Blackmoor Vituperative

U.S. Supreme Court justices on Tuesday appeared to take issue with the current legal standard for granting patents, which many high-tech firms claim is ineffective at weeding out inventions that should be obvious.

During hour-long oral arguments in a case that’s closely watched by the business community, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that an existing federal court test for determining patent obviousness relied too little on common sense. Justice Antonin Scalia went so far as to call the test “gobbledygook” and “meaningless.”

“It’s worse than meaningless because it complicates the question rather than focusing on the statute,” Roberts went on to say of the test, which requires evidence of a past “teaching, suggestion or motivation” that would lead to a particular invention in order for it to be declared “obvious.”

The case, rooted in an obscure patent spat about gas pedal designs between the Canadian firm KSR International and Pennsylvania-based Teleflex, has attracted the attention of high-tech, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other patent-dependent firms because because it addresses one of the fundamental questions in patent law: What makes an invention, particularly a combination of existing parts, too “obvious” to warrant protection?

If the high court decides to rewrite the legal standard of patent “obviousness” to make it more restrictive, it could have wide-ranging effects by reshaping U.S. intellectual property law and reducing the number of marginal patents. Tuesday’s arguments are the only ones that will be heard in the case. A decision is expected by July 2007.

(from ZDNet, Supreme Court weighs ‘obviousness’ of patents)

I have to admit, I am completely surprised that the Court is even hearing these arguments. But this is actually the third major patent case the Court has heard this year. It’s almost enough to put a dent in my knee-jerk cynicism.

France’s gendarmes and Ministry of Culture and Communication have done it, and now members of the country’s parliarment are about to switch to open source.

Starting in June 2007, PCs in French deputes’ offices will be equipped with a Linux operating system and open-source productivity software.

The project, backed by parliament members Richard Cazenave and Bernard Carayon of the Union for a Popular Movement party, will see 1,154 French parliamentary workstations running on Linux, with OpenOffice.org productivity software, the Firefox Web browser and an open-source e-mail client.

(from ZDNet, French parliament dumping Windows for Linux)

The French have gotten a lot of bad press ever since they criticized the violent international misadventures of the USA. Maybe this will help remind people that France was the Western technological power for centuries. With any luck, it will remind the French, as well — they seem to have forgotten.

Vive la France!

I wonder why this anti-French sentiment is not publicly condemned. Other nationalities are also sometimes the butt of jokes, but not to the extent the French are. No one with any sense seriously thinks that the Irish are all wife-beating drunks, or suggests replacing “nachos” with “freedom Fritos”. Why is it that the mainstream culture accepts angry, even hateful comments about the French, where the same comments about Mexicans, the Irish, the Japanese, or — heaven forbid — Africans would elicit a stern and righteous response? Why are we willing to demonize France, and not (for example) China? Are we (Americans) really so insecure that we’ll attack anyone who disagrees with us, even when many of us know that we’re wrong?

I don’t get people, sometimes. Make that “most times”.

Following a time of mass avoidance in the aftermath of the dot-com bust, the U.S. IT work force is facing a shortage of people, according to the Commerce Department’s technology czar.

“The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough,” said Robert Cresanti, undersecretary of commerce for technology, in an exclusive interview with eWEEK editors. “There are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets.”

Cresanti said U.S. colleges and universities are not enrolling enough engineering students, resulting in a dearth of information technology professionals. In addition to boosting engineering enrollment, he urged opening the gates to more foreign workers, including H-1B holders.

(from eWeek, Tech Czar: More IT Workers Needed)

Let me get this straight: this genius thinks that if we increase the number of indentured servants we import to take existing IT jobs, thus reducing the demand for American IT workers, that this will encourage more Americans to go into IT.

Riiiight.

The number of American college students who major in IT is dropping because wages for people in IT are dropping and because the demand for Americans in IT is dropping. The wages in the IT field are dropping and the demand for Americans in IT is dropping because companies like Capital One and Circuit City prefer to hire lower-paid H1-B workers, who are essentially indentured servants. Increasing the number of H1-B visas, as this idiot Cresanti suggests, would make that situation worse, not better. What sensible person is going to spend a small fortune getting a technical degree when the pay is dropping and the jobs are being handed to imported indentured servants?

There are already numerous competent US IT people who are having trouble finding jobs because companies like Capital One and Circuit City give preferential hiring to H1-B workers. If we want to encourage more Americans to go into IT, we need to reduce or even eliminate the importation of H1-B workers. If we don’t (and I am sure we won’t), in a generation there won’t be any Americans in the IT field at all.

Do not misunderstand: this is not about race. It is not about immigration. It is about the future of the United States. The problem is not that people are willing to cross an ocean to work here, and the problem is not that those people have brown skin or have an accent. I strongly support immigration — let the best and brightest of the world come to the USA! Let them come here, and let them stay here, and become citizens. Immigration is what has made the US a great nation. H1-B workers are not immigrants — they come here, take jobs from Americans, and then they take that money and expertise and go home. Because they took IT jobs from Americans and drove down wages, fewer young Americans are willing to go into IT. Because there are fewer Americans in IT, the next batch of H1-B workers have jobs here waiting for them. It’s an expanding cycle, until there aren’t any American IT workers at all, and all of the money paid to IT workers goes overseas. Eventually, there won’t be any need for IT workers to come to the USA in the first place, because the jobs will have moved to India, or whatever other overpopulated third-world country rises to take India’s place thirty years from now. (If current trends hold out, that country will be China.)

It’s also worth pointing out, because sometimes people need to have things spelled out for them, that I have absolutely no animosity toward anyone who learns English and crosses an ocean to work here. I hope that I would be brave enough to do the same thing, in their situation. I have nothing but respect and admiration for people who would take such an enormous risk for a better life.

The response time of a Web page is critical to an application being fully utilized since users will quickly navigate to another site when/if load times are unacceptable. In this article, Tony Patton examines ways to optimize Web applications.

Optimize Web applications with reduced page size

There is nothing earth-shattering in this article, but it offers good, solid advice.

A federal district judge on Friday rejected the Bush administration’s request to halt a lawsuit that alleges AT&T unlawfully cooperated with a broad and unconstitutional government surveillance program.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the lawsuit could continue while a portion of it was being appealed, despite the U.S. Justice Department’s arguments that further hearings and other proceedings would consequently endanger national security.

[…]

Friday’s ruling represents another preliminary victory for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed its lawsuit against AT&T in January. In its suit, the EFF charged that AT&T has opened its telecommunications facilities up to the National Security Agency and continues to “to assist the government in its secret surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans.”

The ruling is also a win for attorneys in 47 other cases against numerous large telecommunications providers. The cases are in the process of being consolidated into one mammoth lawsuit in the northern district of California.

Last week, the Justice Department filed a 27-page request (click for PDF) saying at the least, the court should halt the AT&T case because any proceeding would “indirectly confirm or deny classified facts and cause harm to the national security.”

(from ZDNet, Judge won’t halt AT&T wiretapping lawsuit)

The Justice Department assertion is, of course, complete crap.

A study by the Australian Institute of Criminology revealed that software and music industries couldn’t explain how they calculated piracy losses, even though this data was used for lobbying efforts and in court cases (The Australian reports).

According to The Australian, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) – a body responsible for “investigative and intellectual property rights enforcement related services to the Australian music industry” did not know how piracy estimates were calculated as data it collected was processed by the IFPI in London. The MIPI manager commented that: “The reason … [she] wasn’t personally aware of how they are prepared is because they are compiled by the IFPI… They have a group that has been doing this for some time.”

Also the report noted that often the following misleading assumption is used to estimate piracy losses: a person who acquired pirate goods would otherwise have paid full price for the legal product. Moreover, unverified extrapolations were used by lobbyists to present the problem to the government.

Finally the report suggests that if these statistics are not thoroughly explained by the purveyors they should be withdrawn.

This study is a draft so far and the institute plans to check it further (after the criticism voiced by the industry) before it is handed over to the Australian government as “senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions”.

Piracy stats don’t add up, The Australian
New music ‘piracy’ statistics, p2pnet
Piracy losses fabricated – Aussie study, The Register
Australian Agency Questions Piracy Damage Valuations, Digital Music News

There’s a good reason the music industry can’t explain how they are calculating piracy losses. To my knowledge, there’s only ever been one serious large-scale research project conducted to try to calculate the direct effects of “illegal” downloading. The researchers’ conclusion was that peer-to-peer downloading’s effect on CD sales was so minimal that it was indistinguishible from zero.

This is yet another indication that the entertainment industry’s global push to expand their stranglehold on intellectual property rights is not about protecting creativity; it’s about the desire of a handful of global oligarchs to claim ownership of all forms of human creativity.

You can download a copy of the full study at: www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

(from AllOfMP3.com, Music industry fails to explain how the piracy losses are calculated)

I have been saying for years that the whole “losses from piracy” argument is based on fallacies and that it’s just smoke and mirrors so that the media robber barons can seize and retain control of our cultural future. In my opinion, this observation falls into the “water is wet and teen-agers are horny” category. But some people are so damned gullible that they’ll believe anything the Digital Rights Mafia says unless there’s an egghead study that tells them what anyone with eyes could see for themselves.

I just finished watching a really cute movie called D.E.B.S. It’s sort of like Clueless, except the girls are in college, carry guns, and there’s some girl-girl kissing. It’s funny and campy and sweet.

An archive of 75+ inspirational messages from Despair, Inc., courtesy of TechRepublic.

The US Department of Homeland Security has warned that attackers are exploiting an unpatched flaw in Windows to compromise systems via malicious websites.

Microsoft on Friday said it was investigating reports of a newly discovered, unpatched bug in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX control, which it confirmed was being exploited on malicious sites. The bug has the potential to infect a large number of systems. Since it doesn’t require any user interaction, a user must merely use Internet Explorer to visit a site containing the exploit.

(from TechWorld, Windows hit by zero-day flaw)

Does a house have to fall on you people for you to get the message?

1. Don’t use Internet Explorer!
2. Don’t use or enable ActiveX!

While discussing blogs this afternoon with a colleague, we had a brief discussion on the topic of forcing a hyperlink to open in a new browser window (typically with the target=”_blank” tag). I took the position that most professional web developers take: it’s nearly always a bad idea to wrest control away from the user. My colleague took the position that most people in advertising take: the less control the user has, the better.

The passage below is by Jakob Nielsen, widely acknowledged as the world’s leading expert on user-friendly web design, from his list of the ten very worst web design mistakes of all time. I am not quoting him because I think his opinion is infallible (there are one or two areas where Nielsen and I differ, if only in the details). I am quoting him because experience has taught me that he is very good at explaining why a web design mistake is, in fact, a mistake.

Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet. Don’t pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management).

Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user’s machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the Back button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users often don’t notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill up the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed out Back button.

Links that don’t behave as expected undermine users’ understanding of their own system. A link should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser’s “open in new window” command — assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser’s standard behavior.

With respect to blogs, specifically, I think it is worth pointing out that the best blogs — and, more importantly for my colleague’s purposes, the blogs that get linked to the most — almost never force users to open new windows when they click a link. Visit Technorati.com and check out the top 100 blogs. Go through them all and see how many force users to open links in new windows. I guarantee you that the top 10 English speaking blogs do not.