news
-- H.L. Mencken [ocr]
is no place to lose your wings
so love, love, love.
-- Daniel Ladinsky translating Hafiz
The Federalist offers {@The New School Prayer}. [fed]
If you're looking for middle of the day news, I'm inserting it here, after the "And in other news..." line below the patent stuff.
Robert X. Cringely - Have Another Cup? The Return of Java and its New Importance in Business: a nice primer/recap on Java & Linux. "If Java is the universal language, Linux is emerging as the universal operating system. IBM has Linux running on practically every computer technology it makes... Remember, you heard it here first." [cafe]
"BlueJ is an integrated Java environment specifically designed for introductory teaching... BlueJ offers: a project manager, a compiler, an editor, a class browser, a degugger, a virtual machine, full tool integration (compilation from within the editor, compiler error message, display in the editor, setting breakpoints in the editor, etc.), abstraction from operating system, class structure visualisation, direct object interaction, simplicity, easy-to-use interface." It's written in Java, and it's free. [cafe]
IBM DeveloperWorks - "jMocha is a framework for timing simple Java operations accurately in any JVM environment. The benchmark framework uses sophisticated statistical calculations to make sure that the benchmark measurements are very accurate and reproducible." The problem with most of the IBM DeveloperWorks Java code is that the license doesn't allow you to ship their code. Here's one that you never need to ship, might actually be useful. [lt]
I tried CrushFTP again with nothing running on my machine but it and the builtin Windows telnet client. Still slow:
755942 bytes received in 73.99 seconds (9.978 Kbytes/s)Copying the same file back from the Unix machine using the builtin Windows FTP client:
755942 bytes received in 0.72Seconds 1049.92Kbytes/sec.
Thomas C. Greene at The Register - Janet Reno would curb press freedom on line: apparently the computer snooping that the Clinton administration wants to do is forbidden by the Privacy Protection Act of 1980. Don't cry Willy. Don't cry Janet. [lt]
Jeff Bezos at Amazon - An Open Letter from Jeff Bezos on the Subject of Patents: a nice response in the on-going conversation about Amazon's patent warfare. Proposes changing patent law, but doesn't propose changing Amazon's behavior. You can share your views. As of this writing there were 92 responses. Somehow I ("wws") got in at number 3, right after Jeff and Tim O'Reilly. [script]
I got tired of reading at about 75. The tone was appreciative of Jeff's openness. A few people were convinced by Jeff's letter to end their boycott. Most were not, including yours truly.
I found the reply of "jeffr" (# 32) to be interesting:
The founding fathers did not introduce the idea of patents as a "prize" for inventions; it is a "prize" for the _disclosure_ of inventions. The idea is encourage disclosure of technologies that would otherwise be kept secret, and possibly die with the inventor! In exchange for disclosure, inventors are given a limited monopoly on the idea.The first filter the patent office should use to reject patent applications is the "disclosure" notion. If there is no way for the inventor to use the invention without disclosing it, then there's no reason why the inventor should be rewarded for disclosing it. Pretty simple.
Somewhere along the way, the patent office dropped this filter, and started offering monopolies to anyone who would nag them enough.
Amazon's one click "system" would not be patentable, because it cannot be used without disclosing it. Does this mean Amazon shouldn't bother investing to implement the idea? Of course not. Amazon, or any business, will do whatever they can to make their business more attractive to consumers, regardless of what intellectual property they have or do not have.
And from Lars Jensen (#54), hehe:
To whom it may concern: I have just invented the following concept:"HALF-CLICK ORDERING"
This is a system by which goods may be purchased online by positioning a mouse pointer over an onscreen button that indicates the desire to purchase the item, and pressing the mouse's button. The goods are purchased as of the down-press. A release of the button is not necessary, resulting in greater convenience for the user.
I hereby contribute this innovation to the public domain.
There was also a pointer to OpenPatents.org, where Mark Shewmaker proposes an "Open Patent License", similar to the gpl.
Tim O'Reilly - Amazon's Patent Reform Proposal: Tim's response to Jeff's letter. [script]
Chris Oakes at Wired - Amazon Calls for Patent Fix: Wired's view. "Yes, software patents are easy to get. Yes, the system needs radical change. And yes, we're keeping our software patents." [wired]
Russ Mitchell & Anne Speedie at Wide Open News - Amazon's Bezos Calls for Radical Change in Patent Laws: pointers to many of the stories in this passion play, including Richard Stallman's Boycott Amazon! story at Linux Today. [wide]
Dave Winer's got some more goodies over on today's Scripting News. Don't miss Bill Curry's letter to Karlin Lilington. [script]
faisal has moved back to Blogger, apparently mostly because "editthispage" is down a lot these days. I still love you, Faisal.
I'm having a hard time getting to "editthispage" today, too. Maybe Dave Winer needs to add some more horsepower to the server. It's amazing that one little $2,000 Windows 2000 machine has lasted this long. Then again, maybe it's just lunch time on the net...
John Lott at CBS News - Guns Save Lives: Mr Lott's stump speech that needs to be repeated and repeated and repeated until the Brady Bunch gets it. The amazing thing is to see it at CBS news. Yeah! [sierra]
Colin Johnson at EE Times - $6 System-On-A-Chip Mimics Human Vision: "The $6 Generic Visual Perception Processor (GVPP) can automatically detect objects and track their movement in real-time, according to Bureau d'Etudes Vision (BEV)." Hope it's real. [/.]
Steven Young via Marijuana News - The Boys on the Tracks by Mara Leveritt Reviewed by Stephen Young: There's a new book about the two teenage boys who were killed in 1987 by police when the boys witnessed a drug drop in a small town south of Little Rock, Arkansas. The police were there to pick up the drugs. The boys' dead bodies were thrown onto a train track and run over by a train. The murders were covered up by government at many levels; locally to protect the police, on the state and federal levels to protect the CIA's drug running operation through Mena, Arkansas, that was being used to finance the arming and training of the Nicaruguan contras. Then governor Slick-Willy Clinton was likely involved, but he slipped out of that one just as he's slipped out of every crime since. The book covers the train deaths and the widespread corruption caused by the war on some drugs. For more information go to www.idmedia.com. I've seen their video, Obstruction of Justice. Not fun. [mjn]
Elaine Shannon at Time Magazine via Marijuana News - The World's Best Pot Now Comes from Vancouver: you've gotta buy the paper magazine for this one (Time online doesn't have it). They've got a bud picture worthy of High Times. There's also an article about the return of the drug ecstacy, one I never tried. [mjn]
Ron Jenkins at Politics Live - Keyes Predicts Gore Will Beat Bush: "Alan Keyes promised Thursday to stay in the Republican presidential race because George W. Bush is too weak to stand up to Al Gore on key moral issues like abortion." [wnd]
