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A decade or two ago (I'm not really sure when he wrote it)) Brad Templeton suggested something like this as a fix for various problems, especially trademark. My take is that the basic idea is that TLDs are already meaningless, so diversifying them into increased meaninglessness does no damage while offering some benefits. (e.g. makes monopolizing certain words harder, makes it easier to try out new registration policies, etc)

Brad Templeton proposed a solution many years ago... The school of fish test. http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/fish-test.html

This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?

Brad Templeton proposed a solution many years ago... The school of fish test. http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/fish-test.html

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they can beat public transportation easily, as it really isn't all that efficient overall. A bus with 50 people on it is very efficient, but in order to get those 50 people to actually ride the bus, you have to have a full schedule of back and forth, and most of those trips will be empty or with only a few passengers. Factor in all of the trips, and most public transit is only comparable to a good car.

Where you really save on efficiency is if taxis become drastically cheaper and more reliable. Now, taxis are usually expensive and unreliable, and owning more than one car per person is very expensive, so most people have to get a car that will handle almost anything they'll ever want to do as far as road trips, taking multiple passengers, moving cargo, etc. If you could buy a teeny electric car that'll get you to work and back and handle basic shopping, and call up a taxi cheaply for anything that requires more space or longer range, then you get some real power savings.

See http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

If the amounts go up a lot - to Bill Gates $1m would be essentially meaningless.

In fact, the figure is $1000 for it to be a literal waste of his time. It used to be $20, I think.

All this move by ICANN would do is to chop the last four characters off every .com in the database, and move that whole damn thing to the root level. [...snip...] Bad policy, bad engineering, bad idea.

Yeah... Although a variation on it is a good idea: de-emphasize the .com TLD.

The arguments why the suggestion in TFA is bad were outlined a decade ago by Brad Templeton in his essays "Problems, Goals and a Fix for Domain Names". His proposed fix (allow [almost] anyone to create a TLD, but you can't get one solely for your own business) prevents the problems of vanity TLDs while removing the problems of trademark squatting/fighting in .com...

The problem with this idea is that public transit consumes a lot more energy than people assume. For example, the cleanest electric light rail in the united states consumes approximately 3 times as much energy per passenger mile as driving a Tesla Roadster electric car. The best transit rail system I have reviewed is in Japan, where the system uses approximately as much energy as the average electric car would. High speed intercity trains can consume much less than cars but they are a drop in the bucket for overall consumption. Buses also use a lot of fuel, the average Bus gets around 36 MPG per person. The average car gets 23 MPG (and rising) but contains 1.54 people, so it gets around the same MPG as well. Here is a link to my source (further links in article).

Sure. Here is a source for the bus per person data. The numbers are extracted from a giant British report, see the "How Can This Be" section.

There are an excellent series of essays which I found through /.. They were written by Brad Templeton (EFF chairman). In the essays he outlines a lot of the objections to "robocars" (as he terms it) and many of the possible solutions. Centralized management of data need not be in place for such a system to work. His "school of fish" idea I found pretty interesting...

There are an excellent series of essays which I found through /.. They were written by Brad Templeton (EFF chairman). In the essays he outlines a lot of the objections to "robocars" (as he terms it) and many of the possible solutions. Centralized management of data need not be in place for such a system to work. His "school of fish" idea I found pretty interesting...

BZZZT. Depends on the power source of the transit and the car. Gas/Diesel is virtually the same. Electric is always better than gas and diesel. But an electric car is better than an electric train.

Oh, but the right believes that Public Transportation is "big government that can't support itself".

Actually, it is pretty expensive, and not very energy efficient. Here's a table of efficiencies. Energy efficiency (article is a direct link to a DOE report on the subject). The most important thing to look at is the comparison of the Telsa roadster and the Japanese Train - it's close. Japan is the biggest public transport riding countries in the G8 - so all the typical responses about how trains would be better if people already rode them go out the window. It gets even better. If you divide the Telsa's numbers by 1.57 (the average number of people in a car), you get almost exactly the same number. But it gets better. Google has been testing some plug-in hybrid Escapes and Priuses, and they've been running around about half the Telsa's numbers in average driving (those Tesla numbers are straight and level at 65 mph). What that means is that these cars are more efficient than the train, with only one person in them. You can even compare the gas cars to buses, and note how they edge out buses, ever so slightly.

Car drivers pay about 80-90 of their costs, equivalent to a 11 cent gas tax increase to make up the difference. This works out to about 0.05 cents per mile. Edmunds estimates the TCO of a new 2011 Hyundai Accent at $0.44 per mile. Make that $0.45 to make up for the shortfall and you're done. That includes, gas, insurance, taxes, the tax shortfall, parking, highways, depreciation, the highway patrol, financing, the works. Of course, that's a brand new car. What if you run an old beater into the ground, like many poor people do? A lot of those costs go out the window.

By far, insurance is the biggest cost. A robocar could avoid much of that cost. Public transport may be safer in some cases, and that is a valid point.

So, instead, we're going to implement fine control of individual's actions, which is "being tough on crime".

It'll be a disaster. Fortunately, we're not going to have this: the official response.

And copyright infringement is about reproduction and distribution for profit.

FALSE.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

I remember when newsgroups were hard enough to access that they automatically filtered out everybody who was too dumb to get that "netiquette" was just a joke.

The bottom line is that private cars are no longer a viable solution to our transport needs due to energy shortages and the companies that manufacture private cars can not admit this as it means going out of business.

What evidence do you have to back up this popular, yet incorrect assertion? The fact is that public transport at least, consumes more energy per mile than cars. Why? here is the data and the reasons. It is not the answer, especially when you include the insane costs of transit operation, vs. the incredibly cheap costs of highway construction. Finally, repeat after me, there is no energy shortage. There is no energy shortage. There is no energy shortage. There is an energy collection, storage, and distribution problem. Energy exists all around us. 175 petawatts hits us constantly from the sun. 1000's of years, minimum, is locked in fission fuels. Even wind can provide more than the total energy use. If you want to consider fusion, we have literally oceans of energy ready. The problem is capturing and storing this energy. It's just too expensive. The volt, and other "toys" provide us the technology that we need to solve this shortage.

Anyone who thinks that automated transportation will be 100% safe and trouble free and with absolutely zero fatalities is just being stupid.

The question is whether it can reduce in some significant way the number of injuries and fatalities incurred. We already have a very dangerous transportation system.

The second question is how much are we willing to pay for such a system.

And what is more interesting is that autonomous cars may actually achieve the former (many times safer) while actually reducing costs significantly.

See here for a much broader discussion: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

I thought I had already responded to this, but apparently it didn't get into Slashdot somehow...

That's been happening to me as well. Sometimes the post shows up just a bit later.

As for the example of public transit, the thing is that its benefits are larger than the mere cost of individual travel.

There's a big and critical difference between public transport and highways. Public transport does not pay for itself, and has no hope of doing so. Ticket sales for public transport are only %20 percent of public transport, while gas taxes pay for pay 80-90 percent of direct construction costs. This pays for the externalities of the automobile, not the externalities of the petrochemical engine, which is shared by both some transport, and most automobiles. You might also be interested in the paradoxes involved in transport efficiency.

I agree with pretty much everything you said up until the stuff about solar.

The problem with this idea is that the power companies and the rooftop solar companies are not the same company. The power companies are utilities. The solar companies are home improvement companies. The issue with solar power is that many people (I know a few) are happy to invest a great deal of money in solar power. The problem is that solar is uneconomical. This is changing, due to the decreasing price of raw materials, the increasing price of fossil fuels, and technical improvements.

Now, the utilities, public/private transport companies, are all special cases. My belief is that when a service requires an infrastructure that goes everywhere, it needs to be a public enterprise. Also, if the government is the sole consumer of a product, it needs to be a public enterprise. This is because in order for the market to do its magic, it needs a lot of buyers and sellers. If there are only a few, there is opportunity for price gouging without bound. This happens in the case of both transit, and blackwater. Both cases were a disaster. Another problem is when businesses successfully stack the government to reduce their liability. This happened in Gulf Spill. Imagine if BP had to pay the whole cost of the spill, instead of the 500 million that they are capped to.

Actually the opposite can be true - if something is truly intelligent and prudent, it can be difficult for private companies to make money on it.

Often times, we learn that the things that are "intelligent and prudent" but difficult to make money on, were not. They were either stupid or people quickly found a way to make money on them. For example, I've heard it said that permaculture or organic farming is impossible to make money on and that a capitalist could never do it. Well, capitalists found out it was possible to sell the food and people would pay for the difference in manufacturing costs. So now we have lots of organic food for sale. Even at Walmart, I believe. That's because the market is a democracy and capitalists listen to the will of the people. If some entrenched interest decides it does not want to do something, then someone else will. And that entrenched interest may fade away - we don't really talk about the East India Company today, do we? Nope. Gone, and some might say good riddance. The problems are when an entrenched interest uses either monopoly tactics or government regulation ("regulatory capture") to block upstarts. The other problem is when moralists dislike the will of the people try to change the system to prevent people from getting what they want. So I'm a pro-free market, pro-small business, pro-worker, pro-environment capitalist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal

You might want to learn about why this happened. Ironically, it was because of anti-trust regulations that this happened. You see, you can't own the utilities (I.E., electric generators), and electric trains at the same time. What does this mean? You have two choices. Sell the trains, or sell the generators. And guess what, the utility companies wanted to be utilities, not train operators. So they went for the electric generators. Then, the public found that rail was too expensive. So the businesses collapsed. If public transport was cheaper or more useful to the public, it would have survived. The only way to have public transport is to take from non-riders (like me), to pay out big subsidies. When I drive my car, I pay gas taxes that fund road construction. Public transport relies on subsidies. Why is this? Because it sucks. It uses too many resources to achieve the same goal as a bunch of private cars. You might be interested to look up the real efficiency of public transport, and learn why it is often an unitelligent thing to do.

And also we don't have mass-produced solar power - no one's figured out yet how to put a meter on the Sun.

I can categorically state that this is false. Everyone's already figured out how to meter the sun. Sell the solar arrays. Sell the electricity. It's simple, capitalistic, and makes a lot of sense. The problem is not the laws of man but the laws of physics. If you pick up a rock (coal), throw it into a steam turbine, and light it, that's easier than setting up an array of mirrors to heat up water to turn the turbine. It just is. It uses less iron, less copper, less aluminium, etc. So what does that mean? Back in the older days when iron, etc. was more expensive (natural resource prices fall down over time), it's gotten cheaper to have big arrays of mirrors to point at the boilers. And, because of the increasing price of fossil coal, it's become more expensive to burn it. As a result, we are now right on the edge of solar power being economical. Think about the cost of computers. Think about how to design something to track the sun with 1880's technology. You couldn't, unless you had people adjusting the thing constantly. No one could use the electricity, because they'd be too busy adjusting the solar array to use it.

If you think that our (US) wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are for oil, then the rest of the "first world" owes us those taxes to pay for the costs of the wars. The truth is that governments have been allowed to charge undue taxes on fuels, and have likely impeded economic growth with this corruption. This is bad for all of us.

What is practical is unlikely trains and public transport. Public transport is not always energy efficient. The best cases of public transport are slightly more efficient than an electric car (like a Tesla roadster or a Rav-4 EV). The worst cases are worse than Hummer H1 SUVs. Practical, in the event of undue fuel taxation, is to vote the bums out. Practical is a motorcycle with no emissions controls. Practical is a diesel pickup fuelled by Jim and Jill's BBQ, belching smoke as it drives. Practical is a nuclear powerplant, cranking out synthetic gasoline. Practical is a dead pickup truck full of lead-acid batteries with a generator in it.

If you believe the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were/are for oil, then Europe and all the other "first-world countries" should have to pay us all those fuel taxes, as we Americans paid (both in lives and in cash) for their oil. We pay, your corrupt governments tax you and get rich. Therefore, you should: 1. pay us the fuel taxes. or 2. stop believing our wars have anything to do with oil.

Trains and mass transit is a fake solution. Do not assume it to be more efficient, because most are bad. Some mass transit is slightly more efficient than an electric car. Most buses are similar to cars. Some poorly designed street car systems are less efficient than Hummer H1 SUVs. Practical isn't a train or a bike or a bus. Practical is a motorcycle with no emissions controls. Practical is an aging diesel pickup truck with fuel from Jim and Jill's BBQ, belching black smoke as it drives. Practical is a nuclear power plant cranking out synthetic gasoline. Practical is a revolution against high fuel taxes and the people that want them.

The articles right there, but it's not like I can make you drink or anything. If you don't want to know, that's your lookout.

All the rest is cars. Public transport is only as efficient as cars of the same type. For example, a diesel car is the same as a diesel train (in real operating scenarios).

Actually the contents of the article beyond the for-shock-value graphic are quite interesting. If you read further down you see that the author recommends to actually use mass-transit where available instead of the car.

The numbers for mass transit efficiency are so low because the average number of passengers transported by a specific type of mass transit across the whole country (not just urban) in the US is very low. This in turn is because even though during some periods buses and trains are full, for most of the time they run empty or almost empty (at least outside urban areas).

A fully loaded bus or train is very energy efficient compared to a car on a per-passenger basis, but there are plenty of areas and plenty of periods where/when those buses and trains run almost empty which lowers the overall average efficiency per-passenger.

However this brings an interesting paradox:
- By using mass transit you are actually increasing it's efficiency since it would be running anyway (whether you use it or not) and by adding one more passenger you decrease the energy usage per-passenger (people weight very little compared to the actual vehicle so one more person barelly increases the energy consumed).
- By using a car, you only increase the car's energy efficiency per-passenger if you carpool: if you take one more car and travel solo you actually decrease cars' energy efficiency (again, from the article, you see that the average number of people in a car is 1.57)

Not only that, but from the article commuter-rail numbers are still better than car numbers by about 25% and this is for US diesel-powered commuter trains only. If you check the numbers for East Japan Rail (at the bottom) which is much closer to Europe, you see it's twice as energy efficient as using a car.

Even more interesting, if you take the energy efficiency for the TGV (high-speed train in Europe), which is electric and travels with an average passenger load of 80%, from here and convert them into BTU/passenger-mile, you end up with 229 BTU/Passenger-mile which in that article's graphic puts it at the bottom, below the electric scooter/trike and almost 20(!) times more efficient than car travel (it's also way much faster).

The whole article does in fact read as a recommendation for setting up more electric commuter trains in urban environments and to cover long distance with electric powered high-speed trains rather than inneficient diesel trains.

In Europe as a whole, transportation only takes about a third of their energy usage as of 2009. Much of that is electric since they have a lot of rail, but I couldn't find any better breakdowns.

In the US, transport takes about %28 of total energy use. In Europe, less than %10-%19 percent of all transport is public, and since they have a lot of buses, some fraction of that is rail. I could not find the numbers on percentage breakdown. All the rest is cars. In the USA, public transport is less than %3 of the total. All the rest is cars. Public transport is only as efficient as cars of the same type. For example, a diesel car is the same as a diesel train (in real operating scenarios).

The point is, there's no use in putting off transitioning to direct sun energy consumption.

Yep. I used to think the sun was not a good source of power. I then looked at the data. Most solar panels suck but the sun does not.

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. - Thomas Edison

All known quantities of fossil fuels and U-235 will be exhausted by 2150 at current rates and predicted growth patterns. We might need it for something else we can't foresee, so the smart move would be to conserve every bit of easy to use energy, and use the resources we have now to make progress in sustainable technologies.

Actually, the oceans can last at least 500 years, and the Japanese are already working on technology to extract the uranium in the seawater. Of course, with crappy reactors burning only 0.7 percent of the energy in the uranium and dumping the rest, we have some major efficiency issues. If we fix it, we could look forward to 10,000 years plus. By that time, I'm sure will all by dead or cruising the galaxy. I think it is important to understand the paradoxes involved in energy conservation, as well as the actually effects of conservation measures. For example, public transport looks to be only a modest gain for a lot of investment, while say, upgrading your house's insulation is a much better idea with real, measurable (positive) economic consequences.

Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.

Actually, rail does not. Rail uses electricity when the driver wants it to. That often means peak times of electricity use. An electric car can get charged basically at any time - at night (or mid day in the case of solar) - whenever there is excess electricity in the grid. Rail also uses just as much electricity as an electric car. There's a slight difference but the time of use control makes up this difference. Public transport exposed (article is a graph with nice numbers from a bureau of transportation statistics report - numbers spot checked by me). If the electricity was cheap enough, you could use it to capture CO2, make hydrogen, and heat the mixture to produce gasoline and diesel. However, most renewable electricity is too expensive for this purpose.

Ok, so quitting the car habit is a hard task in the sprawltastic U.S., but much of Europe is quite suited to better transportation mechanisms.

Public transport is not any better than the automobile (see above). Let people choose between the automobile and public transport. Finally, the idea that public transport is big in Europe is a myth. The same article links to an Australian study (which is dead) that suggests that Europe uses 0.75 times as much energy per mile on average in transport. While %1 of trips in the US are based on public transport, less than 10-19 percent are public transport based in Europe. Even they have the automobile as the main mode of transportation. Japan is quite different, but even there the electric public transport is not much more efficient than electric cars.

Because of the evidence. The energy efficiency of transport is about the same as the energy efficiency of cars of the same type. Electric transport == electric cars. Diesel transport == diesel cars. The article's numbers are taken from a department of energy report, and made into nice bar graphs for readers. The DOE report (a humongous document) is linked in the article. It's counter-intuitive and seemingly illogical at first, but definitely worth a read. The greenest mode of transport is an electric motorbike.

Welcome to Slashdot. Now get off my lawn! :)

This thread points up that there's a difference between "doing the right or best thing because it's the reasonable thing to do" and "doing what your religion says is best because it makes you better than the heretics doing something else, all of whom are out to get you" (because every right-thinking green-bike knows that SUVs exist only to flatten bikes).

Or as you succincted it (new verb :) arrogance. An awful lot of which is not actually doing the right thing, but sour grapes: "*I* can't own or drive an SUV, so anyone who does is a wasteful bitch for the oil companies."

At any rate, to the nominal topic -- as Jane Q. Public says in http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1684280&cid=32553894, there's going to be no good way to keep Big Brother out of an "Automotive Internet". And what is Big Brother, really?? A whopping huge arrogance that believes it is right and everyone else is up to no good, therefore needs regulation and restriction. What if the "automotive internet" decides that, for our own good, only certain types of vehicle are allowed? Religious arrogance can't admit to contrary data, such as the interesting article someone cited at http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

And here you thought this subthread was off topic. What was the question?? :)

And then you could realize how crappy mass transit is when we take away your car, crash the economy, waste a bunch of energy, and your transit fares make you go broke. Stop taking my money to pay for your energy wasting transit disasters, and I'll stop taking it back for my car.

But it won't save any energy (or at least not much).

Look at the dude who INTENTIONALLY rammed his SUV(what a surprise, an asshole in an SUV, perish the thought!) into the cyclists in San Fransisco.

Look at all the stupid cyclists blocking me, slowing me down, showing of how cool they are while getting 36 MPG equivalent. I've met a lot more assholes riding bikes, driving golf carts and hybrids than assholes driving SUV's. Most SUV driving folk care about other people but just aren't as concerned about the environment as you are. Some of them are concerned about the environment, but don't want to sacrifice their SUV for the environment. Many of them would buy a PHEV SUV or other eco-SUV if it met their wants in a heartbeat. I know because I've asked them.

I'm thankful every day for not having being born in the Southern US.

Meanwhile bike riders have done nothing but tell me I need to cut my energy use by a few percent instead of going 100 percent non-fossil. I can tell from your sig that you just hate the USA (and maybe with good reason), but are just posting age-old anti-US quips over and over again. This is neither informative nor insightful. There are plenty of reasons to hate the USA, but our choices in transport aren't one of them, unless you hate Europe and Canada as well. Europe uses slightly more public transport, but they still run 85%+ of their miles in cars.

Don't think it's green.

In fact, here it is!

Take it one step further... why do you even need your own car at all? Surely a reliance on the reliability of one car and parking, etc for one car is inferior to being a member of a 'club' which rents out cars by the minute, takes you to work, and then does the same for someone else 20 minutes later.

Here's a brilliant essay on the subject from the founder of EFF http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

As it is I mitigate my environmental impact by using mass transit and riding a bicycle.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

If you use both mass transit and bikes for an equivalent distance, you might as well be driving a car.

If you travel larger distances using mass transit than biking (highly likely), you're actually making your environmental impact bigger than if you drove a car.

Again the policy, intention and result problem. You don't care about the result, just the policy. You're supposedly a better human being because of this, even if the consequences of these actions are worse than what you started with.

I would quite happily eat those consequences if I had any practical choice in the matter.

And I'm sure you would accept this response from those corporate "exploiters" of the earth ? No ?

Well then, why would anyone accept it from you ?

There is only one practical way to meaningfully reduce the impact of your existence on others. Since you cannot function efficiently, without harming others, due to the second law of thermodynamics (but don't worry : you're nowhere near the efficiency limit that law imposes : you're thousands of times worse).

The only solution to your impact is also evident from that law : end the energy exchanges between the world and your body, even those inside your body.

Of course, the condition of stopping energy exchange (I believe the democrat term is "stealing") with the environment has a name :

death

You should not fool yourself. "In the limit", as mathematicians like to say to describe the ultimate destination of a certain principle, genocide, on both humans and animals, is the only working "green" policy.

If you have any practical choice in the matter ... would you kill yourself ? If not, why bother with the environuts idiocy at all ?

I'm sorry but there's no such thing as consuming too much energy. Only producing too much pollution.That's like saying you read too many books. The automobile is the future of transportation, because it is the most efficient large-scale system we have. Even in Europe, %85 of all journeys are made by car. Except in places like New York, the amount of public transport lines needed is just too big. Also, many of the trains and buses will run empty, so they less efficient than cars. The most efficient form of transport right now is an e-bike or scooter (biking and walking consumes energy to make food).

Anyway, I like the huge space between buildings, the huge parking lots, etc. The only reason for traffic jams is because there are not enough roads. As cars get bigger, have more safety features, and more advanced technology, they will be safer. The car of the future will run on either solar or nuclear energy.

Given that spam has been around for 32 years now, and with state of the art classifiers, spam really isn't that much of a problem for users. Most "spam" that gets delivered is actually from sites that the user has dealt with. Buy baseball tickets, and it seems like MLB emails you every two weeks. Buy concert tickets online, and you're autosubscribed to a marketing mailing.

While spam may be problem for network administrators, as a user, I simply don't care. It's literally not my problem.

Honestly. Even my parents don't get random spam and phishing attacks.

This has been referenced before in slashdot... Brad Templeton has a great site discussing robocars: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

It's probable that today's kids will be the last generation that needs to learn to drive. It will be optional for their kids. And it won't be allowed for their grand-children (except perhaps for private roads and tracks.)

Brad Templeton says it better than I can: http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

I'm no more into knocking mass transit than he ... was ... but I can no more help manipulating numbers than I can help breathing, and the numbers show that mass transit works well where you have heavy population density, which most of the USA does not. It works even better when you have low to moderate income and low car ownership, which most of China still has.

And since you don't ask, no, I'm not hoping to impoverish the USA so that mass transit becomes the optimal choice. It'll happen anyway.

Citation or you're wrong.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html (see #5)

So many of your other posts are really good (except the one where you just call the guy a lying sack of shit, come on), and here you fall victim to what you claim the GP is doing.

To paraphrase from here rather than rationalize about the costs/benefits of copyright infringement, maybe you should ask the artist yourself?

If you start with one copy of a copyrighted work and end up with n copies of a work, where n is greater than 1, in the hands of m people, where m is greater than 1, without the permission of the copyright holder, then unauthorized copies have been made. There is no fair use defense, because there is no fair use for that situation.

In this case, I have posted a comment. You have quoted it, and it resulted in n > 1 copies being made in every browser's cache in the hands of m > 1 people, and all of this without my permission. Either your description of an unauthorized copy is wrong, or your fair use defense is wrong. One has to be.

No. His description of fair use defense is correct. Given the purpose of quoting you, and the nature of the copyrighted work, there really can't be any damages. There is precedent for this which I have stated, I don't really want to go find it, but I will if you insist. There is no effect on the market for your work. Further, we have also not infringed on the moral right you have over the work, and this right is not always protected in some countries.

Brad Templeton has an excellent simple explanation of copyright.

Copyright Myths

the first spam e-mail was sent.

No, that was about nine years later.

Seriously, though, from what I've read on the subject, they were pretty happy to just get packets flowing. There's a quite readable section on the connection of the first two IMPs in M. Mitchell Waldrop's book on J.C.R.Licklider, but there are probably entire books on the subject out there somewhere.

No, it was actually about 8 1/2 years later, if you don't count the birthday announcements, etc. May 1, 1978 to be exact.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

YES! I agree 100%. Here's Brad Templeton's (founder of EFF) thesis on what he calls "robocars" It's quite good, and lays out advantages I never thought of (energy efficiency for one). http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

There have been many variations on the "pay to email" theme over the years. The oldest relevant citation of which I am aware is Brad Templeton, E-Stamps. His proposal does not involve the middle-man that takes a cut. Esther Dyson has also advocated this kind of solution for many years. The nearest equivalents to "pay to email" that we have in the actual marketplace are certification schemes like those from Return Path and Goodmail. These involve paying to receive certification as a responsible practitioner of bulk email, and thereby receive a recommendation which will prevent your mail from being filtered in some cases. That's not much like an e-stamp, admittedly, but it's as near to the concept that the market actually bears. Nobody has yet figured out how to introduce an e-stamp system which any email senders have the slightest incentive to use.

As you say, charging for domains is a sort of filter on who gets which domain. Really it would be far better to have real people review the usage of domains and reject people like domain squatters. You could probably handle it by having a wiki or similar system where people could argue that a domain is being abused -- which would require having actual rules instead of ".com is for commercial stuff... yeah...". See Problems, Goals and a Fix for Domain Names for a structure in which that could actually work.

If you actually want to READ and POST text news, then I don't know why anyone would use an NNTP client nowadays. Google Groups is a far superior gateway.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually had a Usenet feed for many years, though articles like this one actually make me want to try one again. I should try one of the free ones (if they still exist) and see if they have even a decent feed for the very few groups I'd want to keep up on. (I really wish Google News had an NNTP feed, even if it charged a low fee.)

I think the reason why anyone would use an NNTP client were actually elaborated very well in Brad Templeton's history of Clarinet article that was posted yesterday..
http://www.templetons.com/brad/clarinet-history.html#m5 in the section "Eventual fate".

(Though I have used it for very infrequent uses, Google News didn't seem to keep track of which articles I read, and the interface certainly wasn't as good as the browser I use(d), trn..)

Your website defines "dot-com" as "a company born to use the internet as its platform for business". So... Usenet counts as "the internet", but email doesn't? I don't really care either way, since this sounds like a silly pub debate over whether golf or NASCAR are "real" sports. I just can't help but point out the ego-serving fact that the guy on the barstool here happens to be a NASCAR driver.

Simple: ICANN makes money off the current system. They would not profit from a fair system.

It's broken, not broke (though the US is working hard on that too), as soon as you want to add hard crypto to the picture. The US will then have a hard lock and will still be saying "trust us, for we don't trust you" to the rest of the world, which understandably the rest of the world things somewhat less than perfectly acceptable. That would be the case even without the US having a long track record of touting its very special brand of Freedom[tm] while simultaneously breaking promises by the imperial arseload.

Personally I really don't want the UN, the ITU, or any other big organisation and certainly not any single government to hold the keys to this shared resource. A group of a score or so representatives freely electable by all who use the system would be much nicer. In that I agree with (plug, plug) http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/fix.html (disclosure: not affiliated in any way).

Yes, DNS can be fixed. The basic idea is to let ICANN just be one authority among many. Put the entire current DNS under .icann (and default to appending .icann so you don't break stuff, I guess) and let anyone else run their own DNS hierarchy setting up competition in the area of properly assigning domain names (for however your users define "properly" here). The result would most likely be a Wikipedia-like distributed oversight system for who controls which domain names, hopefully with no cost for "registering" a domain which seems pretty silly.

The linked essays explain and argue for it much better than I can. In the end, the proposed system makes the root more or less powerless so it would no longer really matter who controlled it.