Hi. I live in Wisconsin. Maybe you've heard of the protests we've been having these last few weeks. Care to tell me how exactly the Republicans and Democrats are the same because it's pretty obvious here that they're not.
Actually, they are. These days, the unions have basically become big business in and of themselves. Thus, in effect, you have the Republicans representing the will of some big businesses while the Democrats represent the will of others.
The key here is that neither side seems to give a flying you-know-what about the actual workers. If they did, they'd be finding ways to raise revenue instead of arguing over who to stick it to with pay cuts or job cuts.
But what is ordinary skill? How large a percentage of the people skilled in an art have to be filing patents before the notion that these people are somehow extraordinary seems folly? When many technology companies get a patent per year per 50 programmers, that means that over the working career of a programmer, on average, nearly every employee should be named on at least one patent....
In my mind, the biggest flaw in the patent system is the obviousness test. The obviousness test should be as follows:
Take ten people randomly selected from the specific area in question.
Tell them the problem that the invention is supposed to solve.
Ask them to sketch out an approximation of how they would solve it.
If any of them gets even remotely close to the same solution, the patent is crap.
It's not enough to ask if the idea should have been obvious. Most ideas are really obvious to anyone paying attention, given the state of the art, assuming someone asks the right question at the right time. Patents are not supposed to be awarded to the lucky. They're supposed to be issued to the crème de la crème—the people who truly come up with unique and creative solutions to problems—not to the person who happens to be in the right position to bring a product to market at the right time.
The open source project would function as prior art against the later application.
Maybe, maybe not. It would have to be shown that the open source project was in use by people in the United States prior to the date that the other company "invented" their product (which is not the filing date for the patent).
It's not at all clear whether online publication is considered publication for patent litigation purposes because it is easy to change and falsify dates. Thus, the project itself might or might not be considered prior art, though a print publication describing the open source project would.
The first to file system only really works in a very specific context - where you have two inventors who filed an application on almost identical types of inventions within a short period of time.
I would argue that except in cases of corporate espionage, all such filings are, by definition, situations in which "the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains." (35 U.S.C. 103) The fact that we're even discussing first-to-patent versus first-to-file patent rules is illustrative of the fundamental brokenness of our patent system. If there is ever an argument about who should get the patent, then the patent is almost invariably too obvious to be deserving of a patent in the first place.
we wonder how long consoles will be the target platform for development of blockbuster games.
Until the average person is willing to spend six or seven hundred dollars on a media center PC to play games, I'd imagine. It really doesn't matter how good the graphics are if you're viewing it on a 17" computer screen. Most people don't want to be stuck in front of a computer when they play games. They want to be in their living rooms, sharing the experience with others.
As someone who was there watching the launch in person, it was definitely a nail biter. Forty seconds left in the launch window, though I suppose they could have waited a day and gone up then.
It almost got delayed a day anyway. There's a minimum separation time between when one ship leaves ISS and another one docks, and if they had held fast to that schedule, it would have been delayed until Friday because of the late departure of... I think it was a Soyuz mission. They decided to override that and go on Thursday anyway. Either way, there presumably was an alternate launch window already planned for Friday.
The best part was how many people reacted to the original mission schedule in the same way. NASA's banners said that it would be up for 10 days and spend 363 days in orbit. Immediately, my reaction was, "Wait... you're within two days of being up there for a year, and you're not going to do it?" Well, they extended the mission by two days.
And just to anthropomorphize the shuttle a bit, I don't think general purpose computer 5 was ready to go to a museum. It failed to shut off. I particularly liked the controller's comment when he said that they'd be sure not to use that switch on the next flight. Hilarious.
One guy in the world whom speaks your native language has to do that one time for each version of each license, pretty much.
First, a lot of the GPL is open to interpretation. Same goes for pretty much any other license. For example, does a GUI wrapper that calls your GPLed tool fall under the category of a derivative work? It's not at all clear from the license. On the one hand, it uses public interfaces exclusively. On the other hand, it is wholly dependent on the tool for functionality. So it's legally fuzzy.
Second, GPLv3 is a whole different animal, so there's the question of whether somebody who is using the v2 version might move to v3 at a later date (in which case if you're depending on the differences, you'd be screwed).
Third, all licenses must be interpreted based on case law, which is a continuously changing field. What might be assumed to be acceptable could suddenly become unacceptable. This is why the license clarification process requires an ongoing dialog between the people making commercial use of a piece of software and the people who produce that software.
So no, it isn't one person doing it one time for each version of the license. People who deal with intellectual property law would kill for a license so precisely worded that such a thing was possible.
And one set for GPL and Apache, too. That's pretty night and day as far as the requirements go, and it's not clear if all of those are really even violations.
I mean, GPL code, sure. That's pretty much toxic to closed source development. But Apache? How do you even violate the Apache license when you're distributing only object code?
Apache defines a derivative work very narrowly, such that (by my reading anyway) library code under an Apache license used as a small part of a larger work isn't one. Therefore, one could potentially argue that it doesn't even require attribution or a copy of the license....
Re:Yeah but how much is the ink cartridge?
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Kidney Printer
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That's a good idea. Only problem is that decent wide format color laser printers start in the neighborhood of two grand. You can burn through an awful lot of print heads before laser pays for itself unless you are content with 8.5x11 or smaller.
Re:Yeah but how much is the ink cartridge?
on
Kidney Printer
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· Score: 1
In my experience, print heads clog more often than I run out of ink. Therefore, neither of those methods is good. The right solution is to make printers that flush out their own heads with an appropriate solvent (e.g. an isopropanol tank) every time you shut them down so that the heads don't get dried ink inside them in the first place. Moving the print head to the ink tank is just shifting the problem around.
Back on topic, can you imagine this sort of printer getting clogged? Whoops. We accidentally put a few of somebody else's kidney cells inside your kidney along with your own. That's gonna be a tumor in a few years, but for now, enjoy your life while it lasts.
More to the point, it cannot be based on any sort of sampling technique. It must be an exact count. Otherwise, those with small download counts become rounding errors and get nothing instead of something.
Each zombie could easily send out 100 emails a day and not trigger "suspicion" flags at the ISP level.
The fact that spam bots can masquerade as the user is largely irrelevant. The reason we have spam is ultimately that there's no good way to verify that a message was sent by a given sender.
The only reason spam is possible with authenticated mail clients is that the ISPs require all outgoing mail to go through their servers, and thus the ISPs are forced to not do comparisons between the ISP's mail drop username and the "From" field in the message. Were it not for this flaw, any botnet would shrink as soon as somebody replied to the spam with a message that says, "Dude, your machine is sending out spam. Run a virus scan."
The only reason that such a technique is ineffective today is that the routing and other header fields are free-form text that can be modified en route, and trying to track down who had a given dynamic IP at a given moment is generally not worth the ISP's time anyway unless there's a subpoena attached to the request. As such, it's not readily possible to start out with an email message as received and definitively and programmatically pin it on a specific account at an ISP.
However, if the email system required each server in the path to sign the message, that would no longer be the case. Routing information would be verifiable and would be canonical in form, thus allowing trivial verification of the entire path all the way back to the initial ISP. Because the system would be inherently verifiable, there would be no reason for ISPs to try to route third-party mail drop clients through their SMTP servers, and thus the authentication to the mail drop server would be the From address.
Further, because the signatures of each server all the way back to the original server could be checked for authenticity, the ISP would be absolutely certain that the user (or at least the user's computer) actually sent the message. Thus, eliminating botnets would be as simple as adding a button in the mail client that says "report as spam" that automatically bounces it to the sender's ISP's abuse address. The ISPs could then collect these reports, and if a threshold is exceeded, the user's account would get disabled. No maximum number of messages per day, no value that the botnet authors have to stay below, just a "this user sent ten messages marked as spam" threshold that (after someone looked to see if the messages really did seem to be spam) would result in the user losing access. Such low volume and poor continuity would make spamming infeasible.
That's why forcing all of the mail servers to have legitimate certificates is the key to eliminating the spam problem. It allows the normal abuse management process to work again like it did back when all the servers were at least ostensibly trusted, and it allows for trivial automation of the verification process, which is key to detecting and eradicating affected machines in a timely manner.
Isn't it an inconvenient truth that there has never been a purely socialist government on our planet? You know, one that wasn't marred either by partial capitalism or by one or more tyrannical nutjobs at the helm who are/were consumed with their desire to retain and increase their own power?
Pure socialism works just fine. For groups of a half dozen people. Maybe even up to a couple of dozen. At some point, it breaks down due to people finding ways around the rules to increase their own standing. The only way it doesn't break down is if you have a despot that punishes the people who break the rules.
Similarly, capitalism inherently breaks down as people find ways around the rules to increase their own standing, and the only way you can stop it is by punishing the winners. In the long run, the only real difference between the two systems has been the degree to which more heavily socialist societies have punished the winner.
The more important point is that most so-called "capitalist" countries employ socialism to some degree. Without enough socialism, you invariably get a widening divide between the lower and middle classes (much as we're seeing in the U.S. today). Any economic system will eventually be abused, and once the avenues for abuse are found, they must be closed. Otherwise, money (and thus power) becomes too concentrated. This eventually leads to a total societal collapse, with rampant unemployment, rapid inflation, and... hey, I'm describing the U.S. economy....
Similarly, without enough capitalism, so-called "socialist" countries eventually see enough discrepancy between members of the ruling party and the general population to cause the same thing to happen. This eventually leads to a violent uprising.
The key is in striking the right balance between allowing people to get ahead for hard work and preventing them from getting so far ahead that no one else can ever hope to catch up because they are bringing in more unearned income than most people could ever hope to bring in as earned income. There are lots of things that can be done in that area, but the things that seem most useful to me are:
Tax all corporate profits regardless of country. If you have a nexus in a given country, you should be required to pay that country's tax rate on all profits, regardless of where that money was earned.
This would, of course, result in lowered corporate tax rates on a larger sum of money, but it would level the playing field for multinational corporations, eliminating the usefulness of storing money in offshore accounts. It would also result in the ability to move money around freely without taxation, which would lead to more flexibility in corporate spending.
Tax earned and unearned income (including capital gains) equally.
This would eliminate one significant reason why the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer in the United States. Right now, the rich make most of their money on capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate, whereas the poor make most of their money through earned income, which is taxed at a higher rate.
Redefine the poverty line as the local minimum wage, and eliminate all taxation on money below that line. This means, among other things, that the working poor should not have to pay any taxes, including sales tax. This basically requires eliminating sales tax as a means of revenue and replacing it with an income tax. Property taxes should similarly be eliminated for a family's primary residence. You would then make up for the losses by raising the tax rate on income above that line.
By doing this, people are more easily able to achieve a baseline lifestyle. So long as that baseline is maintained sufficiently, this will help tremendously. More significantly, by replacing sales taxes (regressive) with income taxes (flat or progressive), it means that the wealthy pay their fair share.
Perhaps stepping back to the way musicians previously made money before the recording industry took over might actually be a Good Thing(TM)
You're kidding, right? There's really no difference between selling a recording of a performance and selling attendance to a performance. The only reason people didn't sell performances before the music industry is because recording didn't exist back then.
More to the point, to a large extent, access to free music online will dry up concert ticket sales, too. Unless it's a band you really like, why would you pay money to go hear them in person when you'll be able to download the concert the next morning from Bittorrent or whatever?
No, I really meant that the only way to make money with music in Canada will be by teaching it. In the long term, this foolishly written law will effectively end the ability to make money by performance in any form, including performing at live venues, with the possible exception of bars.
Zombies can simply bypass all security measures by emulating the end user.
Not really. An end user's ISP typically has throttling in place such that if the user tries to send millions of emails out in a day, they A. will not go through, and B. will result in the user's account getting disabled rather quickly. If spammers are not able to run their own SMTP servers on zombie machines, spam ceases to be profitable, as it requires being able to send out huge volumes of email in a short period of time, and continuing for a long period of time.
With even the most basic host signing requirements, you could stick a fork in the spam. It's done.
But on the balance this would likely be good for the unknown performers because it would likely open up a new audience, one which wouldn't likely pay just to sample.
Unlikely. It would probably be distributed in the same way as royalties for audio CD taxes are, which means it's based on radio airplay counts. Translation: unless you're writing music for a major label, you're not going to see a cent.
That's the real reason the big music publishers want bullshit like this. It ensures that artists and songwriters will be forever beholden to the major labels. The songwriter organizations are playing right into the larger players' hands, and are basically defecating on the indie music scene.
For musicians as a whole, this law, if passed, will be a tremendous step backwards. By further institutionalizing the dependence on radio play and other highly restrictive channels, and by effectively reducing the value of sold music in Canada to zero (because you'll be able to legally share and download it for free), the proposed law would make it so that you can't make money with music except by teaching it.
In an era when the rest of the world is embracing the Internet as a great equalizer, Canada's law is threatening to destroy that---to eliminate the usefulness of the Internet as a medium for independent musicians to sell their music and make money outside the context of a major label. Frankly, any law like this is downright criminal.
...it doesn't matter if you know the identity of the sender if the sender's machine is a zombie.
Depends on how it is designed. If the system required that each server in the chain be a trusted server that signs the message with a valid SSL certificate, then the spammers would have to either buy a cert for each individual zombie (too expensive to be profitable) or tie them all to a single domain name and cert that could then be trivially blocked (either by revoking the cert or by blocking mail from that domain).
Either way, the high cost and low effectiveness of such a scheme would almost completely eliminate any financial benefit to sending spam, while having minimal effect on legitimate mail servers. This does, however, require that every step in the chain require authentication in some form.
The requirements for a secure mail system without spam are actually fairly simple:
All mail hosts must have an SSL certificate.
All mail users must have an SSL certificate.
All supported certificate providers must use a CRL or OCSP.
All supported certificate providers must provide an abuse email address for reporting spam, and must take action promptly.
That's it. It's not magic. Spam is relatively easy to combat. It does, however, require a completely redesigned mail system. Unfortunately, it sounds like this one isn't that system.
Slight exaggeration. Sony didn't really "turn bad" until just prior to the PS3 launch... sometime around 2005. So half a decade really, not 1.5 decades.
They might have turned worse in 2005, but I had already sworn off their products by about 2002 because of what I then considered to be an excessively high premature failure rate, which means that their products had sucked for me since at least 1998 or so. I think 15 years is probably in the ballpark. It just took you a decade to notice it.
Just what are your privacy rights in regard to corporate email or the use of your desk phone at work? What about your company cell phone?
Depends. Do the police have a subpoena? If not, then they'd have to have the company's permission to do the search. If they crack into the company's email servers, it doesn't matter in the slightest that the company warned me that they can allow the government to search my email, nor that the company offered to provide them with any email that they want. That's the closest email analogy I can come up with---an unreasonable search method that would be presumptively illegal even if you have no expectation of privacy.
If the police come in and ask the company you work for to turn over your email or open up your locker, the company can do so without having to have your permission.
That's because anything in your email or your locker is effectively in their possession. That doesn't mean that your employment contract can require you to allow the police to search your own home whenever they choose, nor to search you. There's a very large difference between privacy rights on property held by a third party and property held on your person.
By that standard, the government should not need a warrant to obtain wiretaps because your agreement with your phone company and ISP says that they can monitor your connection at any time. Indeed, by that standard, the government would have almost no limits on their rights to search and seizure so long as they were able to coerce appropriate businesses into writing clauses into their contracts of adhesion.
Somehow, I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation of what our founding fathers meant when they wrote that amendment, nor is it an implementation that makes the slightest bit of sense in any sane universe.
Either way, unreasonable search techniques are not allowed even with consent. Consent to a search only overrides the requirement to obtain a warrant and admissibility of evidence. It does not override the whole of the fourth amendment with regards to reasonableness of the search process itself.
You know, it wouldn't be hard to construct an algorithm that could monitor the data from the CCD and make recommendations. For example:
Face detected, but contrast poor. Consider adding a light from just over your left shoulder.
Face detected, but too much contrast. It looks like you're outside at noon. Try taking the picture later in the day or standing on a white surface.
You know, if you tilt the camera up a little, you'll have a better rule-of-thirds composition. Oh, and zoom in a little, too.
Man, there's not enough light in this room. Are you really sure you want to take this shot? It'll be noisy and probably blurry.
And so on. All those suggestions could be done using basic edge detection, face detection, and some pretty simple algorithms. Help the neophytes compose their shots, in other words.
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Or heck, how about using fiber optic cable with a thicker jacket so that you can pull zip ties as tightly as you would for copper cables?
This is about like saying, "I can't store my backups on any optical media because CDs are too small."
Actually, they are. These days, the unions have basically become big business in and of themselves. Thus, in effect, you have the Republicans representing the will of some big businesses while the Democrats represent the will of others.
The key here is that neither side seems to give a flying you-know-what about the actual workers. If they did, they'd be finding ways to raise revenue instead of arguing over who to stick it to with pay cuts or job cuts.
If you listen to half the Tea Party candidates, you'd certainly think so....
But what is ordinary skill? How large a percentage of the people skilled in an art have to be filing patents before the notion that these people are somehow extraordinary seems folly? When many technology companies get a patent per year per 50 programmers, that means that over the working career of a programmer, on average, nearly every employee should be named on at least one patent....
In my mind, the biggest flaw in the patent system is the obviousness test. The obviousness test should be as follows:
It's not enough to ask if the idea should have been obvious. Most ideas are really obvious to anyone paying attention, given the state of the art, assuming someone asks the right question at the right time. Patents are not supposed to be awarded to the lucky. They're supposed to be issued to the crème de la crème—the people who truly come up with unique and creative solutions to problems—not to the person who happens to be in the right position to bring a product to market at the right time.
Maybe, maybe not. It would have to be shown that the open source project was in use by people in the United States prior to the date that the other company "invented" their product (which is not the filing date for the patent).
It's not at all clear whether online publication is considered publication for patent litigation purposes because it is easy to change and falsify dates. Thus, the project itself might or might not be considered prior art, though a print publication describing the open source project would.
I would argue that except in cases of corporate espionage, all such filings are, by definition, situations in which "the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains." (35 U.S.C. 103) The fact that we're even discussing first-to-patent versus first-to-file patent rules is illustrative of the fundamental brokenness of our patent system. If there is ever an argument about who should get the patent, then the patent is almost invariably too obvious to be deserving of a patent in the first place.
Until the average person is willing to spend six or seven hundred dollars on a media center PC to play games, I'd imagine. It really doesn't matter how good the graphics are if you're viewing it on a 17" computer screen. Most people don't want to be stuck in front of a computer when they play games. They want to be in their living rooms, sharing the experience with others.
As someone who was there watching the launch in person, it was definitely a nail biter. Forty seconds left in the launch window, though I suppose they could have waited a day and gone up then.
It almost got delayed a day anyway. There's a minimum separation time between when one ship leaves ISS and another one docks, and if they had held fast to that schedule, it would have been delayed until Friday because of the late departure of... I think it was a Soyuz mission. They decided to override that and go on Thursday anyway. Either way, there presumably was an alternate launch window already planned for Friday.
The best part was how many people reacted to the original mission schedule in the same way. NASA's banners said that it would be up for 10 days and spend 363 days in orbit. Immediately, my reaction was, "Wait... you're within two days of being up there for a year, and you're not going to do it?" Well, they extended the mission by two days.
And just to anthropomorphize the shuttle a bit, I don't think general purpose computer 5 was ready to go to a museum. It failed to shut off. I particularly liked the controller's comment when he said that they'd be sure not to use that switch on the next flight. Hilarious.
Wow. Just... wow.
My head a splode.
First, a lot of the GPL is open to interpretation. Same goes for pretty much any other license. For example, does a GUI wrapper that calls your GPLed tool fall under the category of a derivative work? It's not at all clear from the license. On the one hand, it uses public interfaces exclusively. On the other hand, it is wholly dependent on the tool for functionality. So it's legally fuzzy.
Second, GPLv3 is a whole different animal, so there's the question of whether somebody who is using the v2 version might move to v3 at a later date (in which case if you're depending on the differences, you'd be screwed).
Third, all licenses must be interpreted based on case law, which is a continuously changing field. What might be assumed to be acceptable could suddenly become unacceptable. This is why the license clarification process requires an ongoing dialog between the people making commercial use of a piece of software and the people who produce that software.
So no, it isn't one person doing it one time for each version of the license. People who deal with intellectual property law would kill for a license so precisely worded that such a thing was possible.
And one set for GPL and Apache, too. That's pretty night and day as far as the requirements go, and it's not clear if all of those are really even violations.
I mean, GPL code, sure. That's pretty much toxic to closed source development. But Apache? How do you even violate the Apache license when you're distributing only object code?
Apache defines a derivative work very narrowly, such that (by my reading anyway) library code under an Apache license used as a small part of a larger work isn't one. Therefore, one could potentially argue that it doesn't even require attribution or a copy of the license....
That's a good idea. Only problem is that decent wide format color laser printers start in the neighborhood of two grand. You can burn through an awful lot of print heads before laser pays for itself unless you are content with 8.5x11 or smaller.
In my experience, print heads clog more often than I run out of ink. Therefore, neither of those methods is good. The right solution is to make printers that flush out their own heads with an appropriate solvent (e.g. an isopropanol tank) every time you shut them down so that the heads don't get dried ink inside them in the first place. Moving the print head to the ink tank is just shifting the problem around.
Back on topic, can you imagine this sort of printer getting clogged? Whoops. We accidentally put a few of somebody else's kidney cells inside your kidney along with your own. That's gonna be a tumor in a few years, but for now, enjoy your life while it lasts.
More to the point, it cannot be based on any sort of sampling technique. It must be an exact count. Otherwise, those with small download counts become rounding errors and get nothing instead of something.
The fact that spam bots can masquerade as the user is largely irrelevant. The reason we have spam is ultimately that there's no good way to verify that a message was sent by a given sender.
The only reason spam is possible with authenticated mail clients is that the ISPs require all outgoing mail to go through their servers, and thus the ISPs are forced to not do comparisons between the ISP's mail drop username and the "From" field in the message. Were it not for this flaw, any botnet would shrink as soon as somebody replied to the spam with a message that says, "Dude, your machine is sending out spam. Run a virus scan."
The only reason that such a technique is ineffective today is that the routing and other header fields are free-form text that can be modified en route, and trying to track down who had a given dynamic IP at a given moment is generally not worth the ISP's time anyway unless there's a subpoena attached to the request. As such, it's not readily possible to start out with an email message as received and definitively and programmatically pin it on a specific account at an ISP.
However, if the email system required each server in the path to sign the message, that would no longer be the case. Routing information would be verifiable and would be canonical in form, thus allowing trivial verification of the entire path all the way back to the initial ISP. Because the system would be inherently verifiable, there would be no reason for ISPs to try to route third-party mail drop clients through their SMTP servers, and thus the authentication to the mail drop server would be the From address.
Further, because the signatures of each server all the way back to the original server could be checked for authenticity, the ISP would be absolutely certain that the user (or at least the user's computer) actually sent the message. Thus, eliminating botnets would be as simple as adding a button in the mail client that says "report as spam" that automatically bounces it to the sender's ISP's abuse address. The ISPs could then collect these reports, and if a threshold is exceeded, the user's account would get disabled. No maximum number of messages per day, no value that the botnet authors have to stay below, just a "this user sent ten messages marked as spam" threshold that (after someone looked to see if the messages really did seem to be spam) would result in the user losing access. Such low volume and poor continuity would make spamming infeasible.
That's why forcing all of the mail servers to have legitimate certificates is the key to eliminating the spam problem. It allows the normal abuse management process to work again like it did back when all the servers were at least ostensibly trusted, and it allows for trivial automation of the verification process, which is key to detecting and eradicating affected machines in a timely manner.
Isn't it an inconvenient truth that there has never been a purely socialist government on our planet? You know, one that wasn't marred either by partial capitalism or by one or more tyrannical nutjobs at the helm who are/were consumed with their desire to retain and increase their own power?
Pure socialism works just fine. For groups of a half dozen people. Maybe even up to a couple of dozen. At some point, it breaks down due to people finding ways around the rules to increase their own standing. The only way it doesn't break down is if you have a despot that punishes the people who break the rules.
Similarly, capitalism inherently breaks down as people find ways around the rules to increase their own standing, and the only way you can stop it is by punishing the winners. In the long run, the only real difference between the two systems has been the degree to which more heavily socialist societies have punished the winner.
The more important point is that most so-called "capitalist" countries employ socialism to some degree. Without enough socialism, you invariably get a widening divide between the lower and middle classes (much as we're seeing in the U.S. today). Any economic system will eventually be abused, and once the avenues for abuse are found, they must be closed. Otherwise, money (and thus power) becomes too concentrated. This eventually leads to a total societal collapse, with rampant unemployment, rapid inflation, and... hey, I'm describing the U.S. economy....
Similarly, without enough capitalism, so-called "socialist" countries eventually see enough discrepancy between members of the ruling party and the general population to cause the same thing to happen. This eventually leads to a violent uprising.
The key is in striking the right balance between allowing people to get ahead for hard work and preventing them from getting so far ahead that no one else can ever hope to catch up because they are bringing in more unearned income than most people could ever hope to bring in as earned income. There are lots of things that can be done in that area, but the things that seem most useful to me are:
Tax all corporate profits regardless of country. If you have a nexus in a given country, you should be required to pay that country's tax rate on all profits, regardless of where that money was earned.
This would, of course, result in lowered corporate tax rates on a larger sum of money, but it would level the playing field for multinational corporations, eliminating the usefulness of storing money in offshore accounts. It would also result in the ability to move money around freely without taxation, which would lead to more flexibility in corporate spending.
Tax earned and unearned income (including capital gains) equally.
This would eliminate one significant reason why the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer in the United States. Right now, the rich make most of their money on capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate, whereas the poor make most of their money through earned income, which is taxed at a higher rate.
Redefine the poverty line as the local minimum wage, and eliminate all taxation on money below that line. This means, among other things, that the working poor should not have to pay any taxes, including sales tax. This basically requires eliminating sales tax as a means of revenue and replacing it with an income tax. Property taxes should similarly be eliminated for a family's primary residence. You would then make up for the losses by raising the tax rate on income above that line.
By doing this, people are more easily able to achieve a baseline lifestyle. So long as that baseline is maintained sufficiently, this will help tremendously. More significantly, by replacing sales taxes (regressive) with income taxes (flat or progressive), it means that the wealthy pay their fair share.
The most significant take-away is
You're kidding, right? There's really no difference between selling a recording of a performance and selling attendance to a performance. The only reason people didn't sell performances before the music industry is because recording didn't exist back then.
More to the point, to a large extent, access to free music online will dry up concert ticket sales, too. Unless it's a band you really like, why would you pay money to go hear them in person when you'll be able to download the concert the next morning from Bittorrent or whatever?
No, I really meant that the only way to make money with music in Canada will be by teaching it. In the long term, this foolishly written law will effectively end the ability to make money by performance in any form, including performing at live venues, with the possible exception of bars.
Not really. An end user's ISP typically has throttling in place such that if the user tries to send millions of emails out in a day, they A. will not go through, and B. will result in the user's account getting disabled rather quickly. If spammers are not able to run their own SMTP servers on zombie machines, spam ceases to be profitable, as it requires being able to send out huge volumes of email in a short period of time, and continuing for a long period of time.
With even the most basic host signing requirements, you could stick a fork in the spam. It's done.
Unlikely. It would probably be distributed in the same way as royalties for audio CD taxes are, which means it's based on radio airplay counts. Translation: unless you're writing music for a major label, you're not going to see a cent.
That's the real reason the big music publishers want bullshit like this. It ensures that artists and songwriters will be forever beholden to the major labels. The songwriter organizations are playing right into the larger players' hands, and are basically defecating on the indie music scene.
For musicians as a whole, this law, if passed, will be a tremendous step backwards. By further institutionalizing the dependence on radio play and other highly restrictive channels, and by effectively reducing the value of sold music in Canada to zero (because you'll be able to legally share and download it for free), the proposed law would make it so that you can't make money with music except by teaching it.
In an era when the rest of the world is embracing the Internet as a great equalizer, Canada's law is threatening to destroy that---to eliminate the usefulness of the Internet as a medium for independent musicians to sell their music and make money outside the context of a major label. Frankly, any law like this is downright criminal.
Depends on how it is designed. If the system required that each server in the chain be a trusted server that signs the message with a valid SSL certificate, then the spammers would have to either buy a cert for each individual zombie (too expensive to be profitable) or tie them all to a single domain name and cert that could then be trivially blocked (either by revoking the cert or by blocking mail from that domain).
Either way, the high cost and low effectiveness of such a scheme would almost completely eliminate any financial benefit to sending spam, while having minimal effect on legitimate mail servers. This does, however, require that every step in the chain require authentication in some form.
The requirements for a secure mail system without spam are actually fairly simple:
That's it. It's not magic. Spam is relatively easy to combat. It does, however, require a completely redesigned mail system. Unfortunately, it sounds like this one isn't that system.
They might have turned worse in 2005, but I had already sworn off their products by about 2002 because of what I then considered to be an excessively high premature failure rate, which means that their products had sucked for me since at least 1998 or so. I think 15 years is probably in the ballpark. It just took you a decade to notice it.
File a bug report if you disagree with the rating.
Depends. Do the police have a subpoena? If not, then they'd have to have the company's permission to do the search. If they crack into the company's email servers, it doesn't matter in the slightest that the company warned me that they can allow the government to search my email, nor that the company offered to provide them with any email that they want. That's the closest email analogy I can come up with---an unreasonable search method that would be presumptively illegal even if you have no expectation of privacy.
That's because anything in your email or your locker is effectively in their possession. That doesn't mean that your employment contract can require you to allow the police to search your own home whenever they choose, nor to search you. There's a very large difference between privacy rights on property held by a third party and property held on your person.
By that standard, the government should not need a warrant to obtain wiretaps because your agreement with your phone company and ISP says that they can monitor your connection at any time. Indeed, by that standard, the government would have almost no limits on their rights to search and seizure so long as they were able to coerce appropriate businesses into writing clauses into their contracts of adhesion.
Somehow, I don't think that's a reasonable interpretation of what our founding fathers meant when they wrote that amendment, nor is it an implementation that makes the slightest bit of sense in any sane universe.
Either way, unreasonable search techniques are not allowed even with consent. Consent to a search only overrides the requirement to obtain a warrant and admissibility of evidence. It does not override the whole of the fourth amendment with regards to reasonableness of the search process itself.
Just to be pedantic, I should probably correct that slightly. I think TRIM operates on erasure blocks rather than (read-write) pages.
You know, it wouldn't be hard to construct an algorithm that could monitor the data from the CCD and make recommendations. For example:
And so on. All those suggestions could be done using basic edge detection, face detection, and some pretty simple algorithms. Help the neophytes compose their shots, in other words.