invisibility

News came last week that a Tokyo professor was working on a system for making someone invisible.

This afternoon, I came across a patent for a Cloaking system using optoelectronically controlled camouflage, via Delphion's Gallery of Obscure Patents (some truly creative and amusing inventions are listed in the gallery, and the gallery's archive).

Just who will go into full scale production of their invisibility systems first? I guess we will just have to wait and see. Good question. Don't know.

feeling rather enum

One single number to identify each of us, tying together our phone numbers, email addresses, web sites, fax numbers, and instant messaging addresses. That's the recommendation of the US Department of Commerce.

USA Today reports upon the standard that will allow this convergence of personal information in an article called Consumers could get one number for phone, faxes, Net access. Frankly, the idea leaves me feeling a bit numb. I'm not sure how different this idea is from the concept of a national ID, or the data mining proposed under the Total Information Awareness program sponsored by DARPA.

A couple of articles sum up nicely many of the concerns that I have about the ENUM standard. Roger Clarke's ENUM - A Case Study in Social Irresponsibility is a thoughtful, and thought provoking analysis of the proposed standard. His abstract:

ENUM is meant to provide a means of mapping from telephone numbers to IP-addresses: "today, many addresses; with ENUM, only one", as its proponents express it.

Any such capability would be extremely dangerous, providing governments, corporations, and even individuals, with the ability to locate and to track other people, both in network space, and in physical space. The beneficiaries would be the powerful who seek to manipulate the behaviour of others. It would do immense social, sociological and democratic harm.

The astounding thing is that the engineers responsible for it are still adopting the naïve position that its impact and implications are someone else's problem. With converged computing-and-communications technologies becoming ever more powerful and ever more pervasive, engineers have to be shaken out of their cosy cocoon, and forced to confront the implications, along with the technology and its applications.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) also takes a hard cold look at ENUM, and their analysis of the privacy protection controls in the standard is equally as harsh as Roger Clarke's.

national service

From the Congress of the United States, the Universal National Service Act of 2003:

To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.

chronically ill river needs new medical coverage

The State of Delaware has declared a portion of the Delaware River, chronically ill. DuPont Co. opposes this declaration, and can you wonder why?

I suspect this will take more than two asprin.

I guess you can't just put factories up and down both sides of a river, pumping toxic chemicals into the water, without killing the river.

Intellectual property run wild

I'm sure that there's a bit of good business sense applied here, but I was kind of saddened when I saw the following. What we can't copyright, we patent. What we can't patent, we trademark. What we can't trademark, we copyright.

Next time you throw together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, remember that if you had applied for the patent before 1995, you could have been there first.

And while a lighter manufacturer was able to get a trademark for the shape of their lighters, you wonder who else will follow that route. Maybe a tire manufacturer can get a trademark for the shape of their tires?

If copyright law can be used to keep people from making replacement toner cartridges for printers, why not?

It strikes me that any of the above could have easily been used five years ago as companion pieces to a 1998 Onion article called Microsoft patents Ones, Zeros.

I am inspired to come out with a new line of foods after reading them though. One package would contain milk and cookies. Another would have donuts and coffee. I'm thinking of calling them "dunkables." I hope someone doesn't have the patent yet. Don't worry, you'll still be able to dunk in the privacy of your own home without having to send me a check.

six sigma

Not a fraternity... at least not in the traditional sense. Six Sigma is a statistical term indicating a miniscule error rate. It is being used as an initiative by the DuPont Legal Model to strive for an enlightened efficiency.

Well then, what is the Du Pont Legal Model? It is an effort to provide a standardization to the legal services provided to the Du Pont entities, improving efficiency while cutting costs. I can see only two Delaware firms that are so affiliated: Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams LLP ; and Potter Anderson & Corroon LLP. I am all for cutting costs and improving efficiency! Where do I sign up?

Smart move on the part of DuPont, and a nice inclusion in our profession.

molly

Our Molly is in the arms of an angel (for puppies). May she find some comfort there.