A few years back, IEEE-USA did some work on US broadband policy. First, there is the issue of defining "broadband." In the IEEE-USA view, anything under a bidirectional gigabit to the home is legacy technology. Essentially, the "blazing fast" 5 megabit broadband being offered by current broadband providers is dumbed-down compared to what other countries are installing. Note that bidirectional gigabit technology means any subscriber can become a content, applications, or services provider.
Having legacy broadband creates an innovation gap. Innovators in countries with real broadband will think of innovations that won't occur to US innovators because of the speed gap. I have described the difference as analogous to the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit in your thinking, you try to develop more efficient ways of hooking up more than one horse to do the work. If you have multi-horsepower engines, then the innovation goes to improving the engines and finding other ways to use engine power.
A concept advocated by many members of the IEEE-USA group that participated in the work was separation of content and carriage. One way to achieve this is end-user ownership. Another (with some issues) is municipal ownership. BTW, we were told that the incumbent telecom companies don't have the money to do real broadband because they still owe billions they borrowed to do ISDN.
We have to get policymakers away from the concept that broadband only gets built to carry one-way proprietary entertainment content (like cable does). With real broadband, the killer app may turn out to be something like full motion family videoconferencing. The technology can support data, voice, and video over a single connection to the home. Also, the end-user ownership concept implies that to get content, applications, or services would require separate arrangements with those providers. That means alacarte entertainment content could be easily supported.
Perhaps if we get real broadband we will see the kinds of $50 per month, gigabit speed, combined data, voice, and video connections we see other countries implementing.
According to Black Box Voting (http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/173 05.html?1138394704) the company that originally designed the Diebold machines was founded by five convicted felons. Four were perpetrators of sophisticated fraud and the fifth was a drug-dealer prison buddy of one of the fraudsters.
The criminal records of these people would make them ineligible to carry bedpans in Maryland nursing homes, but of course there are no criminal record checks for people who design and maintain voting machines.
The criminal backgrounds of Global's original founders gives reason to suspect that the widespread security vulnerabilities of the machines were not due to mere incompetence but might have been connected to some kind of nefarious scheme concocted by their criminal minds.
Accordingly, let me suggest that a proper purchaser for Diebold Election Systems might be some international criminal syndicate, for example the Russian Mafia, the drug cartels, or perhaps some criminal group fronting for terrorists. That would, in a sense, return the machines to people with the backgrounds of the founders of the original developer.
The Russian Mafia could make voting systems a subsidiary of their organization that reportedly is responsible for all the recent spam related to pump-and-dump penny stock schemes. They certainly have sophisticated computer capability behind those schemes. They could auction election victories just like they now reportedly auction cybercrime facilities and exploits.
IANAL, but I understand that there are standards for admissibility of scientific evidence, and the questions quoted below (and several that follow) cover them. The most recent ruling is called "Daubert."
Whatever this witness has to say based on his methods is useless because the methods have not been generally accepted and/or there are no peer reviews or tests of the methods' accuracy/reliability and no known level of accuracy/reliability.
Q. Has your method of determining from the MediaSentry materials whether a particular computer has been used for uploading or downloading copyrighted works been tested by any testing body?
A. Not that I have submitted. Q. Do you know anyone else that is using your method, other than you? A. Not that I'm aware of. Q. Has your method of determining through the MediaSentry materials whether a particular computer has been used for uploading or downloading copyrighted works been subjected to any form of peer review? A. Not that I'm aware of. Q. Has your method of determining from the MediaSentry materials whether a computer has been used for uploading or downloading copyrighted works been published? A. No. Q. Is there a known rate of error for your method? A. No. Q. Is there a potential rate of error? MR. GABRIEL: Object to the form. A. I guess there is always a potential of an error. Q. Do you know of a rate of error? A. To my process, no.
Q. Are there any standards and controls over what you have done? A. No. Q. Have your methods been generally accepted in the scientific community? A. The process has not been vetted through the scientific community.
Around 2000 there was legislation adopted in many states called the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA). Under UETA a legal notice sent by email is considered delivered to the recipient when it enters the recipient's ISP, regardless of whether the recipient ever sees the email. This was the UETA drafters' attempt to create the equivalent of something called the "mail box rule" for email. AFAIK, under the mail box rule, if you give a legal notice to the post office, it is considered delivered.
There are numerous examples of legitimate emails getting caught in spam filters, and there are ways to format a legal notice to raise the likelihood that it will be caught by a spam filter.
In addition to educating our corporate managements, we also need to educate legislators about this and to get UETA amended in the various states to recognize the realities of todays electronic commerce environment.
Why the restriction to "non-commercial" use?
on
DieHard, the Software
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why not just license under the GPL, LGPL or some other open source license? This business of being "free for non-commercial use" restricts users who use open source software for commercial purposes. This software is really "non-free" according to any definition of the FSF or Open Source Initiative, which explicitly forbid discrimination against fields of endeavor. Perhaps you should say "non-free, but gratis for non-commercial use."
The patent tradeoff is supposed to be disclosure of the patented technology in return for a monopoly over a period of years. There is also a requirement that the patent not be obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the art involved.
Patents are often issued for obvious technology (the subject of a Supreme Court case this session), and are often written in such obfuscatory language it is impossible for anyone to know exactly what technology is being disclosed. In many cases it seems to me that the patent claims all solutions to a *_problem_* described in the patent rather than disclosing an implementable *_solution_* to the problem.
Also, there is a company that investigates patent portfolios for financial and insurance companies' due diligence whose president claims that about 37% of patents issued worldwide are fraudulent.
The only problem for the open source community is that it takes money to fight all this patent nonsense.
The BSD license doesn't require much, but it does require that a copy be included in anything that uses the code. Has anyone seen a copy of the BSD license included in Microsoft products? I understand they make substantial use of BSD-licensed code. What is the penalty for that violation? How much of Microsoft's intellectual property is really Microsoft's. How many of Microsoft's patents are similar to their recent years' patenting of sudo (that had been in use for well over 17 years)? How many of Microsoft's patents are based on ideas in code they acquired having BSD licenses?
Folks, we are getting into a massive prior art battle here. Microsoft couldn't create problems for Linux through SCO, so now they are trying to do so directly.
His proposal is in line with IEEE-USA proposals
on
Own the Last Mile
·
· Score: 4, Informative
End-user ownership is a cornerstone of a proposal and a more recent white paper by a committee of IEEE-USA. See
The fact is that the US is being dumbed down with respect to broadband technology. The Washington Post recently had an article stating that Koreans feel like they are going back to the past, telecommunications-wise, when they come to the US.
Real broadband is gigabit or better, bidirectional, to the end user. Ownership by end-users may be the only way we can achieve it. Content and bandwidth should be separated, with nobody other than end users allowed to provide both.
It seems to me that object-relational mapping was being done as soon as object oriented programming became popular in the 1980's. Relational databases were also becoming popular and the easiest way to get persistent storage with an OOP program was object-relational mapping. By the early 1990's all the relational database providers were advertising that their products did objects, too.
Did the same patent examiner pass this one who passed M$'s patenting of sudo?
The big telco's and cable companies have been dumbing down our understanding of broadband. Their offerings are legacy broadband. Real broadband is gigabit and has equal speeds bi-directionally, so any subscriber can be a content/service provider.
The US is headed toward becoming a third world telecommunications country. Other countries are putting in the gigabit broadband. I have used the analogy of animal power versus engine power. An innovator who knows only animal power (i.e., where one horsepower is a fundamental limit, and you have to figure out how to get two horses to generate double the energy) will not think of innovations that are relevant to engine power.
The key to becoming a first world telecommunications power is net neutrality. As for the opponents' claim that web providers are trying to "stick the consumer with the bill for the next Internet," perhaps it is on target but spun the wrong way. End user ownership of the last mile is one way of ensuring that no content/application/service provider can monopolize the Internet and exploit users. The other way is to require bandwidth providers to be common carriers, a.k.a net neutrality.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back, IEEE-USA did some work on US broadband policy. First, there is the issue of defining "broadband." In the IEEE-USA view, anything under a bidirectional gigabit to the home is legacy technology. Essentially, the "blazing fast" 5 megabit broadband being offered by current broadband providers is dumbed-down compared to what other countries are installing. Note that bidirectional gigabit technology means any subscriber can become a content, applications, or services provider.
Having legacy broadband creates an innovation gap. Innovators in countries with real broadband will think of innovations that won't occur to US innovators because of the speed gap. I have described the difference as analogous to the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit in your thinking, you try to develop more efficient ways of hooking up more than one horse to do the work. If you have multi-horsepower engines, then the innovation goes to improving the engines and finding other ways to use engine power.
A concept advocated by many members of the IEEE-USA group that participated in the work was separation of content and carriage. One way to achieve this is end-user ownership. Another (with some issues) is municipal ownership. BTW, we were told that the incumbent telecom companies don't have the money to do real broadband because they still owe billions they borrowed to do ISDN.
We have to get policymakers away from the concept that broadband only gets built to carry one-way proprietary entertainment content (like cable does). With real broadband, the killer app may turn out to be something like full motion family videoconferencing. The technology can support data, voice, and video over a single connection to the home. Also, the end-user ownership concept implies that to get content, applications, or services would require separate arrangements with those providers. That means alacarte entertainment content could be easily supported.
Perhaps if we get real broadband we will see the kinds of $50 per month, gigabit speed, combined data, voice, and video connections we see other countries implementing.
According to Black Box Voting (http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/173 05.html?1138394704) the company that originally designed the Diebold machines was founded by five convicted felons. Four were perpetrators of sophisticated fraud and the fifth was a drug-dealer prison buddy of one of the fraudsters.
The criminal records of these people would make them ineligible to carry bedpans in Maryland nursing homes, but of course there are no criminal record checks for people who design and maintain voting machines.
The criminal backgrounds of Global's original founders gives reason to suspect that the widespread security vulnerabilities of the machines were not due to mere incompetence but might have been connected to some kind of nefarious scheme concocted by their criminal minds.
Accordingly, let me suggest that a proper purchaser for Diebold Election Systems might be some international criminal syndicate, for example the Russian Mafia, the drug cartels, or perhaps some criminal group fronting for terrorists. That would, in a sense, return the machines to people with the backgrounds of the founders of the original developer.
The Russian Mafia could make voting systems a subsidiary of their organization that reportedly is responsible for all the recent spam related to pump-and-dump penny stock schemes. They certainly have sophisticated computer capability behind those schemes. They could auction election victories just like they now reportedly auction cybercrime facilities and exploits.
Just some thoughts.
IANAL, but I understand that there are standards for admissibility of scientific evidence, and the questions quoted below (and several that follow) cover them. The most recent ruling is called "Daubert."
Whatever this witness has to say based on his methods is useless because the methods have not been generally accepted and/or there are no peer reviews or tests of the methods' accuracy/reliability and no known level of accuracy/reliability.
Q. Has your method of determining from
the MediaSentry materials whether a particular
computer has been used for uploading or downloading
copyrighted works been tested by any testing body?
A. Not that I have submitted.
Q. Do you know anyone else that is using
your method, other than you?
A. Not that I'm aware of.
Q. Has your method of determining
through the MediaSentry materials whether a
particular computer has been used for uploading or
downloading copyrighted works been subjected to any
form of peer review?
A. Not that I'm aware of.
Q. Has your method of determining from
the MediaSentry materials whether a computer has
been used for uploading or downloading copyrighted
works been published?
A. No.
Q. Is there a known rate of error for
your method?
A. No.
Q. Is there a potential rate of error?
MR. GABRIEL: Object to the form.
A. I guess there is always a potential
of an error.
Q. Do you know of a rate of error?
A. To my process, no.
Q. Are there any standards and controls
over what you have done?
A. No.
Q. Have your methods been generally
accepted in the scientific community?
A. The process has not been vetted
through the scientific community.
Around 2000 there was legislation adopted in many states called the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA). Under UETA a legal notice sent by email is considered delivered to the recipient when it enters the recipient's ISP, regardless of whether the recipient ever sees the email. This was the UETA drafters' attempt to create the equivalent of something called the "mail box rule" for email. AFAIK, under the mail box rule, if you give a legal notice to the post office, it is considered delivered.
There are numerous examples of legitimate emails getting caught in spam filters, and there are ways to format a legal notice to raise the likelihood that it will be caught by a spam filter.
In addition to educating our corporate managements, we also need to educate legislators about this and to get UETA amended in the various states to recognize the realities of todays electronic commerce environment.
Why not just license under the GPL, LGPL or some other open source license? This business of being "free for non-commercial use" restricts users who use open source software for commercial purposes. This software is really "non-free" according to any definition of the FSF or Open Source Initiative, which explicitly forbid discrimination against fields of endeavor. Perhaps you should say "non-free, but gratis for non-commercial use."
The patent tradeoff is supposed to be disclosure of the patented technology in return for a monopoly over a period of years. There is also a requirement that the patent not be obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the art involved.
Patents are often issued for obvious technology (the subject of a Supreme Court case this session), and are often written in such obfuscatory language it is impossible for anyone to know exactly what technology is being disclosed. In many cases it seems to me that the patent claims all solutions to a *_problem_* described in the patent rather than disclosing an implementable *_solution_* to the problem.
Also, there is a company that investigates patent portfolios for financial and insurance companies' due diligence whose president claims that about 37% of patents issued worldwide are fraudulent.
The only problem for the open source community is that it takes money to fight all this patent nonsense.
The BSD license doesn't require much, but it does require that a copy be included in anything that uses the code. Has anyone seen a copy of the BSD license included in Microsoft products? I understand they make substantial use of BSD-licensed code. What is the penalty for that violation? How much of Microsoft's intellectual property is really Microsoft's. How many of Microsoft's patents are similar to their recent years' patenting of sudo (that had been in use for well over 17 years)? How many of Microsoft's patents are based on ideas in code they acquired having BSD licenses?
Folks, we are getting into a massive prior art battle here. Microsoft couldn't create problems for Linux through SCO, so now they are trying to do so directly.
End-user ownership is a cornerstone of a proposal and a more recent white paper by a committee of IEEE-USA. See
. asp
/ docs/Gigabit-WP.pdf
http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/broadband
and
http://www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/ccip
The fact is that the US is being dumbed down with respect to broadband technology. The Washington Post recently had an article stating that Koreans feel like they are going back to the past, telecommunications-wise, when they come to the US.
Real broadband is gigabit or better, bidirectional, to the end user. Ownership by end-users may be the only way we can achieve it. Content and bandwidth should be separated, with nobody other than end users allowed to provide both.
It seems to me that object-relational mapping was being done as soon as object oriented programming became popular in the 1980's. Relational databases were also becoming popular and the easiest way to get persistent storage with an OOP program was object-relational mapping. By the early 1990's all the relational database providers were advertising that their products did objects, too.
Did the same patent examiner pass this one who passed M$'s patenting of sudo?
The big telco's and cable companies have been dumbing down our understanding of broadband. Their offerings are legacy broadband. Real broadband is gigabit and has equal speeds bi-directionally, so any subscriber can be a content/service provider.
/ docs/Gigabit-WP.pdf
The US is headed toward becoming a third world telecommunications country. Other countries are putting in the gigabit broadband. I have used the analogy of animal power versus engine power. An innovator who knows only animal power (i.e., where one horsepower is a fundamental limit, and you have to figure out how to get two horses to generate double the energy) will not think of innovations that are relevant to engine power.
Take a look at http://www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/ccip
The key to becoming a first world telecommunications power is net neutrality. As for the opponents' claim that web providers are trying to "stick the consumer with the bill for the next Internet," perhaps it is on target but spun the wrong way. End user ownership of the last mile is one way of ensuring that no content/application/service provider can monopolize the Internet and exploit users. The other way is to require bandwidth providers to be common carriers, a.k.a net neutrality.