For my little network at the home office I use the original (pre-
annexation) names of streets in the neighborhood.
My wife thinks this is cool because she loves local history.
I think it's cool because I get to use names like maple, kuchle, liberty, newburgh, and columbus. Only the real old-timers from the hood get it. They enjoy knowing a little something about computers that younger people don't, even though it's totally non-technical.
As a practical matter, it's a nearly inexhaustible "theme" category; as you need more names, just reach out to a larger radius. In a decent-sized city you'll need a full Class C to max out the theme.
The interesting part is where in the equation free or open source software enters.
No, that's not the least bit interesting. Software doesn't fall under the city's gross receipts tax, which is what the article is about... until you sell it. See, that's what "gross receipts" means.
Can you assign a $ ammount of wealth to software in terms of property (not revenue from selling)? If so, then you could assign a value to any type of software, regardless of how much was paid for it. Thus, if you use software that didn't cost you anything, but is important to you/your company and contributes to the profits that your company generates, then the Tax Man will assign a $ ammount of value to it and tax you every year for simply owning the software.
Try reading the article. It's explicitly talking about the city's gross receipts tax. If you're giving your software away, you have no gross receipts.
This is just reductio ad absurdum of the concept of taxing labor at all.
Writing software or digging ditches or making Beanie Babies with your own labor and the people you employ is a right, not a privilege. You shouldn't have to pay the government for exercising your natural rights.
Obviously, when you tax something people will do less of it. Does Seattle really want less software to be written there? Fewer widgets built? Fewer ditches dug or Beanie Babies made?
We should be taxing pollution, use of resources, taking up space, and all other forms of Privilege.
If the 1099 status holds up these guys should be somewhat thankful. That will let them file a Schedule C and deduct their out-of-pocket expenses from income, although it sounds like they'll have to cough up taxes on the net after these expenses.
But they've already paid, perhaps overpaid, their state and federal income taxes by withholding. If they got 1099s instead of W2s, they would be expected by the government to pay those taxes all over again. Deducting expenses would barely dent that cost.
Of course, any former Loki employee who actually got a 1099 instead of the W2 and doesn't immediately consult a competent tax and labor attorney is doing himself or herself a great disservice. I am reasonably certain that federal tax law provides some relief for situations like these.
If everyone else is laying people off, and I believe in what the company is doing, then why not show up and do what you enjoy instead of sitting around at home bored?
Why not? Because they promised to pay you and they didn't. There has to be some deterrent to that!
...the high-tech breakthrough schools everywhere, not just in the UK, have been waiting for...
Are we talking about the same thing here?
I'm not aware of a rising clamor for really cool high-tech whiteboards in schools.
But I keep seeing and hearing about outnumbered and underqualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms, dumbed-down curricula, violence, racial conflict, patronage, corruption, drug addiction, excessive review time for high-stakes testing, poor morale, and low expectations.
Which one of those problems is the space-age whiteboard supposed to solve?
Sure, it's a neat idea and probably pretty useful, but a "breakthrough" that schools have been waiting for? Insert obligatory derogatory comparison to Microsoft marketing!
Of course, the flipside is that while some spammers are outright criminals, there are some spammers that are genuinely trying to target their email to generate leads and act responsibly. The problem is that the criminal element has ruined it for the latter group, because almost noone trusts "Sorry - go here to opt-out of further emails" any more.
Bah. Opt-out is still spam, and it still sucks. Being slightly less grievous than the stuff you can't opt out of doesn't make it okay.
I can't opt out of the 100-plus spams I get every day even if the spammers weren't lying. It's just far too much work to bother with, and it's a hell of an imposition considering who benefits from the spam in the first place. (Hint: not me.)
Even more importantly, you shouldn't have to sit and tap delete. If I'm spending half a second evaluating whether each message is legitimate or not, it's entirely probable that I'm going to accidentally delete the wrong message.
I get about a hundred spams a day on average, a bit more on weekends, so I automatically filter as much as I reasonably can.
Just a couple weeks ago, I got email from an old college pal who hasn't reached out in fourteen years. He had a Yahoo address that didn't look anything like his name, and he picked a pretty lame subject line too. I was this >< close to deleting the message unread, manually, since it hadn't hit the filters but looked rather spammish.
Given my line of work and his, there's a decent possibility we may actually get to do some mutually profitable (i.e., no jokes, it's not MLM) business together in the near future. But even if that doesn't work out, I'd been looking for this guy for years; his name is so common and he lives in such a large city that a directory search would have been pointless.
What if Congress could some how interpret writing GPL code as a taxable activity? As in: open source code is in effect a massive, distributed barter transaction? That could have a devastating effect on GPL'd code just from the book-keeping overhead alone.
But that's quite a stretch. It's not really barter unless you trade value for value. In dollar terms, the common production of Open Source (or Free Software) is value for nothing--excluding some cases, such as when you are paid to write Free Software and are already taxed for it.
Income tax can't even be calculated without a transaction of some kind, even if it's a barter. But where's the transaction when you contribute a device driver to Linus's kernel or fix a bug on Sourceforge?
I know The Man uses words to mean what he wants them to mean, but taxing free software development as "barter" would be extreme even for The Man.
Bell's copper wires aren't essential for transferring data (unlike Monopoly money, which is essential for buying properties in the game).
Just like a business full of old IBM XT computers, they might have been worth millions of dollars and been state of the art when they were first installed - but now, what value is left in them? Next to nothing....
Which is why all the CLECs are begging for access to those wires? And why the Bells are using blatant tactics to deny that access?
Not that it matters if you're arguing property rights. But it's hard to tell what your argument is now.
That's rather like Bell in today's marketplace. They've got all of this legacy equipment that works reliably (and sure, there's something to be said for that!), but is no longer the best way to accomplish the tasks they're paid to perform.
For what definition of "best"? Surely it's still cheaper to run voice and data over existing copper. If it weren't, the ILECs would have changed over already.
All things being equal, 99% of the people out there would prefer having a single phone number that works no matter where they go. They don't want to worry about disconnect orders and reconnect orders, number changes, new area codes, and DSL that's only fast on download speed, not upload speed. They like wireless.
I find that to be a weird argument from someone who claims to want deregulation. Why not let the market decide? Right now the market says that even the artificially inflated price of access to those copper wires is a better deal than the corresponding, and lightly regulated, wireless products.
How many companies have hardwired T1s? Okay, now how many are using wireless T1 equivalents? Tell me copper is obsolete.
How many residences are using copper circuits? How many have gone fully wireless? Why is that?
The sunken cost of that copper last-mile network is in the billions of dollars if not tens of billions. It isn't the newest thing going, and it's not glamorous, but it's still more profitable to run than the alternatives. Which explains why the ILECs are so reluctant to share the network. That's what market forces do when you have a natural monopoly situation controlled by one of the players.
I find your position... baffling. If the last-mile network is so devoid of value, what's the harm in opening it to all users? Who's being cheated of their private investment if it's worth "next to nothing"? And in any case, you yourself claimed (I didn't) that the network might as well be considered government-owned considering the protected monopoly status it had for a hundred years.
*sigh*
If you're driving at a point, I'm afraid I don't follow your path nor can I see your destination. All I'm saying is that equal access to last-mile facilities is the bare minimum for a competitive market in telecom services, and that the ILECs have a hell of a nerve complaining about finally having to share the physical plant they built with money that was funneled to them over the decades by state and federal legislation.
Now, you have this weird philosophy that to "break up" the monopoly, you have to let "companies" form (that don't really do anything on their own besides run a billing dept. and advertisements for themselves), and proceed to use the existing "Ma Bell" resources
as though they owned them. [Emphasis added]
Not "as though they [the CLECs] owned them." How about as though Ma Bell would acknowledge the assets she holds are a unique product of that might-as-well-be-the-government circumstance that you claimed. Acquiring the wires and CO assets over decades, out of an ongoing competition-free windfall, and then hoarding the use of those assets that everyone had to pay for--now that is imposing on everyone.
We didn't give the ILECs a monopoly because it was somehow the moral thing to do. We did so because of a tradeoff between private profit and public service. That balance should be maintained, because without it the ILECs are given billions of dollars of infrastructure just because... well, just because they were there to take it.
Otherwise we're left in the absurd situation of changing the rules in mid-game while forcing all but one player to start over from the beginning.
I have a great idea. Let's you and me and everyone else sit down for a game of Monopoly[tm]. I'll start the game with all the money and property I had left over from my last game (which I won), and the rest of you just start at the beginning, okay? That's fair, isn't it?
Re:I can't find any reference...
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, I've had it that long too. Probably about mid-summer of 1990.
Re:I can't find any reference...
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
The bill has not been introduced into Congress yet. It's still at the draft and discussion stage.
That's why yesterday's hearings were about the supposed need for such a bill, not debating a specific bill.
home movies:non-geeks::free software:geeks
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Intel guy wrote:
[U]nprotected media looks no different to digital devices than a home movie that you would send to a relative or friend. There is no watermark, chip device, or screening system that will ever
effectively put an end to this problem.
Could this be a signal?
Politically, he's suggesting that the best argument against SSSCA is that it would effectively ban "home movies" and similar things.
If you want to persuade your Senators, your Representative, or your neighbors that SSSCA is a bad idea, perhaps the "home movie" angle tells the story best. Home movies are the non-geek equivalent of Free Software, after all.
Like Turing machines, computers are universal devices. You cannot make a "work computer" that cannot convert a divx into video signals or an mp3 into audio signals. A device without these capabilities is not a computer and will not be able to run your "work programs" either.
Shhhhh. Maybe Congress won't notice.
More seriously, that's where the line needs to be drawn legislatively. If "they" simply must have their DRM-enabled computers, fine. If they arm-twist Intel or someone else into making them available, whatever.
But they have to live with the idea that a Turing-complete computer of sufficient power is enough to get at their "content" given enough time and effort, however strongly it's encrypted. DMCA already makes doing this illegal however, so any excuse of "content protection" for needing SSSCA bites it.
Maybe that's the proper approach to lobbying against SSSCA-style bills. Point out that circumvention of content controls is already a felony. Banning general-purpose computers (as ludicrous as it sounds) far exceeds what is needed to protect anyone's copyright. Again, that's already covered by DMCA.
What problem it is that SSSCA is supposed to solve? Surely it can't be unlicensed copying, because DMCA covers that no matter what kind of computer you have. Could it be that the "content providers" want no alternatives to their product?
Long story short: let's use the truly awful DMCA as a defense against the even more horrible SSSCA. That analysis is familiar to geeks, but it needs to go farther.
Decent arguments could be made that SSSCA would violate Amendments 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, and 10. Fortunately, even more recent Supreme Courts--no friends of the Bill of Rights--have tended to throw out laws that don't meet the "compelling interest" standard. I can't imagine how the government could claim a "compelling" need to violate six amendments to prevent unlicensed copying of copyrighted material--which is already illegal.
Obviously Hollings needs to be thrown out of the Senate for even thinking out loud about something so blatantly unconstitutional. Pig.
The article quoted Hollings as saying to Intel, "We don't want to legislate. We want to give you time... to develop technology."
I think the real-world translation of this might indicate that the Honorable Senator from Disney is looking for a settlement of sorts.
Maybe Intel ends up producing DRM-enabled CPUs and mainboards for entertainment-oriented PCs, and Congress refrains from banning traditional general-purpose computers.
Then the "content" industry produces stuff that only works on the DRM-enabled systems, and those of us who don't care about watching the latest Disney flicks on our rack-mount servers will be left alone.
In other words, the scenario that Seth Finkelstein described in a comment to the previous SSSCA article.
But I don't think that's such a horrible outcome. You'll have your regular computers like you have now, and then you'll have a glorified VCR to use with all your "content." A work computer and a "fun" computer.
Microsoft called those "meritless complaints," and said Tunney's opinion, "coming over 25 years after enactment of the statute, is irrelevant as a legal matter."
Uh... so if a law is more than 25 years old, it is no longer relevant?
You lost the antecedent. Microsoft is saying that Sen.Tunney's opinion shouldn't get any special consideration
just because he happened to have written the statute 25 years ago.
Of course if anyone should know about "legislative intent" here it would be Tunney.
Whenever a govt. regulated monopoly is granted/allowed, then yes - the business should have a certain level of "public responsibility". It's not really operating as anything other than a branch of govt. itself in that situation. (The post office makes a profit too, but it's still govt. owned and controlled.)
Hello? That's a complete reversal of your previous statement, that the CLECs are "leeches" for using the existing infrastructure.
All those copper lines run by ILECs during the monopoly era (around 1900 through the present), by your own analysis, might as well be government resources. Why is it okay for the ILECs to use those resources but the CLECs are parasites?
The leeches are the ones who've had windfall profits funneled to them by government for a hundred years on the understanding that they were creating a semi-public, regulated resource. And who now use every available tactic, legal or not, to maintain their exclusive use of that resource.
Except, per the DMCA, it would be illegal for the software developers to write anything that duplicated the DRM machines. Hence the practical result would be that you could buy other machines, but they wouldn't work with the content on the DRM machines.
Right. So?
With DMCA but no SSSCA, you have the crummy situation of being
able to play your Disney movies only on the Disney-approved
DRM-enabled commodity device.
But you could also have a real, unfettered computer
with your choice of non-DRM-enabled operating systems. It won't
play your Disney movies, but your pocket calculator and microwave
won't either. Different devices for different applications.
The effect of DRM-bound entertainment media in an environment
with DMCA but no SSSCA would be pretty limited. You might have to buy
an "entertainment" computer to go along with your "real" computer. That sucks, and the DMCA is obviously
a terrible law, but geeks and business people can generally keep
doing what we've always been doing--with our own computers and the
software we write or purchase under reasonable licenses.
With SSSCA, you couldn't have the "real" computer. SSSCA would divide computing into DRM-enabled
toy machines and... contraband. Now that would be truly horrible.
So are you trying to make a point that "we, the people" own the telco's wires - because they used to be granted a protected monopoly status by the federal govt.?
No, I'm claiming again (still) that their privileged ownership comes with a public responsibility. It happens that hundreds of years of statute and common law, as well as all the classical economists, agree with me.
Your idea, that under a government umbrella of guaranteed profits and privileged freedom from competition the telcos should have the rights of "every other business," is radically anti-free-market and goes against every classical economist back to Adam Smith and beyond.
What you're preaching is fake libertarianism. There's always a good excuse for subsidizing the corporations, or you dismiss the current monopoly situation with a hand-waving assertion that "those days are over" even though one still can't run competitive copper without the permission of the ILECs.
The issue a number of people want to pretend doesn't exist is this: The telcos own the wires, period! Anyone coming along to resell DSL or other phone services amounts to a leech, trying to make cash off of the telco's cabling and infrastructure.
The telcos own the wires, no period, comma, subject to a public
trust. They bought those wires with government-granted and
government-guaranteed monopoly profits. For a hundred years
government enforced the lack of competition.
The real leeches are the ones who coast along on a state-guaranteed
profit for decades and then whine when modern technology renders
their business model obsolete.
But yet again, Congress is protecting an inefficient, outdated
business model at the cost of everyone else.
It's just another one of those eleet-libertarian arguments. The
last thing your corporate heroes want is a free market. In a free
market AT&T and the ILECs never would have made the huge profits
they get today.
How many different extensions are we going to have?
Answer: exactly zero. There's no such thing as an "extension" in DNS. Thinking that domains consist of "domains" and "extensions" is what got us silliness like dot-biz and domain squatters in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
For my little network at the home office I use the original (pre- annexation) names of streets in the neighborhood.
My wife thinks this is cool because she loves local history.
I think it's cool because I get to use names like maple, kuchle, liberty, newburgh, and columbus. Only the real old-timers from the hood get it. They enjoy knowing a little something about computers that younger people don't, even though it's totally non-technical.
As a practical matter, it's a nearly inexhaustible "theme" category; as you need more names, just reach out to a larger radius. In a decent-sized city you'll need a full Class C to max out the theme.
No, that's not the least bit interesting. Software doesn't fall under the city's gross receipts tax, which is what the article is about... until you sell it. See, that's what "gross receipts" means.
Sheesh. Like it's so hard to read the article.
Try reading the article. It's explicitly talking about the city's gross receipts tax. If you're giving your software away, you have no gross receipts.
This is just reductio ad absurdum of the concept of taxing labor at all.
Writing software or digging ditches or making Beanie Babies with your own labor and the people you employ is a right, not a privilege. You shouldn't have to pay the government for exercising your natural rights.
Obviously, when you tax something people will do less of it. Does Seattle really want less software to be written there? Fewer widgets built? Fewer ditches dug or Beanie Babies made?
We should be taxing pollution, use of resources, taking up space, and all other forms of Privilege.
Tax bads, not goods.
But they've already paid, perhaps overpaid, their state and federal income taxes by withholding. If they got 1099s instead of W2s, they would be expected by the government to pay those taxes all over again. Deducting expenses would barely dent that cost.
Of course, any former Loki employee who actually got a 1099 instead of the W2 and doesn't immediately consult a competent tax and labor attorney is doing himself or herself a great disservice. I am reasonably certain that federal tax law provides some relief for situations like these.
"They might miss a payroll someday" is a risk. "They did miss payroll" is an actual loss to you.
If they've missed a payroll, you're not behaving in a risk-averse manner. You're behaving in a loss-averse manner.
Why not? Because they promised to pay you and they didn't. There has to be some deterrent to that!
Are we talking about the same thing here?
I'm not aware of a rising clamor for really cool high-tech whiteboards in schools.
But I keep seeing and hearing about outnumbered and underqualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms, dumbed-down curricula, violence, racial conflict, patronage, corruption, drug addiction, excessive review time for high-stakes testing, poor morale, and low expectations.
Which one of those problems is the space-age whiteboard supposed to solve?
Sure, it's a neat idea and probably pretty useful, but a "breakthrough" that schools have been waiting for? Insert obligatory derogatory comparison to Microsoft marketing!
Bah. Opt-out is still spam, and it still sucks. Being slightly less grievous than the stuff you can't opt out of doesn't make it okay.
I can't opt out of the 100-plus spams I get every day even if the spammers weren't lying. It's just far too much work to bother with, and it's a hell of an imposition considering who benefits from the spam in the first place. (Hint: not me.)
There is no such thing as responsible spamming!
I get about a hundred spams a day on average, a bit more on weekends, so I automatically filter as much as I reasonably can.
Just a couple weeks ago, I got email from an old college pal who hasn't reached out in fourteen years. He had a Yahoo address that didn't look anything like his name, and he picked a pretty lame subject line too. I was this >< close to deleting the message unread, manually, since it hadn't hit the filters but looked rather spammish.
Given my line of work and his, there's a decent possibility we may actually get to do some mutually profitable (i.e., no jokes, it's not MLM) business together in the near future. But even if that doesn't work out, I'd been looking for this guy for years; his name is so common and he lives in such a large city that a directory search would have been pointless.
Now tell me spam doesn't have real consequences.
But that's quite a stretch. It's not really barter unless you trade value for value. In dollar terms, the common production of Open Source (or Free Software) is value for nothing--excluding some cases, such as when you are paid to write Free Software and are already taxed for it.
Income tax can't even be calculated without a transaction of some kind, even if it's a barter. But where's the transaction when you contribute a device driver to Linus's kernel or fix a bug on Sourceforge?
I know The Man uses words to mean what he wants them to mean, but taxing free software development as "barter" would be extreme even for The Man.
Which is why all the CLECs are begging for access to those wires? And why the Bells are using blatant tactics to deny that access?
Not that it matters if you're arguing property rights. But it's hard to tell what your argument is now.
For what definition of "best"? Surely it's still cheaper to run voice and data over existing copper. If it weren't, the ILECs would have changed over already.
I find that to be a weird argument from someone who claims to want deregulation. Why not let the market decide? Right now the market says that even the artificially inflated price of access to those copper wires is a better deal than the corresponding, and lightly regulated, wireless products.
How many companies have hardwired T1s? Okay, now how many are using wireless T1 equivalents? Tell me copper is obsolete.
How many residences are using copper circuits? How many have gone fully wireless? Why is that?
The sunken cost of that copper last-mile network is in the billions of dollars if not tens of billions. It isn't the newest thing going, and it's not glamorous, but it's still more profitable to run than the alternatives. Which explains why the ILECs are so reluctant to share the network. That's what market forces do when you have a natural monopoly situation controlled by one of the players.
I find your position... baffling. If the last-mile network is so devoid of value, what's the harm in opening it to all users? Who's being cheated of their private investment if it's worth "next to nothing"? And in any case, you yourself claimed (I didn't) that the network might as well be considered government-owned considering the protected monopoly status it had for a hundred years.
*sigh*
If you're driving at a point, I'm afraid I don't follow your path nor can I see your destination. All I'm saying is that equal access to last-mile facilities is the bare minimum for a competitive market in telecom services, and that the ILECs have a hell of a nerve complaining about finally having to share the physical plant they built with money that was funneled to them over the decades by state and federal legislation.
Not "as though they [the CLECs] owned them." How about as though Ma Bell would acknowledge the assets she holds are a unique product of that might-as-well-be-the-government circumstance that you claimed. Acquiring the wires and CO assets over decades, out of an ongoing competition-free windfall, and then hoarding the use of those assets that everyone had to pay for--now that is imposing on everyone.
We didn't give the ILECs a monopoly because it was somehow the moral thing to do. We did so because of a tradeoff between private profit and public service. That balance should be maintained, because without it the ILECs are given billions of dollars of infrastructure just because... well, just because they were there to take it.
Otherwise we're left in the absurd situation of changing the rules in mid-game while forcing all but one player to start over from the beginning.
I have a great idea. Let's you and me and everyone else sit down for a game of Monopoly[tm]. I'll start the game with all the money and property I had left over from my last game (which I won), and the rest of you just start at the beginning, okay? That's fair, isn't it?
Sorry, I've had it that long too. Probably about mid-summer of 1990.
The bill has not been introduced into Congress yet. It's still at the draft and discussion stage.
That's why yesterday's hearings were about the supposed need for such a bill, not debating a specific bill.
The Intel guy wrote:
Could this be a signal?
Politically, he's suggesting that the best argument against SSSCA is that it would effectively ban "home movies" and similar things.
If you want to persuade your Senators, your Representative, or your neighbors that SSSCA is a bad idea, perhaps the "home movie" angle tells the story best. Home movies are the non-geek equivalent of Free Software, after all.
Shhhhh. Maybe Congress won't notice.
More seriously, that's where the line needs to be drawn legislatively. If "they" simply must have their DRM-enabled computers, fine. If they arm-twist Intel or someone else into making them available, whatever.
But they have to live with the idea that a Turing-complete computer of sufficient power is enough to get at their "content" given enough time and effort, however strongly it's encrypted. DMCA already makes doing this illegal however, so any excuse of "content protection" for needing SSSCA bites it.
Maybe that's the proper approach to lobbying against SSSCA-style bills. Point out that circumvention of content controls is already a felony. Banning general-purpose computers (as ludicrous as it sounds) far exceeds what is needed to protect anyone's copyright. Again, that's already covered by DMCA.
What problem it is that SSSCA is supposed to solve? Surely it can't be unlicensed copying, because DMCA covers that no matter what kind of computer you have. Could it be that the "content providers" want no alternatives to their product?
Long story short: let's use the truly awful DMCA as a defense against the even more horrible SSSCA. That analysis is familiar to geeks, but it needs to go farther.
Decent arguments could be made that SSSCA would violate Amendments 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, and 10. Fortunately, even more recent Supreme Courts--no friends of the Bill of Rights--have tended to throw out laws that don't meet the "compelling interest" standard. I can't imagine how the government could claim a "compelling" need to violate six amendments to prevent unlicensed copying of copyrighted material--which is already illegal.
Obviously Hollings needs to be thrown out of the Senate for even thinking out loud about something so blatantly unconstitutional. Pig.
The article quoted Hollings as saying to Intel, "We don't want to legislate. We want to give you time... to develop technology."
I think the real-world translation of this might indicate that the Honorable Senator from Disney is looking for a settlement of sorts.
Maybe Intel ends up producing DRM-enabled CPUs and mainboards for entertainment-oriented PCs, and Congress refrains from banning traditional general-purpose computers.
Then the "content" industry produces stuff that only works on the DRM-enabled systems, and those of us who don't care about watching the latest Disney flicks on our rack-mount servers will be left alone.
In other words, the scenario that Seth Finkelstein described in a comment to the previous SSSCA article.
But I don't think that's such a horrible outcome. You'll have your regular computers like you have now, and then you'll have a glorified VCR to use with all your "content." A work computer and a "fun" computer.
*shrug*
You lost the antecedent. Microsoft is saying that Sen.Tunney's opinion shouldn't get any special consideration just because he happened to have written the statute 25 years ago.
Of course if anyone should know about "legislative intent" here it would be Tunney.
Hello? That's a complete reversal of your previous statement, that the CLECs are "leeches" for using the existing infrastructure.
All those copper lines run by ILECs during the monopoly era (around 1900 through the present), by your own analysis, might as well be government resources. Why is it okay for the ILECs to use those resources but the CLECs are parasites?
The leeches are the ones who've had windfall profits funneled to them by government for a hundred years on the understanding that they were creating a semi-public, regulated resource. And who now use every available tactic, legal or not, to maintain their exclusive use of that resource.
Right. So?
With DMCA but no SSSCA, you have the crummy situation of being able to play your Disney movies only on the Disney-approved DRM-enabled commodity device.
But you could also have a real, unfettered computer with your choice of non-DRM-enabled operating systems. It won't play your Disney movies, but your pocket calculator and microwave won't either. Different devices for different applications.
The effect of DRM-bound entertainment media in an environment with DMCA but no SSSCA would be pretty limited. You might have to buy an "entertainment" computer to go along with your "real" computer. That sucks, and the DMCA is obviously a terrible law, but geeks and business people can generally keep doing what we've always been doing--with our own computers and the software we write or purchase under reasonable licenses.
With SSSCA, you couldn't have the "real" computer. SSSCA would divide computing into DRM-enabled toy machines and... contraband. Now that would be truly horrible.
No, I'm claiming again (still) that their privileged ownership comes with a public responsibility. It happens that hundreds of years of statute and common law, as well as all the classical economists, agree with me.
Your idea, that under a government umbrella of guaranteed profits and privileged freedom from competition the telcos should have the rights of "every other business," is radically anti-free-market and goes against every classical economist back to Adam Smith and beyond.
What you're preaching is fake libertarianism. There's always a good excuse for subsidizing the corporations, or you dismiss the current monopoly situation with a hand-waving assertion that "those days are over" even though one still can't run competitive copper without the permission of the ILECs.
The telcos own the wires, no period, comma, subject to a public trust. They bought those wires with government-granted and government-guaranteed monopoly profits. For a hundred years government enforced the lack of competition.
The real leeches are the ones who coast along on a state-guaranteed profit for decades and then whine when modern technology renders their business model obsolete.
But yet again, Congress is protecting an inefficient, outdated business model at the cost of everyone else.
It's just another one of those eleet-libertarian arguments. The last thing your corporate heroes want is a free market. In a free market AT&T and the ILECs never would have made the huge profits they get today.
...because Yahoo won't cut anybody off for spamming. They're as black-hat as it gets with their own spammers.
Answer: exactly zero. There's no such thing as an "extension" in DNS. Thinking that domains consist of "domains" and "extensions" is what got us silliness like dot-biz and domain squatters in the first place.