Re:Maybe this is the start of revamping processes?
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 1
I think we should all just get together and start our own government from scratch. Put it in a sand box, run some pretend legislation through it, a few high profile pretend cases, a few wars and riots, and when things are all tested out and the kinks ironed out, replace the existing one.
This actually sounds like an interesting sociology project.
Re:Maybe this is the start of revamping processes?
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 1
This is a very good point. I think the intent was more to prevent the government from speeding through resolutions or legislation without sufficient thought. This can always be built into a mechanized system, though. You can put in some required waiting periods that can't be overcome without a significant majority vote (for "fast track" legislation related to natural disasters, for example).
Some additional accountability might be nice also. Instead of just voting for or against something, you have to document why. This is what I love about major court decisions: you understand the reasoning and rationale, and can plainly see that the justice put some serious thought into it.
But mainly I think it'd be cool for a rep to pull up a current bill and see the text of it, see cross references, and see annotations made by other reps. You have the potential to get all of the information you'd get on the floor without having to sit through oration. Maybe the vote could still be done in person, preceeded by a question-and-answer session, just in case someone doesn't completely understand or believe one of the pros/cons. Bring in some experts for that.
I don't know. I can think of a million ways things could possibly change, but I don't know if many of them are really practical.
Maybe this is the start of revamping processes?
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The one big thing I can see a large technie presence in the government doing is updating processes. Everything is still based on oration and a verbose written process. A lot of fairly trivial things require an enormous amount of paperwork, and where that paperwork has been replaced by electronic versions, that's literally all it is: a scanned or Word version of the same written document.
An intelligent and powerful technical presence in the government could allow more technical processes to find their way into government processes. On the technical and scientific side, we're already using better voting techniques to allow systems to handle their own little elections autonomously. We have markup languages that could make legislation sensical to machines. We have technologies that could allow representatives to represent their constituents from places other than the congress.
Technology has the potential to streamline processes significantly, and there are fewer processes less streamlined than these fundamental processes within our governments.
My thoughts at least.
Re:Be wary of 'trusted' protocols
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
(with the assistance of random helpful people; the same people who keep spreading email viruses)
That's just it: if there are intermediaries that are applying "trust" to spammers or scam artists, they should be pretty easy to identify.
It could even be automated: every time you receive something untrustworthy, you penalize everyone in the chain from you to the sender a little bit. If you keep getting the same crap from the same little syndicate, it will be clear which user(s) are imparting trust to those identities and eventually they will themselves become untrustworthy. And then you can slap around the guy that trusted them in the first place.
OK, maybe it isn't that simple. But still, in order to "trust" someone's identity, you have to trust a friend that trusts a friend that trusts them. That chain of trust can be identified and, if necessary, broken as appropriate.
Spam today amounts to abuse of someone's misconfigured/poorly maintained servers. Spam in a web of trust amounts to abuse of someone's trust, which is a little harder to do indiscriminately.
Re:Lessening Spam: The True Hollywood Story
on
Replacing SMTP?
·
· Score: 1
I found out that you WILL get LESS spam if you actually follow the advice in the spam, in general.
I've done this also and my results were inconclusive. The total amount of spam seemed to go down, but not very noticably (it certainly didn't reverse the upward trend). In addition, I did catch three "removal" sites (e.g. jet.com) that actually added my address to other spam lists.
It's possible that this policy will reduce the amount of spam you get, but some of that reduction is negated by other spammers that will spam the e-mail addresses you ask them to remove.
(Every time I added my e-mail address to a removal system upon receiving a spam, I would also "remove" a specially-generated e-mail address designed to identify the removal system. If spam arrives destined to that e-mail address, I know the "removal" mechanism was bogus/fraudulant.)
Joe Homeowner should not be running his own mail servers. That's the responsibility of his Internet Provider.
Client-side techniques need to be implemented in the clients, and made transparent and easy to use so that Joe Homeowner shouldn't need to know/care what's going on.
In Perl6, the "context" of a variable actually gets a little more specific. In a vague "scalar" context, yes, an array will resolve to a reference to itself.
However, you can examine either in a numeric context and obtain the number of elements within it. So things will work as you expect, you just have to realize that "scalar" is now a real vague term.
Is this "macro system" different than the one presented in this article? Damian's showcasing a macro syntax on some of the later pages of the article that involves evaluating Perl code (similarly to a Perl 5 BEGIN block) and injecting the returned string directly into the code where the macro is called, where it is immediately parsed as the parser picks up where it left off.
I admit that I'm not completely familiar with how Lisp does things, but is this a sufficient macro system for your needs, or are you suggesting that something better is needed?
Agreed, but there are other issues here: a lot of the lines were run with government subsidies. Bell didn't pony up all of the original expense. So anyone trying to run competing lines would have to bear the entire expense of doing so, which is more than Bell had to do (in some cases), which also makes it prohibitively expensive.
So in order to break the monopoly, you have to force Bell to let others sell service over their lines. It's ugly and frustrating for companies like SBC, but it's what the government chose to do.
Now, if it were up to me, I'd sell those physical lines to the government, or spin off a company that is there simply to run and maintain those lines. This would be more or less like any other public utility. Then, companies wanting to put services on those lines (including the original Bells) would have to pay fairly to use them. None of this government price fixing crap.
I think you're underestimating the position the person served with this subpoena. See another comment that describes this on a related thread. Let's say the RIAA has served you with a subpoena for an act of piracy that someone else in your household committed. They have pretty conclusive evidence that your Internet connection has been used to share files online. Your ISP has given your identity to the RIAA based on the fact that you own the Internet account these files were shared from.
If they wanted to go further, the RIAA could have your PC searched, where they would no doubt locate a copy of file sharing software along with lots of files shared with it.
Like it or not, this is some pretty damning evidence that you've been sharing files. It might even be proof "beyond a reasonable doubt", but even if it isn't, remember that civil trials don't require that standard of proof.
Now, are you willing to let things go this far, or are you going to perhaps make the suggestion that someone else was using your PC at the time? Odds are, you're going to be found guilty if you don't. They don't need much more than this to prove their case against you. You may not agree, but most people do not consider this a lack of "sufficient evidence".
So yes, in this situation, you need to be a little more cooperative with them if you want to keep yourself cleared of the crime.
There are lots of reasons the RIAA would subpoena the "wrong" person here. All they have is information indicating that a particular Internet account was used to share files. In many cases, the owner of the account is not only person using it. The subpoena will go to the "wrong" person. That person would presumably point them to the right person.
Bear in mind that when you sign up for Internet service, you also take on a certain degree of responsibility for how your account is used. Choose your users wisely. I'm not suggesting that the owners of an account should be slapped with lawsuits if their account is used in ways they didn't intend, I'm just saying that you should expect some amount of headache if you allow someone to use your Internet access and they abuse it. No, you did not commit a crime here, but you need to take a little bit of responsibility and work with all of the parties involved to ensure the right person is prosecuted. The RIAA wants to prosecute the right guy here. It's neither justice nor a deterrent if they're hitting innocent bystanders with their lawsuits.
The issue with parents is actually a little more complicated: in some jurisdictions, they are actually the right person. In some areas, the parents are fully responsible for their child's crimes. At a minimum, damages awarded in a civil trial for a minor's actions would almost certainly be paid by the parent anyway, not the child.
Obviously you aren't guilty of a crime you did not commit.
However, if you are served with a subpoena indicating you did commit a crime, and you are pretty sure you have no idea what they're talking about, perhaps that might be enough of a curiosity to cause you to investigate what might have happened?
RIAA: This guy distributed pirated versions of our songs.
You: No I didn't.
RIAA: Yes you did. Here's proof, certified by your ISP, indicating you were doing this sharing at this time.
You: No I didn't.
RIAA: Yes you did. We nabbed your computer and found all of these files on your PC and the sharing software installed and running.
You: No it wasn't.
Jury: Guilty.
If a party like the RIAA has sufficient evidence to prove you did it, you're going to need a sufficient defense to show you didn't, even if you are truly innocent. If you have reason to believe that someone else broke in to your computer and committed these crimes, you shouldn't have much of a problem getting the FBI or even the RIAA to investigate that. They're all after the same thing here: the person doing the infringing/crime. If you didn't do it, but have information on your PC that can point them to who did, don't just clam up and say "I didn't do it," without giving them the opportunity to investigate.
If a friend asks to borrow your car so that he can go kill some people, then yes. Theft or some other unauthorized use clearly doesn't make you responsible. Think about this a little more rationally.
He's referring to the legal "public domain" term. Once a work is released into the public domain, there is no copyright restriction to it whatsoever. Anyone can use, modify or reproduce it however they want with no attribution to the original author. It can be released as part of any other product under any license or copyright.
I don't think the original poster meant to emphasize "realistically" with respects to computer software. I suspect he was trying to comment on reliability and fitness.
Meanwhile, the average shopper gets the brunt of the inconvenience.
Am I missing something? What inconvenience? The inconvenience of being temporarily photographed without your explicit knowledge?
the concept's usefulness is limited to pattern-offenders, and socially-engineering confessions from probable-offenders.
Are you suggesting that RFID tags in blades will allow authorities to get innocent people to confess to stealing razor blades? Where did this come from?
A smart thief would limit their pilferage to stuff that's already wandered away from its original shelf, thus has already taken someone else's picture.
That's what I would do. Of course, if a store has RFID-sensitive cameras where razors are kept, they probably have an existing, rather thorough CCTV setup keeping an eye out for this type of thing as well. Granted, it's back to "low tech" shoplifting prevention, but they're no worse off than they are today.
Presumably, if the RFID tags were embedded with the blade itself, it would be picked up at a later inventory.
A single incident might not be suggestive. Unusual? Yes. Odd? Not really. Suggestive? No. But if the same guy showed up several times as having picked up a pack without that pack being purchased, I might keep an eye on him the next time he was in the store.
The camera "evidence" might actually be enough to evoke a confession.
Keep in mind that the definition of "infringed" has changed very slightly. Back then, it literally meant something to the effect of "invalidate".
Other posters have some really good points, relating to the rationale behind the second amendment:
1. The public needs to be armed to defend itself from foreign invaders
2. The public needs to be armed in the event their government becomes oppressive
3. The average citizen should be allowed to bear arms to defend himself from local crimes
Point #1 is fairly moot, now that we have a standing army and have no need for a militia.
Point #2 is controversial, since we do have a standing army that no private arsenal would likely be able to compete with. In any event, this point might require/allow citizens to possess most any form of weaponry the federal government wishes to use.
Point #3 is still very much valid, but doesn't require large-scale weaponry prohibited by most gun control laws.
An amendment altering the second, bringing it more in line with point #3 seems logical, but I guarantee those that feel strongly about #2 aren't going to let something like that pass quietly (or peacefully).
It's a little difficult for a government to take steps to ensure that its people have the ability to violently rise up against it.
I don't think they care if the pair match, I think they work to ensure that there is some form of pair: one taken pack mates with one purchase. The photos become useful when a pack is taken and not purchased. The article does make it sound like they're trying to get them to match, but as you suggest, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
I had the same experience with 'ccbill'. Would that by chance be the one you're talking about? I confronted them and they flat out denied selling my address. They suggested that I might have used the address somewhere else, even though it was clear and obvious that the address was made up specifically for that one transaction.
Re:Section 105 of the 1976 Copyright acts covers t
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
Not to indulge the off-topic much further, but this attitude kind of rubs me the wrong way. People resent government from a distance. Local and state governments still need to play a role here for one important reason: the people playing a part in those governments are people from your local community. Do you really trust a centralized government a thousand miles a way to make decisions about how your locality should behave? Would you really prefer that over letting your own community make those decisions?
There are certainly good reasons for the federal government to be there, and good reasons that standard laws should be there that are the same across all states, but lots of issues really need to be decided at the local scale. Some things are important to people in one area and not important to people in a different area. This is not a bad thing. A law might make perfect sense for one locality but might be horrible for another. Let them decide that on their own.
I do exactly the same thing (with the user+mailbox@example.com format) and have found at least two otherwise reputable places selling my address. In both cases, when I confronted them, they strenuously denied ever selling my address to spammers (one going so far as to suggest that I was using the same obviously unique address elsewhere, or that a spammer had hacked into my system and sifted through my data looking for e-mail addresses to spam).
Clearly they leaked the address somehow. But I have to consider the possibility that one of their employees sold it on the side, or that their systems were compromised. In both cases, I presented these as the only likely scenarios and told them if they weren't going to take measures to prevent it, I would take my business elsewhere.
In addition to this trick, I have a subdomain set up as a 'trap' for spam, and automatically generate e-mail addresses using keywords, encoded IP addresses and date/time stamps to embed within web pages. Spam harvesters pick them up without a significant risk of someone legitimate trying to use one to contact me. With enough information in the e-mail address, you can go back and see exactly who harvested the address. ISPs frequently don't see these types of complaints, and if you're lucky, the spammer is doing the harvesting on a more persistent Internet account and not his throw-away spam injection account. (This is especially interesting for those Nigerian scams, since your local authorities have the ability to use that information to track the guy sending the e-mails by way of his harvesting.)
Site not slashdotted, karma whore/troll
on
Incas Used Binary?
·
· Score: 1
The site is fine, the text of this post is a slightly mangled version of the real article, and this post gets moderated to a 5?
Please stop blindly moderating posts like this up. In few cases is the site actually slashdotted. More often than not, this is someone trying to get karma or watch in glee as idiot moderators upvote the post. Take a look at this person's comment history if you believe I'm mistaken.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we should all just get together and start our own government from scratch. Put it in a sand box, run some pretend legislation through it, a few high profile pretend cases, a few wars and riots, and when things are all tested out and the kinks ironed out, replace the existing one.
This actually sounds like an interesting sociology project.
This is a very good point. I think the intent was more to prevent the government from speeding through resolutions or legislation without sufficient thought. This can always be built into a mechanized system, though. You can put in some required waiting periods that can't be overcome without a significant majority vote (for "fast track" legislation related to natural disasters, for example).
Some additional accountability might be nice also. Instead of just voting for or against something, you have to document why. This is what I love about major court decisions: you understand the reasoning and rationale, and can plainly see that the justice put some serious thought into it.
But mainly I think it'd be cool for a rep to pull up a current bill and see the text of it, see cross references, and see annotations made by other reps. You have the potential to get all of the information you'd get on the floor without having to sit through oration. Maybe the vote could still be done in person, preceeded by a question-and-answer session, just in case someone doesn't completely understand or believe one of the pros/cons. Bring in some experts for that.
I don't know. I can think of a million ways things could possibly change, but I don't know if many of them are really practical.
The one big thing I can see a large technie presence in the government doing is updating processes. Everything is still based on oration and a verbose written process. A lot of fairly trivial things require an enormous amount of paperwork, and where that paperwork has been replaced by electronic versions, that's literally all it is: a scanned or Word version of the same written document.
An intelligent and powerful technical presence in the government could allow more technical processes to find their way into government processes. On the technical and scientific side, we're already using better voting techniques to allow systems to handle their own little elections autonomously. We have markup languages that could make legislation sensical to machines. We have technologies that could allow representatives to represent their constituents from places other than the congress.
Technology has the potential to streamline processes significantly, and there are fewer processes less streamlined than these fundamental processes within our governments.
My thoughts at least.
(with the assistance of random helpful people; the same people who keep spreading email viruses)
That's just it: if there are intermediaries that are applying "trust" to spammers or scam artists, they should be pretty easy to identify.
It could even be automated: every time you receive something untrustworthy, you penalize everyone in the chain from you to the sender a little bit. If you keep getting the same crap from the same little syndicate, it will be clear which user(s) are imparting trust to those identities and eventually they will themselves become untrustworthy. And then you can slap around the guy that trusted them in the first place.
OK, maybe it isn't that simple. But still, in order to "trust" someone's identity, you have to trust a friend that trusts a friend that trusts them. That chain of trust can be identified and, if necessary, broken as appropriate.
Spam today amounts to abuse of someone's misconfigured/poorly maintained servers. Spam in a web of trust amounts to abuse of someone's trust, which is a little harder to do indiscriminately.
I found out that you WILL get LESS spam if you actually follow the advice in the spam, in general.
I've done this also and my results were inconclusive. The total amount of spam seemed to go down, but not very noticably (it certainly didn't reverse the upward trend). In addition, I did catch three "removal" sites (e.g. jet.com) that actually added my address to other spam lists.
It's possible that this policy will reduce the amount of spam you get, but some of that reduction is negated by other spammers that will spam the e-mail addresses you ask them to remove.
(Every time I added my e-mail address to a removal system upon receiving a spam, I would also "remove" a specially-generated e-mail address designed to identify the removal system. If spam arrives destined to that e-mail address, I know the "removal" mechanism was bogus/fraudulant.)
Joe Homeowner should not be running his own mail servers. That's the responsibility of his Internet Provider.
Client-side techniques need to be implemented in the clients, and made transparent and easy to use so that Joe Homeowner shouldn't need to know/care what's going on.
In Perl6, the "context" of a variable actually gets a little more specific. In a vague "scalar" context, yes, an array will resolve to a reference to itself.
However, you can examine either in a numeric context and obtain the number of elements within it. So things will work as you expect, you just have to realize that "scalar" is now a real vague term.
Is this "macro system" different than the one presented in this article? Damian's showcasing a macro syntax on some of the later pages of the article that involves evaluating Perl code (similarly to a Perl 5 BEGIN block) and injecting the returned string directly into the code where the macro is called, where it is immediately parsed as the parser picks up where it left off.
I admit that I'm not completely familiar with how Lisp does things, but is this a sufficient macro system for your needs, or are you suggesting that something better is needed?
Agreed, but there are other issues here: a lot of the lines were run with government subsidies. Bell didn't pony up all of the original expense. So anyone trying to run competing lines would have to bear the entire expense of doing so, which is more than Bell had to do (in some cases), which also makes it prohibitively expensive.
So in order to break the monopoly, you have to force Bell to let others sell service over their lines. It's ugly and frustrating for companies like SBC, but it's what the government chose to do.
Now, if it were up to me, I'd sell those physical lines to the government, or spin off a company that is there simply to run and maintain those lines. This would be more or less like any other public utility. Then, companies wanting to put services on those lines (including the original Bells) would have to pay fairly to use them. None of this government price fixing crap.
I think you're underestimating the position the person served with this subpoena. See another comment that describes this on a related thread. Let's say the RIAA has served you with a subpoena for an act of piracy that someone else in your household committed. They have pretty conclusive evidence that your Internet connection has been used to share files online. Your ISP has given your identity to the RIAA based on the fact that you own the Internet account these files were shared from.
If they wanted to go further, the RIAA could have your PC searched, where they would no doubt locate a copy of file sharing software along with lots of files shared with it.
Like it or not, this is some pretty damning evidence that you've been sharing files. It might even be proof "beyond a reasonable doubt", but even if it isn't, remember that civil trials don't require that standard of proof.
Now, are you willing to let things go this far, or are you going to perhaps make the suggestion that someone else was using your PC at the time? Odds are, you're going to be found guilty if you don't. They don't need much more than this to prove their case against you. You may not agree, but most people do not consider this a lack of "sufficient evidence".
So yes, in this situation, you need to be a little more cooperative with them if you want to keep yourself cleared of the crime.
There are lots of reasons the RIAA would subpoena the "wrong" person here. All they have is information indicating that a particular Internet account was used to share files. In many cases, the owner of the account is not only person using it. The subpoena will go to the "wrong" person. That person would presumably point them to the right person.
Bear in mind that when you sign up for Internet service, you also take on a certain degree of responsibility for how your account is used. Choose your users wisely. I'm not suggesting that the owners of an account should be slapped with lawsuits if their account is used in ways they didn't intend, I'm just saying that you should expect some amount of headache if you allow someone to use your Internet access and they abuse it. No, you did not commit a crime here, but you need to take a little bit of responsibility and work with all of the parties involved to ensure the right person is prosecuted. The RIAA wants to prosecute the right guy here. It's neither justice nor a deterrent if they're hitting innocent bystanders with their lawsuits.
The issue with parents is actually a little more complicated: in some jurisdictions, they are actually the right person. In some areas, the parents are fully responsible for their child's crimes. At a minimum, damages awarded in a civil trial for a minor's actions would almost certainly be paid by the parent anyway, not the child.
Obviously you aren't guilty of a crime you did not commit.
However, if you are served with a subpoena indicating you did commit a crime, and you are pretty sure you have no idea what they're talking about, perhaps that might be enough of a curiosity to cause you to investigate what might have happened?
RIAA: This guy distributed pirated versions of our songs.
You: No I didn't.
RIAA: Yes you did. Here's proof, certified by your ISP, indicating you were doing this sharing at this time.
You: No I didn't.
RIAA: Yes you did. We nabbed your computer and found all of these files on your PC and the sharing software installed and running.
You: No it wasn't.
Jury: Guilty.
If a party like the RIAA has sufficient evidence to prove you did it, you're going to need a sufficient defense to show you didn't, even if you are truly innocent. If you have reason to believe that someone else broke in to your computer and committed these crimes, you shouldn't have much of a problem getting the FBI or even the RIAA to investigate that. They're all after the same thing here: the person doing the infringing/crime. If you didn't do it, but have information on your PC that can point them to who did, don't just clam up and say "I didn't do it," without giving them the opportunity to investigate.
If a friend asks to borrow your car so that he can go kill some people, then yes. Theft or some other unauthorized use clearly doesn't make you responsible. Think about this a little more rationally.
He's referring to the legal "public domain" term. Once a work is released into the public domain, there is no copyright restriction to it whatsoever. Anyone can use, modify or reproduce it however they want with no attribution to the original author. It can be released as part of any other product under any license or copyright.
I don't think the original poster meant to emphasize "realistically" with respects to computer software. I suspect he was trying to comment on reliability and fitness.
various ways to confuse the system via perfectly normal family shopping scenarios.
Got it. I think most stores would elect to err on the side of the customer than to annoy a significant percentage of them like that, though.
Meanwhile, the average shopper gets the brunt of the inconvenience.
Am I missing something? What inconvenience? The inconvenience of being temporarily photographed without your explicit knowledge?
the concept's usefulness is limited to pattern-offenders, and socially-engineering confessions from probable-offenders.
Are you suggesting that RFID tags in blades will allow authorities to get innocent people to confess to stealing razor blades? Where did this come from?
A smart thief would limit their pilferage to stuff that's already wandered away from its original shelf, thus has already taken someone else's picture.
That's what I would do. Of course, if a store has RFID-sensitive cameras where razors are kept, they probably have an existing, rather thorough CCTV setup keeping an eye out for this type of thing as well. Granted, it's back to "low tech" shoplifting prevention, but they're no worse off than they are today.
But even that is poor proof.
In fact, I'd say no proof.
dropped it on some random shelf elsewhere?
Presumably, if the RFID tags were embedded with the blade itself, it would be picked up at a later inventory.
A single incident might not be suggestive. Unusual? Yes. Odd? Not really. Suggestive? No. But if the same guy showed up several times as having picked up a pack without that pack being purchased, I might keep an eye on him the next time he was in the store.
The camera "evidence" might actually be enough to evoke a confession.
Keep in mind that the definition of "infringed" has changed very slightly. Back then, it literally meant something to the effect of "invalidate".
Other posters have some really good points, relating to the rationale behind the second amendment:
1. The public needs to be armed to defend itself from foreign invaders
2. The public needs to be armed in the event their government becomes oppressive
3. The average citizen should be allowed to bear arms to defend himself from local crimes
Point #1 is fairly moot, now that we have a standing army and have no need for a militia.
Point #2 is controversial, since we do have a standing army that no private arsenal would likely be able to compete with. In any event, this point might require/allow citizens to possess most any form of weaponry the federal government wishes to use.
Point #3 is still very much valid, but doesn't require large-scale weaponry prohibited by most gun control laws.
An amendment altering the second, bringing it more in line with point #3 seems logical, but I guarantee those that feel strongly about #2 aren't going to let something like that pass quietly (or peacefully).
It's a little difficult for a government to take steps to ensure that its people have the ability to violently rise up against it.
I don't think they care if the pair match, I think they work to ensure that there is some form of pair: one taken pack mates with one purchase. The photos become useful when a pack is taken and not purchased. The article does make it sound like they're trying to get them to match, but as you suggest, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
I had the same experience with 'ccbill'. Would that by chance be the one you're talking about? I confronted them and they flat out denied selling my address. They suggested that I might have used the address somewhere else, even though it was clear and obvious that the address was made up specifically for that one transaction.
Not to indulge the off-topic much further, but this attitude kind of rubs me the wrong way. People resent government from a distance. Local and state governments still need to play a role here for one important reason: the people playing a part in those governments are people from your local community. Do you really trust a centralized government a thousand miles a way to make decisions about how your locality should behave? Would you really prefer that over letting your own community make those decisions?
There are certainly good reasons for the federal government to be there, and good reasons that standard laws should be there that are the same across all states, but lots of issues really need to be decided at the local scale. Some things are important to people in one area and not important to people in a different area. This is not a bad thing. A law might make perfect sense for one locality but might be horrible for another. Let them decide that on their own.
I do exactly the same thing (with the user+mailbox@example.com format) and have found at least two otherwise reputable places selling my address. In both cases, when I confronted them, they strenuously denied ever selling my address to spammers (one going so far as to suggest that I was using the same obviously unique address elsewhere, or that a spammer had hacked into my system and sifted through my data looking for e-mail addresses to spam).
Clearly they leaked the address somehow. But I have to consider the possibility that one of their employees sold it on the side, or that their systems were compromised. In both cases, I presented these as the only likely scenarios and told them if they weren't going to take measures to prevent it, I would take my business elsewhere.
In addition to this trick, I have a subdomain set up as a 'trap' for spam, and automatically generate e-mail addresses using keywords, encoded IP addresses and date/time stamps to embed within web pages. Spam harvesters pick them up without a significant risk of someone legitimate trying to use one to contact me. With enough information in the e-mail address, you can go back and see exactly who harvested the address. ISPs frequently don't see these types of complaints, and if you're lucky, the spammer is doing the harvesting on a more persistent Internet account and not his throw-away spam injection account. (This is especially interesting for those Nigerian scams, since your local authorities have the ability to use that information to track the guy sending the e-mails by way of his harvesting.)
The site is fine, the text of this post is a slightly mangled version of the real article, and this post gets moderated to a 5?
Please stop blindly moderating posts like this up. In few cases is the site actually slashdotted. More often than not, this is someone trying to get karma or watch in glee as idiot moderators upvote the post. Take a look at this person's comment history if you believe I'm mistaken.
For some reason you have this crazy notion in your head that this system is finished and the only kinks to be worked out are minor.
The car went on sale in Japan yesterday. I sure hope it's finished.