Slate has a photo essay on various displays of the Ten Commandments on public grounds and discusses the constitutionality of each. The most interesting thing I learned is that the big Fraternal Order of the Eagles Ten Commandments monuments were paid for in part by Cecil B DeMille to market his commandments movie.

Charles Miller wrote an item item today about AOL’s patent for instant messaging (courtesy of ICQ). In it he says he thinks IM is patentable because it was something completely new and innovative. The problem is, if it is patentable, ICQ should not be the one with the patent. Back in 1995, I worked for a company called InSoft that you have almost certainly never heard of. Our key product was called Communique! — a desktop videoconferencing tool that ran on high end Unix workstations with really expensive video cards. As PCs became more powerful, InSoft came out with a Windows version of the product, and wound up coming out with a lightweight product that would run over low bandwidth connections. We released this product under the name CoolTalk, and were acquired by Netscape not long afterward (for a brief period of time, CoolTalk was actually part of the Netscape install).

Anyway, one of the features of our products from the high end product down to CoolTalk was that you could maintain an address book of people who you conferenced with (think buddy list in AIM), and when you wanted to start a conference, our tool showed you who on your buddy list was currently online so that you didn’t bother to invite people to your conference if they weren’t running their conferencing tool. The real kicker here is that our product had a number of tools built in. It had video and audio, but it also had a file transfer tool, a shared whiteboard tool, and something we called the text tool. It had a window with two panes, the bottom one was for typing new messages, and the top pane showed a history of the messages you’d exchanged with the other person (or people) in your conference. In other words, the very same window that’s used in every IM application that I’ve ever seen.

The ironic thing from my standpoint is that we had all of the parts of a truly killer application buried underneath the video and and audio conferencing veneer. We thought the killer features were multimedia, when it turned out that the killer feature was letting people see their friends online and talk to them using text. When I wrote the docs for the text tool, I suggested that users could use it to help diagnose audio and video problems in their conferences. As it’s turned out, seven years later people still seem satisfied with just using the boring old text tool.

My point here is that despite the overwhelming success of ICQ in particular and IM in general, there’s really no excuse for giving AOL that patent. I have anecdotal evidence from one obscure startup that did what ICQ did before the patent was filed. I’m sure plenty of other people have similar stories as well for just about every software patent that’s been issued. I would like to note that I haven’t read the patent itself, maybe it covers an obscure technical point that our product didn’t have. And, to further crank up the irony meter, the work we did at InSoft was purchased by Netscape which is now owned by AOL, so our prior art wouldn’t count anyway.

I’ve migrated all of the content on this site to a Creative Commons license. I went for the license that requires attribution, noncommercial use only, and that anyone who uses the content agree to share their work as well. Seems fair to me.

If you’re using the HTML provided by Creative Commons and you want it to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict, you’ll need to change border="0" in the img tag to style="border: none".

The White House has ordered the deployment of a missle defense system, despite the fact that, you know, it doesn’t work. Actually, it’s worked 62.5% of the time in controlled tests; who knows what kind of success rate that would lead to if it ever had to be used. As anyone who has followed this site for awhile knows, there are a lot of people smarter than me who don’t think it can ever be deployed in an effective manner. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I know we’re spending billions of dollars to roll out a worthless system. Not to go all bleeding heart on you, but as long as we’re just going to waste money, why not use it to feed the starving? If it will make the White House feel better to pay defense contractors to distribute the food, that’ll work for me, too.

You know what makes it obvious that the Democratic party really is lost in the wilderness? The fact that 41% of Americans think an unreconstructed panderer (before to racists and now to anybody willing to listen) and obvious moron like Trent Lott is well suited to serve as Senate majority leader. Shouldn’t the other 60% of us send those idiots packing?

ElcomSoft was found not guilty of violating the DMCA. Ha ha ha. The result for the teen author of DeCSS in Norway was less pleasant.

Now that Wi-Fi is pretty much taking over the world, the military is complaining that it interferes with some types of military radar and that changes should be made to accommodate the military’s requirements. Unfortunately, it’s too late. There are already millions of Wi-Fi devices that have been deployed, and there are going to be millions more as well. The appropriate time for the military to complain was when the FCC proposed opening up the frequency range used by Wi-Fi for unlicensed usage. Besides, newer cordless phones also use the same frequency ranges as 802.11b and 802.11a wireless networking devices — are we going to update all of those as well? And finally, what incentive to people in other countries have for complying with the requirements of the US military? In theory, it’s more important that military radar work in parts of the world where we actually fight than here on American soil, unless the concern is that Wi-Fi is making it harder for us to catch drug smugglers or something.

This post at Textism makes me glad I never sent Dean Allen that email telling him how much he looks like Dubya (see picture). One day I went as far as shuffling through the pictures of Dubya at Yahoo News to see if I could find one with a particularly uncanny resemblance to send along but I got bored of it really quickly and gave up.

The Creative Commons site has launched, along with some interesting licenses you can apply to your creative works. Of course you can write any license you want for the work you do, but the availability of some standard licenses for software was a great catalyst for the explosion of open source software, and hopefully these licenses will create a similar renaissance in the creation of other intellectual property dedicated to the public good. This isn’t the first attempt to create open licenses for creative works, but that’s OK. What’s important here is the exposure.

Just riffing here on something somebody said:

Andy Oliver is whipping up a froth about the JCP. One thing I rarely see discussed by the proponents of open sourcing Java is how to stop Microsoft from highjacking Java. If Java was open sourced, then Microsoft would pick it up, change it in incompatible ways, and then distribute it to 90% of all computers on the planet through the next version of Windows, and every Windows update.

What if we posit that C# is Microsoft’s incompatible revision of Java and the .NET runtime is the new Java Virtual Machine? There’s a lot more to .NET and the CLR than that, but my point stands. Now that Microsoft already has its Java killer out on the market, it seems the risks of open sourcing have gone down.