To nail the point down better, I'd rephrase that as "multiple layers of defense".
It goes without saying to this audience, but probably needs to be said multiple times to the people that manage your budget, but having defense in layers (i.e., serial) is more effective than having defense mechanisms side by side (parallel).
Make potential intruders go through all the doors of your dungeon, not just one.
That's easy to say and hard to do. The problem is that many dungeons (workplaces, whatever they're called these days) have obscure, lesser known secret doors that can let in the monsters if only that one door is discovered and compromised. Creative social engineering tricks are particularly devastating this way.
Some internal walls for damage control can be helpful in the event of an incident.
"old-growth" forests to be opened up to logging because that's where the best quality wood is
Quite so.
If you're any kind of fan of big classic woods, then you know that 19th century barns are where you find some incredibly large pieces of cherry and other fine hardwoods that you could never find these days in a forest.
A lot of the really fine large trees in the Eastern forests of the United States disappeared more than 100 years ago.
Even out in the western U.S., an old timer was telling me of pine trees large enough that they could saw a 4'x8' sheet of wood from it that didn't include any center wood, either!
[Not to mention all those very big chestnut trees that got nearly wiped out completely by an Asian fungus.]
An intriguing essay and one that most of us ought to ponder as we sit in the here and now, as groups, making decisions, watching things happen, recogizing or ignoring problems.
One thing is that many members of a group don't like to confront problems or issues. Frankly, it's too damn uncomfortable for many people to come face problems whose evident solution may well demand of them that they endure change or discomfort. We're creatures of habit and we don't like change (shoot, some people won't make a change for the better even if you lead them to water), even if events suggest that change might be in our better long-term interest.
Second, groups are composed of individuals with greater and lesser abilities to influence group decision making. For example, decisions by one typical homeless person are less likely to impact the group's overall decisions than are decisions by a large stockholder of Exxon-Mobil, just to take an illustrative example. It turns out that decision makers at EXOM may well perceive threats and benefits differently than the average homeless person, and even differently than an average cross-section of individuals in the group we call society.
From an environmental perspective, beneficiaries of extractive industries don't necessarily feel a balanced level of pain for their actions: some of the consequences won't be felt for a lifetime. (Same deferred consequence problems applies to political decisions in general).
Easter Island's environmental demise probably wasn't accelerated due a few powerful individuals benefitting out of proportion to the changes made to their environment.
But it's certain in our modern industrialized society that some points of view are going to be affected because some individuals will perceive current benefits to outweigh possible long-term adverse consequences. Those individuals have more influence than an average person. They may even be right sometimes in their views. But it's important to know the frame of mind where those views are born.
Reminds me of a post several years ago on Slashdot.
Paraphrasing, one of the most dangerous things that will present itself to you in your career was
Boss With Idea.
Bosses weigh a lot, so when they get moving at a rapid velocity, it takes a helluva a lot of torque on the steering wheel to get them pointed in the proper direction.
Bosses that can be swayed so easily by a sales pitch don't sound like very good bosses to me. The best bosses get multiple points of view, digging deep, before they come out with a decision because they know that any single party will have their own agenda.
While I still have a job, a relative of mine recently lost his. He's a top-notch processing and fabrication magician for III-V and other exotic compounds (diamond), but with the telecom industry tanking of late, there's little interest in breakthrough developments in optical communications.
So this guy may well end up doing something completely different for a living in the future. I don't know if he'll ever try to go back into processing again. Which is a shame in some ways, because it means the industry will lose someone with 20 years of experience and a great deal of talent.
The drastic acceleration of the late 1990s and the deceleration of the early 2000s are going to have some long term implications for the technology job market. Since people's career's can't be turned off and on and redirected on any short time scale, the longer that this job slump lasts, the longer it will subsequently take to gear up in the future.
[Long ago, the rule of thumb for job seeking was number_of_months_to_new_job = salary / $10K.]
Offsite backups, whether tape or disk, present
some pros and cons.
Pro: offsite is safer from local disaster effects.
Con: data restoration takes longer from further away.
Pro: high bandwidth connection makes moving data quick enough.
Con: high bandwidth connections are expensive
Con: high bandwidth connections are susceptible to disaster induced interruption
Overall, though, I like the random access provided by disk drives over linear searches of tapes. In case the network connection is broken to the backup site, you can easily load a couple of terabytes on cheap IDE drives into the back of your station wagon and bring them to any site you like and the effective BW will still be pretty darn good.
If you drive your station wagon across the continental U.S loaded with 3 TB of IDE drives in 3 days then you will be running faster than T1.
safer away from local disaster
access time is high when locals need restoration
big net pipe to far away
but disaster that kills the network pipe ?
maybe hard drives can be couriered back.
I'm in the middle of reading Francis Fukuyama's Our PostHuman Future which I bought a week ago. It deals with exactly this subject, how biotechnology will affect our fundamental human nature and what the implications of this might be for politics. (Politics seems a lesser issue in some ways to me than the possible changes to human nature. Imagine "humans" bred and conditioned specifically to serve perfectly a dictator.)
The obvious "solution" to the problem of regular people feeling jealous or betrayed about a wealthy class that breeds itself into a position of superiority is to breed the regular people (or to drug them) into not feeling so jealous or betrayed.
As our understanding of human behavior improves, this may be introduced gradually.
IMHO, it has already started in some ways. I see most of my fellow citizens letting their minds be sotted with various drugs (alcohol, chief among them) and watching television constantly to become indoctrinated into some kind of culture based on raw emotions, sex, violence, and whatever other levers and buttons their minds expose to the world.
Our society's experience up to this point with self medication and with setting up hierarchies to govern society has been fraught with all kinds of problems. If we haven't been able to deal with those problems effectively, then it's probable we won't deal very well with the power of self-modification on the scale that future biotechnology permits.
A lot of people in the scientific community would welcome a means for easily publishing their work in a high quality format on the web. HTML is a nice standard when content and presentation can or should be separated. PDF permits high quality output, but the format is opaque to manual use unlike HTML.
That means scalable vector graphics and high quality mathematics typesetting, things which up until now have been available only through graphical drawing applications supporting PostScript or PDF, or document preparation systems like TeX.
If Amaya permitted one to author a graphical SVG sketch and to annotate specific locations with mathematical equations in MathML that would be rendered with TeX quality, that would be a real plus.
Imagine what could have been the Web if Amaya, with built in MathML, SVG, and authoring (more P2P like and less client-server like) instead of what we have now.
I think the motivating ideas behind Amaya are wonderful and would like to see them really take off.
Unlike a crackhouse, which is an eyesore and reduces quality of life for the people around it...
A lot of people, myself included, would be inclined to believe that a insecured, vulnerable and 0wn3d computer on a high BW connection represents an inconvience and reduction in quality of life to the net community.
Getting a DDOS attack from compromised zombie machines is as bad as getting woke up in the middle of the night by gunshots coming from the crackhouse down the block.
Does open source and freely available security support terrorism by its very nature?
Yes, it supports terrorism just like other things that terrorists use to live and do their jobs. Things like clothing, telephones, buses, automobiles, closed source software, money, knives, guns, school classrooms, etc.
Any intelligent person will recognize that free and open source software is only one of many tools that a terrorist might use; it is not some critical key or linchpin in their nefarious schemes.
Few people are really willing to think clearly about what the real roots of terrorism are and how best to address those causes.
However, on a bright note, it certainly is some kind of vote of confidence in free and open source software that authorities in the U.S. government think it will be too useful to terrorists. That fear, even though it is exaggerated, is still an answer to the question:
"Is free and open source software ready for the enterprise?"
Next thing you know some radical will be claiming that free and open source software will be useful to businesses, governments and individuals, too.
Don't forget the extra senses available to urban parkers.
Namely, instead of just limiting yourself to visual cues to determine the distance between your car and the bounding cars, you can use your internal accelerometer to sense a slight bump when you get sufficiently close to the other car.
If you're in hurry, you can use acoustic senses, too. There will a nice "bonk" sound as your car meets the next one.
Finally, in some cases it is possible to nudge adjoining cars over just enough to create space for your car. When you do this, though, make sure that no pedestrians are between you and the car to be nudged.
Negligence Or Delusion
on
The Virus Did It
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This case sounds interesting for a couple of reasons. The defendent's entire case is out the window, of course, if the prosecution shows that the virus was not responsible for downloading kiddie pr0n. Assume such a virus existed for the sake of argument.
First, there is negligence for allowing one's computer to become infected. A related precedent would be the owner of a condemned house allowing it to become a crack house. IANAL, but in a lot of ways it seems the cases are similar. One could claim that the software manufacturer (MS) was responsible for faulty software, or that the virus writer was responsible for letting loose his creation. In the same way, the crackhouse owner could claim that the lock manufacturer did a poor job, or that the addicts breaking into his house were at fault.
Second, if computers become more like personal extensions of ourselves, indispensible, parts of our consciousness in some far-fetched way, then the defendent might take the insanity route. That is, "God told me to take 7 wives and this girl is one of them." However, computers are subject to more detailed forensics that people's brains, so claiming an insane computer might not withstand much scrutiny in court.
This is going to be more and more of a problem as time goes on, just because there's a limited supply of desirable and pronouncable names. Plus, the names that are registered trademarks keep getting deleted from the permissible set of assigned names.
If cars and pharmaceuticals are any indication, software should start to use generated names that are still suggestive of desirable traits.
From what I understand, big money is paid to come up with names like Viagra.
To give you an idea of all the pitfalls. I recall hearing that the Chevrolet Nova was less than a hot selling vehicle in the Hispanic market because "no va" means, well, "no go", not exactly the best name for your next car.
Pretty soon the only names left are going to be a.out and install.exe.
Despite all the hoopla about marketing to cost-conscious IT managers, what you won't see in the Win2003 advertising campaign is the real, the actual, the true way to best manage your Windows servers in the most cost effective way.
To wit: Keep running Win2K. It's good enough for a while (Think cars: run it into the ground). That, and keep poking your toe in the Linux/SAMBA water from time to time to test for sufficient warmth.
As much as John Ashcroft deserves round condemnation for his leading the charge to trample fourth amendment rights, I don't think he's necessarily to blame here.
IIRC, law enforcement has for years, if not decades, worked with telephone carriers so that wiretapping was a technical possibility that could be exercised when it was needed during the course of an ongoing criminal investigation.
That was back in the old days when a court order was necessary to establish that kind of eavesdropping. Now, of course, the criterion for the U.S. government listening in on private citizens is less stringent.
I agree with the earlier poster, though. There's no reason why an SSL session can't be used to safeguard the privacy of individuals.
Once again, a heavy-handed policy will needlessly sacrifice privacy for a majority of law-abiding citizens. These measures will achieve the admirable goal of keeping tabs on that large class of dangerous criminals, Terrorist That Are Too Stupid. [The policy makers responsible for this kind of bad legislation and technological half measures should stop making the mistake of assessing the intellect of terrorists based on the intellect people like themselves, clicking away on Outlook attachments, being in Shock and Awe at the results, etc.]
I'm almost sorry to point out technical deficiencies. The obvious solution- you can see this coming - is to impose even more restrictive and more instrusive monitoring, to outlaw SSL unless it is "to an authorized commercial provider", etc.
I think one of the more remarkable things about the WWW was that it came out of CERN and NCSA.
Those institutions were publicly funded to do work on physics and generic supercomputing.
Note that WWW and Mosaic were only peripherally related to the core missions of CERN and NCSA.
In a privately funded enterprise, these projects might well have been killed off because they would have been deemed too peripheral, not manifestly contributing to next quarter's EPS.
So these great inventions, WWW and the browser, did not emerge from private enterprise.
Think about that the next time you provide guidance to your congressperson about how much to spend on what.
Personally, I think any individual that has applied for spurious broad patents on prior art let's say 3 times should be barred from applying for any more patents for a period of about 17 years.
OK, that was a bit too informative. Are you him or something?
Yes, I am that person.
I'm willing to back up what I say with cash, too!
During my tenure as a special United States government official, my business connections have netted me slightly more than US$47 million in funds in an account that has been kept safe from the contant roving prying eyes of liberal-biased media in America.
Now, I need to transfer the money to a special account in the Cayman Islands, but need an unrelated person that will not arouse suspicion. If you would like to help me, then for your services, you will be entitled to 15% of the amount, plus 5% to cover expenses, including airfare and accomodations...
Probably both AMD and Intel will compare future chips to some cheap P4 and say that their new chip has 6.4 GHz of equivalent performance.
Like in the days of yore, when new computer performance was measured in terms of the DEC VAX 11/780.
Or, in the mid 1990s, SPECfp95 was close to 1.0 for a Sun SPARCStation 10.
I'd be curious what the new chips do in terms of the old benchmarks. The numbers would probably be outrageously high.
I'm glad that AMD is bringing out the Opteron. Competition in the CPU market is good news for consumers and it's been a lot of sad news to see some promising high performance chips like the Alpha get canned.
Slashdot Mirror
To nail the point down better, I'd rephrase that as "multiple layers of defense".
It goes without saying to this audience, but probably needs to be said multiple times to the people that manage your budget, but having defense in layers (i.e., serial) is more effective than having defense mechanisms side by side (parallel).
Make potential intruders go through all the doors of your dungeon, not just one.
That's easy to say and hard to do. The problem is that many dungeons (workplaces, whatever they're called these days) have obscure, lesser known secret doors that can let in the monsters if only that one door is discovered and compromised. Creative social engineering tricks are particularly devastating this way.
Some internal walls for damage control can be helpful in the event of an incident.
"old-growth" forests to be opened up to logging because that's where the best quality wood is
Quite so.
If you're any kind of fan of big classic woods, then you know that 19th century barns are where you find some incredibly large pieces of cherry and other fine hardwoods that you could never find these days in a forest.
A lot of the really fine large trees in the Eastern forests of the United States disappeared more than 100 years ago.
Even out in the western U.S., an old timer was telling me of pine trees large enough that they could saw a 4'x8' sheet of wood from it that didn't include any center wood, either!
[Not to mention all those very big chestnut trees that got nearly wiped out completely by an Asian fungus.]
2000 is quite stable; anyone who says otherwise either never tried it, or doesn't know what they're doing.
Dammit, you're going to have to go back to ReEducation Camp for Windows Advocacy!
Yes, yes, you got the part right about Windows 2000 stability being a good thing. Any intelligent person will agree with that assessment.
But we want those people to upgrade to Windows 2003!
If users figure out that Windows 2000 is good enough, then they won't upgrade!
Doh!
but usually you can remove most of your problems with common sense.
This Common Sense sounds very useful!
How come I've never heard of it before now?
I've never seen any advertisements for it on television!
Do you know places where I might buy Common Sense?
An intriguing essay and one that most of us ought to ponder as we sit in the here and now, as groups, making decisions, watching things happen, recogizing or ignoring problems.
One thing is that many members of a group don't like to confront problems or issues. Frankly, it's too damn uncomfortable for many people to come face problems whose evident solution may well demand of them that they endure change or discomfort. We're creatures of habit and we don't like change (shoot, some people won't make a change for the better even if you lead them to water), even if events suggest that change might be in our better long-term interest.
Second, groups are composed of individuals with greater and lesser abilities to influence group decision making. For example, decisions by one typical homeless person are less likely to impact the group's overall decisions than are decisions by a large stockholder of Exxon-Mobil, just to take an illustrative example. It turns out that decision makers at EXOM may well perceive threats and benefits differently than the average homeless person, and even differently than an average cross-section of individuals in the group we call society.
From an environmental perspective, beneficiaries of extractive industries don't necessarily feel a balanced level of pain for their actions: some of the consequences won't be felt for a lifetime. (Same deferred consequence problems applies to political decisions in general).
Easter Island's environmental demise probably wasn't accelerated due a few powerful individuals benefitting out of proportion to the changes made to their environment.
But it's certain in our modern industrialized society that some points of view are going to be affected because some individuals will perceive current benefits to outweigh possible long-term adverse consequences. Those individuals have more influence than an average person. They may even be right sometimes in their views. But it's important to know the frame of mind where those views are born.
Reminds me of a post several years ago on Slashdot.
Paraphrasing, one of the most dangerous things that will present itself to you in your career was
Bosses weigh a lot, so when they get moving at a rapid velocity, it takes a helluva a lot of torque on the steering wheel to get them pointed in the proper direction.
Bosses that can be swayed so easily by a sales pitch don't sound like very good bosses to me. The best bosses get multiple points of view, digging deep, before they come out with a decision because they know that any single party will have their own agenda.
While I still have a job, a relative of mine recently lost his. He's a top-notch processing and fabrication magician for III-V and other exotic compounds (diamond), but with the telecom industry tanking of late, there's little interest in breakthrough developments in optical communications.
So this guy may well end up doing something completely different for a living in the future. I don't know if he'll ever try to go back into processing again. Which is a shame in some ways, because it means the industry will lose someone with 20 years of experience and a great deal of talent.
The drastic acceleration of the late 1990s and the deceleration of the early 2000s are going to have some long term implications for the technology job market. Since people's career's can't be turned off and on and redirected on any short time scale, the longer that this job slump lasts, the longer it will subsequently take to gear up in the future.
[Long ago, the rule of thumb for job seeking was number_of_months_to_new_job = salary / $10K.]
Offsite backups, whether tape or disk, present some pros and cons.
Pro: offsite is safer from local disaster effects.
Con: data restoration takes longer from further away.
Pro: high bandwidth connection makes moving data quick enough.
Con: high bandwidth connections are expensive
Con: high bandwidth connections are susceptible to disaster induced interruption
Overall, though, I like the random access provided by disk drives over linear searches of tapes. In case the network connection is broken to the backup site, you can easily load a couple of terabytes on cheap IDE drives into the back of your station wagon and bring them to any site you like and the effective BW will still be pretty darn good.
If you drive your station wagon across the continental U.S loaded with 3 TB of IDE drives in 3 days then you will be running faster than T1.
safer away from local disaster access time is high when locals need restoration big net pipe to far away but disaster that kills the network pipe ? maybe hard drives can be couriered back.The GPL is really summarized as:
Meanwhile, the MS EULA is pretty much just
Both licenses pretty much say:
I'm in the middle of reading Francis Fukuyama's Our PostHuman Future which I bought a week ago. It deals with exactly this subject, how biotechnology will affect our fundamental human nature and what the implications of this might be for politics. (Politics seems a lesser issue in some ways to me than the possible changes to human nature. Imagine "humans" bred and conditioned specifically to serve perfectly a dictator.)
The obvious "solution" to the problem of regular people feeling jealous or betrayed about a wealthy class that breeds itself into a position of superiority is to breed the regular people (or to drug them) into not feeling so jealous or betrayed.
As our understanding of human behavior improves, this may be introduced gradually.
IMHO, it has already started in some ways. I see most of my fellow citizens letting their minds be sotted with various drugs (alcohol, chief among them) and watching television constantly to become indoctrinated into some kind of culture based on raw emotions, sex, violence, and whatever other levers and buttons their minds expose to the world.
Our society's experience up to this point with self medication and with setting up hierarchies to govern society has been fraught with all kinds of problems. If we haven't been able to deal with those problems effectively, then it's probable we won't deal very well with the power of self-modification on the scale that future biotechnology permits.
It's nice to show off SVG and MathML,
A lot of people in the scientific community would welcome a means for easily publishing their work in a high quality format on the web. HTML is a nice standard when content and presentation can or should be separated. PDF permits high quality output, but the format is opaque to manual use unlike HTML.
That means scalable vector graphics and high quality mathematics typesetting, things which up until now have been available only through graphical drawing applications supporting PostScript or PDF, or document preparation systems like TeX.
If Amaya permitted one to author a graphical SVG sketch and to annotate specific locations with mathematical equations in MathML that would be rendered with TeX quality, that would be a real plus.
Imagine what could have been the Web if Amaya, with built in MathML, SVG, and authoring (more P2P like and less client-server like) instead of what we have now.
I think the motivating ideas behind Amaya are wonderful and would like to see them really take off.
Unlike a crackhouse, which is an eyesore and reduces quality of life for the people around it...
A lot of people, myself included, would be inclined to believe that a insecured, vulnerable and 0wn3d computer on a high BW connection represents an inconvience and reduction in quality of life to the net community.
Getting a DDOS attack from compromised zombie machines is as bad as getting woke up in the middle of the night by gunshots coming from the crackhouse down the block.
the most updated computer is just too full of vulnerabilities
Well, that probably says a lot about the overall state of computer security.
But if you've kept your system updated with the latest patches, then most people would think that you've exercised due diligence.
Does open source and freely available security support terrorism by its very nature?
Yes, it supports terrorism just like other things that terrorists use to live and do their jobs. Things like clothing, telephones, buses, automobiles, closed source software, money, knives, guns, school classrooms, etc.
Any intelligent person will recognize that free and open source software is only one of many tools that a terrorist might use; it is not some critical key or linchpin in their nefarious schemes.
Few people are really willing to think clearly about what the real roots of terrorism are and how best to address those causes.
However, on a bright note, it certainly is some kind of vote of confidence in free and open source software that authorities in the U.S. government think it will be too useful to terrorists. That fear, even though it is exaggerated, is still an answer to the question:
Next thing you know some radical will be claiming that free and open source software will be useful to businesses, governments and individuals, too.What will come of society if that happens.
Don't forget the extra senses available to urban parkers.
Namely, instead of just limiting yourself to visual cues to determine the distance between your car and the bounding cars, you can use your internal accelerometer to sense a slight bump when you get sufficiently close to the other car.
If you're in hurry, you can use acoustic senses, too. There will a nice "bonk" sound as your car meets the next one.
Finally, in some cases it is possible to nudge adjoining cars over just enough to create space for your car. When you do this, though, make sure that no pedestrians are between you and the car to be nudged.
This case sounds interesting for a couple of reasons. The defendent's entire case is out the window, of course, if the prosecution shows that the virus was not responsible for downloading kiddie pr0n. Assume such a virus existed for the sake of argument.
First, there is negligence for allowing one's computer to become infected. A related precedent would be the owner of a condemned house allowing it to become a crack house. IANAL, but in a lot of ways it seems the cases are similar. One could claim that the software manufacturer (MS) was responsible for faulty software, or that the virus writer was responsible for letting loose his creation. In the same way, the crackhouse owner could claim that the lock manufacturer did a poor job, or that the addicts breaking into his house were at fault.
Second, if computers become more like personal extensions of ourselves, indispensible, parts of our consciousness in some far-fetched way, then the defendent might take the insanity route. That is, "God told me to take 7 wives and this girl is one of them." However, computers are subject to more detailed forensics that people's brains, so claiming an insane computer might not withstand much scrutiny in court.
This is going to be more and more of a problem as time goes on, just because there's a limited supply of desirable and pronouncable names. Plus, the names that are registered trademarks keep getting deleted from the permissible set of assigned names.
If cars and pharmaceuticals are any indication, software should start to use generated names that are still suggestive of desirable traits.
From what I understand, big money is paid to come up with names like Viagra.
To give you an idea of all the pitfalls. I recall hearing that the Chevrolet Nova was less than a hot selling vehicle in the Hispanic market because "no va" means, well, "no go", not exactly the best name for your next car.
Pretty soon the only names left are going to be a.out and install.exe .
Despite all the hoopla about marketing to cost-conscious IT managers, what you won't see in the Win2003 advertising campaign is the real, the actual, the true way to best manage your Windows servers in the most cost effective way.
To wit: Keep running Win2K. It's good enough for a while (Think cars: run it into the ground). That, and keep poking your toe in the Linux/SAMBA water from time to time to test for sufficient warmth.
As much as John Ashcroft deserves round condemnation for his leading the charge to trample fourth amendment rights, I don't think he's necessarily to blame here.
IIRC, law enforcement has for years, if not decades, worked with telephone carriers so that wiretapping was a technical possibility that could be exercised when it was needed during the course of an ongoing criminal investigation.
That was back in the old days when a court order was necessary to establish that kind of eavesdropping. Now, of course, the criterion for the U.S. government listening in on private citizens is less stringent.
I agree with the earlier poster, though. There's no reason why an SSL session can't be used to safeguard the privacy of individuals.
Once again, a heavy-handed policy will needlessly sacrifice privacy for a majority of law-abiding citizens. These measures will achieve the admirable goal of keeping tabs on that large class of dangerous criminals, Terrorist That Are Too Stupid. [The policy makers responsible for this kind of bad legislation and technological half measures should stop making the mistake of assessing the intellect of terrorists based on the intellect people like themselves, clicking away on Outlook attachments, being in Shock and Awe at the results, etc.]
I'm almost sorry to point out technical deficiencies. The obvious solution- you can see this coming - is to impose even more restrictive and more instrusive monitoring, to outlaw SSL unless it is "to an authorized commercial provider", etc.
I think one of the more remarkable things about the WWW was that it came out of CERN and NCSA.
Those institutions were publicly funded to do work on physics and generic supercomputing.
Note that WWW and Mosaic were only peripherally related to the core missions of CERN and NCSA.
In a privately funded enterprise, these projects might well have been killed off because they would have been deemed too peripheral, not manifestly contributing to next quarter's EPS.
So these great inventions, WWW and the browser, did not emerge from private enterprise.
Think about that the next time you provide guidance to your congressperson about how much to spend on what.
Personally, I think any individual that has applied for spurious broad patents on prior art let's say 3 times should be barred from applying for any more patents for a period of about 17 years.
A period of probation would do some good.
In some countries, school teachers are dying of AIDS faster than they can be trained.
Worse, in one African country local superstition has resulted in some schoolteachers being killed outrightfor casting Ebola spells.
Now that's the kind of problem that is like burning your seed corn.
As you note, IT problems in Africa are the least of their problems.
OK, that was a bit too informative. Are you him or something?
Yes, I am that person.
I'm willing to back up what I say with cash, too!
During my tenure as a special United States government official, my business connections have netted me slightly more than US$47 million in funds in an account that has been kept safe from the contant roving prying eyes of liberal-biased media in America.
Now, I need to transfer the money to a special account in the Cayman Islands, but need an unrelated person that will not arouse suspicion. If you would like to help me, then for your services, you will be entitled to 15% of the amount, plus 5% to cover expenses, including airfare and accomodations...
Probably both AMD and Intel will compare future chips to some cheap P4 and say that their new chip has 6.4 GHz of equivalent performance.
Like in the days of yore, when new computer performance was measured in terms of the DEC VAX 11/780.
Or, in the mid 1990s, SPECfp95 was close to 1.0 for a Sun SPARCStation 10.
I'd be curious what the new chips do in terms of the old benchmarks. The numbers would probably be outrageously high.
I'm glad that AMD is bringing out the Opteron. Competition in the CPU market is good news for consumers and it's been a lot of sad news to see some promising high performance chips like the Alpha get canned.