Top of the mornin’ to ye all!

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Er, it’s St Patrick’s Day. More importantly, Sinn Fein have not been invited to the White House and the McCartney family have. And of course it’s Cheltenham week. Sue and I used to go every year with a group of friends. We had a rule that if anyone had a winner in a race, they had to buy a bottle of champagne at the end of the race. On one unforgettable day we had six bottles. Ah, those were the days… (dozes off into daydream about the time when marmalade was thicker and 640k of RAM was enough for anyone.)

What? (Shakes himself abruptly) Where was I? Oh, yes, I remember. People are always attributing to Bill Gates the quote that “640k should be enough for anyone”. But Gates has vehemently denied that he said it. And, for once, I believe him.

Summers censured by Harvard academics

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From The Harvard Crimson Online

In a sharp and unexpected rebuke of University President Lawrence H. Summers, members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted yesterday that they lack confidence in his leadership.

Voting by secret ballot in a Faculty meeting at the Loeb Drama Center, 218 faculty members affirmed a motion … stating that “the Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.” One hundred eighty-five voted against and 18 abstained from the motion, which was tantamount to a vote of no confidence.

A second motion, expressing regret for Summers’ Jan. 14 remarks on women in science and certain “aspects of the President’s managerial approach,” also passed the Faculty.

The two motions, allegedly unique in Harvard’s history, are largely symbolic gestures. Only the Harvard Corporation, the University’s governing body, can force Summers to step down, and I can’t see them giving him the push.

Jury thinks Bernie did understand accounting after all

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The New York Times | Worldcom verdict

Bernard J. Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, was found guilty yesterday in federal court of orchestrating a record $11 billion fraud that came to symbolize the telecommunications bubble of the 1990’s and the excesses that were uncovered in its aftermath.

Mr. Ebbers was convicted of securities fraud, conspiracy and seven counts of filing false reports with regulators. Each count carries a sentence of 5 or 10 years.

Mr. Ebbers and WorldCom, through the acquisition of dozens of phone companies, helped to create the rush for telecommunications stocks in the 1990’s. They were at the center of a swirl of scandals that cast doubt on corporate accounting methods, the role of Wall Street analysts, and investment bankers who sold stocks and bonds to investors.

Note: during the trial, Bernie maintained that he didn’t understand all the accounting mumbo-jumbo. He was, it seems, just a regular guy at the mercy of sharp-witted accountants.

The doomsday plan: useful checklist for terrorists

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According to today’s New York Times, the US Department of Homeland Security has identified a dozen possible strikes it views as most plausible or devastating, including detonation of a nuclear device in a major city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings and a truck bombing of a sports arena. The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack.

They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000; spreading pneumonic plague in the bathrooms of an airport, sports arena and train station, killing 2,500 and sickening 8,000 worldwide; and infecting cattle with foot-and-mouth disease at several sites, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

The agency’s objective is not to scare the public, officials said, and they have no credible intelligence that such attacks are planned. The department did not intend to release the document publicly, but a draft of it was inadvertently posted on a Hawaii state government Web site.

Steam coming out of your subroutines?

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Interesting paper by Nancy Leveson on “High-Pressure Steam Engines and Computer Software” which argues that we can learn useful lessons for software engineering from the history of high-pressure steam engines.

Risk induced by technological innovation existed long before computers; this is not the first time that humans have come up with an extremely useful new technology that is potentially dangerous. We can learn from the past before we repeat the same mistakes. In particular, parallels exist between the early development of high-pressure steam engines and software engineering that we can apply to the use of computers in complex systems.

Moral blackmail

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Here’s something strangely repulsive. Quentin pointed me towards a site run by a man who claims to have found an injured, young rabbit under a porch one day, and then nursed it back to health. He then named the rabbit Toby. This individual swears that he will have Toby butchered and served for dinner on June 30, 2005, unless he is able to raise $50,000 in donations or merchandise sales. If he is able to raise the money, he promises that Toby will have the life of Riley until he dies a natural death. The site provides the story of the bunny’s rescue, photos (one of which shows Toby sitting in a cooking pot), possible recipes and answers to questions (some dealing with the legality of the website and the underlying idea). Rob Parsons has written an interesting commentary on this ingenious attempt to part animal lovers from their cash. Apparently he’s raised $18,000 already. But PayPal have cancelled his account after protests from a rabbit sanctuary,

AOL thinks again about AIM Terms of Service

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According to eWeek (where do they get these names from?), AOL has been taken aback by the storm of protest raised by its plans to change the terms of service under which people use AIM.

“We’re not making any policy changes. We’re making some linguistic changes to clarify certain things and explain it a little better to our users,” AOL spokesperson Andrew Weinstein told eWEEK.com.

The modifications will use similar language from the AIM privacy policy to “make it clear that AOL does not read private user-to-user communications,” Weinstein said.

“We’ll be adding that to the beginning of the section to make it clear that the privacy rights discussed in that section only refer to content posted to public areas of the AIM service.”

More importantly, Weinstein said a blunt and inelegant line that reads “You waive any right to privacy” will be deleted altogether.

“That’s a phrase that should not have been in that section in the first place. It clearly caused confusion, with good reason,” Weinstein conceded.

Over the last weekend, AOL representatives moved to quell public criticism of the terms of service after the issue was first flagged on Weblogs and discussion forums.

[Thanks to Dave and Quentin for the update.]

Software patents — the reality

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The New Zealand Herald

If you wondered how Bill Gates topped the Forbes rich list for the 11th year with a personal fortune of US$46.5 billion ($63 billion), look no further than the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office.

Patent 525484, accepted by the office and now open for objections until the end of May, says Microsoft invented and owns the process whereby a word-processing document stored in a single XML file may be manipulated by applications that understand XML.

It is one of a raft of patent applications Microsoft has dumped on the overworked staff of the office, and on patent offices worldwide.