Another possibility is that parodies are explicitly provided for in copyright law. All someone has to do to make their track legit is style it like a parody (laugh every few seconds, distort things comically in the commentary, etc).
I am vehemently opposed to the Hollings-Feinstein CBDTPA bill.
Fair Use is a concept (upheld by the Supreme Court) that allows exemptions from copyright law such that the owner of a copyrighted work may make copies of it for personal use (time/space shifting and archiving, for example). The SSSCA is a technological end-run around this. Justified in the name of "stopping piracy", Hollywood wants to put ever more money in its pockets by eventually creating a world where they can charge for each and every individual usage of a copyrighted work. Not only would this be costly, but its implications for privacy are scary: the only way this will work is if Hollywood knows every time you read a book, watch a movie, or listen to a piece of music.
The technological measures required of hardware and software producers by the CBDTPA will significantly increase the cost of all kinds of computing equipment. It will relegate the general-purpose computer to a thing of the past, replaced by a special-purpose computing "appliance" whos purpose will be not to serve its owners but to endlessly siphon money towards those who control the closed standards and high-priced service contracts. Efforts to keep systems secure will consist of restricting free speech by making it a crime to discuss any flaws that are discovered, as opposed to actually addressing the flaws technologically. Computing innovation in the US will flag behind every other country that keeps computing standards as they should be: open, competitive, and non-monopolistic. Because recording devices will essentially be outlawed, artistic expression will be narrowed to an ever smaller class of plotless manufactured Hollywood special effects tripe, and an endless stream of boy bands and girl divas plucked from shopping malls, given implants, taught ten choreographed moves, and shoved onstage.
Hollings claims that this bill is necessary for broadband to catch on, because (so goes his argument) broadband won't catch on until there is lots of online content that requires high bandwidth, and the only source of high bandwidth content is Hollywood, and Hollywood won't post its content until we have a law like the CBDTPA. I question both the premise and the ensuing logic. The truth is that this country doesn't "need" broadband to catch on; the only people who need that are the ones trying to make money off of it, and even they don't NEED it, they'll simply need to find a different business to try if it doesn't catch on. As for Hollywood being the only source of high bandwidth content, this logic seeks to reverse cause and effect: I would rephrase this by saying that if this bill passes, then the only high bandwidth content online will be that produced by Hollywood, because it will be practically impossible for an individual to record, reproduce, and distribute their own music and movies.
The technological changes described in the CBDTPA have been initiated for the purpose of creating monopolies, rubbermarked thus far by politicians who don't understand it but have been bought by campaign contributions. Whether they are achievable remains to be seen. I think it quite likely that if the technology achieves its creators goals, it will be at the expense of turning the US squarely into a police state. And even if the technology somehow fails in its goals, it will send large numbers of innocents to prison and waste money on a scale unmatched even by the medical insurance infrastructure.
I was shocked to discover that this bill is being proposed by democrats. It is the proposal of this bill that has made me and my wife decide to no longer register as democrats. From now on we are registering as independents. The democrats have clearly lost touch with what it means to empower the people who have entrusted decisions to them.
1. Requires two-way communication between sender and recipient to establish a one-directional message transfer.
On a low level (i.e. the protocol level, which is where I imagine a hash challenge/compute exchange would be implemented), it is *already* a requirement that two-way communication occur. This is because mail protocols use more than UDP; they use guaranteed delivery (where the "guarantee" is not actual delivery but an error code if the delivery fails).
2. Requires end-users to set up "scorefiles" to dictate how much they trust every sender in the world.
A bit of hyperbole in the above statement. It doesn't require every sender in the world. There are large categories possible, and a catch-all "untrusted so charge 'em maximally" category for non-specifieds. And I imagine people/admins who didn't want this could just turn it off.
3. Ties senders' ability to get their message out to the CPU power of their machine. Owners of dual-10GHz Pentathlon systems should not have a louder voice than the hobbyist running sendmail on an old 286.
Yes, but this will only become important to the owner of a 286 if he/she is trying to send so many emails that the machine is occupied fulltime with hashcode computations. I think even a 286 can keep up with the needs of a non-spammer. As you note below, most machines don't run even near 100% load.
4. Spammers HAVE CPU cycles to burn--like most of us, their machines rarely run anywhere near 100% load. They will learn to send out their garbage in a slow,steady stream rather than in huge batches so that their machines can handle it--simultaneously making bulk-mailing harder to identify.
For my part, I and my filters have always identified bulk emails by factors other than any headers' indication of how many recipients the message was targeted at.
First off, there is an xserver available for the Zaurus
If so, they're not making it obvious. I just went to google and typed in "xserver zaurus". Approximately 7 hits came up, 2 of which were in German, a few more in Japanese, and one pdf doc that I didn't bother to read.
While I don't like the DMCAA et al, I think we can all agree there are flat out illegal pirates out there amongst the legal users. Because of this, they're an accomplist to theft/copyright infringement/whatever you want to call it.
Any extent to which they can be deemed "accomplices" is only in the same way that VCR manufacturers are accomplices to whatever illegal uses are made of their products. The critical fact is that there are significant non-infringing uses of the technology, and that is what got VCRs past the supreme court in the betamax case.
Why is MS where they are? Cut throught business practices, strategic partnerships, product innovation, and good luck. Why do you think Sun-Tzu's Art of War is required reading at business schools around the country.
Microsoft is where it is primarily because of the usefulness of OS software coupled with an operating system's unparalleled potential to restrict and channel competition. Plain and simple. Making software is different from making coffee mugs; you can't program the mugs to pour milk slower than they pour coffee, or to be slightly incompatible with orange juice.
Tzu's Art of War is required reading at business schools because of the dramatic ego inflation it confers on its readers. Some personality types enjoy (and are motivated by) the thought that their gain is necessarily someone else's loss.
There was a slashdot exchange on this topic that I resonated with. It was a followup to an interview with Linus wherein he was asked what his strategies are for competing with other operating systems, and he answered "I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others." One of the slashdot exchanges that consequently took place was the following:
first post:
To quote the "Art of War"
One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.
One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.
One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle.
response:
[yawn] I'm so sick of people quoting "The Art of War" and "On War" and "The Book of Five Rings" and other military classics in reference to software development. First of all, as several other posters have pointed out, Linus sees himself primarily as a programmer, not a businessman -- he doesn't define other OS'es as "the enemy" and therefore doesn't worry about ancient military wisdom. Second, and perhaps more important, even more business-oriented programmers are fools if they think military advice translates to any business, especially software. No matter what the Japanese say, business _isn't_ war.
Whatever happend to that fabled Japanese "business is war" economy, anyway? Oh, that's right -- all those warrior businessmen had a couple of decades of success with their slash'n'burn tactics, then kept going with it and drove one of the world's largest economies straight into the toilet.
There's a lesson here, one which Microsoft and Oracle and Sun should learn really fast war is about killing people and breaking things, and business (ideally) is about empowering people and building a stable, lasting structure to create good products. These are not only different goals, they're opposite and mutually incompatible goals, and techniques that work for one simply _do not work_ for the other.
I've seen this from both sides, by the way -- I was in the Air Force when A.F. leadership went through a "TQM" craze. It didn't work worth a damn then, and "Sun Tzu's Guide To Crushing The Competition In The Global Marketplace" doesn't work now.
Apple usually includes a boilerplate license on a sheet of paper (in several languages) in the box with all their software, and a big red dot on the CD pouch that says "By opening this, you agree to the license". I would imagine that's the earliest point at which you agree.
For my part, I choose to skirt these issues by refusing to "open" such boxes. Instead, I drive over them repeatedly with a truck. If something like a cd happens to fall out, whose fault is that?
The correct analogy is if the cashier at a store gives you a $20 instead of the single that you were supposed to get in your change. Or buying a car from someone and finding an expensive watch between the seats.
Nope. Both of your examples are premised on accidental, unknown circumstance. By contrast, Apple knew full well what it was doing when it produced a cd with the full install software on it. Unless you want to claim that somehow some rogue engineer snuck this little aspect of things past Apple's QA department. Different discussion, I suppose.
I'm going to conduct a personal experiment in the coming years. I'm going to steadfastly refuse to ever log on to passport in any way, shape, or form. I'm betting that a reasonable number of web pages (not "services", thank you) will still be available to me. I assume that passport logins are - or will become - incestuously integrated into XP, so of course I won't touch that OS with a ten foot pole (among other reasons). If this ultimately means not surfing the web, I'm not ruling that out. If it means not working for a particular set of companies, I'm prepared; I'll even state contractually that as a condition of employing me I shall never log in to passport.
Perhaps I'll just eventually do the equivalent of a survivalist who lives in a mountain cave: form my own local community LAN and have that be as much contact as I have with the web. I want to see just how hard or easy staying completely passport free turns out to be.
Bring it on, Billy. Your rugged good looks haven't worked their magic on ME.
Cept that, in being an open standard, the.NET stuff is less proprietary than Java.
Huh? Not. Sun has been completely open about every aspect of java; you can right now go and download the source for the jvms, the spec of the jvms, the source of J2EE and all the other layers of libraries... whereas Microshaft is only releasing the source to about 10% of their libraries. The main reason sun hasn't ushered java through the standards committee is because Micro$oft has too much influence over the process, and would doubtless try to warp java into something other than "the right thing".
Only if your definition of "devastating" means that the consumer loses nothing but the few minutes that it takes to dispute a charge...
I'm going to assume from your statement that you have no idea what this crime is like. People spend an average of 176 hours of their personal time trying to undo the snarl that credit fraud turns their lives into. People are frequently repeat victims despite their well-executed attempts to prevent further abuse; this is because the credit companies are looking the other way. I've known people whose ability to purchase a home was cast into severe doubt because of credit card fraud. This is a LOT more traumatic than "a few minutes to dispute some charges."
[paying by credit card protects you]. If you paid by check or money order... where's your common sense?
Someone who wades through the legalities surrounding credit cards may or may not conclude that paying with them is a good thing. But given that credit card fraud is one of the most common and devastating crimes, it seems to me that common sense should give the average person a healthy skepticism about giving their credit card number to a complete stranger.
So how about if someone develops some software that prints out ascii as though it has been handwritten? I'm not talking about a simple handwriting font, as they're too easy to spot; I'm talking about a program which, letter for letter, introduces small individual flaws and variations in each character. I've seen this technique available in MIDI music programs, where one can make something sound more human and less robotic by automatically adding small random offsets to the precise times when notes are played. Same technique ought to make handwriting-printing pretty convincing.
There's a groundswell of people who are becoming fed up with what's going on. They don't know why, they can't agree on what to replace what we have with.
Doesn't seem like rocket science. How about:
campaign finance reform, which among other things bans soft money
I agree entirely (up to and including that not all muslims are terrorists). I'm genuinely proud that such clearheaded and dedicated people are among our military forces.
Bin Laden is linked strongly enough to previous atrocities to warrant extradition. Anyone who thinks we ought to do nothing is - to put in bluntly - bound to fall out of the gene pool. I've followed the peace rallies at Harvard and other schools, and I have to remind myself that those students are far more intoxicated by testing their wings than promoting a position that will have lasting value.
Alongside the recommendation to watch a tape of the towers, I recommend the following mental exercise to those who think military action unwarranted. Imagine that someone you know and love has been lost. Now imagine another one. Now another one. Keep at it. Is there any point at which you would declare that something must be done? If the answer is no, you're a zealot. If the answer is yes, you simply have a different threshold for military action, and ought to acknowledge your difference of opinion as such.
For me, it turned out that I only needed to lose one person I loved. I won't have the academic luxury of pondering whether zero would have been sufficient.
The terrorists mostly came from Saudi Arabia, and did most of their training in the US and the UK, so by your rationale the UK and US governments should be being crushed.
Hard to tell if the above statement is sarcasm or a genuine lack of understanding... but in case it's the latter, I point out that neither the UK nor the US governments knowingly harbored any terrorists, whereas the Afghanistan govt did.
A perverse way of looking at this would be to think that the signwriter profession has been 'robbed' of its rightful earnings because bad technology has made them irrelevant.
This reminds me of an excerpt from John Gilmore's excellent essay about what's wrong with copy control:
"If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars? Yes, such developments would cause economic dislocations for sure. But should we drive them underground and keep the world impoverished to save these peoples' jobs?"
I see various posts here investigating the question of whether an OK button is warranted when making the decision to launch the hqx file. I think the issue is quite different. The problem as described is that any download that the browser thinks is an hqx file gets *executed*... as opposed to decoded by the appropriate program.
The problem begins and ends with the browser designers' decision to invoke the decode by telling the OS to "launch" the file, leaving it to the system to examine the file's metadata and leading to this security hole when that metadata indicates that the file is an application instead of a binhex file (despite the.hqx ending).
The right way to solve this problem is to:
1) download the file ending in.hqx
2) tell the OS to launch the OS's choice of decoder program for hqx files, and
3) tell that launched program to decode the downloaded file.
do these 'copy protected' CDs still conform to IEC 908 and can they be legally marked with the compact disc digital audio emblem
I believe it would be useful to start a web dbase that documents which cd's don't conform to standards. That way, people could make informed choices about what they buy. The dbase could be run a bit like freeddb...
The airline have every right to know who's boarding their $100 million toys.
Such phrasing implies that a "right" arises out of the size of an investment. I'd rephrase the above by saying that because of the costs of the planes, it's understandable that the airlines find it economically useful to know who's boarding so they can reduce their risks. If the discussion turns to rights as consequences of what is at stake for a given party, then I'd argue that as a passenger I have a right to review psych/medical/religious documentation regarding the pilots, the maintenance crews, and the control tower folks.
But it's NOT teleporation. Teleportation involves taking an object from point A and moving it to point Z without crossing the in-between space, C through Y.
Those of you out there who are lazy and want a free lunch, don't forget that you have to cross through point B! And from what I hear, qualifications to cross through point B are especially rigorous; physicists trying to unravel teleportation have dubbed its essential conundrum as "the Point B obstacle".
The only difference between a sponsorship spot and an out-and-out ad is... a sponsorship spot is read by the DJ... [and] a sponsorship cannot contain a call to action.
In addition to prohibiting underwritings from including calls to action, FCC regulations also ban inducements to buy, price information, and qualitative statements of any kind (comparatives, superlatives, etc).
There are probably some fuzzy lines. For example, since contact info is allowed would it be permissible for a company to give the url "www.actNowAndSave.com"?
Slashdot Mirror
Another possibility is that parodies are explicitly provided for in copyright law. All someone has to do to make their track legit is style it like a parody (laugh every few seconds, distort things comically in the commentary, etc).
I am vehemently opposed to the Hollings-Feinstein CBDTPA bill.
Fair Use is a concept (upheld by the Supreme Court) that allows exemptions from copyright law such that the owner of a copyrighted work may make copies of it for personal use (time/space shifting and archiving, for example). The SSSCA is a technological end-run around this. Justified in the name of "stopping piracy", Hollywood wants to put ever more money in its pockets by eventually creating a world where they can charge for each and every individual usage of a copyrighted work. Not only would this be costly, but its implications for privacy are scary: the only way this will work is if Hollywood knows every time you read a book, watch a movie, or listen to a piece of music.
The technological measures required of hardware and software producers by the CBDTPA will significantly increase the cost of all kinds of computing equipment. It will relegate the general-purpose computer to a thing of the past, replaced by a special-purpose computing "appliance" whos purpose will be not to serve its owners but to endlessly siphon money towards those who control the closed standards and high-priced service contracts. Efforts to keep systems secure will consist of restricting free speech by making it a crime to discuss any flaws that are discovered, as opposed to actually addressing the flaws technologically. Computing innovation in the US will flag behind every other country that keeps computing standards as they should be: open, competitive, and non-monopolistic. Because recording devices will essentially be outlawed, artistic expression will be narrowed to an ever smaller class of plotless manufactured Hollywood special effects tripe, and an endless stream of boy bands and girl divas plucked from shopping malls, given implants, taught ten choreographed moves, and shoved onstage.
Hollings claims that this bill is necessary for broadband to catch on, because (so goes his argument) broadband won't catch on until there is lots of online content that requires high bandwidth, and the only source of high bandwidth content is Hollywood, and Hollywood won't post its content until we have a law like the CBDTPA. I question both the premise and the ensuing logic. The truth is that this country doesn't "need" broadband to catch on; the only people who need that are the ones trying to make money off of it, and even they don't NEED it, they'll simply need to find a different business to try if it doesn't catch on. As for Hollywood being the only source of high bandwidth content, this logic seeks to reverse cause and effect: I would rephrase this by saying that if this bill passes, then the only high bandwidth content online will be that produced by Hollywood, because it will be practically impossible for an individual to record, reproduce, and distribute their own music and movies.
The technological changes described in the CBDTPA have been initiated for the purpose of creating monopolies, rubbermarked thus far by politicians who don't understand it but have been bought by campaign contributions. Whether they are achievable remains to be seen. I think it quite likely that if the technology achieves its creators goals, it will be at the expense of turning the US squarely into a police state. And even if the technology somehow fails in its goals, it will send large numbers of innocents to prison and waste money on a scale unmatched even by the medical insurance infrastructure.
I was shocked to discover that this bill is being proposed by democrats. It is the proposal of this bill that has made me and my wife decide to no longer register as democrats. From now on we are registering as independents. The democrats have clearly lost touch with what it means to empower the people who have entrusted decisions to them.
On a low level (i.e. the protocol level, which is where I imagine a hash challenge/compute exchange would be implemented), it is *already* a requirement that two-way communication occur. This is because mail protocols use more than UDP; they use guaranteed delivery (where the "guarantee" is not actual delivery but an error code if the delivery fails).
A bit of hyperbole in the above statement. It doesn't require every sender in the world. There are large categories possible, and a catch-all "untrusted so charge 'em maximally" category for non-specifieds. And I imagine people/admins who didn't want this could just turn it off.
Yes, but this will only become important to the owner of a 286 if he/she is trying to send so many emails that the machine is occupied fulltime with hashcode computations. I think even a 286 can keep up with the needs of a non-spammer. As you note below, most machines don't run even near 100% load.
For my part, I and my filters have always identified bulk emails by factors other than any headers' indication of how many recipients the message was targeted at.
---
You rock! :)
I also found it available on the cryptome site:
http://cryptome.org/softman-v-adobe.htm
If so, they're not making it obvious. I just went to google and typed in "xserver zaurus". Approximately 7 hits came up, 2 of which were in German, a few more in Japanese, and one pdf doc that I didn't bother to read.
Any extent to which they can be deemed "accomplices" is only in the same way that VCR manufacturers are accomplices to whatever illegal uses are made of their products. The critical fact is that there are significant non-infringing uses of the technology, and that is what got VCRs past the supreme court in the betamax case.
Microsoft is where it is primarily because of the usefulness of OS software coupled with an operating system's unparalleled potential to restrict and channel competition. Plain and simple. Making software is different from making coffee mugs; you can't program the mugs to pour milk slower than they pour coffee, or to be slightly incompatible with orange juice.
Tzu's Art of War is required reading at business schools because of the dramatic ego inflation it confers on its readers. Some personality types enjoy (and are motivated by) the thought that their gain is necessarily someone else's loss.
There was a slashdot exchange on this topic that I resonated with. It was a followup to an interview with Linus wherein he was asked what his strategies are for competing with other operating systems, and he answered "I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others." One of the slashdot exchanges that consequently took place was the following:
first post:
response:For my part, I choose to skirt these issues by refusing to "open" such boxes. Instead, I drive over them repeatedly with a truck. If something like a cd happens to fall out, whose fault is that?
---
Nope. Both of your examples are premised on accidental, unknown circumstance. By contrast, Apple knew full well what it was doing when it produced a cd with the full install software on it. Unless you want to claim that somehow some rogue engineer snuck this little aspect of things past Apple's QA department. Different discussion, I suppose.
---
I'm going to conduct a personal experiment in the coming years. I'm going to steadfastly refuse to ever log on to passport in any way, shape, or form. I'm betting that a reasonable number of web pages (not "services", thank you) will still be available to me. I assume that passport logins are - or will become - incestuously integrated into XP, so of course I won't touch that OS with a ten foot pole (among other reasons). If this ultimately means not surfing the web, I'm not ruling that out. If it means not working for a particular set of companies, I'm prepared; I'll even state contractually that as a condition of employing me I shall never log in to passport.
Perhaps I'll just eventually do the equivalent of a survivalist who lives in a mountain cave: form my own local community LAN and have that be as much contact as I have with the web. I want to see just how hard or easy staying completely passport free turns out to be.
Bring it on, Billy. Your rugged good looks haven't worked their magic on ME.
Huh? Not. Sun has been completely open about every aspect of java; you can right now go and download the source for the jvms, the spec of the jvms, the source of J2EE and all the other layers of libraries... whereas Microshaft is only releasing the source to about 10% of their libraries. The main reason sun hasn't ushered java through the standards committee is because Micro$oft has too much influence over the process, and would doubtless try to warp java into something other than "the right thing".
I'm going to assume from your statement that you have no idea what this crime is like. People spend an average of 176 hours of their personal time trying to undo the snarl that credit fraud turns their lives into. People are frequently repeat victims despite their well-executed attempts to prevent further abuse; this is because the credit companies are looking the other way. I've known people whose ability to purchase a home was cast into severe doubt because of credit card fraud. This is a LOT more traumatic than "a few minutes to dispute some charges."
The -8503 number (same is listed on Hollings' website) is disconnected. HOWEVER, this number:
(202)224-6121
appears to get one to an answering machine that is directly associated with the senator.
Remember, no foul language.
Someone who wades through the legalities surrounding credit cards may or may not conclude that paying with them is a good thing. But given that credit card fraud is one of the most common and devastating crimes, it seems to me that common sense should give the average person a healthy skepticism about giving their credit card number to a complete stranger.
So how about if someone develops some software that prints out ascii as though it has been handwritten? I'm not talking about a simple handwriting font, as they're too easy to spot; I'm talking about a program which, letter for letter, introduces small individual flaws and variations in each character. I've seen this technique available in MIDI music programs, where one can make something sound more human and less robotic by automatically adding small random offsets to the precise times when notes are played. Same technique ought to make handwriting-printing pretty convincing.
Doesn't seem like rocket science. How about:
I agree entirely (up to and including that not all muslims are terrorists). I'm genuinely proud that such clearheaded and dedicated people are among our military forces.
Bin Laden is linked strongly enough to previous atrocities to warrant extradition. Anyone who thinks we ought to do nothing is - to put in bluntly - bound to fall out of the gene pool. I've followed the peace rallies at Harvard and other schools, and I have to remind myself that those students are far more intoxicated by testing their wings than promoting a position that will have lasting value.
Alongside the recommendation to watch a tape of the towers, I recommend the following mental exercise to those who think military action unwarranted. Imagine that someone you know and love has been lost. Now imagine another one. Now another one. Keep at it. Is there any point at which you would declare that something must be done? If the answer is no, you're a zealot. If the answer is yes, you simply have a different threshold for military action, and ought to acknowledge your difference of opinion as such.
For me, it turned out that I only needed to lose one person I loved. I won't have the academic luxury of pondering whether zero would have been sufficient.
Hard to tell if the above statement is sarcasm or a genuine lack of understanding... but in case it's the latter, I point out that neither the UK nor the US governments knowingly harbored any terrorists, whereas the Afghanistan govt did.
This reminds me of an excerpt from John Gilmore's excellent essay about what's wrong with copy control:
I see various posts here investigating the question of whether an OK button is warranted when making the decision to launch the hqx file. I think the issue is quite different. The problem as described is that any download that the browser thinks is an hqx file gets *executed*... as opposed to decoded by the appropriate program.
.hqx ending).
.hqx
The problem begins and ends with the browser designers' decision to invoke the decode by telling the OS to "launch" the file, leaving it to the system to examine the file's metadata and leading to this security hole when that metadata indicates that the file is an application instead of a binhex file (despite the
The right way to solve this problem is to:
1) download the file ending in
2) tell the OS to launch the OS's choice of decoder program for hqx files, and
3) tell that launched program to decode the downloaded file.
I believe it would be useful to start a web dbase that documents which cd's don't conform to standards. That way, people could make informed choices about what they buy. The dbase could be run a bit like freeddb...
Or simply putting cotton balls in their cheeks, eye shadow around their eyes, false facial hair, glasses...
Such phrasing implies that a "right" arises out of the size of an investment. I'd rephrase the above by saying that because of the costs of the planes, it's understandable that the airlines find it economically useful to know who's boarding so they can reduce their risks. If the discussion turns to rights as consequences of what is at stake for a given party, then I'd argue that as a passenger I have a right to review psych/medical/religious documentation regarding the pilots, the maintenance crews, and the control tower folks.
Those of you out there who are lazy and want a free lunch, don't forget that you have to cross through point B! And from what I hear, qualifications to cross through point B are especially rigorous; physicists trying to unravel teleportation have dubbed its essential conundrum as "the Point B obstacle".
In addition to prohibiting underwritings from including calls to action, FCC regulations also ban inducements to buy, price information, and qualitative statements of any kind (comparatives, superlatives, etc).
There are probably some fuzzy lines. For example, since contact info is allowed would it be permissible for a company to give the url "www.actNowAndSave.com"?