Well, that just raises further problems -- difficulties in walking or taking public transit to the shops aren't a signficiant barrier to petfood procurement in most of the US: the ubiquity of the automobile, and a built environment which caters to it, makes sure of that. The problem is that web-ordering and delivery of dogfood, in the Bay Area or anywhere else, doesn't make sense *AT ALL* and was never intended to -- the Pets.com type of model was about entrepeneurs and VCs taking advantage of a climate that was uniquely suited for screwing lots of money out of gullible investors. I think he's got a theory in search of a problem, really.

I strongly suggest you avoid crossing my path for the rest of your days.

And you just remember this too you bastard. I am the guy who found out in detail about the plans to attack the WTC, the pentagon, and the US Capitol on or around 9-11-01. I have a book in the making right now, and part of it is on the internet.

best thread ever!
http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/messagep...from=1&showall=true

I have just about had it with you internet cowards who are emboldened by anonymity and distance so that you think you have the right to foist your unwarranted horning in on the affairs of others.

(OKay, I'll stop now. You made my day with that, Just! :-)

Those articles on Climate Change are excellent. If you want to learn more both from an Irish/Global and historical perspective read the follwing:

Reading the Irish Landscape. by Frank Mitchell
Climate, History and the Modern World by H.H. Lamb

Both of these guys were geniuses and way ahead of their time. It is abit depressing that certain areas of the scientific community are only coming around to their way of thinking now. A great blog is www.realclimate.org

The situation is actually worse - ICT Ireland, called again for support for software patents - http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=9614994. While ICT Ireland most definitely is pro-big/funded-by business, it's perhaps the most recognisable lobby group for IT in ireland - it was also founded by IBEC. The only other group, ISA (Irish Software Association) has made no comments, however it is a member of ICT so presumably it supports the position.

Justin, why don't you hold a contest to find a guest writer for taint? then you can publish all the entries, and the winner gets to write one day's post for you. :D

because only one person would answer? ;)

the ISA had a talking head on mronign ireland this morning supporting s/w patents.

Cool, so now Linux folks can copy other peoples innovation with impunity in certain parts of Europe. The system needs to be reformed, not abolished - but considering most open source adovcates have never had a patentable idea in their lives its not a wonder they are so happy about this.
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The solution is open standards, and standards should not be patented - the solution is not allowing any little kid with a debugger to reverse engineer my work and my innovations, copy it, and release it as a piece of crud GTK application or something similar. Out of curiosity Justin did IONA file no patents in the seven years you worked there?

"na": You've got a good line in the usual FUD going there.

First off, I'll do you the courtesy of assuming you weren't just using a straw-man argument with that "most open source adovcates" line. As an open source advocate and the author of SpamAssassin, I'll talk about that. SpamAssassin contained quite a bit of patentable innovation, being the first anti-spam product (under any license) to use genetic and neural-network algorithms to optimise a spam detection algorithm. I didn't feel the need to patent those inventions. Sadly, in the meantime, our proprietary competition have gradually encroached on the areas that *we* in the open source community innovated, and may have received patents on the things we invented. (I can't say for sure, since I haven't looked, since all legal advice indicates that I shouldn't.)

Now, *we* invented that stuff first. How exactly does allowing other people to steal my ideas out from under me, at a later date, just because they were the ones to pay the USPTO, help innovation, progress, etc.? How does it improve life and product quality for the customers? Is it better because the other companies paid the filing fees?

Let legitimate competition take care of that, not the competition-evading technique of patenting.

Also, so what if a little kid creates a crappy GTK application. Do you really think that if *your* application was any good, people would use the POS gtk one? There's more to software than the *ideas* used in it, which is exactly where patenting slips up. Software patents give companies a way to capture a monopoly on an *idea* of how a piece of software works, not the implementation. If a competing implementation is better, people will use it.

If the little kid has figured out your product's implementation through reverse engineering, and copied that, you have copyright to fight them with. If they've just figured out your *ideas*, well, that's life. Assuming that you should be assigned ownership over an idea is absurd.

Also: I'm sure Iona filed patents, although I wasn't involved. That's their business. FWIW, at that stage, it was widely believed among investors that software patenting in the US was to be encouraged, and a company that doesn't do what its investors ask, quickly stops having investors. This was before the point of view in the investor community that Laura Creighton talks about, became known.

This might be of interest WRT DNS poisioning. Duane Wessels did some survey work to look for DNS servers that were serving apparently poisioned data. Many seemed like they were just misconfigurations, but some pointed you at a web proxy that would proxy the real site!

You can get Duane's slides at http://public.oarci.net/oarc/workshop-2005/minutes/wessels-dsc - there were also some interesting talks on identifing Botnets before they become active at the same workshop.

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'This might be of interest WRT DNS poisioning. Duane Wessels did
some survey work to look for DNS servers that were serving
apparently poisioned data. Many seemed like they were just
misconfigurations, but some pointed you at a web proxy that
would proxy the real site!'

cool -- but thoroughly mystifying! why were they doing that?
I couldn't quite pick that up from the slides.

- --j.
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I guess you mean "why were they trying DNS poisioning?" rather than "Why was Duane trying to survey it?". I think the people doing it were either curious or they were just trying on the off chance they would catch some interesting data, however that's speculation based on what people were saying at the workshop.

'I guess you mean "why were they trying DNS poisioning?" rather than "Why was Duane trying to survey it?".'

yeah. I meant, why were "some" DNS servers pointing you at a web proxy that would proxy the real site. it seems like such an odd thing to do!

mind you, this form of reverse proxying has been observed being used by spammers and phishers.

oh, I wish I'd seen that talk now ;)