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It would appear that a .pdf of the enacted text of the Children's Internet Protection Act can be found here (check in the middle of the page, under "McCain Amendment No. 3610").

My question is this: would the icra voluntary content rating system qualify as a "technology" under the bill sufficient to comply with the statute and the regulation? If so, the thing to do is to head to your local library and get them to implement ICRA, a self-rating and filtering tool based on voluntary disclosure by the page author of web site content. A quick and dirty summary of ICRA can be found here. I'm interested to know what /.ers think about this possible compromise.

--J

--Asa

Section 310 provides enhanced (more severe) sentencing for computer criminals who use encryption

Section 306 of H.R. 46 would allow federal courts to hear juvenile delinquency cases involving alleged teenage computer criminals

Section 308 of the bill provides federal wiretapping authority over people suspected of committing various computer crimes

Section 304 of the "Medal of Valor" bill provides for "Criminal and Civil Forfeiture for Computer Fraud and Abuse."...........allow the government to seize property from people who have never been convicted of a crime.

I feel a need to comment on basically every part of this article. Here we go.

Stanford University held a workshop last Friday - The Policy Implications of End-to-End - covering some of the policy questions cropping up which threaten the end-to-end paradigm that serves today's Internet so well.

A workshop implies that something gets done, and all I see here is a lot of talk. This should have been called a roundtable. This is just a nit, and the rest of my comment will not be quite so picky.

I'm already confused about how "End-to-End" is being used here. The only people I'm aware of who have a truly end to end solution are AT They are a portion of the backbone, they provide service down to smaller providers, and they are a cable-to-internet provider. THEY are end-to-end. Buying internet from many other companies which go back to the backbone level actually results in your internet service being carried and supported by a third party ISP.

I also think that an end-to-end "paradigm" (I thought this wasn't a Katz post?) doesn't serve anyone other than the company controlling it. Oh sure, at first it looks like a good idea; If Microsoft built your PC, and wrote the OS, and all the applications, it would all work perfectly, right? Everything would interoperate. Then they could gouge you whatever they wanted for support and upgrades because you and the rest of the world are locked in to their model. Thank you, but no.

The final segment of the morning covered caching. The main issue centered around transparent caching, where users ask for certain content but their request is silently fulfilled by a caching proxy server instead, generally without the user having any way to detect this.

This might be a good one for Ask Slashdot; How can you detect when you are a victim of transparent caching? I can see how you might want to go about it in a vague sort of manner, but it would pretty much require some sort of sniffing since you have to go through port 80 in order to trip the ACL. Is there any package which will do this in an automated fashion, or does anyone know what sort of things you'd want to look for in sniffer logs to determine if this is happening to you?

Ann Brick noted a subsidiary issue - big commercial players have the ability to pay for their sites to be cached, while individuals do not. Similar to the QoS issue, this might be used to discriminate between paying, fast, commercial sites, and sites owned by individuals or even competitors.

Uh, yeah. It's called capitalism. The bands which sign up with a major record label get promotion. The companies with lots of money put up billboards and pay for spots in the middle of the superbowl. If I make more money than you, I can better afford fancy cheese for my crackers. This is a shock?

David Clark made the insightful observation that dollars spent on caching don't go to general network improvements -- one small piece of the network is improved by caches, but the same money spent improving the whole network could improve it for everyone.

Again, this is not a communism. The internet was controlled by the government once, and it wasn't really keeping up. Now, for the most part, the private interests maintaining the sucker have been upgrading it as they see a need. Dollars speak, folks. That's just the way it is. Perhaps one day when we've invented nanotech no one will have to work and everyone will have access to super high speed data connections, but not today.

Timothy Denton concluded this segment with the characterization of transparent caching as the difference between "form follows function" and "function follows form": the mere presence of caching and the ability to interfere with content delivery in the middle of the network destroys end-to-end and creates opportunities for mischief.

This has always been a danger on the internet. If you are in between two points, you can screw with people. That's just a fact of life. Man-in-the-middle attacks, faked DNS, routing alterations, blocking traffic, sniffing traffic; It's all been done. The only way to avoid such things is to use public key cryptography on all data; And your key exchange has to be private for maximum security. This means not using the internet to exchange keys. Oh well, so much for that one.

Jerry Duvall led the broadband discussion. He presented a rather fascinating economists' view of the situation -- an economists' world being solely concerned with customers, producers and markets. Laws are necessary to enable markets -- contract law, commercial law, fraud law, and so on are needed in order for markets to function.

Finally, someone with their head on straight. This guy sounds brilliant. I'd pay good money to see a transcript (or even have an mp3 or similar) of his part of the speech. Then again, maybe it's already on the 'net someplace and I just don't know where it is. The footnote version of his speech in the article I'm commenting on is quite succint. This is the way the whole world works.

Another panelist emphasized the democratic value of open systems, a recurring topic in Lessig's writings. There was a bit more discussion of bundling-as-an-aid-for-novice-users vs. bundling-as-a-way-to-lock-in-customers.

As AOL could tell you, the beauty of bundling is that it accomplishes both at once. This may not be beautiful from a consumer standpoint, or only halfway attractive. But the facts are that companies want to keep their userbase, and that bundling works.

Deborah Lathen, acting perhaps as devil's advocate, asked why the builder of the pipe shouldn't be allowed to monopolize it.

Ayn Rand would be proud.

Duvall noted that no matter what the FCC might do to regulate cable carriers, that economic theory doesn't hold much chance for relief -- any time there's a monopoly (over the cable pipe), the monopolist is going to be able to extract monopoly rents, one way or another. If regulation affects a certain aspects of the business, the monopolist will find some other way to leverage the monopoly for greater profits. The only sure remedy is eliminating the monopoly.

Absolutely true. Free and Open Markets cannot exist inside of a monopoly. If we care more about openness than capitalism (do we?) then certainly we cannot allow an end-to-end monopoly.

Further audience discussion raised the idea that the concept of "an ISP" is a odd sort of legacy brought about by the necessity to have an intermediary between the telephone network and the TCP/IP network. In the future, the concept of an ISP may change radically. A question was asked: what benefit does the public get by allowing the cable companies to monopolize access? There were no good answers.

I've got a good answer: nothing. Remember when we were talking about monopolies? In theory, because everything is from the same provider, it should all interoperate perfectly. In reality, of course, this is never the case. The different departments will treat each other like different companies, and spite and malice will rule the day.

Mark Laubach gave a good overview of the architecture of cable Internet access, referring to the DOCSIS standard, which wasn't designed with open access in mind. Laubach stated that "basic IP dialtone" -- that is, a simple TCP/IP Internet connection without frills or bundled services -- should be a consumer right, which should apply to every broadband service regardless of delivery method: cable, DSL, wireless or satellite services.

This is just FULL of stuff I would like to poke holes in. First of all, I don't know what you mean when you say DOCSIS wasn't designed with open access in mind. What does "open access" mean at the moment? DOCSIS is just another physical spec for how a certain type of cable modem (and cable modem head end) should act. I used to work as a Lab Admin for Cisco in Santa Cruz and we did QA and dev for DOCSIS cable modem products. We were not the only ones with DOCSIS head ends; 3com and Lucent (at least) also had solutions. They also have modems; So does Cisco, although production of their CM is fairly unimportant to their buisness strategy, since they're partnered with something like seven other companies which will be making CMs or STBs (Set-Top Boxes) with embedded CMs.

BTW, DOCSIS is really spiffy. You get ~40Mb/sec downstream on your very own frequency not shared with anyone else. You do, however, share ~10Mb/sec upstream with everyone else on your segment, which could be as many as 25,000 people, though that's highly unlikely in the field.

As for "basic IP dialtone" being a basic consumer right, this is pure poppycock. You get what you pay for. IMO a "basic IP dialtone" would include a static IP, and look at what a pain it is to get static these days, what with the artificial shortage in address space due to legacy Class A addresses and poor partitioning. Of course, we will be experiencing a real address space shortage soon enough, so I'm not too worried about taking away those legacy IPv4 addresses from people who got them back in the day.

The big problem with this summary is the lack of definitions. What is "basic IP dialtone"? (Note that every time I say this, I sneer. Just wanted to set a mood.) It almost seems like it would imply a basic connection type. Dialtone doesn't require any configuration on the line, so does this include DHCP? Or even BOOTP, I guess, but DHCP is superior, so let's just say that. So a static IP, DHCP, and an ethernet jack in your wall, perhaps? Or do you want to standardise on cable? DOCSIS would be dandy there, since you'll be able to go to Fry's and pick up a Sony CM (based on a Cisco Reference Design.) Uh-oh, but DOCSIS is apparently not designed with open access in mind. I don't know what's so closed about a CM which configures itself via DHCP regardless of what ISP you plug it into, but I guess that's just not open enough for some people.

Now the cable companies have a 750mhz copper wire that they claim is "impossible" to share.

Impossible? No. Really goddamned hard? Definitely. Let's take a look at what's involved in just setting up a DOCSIS cable modem environment without any Cable TV services existing concurrently. First of all, you have the head end. Connected to this you have some number of attenuators, and then you run into another box called an up-converter which converts your particular frequency information from your device into the proper "channel" frequency for cable "broadcast". Just to get all of this tuned and troubleshot requires a multi-thousand-dollar cable analyzer. We used one from HP with a very sturdy plastic case. I believe it ran about US$90K. It was hardly the most expensive model.

A number of these UP converters get attenuated (again) and go into a condenser (A backwards splitter) and they go to the repeaters, which then go to your house.

It's worth considering that under DOCSIS a lot more bandwidth will be used (what with giving every consumer their own little chunk of the spectrum to download on) so it will be far more difficult to give out bandwidth. Under legacy CM systems it would be far simpler.

Further discussion brought out the case of Stockholm, Sweden. Stockholm and certain other cities have taken on the job of laying fiber-optic cable as a municipal service, similar to sewer service or water or roads. Since the municipality built the pipe to the home, there is no issue of a company attempting to monopolize the pipe, and any company which wants to offer Internet service over the pipe may do so.

Cable is a bike path. Fiber is an interstate. Copper, of course, is a deer trail. Some wonderful things have been done with copper, but by and large, we're pushing the limits. It would be wonderful if the US would run fiber to every door, or at least to the curb, but it doesn't seem all that likely to me. There's a lot of US in which to run fiber. Besides, the companies will do it eventually, and then the government will belatedly try to regulate it, and more or less succeed, because fiber has that holy grail of "virtual unlimited" bandwidth; You can put many different signals into the fiber on various frequencies and get them all out again at the other end, and since they're in the wavelengths for light and not radio (near 10^14 Hz rather than between 3KHz and 300GHz*) you can put a lot more data in each frequency band.

The panel then debated whether (and how) it would make sense to move the U.S. to that sort of municipal model. A panelist threw out the figure that true open access to cable pipes might require a choice of 400 ISPs. An audience member suggested that as things are currently going in the U.S., there might be a choice of five ISPs at most, hand-picked by the cable provider.

Knowing the U.S., we'd probably end up giving a certain band to each provider, so we couldn't support more than a few with regulation anyway.

Finally the broadband session closed with a pithy statement that, despite claims to the contrary, content is not king -- there is, and always has been, more money in individuals talking to each other than in one-way content distribution.

Thank god they didn't actually come out and say that it would always be that way. It would be interesting to compare the value of selling Cable Television to the value of selling someone internet access, when examined as a Profit-Loss chart.

I don't have much to say about the wireless stuff, but:

Yochai Benkler brought up the issue of spread spectrum changing the rules for FCC frequency allocation -- more communications may shift to frequencies where the FCC does not require licenses to broadcast.

In theory, this is a good thing. In practice, spread spectrum devices are going to trample each other, potentially on purpose, especially when you think about some of those ass-end taiwanese firms which make their money by reverse engineering ASICs and such and then selling them as their own product, or the korean fabs which will personally sell someone else's product; These are companies already shown to be short on morality.

One audience member quipped that disruptive technologies always appear to incumbents as toys.

Probably the most insightful thing said all day, and they're only referred to as "one audience member".

Finally, the closing paragraph of the article (in which the author apologizes for not getting the name of another audience member, thank you very much) talks about how it's important to eliminate "gatekeepers" on the internet, but we lost that right when we privatized the internet. We chose between Big Brother controlling the internet (though what with carnivore and its probable relatives, that didn't quite end, did it?) and the soulless corporations (an entity designed to spread blame) controlling our most pure access to information which people may not want us to see. I don't have an answer for this one, sorry. And here you thought I knew everything!

* Source: United States Frequency Allocations (The Radio Spectrum) chart, U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Office of Spectrum Management, March 1996. For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office. Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC, 20402-9328. Or you can order it for $7 plus shipping from This Link. Slashdot will probably mangle the hell out of the URL; The Stock Number is 003-000-00652-2 and the U.S. Government Online Bookstore lives at https://orders.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/sale/index.h tml.

I feel a need to comment on basically every part of this article. Here we go.

Stanford University held a workshop last Friday - The Policy Implications of End-to-End - covering some of the policy questions cropping up which threaten the end-to-end paradigm that serves today's Internet so well.

A workshop implies that something gets done, and all I see here is a lot of talk. This should have been called a roundtable. This is just a nit, and the rest of my comment will not be quite so picky.

I'm already confused about how "End-to-End" is being used here. The only people I'm aware of who have a truly end to end solution are AT They are a portion of the backbone, they provide service down to smaller providers, and they are a cable-to-internet provider. THEY are end-to-end. Buying internet from many other companies which go back to the backbone level actually results in your internet service being carried and supported by a third party ISP.

I also think that an end-to-end "paradigm" (I thought this wasn't a Katz post?) doesn't serve anyone other than the company controlling it. Oh sure, at first it looks like a good idea; If Microsoft built your PC, and wrote the OS, and all the applications, it would all work perfectly, right? Everything would interoperate. Then they could gouge you whatever they wanted for support and upgrades because you and the rest of the world are locked in to their model. Thank you, but no.

The final segment of the morning covered caching. The main issue centered around transparent caching, where users ask for certain content but their request is silently fulfilled by a caching proxy server instead, generally without the user having any way to detect this.

This might be a good one for Ask Slashdot; How can you detect when you are a victim of transparent caching? I can see how you might want to go about it in a vague sort of manner, but it would pretty much require some sort of sniffing since you have to go through port 80 in order to trip the ACL. Is there any package which will do this in an automated fashion, or does anyone know what sort of things you'd want to look for in sniffer logs to determine if this is happening to you?

Ann Brick noted a subsidiary issue - big commercial players have the ability to pay for their sites to be cached, while individuals do not. Similar to the QoS issue, this might be used to discriminate between paying, fast, commercial sites, and sites owned by individuals or even competitors.

Uh, yeah. It's called capitalism. The bands which sign up with a major record label get promotion. The companies with lots of money put up billboards and pay for spots in the middle of the superbowl. If I make more money than you, I can better afford fancy cheese for my crackers. This is a shock?

David Clark made the insightful observation that dollars spent on caching don't go to general network improvements -- one small piece of the network is improved by caches, but the same money spent improving the whole network could improve it for everyone.

Again, this is not a communism. The internet was controlled by the government once, and it wasn't really keeping up. Now, for the most part, the private interests maintaining the sucker have been upgrading it as they see a need. Dollars speak, folks. That's just the way it is. Perhaps one day when we've invented nanotech no one will have to work and everyone will have access to super high speed data connections, but not today.

Timothy Denton concluded this segment with the characterization of transparent caching as the difference between "form follows function" and "function follows form": the mere presence of caching and the ability to interfere with content delivery in the middle of the network destroys end-to-end and creates opportunities for mischief.

This has always been a danger on the internet. If you are in between two points, you can screw with people. That's just a fact of life. Man-in-the-middle attacks, faked DNS, routing alterations, blocking traffic, sniffing traffic; It's all been done. The only way to avoid such things is to use public key cryptography on all data; And your key exchange has to be private for maximum security. This means not using the internet to exchange keys. Oh well, so much for that one.

Jerry Duvall led the broadband discussion. He presented a rather fascinating economists' view of the situation -- an economists' world being solely concerned with customers, producers and markets. Laws are necessary to enable markets -- contract law, commercial law, fraud law, and so on are needed in order for markets to function.

Finally, someone with their head on straight. This guy sounds brilliant. I'd pay good money to see a transcript (or even have an mp3 or similar) of his part of the speech. Then again, maybe it's already on the 'net someplace and I just don't know where it is. The footnote version of his speech in the article I'm commenting on is quite succint. This is the way the whole world works.

Another panelist emphasized the democratic value of open systems, a recurring topic in Lessig's writings. There was a bit more discussion of bundling-as-an-aid-for-novice-users vs. bundling-as-a-way-to-lock-in-customers.

As AOL could tell you, the beauty of bundling is that it accomplishes both at once. This may not be beautiful from a consumer standpoint, or only halfway attractive. But the facts are that companies want to keep their userbase, and that bundling works.

Deborah Lathen, acting perhaps as devil's advocate, asked why the builder of the pipe shouldn't be allowed to monopolize it.

Ayn Rand would be proud.

Duvall noted that no matter what the FCC might do to regulate cable carriers, that economic theory doesn't hold much chance for relief -- any time there's a monopoly (over the cable pipe), the monopolist is going to be able to extract monopoly rents, one way or another. If regulation affects a certain aspects of the business, the monopolist will find some other way to leverage the monopoly for greater profits. The only sure remedy is eliminating the monopoly.

Absolutely true. Free and Open Markets cannot exist inside of a monopoly. If we care more about openness than capitalism (do we?) then certainly we cannot allow an end-to-end monopoly.

Further audience discussion raised the idea that the concept of "an ISP" is a odd sort of legacy brought about by the necessity to have an intermediary between the telephone network and the TCP/IP network. In the future, the concept of an ISP may change radically. A question was asked: what benefit does the public get by allowing the cable companies to monopolize access? There were no good answers.

I've got a good answer: nothing. Remember when we were talking about monopolies? In theory, because everything is from the same provider, it should all interoperate perfectly. In reality, of course, this is never the case. The different departments will treat each other like different companies, and spite and malice will rule the day.

Mark Laubach gave a good overview of the architecture of cable Internet access, referring to the DOCSIS standard, which wasn't designed with open access in mind. Laubach stated that "basic IP dialtone" -- that is, a simple TCP/IP Internet connection without frills or bundled services -- should be a consumer right, which should apply to every broadband service regardless of delivery method: cable, DSL, wireless or satellite services.

This is just FULL of stuff I would like to poke holes in. First of all, I don't know what you mean when you say DOCSIS wasn't designed with open access in mind. What does "open access" mean at the moment? DOCSIS is just another physical spec for how a certain type of cable modem (and cable modem head end) should act. I used to work as a Lab Admin for Cisco in Santa Cruz and we did QA and dev for DOCSIS cable modem products. We were not the only ones with DOCSIS head ends; 3com and Lucent (at least) also had solutions. They also have modems; So does Cisco, although production of their CM is fairly unimportant to their buisness strategy, since they're partnered with something like seven other companies which will be making CMs or STBs (Set-Top Boxes) with embedded CMs.

BTW, DOCSIS is really spiffy. You get ~40Mb/sec downstream on your very own frequency not shared with anyone else. You do, however, share ~10Mb/sec upstream with everyone else on your segment, which could be as many as 25,000 people, though that's highly unlikely in the field.

As for "basic IP dialtone" being a basic consumer right, this is pure poppycock. You get what you pay for. IMO a "basic IP dialtone" would include a static IP, and look at what a pain it is to get static these days, what with the artificial shortage in address space due to legacy Class A addresses and poor partitioning. Of course, we will be experiencing a real address space shortage soon enough, so I'm not too worried about taking away those legacy IPv4 addresses from people who got them back in the day.

The big problem with this summary is the lack of definitions. What is "basic IP dialtone"? (Note that every time I say this, I sneer. Just wanted to set a mood.) It almost seems like it would imply a basic connection type. Dialtone doesn't require any configuration on the line, so does this include DHCP? Or even BOOTP, I guess, but DHCP is superior, so let's just say that. So a static IP, DHCP, and an ethernet jack in your wall, perhaps? Or do you want to standardise on cable? DOCSIS would be dandy there, since you'll be able to go to Fry's and pick up a Sony CM (based on a Cisco Reference Design.) Uh-oh, but DOCSIS is apparently not designed with open access in mind. I don't know what's so closed about a CM which configures itself via DHCP regardless of what ISP you plug it into, but I guess that's just not open enough for some people.

Now the cable companies have a 750mhz copper wire that they claim is "impossible" to share.

Impossible? No. Really goddamned hard? Definitely. Let's take a look at what's involved in just setting up a DOCSIS cable modem environment without any Cable TV services existing concurrently. First of all, you have the head end. Connected to this you have some number of attenuators, and then you run into another box called an up-converter which converts your particular frequency information from your device into the proper "channel" frequency for cable "broadcast". Just to get all of this tuned and troubleshot requires a multi-thousand-dollar cable analyzer. We used one from HP with a very sturdy plastic case. I believe it ran about US$90K. It was hardly the most expensive model.

A number of these UP converters get attenuated (again) and go into a condenser (A backwards splitter) and they go to the repeaters, which then go to your house.

It's worth considering that under DOCSIS a lot more bandwidth will be used (what with giving every consumer their own little chunk of the spectrum to download on) so it will be far more difficult to give out bandwidth. Under legacy CM systems it would be far simpler.

Further discussion brought out the case of Stockholm, Sweden. Stockholm and certain other cities have taken on the job of laying fiber-optic cable as a municipal service, similar to sewer service or water or roads. Since the municipality built the pipe to the home, there is no issue of a company attempting to monopolize the pipe, and any company which wants to offer Internet service over the pipe may do so.

Cable is a bike path. Fiber is an interstate. Copper, of course, is a deer trail. Some wonderful things have been done with copper, but by and large, we're pushing the limits. It would be wonderful if the US would run fiber to every door, or at least to the curb, but it doesn't seem all that likely to me. There's a lot of US in which to run fiber. Besides, the companies will do it eventually, and then the government will belatedly try to regulate it, and more or less succeed, because fiber has that holy grail of "virtual unlimited" bandwidth; You can put many different signals into the fiber on various frequencies and get them all out again at the other end, and since they're in the wavelengths for light and not radio (near 10^14 Hz rather than between 3KHz and 300GHz*) you can put a lot more data in each frequency band.

The panel then debated whether (and how) it would make sense to move the U.S. to that sort of municipal model. A panelist threw out the figure that true open access to cable pipes might require a choice of 400 ISPs. An audience member suggested that as things are currently going in the U.S., there might be a choice of five ISPs at most, hand-picked by the cable provider.

Knowing the U.S., we'd probably end up giving a certain band to each provider, so we couldn't support more than a few with regulation anyway.

Finally the broadband session closed with a pithy statement that, despite claims to the contrary, content is not king -- there is, and always has been, more money in individuals talking to each other than in one-way content distribution.

Thank god they didn't actually come out and say that it would always be that way. It would be interesting to compare the value of selling Cable Television to the value of selling someone internet access, when examined as a Profit-Loss chart.

I don't have much to say about the wireless stuff, but:

Yochai Benkler brought up the issue of spread spectrum changing the rules for FCC frequency allocation -- more communications may shift to frequencies where the FCC does not require licenses to broadcast.

In theory, this is a good thing. In practice, spread spectrum devices are going to trample each other, potentially on purpose, especially when you think about some of those ass-end taiwanese firms which make their money by reverse engineering ASICs and such and then selling them as their own product, or the korean fabs which will personally sell someone else's product; These are companies already shown to be short on morality.

One audience member quipped that disruptive technologies always appear to incumbents as toys.

Probably the most insightful thing said all day, and they're only referred to as "one audience member".

Finally, the closing paragraph of the article (in which the author apologizes for not getting the name of another audience member, thank you very much) talks about how it's important to eliminate "gatekeepers" on the internet, but we lost that right when we privatized the internet. We chose between Big Brother controlling the internet (though what with carnivore and its probable relatives, that didn't quite end, did it?) and the soulless corporations (an entity designed to spread blame) controlling our most pure access to information which people may not want us to see. I don't have an answer for this one, sorry. And here you thought I knew everything!

* Source: United States Frequency Allocations (The Radio Spectrum) chart, U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Office of Spectrum Management, March 1996. For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office. Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC, 20402-9328. Or you can order it for $7 plus shipping from This Link. Slashdot will probably mangle the hell out of the URL; The Stock Number is 003-000-00652-2 and the U.S. Government Online Bookstore lives at https://orders.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/sale/index.h tml.

Budgets and funding are not tight.

We are simply not spending our money wisely.

See the US Budget for next year
For instance, note that NASA's total budget (5.1 billion) is less than the military and other aid we give to one country, namely Israel.

To put it plainly, we spend more money (that's tax dollars, your money and mine) so one religious group can kill another with our helicopters than we spend on the total effort to go to Mars, explore space, and all the other things that make this a beautiful time to be living in. Instead, we spend this money to violently support one side in a dispute that has been going on for hundreds of years; (ok, since 1948 at least) one that no one is possibly going to give in to because both side are blinded by irrational religious fevor.

Take all the money, machine guns, ammunition, and other arms we give to Israel and give it to NASA. Double the budget!

Budget items FY2000

Agriculture: $17 billion

Education: $34 billion

Health and Human Services: $43 billion

House and Urban Development: $34 billion

Veterans Affairs: $20 billion

Environmental Protection Agency: $7 billion

Federal Emergency Management Agency: $3 billion

Internation Assistance Programs: $12 billion

National Science Foundation: $3 billion

When it comes down to it, general science, space and technology spending is $19 billion. Revenue from all sources was $1.9 trillion in 2000. For you non-math majors, that's only about 1% of the total revenue being spent on space, general science, and technology.

Social security, Medicare, and Medicaid account for over 42% of that $1.9 trillion. So before you continue to spout off biased liberal feel-good views, we ARE feeding the hungry, housing and homeless and protecting the environment.

SOURCE: http://w3.access.g po. gov/usbudget/fy2001/pdf/guide.pdf

Anybody that thinks you can just do away with income taxes and the entire IRS needs a bite of a reality sandwich.

Actually, if you just cut federal spending to its inflation-adjusted 1984 spending level, we'd have had a $975,580,000,000 budget surplus in 1999 (budget figures from the OMB)

Now, sure, the U.S. population has increased. So instead of spending a constant-dollar $851,874,000,000, we'll add a 40% increase to the budget, for a total of $1,192,624,000,000. Since 1999 revenues were $1,827,454,000,000, we still have a $634,830,000,000 surplus, or 34% of total receipts.

Now, admittedly, that's not as much as the $879,500,000,000 brought in annually by the federal income tax. And we're currently spending more on debt interest than we were in 1984, which would reduce the $634,830,000,000 further. In 1984 we were paying $111,100,000,000 in interest, which we have already increased by our 40% grant above to $155,540,000,000. In 1999 we paid $229,700,000,000, for a net increase of $74,160,000,000 in expenditures, for net expenditures of $1,266,784,000,000 and a net surplus of $560,670,000,000 a year.

So by simply spending the same amount as we did in 1984, adjusted for inflation and population, with no cuts relative to 1984, we could cut income taxes by 63% and still balance the budget -- assuming no economic growth. Would our country be in serious trouble if the government spent the same amount of money per capita today as it did in 1984?

Now, assume a Libertarian can find a smidge more than 25% to cut in the $1,266,784,000,000 budget. Suddenly, you can eliminate 100% of the income tax.

78. Although they have been the most prominent, Netscape's Navigator and Sun's Java implementation are not the only manifestations of middleware that Microsoft has perceived as having the potential to weaken the applications barrier to entry. Starting in 1994, Microsoft exhibited considerable concern over the software product Notes, distributed first by Lotus and then by IBM. Microsoft worried about Notes for several reasons: It presented a graphical interface that was common across multiple operating systems; it also exposed a set of APIs to developers; and, like Navigator, it served as a distribution vehicle for Sun's Java runtime environment. Then in 1995, Microsoft reacted with alarm to Intel's Native Signal Processing software, which interacted with the microprocessor independently of the operating system and exposed APIs directly to developers of multimedia content. Finally, in 1997 Microsoft noted the dangers of Apple's and RealNetworks' multimedia playback technologies, which ran on several platforms (including the Mac OS and Windows) and similarly exposed APIs to content developers. Microsoft feared all of these technologies because they facilitated the development of user-oriented software that would be indifferent to the identity of the underlying operating system.

-- Thomas Penfield Jackson, U.S. District Judge, Findings of Fact

This is Public Law 106-229, available in text and PDF. It is not clear to me that clicking on a web page's order icon or similar act will constitute an electronic signature. The original legislation defined an electronic signature to be something intended by the person to indicate agreement, but the final law defines it to be something executed with intent to sign a record. It seems to me an electronic signature is not created unless the person specifically intends to create a signature, not just agree to a contract.

This is Public Law 106-229, available in text and PDF. It is not clear to me that clicking on a web page's order icon or similar act will constitute an electronic signature. The original legislation defined an electronic signature to be something intended by the person to indicate agreement, but the final law defines it to be something executed with intent to sign a record. It seems to me an electronic signature is not created unless the person specifically intends to create a signature, not just agree to a contract.

Lets pick some of these major concerns apart shall we?
A major reason why so much software sucks, is because its written by some guy with his brand new AS in Visual Basic.

"An H-1B nonimmigrant is an alien employed in a specialty occupation or as a fashion model of distinguished merit and ability. A specialty occupation is an occupation that requires theoretical and practical application of a body of specialized knowledge and attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree in the specific specialty as a minimum for admission into the United States."

Quoted from here. Additionally, Characteristics of Specialty Occupationalist Workers state that it is a must that the degree this worker holds be equivalent for them to be considered for a Visa, further about 41% according to the document of workers hold a Masters or higher.
Darn, I guess we can't blame foreign workers for some software being crappy....

Unemployment is so horribly low at the moment there isn't any labor
Well hmm lets think about this... maybe the statistics include mostly the elderly, children and the few-and-far-between-people who choose not to work?

It alarms me that people put forward statements like these "foremost concerns" with no regard for how foreign workers are treated while they are here... They make at least a factor of ten less in some cases than American workers.... and with the current ACWIA they lose work authorization status if they try to leave jobs where they are treated badly. Yes, I know the parties use dispicable tactics but we also need a global perspective on how what is done here affects other countries, regardless.

What also bothers me is that I have not yet seen or heard of efforts for having the educational system entertained in America to be on par with the countries that you "import" workers from. If you look at the list of countries you notice that the countries have a strong educational (and disciplinary system). In that particular regard, put up or shut up.

...if it passes.

FWIW, this is H,R. 5275, submitted 25-Sep-2000 it seems to the Committee on the Judiciary. (from the Congressional Record.

But why, one must ask, does it only cover music? The same logic theoretically should apply to all dual-media creative works, such as books (at least for methods that preserve exact formatting, like PDF and PS, in constrast to ASCII text), visual arts (paintings as JPEGs, and so forth), and likewise.

We may not have book-digitizing services now (to my knowledge, but I haven't been looking), but when PDAs or other devices are developed that ARE pleasing for books, or if good-enough laptops become common -- then there may be a potential market.

This seems overly... tailored, shall we say.

Please put onus where onus belongs. Do you think japan or china spend half as much as we do on defense? No? Why not?? Because they are not policing half the freaking world with aircraft carriers. They don't have forward deployed troops in 30 countries.

It's time for us to pick our battles. One carrier battle group off of Iraq, one off of Taiwan (I want my Crusoe's dammit, and I don't want Taiwan semiconductor to get sacked!) and bring everybody else home.

Not everybody has the same priorities as you. That is why we need to police the world. Our interests are all over the world, not just Iraq and Taiwan. If we took a less active role in the world, Oil and semiconductor prices could be much higher ( Saddam with 43% of the world's oil and China with a significant portion of the semiconductor manufacturing base. ) So you can pay taxes to the US govt ( which really are not that high ), or you can pay to line the coffers of some regieme in another part of the world. I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep my money here in the States.

Also, notice that your taxes are significantly lower than in other developed nations, but we still have the leading economy ( stable and growing ) and the ability to enforce our policy worldwide. I'd consider that a pretty good deal.

If you think that all the money goes to defense and contractors and other fat cats, just remember that the defense budget is only about %35 of the budget. The largest draw on the budget is all of the entitlement programs ( Social Security, Medicare, etc ). Check out the budget website.

Bottom line: Defense pays for itself by protecting the most stable economy in the world. Japan doesn't need to spend on defense because the U.S provides it for them. China relies on conscription and slave labor to keep costs down. US troops in other countries are usually there to keep them from openly obliterating each other. We gave the Europeans 4 years (1992-1996) to stop the Balkan wars and they couldn't do it. We had many debates about getting involved in these foriegn brushfires. Only when the U.S. stepped and bombed everything, did things calm down.

The answer: no.

They might. They might improve the lives of your children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Many of the foundations of modern technology were laid by ancient Greek scientists. Knowing that the Earth is round and that it orbits the Sun was not particularly useful to them at the time, but without that knowledge, we would not have communications satellites.

Personally I think all that money could - and arguably should - be put to better use. Then when things are going better, we can move on.

The US budget for fiscal year 2001 set aside a total of $13.1 billion for NASA. Of that $2 billion is actually used for astronomy. Compare that with $67.5 billion for education, training, employment and social services; $218 billion on Medicaire; $426 billion on Social Security; and $306 billion for National Defense. I would say we do have our priorities straight when it comes to overall spending on scientific endeavors.

Could I suggest someone protests to the delegated naming authority, which is listed as:

Federal Networking Council
4001 N. Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22203
Phone: (703) 522-6410
EMail: execdir@fnc.gov
URL: http://www.fnc.gov

.

The actual links of interest are

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00-14001-fil ed or

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00-14001-fil ed.pdf

(Stupid /. insists on inserting blanks in the URLs. Remove them.)

If you provided them as links instead of just text, the links would work, regardless of how /. ends up displaying them. Try these:

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00 -14001-filed

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&doci d=00-14001-filed.pdf

(Looks like they've been /.'d already.)

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

The actual links of interest are

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00-14001-fil ed or

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00-14001-fil ed.pdf

(Stupid /. insists on inserting blanks in the URLs. Remove them.)

If you provided them as links instead of just text, the links would work, regardless of how /. ends up displaying them. Try these:

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00 -14001-filed

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&doci d=00-14001-filed.pdf

(Looks like they've been /.'d already.)

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

I find it ironic in cosmic proportions that the birthplace and former bastion of communism is prostituting itself with wanton abandon for the gratification of pathologically capitalist companines like PepsiCo and their spinoff Pizza Hut.

This is great! This is at LEAST a hundred points for us Americans!

In the interim we have managed to scrape together enough Pu-238 to meet NASA's needs by using the remaining stock from the cold war days and by purchasing it from Russia. Improvements in the efficiency of the RTG's have reduced the requirements for Pu-238. The recent Casini mission, however, required nearly 35 kg.

There are proposals on the table to produce Pu-238 in Department of Energy research and test reactors. Analysis has shown that they can produce up to 5 kg per year which NASA states is sufficient for future mission. Another alternative that is currently being considered it the restart of the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) for isotope production, including Pu-238. DOE is expected to make a decision on FFTF in the near future. It's also possible to produce Pu-238 in commercial power reactors, but there is little support for this.

I sincerely hope that problems in procuring Pu-238 do not impact future NASA missions.

Now we have a line item veto, which allows the President to veto some portions of a bill while passing others into law. Those vetoed portions are still allowed to be re-debated by the Hill and passed without the Presidents consent etc (see The Constitution of the United States of America , John Adams et al.)

Now, given that the President has the power to veto something like this while keeping the outer bill intact, does he have the courage to act? In the Clinton era, I think not.

It looks a bit out of date, but its comprehensive.

Checking with the Library of Congress legislation site, we find a number of bills related to digital signatures. The one referred to in the Cryptome article seems to be S.761, "The Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act", which has passed both House and Senate and has been sent to the President for signature or veto. So this is further along than the Slashdot article indicates.

I wonder whether you can sue legislators who pass unconstitutional legislation. Clearly, they violate our civil rights whenever they do so.

They [members of Congress] shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.

However, to be fair, there is a differing view at the US Government Printing Office Annotated US Constitution (http://www.access. gpo.gov/congress/senate/constitution/art1.html):

This clause is practically obsolete. It applies only to arrests in civil suits, which were still common in this country at the time the Constitution was adopted. It does not apply to service of process in either civil or criminal cases. Nor does it apply to arrest in any criminal case. The phrase ``treason, felony or breach of the peace'' is interpreted to withdraw all criminal offenses from the operation of the privilege.

The FY 2000 Federal Budget of the US

A citizen's guide to the federal budget (pdf), in there you will find a break down of US government spending: 15% National Defense, 17% non-defense discretionary (this is stuff like the NASA budget, spending on dams, national parks, federally funded cancer research, etc., basically everything that's not an entitlement or national defense), 27% social security, 11% interest on the national debt, 11% medicare, 6% medicaid, 6% "other mandatory" (federal retirement and insurance, unemployment, farmer subsidies, etc.), 6% "other means-tested entitlements" (stuff like foodstamps, children's lunch programs, etc.), 6% reserve spending social security reform. Total spending, about 1.7 Trillion dollars.

In the last link you will also find:
General science, space, and technology: 19 billion dollars
...
National Aeronautics and Space Administration: 14 billion dollars.

Note that the US spends 10 times more on Medicare alone than it does on NASA.

Also, note that this doesn't take into account spending of any individual states, which includes a substantial amount of spending on various "helping humans stuff".

The FY 2000 Federal Budget of the US

A citizen's guide to the federal budget (pdf), in there you will find a break down of US government spending: 15% National Defense, 17% non-defense discretionary (this is stuff like the NASA budget, spending on dams, national parks, federally funded cancer research, etc., basically everything that's not an entitlement or national defense), 27% social security, 11% interest on the national debt, 11% medicare, 6% medicaid, 6% "other mandatory" (federal retirement and insurance, unemployment, farmer subsidies, etc.), 6% "other means-tested entitlements" (stuff like foodstamps, children's lunch programs, etc.), 6% reserve spending social security reform. Total spending, about 1.7 Trillion dollars.

In the last link you will also find:
General science, space, and technology: 19 billion dollars
...
National Aeronautics and Space Administration: 14 billion dollars.

Note that the US spends 10 times more on Medicare alone than it does on NASA.

Also, note that this doesn't take into account spending of any individual states, which includes a substantial amount of spending on various "helping humans stuff".

Do you think Dell would have had the balls to ship a Linux box if not for the DOJ investigation? OEMs couldn't even preinstall a browser on their Windows boxes without MSFT's say so. Intel quashed a lot of their software plans because of MSFT. Everyone was under their thumb. From the looks of things that were discovered at the trial MSFT basically was dictating what a majority of the computer industry did.

If anyone believes that Dell would risked angering MSFT by selling Linux, a rereading of the Findings of the Fact is in order. MSFT played the OEMs with its Windows pricing scheme and does that played ball (Compaq, Gateway) were charged substantially less than others. IBM on the other hand would have pursued Linux regardless but I'm not so sure about Dell. Here's a Google cache of Bill G commenting on Dell from the MSFT trial days.

PS: I once interviewed with Dell and asked the why they didn't have a comprehensive Linux plan and the response was "We're waiting to see how things go before committing resources. Once someone shows it's a viable plan, we'll jump on it."

No physical evidence?!? You're kidding, right? If someone robs you and then burns what he took, then it's not provable because there's no physical evidence?

I disagree. The Sherman Act defines in great detail what is and is not a monopoly, and how a monopoly may and may not be used legally. There is very little that is "nebulous" about it.

I wish more people would take the time to read the Findings of Fact. The text is long, but very informative. It first demonstrates that Microsoft is, in fact, a monopoly (which isn't illegal by itself), and then exemplifies how they used this monopoly contrary to the Sherman Act (which is definitely illegal).

--

Microsoft has proved untrustworthy in the past.

Think the judge has been reading /.?

-Tommy

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

These cases are before the Court for disposition of the sole matter presently remaining for decision by the trial court, namely, entry of appropriate relief for the violations of the Sherman Act, 1 and 2, and various state laws committed by the defendant Microsoft Corporation as found by Court in accordance with its Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law. Final judgment will be entered contemporaneously herewith. No further proceedings will be required.

The Court has been presented by plaintiffs with a proposed form of final judgment that would mandate both conduct modification and structural reorganization by the defendant when fully implemented. Microsoft has responded with a motion for summary rejection of structural reorganization and a request for months of additional time to oppose the relief sought in all other respects. Microsoft claims, in effect, to have been surprised by the "draconian" and "unprecedented" remedy the plaintiffs recommend. What it proposes is yet another round of discovery, to be followed by a second trial - in essence an ex post and de facto bifurcation of the case already considered and rejected by the Court.

Microsoft's profession of surprise is not credible.(1) From the inception of this case Microsoft knew, from well-established Supreme Court precedents dating from the beginning of the last century, that a mandated divestiture was a possibility, if not a probability, in the event of an adverse result at trial. At the conclusion of the trial the Court's Findings of Fact gave clear warning to Microsoft that the result would likely be adverse, yet the Court delayed entry of its Conclusions of Law for five months, and enlisted the services of a distinguished mediator, to assist Microsoft and the plaintiffs in reaching agreement on a remedy of some description that Microsoft knew was inevitable. Even assuming that Microsoft negotiated in utmost good faith in the course of mediation, it had to have in contemplation the prospect that, were mediation to fail, the prevailing plaintiffs would propose to the Court a remedy most to their liking and least likely to be acceptable to Microsoft. Its failure to anticipate and to prepare to meet such an eventuality gives no reason to afford it an opportunity to do so now.

These cases have been before the Court, and have occupied much of its attention, for the past two years, not counting the antecedent proceedings. Following a full trial Microsoft has been found guilty of antitrust violations, notwithstanding its protests to this day that it has committed none. The Court is convinced for several reasons that a final - and appealable - judgment should be entered quickly. It has also reluctantly come to the conclusion, for the same reasons, that a structural remedy has become imperative: Microsoft as it is presently organized and led is unwilling to accept the notion that it broke the law or accede to an order amending its conduct.

First, despite the Court's Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, Microsoft does not yet concede that any of its business practices violated the Sherman Act. Microsoft officials have recently been quoted publicly to the effect that the company has "done nothing wrong" and that it will be vindicated on appeal. The Court is well aware that there is a substantial body of public opinion, some of it rational, that holds to a similar view. It is time to put that assertion to the test. If true, then an appellate tribunal should be given early opportunity to confirm it as promptly as possible, and to abort any remedial measures before they have become irreversible as a practical matter.

Second, there is credible evidence in the record to suggest that Microsoft, convinced of its innocence, continues to do business as it has in the past, and may yet do to other markets what it has already done in the PC operating system and browser markets. Microsoft has shown no disposition to voluntarily alter its business protocol in any significant respect. Indeed, it has announced its intention to appeal even the imposition of the modest conduct remedies it has itself proposed as an alternative to the non-structural remedies sought by the plaintiffs.

Third, Microsoft has proved untrustworthy in the past. In earlier proceedings in which a preliminary injunction was entered, Microsoft's purported compliance with that injunction while it was on appeal was illusory and its explanation disingenuous. If it responds in similar fashion to an injunctive remedy in this case, the earlier the need for enforcement measures becomes apparent the more effective they are likely to be.

Finally, the Court believes that extended proceedings on the form a remedy should take are unlikely to give any significantly greater assurance that it will be able to identify what might be generally regarded as an optimum remedy. As has been the case with regard to Microsoft's culpability, opinion as to an appropriate remedy is sharply divided. There is little chance that those divergent opinions will be reconciled by anything short of actual experience. The declarations (and the "offers of proof") from numerous potential witnesses now before the Court provide some insight as to how its various provisions might operate, but for the most part they are merely the predictions of purportedly knowledgeable people as to effects which may or may not ensue if the proposed final judgment is entered. In its experience the Court has found testimonial predictions of future events generally less reliable even than testimony as to historical fact, and cross-examination to be of little use in enhancing or detracting from their accuracy.

In addition to its substantive objections, the proposed final judgment is also criticized by Microsoft as being vague and ambiguous. Plaintiffs respond that, to the extent it may be lacking in detail, it is purposely so to allow Microsoft itself to propose such detail as will be least disruptive of its business, failing which plaintiffs will ask the Court to supply it as the need appears.

Plaintiffs won the case, and for that reason alone have some entitlement to a remedy of their choice. Moreover, plaintiffs' proposed final judgment is the collective work product of senior antitrust law enforcement officials of the United States Department of Justice and the Attorneys General of 19 states, in conjunction with multiple consultants.(2) These officials are by reason of office obliged and expected to consider - and to act in - the public interest; Microsoft is not. The proposed final judgment is represented to the Court as incorporating provisions employed successfully in the past, and it appears to the Court to address all the principal objectives of relief in such cases, namely, to terminate the unlawful conduct, to prevent its repetition in the future, and to revive competition in the relevant markets. Microsoft's alternative decree is plainly inadequate in all three respects.

The final judgment proposed by plaintiffs is perhaps more radical than might have resulted had mediation been successful and terminated in a consent decree. It is less so than that advocated by four disinterested amici curiae. It is designed, moreover, to take force in stages, so that the effects can be gauged while the appeal progresses and before it has been fully implemented. And, of course, the Court will retain jurisdiction following appeal, and can modify the judgment as necessary in accordance with instructions from an appellate court or to accommodate conditions changed with the passage of time.

It is, therefore, this _____ day of June, 2000,

ORDERED, that the motion of defendant Microsoft Corporation for summary rejection of the plaintiffs' proposed structural reorganization is denied; and it is

FURTHER ORDERED, that defendant Microsoft Corporation's "position" as to future proceedings on the issue of remedy is rejected; and it is

FURTHER ORDERED, that plaintiffs' proposed final judgment, as revised in accordance with the proceedings of May 24, 2000 and Microsoft's comments thereon, be entered as a Final Judgment herein.

1. Despite their surprise, compounded no doubt by the Court's refusal on May 24th to allow discovery and take testimony on the issue, Microsoft's attorneys were promptly able to tender a 35-page "Offer of Proof," summarizing in detail the testimony 16 witnesses would give to explain why plaintiffs' proposed remedy, in its entirety, is a bad idea. Within a week they added seven more.

2. Two states dissented from the imposition of structural remedies but fully supported the remainder of the relief proposed. The absence of total unanimity merely confirms the collaborative character of the process by which the proposed final judgment was formulated.

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

These cases are before the Court for disposition of the sole matter presently remaining for decision by the trial court, namely, entry of appropriate relief for the violations of the Sherman Act, 1 and 2, and various state laws committed by the defendant Microsoft Corporation as found by Court in accordance with its Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law. Final judgment will be entered contemporaneously herewith. No further proceedings will be required.

The Court has been presented by plaintiffs with a proposed form of final judgment that would mandate both conduct modification and structural reorganization by the defendant when fully implemented. Microsoft has responded with a motion for summary rejection of structural reorganization and a request for months of additional time to oppose the relief sought in all other respects. Microsoft claims, in effect, to have been surprised by the "draconian" and "unprecedented" remedy the plaintiffs recommend. What it proposes is yet another round of discovery, to be followed by a second trial - in essence an ex post and de facto bifurcation of the case already considered and rejected by the Court.

Microsoft's profession of surprise is not credible.(1) From the inception of this case Microsoft knew, from well-established Supreme Court precedents dating from the beginning of the last century, that a mandated divestiture was a possibility, if not a probability, in the event of an adverse result at trial. At the conclusion of the trial the Court's Findings of Fact gave clear warning to Microsoft that the result would likely be adverse, yet the Court delayed entry of its Conclusions of Law for five months, and enlisted the services of a distinguished mediator, to assist Microsoft and the plaintiffs in reaching agreement on a remedy of some description that Microsoft knew was inevitable. Even assuming that Microsoft negotiated in utmost good faith in the course of mediation, it had to have in contemplation the prospect that, were mediation to fail, the prevailing plaintiffs would propose to the Court a remedy most to their liking and least likely to be acceptable to Microsoft. Its failure to anticipate and to prepare to meet such an eventuality gives no reason to afford it an opportunity to do so now.

These cases have been before the Court, and have occupied much of its attention, for the past two years, not counting the antecedent proceedings. Following a full trial Microsoft has been found guilty of antitrust violations, notwithstanding its protests to this day that it has committed none. The Court is convinced for several reasons that a final - and appealable - judgment should be entered quickly. It has also reluctantly come to the conclusion, for the same reasons, that a structural remedy has become imperative: Microsoft as it is presently organized and led is unwilling to accept the notion that it broke the law or accede to an order amending its conduct.

First, despite the Court's Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, Microsoft does not yet concede that any of its business practices violated the Sherman Act. Microsoft officials have recently been quoted publicly to the effect that the company has "done nothing wrong" and that it will be vindicated on appeal. The Court is well aware that there is a substantial body of public opinion, some of it rational, that holds to a similar view. It is time to put that assertion to the test. If true, then an appellate tribunal should be given early opportunity to confirm it as promptly as possible, and to abort any remedial measures before they have become irreversible as a practical matter.

Second, there is credible evidence in the record to suggest that Microsoft, convinced of its innocence, continues to do business as it has in the past, and may yet do to other markets what it has already done in the PC operating system and browser markets. Microsoft has shown no disposition to voluntarily alter its business protocol in any significant respect. Indeed, it has announced its intention to appeal even the imposition of the modest conduct remedies it has itself proposed as an alternative to the non-structural remedies sought by the plaintiffs.

Third, Microsoft has proved untrustworthy in the past. In earlier proceedings in which a preliminary injunction was entered, Microsoft's purported compliance with that injunction while it was on appeal was illusory and its explanation disingenuous. If it responds in similar fashion to an injunctive remedy in this case, the earlier the need for enforcement measures becomes apparent the more effective they are likely to be.

Finally, the Court believes that extended proceedings on the form a remedy should take are unlikely to give any significantly greater assurance that it will be able to identify what might be generally regarded as an optimum remedy. As has been the case with regard to Microsoft's culpability, opinion as to an appropriate remedy is sharply divided. There is little chance that those divergent opinions will be reconciled by anything short of actual experience. The declarations (and the "offers of proof") from numerous potential witnesses now before the Court provide some insight as to how its various provisions might operate, but for the most part they are merely the predictions of purportedly knowledgeable people as to effects which may or may not ensue if the proposed final judgment is entered. In its experience the Court has found testimonial predictions of future events generally less reliable even than testimony as to historical fact, and cross-examination to be of little use in enhancing or detracting from their accuracy.

In addition to its substantive objections, the proposed final judgment is also criticized by Microsoft as being vague and ambiguous. Plaintiffs respond that, to the extent it may be lacking in detail, it is purposely so to allow Microsoft itself to propose such detail as will be least disruptive of its business, failing which plaintiffs will ask the Court to supply it as the need appears.

Plaintiffs won the case, and for that reason alone have some entitlement to a remedy of their choice. Moreover, plaintiffs' proposed final judgment is the collective work product of senior antitrust law enforcement officials of the United States Department of Justice and the Attorneys General of 19 states, in conjunction with multiple consultants.(2) These officials are by reason of office obliged and expected to consider - and to act in - the public interest; Microsoft is not. The proposed final judgment is represented to the Court as incorporating provisions employed successfully in the past, and it appears to the Court to address all the principal objectives of relief in such cases, namely, to terminate the unlawful conduct, to prevent its repetition in the future, and to revive competition in the relevant markets. Microsoft's alternative decree is plainly inadequate in all three respects.

The final judgment proposed by plaintiffs is perhaps more radical than might have resulted had mediation been successful and terminated in a consent decree. It is less so than that advocated by four disinterested amici curiae. It is designed, moreover, to take force in stages, so that the effects can be gauged while the appeal progresses and before it has been fully implemented. And, of course, the Court will retain jurisdiction following appeal, and can modify the judgment as necessary in accordance with instructions from an appellate court or to accommodate conditions changed with the passage of time.

It is, therefore, this _____ day of June, 2000,

ORDERED, that the motion of defendant Microsoft Corporation for summary rejection of the plaintiffs' proposed structural reorganization is denied; and it is

FURTHER ORDERED, that defendant Microsoft Corporation's "position" as to future proceedings on the issue of remedy is rejected; and it is

FURTHER ORDERED, that plaintiffs' proposed final judgment, as revised in accordance with the proceedings of May 24, 2000 and Microsoft's comments thereon, be entered as a Final Judgment herein.

1. Despite their surprise, compounded no doubt by the Court's refusal on May 24th to allow discovery and take testimony on the issue, Microsoft's attorneys were promptly able to tender a 35-page "Offer of Proof," summarizing in detail the testimony 16 witnesses would give to explain why plaintiffs' proposed remedy, in its entirety, is a bad idea. Within a week they added seven more.

2. Two states dissented from the imposition of structural remedies but fully supported the remainder of the relief proposed. The absence of total unanimity merely confirms the collaborative character of the process by which the proposed final judgment was formulated.

Isn't it so nice to see the decision written in Corel Word Perfect !!!

First, a nitpick: it wasn't the DoJ that decided to break up Microsoft, it was the Court. :)

Quoting from Judge Jackson's opinion:

First, despite the Court's Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, Microsoft does not yet concede that any of its business practices violated the Sherman Act. Microsoft officials have recently been quoted publicly to the effect that the company has "done nothing wrong" and that it will be vindicated on appeal. The Court is well aware that there is a substantial body of public opinion, some of it rational, that holds to a similar view. It is time to put that assertion to the test. If true, then an appellate tribunal should be given early opportunity to confirm it as promptly as possible, and to abort any remedial measures before they have become irreversible as a practical matter.

Second, there is credible evidence in the record to suggest that Microsoft, convinced of its innocence, continues to do business as it has in the past, and may yet do to other markets what it has already done in the PC operating system and browser markets. Microsoft has shown no disposition to voluntarily alter its business protocol in any significant respect. Indeed, it has announced its intention to appeal even the imposition of the modest conduct remedies it has itself proposed as an alternative to the non-structural remedies sought by the plaintiffs.

Third, Microsoft has proved untrustworthy in the past. In earlier proceedings in which a preliminary injunction was entered, Microsoft's purported compliance with that injunction while it was on appeal was illusory and its explanation disingenuous. If it responds in similar fashion to an injunctive remedy in this case, the earlier the need for enforcement measures becomes apparent the more effective they are likely to be.

Basically the Court is saying, "You guys are lying, cheating, and acting like nothing has changed, and saying that you can get away with it on appeal. You know what? Go ahead and appeal. I'm getting the knives out."

It gets better: Microsoft offered a bunch of witnesses to testify to the 'detrimental effects' of a possible breakup. To which the Court replied:

Finally, the Court believes that extended proceedings on the form a remedy should take are unlikely to give any significantly greater assurance that it will be able to identify what might be generally regarded as an optimum remedy. As has been the case with regard to Microsoft's culpability, opinion as to an appropriate remedy is sharply divided. There is little chance that those divergent opinions will be reconciled by anything short of actual experience. The declarations (and the "offers of proof") from numerous potential witnesses now before the Court provide some insight as to how its various provisions might operate, but for the most part they are merely the predictions of purportedly knowledgeable people as to effects which may or may not ensue if the proposed final judgment is entered. In its experience the Court has found testimonial predictions of future events generally less reliable even than testimony as to historical fact, and cross-examination to be of little use in enhancing or detracting from their accuracy.

Basically saying, "your witnesses are BS and you're just delaying the inevitable."

I love this judge.

You can find the text of the ruling here, btw.
The Second Amendment Sisters

For those who can't do PDF, here's the HTML version. Grab it before it gets slashdotted by the entire world.

After reading your TOS I have become rather curious in regards to the following cluase:

Unacceptable publications include, but are not limited to:

1. Material that is ruled unlawful in the jurisdiction of the originating server (Such as child pornography, in the case of our flagship Sealand datacenter)

In the case of the Sealand datacenter, what are some of the limitations?

Please note that in the following examples I am not equating one example with any other or implying that any of the following should be censored; rather they are examples of what I would consider sticky wickets when running a "data haven" and wonder how such things will be handled.

Imagine the following:

I am a rabid anti-choice activist in the United States. I wish to post a site with a hit list of doctors performing abortions in the United States. After each "accident" I wish to mark them with a big red X. I publish detailed information on how to find each of these doctors.

Is this site permitted?

I am a hacker who wants to play DVDs on my Linux box and I want to use free software. I want to place source code on my website. The United States says this violates some stupid law and some annoying people object.

Is this site permitted?

I am a devote Iron Chef fan and Fuji TV has just sent me a cease and desist order. I wish to move my materials to Sealand.

Is this site permitted?

I am a regular guy in the UK creating a website about my daily life. Some people don't like the way I talk about them and my site is pulled.

Is this site permitted?

Will you allow sites advocating the overthrow of rival goverments, challenged uses of intellectual property, bomb making instructions, and other information that will get other nation-states panties in a twist?

PATENTS were/are about fostering innovation
COPYRIGHTS have always been about lining the copyright holders pockets. That's their entire point, to prevent unauthorized copying, to guarentee that the author has control over their works, etc....

No, no, no! Read The Constitution of the United States of America, please. In the U.S., both Copyright and Patents exist to guarantee innovation and advancement in the useful arts. The wording goes something like "Congress shall grant for a limited time". Pay attention, it says "limited time." But, don't take my word for it, read it for yourself.

This is kind of like Microsoft's Open License program, just for music.

MS's Open License is a marketing ploy to confuse end users about the term "Open"

Product use rights

There are two use rights that are common to all Microsoft Open License customers in addition to rights granted under specific product end-user license agreements (EULAs).

that is to say, "In addition to the rights taken away by EULA.."

Oh, and those new "rights"

Open License grants the right to use different product language versions. Customers must have an initial language version that is the same price or higher than the desired language version.

Wow, I feel so empowered.

Open License grants downgrade rights for all Microsoft products. Downgrade rights allow users to run any prior version of a product for which they have received license confirmations, instead of running the version they acquired.

Woohoo! I am allowed to use old unsupported software at the new price. yaaah!

Did you see this?

Oh, and it's about control of money, IMHO.

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Up to 1 W of output power according to the FCC regs for this frequency band FCC (47 CFR) Part 15C, Section 15.247 The relavent code according to the Lucent website for the WaveLAN(Orinoco) cards.

Note the hack described used 1500mW directional to get a 14km range(or 1.5W in case you can't convert this is over the limit stated by the FCC for this frequency band and use).

Interesting that use of this frequency requires frequency hopping, anyone who knows more than me about what this means for interferrence between units?

I mirrored the PDF version here.

I hope they get everything they have coming to them.

James Carter

Booya, baby.

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The Conclusions of Law are up. Your choice of HTML or PDF, but could we get some mirrors before the servers goes down? ;-)

The Conclusions of Law are up. Your choice of HTML or PDF, but could we get some mirrors before the servers goes down? ;-)

The Conclusions of Law are up. Your choice of HTML or PDF, but could we get some mirrors before the servers goes down? ;-)

Dear Mr. Microsoft Apologist,

Please read the findings of fact, so that you can understand Microsoft's real reason for *free* www support.

Consider Microsoft VP Jim "Demomaster" Allchin, who said:

I don't understand how IE is going to win. The current path is simply to copy everything that Netscape does packaging and product wise. Let's [suppose] IE is as good as Navigator/Communicator. Who wins? The one with 80% market share. Maybe being free helps us, but once people are used to a product it is hard to change them. Consider Office. We are more expensive today and we're still winning. My conclusion is that we must leverage Windows more. Treating IE as just an add-on to Windows which is cross-platform [means] losing our biggest advantage -- Windows marketshare. We should dedicate a cross group team to come up with ways to leverage Windows technically more. . . . We should think about an integrated solution -- that is our strength.

You see browser share as job 1. . . . I do not feel we are going to win on our current path. We are not leveraging Windows from a marketing perspective and we are trying to copy Netscape and make IE into a platform. We do not use our strength -- which is that we have an installed base of Windows and we have a strong OEM shipment channel for Windows. Pitting browser against browser is hard since Netscape has 80% marketshare and we have less than 20%. . . . I am convinced we have to use Windows -- this is the one thing they don't have. . . . We have to be competitive with features, but we need something more -- Windows integration.

Hmmm. Doesn't sound sound like the purest of intentions to me.

MaxwellSilverHammer wrote: "Be, Inc. clearly does not hold a monopoly on Intel/AMD/et al. based PCs. There is a big difference."

Does Microsoft?

While I am sure there are many opinions on whether or not Microsoft holds monopoly power, (as legally defined), on PC desktop operating systems, I think for at least the time being, that Judge Jackson's own opinion is probably most significant with respect to this case. He has found that indeed Microsoft does hold Monopoly power on Intel-based PC operating systems, which you can read here: Findings of Fact

Here's a quote:

III. MICROSOFT'S POWER IN THE RELEVANT MARKET

33. Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market.

Fair use is written into law: check out this link, for one.

And Maritz's quote:

'The major reason for this is . . . to combat Nscp, we have to [] position the browser as "going away" and do deeper integration on Windows. The stronger way to communicate this is to have a 'new release' of Windows and make a big deal out of it. . . . IE integration will be [the] most compelling feature of Memphis.'

Confirms Micro$oft's true Monopolistic, illegal intentions.

> Tell me. As a consumer, how will i be any better off with Microsoft being sued?

Tell me, have you R E A D the findings of fact? Can't you S E E how unbelivable evil they are? Isn't it O B V I O U S that the govenment has to intervene? Do you realize how U N I N F O R M E D your opinions are?

Please read:
Halloween I
Halloween II
Findings of Fact

And theres plenty more material I can point you to. Work on those first. Or try Stephenson's stuff.

Without the Sherman Act, your entire life would be run by GlobalMegaCom. It's a patch to the flaw of capitalism.

Please note that the link to the findings of fact is to the original version, released in November 1999. A version, apperantly with slight corrections, was released a month later "by court order", but it's HTML format has quite a few problems... which comes as no surprise: META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97"