Yes, I agree totally. Having these results floating around uninterpreted by someone who really knows the science is just a recipe for silliness, but also some real harm could come if people jump to conclusions.
At one point, our obstetrician ordered up a "routine genetic screening" while my kid was in utero. I guess he was looking for Downs or something where the markers are well-known. What came back was a report of a marker - a "backwards" chromosome, and a cryptic one-liner about possible dire stuff and a reference to an academic paper on which the marker identification was based. Our obstetrician, a very experienced guy, couldn't tell us anything about what dire stuff we might be facing, or what the probability was, or what it all meant. He noted that according to the paper, if one of the parents had the same marker and was fine, then the probability was very high that the marker was benign. We also contacted the geneticist who performed the test for more information and counseling, and she had no further information about the meaning of the results. So we tested both of us parents (not cheap!) and mine came back with the same marker. Big sigh of relief -- no, no particular reason to consider aborting the fetus.
In the interim, we tracked down the researcher who wrote the original paper. Google and email are wonderful things. The researcher turned out to be a nice post-doc at Columbia Presbyterian. She couldn't tell us what dire consequences we might be facing or their probabilities, either. I don't think she'd ever been anywhere near a clinical situation. She had only published a paper noting the correlation and indicating that this might be a fruitful area for further research. She was quite surprised that a commercial genetic testing company was using her results as the basis for a test used for routine genetic screening.
This is very young science, folks. This is just one tiny example, and there are a lot of genes! It's going to take decades to sort through all the data we already have to figure out what it means. Doing this over the counter now is really jumping the gun.
The point of having the committee was so that the various corporations who wanted to profit from having a standard could fight it out "in committee" and thus lessen the amount of effort the FCC commissioners would have to put into resolving the squabble.
Another reason to have the committee was to put a bit of distance between the warring corporations and the FCC. After all, if there's going to be bribing and backroom deal-making going on, isn't it better that the FCC itself was not the body taking the bribes?
Yes, you're right that once Apple learned of the guy's status as a minor they were wise to act. But using him as a liability shield is not the reason. Open source contributors, as a practical matter, aren't usually rich enough to be helpful to a company the size of Apple.
Consider, for example, if Apple unknowingly used contributed code that turned out to violate someone else's copyright. That someone else would sue Apple *and* the contributor. Apple has no "defense" by claiming it's the contributor's fault -- intent and knowledge aren't elements of copyright infringment. So, a liable Apple would then go after the contributor to make Apple whole. Yes, the minor could void the indemnity -- but individual open source contributors usually aren't useful as indemnifiers anyway. Anyone could just declare bankruptcy, and look ma, can't get blood from a stone.
The real defense that Apple needs that it wasn't getting was the ability of the minor contributor to void the copyright assignment, and then come after Apple himself for infringement.
Some people here have bought into a common fallacy -- that working through a corporation (or LLC) shell will protect a software consultant from being liable for his/her actions or omissions.
This is simply not the case. You are *always* responsible for your own actions or omissions. If you cause damage, you will be liable *personally* and so will your corporation if you were "acting within the scope of your employment." The corporate shell will limit the liability of any other shareholders in the corporation who are just shareholders -- but that's the only people it protects.
This is why all consultants should consider errors and omissions (E&O) insurance, whether they are working direct (sole proprietership) or through any business entity (corporation, partnership, LLC). Not everyone gets this -- it can be expensive, so you want to weigh the risks and cost yourself. What you will probably *have* to get (because your client will demand it) is General Liability insurance which covers more usual liabilities like if you leave a cable lying around and someone trips over it.
People going into contract software employment may want to pick up a copy of Janet Ruhl's "The Computer Consultant's Guide", 2d. ed., John Wiley & Sons 1997 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471176494). There are lots of details and Janet at least touches on them all. Also, her web site http://www.realrates.com has a lot of useful info (warning: some of the info is free, some is for sale.)
Said EResolution President Karim Benyekhlef: "It is but an open secret that lawyers advising their clients in domain name cases have no scruples about quoting the figures and saying that the odds are better with a given provider."
Why are the complainants' lawyers to blame for this? The ICANN rules let the complainant pick the arbitrator. In the US at least, an attorney has a ethical obligation (which are enacted as statutes or regulations in most states) to zealously represent a client's interest. Picking an arbitrator that rules less often for the complainant is arguably a breach of that obligation. In fact, the attorney who didn't do this could be sued (probably successfully) for malpractice and potentially disbarred or sanctioned by the state. Thus, by the admittedly a bit counterintuitive logic of the legal system, it is entirely scrupulous of the lawyers to advise using a complainant-favorable arbitrator.
The problem is in the ICANN UDRP rules, which are blatantly unfair to the defendant.
Well, if you buy the whole software-engineers-need-to-be-accredited idea (and there is more than enough room for doubt), the IEEE is by far better suited for administering this than is the ACM. The ACM is really good at gathering, reviewing, and publishing academic CS papers. The ACM has also put together some CS sample curricula (which IMHO have been questionable or at least a bit too lowest-common-denominator for me). The IEEE has much more experience in, and the relevant infrastructure and processes for, putting together standards.
It may or may not be legal to copy others' software in Taiwan and use it there, I don't know for sure. I'm pretty sure though, that Taiwan has its own IP laws that are getting similar to the rest of the world's even if they may not be signatories to WIPO. I remember in '93 Taiwanese officials were giving out copies of Taiwan's then-new copyright laws to passers-by in the Taipei airport as a way to publicize their new seriousness about IP. (Whether or how they enforce these is another matter entirely!)
Nonetheless, it is illegal to bring the copied software back to the US without authorization of the US copyright holder. Copying Office 2000 from an ftp server physically located in Taiwan would violate US copyright statutes, and probably customs statutes as well.
If something seems to good to be true, it probably is.
Just to clarify -- MetaMath is not a proof *generator*, it is a proof *verifier*. It won't do your homework for you, at best it can help people who think a certain way understand the nuts and bolts of logic and set theory.
Using MetaMath to do anything else would be *serious* work, and if you can do this, you would be qualified to teach a class in the subject matter, not just work the exercises.
The trick with arguments like Lockard's (at least as summarized by Katz) is that they anticipate examples of getting real stuff from so-called virtual sources by redefining the notion of virtual communities to exclude the things from which you get real stuff, and then declaring, again -- and this time by definition -- that virtual communities are a myth.
I never liked the term virtual communities, precisely because it is, as Lockard points out, an oxymoron. "Online community" would be better; it avoids the vagueness of the word virtual, but it's not as much fun to say.
I can't think of a single "real" community that actually satisfies all my needs and desires -- I participate in many communities, online being the "location" of some of them.
Goodness, this is such an old argument. There's nothing new here, except that an English Lit professor managed to publish a collection of the same doubts and issues that surfaced back on EIES2 in the '70s, as Howard Rheingold documented in his Virtual Communities book years ago.
Both Deja and Remarq corrupt the Usenet in their own ways.
I really wouldn't mind if Remarq only attached an ad for their own services to my posts. After all, they have to pay the bills somehow. And, if I'm posting from Remarq, I'm in a very real way endorsing their service anyway.
But to add a Keen.com ad to my post is pretty shoddy. Keen.com, apart from being a silly concept, markets itself often as a way of contacting for-pay psychics. I really can't get behind endorsing that in any context.
The Deja case is perhaps even a little sadder. DejaNews started as Usenet archive (very useful and a huge contribution to the Net community), then added a Web-based interface to Usenet (also a big contribution), then started peppering those Web pages with ads to pay the bills (probably a necessary evil) and then . . . . literally sold out, to new owners who reconceptualized the entire Usenet as nothing more than a way for consumers to discuss products (an incredible travesty, and pretty much a metaphor for the course of the Internet over the past five years).
It's not that I mind commerce. Commerce is good; it is the machinery that enables modern society, and support me and my family.
But all of life is not actually comerce, and I do mind the replacement of things that are fundamentally non-commercial with commercial simulacrums that are far inferior to the original.
Here's an aspect that showed up in the SecurityFocus Quova article that I haven't seen anyone comment on.
SecurityFocus notes that the Quova service mark is registered at the USPTO for "providing demographic, geographic and psychographic information to others."
SecurityFocus also paraphrases Quova CEO Bhargava as asserting that the "service mark description is a broad category crafted by company attorneys, and has little to do with Quova's business plan."
Registering a mark whose service description exceeds the actual services provided can result in that mark being invalidated by the PTO. In other words, it's illegal.
Sounds to me like Quova is being disingenuous here, at best, and trying to pass it off as an inevitable result of their secrecy or their lawyers' overreaching. I'm not buying it.
Around our company we usually recommend the two-book series Horstmannn and Cornell's Core Java. It's best if you know a language like C or C++ before reading this. These books are very well-written and they don't skimp on the hard stuff. One may wish to consider glossing over the increasingly deprecated AWT material in favor of some other book on JFC and Swing, when the time comes to learn GUI stuff.
I really don't believe that Codes of Ethics do very much good, and I'm not a huge fan of the idea that software development needs to be turned into a "profession," whatever that means.
As a software guy who used to practice law for a living, I've lived both sides of the street.
Lawyers live under a code of ethics that in most states has literally become enacted as part of the statutory law, and also is enforced, at least in theory, by the courts and Bar Associations. Some of the ethical codes work to help protect the clients, some work to better some view of society I guess, but many of these rules simply operate to keep other working folks from practicing law without a license. It is turf protectionism in its rawest form. Further, some lawyers actually spend time pushing the envelope on what practices are "ethical" by finessing the rules. Not a pretty picture. And, of course, there are now lawyers who specialize in the lawyers' ethical rules themselves, making lucrative practices out of defending other attorneys accused of malpractice. Do we in software really want this stuff to happen in our field?
The existence of the lawyers' code, and mandated degrees, and bar exams, and mandatory legal education do little to the ensure competence of the individual lawyer. Word of mouth from satisfied customers you know is still the best way to find a good attorney.
Regarding the IEEE/ACM SEEPP Code of Ethics, I was for a while a member of the task force that drafted the current code. It's all very nice and noble, but there isn't much in it that all of us didn't learn by the time we got to kindergarten. Worse, there are a few things in there that I wouldn't want to be held accountable for as a practicing programmer. Here are the highlights:
1) Once you are a "professional", you can be held liable for malpractice, and you must legally exercise a higher standard of care than other mortals have to in their chosen fields. For most software, there is little societal benefit to be gained for the added burden placed on the practitioner (and their malpractice insurers). The costs for such insurance are just passed on to consumers, anyway. (Some software does require high standards of care, but really, not most.)
2) The Code effectively makes programmers responsible for respecting and enforcing other people's intellectual property rights in their workplace. So, if your boss won't pay for a site license for that software everyone is using, does that mean you should be sanctioned by a professional organization for continuing to work there? For not sticking your neck out? Where's the line? Why do software people have to live with this explicit ethical responsibility and not, say, secretaries? Don't we all have to follow copyright law anyway? I don't get it.
3) The Code also places the responsibility for quality on individual programmers, where it often belongs, but doesn't magically imbue programmers with any means to impose this goal on the their employers. The Code itself does not speak to the non-programmers' employers' ethical responsibility. So, in practice, this stuff rings a bit hollow.
Finally, when thinking about the ACM/IEEE Code of Ethics, I find it helpful to remember that most of the good folks on the task force aren't actually practicing programmers (though many of them were at one time or another). The task force was predominantly composed of academics who make their living teaching computer ethics courses. I don't mean to question peoples' motives; I found all my colleagues on the task force to be good and honorable folks pursuing ideals in which they passionately believed. I mean, why else be an ethics professor? But I really couldn't ignore the fact that most of these folks' passions will be essentially guaranteed places in the curricula of our universities once software ethics is legislated.
So I still can't figure out how a software ethics code makes the world a better place, even though the ethical practice of software development is a good thing unto itself.
Yes. The thing to note about MIT is that it is a big place -- big enough for multiple paradigms to coexist and barely notice each other. MIT, being a human creation, has plenty of good and evil, yin and yang, within itself to confound anyone's predictions. The MIT of X and Kerberos is also the MIT of Draper and Lincoln Labs. The same institution that was the first to openly distribute PGP online also has for decades had a think tank on campus funded largely by the CIA, or so it is widely believed. $25 million is a drop in the MIT bucket. It's more likely that MIT will coopt pieces of Microsoft than vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes indeed. #jumpthesharkmoments
Yes, I agree totally. Having these results floating around uninterpreted by someone who really knows the science is just a recipe for silliness, but also some real harm could come if people jump to conclusions.
At one point, our obstetrician ordered up a "routine genetic screening" while my kid was in utero. I guess he was looking for Downs or something where the markers are well-known. What came back was a report of a marker - a "backwards" chromosome, and a cryptic one-liner about possible dire stuff and a reference to an academic paper on which the marker identification was based. Our obstetrician, a very experienced guy, couldn't tell us anything about what dire stuff we might be facing, or what the probability was, or what it all meant. He noted that according to the paper, if one of the parents had the same marker and was fine, then the probability was very high that the marker was benign. We also contacted the geneticist who performed the test for more information and counseling, and she had no further information about the meaning of the results. So we tested both of us parents (not cheap!) and mine came back with the same marker. Big sigh of relief -- no, no particular reason to consider aborting the fetus.
In the interim, we tracked down the researcher who wrote the original paper. Google and email are wonderful things. The researcher turned out to be a nice post-doc at Columbia Presbyterian. She couldn't tell us what dire consequences we might be facing or their probabilities, either. I don't think she'd ever been anywhere near a clinical situation. She had only published a paper noting the correlation and indicating that this might be a fruitful area for further research. She was quite surprised that a commercial genetic testing company was using her results as the basis for a test used for routine genetic screening.
This is very young science, folks. This is just one tiny example, and there are a lot of genes! It's going to take decades to sort through all the data we already have to figure out what it means. Doing this over the counter now is really jumping the gun.
The point of having the committee was so that the various corporations who wanted to profit from having a standard could fight it out "in committee" and thus lessen the amount of effort the FCC commissioners would have to put into resolving the squabble.
Another reason to have the committee was to put a bit of distance between the warring corporations and the FCC. After all, if there's going to be bribing and backroom deal-making going on, isn't it better that the FCC itself was not the body taking the bribes?
Yeah, but don't use registered mail, use certified mail, return receipt requested.
It's cheaper, and works just as well.
Prof. Madnick does not teach in the EECS at MIT. He teaches information technology in the Sloan School of Management.
He's a database guy, not an OS guy.
Big difference.
The joke at MIT is that you stick around and get a management degree if you start failing out of the Science or Engineering schools.
Consider, for example, if Apple unknowingly used contributed code that turned out to violate someone else's copyright. That someone else would sue Apple *and* the contributor. Apple has no "defense" by claiming it's the contributor's fault -- intent and knowledge aren't elements of copyright infringment. So, a liable Apple would then go after the contributor to make Apple whole. Yes, the minor could void the indemnity -- but individual open source contributors usually aren't useful as indemnifiers anyway. Anyone could just declare bankruptcy, and look ma, can't get blood from a stone.
The real defense that Apple needs that it wasn't getting was the ability of the minor contributor to void the copyright assignment, and then come after Apple himself for infringement.
This is simply not the case. You are *always* responsible for your own actions or omissions. If you cause damage, you will be liable *personally* and so will your corporation if you were "acting within the scope of your employment." The corporate shell will limit the liability of any other shareholders in the corporation who are just shareholders -- but that's the only people it protects.
This is why all consultants should consider errors and omissions (E&O) insurance, whether they are working direct (sole proprietership) or through any business entity (corporation, partnership, LLC). Not everyone gets this -- it can be expensive, so you want to weigh the risks and cost yourself. What you will probably *have* to get (because your client will demand it) is General Liability insurance which covers more usual liabilities like if you leave a cable lying around and someone trips over it.
People going into contract software employment may want to pick up a copy of Janet Ruhl's "The Computer Consultant's Guide", 2d. ed., John Wiley & Sons 1997 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471176494 ). There are lots of details and Janet at least touches on them all. Also, her web site http://www.realrates.com has a lot of useful info (warning: some of the info is free, some is for sale.)
-Steve
Why are the complainants' lawyers to blame for this? The ICANN rules let the complainant pick the arbitrator. In the US at least, an attorney has a ethical obligation (which are enacted as statutes or regulations in most states) to zealously represent a client's interest. Picking an arbitrator that rules less often for the complainant is arguably a breach of that obligation. In fact, the attorney who didn't do this could be sued (probably successfully) for malpractice and potentially disbarred or sanctioned by the state. Thus, by the admittedly a bit counterintuitive logic of the legal system, it is entirely scrupulous of the lawyers to advise using a complainant-favorable arbitrator.
The problem is in the ICANN UDRP rules, which are blatantly unfair to the defendant.
Well, if you buy the whole software-engineers-need-to-be-accredited idea (and there is more than enough room for doubt), the IEEE is by far better suited for administering this than is the ACM. The ACM is really good at gathering, reviewing, and publishing academic CS papers. The ACM has also put together some CS sample curricula (which IMHO have been questionable or at least a bit too lowest-common-denominator for me). The IEEE has much more experience in, and the relevant infrastructure and processes for, putting together standards.
It may or may not be legal to copy others' software in Taiwan and use it there, I don't know for sure. I'm pretty sure though, that Taiwan has its own IP laws that are getting similar to the rest of the world's even if they may not be signatories to WIPO. I remember in '93 Taiwanese officials were giving out copies of Taiwan's then-new copyright laws to passers-by in the Taipei airport as a way to publicize their new seriousness about IP. (Whether or how they enforce these is another matter entirely!)
Nonetheless, it is illegal to bring the copied software back to the US without authorization of the US copyright holder. Copying Office 2000 from an ftp server physically located in Taiwan would violate US copyright statutes, and probably customs statutes as well.
If something seems to good to be true, it probably is.
Just to clarify -- MetaMath is not a proof *generator*, it is a proof *verifier*. It won't do your homework for you, at best it can help people who think a certain way understand the nuts and bolts of logic and set theory.
Using MetaMath to do anything else would be *serious* work, and if you can do this, you would be qualified to teach a class in the subject matter, not just work the exercises.
The trick with arguments like Lockard's (at least as summarized by Katz) is that they anticipate examples of getting real stuff from so-called virtual sources by redefining the notion of virtual communities to exclude the things from which you get real stuff, and then declaring, again -- and this time by definition -- that virtual communities are a myth. I never liked the term virtual communities, precisely because it is, as Lockard points out, an oxymoron. "Online community" would be better; it avoids the vagueness of the word virtual, but it's not as much fun to say. I can't think of a single "real" community that actually satisfies all my needs and desires -- I participate in many communities, online being the "location" of some of them. Goodness, this is such an old argument. There's nothing new here, except that an English Lit professor managed to publish a collection of the same doubts and issues that surfaced back on EIES2 in the '70s, as Howard Rheingold documented in his Virtual Communities book years ago.
I really wouldn't mind if Remarq only attached an ad for their own services to my posts. After all, they have to pay the bills somehow. And, if I'm posting from Remarq, I'm in a very real way endorsing their service anyway.
But to add a Keen.com ad to my post is pretty shoddy. Keen.com, apart from being a silly concept, markets itself often as a way of contacting for-pay psychics. I really can't get behind endorsing that in any context.
The Deja case is perhaps even a little sadder. DejaNews started as Usenet archive (very useful and a huge contribution to the Net community), then added a Web-based interface to Usenet (also a big contribution), then started peppering those Web pages with ads to pay the bills (probably a necessary evil) and then . . . . literally sold out, to new owners who reconceptualized the entire Usenet as nothing more than a way for consumers to discuss products (an incredible travesty, and pretty much a metaphor for the course of the Internet over the past five years).
It's not that I mind commerce. Commerce is good; it is the machinery that enables modern society, and support me and my family.
But all of life is not actually comerce, and I do mind the replacement of things that are fundamentally non-commercial with commercial simulacrums that are far inferior to the original.
SecurityFocus notes that the Quova service mark is registered at the USPTO for "providing demographic, geographic and psychographic information to others."
SecurityFocus also paraphrases Quova CEO Bhargava as asserting that the "service mark description is a broad category crafted by company attorneys, and has little to do with Quova's business plan."
Registering a mark whose service description exceeds the actual services provided can result in that mark being invalidated by the PTO. In other words, it's illegal.
Sounds to me like Quova is being disingenuous here, at best, and trying to pass it off as an inevitable result of their secrecy or their lawyers' overreaching. I'm not buying it.
Around our company we usually recommend the two-book series Horstmannn and Cornell's Core Java. It's best if you know a language like C or C++ before reading this. These books are very well-written and they don't skimp on the hard stuff. One may wish to consider glossing over the increasingly deprecated AWT material in favor of some other book on JFC and Swing, when the time comes to learn GUI stuff.
I really don't believe that Codes of Ethics do very much good, and I'm not a huge fan of the idea that software development needs to be turned into a "profession," whatever that means.
As a software guy who used to practice law for a living, I've lived both sides of the street.
Lawyers live under a code of ethics that in most states has literally become enacted as part of the statutory law, and also is enforced, at least in theory, by the courts and Bar Associations. Some of the ethical codes work to help protect the clients, some work to better some view of society I guess, but many of these rules simply operate to keep other working folks from practicing law without a license. It is turf protectionism in its rawest form. Further, some lawyers actually spend time pushing the envelope on what practices are "ethical" by finessing the rules. Not a pretty picture. And, of course, there are now lawyers who specialize in the lawyers' ethical rules themselves, making lucrative practices out of defending other attorneys accused of malpractice. Do we in software really want this stuff to happen in our field?
The existence of the lawyers' code, and mandated degrees, and bar exams, and mandatory legal education do little to the ensure competence of the individual lawyer. Word of mouth from satisfied customers you know is still the best way to find a good attorney.
Regarding the IEEE/ACM SEEPP Code of Ethics, I was for a while a member of the task force that drafted the current code. It's all very nice and noble, but there isn't much in it that all of us didn't learn by the time we got to kindergarten.
Worse, there are a few things in there that I wouldn't want to be held accountable for as a practicing programmer. Here are the highlights:
1) Once you are a "professional", you can be held liable for malpractice, and you must legally exercise a higher standard of care than other mortals have to in their chosen fields. For most software, there is little societal benefit to be gained for the added burden placed on the practitioner (and their malpractice insurers). The costs for such insurance are just passed on to consumers, anyway. (Some software does require high standards of care, but really, not most.)
2) The Code effectively makes programmers responsible for respecting and enforcing other people's intellectual property rights in their workplace. So, if your boss won't pay for a site license for that software everyone is using, does that mean you should be sanctioned by a professional organization for continuing to work there? For not sticking your neck out? Where's the line? Why do software people have to live with this explicit ethical responsibility and not, say, secretaries? Don't we all have to follow copyright law anyway? I don't get it.
3) The Code also places the responsibility for quality on individual programmers, where it often belongs, but doesn't magically imbue programmers with any means to impose this goal on the their employers. The Code itself does not speak to the non-programmers' employers' ethical responsibility. So, in practice, this stuff rings a bit hollow.
Finally, when thinking about the ACM/IEEE Code of Ethics, I find it helpful to remember that most of the good folks on the task force aren't actually practicing programmers (though many of them were at one time or another). The task force was predominantly composed of academics who make their living teaching computer ethics courses. I don't mean to question peoples' motives; I found all my colleagues on the task force to be good and honorable folks pursuing ideals in which they passionately believed. I mean, why else be an ethics professor? But I really couldn't ignore the fact that most of these folks' passions will be essentially guaranteed places in the curricula of our universities once software ethics is legislated.
So I still can't figure out how a software ethics code makes the world a better place, even though the ethical practice of software development is a good thing unto itself.
Yes. The thing to note about MIT is that it is a big place -- big enough for multiple paradigms to coexist and barely notice each other. MIT, being a human creation, has plenty of good and evil, yin and yang, within itself to confound anyone's predictions. The MIT of X and Kerberos is also the MIT of Draper and Lincoln Labs. The same institution that was the first to openly distribute PGP online also has for decades had a think tank on campus funded largely by the CIA, or so it is widely believed. $25 million is a drop in the MIT bucket. It's more likely that MIT will coopt pieces of Microsoft than vice versa.