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"There are several very good ideas floating around out there that don't require an office of homeland spam in the whitehouse."

What amazing reflexes you have in your knee-jerk reactions. You could have a future in television news. Just because there is a federal law passed on something doesn't mean there will have to be federal enforcement of that law.

Consider federal anti-junk-fax laws. If you get an unsolicited advertisement on your fax machine, the sender owes you $500, collectable through your local small claims court/justice of the peace/etc (if need be). Essentially, all this law does is explicitly spell out the rights of the owner of the receiving equipment and make it easier for the recipient to claim damages without having to carefully explain how junk faxing is essentially trespassing each and every time.

The FCC doesn't enforce this law. The FBI doesn't enforce this law. You enforce this law.

I personally think the idea of expanding the existing junk fax law to include spam would be easier to enact (add three or four words to existing law) and easier to enforce (track down spammers for a guranteed $500 instead of just a chance at $10,000), but I'm obviously biased.

Now calm down before you shatter your kneecap.

"the fundamental flaws of the voting procedure itself."

How about the fundamental flaw of the article itself, in which it (and most people) assumes that "democracy" means nothing more than voting every few years? Where does it say that being a concerned citizen is limited to voting regularly? How can a politician "represent" someone they only hear a "yes" or "no" out of once every two years?

If democracy is nothing more than voting, then the rest of the world has no right at all to turn its nose up at the elections in Iraq last month.

Bah. Two more days until I get off this soapbox of mine.

Your NIC has to decide whether a particular frame on the wire is going to your node or not. Does the fact that no frames are going to your particular node at this exact time make the job of a core router appreciably easier?

Actually yes it does. Less trafic means LESS work for the router. And there is no 1 router in the list. There are usually 20-30 routers involved. That means OTHER trafic can get through more efficiently. This is why denal of service attacks are so effective. You can swamp out real useful trafic with bogus traffic. Even route lookuptables COST. Everything has a cost. There is no FREE.

The NIC card in your example is more like the local mail office. The OS is me. If my OS is not worying about extra junk (the nic card snags it and doesnt tell the os), then it does not take away from my tasks at hand.


And he's the only one working on getting mail to your mailbox?

At the moment he is sitting with his little whitemobile in front of my house. YES he is the ONLY person working on getting the mail to me. You are confusing economy of scale with delegation of work.

Economy of scale is the fact that if I BUILD 1000 items it may (not neccesarily) cost less than if I build 1000 1 off's. That a postal delivery system is able TO scale is not economy of scale. The postal system MUST grow in order for you to move more volume given NO technological advances. Growth = People. People = Money. Money has to come from somewhere. It comes from stamps. Stamps cost me and everyone else money. Let me use your network example again. Lets say I want to move a 20 meg file now. But before I was moving a 10 meg file. But I want it in the same amount of time. In order to do that I will need more hardware. That cost money. Also in Econ terms the network is a one time fixed cost. However the dude to run the network and make sure it works thats a recurring cost. The people to deliver mail is a recurring cost. Minimizing recurring costs is a good way to get that economy of scale you talk about. But in order to move volume you MUST have more people to move the stuff.

Make up your mind. Small scale, or a scale large enough to be useful to the public?

Why can it not be BOTH usefull and small? Does goverment have to be LARGE in order to be usefull?

So has inflation and the price of gas. What's your point? We still have among the lowest postage rates in the industrialized world

Yet the rate did not go up at the same rate as inflation. It went beyond it. Unless the inflation rate was 9%? Also I was not compairing to other countries. We are not THEM. Why do we always compair ourselves to them? Sure it may not be fair to them. But they need to talk to their goverments about that...

If a driver only had 3 houses out of a hundred for days or weeks, would he bother going out every day, or would he wait until he had a decent amount? He keeps going out every day because it's usually more like 97 houses out of 100 that have mail.

EXACTLY what I was talking about. But most of those 97 will be what the recipients call junk. Now if he was making 'special' trip for a neighborhood. He would probably be staggering it with other neighborhoods. Yet if he must stop at every house. They will have to put in a driver to get the OTHER neighborhood. The reason they drive by everyday is not because they are being nice. It is because if they dont get rid of it it piles up. LARGE amounts of it. They MUST get rid of it because they do not have the room to store it for any length of time. The only way they can get rid of it is to deliver it. If there was less they could hold more.

Take for example the mail I got this week. 2 were things I needed (finacial, bills, ect). 6 were junk. Thats fairly typical. That means junk is outpacing useless by 300% this week.


If you want to mail something out, you can put it in your curbside mailbox and know it will be picked up today instead of "some time next week."

That is mearly a 'perk' of the fact they must drive by everyday to deliver large amounts of junk. Oh and great we get to hire another person. That means more money to pay that person with. Get enough of that 'we will just raise the rates again, hell with em' mentality. If you want a letter to go out today put it in a blue box. Learned that from my Uncle who works for the postal service. Why? It is not sorted at the local office. Its straight into the main local sorting center and straight to the next main sorting center by semi truck (MCA). If you put it in your mail box it will take an extra 2 days to get there. 1 day for pickup and 1 day for the sort that happens at the local office. Just putting the WHOLE zip code goes a long way also. Not just the 6 diget. The OCR can put it in the right local route faster. Instead of having a person that must look at it.

saves a "whopping" 1.8 cents per letter or post card

Apparently you dont consider that saved money. you consider it wasted money. With the rates as they are it would be cheeper at 500 not to sort them. It would cost you more than 5 dollars to sort them before hand. There is a difference when you start to talk 50000. You can pay a guy 100 bucks to sort it all and a corp would 'save' 400 bucks. Yet how does that help the normal guy like me? Who does a letter once and awhile. You say its subsidized. I say the system is self serving.

Lets say I do 10 bills a month. The rate went up 3 cents. That is an extra 30 cents a month. And 3.60 per year. For me thats NOTHING. But for some people that is a whole meal or two for their family. The rate does not help the little guy.

You missed it by a mile

OH?
1) A sorting machine can sort THOUSANDS of letters per hour. It does not get tired it does not sleep. It is always running. It cost aloooot less than a few hundred people that are sorting mail. They have them, fixed cost, done. They cost TONS less than people sorting mail. That is why they have em. The sorting machine is a fixed cost. Its costs will not rise or fall dramaticly. If the machine is costing more than people to sort. Unplug the thing and hire people in its place. If the ROI on that machine is not going to be there why was it purchased?
2) They have these machines because usefull mail is outpacing junk mail by 300% at this household.
3) Yes a tax. Tax's for many years were judged by the tax stamp. These days we call them stamps. A goverment stamp of aproval as it were. The 'newer' type taxs are just garnished right out of your check and you dont miss them (different story).
4) So? He does this to take advantage of a rate scale. He would be stupid not to.
5) USPS saves money. HA. They have set up a system that is self fullfilling. If you make the rate to send out advertisments cheaper. If you do a bit of leg work up front. You will save yourself some work. But you will end up delivering MORE things then you were before. They will then JUSTIFY rasing rates because volume has increased.
6) The ONLY person in this deal that saves money is the person pre sorting large mailings. Again you need larger machines and more people to deal with this sort of thing. Sure its 'easier' to do but it creates MORE volume.
7) The cd thing that AOL was doing from the 'parent' can NOT be sorted by machine because they use odd shaped mail. It must be handled by hand the whole way. Even IF they presort.

A broadcast is easier (cheaper) to do than a multicast.

To whom? To the sender maybe. Let me take your example to the email world. You send a email to 10000 people. Lets say .5% care. You have just wasted 9950 peoples time. You have also snorked 9950 peoples bw and wasted their money (time = money your 1 from above).

You dont think for one second that people like getting this stuff do you?

It pays for the sorting machines the "little guy" uses without having to use them

The sorting machines are only in the bulk centers. They were paid for years ago. Their ongoing cost can not be THAT much. Your saying that a machine (or series of them) that let say sorts 10000 letters per hour costs an additional 3 cents per letter to sort. Or that the cost of that machine went up 300 dollars PER hour. Lets say of that 1 cent was sorting. Then it went up 100 dollars an hour. or 2400 dollars PER day. Just for that one machine.

Depends on local recycling programs

Your assuming everyone recycles. Your second assumption there IS a recycling system. Your third assumption is that the system takes junk mail. Mine does not. Newsprint, cans, bottles, 2-litter jugs, milk jugs ONLY. Any other sort of print gets tagged as extra and the recycler charges back to the local municipality that is running it for having to throw it out.

They're getting that miniscule 1.8 cent savings I mentioned earlier

I guess you consider saved money a waste of time. Just because it is 1.8 cents.

The real problem is if you give a person a budget of 10000 this year, and they spend 9000 of it this year. Then give them a budget of 9000 the next year because of what they spent last year is self destructive. They will then overspend the year after that. Even though they only needed 9000. They will spend the 10000 to justify it. But after awhile they will NEED that 10000. But they are used to overspending so now they overspend what they were already overspending. So now they need 11000. Yet they could have gotten by with 9000 in the first place.

like the USPS eliminating presorted standard mail that can't be delivered

oh goodie another burden to take care of. So now not only do you have mail to deliver that no one really wants. You have mail that can not be delivered. So now you have to hire people JUST to pull that junk out and make sure its recycled (by law).

IF however my rant doesnt convince you let your own words do it
spam stuff

Many (if not most) elections revolve around the platforms of the candidates, to the point where often the platforms are more important to the voters than the candidates themselves. I intend to avoid platforms altogether. In my opinion, political platforms are little more than pieces of driftwood politicians cling to when cast adrift in the Potomac, away from the voters. Through the internet I intend never to be away from the voters of our district long enough to need a platform. I can present issues that spring up to the voters directly instead of having to rely on a platform set in stone for two years.

• People can abuse moderation by only moderating up only posts whose conclusion they agree with, and I would expect this problem to be greater in an environment where important decisions may be made based on the comments.
• Moderation is good for getting interesting ideas from multiple viewpoints (when it is not abused) and for finding the majority (when it is abused), but it is not ideal for reaching consensus, where the ideas backed by the best arguments and most trusted debaters win. How will you look at comments and decide how to vote on an issue?
• In Congress, you may find yourself wanting to suggest compromises regarding bills and riders. How will you determine which issues are most important to your state and district?
• Moderation does little to fix the simple problem that there are too many posts for everyone to read. Will you read all posts, or will you rely on moderation to filter up the best comments for you to read?
• Will you participate in online debates yourself?

Many (if not most) elections revolve around the platforms of the candidates, to the point where often the platforms are more important to the voters than the candidates themselves. I intend to avoid platforms altogether. In my opinion, political platforms are little more than pieces of driftwood politicians cling to when cast adrift in the Potomac, away from the voters. Through the internet I intend never to be away from the voters of our district long enough to need a platform. I can present issues that spring up to the voters directly instead of having to rely on a platform set in stone for two years.

• People can abuse moderation by only moderating up only posts whose conclusion they agree with, and I would expect this problem to be greater in an environment where important decisions may be made based on the comments.
• Moderation is good for getting interesting ideas from multiple viewpoints (when it is not abused) and for finding the majority (when it is abused), but it is not ideal for reaching consensus, where the ideas backed by the best arguments and most trusted debaters win. How will you look at comments and decide how to vote on an issue?
• In Congress, you may find yourself wanting to suggest compromises regarding bills and riders. How will you determine which issues are most important to your state and district?
• Moderation does little to fix the simple problem that there are too many posts for everyone to read. Will you read all posts, or will you rely on moderation to filter up the best comments for you to read?
• Will you participate in online debates yourself?

The law Fax.com was found to be guilty of breaking is Section 227 of Title 47 of the United States Code. The relevant text follows:

Restrictions on the use of automated telephone equipment:

It shall be unlawful for any person in the United States (...) to use any to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine(.)

In my opinion the solution to this problem is very simple: expand 227 U. S. C. 47 to prohibit unsolicited e-mail advertisements in exactly the same way it prohibits unsolicited fax advertisements. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

"I would scream it from the rooftops if I felt it would do any good: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM! It may not solve every problem, but strong, enforced CFR would at least help."

The laws are a joke and I should know. All campaign finance reform laws have done is increased the amount of paperwork required to run for office. I have to file paperwork with the Louisiana Ethics Comission, the Clerk of the House the Federal Election Commissions, and I have to send a copy of FEC paperwork to the Louisiana Department of State. All that paperwork does is provide another bureaucratic layer for the candidates to hide behind. Does it increase public access to information on my funding? Not really. Most people don't even know of the existance of these organizations, let alone how to obtain copies of the papers I've filed. It sure as hell isn't as informative to the general public as this, but most politicians want you to know as little about them as possible. It seems that most major candidates spend more time running interference on each other than actually sharing information with the voting public.

"The rich and powerful are vastly overrepresented in the legislatures, some effort at restoring balance is incredibly important."

You're not going to get it with the current batch of party sheep. If anything, they know what they needed to get into office themselves and aren't about to give it up easily.

"I'm a Democrat, but if McCain had been on the ballot I would have voted for him in a heartbeat."

Maybe too many Americans are too busy toeing the party line to see that most of the problems lie in the current two-paty system in the US. Guess how all those legislators probably got all their money? It was likely all funnelled through the state and national Democratic and Republican committees. All that most of the required election paperwork seems to have accomplished is to make sure more money is funnelled ("laundered?") through the party rather than going to the politician directly.

"Now we have a President that has spent over half of his time in office either on vacation or fund raising, or a combination thereof."

Which is completely different from what Clinton, Bush, Regan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, or McKinley have done in office? Should I go through the nineteenth century as well?

Most of the "this president is the most lazy/money-grubbing yet" stuff is just talk from the other party. If anything it's just more politicians running political interference. We have an executive that is very much alone and very easy for the press to focus on, and we have 535 legislators that can easily hide behind each other and can generally get away with more individually and as a group than the president. In my opinion, all this party nonsense about bad-mouthing the president's policies is little more than Congress keeping the attention shifted away from the real seat of corruption in government.

And the same goes for the states as well. Most governors would know better than to shoot themselves in the political foot by vetoing a bill with a title like that. But if it never gets to the governor's office to begin with, who's the wiser?

The only real solution to this problem is both very simple and the one nobody ever brings up:

1.) Go find the California Legislature on the internet

2.) Find the bill on-line

3.) See which state Senators voted against it (whoever is represented by Senator Haynes is in luck, otherwise...). The measure passed the State Assembly, but it might be worth seeing who voted against it there as well.

4.) Vote against them next election. In fact, tell them you're going to do so. Better yet, run against the bastard yourself. It's a cushy job and looks good on a resume at the very least.

It's that easy! And you're still not going to do it, are you? Most people don't even know their national legislators, let alone their legislators at the state level. Nobody even bothers to vote for anybody in the state governments, except maybe the governor. Maybe. This is probably little more than the state legislators showing the same contempt for the voters as the voters seem to have for the legislators. They listen to campaign contributors because they're usually the only people talking to them.

I have seen some ineffective bills drift through both houses of Congress that are written to allow unsolicited messages so long as they have an "opt-out" mechanism. Ignoring the fact that such legal loopholes would essentially negate the law entirely (can you prove that you tried to opt out?), it quite literally sickens me the way some of your fellow members of Congress feel that spam is somehow an issue dealing with the freedom of speech. The mere existence of the internet and the supposed changes it has on how business and the legal system work (even though such "changes" have been shown to be a lie) have helped to convince these poor fools that people should somehow have a right to use and abuse the property of others. Does my neighbor have the constitutional right to break my kneecap so long as they provide me with the ability to "opt out" of future kneecappings?

The United States Constitution guarantees that all citizens are free to say what they want. It does not guarantee a soapbox upon which they can say it. Just as I am not guaranteed the right to have a billboard on Interstate 10, spammers should not have the "right" to use the resources of others simply because they're there.

... and the crap they're putting on my radio and television have what to do with the internet exactly?

... but I already ranted about this one.

Naw, really!?

What I think we should see more of is alternative delivery methods explored. Sprint PCS just deployed their new wireless network, I'd think wireless access would sidestep the Baby Bells entirely. Even better are satellite internet options (no new ground infrastructure required).

But instead we have... well... you get the idea.

I've moved it to my new website