short.
In a way, it feels like a rush or a march to the conclusion. The actual true ending DOES make sense, even despite being vaguely disappointing, but it also leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
I'd say anyone working for a 'true' enterprise doesn't need an article to tell them what's best; otherwise, they're in trouble already. I'll also note I've seen plenty of things I might classify "enterprises" using ASP as a primary language.
First, don't go counting PHP's compile time. If you're balancing across several servers, you're paying for the Zend Optimizer, and you've got code precompiled and parsed, and optimized. When I converted my ~30k line project to encoded, CPU use fell by 30-50%.
Second, unless you're absolutely gluttonous, then session data is not an incredibly significant thing to store in the db. You're working off a single key with a chunk of data, you're keeping the table small with constant GC checks... it's possible that using the db is faster than using the disk-based caching. And note you can split off the session data to a separate db; there's not significant overhead forming connections because you can use persistent connections that stick around through many pageviews.
I have a high volume site I've worked with to split their e-commerce app across servers. Session data is handled via the db; it is ready to be split off to a separate db as needed. Most data is read-based and not very time sensitive (people looking up items, searching for items, generating dynamic pricing data based on sales and so forth), and this balances easily across many servers.
One thing I'm quite sure of is that your design skills count more than the technology in PHP vs Java. One wrong query, one bad decision about caching, and you're wrecking your performance. If one looked at 99% of the apps out there, they'd benefit 5x as much from optimizing the application logic as compared to 'switching languages', regardless of which has the edge. So I view the whole discussion as a red herring; if you're Amazon.com, or the FTC, maybe you need to solve this question. Otherwise, it is unlikely.
I will oppose expansion of the Patriot Act, efforts to remove sunset clauses included in the act, and I will seek to repeal the portions of the Patriot Act that are unconstitutional.
I will protect the civil rights of immigrants detained by the Department of Homeland Security.
I will work for federal legislation to restore the right to vote in any federal election for ex-felons who have paid their debt to society.
I will appoint an Attorney General who sees our constitution not just as a document to be manipulated, ignored, and violated, but who recognizes and respects it as the fabric that binds the American community together.
I will nominate federal judges with outstanding legal credentials, records of professional excellence, and demonstrated commitment to the constitutional principles of equality, liberty, and privacy. [emphasis mine]
[Note: platform points editted down and re-ordered]
It makes a difference. Dean didn't even get into this race so he could win; but he is personable, compelling, and doesn't seem to play games. I don't agree with some of his platform, but I respect a straight-talking former doctor who seems wonderfully out of place among slick career politicians.
If you think voting for Dean vs. voting for Bush doesn't make a difference, then you're insane. We know Bush will get the Republican nomination. So register as a democrat NOW and back Dean in the primary.
The article claims no such thing. It says the DMA and other plaintiffs argued that the FTC does not have the authority to implement and enforce such a list. But thanks for digging deep for this insightful nugget anyhow, it has really opened my eyes. Or something.
Slashdot Mirror
To anyone familiar with the topic being discussed -- as opposed to a government bureaucrat that couldn't recognize a piece of code if it fell on their head -- it seems obvious that Ken Brown is being disingenuous.
AdTI did not publish Samizdat with the expectation that rabidly pro-Linux developers would embrace it. Its purpose is to provide U.S. leadership with a researched presentation on attribution and intellectual property problems with the hybrid source code model, particularly Linux.
Clearly not, because the pro-Linux developers are aware that the claims, as outlined in this document, are preposterous. "rabidly" is simply a thinly disguised ad hominem attack trying to lend some semblance of credence to claims which deserve none.
The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency which contributes to the worldwide effort to protect and govern intellectual property. In addition, the U.S. government is one of the largest patent holders in the world, owning the rights to 20-30,000 patents.
The USPTO cannot easily be said to be "internationally respected", when in fact huge organizations and a tidal wave of dissatisfcation have arisen, because the USPTO grants 95% of all patents filed, has no manpower to assess the validity of patents and has spawned an industry of patent litigation and manipulation. The government's portfolio is relatively unimpressive; IBM, a single US company, has 23,000 active patents and was granted 3415 in 2003 alone. (And, it should be noted, IBM is one of the largest corporate supported of Linux; funny how they are simultaneously the largest patent 'consumer', but also one of Linux's biggest supporters; that in itself seems to imply a disconnection in the documents conclusions)
The disturbing reality is that the hybrid source model depends heavily upon sponging talent from U.S. corporations and/or U.S. proprietary software. Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporations b) not in the best interest of IT workers in America c) at a serious expense to the investment community, an entity betting on the success of intellectual property in the marketplace.
This is very cute, and the derogatory language immediately gives away the intent. "Sponging"? Linux inspires grateful contributions of improvements from developers excited to be a part of a phenomenon. That's not "sponging". And I'd like to see Ken Brown justify his argument of theft of proprietary software, which sounds slanderous to me. Note that OSRM now offers intellectual property insurance because their EXTENSIVE review of Linux concluded that it was legally unencumbered. I doubt Ken Brown was so thorough.
Moreover, Brown's paragraphs conclusions about 'best interests' is fallacious. Because with respect to: (a) U.S. Corporations like IBM support Linux because it gives them access to powerful technology that they can build services and other revenue models on top of without forcing them to develop it themselves and Linux inspires more confidence than their proprietary products (such as AIX) ever did; (b) IT workers can benefit enormously from cheaper and more accessible software; expensive proprietary products simply allow soaking customers for IP, which does not benefit IT workers who do less work and see corporations charge more for it; moreover, OSS gives independant and small IT shops the ability to build powerful services on top of openly available tools; I make my living this way (and a good one), and (c) the investment community is irrelevent -- their "bet" on the IP marketplace is not one that government policy makers need to hedge for them; if someone betting on an "IP marketplace", if in fact such a bet has been made, th
I forgot to mention - my daughter was born in September of 2001, and so I did this working from home. My wife was full-time at home for nearly the first 18 months as well, not working. Now we both work, although her more by choice than by need; our daughter goes to Montessori preschool now, at 2.5, from 9-4 (2 of which is napping), and spends the rest with us.
Small other note: your kids will want to do as you do, so have a plan for introducing them to computers. If Daddy does it all day, they'll want to also.
Since I left my last full-time job in september of 2001, I've been working as a contract programmer. I've enjoyed steady demand from the same few clients, and that's obviously a nice thing. But I've made as much money as I would working full time, and worked more like 30 hours a week and done so with complete and utter flextime. The panic fire-fighting calls tend to come far less frequently than they did at my full time job, and at worst my clients tend to apologetically ask if I can finish something urgently - they don't demand it, or simply assume it, which is what happened at my last full time job.
So, before you do something radical like changing careers, think about leveraging what you know and changing HOW you do what you do. I'm sure your ability to pull this sort of thing off depends a lot on your ability to soak some short time financial risk, your skill at what you do and the demand there is for it.
I recommend avoiding Saturns -- go for a Sunbeam, or a Shelby Cobra, or maybe an Aston-Martin DB7 Volante. ;)
I advise that you look strongly at contract-to-hire type work, or just straight contract work, if you're good. If you were better than your peers in school, are more into what you do, etc, then this will likely pay off. Talent, skill, and ability pay. So take a contract job to make yourself low-risk for your employer, and you'll likely find yourself being reeled in as a permanent. Negotiate up.
If you're not good, say under the 75th percentile in skill, this will not work well, and it will be best at the 90th+. But if you're good, think about this.
First, I'm impressed by Avi's candor. His admissions of his own error, his discussion of mitigation of some risks, and so on point to someone, I feel, who is trying their utmost to be forthright and thorough. By the same token, clearly these doing really lessen the great danger of an e-voting machine. We need to stop for a moment and consider the sinister possibilities. When, say, Microsoft buys Diebold, purportedly for technology or such, who's to say they're not buying themselves a congress that will outlaw open source? That's only the most mild of such scenarios.
Second, I wonder if there's a sacraficial lamb out there who'd be willing to hack a Diebold box. If someone could successfully seriously skew the outcome such that people went, "Wait, that's *really* the result?" and then claim credit, that might be the death blow to unaudited evoting.
Third, I'd like to simply point out an analogy that's appropriate when consider that e-voting on super tuesday was "successful". Windows works pretty well when you sit down and use it, most of the time. That doesn't mean it's secure - witness the rash of viruses as of late - and it doesn't mean it isn't *disastrous* when that insecurity is exploited.
Thanks for doing what you can to keep the spotlight on this issue, Avi - America needs you.
Ah, 1999. The good ol' days.
Put on the tin foil hats? Or just another way for them to keep your monthly fee down (snicker)
The submitter seems to imply that TiVo is a gluttonous corporation trying to gouge its users.
TiVo Financial Data
Notice that TiVo has not made money, and will not in the near future. They're in a cut-throat business against vicious competition. Recent possible policy changes notwithstanding, they've also used free software, distributed the changes under the GPL in a forthright manner, and tolerated hacking their hardware. All very good things.
I've had my TiVo now since Nov or Dec of '99, when I paid a $199 'lifetime' subscription fee. By my calculations, that means I'm at $4/mo for the fee, and still falling. Doesn't seem too bad, especially given that it calls a toll-free number.
I don't know if you'd call these "Ep 7/8/9", but Timothy Zahn wrote a trilogy that began with "Heir to the Empire", and was a trilogy where a Grand Admiral tries to bring the Empire to power using his control over the remnants. It was a fun to read series, and Grand Admiral Thrawn was a very cool character. It seemed to me to follow the general context of Ep 4-6, with someone picking up the pieces of the empire, as well as following all the other major characters (Luke, Leia, Han Solo, etc).
Heir to the Empire at Amazon
Call me crazy, but Jackson handled LOTR with about the most love and care and achievement I could ever expect from making it into a Hollywood trilogy.
So, if Lucas doesn't want to do VII-IX himself, that's fine, but how about he let Jackson take over? You end up with a vastly superior sequel trilogy, and we'd probably get the movies 1 year apart instead of 3.
How about just a pre-fab store, period? Maybe by branding it an "E-Music" store it is suddenly worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. Talk about $50 pickaxes.
Feuding and scratching the same itch is merely one form of competition. In the OSS community, you often find a war of ideas, whether that's Gnome vs KDE or Linus insisting on a plaintext /proc.
I much prefer this war of ideas to the way commercial companies operate -- the war of marketing departments. Is it any wonder OSS turns out better?
There's a reason it seems that way. BG2 was expectation-shattering. I mean, BG1 was like: wow, this is a fun game, and nicely nonlinear.
BG2 was like: Wow, this is totally mind-numbingly amazing. It reproduced tons of fun kits, all the crazy spells like limited wish and contingency that we'd never seen in a game before, and the impossible hugeness of the game... you could play it 3 times and not find all the quests or read all the funny comments from the NPCs.
NWN, partially because of the huge success of BG2, had huge expectations attached. It definitely fell short, largely because the OC was just rather weak, partially because of a story that felt somehow mechanical, and partially because there were just too damn many chests... it literally slowed the game down.
Go back and play BG2 now though, and you'll realize without pause, its nearly impossible to control 1 character, let alone 6, and you'll find you REALLY want to rotate the screen around to see things from another angle... I find myself wanting to do that with ToEE all the time.
I would love to know how the sales compared to their expected sales... personally, I'd like to see them build on it. With a graphical update and a bunch of engine enhancements, NWN2 could be to NWN what BG2 was to BG. NWN already has a LOT of staying power: the City Of Doors and Dragonlance Adventures teams are producing projects far more impressive in scope than the OC, and containing more custom content than the first expansion pack. They've released custom modeling tools, creatures, and tilesets already. So there's actually a LOT of longevity left in the game -- because the biggest, best of the third-party projects are only going to start coming out now.
They have 2 new 2da fields -- Divine and Spellcaster level offset in classes.2da, so they say. They allow you to give a +1 spellcaster level to any PrC, and they're using it themselves for Pale Master (which gets +1 every other level per the books).
The custom talk tables are a REALLY big deal, however, since they allow you to add in custom strings, needed for custom classes, spells, etc, without including the 8+ Mb dialog.tlk file in a hak pak (or requiring people to put a new dialog.tlk in their override directory, since it wasn't even hakable before)
But yeah, HotU > Sou, big time. Although SoU had a nice official campaign, IMO -- more fun and better story than the NWN OC -- it was feeble. The PrCs were broken, the spell additions were either dull or unbalancing (say, flare and Isaac's * Missile Storm, respectively), and the 'new tilesets' were rather bare -- totally lacking placables and features that they didn't absolutely need for the SoU OC.
Incidentally, you can run the toolset under Wine, or so I hear. I'm pretty happy they did a linux version at all. In fact, if they'd done it simultaneous release, I'd be using it. (But who could wait a year?!)
Calling Avi Rubin a "smart aleck" after he criticizes e-voting machines is like saying the AMA is a bunch of smart alecks when they decry smoking as cancer-causing. We don't have a 'Security General' like we have a Surgeon General, but if we did, Rubin would be qualified by the job -- and only one of a handful of people I'd want to see in it.
This has really gone from, "Wow, what is that crazy county thinking?" when they selected Diebold e-Tyranny systems to absolute insanity. After so many major vulnerabilities were found and a bevy of absolutely insane catastrophes have occurred (like the number of votes being 10x the number of registered voters?), these systems should be done forever. Fix them? Wrong. Throw them away, and let Diebold make something they're qualified to make, like... bubble gum dispensers.
The shocking thing is that the security experts are raving about how intentional compromises could occur -- but these machines are so pathetic, they can't even function properly due to accidental bugs! If they can't even function when used normally, what happens when we introduce maliciousness?
The ACLU should have lawsuits coming out the wazoo for this. Hanging chad? Hanging chad has nothing on these machines.
You're good with the SPEWS line, there, but there's good reasons why any admin with a clue doesn't use that fucked up list.
(1) SPEWS is ineffective. It might have some effect if your goal is to drive spammers away from a given ISP, or drive customers in general away from a given ISP. But it won't significantly reduce the amount of spam you get compared to using the lists with a philosophy that involves far less collateral damage. But by using SPEWS, you WILL block hundreds or thousands of times more legitimate emails. If you (the list USER) wish to use the inconvenience of your customer base as a means to punish an ISP with spamming customers, then by all means, use SPEWS. However, if you think your first duty is to maximize spam droppage while minimizing false positives, SPEWS is NOT for you.
(2) SPEWS is inaccurate because of how it is organized. For example, one ISP I used had a spammer, and a clueless staff. After the SPEWS listing hit us, we worked with them to clear out their spammers. They did so; but one set up across town with their own space, and had a very similar name to the ISP. SPEWS decided the ISP was "hiding" its spamming on another block, and listed all blocks (the ISP and their former customer) together, despite different names and addresses on their ARIN registrations. To this day, the ISP remains in SPEWS because the other company spams. Of course, since Collateral Damage is SPEWS middle name, this is of no concern.
(3) Run by fanatics. Much like the 'Eat Your Spews' crowd; they're just the shame of all of us who'd like to see spam stop and would like to take reasonable countermeasures. I get over 1000 spams per day to my 8-year-old email address (most of which are oblitterated by spamassassin), and I wouldn't think of using SPEWS.
(4) SPEWS damages the innocent and does so without warning. Even if you're incredibly conscientious about NOT spamming, you may one day discover a horde of bounces because you are on SPEWS. Now without warning or cause, you will now suffer significant economic damages even if you do immediately exactly what SPEWS would like you to do: switch ISPs.
(5) Because of the sudden effect of (4), you probably will not; you will probably begin immediately routing your mail through a third party, thus rendering SPEWs useless, and simply costing you more money, slowing delivery, wasting bandwidth, etc.
(6) Because SPEWS must, by necessity, delist organizations who stop sending spam, the whole process only serves to make spammers be clandestine and move from ISP to ISP. And so they do; they still show up in ALL the same places. They just move on more often. And the problem is never solved. I'm sure you've noticed that there's still no shortage of spam and years of SPEWS listing places hasn't even dented the problem. But it has cost billions of dollars of productivity and other collateral damage trying to deal with the effects of SPEWS.
Basically, SPEWS is the terrorist anti-spam organization. It is threatening to blow up mail delivery if the spammers don't capitulate. Whether SPEWS works or not is really irrelevant; spammers will always move on and find new ISPs, and at best, SPEWS makes them move more often. Meanwhile, the innocent suffer, because the cure is worse than the disease.
Now, one thing I do agree with: you have every right to use SPEWS. But realize that most of your users would never concur with what you're doing, and they only accept it because they are clueless. Almost every ACCOUNTABLE organization (typically, corporations) that tries to use SPEWS stops immediately, because it is UNACCEPTABLE to have a 100:1 ratio of false positives:true positives. The shame is moronic ISPs like pacbell.net signing their servers onto SPEWS and fucking their ignorant customers out of a ton of their legitimate email.
So, it is perfectly accurate to call SPEWS the nuclear bomb of blacklists. It can and does do enormous collateral damage, most of the IPs it blocks are used by responsible or at least innocent net
Policies and procedures? Like SPEWS, "Don't call us, we won't call you either, we'll just blacklist as much collateral damage as possible while being ineffectual."
You paid $80/mo for cable, you had to spend
Sign me up!
But then again... those tech support people are there for a reason. So there must be a way to call them. Clearly, you didn't know what it was, but if they took no calls, they'd at least fire the support people.
As for them not accessing the internet...well, it is an ISP, but ISPs hire the lowest common denominator for tech support. The only competent people are just those who slip through the cracks -- and trust me, having been there, we escape quickly. That said, the tech support people will only be capable of one thing: following a script. If your problem isn't on it, tough. And you don't need internet access to follow a script.
Initially, I believed it was the machine god acting because of the glowy lights. However, Neo clearly acts with purpose when he lets Smith subsume him -- he groks the message from the Oracle, when Smith says, "I'm supposed to say...'Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo'".
I still think the insane glow was a bit absurd - to show the "Neo Vision" view and have THAT be glowing is plausible, because of the potential for huge data transfer. But to have his physical self glowing with energy? One would think that was the machine 'overloading' Smith via Neo. Or that was my first impression.
I saw it a second time, and I'm more of the belief that it was Neo acting now, mostly because of the way he reacts to the Oracle's message passed through Smith.
Given that Smith tried to consume Neo in Reloaded and Neo stopped it, it may imply that he has some power over it.
From a philosophical perspective, Smith gains rather weak power from his resurrection -- it is almost 'fake'. Unlike Neo's resurrection, where he is clearly enlightened (as he begins to see the Matrix as its construct code). Smith gets enlightened WITH power after he converts the Oracle. But why would she allow it? She's specifically engineering a situation where only Neo can stop Smith. The Oracle's story, in a way, is the interesting one -- how did she come to be, and why did she rebel against the machine authority and engineer the freeing of Zion?
None of the questions in Reloaded are answered. How does Neo really stop the Sentinels? How did Smith enter Bane? How did he get so powerful? It's all explained away with one or two sentences. We're just supposed to accept it because it's "symbolic" of something. Reloaded seemed to treat itself like a bridge to some sort of great explanation for everything in the third movie. Guess what? It never comes! What the fuck?
Neo stops the sentinels because he was enlightened by the process of becoming the One. He sees the Matrix as what it is -- an input/output stream communicating with the senses, and sees it logically instead of allowing his senses to interpret it. It's very Eastern - the idea that the world is not what you simply perceive.
Smith enters Bane by essentially hacking his brain. Realize that Neo empowered smith by destroying him, just as Smith symmetrically empowered Neo by killing him. Neo was a martyr who's death allowed him to transcend the "living" in the Matrix and realize that it was all just input. Neo's slaying of Smith was unorthodox, and showed Smith that people exposed themselves by being part of the system. So Smith uses that knowledge, and his amalgam of knowledge about human biology and such, to hack Bane's brain. It is, on one level, just a machine. They mention brain scarring and cross-synaptic firing in Bane's brain scan -- essentially, Smith rewired him, and it was possible because Bane had his brain wide open jacked into the Matrix. If you can die in the real world because you think you're dead in the Matrix, can't you become Smith in the real world because you think you've become him in the Matrix? If you accept the premise of the linking of those two worlds in the first place, this is not really a stretch.
How did he get powerful? Everyone has boundaries in the Matrix. Neo is enlightened by his virtual death and transcends his senses. It gives him the second sight in full strength. Likewise, Neo destroys Smith's boundaries to 'enter' him. Smith gains the ability to 'enter' others and take them over, becoming a virus. Notice that his Neo-like powers come chronologically after he absorbs the Oracle. This is not coincidence. He needed Neo's enlightenment in full, so he took it from the only person he could get it from. But where Neo earned it, Smith had to steal it, because that's all a virus can do, is absorb. It doesn't evolve or grow or change.
Zion is the focus because its the free world; everything else is 'controlled', whether virtual or real.
Nobody is freed, Trinity and Neo die, and we're left with the same situation we had at the beginning of the first movie. We've invested our attention to these three movies all for nothing. It was pointless. Why even have Trinity live in Reloaded? She should have stayed dead. It would have been more interesting to see how Neo copes with being unable to save her last time.
Trinity isn't human when she says that dying was fine, but she should have been telling Neo how good it was instead of apologizing for dying, and thanks for the second chance to be real? I dunno, I thought that scene was a LOT more touching and a lot less fake than EITHER of the first two movies Trinity-saves-Neo or Neo-saves-Trinity scenes.
The Matrix is a semi-independant network. Think of the Machine God as a mainframe connected to the Internet. It could handle Smith if it could 'connect' to him, but much like you might filter a machine connected to a common network, Smith is only partially open when connected to the Matrix. When Neo surrenders and allows Smith to absorb him, Neo is still directly connected to the Machine God, who then gains full access to the others Smiths via the Neo-Smith. This is why he says, "Stay away from me", because Smith absorbs Neo, but realizes that the Machine God has access to the whole Smith consciousness through the link that Smith has unwittingly formed. In other words, Neo became a back door into Smith, which allowed the Machine God to deal with Smith, and cleanse the Matrix.
Neo was a martyr -- again. The Oracle's final words imply he survived; I had thought he died, but then again, since all the others, including the Oracle herself, were restored, there would seem to be no reason to believe Neo would be any different.
I think the reason that Neo had to fight the fight until the end was to ensure that Smith believed he had 'won' honestly so that he would be open for the Machine's counterattack. Perhaps Smith might not have even tried to absorb Neo if he thought he could just kill him at the end.
Regardless, the passivity of the ending is disappointing -- but it is hardly nonsensical.
The REAL questions that need to be explained have nothing to do with the finale, but how Neo is "seeing" all the machines and affecting them with only his human mind. It would have been nice to hear something about the human-fusion bullshit. And it does seem like a fragile peace -- how does one justify inaction when you know countless other people are being 'grown' still to serve as batteries? But maybe humanity can conclude that their ancestors gave up the right to avoid that fight when they started the war and then lost it. It sort of ruins the moral imperative when you bring it on yourself that way. (They even created the necessity themselves by scorching the sky)
* Pacing is good, you don't feel like the movie gets bogged down (which I felt during the extended Zion scene of Reloaded, even though I liked most of its parts individually)
* The ending is disappointing. I don't mean it's just lame, per se, but it isn't what you're really expecting, and it feels bad at first. If you stop and think things through, I think it actually makes good sense. In a way, it ends how it HAD to end.
* Many things are never explained, and you expect them to be. Don't expect much in the way of logical explanation for a number of discrepancies. After Reloaded, you end up postulating a lot, "Well, it must be true that XXX, but how?" Well, Revolutions has characters saying, "XXX is how it is" plainly, but they don't explain why.
Sadly, I don't think the vision was complete. The Wachowski's probably DON'T have the answers to the tough questions to make the Matrix picture 'fit', and so they fail to achieve the true suspension of disbelief that allows immersion, and that hurts them. It doesn't really matter how absurd your premises are when it is clear they are premises; you need internal consistency. Reloaded and Revolutions, as a unit, fail to delivery that.
Put one way, this is a good movie. It is worth seeing, it has its moments, but it is not the mind-blowing, zen-moment conclusion that fans would have wanted. It does not sate the lust for action OR explanation, and so it comes up short.
In a way, it feels like a rush or a march to the conclusion. The actual true ending DOES make sense, even despite being vaguely disappointing, but it also leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
I'd say anyone working for a 'true' enterprise doesn't need an article to tell them what's best; otherwise, they're in trouble already. I'll also note I've seen plenty of things I might classify "enterprises" using ASP as a primary language.
First, don't go counting PHP's compile time. If you're balancing across several servers, you're paying for the Zend Optimizer, and you've got code precompiled and parsed, and optimized. When I converted my ~30k line project to encoded, CPU use fell by 30-50%.
Second, unless you're absolutely gluttonous, then session data is not an incredibly significant thing to store in the db. You're working off a single key with a chunk of data, you're keeping the table small with constant GC checks... it's possible that using the db is faster than using the disk-based caching. And note you can split off the session data to a separate db; there's not significant overhead forming connections because you can use persistent connections that stick around through many pageviews.
I have a high volume site I've worked with to split their e-commerce app across servers. Session data is handled via the db; it is ready to be split off to a separate db as needed. Most data is read-based and not very time sensitive (people looking up items, searching for items, generating dynamic pricing data based on sales and so forth), and this balances easily across many servers.
One thing I'm quite sure of is that your design skills count more than the technology in PHP vs Java. One wrong query, one bad decision about caching, and you're wrecking your performance. If one looked at 99% of the apps out there, they'd benefit 5x as much from optimizing the application logic as compared to 'switching languages', regardless of which has the edge. So I view the whole discussion as a red herring; if you're Amazon.com, or the FTC, maybe you need to solve this question. Otherwise, it is unlikely.
I will oppose expansion of the Patriot Act, efforts to remove sunset clauses included in the act, and I will seek to repeal the portions of the Patriot Act that are unconstitutional.
I will protect the civil rights of immigrants detained by the Department of Homeland Security.
I will work for federal legislation to restore the right to vote in any federal election for ex-felons who have paid their debt to society.
I will appoint an Attorney General who sees our constitution not just as a document to be manipulated, ignored, and violated, but who recognizes and respects it as the fabric that binds the American community together.
I will nominate federal judges with outstanding legal credentials, records of professional excellence, and demonstrated commitment to the constitutional principles of equality, liberty, and privacy. [emphasis mine]
[Note: platform points editted down and re-ordered]
It makes a difference. Dean didn't even get into this race so he could win; but he is personable, compelling, and doesn't seem to play games. I don't agree with some of his platform, but I respect a straight-talking former doctor who seems wonderfully out of place among slick career politicians.
If you think voting for Dean vs. voting for Bush doesn't make a difference, then you're insane. We know Bush will get the Republican nomination. So register as a democrat NOW and back Dean in the primary.
Nice link -- IMO, far more interesting, consistent, and enlightening than the parent.
The article claims no such thing. It says the DMA and other plaintiffs argued that the FTC does not have the authority to implement and enforce such a list. But thanks for digging deep for this insightful nugget anyhow, it has really opened my eyes. Or something.