Imagine that, perhaps, not all radio emissions generate money. Imagine that researchers and hams get trampled on by some company because the company has millions to throw at a piece of the spectrum and the researcher/ham doesn't?
Imagine you have a small dinky radio station that broadcasts programs for "friends of the earth" and other ecologists, and Texaco buys out all the spectrum available, and that *oops, too bad* the dinky station can't broadcast anything?
If the researcher or ham already owns the spectrum, then he can refuse to sell. If he doesn't own it, then he can buy his own spectrum.
The situation is that the spectrum is like land: no one can afford to own all of it (without government assistance). As you can keep slicing it thinner and thinner (at a loss of functionality, yes), the price becomes astronomic.
What you'd have to watch out for would be rigged auctions, government takeovers of property (a la eminent domain), that sort of thing.
The situation with the "dinky radio station" is actually interesting: in a land rights situation, you could probably get together enough money from donations to be able to purchase the spectrum you need, and then no one could take it away from you.
Under the current system, you can have it taken away from you if the Special Interest (read: corp) has enough Special Influence. You could also get shuffled around, because you are not important. When you own it, they can't tell you to go away.
umm. in that world your broadcast would get approximately to your neighbours house before getting interference from the gazillion other guys pumping out to the same frequency. if there's _no_ regulation at all it all gets quite crowded quite fast and and then it's no good for anybody.
I don't believe the proposal is to get rid of enforcement. In fact, if they want to go over to a property rights system, then you need to have enforcement.
When the word "regulation" is used, it's meant to refer to government oversight/planning. The court system and the police would take care of the issue you suggest, just like they take care of people who would try to build a 7/11 on your front lawn.
The problem is that while the utilities are sold off to private companies (usually not plural, either), the right-of-ways and such remain solely allocated to that utility. There is thus no possibility of competition for customers, only competition for maintenance and management contracts. Not Cool.
It really sucks when you have to convince 51% of the voting population of a town to switch providers because you got screwed over. That kind of privatization is pretty lame.
Incidently, I refused to have my name listed as the co-inventer on a patent my company wanted to file because I considered it so trivial as to be silly. I don't want my name associated with patent abuse, and if more people took that approach this problem simply wouldn't occur. That's a pipe-dream though.
A gentleman's agreement (particularly with the entire world) not to do something that could provide significant monetary benefit is like an agreement not to have nukes: the temptation to be the only one in the world with them is overwhelming.
In social circumstances (and contracts) you need to avoid the one shot prisoner's dilemma.
I wonder if the same strategy will work for prostitution.
Funny you should mention it.
There have been several cases where ticket scalpers have circumvented the law by doing things like selling $100 hot chocolate...with tickets to the event included for free.
Gifts back and forth don't usually work because the litmus test is "are you expecting to exchange your work for money in this transaction."
Prostitutes will rarely give away their product for free in the hopes that someone, sometime might donate to keep their services going, or in appreciation.
We usually refer to those as "floozies," not prostitutes.
In the science world, it is common to give an honorarium to a guest speaker. He speaks for free, in the interest of science, but you may choose to express your gratitude in the form of money. Not all places do this, and many scientists don't let the honorarium influence their decision. Tax-wise, I believe the honorarium falls under the "gift" category, but I'm not sure.
Anyways, if you want to have sex with a prostitute legally, just bring along a camera.
It would be commercial if there was an exchange of goods for money. There isn't. They give away the goods for free, some people just happen to donate.
Consider the flowers that the Hari Krishnas used to give people. Many people donated money to their organization, but were they giving the Hari Krishnas money with the expectation of getting a flower?
Xenova, the British biotechnology firm, has carried out trials on an anti-cocaine vaccine which showed that 58 per cent of patients remained cocaine-free after three months.
Placebo does about that well. Detox does about that well, too.
I don't have exact numbers for cocaine, but heroin looks much the same. The recidivism is near 100% after 5 years. The important thing is not 3 months, it's a year down the line. Two years down the line. After a year, you'll see less than 10% of your patients continuing to abstain.
The article almost mentions a virus that produces what I assume are cocaine agonists. If this works forever, you might succeed in getting people off cocaine.
It's not exactly a fair criticism, as what they intend to do is exactly this - get people off cocaine - but there are plenty of other drugs out there, and many of them are easy to manufacture.
When it comes down to it, inhalants such as nitrous oxide (laughing gas), gasoline, and paint thinner are pretty hard to block. Barbituate agonists also block alcohol: are you really going to get people to sign up to be immune to alcohol?
Well...maybe their children. Of course. Think of the children. Maybe the pleasure of sex, while they're at it.
My favorite part was talking about "spiraling addiction."
"Last week, the IoS revealed that cocaine use had trebled in Britain with increasing numbers of users switching to highly addictive crack cocaine."
This is pretty much directly linked to Britain's rise in amphetamine interdiction raids. Amphetamines and cocaine are often used interchangeably, depending on market rate. When they start busting more cocaine, you'll see a rise in amphetamine use, with the re-emergence of mainlining amphetamines ("speed") - on par with crack cocaine.
My other favorite part:
According to the Government's own figures, the cost of drug addiction - through related crime and health problems - to the economy is 12bn [pounds] a year.
Perhaps it would be better to say that the cost of the drug war is 12+ bn pounds a year. The only way to know the cost of drug addiction would be to know the approximate number of addicts and the approximate yearly public cost of a legal addict.
Oh, that's right: Britain does* have those numbers. There used to be a program for distributing legal heroin to addicts in Britain, and the entire program was quite cheap. Certainly not 12 billion pounds a year: heroin maintenance wasn't even a major budget issue.
Let's be clear about what we mean when we say "monoculture." We mean "not my platform" or "not the platform my friend wants (possibly for X purpose)."
Not all of us would insist forcing our choices on others, but very few of us want a plethora of platforms for the benefit of having a cornucopia of platforms. We've come to say "you're creating a deadly monoculture" when we really mean "I don't think your hammer is going to do that great with all these screws."
What I have a problem with is IT departments that force a choice upon the users for a theoretical cost savings...which never emerges. Of course, I also don't like people telling me what platform to use when it doesn't affect my ability to work.
Liberalism is based upon unrestrained trade. It is freedom of contract.
The GPL is a public trade agreement: use of this code in return for code if you publish.
The BSD license has nothing to do with trade, it is a waiver of certain rights, necessary to widely disseminate an idea/piece-of-code.
One is a contract, one is a publication (in nature. They're both contracts, in reality).
The only time socialist philosophy would come into play were if you were compelled to give/assign-rights-to code to another, or if you were compelled to produce code by a central planning group. Neither of these are the case with either license. Not really a socialist/libertarian conflict.
I think we can head off about 90% of the issues regarding right and wrong for RFID on children with one question: should it be required for parents to tag their children?
If not, then it's not an issue within the grounds presented. I think that the "if it saves one kid, it's worth it" argument would usually fall into the "0 coerscion on the parents" category.
One objection to the "non-coerscive" argument is that it is coerscive upon the child. They are not given a choice. I will avoid this argument here, but it is something to think about.
I hope that is a satisfactory argument.
If anyone has an argument in favor of requiring RFID tags on children, I'd like to hear it and discuss.
Of course, she could be like Oracle, where she knows you're not doing it right, but has no suggestions whatsoever on where the problem might lie or how to fix it.
Perl can be difficult to debug. It's one of those "wide or deep" questions: you can have an extremely simple syntax, and require a ton of code to describe what you mean to do, or you can have a rich syntax and say it more succinctly (even more descriptively, given skill on the part of the writer and the reader).
All languages are a tradeoff. Glad PHP is where you want to be on that spectrum.
Any decent language has full PCRE support these days. Perls days as regular expression king are in the past. Sure it may have set the standard for how it's done, but now it's no longer a selling point. Plenty of other nicer languages exist.
C has full PCRE support. That doesn't mean its regexp support is royal.
One of Perl's advantages is just how tightly integrated into the language regexps are. I haven't seen PHP5 yet, I hope it's better than PHP4. I'm just saying that PCRE support does not a good regexp language make.
Now someone can place a toll boothe for the use of an international standard, and despite the fact they probably did not contribute to that, then do you blame them for doing so?
Okay, this is just a hobby horse of mine, so excuse me while I gallop around for a while. Please note that I'm not accusing you of making this mistake, it's just one possible reading of your statement. I've seen this problem before on/., and you brought it up, so....
When a portfolio company purchases patents from an R&D company they are contributing. In a very similar vein to putting up cash for research.
See, you do research and it costs money. One of the ways you can defray the cost of research that doesn't lead to where you're going (dead end for your purposes) is to sell what you've got. Hopefully it will cover your expenses, and you'll be no worse for wear, and can continue your research.
If there was no one willing to buy your dead end, you would have to eat the cost - ie lose the investment. This makes people who would invest in you nervous, and makes them stick to mainstream research. It also makes it a much bigger risk to sink your own money into your research, as you can get stuck halfway, and that sucks.
Now, these patent portfolio groups buy these patents in the hope that some of them will be useful or salable in turn, just like investing in real estate. These houses often drive further development, in fact, as they want people to use their tech so they try to introduce people to it.
Many ideas and well-developed inventions would go completely unknown if not for people pushing them.
As for the law suit part of things...if they're filing a patent suit, then things are serious. I happen to know that patent lawsuits start in the $0.5 million range to prosecute, and then they start getting expensive. And it may be years before you see anything.
Now, caveat: when the patent is over something that was obvious when it was invented, or is on an idea rather than an implementation, I'm with you: it's stupid, and it should be invalidated.
My point is that purchasing a patent is contributing to it.
A really distributable system would include only the scheduler in the kernel, with an "outer" layer of secure (crypto signed, sealed and delivered) APIs for submitting process and data requests, and an "inner" core for hardware access, including CPU, data (storage/network such as ethernet, USB, IDE, RAM, BIOS ROM, etc) and presentation (monitors, keyboards, mice, soundcards, printers, etc). Such a nanokernel would be tiny, highly efficient, and mix/matchable with many other apps and OS'es. Privileges would be part of a comprehensive security model, with IPC filtered through access control, whether within a single memory segment, LAN, or WAN. All domains would be virtualized. And such symmetry and simplicity would set the stage for flexible inter-kernel load balancing and failover.
We're talking open-ended scalability. Security. Performance. Reliability. The OS is no longer just a privileged app, but a smaller, more focused critter, serving apps rather than being served by them. With this new scheduler framework, let a billion nanokernels bloom.
I'll have what the Doc's having, and let me borrow your lighter - I left mine at home.
Part of the problem is that simple offences (citations and such) are easier to process than big offences, and far more common.
I'm sure everyone has had that horrible feeling when a cop car pulls in behind you when you're on the highway. How we all drive very carefully. If they're here for our protection, why do we all feel so worried around them?
There's a cop where I live who is famous for hassling kids. She's well known for writing lots and lots of citations. Broken taillight, dent in the bumper, things like that.
So, now imagine these citation writing machines with full camera access.
Sure, they may not do anything now, but "the liberty you give up to a friendly power is the liberty you don't have when another takes its place."
Re:Could someone explain a little bit please
on
Hackers & Painters
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've found most often the best meaning to these words is based on what people call others, not as they identify themselves.
Part of the problem is that the terms have changed meaning over time, as they were concocted so as to oppose themselves to another group.
Imagine the pro-life and pro-choice groups, in 30 years. Let's say that the stance that all abortion should be illegal fades away to obscurity, and is replaced by the idea that the most important thing is that both the mother and the father have a say in what happens.
This group is opposing itself to the pro-choice group (of 30 years in the future, keep in mind!), and they want to say exactly what they believe in their name, so thay call themselves the Rights party.
Well now, "pro-choice" makes little sense, since both groups desire for abortion to be legal. But nevertheless, there they are.
The process repeats itself over the years, and the terms stop meaning anything. You could really start saying "party A" and "party B" and be about as accurate.
The things that don't change are fundamental ideas about government: proper use of police powers, rights of component states, how law is created, jurisprudence, rights of commerce, central planning, etc.
Which groups are which, though...that changes all the time.
First off, excellent post. Thank you for providing something considered enough that we can have a conversation.
So. The market offers no guarantee for the radio spectrum besides this: freedom.
By this I mean that with your ownership you may do whatever you will, and that anyone has the possibility of owning bandwidth (ie there is no restriction but money), and this possibility grows ever more within reach[1].
There is no other system which can promise that.
In the other direction is central control. Planning. Allow me to use a rough form of an argument Hayek once suggested: if buying and selling to anyone who has the resources is not used as a method of allocation, then another method must be used. It does not matter what group administers the method for the following to be true:
There will be exclusion, and there will be inclusion. It will be based on some factor or value viewed with favor by those who are in charge of disbursement. This factor will be judged by those in charge. Undoubtedly this factor will be viewed differently by many, and there will be no ultimate reference or algorithm for determining who precisely has more or less of it[2].
The allocation will thus be arbitrary. When it is arbitrary, politics enters the situation: who is doing the judging is far more important than who is being judged. This isn't necessarily due to bad intentions: you and I might prefer that someone who thinks like us make the decisions. Or we might prefer someone we think of as "rational" to make the decisions. Both of those distinctions are arbitrary.
The result is not freedom. Tyrrany of the majority, politics, arguments over meaning, etc, etc, etc.
The question is: do you believe that spectrum allocation requires a system of beliefs and values, or that it should be used as people can imagine, and done with as they wish?
[1] - I base this off of the observation that when you allow subdivision and re-sale and have permanent property rights, over time there will always be some small amount that will be available on the market, and the rise in valuation of small areas will create areas of little perceived value that will be available for speculation.
[2] - After all, if there were an ultimate reference that everyone agreed upon for the disbursement of property, we wouldn't be having this argument....
how do you expect an amateur such as myself, operating out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, to not interfere with another amateur in Washington D.C. who is subject to different rules?
As the property would be allocated nationwide for such spectra, the rules for their usage would as well. Yes, you can still have rules without the regulation.
First, you could have a foundation created by users of the spectrum with a charter drawn from the rules of usage, and it would be able to bring civil penalties to bear on abusers.
Or you could have interference with a spectrum (a sort of vandalism) be a criminal offense, and allow the FBI (as this is inter-state) to investigate and prosecute. I think you'd be better off with the civil penalties in small cases, but there's no reason you can't do both.
Lastly, if the area of effect crosses national borders, you would almost definitely be within the purvue of the FBI and treaties signed between other countries.
In addition to the foundation option, you could register acceptable public use with an agency, and allow individual parties to bring suit against one another in civil court alleging improper use. This would be for a fully-public band such as amateur radio. Private bands would be different.
Even if landline telephone companies no longer need regulation, an independent (though even the FCC seems to lack this trait) organization is needed to maintain and police other things, even if they are not regulation.
I believe this is the combined element of the civil and criminal court systems and the police power of the state.
The question of imported devices is a big one. I wonder, though, if the legal questions wouldn't motivate manufacturers to be even more careful about emitted signals?
In the current situation, if the FCC vettes your design and says it's ok, then it turns out it interferes with TV...you have to withdraw the product or fix it, and you have no legal recourse to the FCC. At least when an independent lab tests something and says "no interference," you can sue them.
Secondly, the regulations on phone companies...I wonder how much of the problem is due to cities only allowing one set of copper, and all the regulations preventing outsiders from joining the system? Just look at what's going on with VOIP.
We will doubtless have problems though with the entrenched monopolies making competition difficult for years to come whether or not we have deregulation.
Any marketizing plan such as doing this for radio spectrum must be carefully watched. I think it could work, but a lot of the monied interests are more interested in the definition of "privatization" that sounds a lot like "government granted monopoly."
Let me add that it isn't necessary for the government to own certain spectra besides that needed for military and civic use (police, fire department, etc). When you create a standard such as GSM, it is created by a consortium of companies who want to implement the standard. If they were to band together and purchase the bands needed, they could ensure interoperability.
Further, when they license others to implement the standard (and all the patents, etc), they could inclue a license to broadcast in the spectrum. You can use your cell phone because the company you subscribe to owns a share in the spectrum that you're using. And anyone who interferes with the signal is liable to the owners.
The same idea can be further applied to things such as amateur radio: get a group of interested people together and form a foundation with a charter. Get enough money together and have the foundation purchase a spectrum. The charter then would cover the functioning of the spectrum. Interference is still a no-no, while free and public usage is allowed.
A good example of a similar structure is the Debian group (I know, cue jokes about how slow Debian is, but you haven't seen their legal group go after it).
The question of "where is the boundary between 'public' and 'private'" is a good one. Particularly in ephemera.
I think, though, that part of the problem is the establishment of broadcast television as a "public" forum. No one really considers subscription porn sites to be a public area, but subscription television seems to be another matter.
I personally believe that if a broadcaster is attempting to control who can and who cannot receive their transmissions (through technical measures such as encryption. I am NOT in favor of making general receivers illegal. It's not effective anyways), then they should be considered a private forum and be granted the protections that private life affords.
After all, if someone gives usernames and passwords to porn sites away to people out of the kindness of their...hearts (and they are not the proprieters of the porn site), then would you say that the porn site is still responsible for the eyes viewing the material illegally?
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If the researcher or ham already owns the spectrum, then he can refuse to sell. If he doesn't own it, then he can buy his own spectrum.
The situation is that the spectrum is like land: no one can afford to own all of it (without government assistance). As you can keep slicing it thinner and thinner (at a loss of functionality, yes), the price becomes astronomic.
What you'd have to watch out for would be rigged auctions, government takeovers of property (a la eminent domain), that sort of thing.
The situation with the "dinky radio station" is actually interesting: in a land rights situation, you could probably get together enough money from donations to be able to purchase the spectrum you need, and then no one could take it away from you.
Under the current system, you can have it taken away from you if the Special Interest (read: corp) has enough Special Influence. You could also get shuffled around, because you are not important. When you own it, they can't tell you to go away.
I don't believe the proposal is to get rid of enforcement. In fact, if they want to go over to a property rights system, then you need to have enforcement.
When the word "regulation" is used, it's meant to refer to government oversight/planning. The court system and the police would take care of the issue you suggest, just like they take care of people who would try to build a 7/11 on your front lawn.
The problem is that while the utilities are sold off to private companies (usually not plural, either), the right-of-ways and such remain solely allocated to that utility. There is thus no possibility of competition for customers, only competition for maintenance and management contracts. Not Cool.
It really sucks when you have to convince 51% of the voting population of a town to switch providers because you got screwed over. That kind of privatization is pretty lame.
A gentleman's agreement (particularly with the entire world) not to do something that could provide significant monetary benefit is like an agreement not to have nukes: the temptation to be the only one in the world with them is overwhelming.
In social circumstances (and contracts) you need to avoid the one shot prisoner's dilemma.
I wonder if the same strategy will work for prostitution.
Funny you should mention it.
There have been several cases where ticket scalpers have circumvented the law by doing things like selling $100 hot chocolate...with tickets to the event included for free.
Gifts back and forth don't usually work because the litmus test is "are you expecting to exchange your work for money in this transaction."
Prostitutes will rarely give away their product for free in the hopes that someone, sometime might donate to keep their services going, or in appreciation.
We usually refer to those as "floozies," not prostitutes.
In the science world, it is common to give an honorarium to a guest speaker. He speaks for free, in the interest of science, but you may choose to express your gratitude in the form of money. Not all places do this, and many scientists don't let the honorarium influence their decision. Tax-wise, I believe the honorarium falls under the "gift" category, but I'm not sure.
Anyways, if you want to have sex with a prostitute legally, just bring along a camera.
It would be commercial if there was an exchange of goods for money. There isn't. They give away the goods for free, some people just happen to donate.
Consider the flowers that the Hari Krishnas used to give people. Many people donated money to their organization, but were they giving the Hari Krishnas money with the expectation of getting a flower?
After all, they already got the flower.
Actually, this isn't much good to anyone.
The article mentions:
Placebo does about that well. Detox does about that well, too.
I don't have exact numbers for cocaine, but heroin looks much the same. The recidivism is near 100% after 5 years. The important thing is not 3 months, it's a year down the line. Two years down the line. After a year, you'll see less than 10% of your patients continuing to abstain.
The article almost mentions a virus that produces what I assume are cocaine agonists. If this works forever, you might succeed in getting people off cocaine.
It's not exactly a fair criticism, as what they intend to do is exactly this - get people off cocaine - but there are plenty of other drugs out there, and many of them are easy to manufacture.
When it comes down to it, inhalants such as nitrous oxide (laughing gas), gasoline, and paint thinner are pretty hard to block. Barbituate agonists also block alcohol: are you really going to get people to sign up to be immune to alcohol?
Well...maybe their children. Of course. Think of the children. Maybe the pleasure of sex, while they're at it.
"We're all brothers in a perfect world."
My favorite part was talking about "spiraling addiction."
This is pretty much directly linked to Britain's rise in amphetamine interdiction raids. Amphetamines and cocaine are often used interchangeably, depending on market rate. When they start busting more cocaine, you'll see a rise in amphetamine use, with the re-emergence of mainlining amphetamines ("speed") - on par with crack cocaine.
My other favorite part:
Perhaps it would be better to say that the cost of the drug war is 12+ bn pounds a year. The only way to know the cost of drug addiction would be to know the approximate number of addicts and the approximate yearly public cost of a legal addict.
Oh, that's right: Britain does* have those numbers. There used to be a program for distributing legal heroin to addicts in Britain, and the entire program was quite cheap. Certainly not 12 billion pounds a year: heroin maintenance wasn't even a major budget issue.
Every year I vote against Hatch (I live in Utah) and every year that bastard continues to get elected.
Maybe you should try voting for him one year, see if there's any change.
Let's be clear about what we mean when we say "monoculture." We mean "not my platform" or "not the platform my friend wants (possibly for X purpose)."
Not all of us would insist forcing our choices on others, but very few of us want a plethora of platforms for the benefit of having a cornucopia of platforms. We've come to say "you're creating a deadly monoculture" when we really mean "I don't think your hammer is going to do that great with all these screws."
What I have a problem with is IT departments that force a choice upon the users for a theoretical cost savings...which never emerges. Of course, I also don't like people telling me what platform to use when it doesn't affect my ability to work.
Liberalism is based upon unrestrained trade. It is freedom of contract.
The GPL is a public trade agreement: use of this code in return for code if you publish.
The BSD license has nothing to do with trade, it is a waiver of certain rights, necessary to widely disseminate an idea/piece-of-code.
One is a contract, one is a publication (in nature. They're both contracts, in reality).
The only time socialist philosophy would come into play were if you were compelled to give/assign-rights-to code to another, or if you were compelled to produce code by a central planning group. Neither of these are the case with either license. Not really a socialist/libertarian conflict.
Permit me to take a stab at a better argument.
I think we can head off about 90% of the issues regarding right and wrong for RFID on children with one question: should it be required for parents to tag their children?
If not, then it's not an issue within the grounds presented. I think that the "if it saves one kid, it's worth it" argument would usually fall into the "0 coerscion on the parents" category.
One objection to the "non-coerscive" argument is that it is coerscive upon the child. They are not given a choice. I will avoid this argument here, but it is something to think about.
I hope that is a satisfactory argument.
If anyone has an argument in favor of requiring RFID tags on children, I'd like to hear it and discuss.
Of course, she could be like Oracle, where she knows you're not doing it right, but has no suggestions whatsoever on where the problem might lie or how to fix it.
Perl can be difficult to debug. It's one of those "wide or deep" questions: you can have an extremely simple syntax, and require a ton of code to describe what you mean to do, or you can have a rich syntax and say it more succinctly (even more descriptively, given skill on the part of the writer and the reader).
All languages are a tradeoff. Glad PHP is where you want to be on that spectrum.
Any decent language has full PCRE support these days. Perls days as regular expression king are in the past. Sure it may have set the standard for how it's done, but now it's no longer a selling point. Plenty of other nicer languages exist.
C has full PCRE support. That doesn't mean its regexp support is royal.
One of Perl's advantages is just how tightly integrated into the language regexps are. I haven't seen PHP5 yet, I hope it's better than PHP4. I'm just saying that PCRE support does not a good regexp language make.
Now someone can place a toll boothe for the use of an international standard, and despite the fact they probably did not contribute to that, then do you blame them for doing so?
Okay, this is just a hobby horse of mine, so excuse me while I gallop around for a while. Please note that I'm not accusing you of making this mistake, it's just one possible reading of your statement. I've seen this problem before on /., and you brought it up, so....
When a portfolio company purchases patents from an R&D company they are contributing. In a very similar vein to putting up cash for research.
See, you do research and it costs money. One of the ways you can defray the cost of research that doesn't lead to where you're going (dead end for your purposes) is to sell what you've got. Hopefully it will cover your expenses, and you'll be no worse for wear, and can continue your research.
If there was no one willing to buy your dead end, you would have to eat the cost - ie lose the investment. This makes people who would invest in you nervous, and makes them stick to mainstream research. It also makes it a much bigger risk to sink your own money into your research, as you can get stuck halfway, and that sucks.
Now, these patent portfolio groups buy these patents in the hope that some of them will be useful or salable in turn, just like investing in real estate. These houses often drive further development, in fact, as they want people to use their tech so they try to introduce people to it.
Many ideas and well-developed inventions would go completely unknown if not for people pushing them.
As for the law suit part of things...if they're filing a patent suit, then things are serious. I happen to know that patent lawsuits start in the $0.5 million range to prosecute, and then they start getting expensive. And it may be years before you see anything.
Now, caveat: when the patent is over something that was obvious when it was invented, or is on an idea rather than an implementation, I'm with you: it's stupid, and it should be invalidated.
My point is that purchasing a patent is contributing to it.
A really distributable system would include only the scheduler in the kernel, with an "outer" layer of secure (crypto signed, sealed and delivered) APIs for submitting process and data requests, and an "inner" core for hardware access, including CPU, data (storage/network such as ethernet, USB, IDE, RAM, BIOS ROM, etc) and presentation (monitors, keyboards, mice, soundcards, printers, etc). Such a nanokernel would be tiny, highly efficient, and mix/matchable with many other apps and OS'es. Privileges would be part of a comprehensive security model, with IPC filtered through access control, whether within a single memory segment, LAN, or WAN. All domains would be virtualized. And such symmetry and simplicity would set the stage for flexible inter-kernel load balancing and failover.
We're talking open-ended scalability. Security. Performance. Reliability. The OS is no longer just a privileged app, but a smaller, more focused critter, serving apps rather than being served by them. With this new scheduler framework, let a billion nanokernels bloom.
I'll have what the Doc's having, and let me borrow your lighter - I left mine at home.
Part of the problem is that simple offences (citations and such) are easier to process than big offences, and far more common.
I'm sure everyone has had that horrible feeling when a cop car pulls in behind you when you're on the highway. How we all drive very carefully. If they're here for our protection, why do we all feel so worried around them?
There's a cop where I live who is famous for hassling kids. She's well known for writing lots and lots of citations. Broken taillight, dent in the bumper, things like that.
So, now imagine these citation writing machines with full camera access.
Sure, they may not do anything now, but "the liberty you give up to a friendly power is the liberty you don't have when another takes its place."
I've found most often the best meaning to these words is based on what people call others, not as they identify themselves.
Part of the problem is that the terms have changed meaning over time, as they were concocted so as to oppose themselves to another group.
Imagine the pro-life and pro-choice groups, in 30 years. Let's say that the stance that all abortion should be illegal fades away to obscurity, and is replaced by the idea that the most important thing is that both the mother and the father have a say in what happens.
This group is opposing itself to the pro-choice group (of 30 years in the future, keep in mind!), and they want to say exactly what they believe in their name, so thay call themselves the Rights party.
Well now, "pro-choice" makes little sense, since both groups desire for abortion to be legal. But nevertheless, there they are.
The process repeats itself over the years, and the terms stop meaning anything. You could really start saying "party A" and "party B" and be about as accurate.
The things that don't change are fundamental ideas about government: proper use of police powers, rights of component states, how law is created, jurisprudence, rights of commerce, central planning, etc.
Which groups are which, though...that changes all the time.
First off, excellent post. Thank you for providing something considered enough that we can have a conversation.
So. The market offers no guarantee for the radio spectrum besides this: freedom.
By this I mean that with your ownership you may do whatever you will, and that anyone has the possibility of owning bandwidth (ie there is no restriction but money), and this possibility grows ever more within reach[1].
There is no other system which can promise that.
In the other direction is central control. Planning. Allow me to use a rough form of an argument Hayek once suggested: if buying and selling to anyone who has the resources is not used as a method of allocation, then another method must be used. It does not matter what group administers the method for the following to be true:
There will be exclusion, and there will be inclusion. It will be based on some factor or value viewed with favor by those who are in charge of disbursement. This factor will be judged by those in charge. Undoubtedly this factor will be viewed differently by many, and there will be no ultimate reference or algorithm for determining who precisely has more or less of it[2].
The allocation will thus be arbitrary. When it is arbitrary, politics enters the situation: who is doing the judging is far more important than who is being judged. This isn't necessarily due to bad intentions: you and I might prefer that someone who thinks like us make the decisions. Or we might prefer someone we think of as "rational" to make the decisions. Both of those distinctions are arbitrary.
The result is not freedom. Tyrrany of the majority, politics, arguments over meaning, etc, etc, etc.
The question is: do you believe that spectrum allocation requires a system of beliefs and values, or that it should be used as people can imagine, and done with as they wish?
[1] - I base this off of the observation that when you allow subdivision and re-sale and have permanent property rights, over time there will always be some small amount that will be available on the market, and the rise in valuation of small areas will create areas of little perceived value that will be available for speculation.
[2] - After all, if there were an ultimate reference that everyone agreed upon for the disbursement of property, we wouldn't be having this argument....
how do you expect an amateur such as myself, operating out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, to not interfere with another amateur in Washington D.C. who is subject to different rules?
As the property would be allocated nationwide for such spectra, the rules for their usage would as well. Yes, you can still have rules without the regulation.
First, you could have a foundation created by users of the spectrum with a charter drawn from the rules of usage, and it would be able to bring civil penalties to bear on abusers.
Or you could have interference with a spectrum (a sort of vandalism) be a criminal offense, and allow the FBI (as this is inter-state) to investigate and prosecute. I think you'd be better off with the civil penalties in small cases, but there's no reason you can't do both.
Lastly, if the area of effect crosses national borders, you would almost definitely be within the purvue of the FBI and treaties signed between other countries.
In addition to the foundation option, you could register acceptable public use with an agency, and allow individual parties to bring suit against one another in civil court alleging improper use. This would be for a fully-public band such as amateur radio. Private bands would be different.
Even if landline telephone companies no longer need regulation, an independent (though even the FCC seems to lack this trait) organization is needed to maintain and police other things, even if they are not regulation.
I believe this is the combined element of the civil and criminal court systems and the police power of the state.
Great post. Hadn't considered those problems.
The question of imported devices is a big one. I wonder, though, if the legal questions wouldn't motivate manufacturers to be even more careful about emitted signals?
In the current situation, if the FCC vettes your design and says it's ok, then it turns out it interferes with TV...you have to withdraw the product or fix it, and you have no legal recourse to the FCC. At least when an independent lab tests something and says "no interference," you can sue them.
Secondly, the regulations on phone companies...I wonder how much of the problem is due to cities only allowing one set of copper, and all the regulations preventing outsiders from joining the system? Just look at what's going on with VOIP.
We will doubtless have problems though with the entrenched monopolies making competition difficult for years to come whether or not we have deregulation.
Any marketizing plan such as doing this for radio spectrum must be carefully watched. I think it could work, but a lot of the monied interests are more interested in the definition of "privatization" that sounds a lot like "government granted monopoly."
Excellent post.
Let me add that it isn't necessary for the government to own certain spectra besides that needed for military and civic use (police, fire department, etc). When you create a standard such as GSM, it is created by a consortium of companies who want to implement the standard. If they were to band together and purchase the bands needed, they could ensure interoperability.
Further, when they license others to implement the standard (and all the patents, etc), they could inclue a license to broadcast in the spectrum. You can use your cell phone because the company you subscribe to owns a share in the spectrum that you're using. And anyone who interferes with the signal is liable to the owners.
The same idea can be further applied to things such as amateur radio: get a group of interested people together and form a foundation with a charter. Get enough money together and have the foundation purchase a spectrum. The charter then would cover the functioning of the spectrum. Interference is still a no-no, while free and public usage is allowed.
A good example of a similar structure is the Debian group (I know, cue jokes about how slow Debian is, but you haven't seen their legal group go after it).
The question of "where is the boundary between 'public' and 'private'" is a good one. Particularly in ephemera.
I think, though, that part of the problem is the establishment of broadcast television as a "public" forum. No one really considers subscription porn sites to be a public area, but subscription television seems to be another matter.
I personally believe that if a broadcaster is attempting to control who can and who cannot receive their transmissions (through technical measures such as encryption. I am NOT in favor of making general receivers illegal. It's not effective anyways), then they should be considered a private forum and be granted the protections that private life affords.
After all, if someone gives usernames and passwords to porn sites away to people out of the kindness of their...hearts (and they are not the proprieters of the porn site), then would you say that the porn site is still responsible for the eyes viewing the material illegally?