The base article (from UPI) is about what you'd expect from the Moonies, who bought the UPI brand in bankruptcy. It's a day late and an ounce of their precious gold short. So let's clarify what's going on.
Cellular and other commercial wireless telecommunications is all based on recycled spectrum. The original cellular 800 MHz licenses were taken from TV channels 70-83, which were deleted from broadcasting some years ago. PCS 1800 MHz licenses were largely taken away from fixed terrestrial microwave systems, used by many types of utilities -- and the licensees had to pay to relocate the utilities. In rural areas, there are still a lot of microwave systems on PCS frequencies. (I actually downloaded the FCC microwave license database and mapped those frequencies in a GIS program, just to see. Alas, while it's easy with commercial MS Access and MapInfo, the open source answer would probably be Postgresql and GRASS, which are much less user-friendly.)
The frequencies in question (1700/2100 MHz) were allocated about two years ago to the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS). That's a new set of auctioned licenses which, like PCS, could be used for "3G" services, though American rules do not dictate how auctioned frequencies actually are used. AWS frequencies are being transferred from government to civilian use by an Act of Congress a few years ago, which ordered the government to give up a little of its spectrum. Congress also wants auctions, because it maximizes federal revenue -- they actually anticipate auction revenues in the federal budget and use them as part of general revenues.
So in June's auction, we're likely to see Verizon Wireless, Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint and Alltel bid as usual. A few small bidders will pop up here and there. The big-market bidding will be defensive, mostly VZW and Cingular bidding up the spectrum in order to keep anyone else from using it to compete with them. If "3G" data services are offered, they'll probably be the usual "Wireless Web" walled gardens, or at best heavily-restricted data services like VZW's Broadband Access (with more Thou Shalt Nots than the King James Version).
It's a very good thing that the United States has a system of judicial review, wherein legislative folly can be overturned by courts. HOWEVER, there's a downside. Legislators know that they can pass anything they want, since their mistakes are subject to being overturned anyway. This lets them legislate recklessly. It's a free pass to allow them to pander to the religious right, for instance, by passing laws that will sound good to the party "base", and getting a double benefit by being able to rail against "activist judges" who are predictably bound by law and precedent.
The specific function -- selecting 10xxx codes -- was done long before their first patent was filed for. Even if it was done dialing 7-digit access numbers in a PBX, as it was in 1979 before 10xxx was implemented, that was technically the same as "customer premise equipment" dialing a "carrier access code".
Weinberger just patented something that already existed, omitting prior art from the application. Purely fraudulent.
OSPF? You're not even touching a huge well of prior art that predates OSPF by years! This goes right back to telephone network switches and direct distance dialing. By the late 1970s, most major PBX systems had least-cost routing features, some more sophisticated than that named in the Weinberger "patent". And after Equal Access created 10xxx codes, there were boxes that updated tables to decide which 10xxx was cheapest for any given call. All of this directly wipes out the patent in question. (And yes, I've offered information about this to a high-placed person in Google.)
However, the VoIP service doesn't even seem to infringe upon the patent itself, as if the patent were valid, so the case fails on those grounds too. This looks like a blatant attempt to use a trash patent against a deep-pocketed victim in hopes of getting quick cash, rather than dealing with a lawsuit that might somehow upset investors.
Not all -- you may be working your butt off on some fine ones. I've had no trouble with the LJ1100. But the LIDIL driver package (OfficeJet 5510) is a bloated mess. It sometimes eats 80 Mbytes of RAM, under XP. With Word Perfect Presentations, it doesn't align the black and color inks correctly. If you try to print to it from Linux, it hangs, and you have to reboot XP to free the printer. Yes, that is unsupported, but it shouldn't hang the Windows print system.
Moving things back to user mode will probably help a lot.
Sure, this company can come up with its own naming scheme, and charge big bucks for a position in their registry. But so what? It reminds me of the "International Star Registry", or whatever it's called, that advertises all over the place as a special gift. They have their own registry, and take puny little numbered stars, and assign them names for $49. The name is local to their registry, which they dutifully mail to the Library of Congress, as if that mattered (okay, so it might give them a useless copyright). But the astronomy community doesn't give a rat's kiester about their names.
Yes, actually -- separate the Bells into companies who own wire and cable (on behalf of any user) and companies that provide retail service to end users (in competition with CLECs and ISPs). The former is a natural monopoly (i.e., the economies of scale militate against competitive entry) while the latter is naturally competitive.
The Bells do not want anyone else to use their wire. This is not just turning back post-1996 competition; it's turning back pre-1900 common carriage! It *is* that bad. By denying access to competing ISPs (which the FCC just told them they could do), the Bells gain the ability to literally control content, determine what web sites you can visit, what sites you can shop at, what applications you can use, and who you can get email from.
The Bells and their fully bought-and-paid-for FCC use the word "broadband", but they rarely say "Internet". They don't want people to have what we call the Internet. Their model for "broadband" is closer to the old French Minitel, or pre-1992 Prodigy, or VZW's WAP. It's a walled garden of pay-to-view sites. Tellywood loves it too, since they'll be able to sell (for a fee) DRM'd drivel. Intel loves it, because the "deep packet inspection" filters that companies like Bytemobile and other "IPsphere" and "IMS" vendors are trying to sell the Bells are very CPU-intensive. (Think Great Firewall of China, with precise per-application billing added.)
This isn't Broadband, it's a Fat Wasteband. The FCC is supposed to protect the public interest, but it's part of the conspiracy (I know, dangerous word, and I don't mean literal black helicopters) to screw the public for profit and political gain. Telephone companies were "utilities", regulated monopolies. They have nominal competition in most places from cable, but that's hardly a wide-open market. They don't want to be utilities any more, they want to be the gatekeepers of information.
And the topic article's exaggerated view of the value of unlicensed spectrum plays into the FCC's and Bells' hand. Physical reality (Shannon's law, for instance) and power limits prevent unlicensed radios from really becoming competitive, except perhaps in some small town and semi-rural areas. But it's a good cover story to use -- incipient competition from imaginary sources is used to justify taking out the entire ISP industry.
Splitting them into a wire company (no content, open to all) and a service company (just let it try to sell Fat Wasteband in a competitive market -- fat chance!) would be the correct remedy. Alas, it probably requires a major change in power in Washington for that to happen.
It correctly notes that WiMax is capable of the following:
- 30 mile range
- 75 Mbps burst speed
- unlicensed or licensed operation
What it misses is the key: Pick One!
WiMax, like any other radio, trades off range for bandwidth (speed). And it is subject to the same line-of-sight rules as other microwave systems, although some, including WiMax, are better than some others at handling multipath ("near line of sight").
Unlicensed bands have strict power limits, and WiMax is not magic, so while it typically outperforms WiFi for distance, unlicensed power levels are very limiting. In Europe, the 3.5 GHz band seems popular for it. There is no such band in the USA. The 2.5 GHz (EBS/BRS) band is suitable for TDD operation. Sprint/Nextel owns most of the commercial spectrum there; the other half is owned by lots of "educational" institutions who are allowed to lease up to 75% to commercial users. The Roman Catholic Church and its affiliates are major licensees of this EBS (formerly "ITFS") spectrum. Another big licensee rents it to Clearwire in a lot of markets. There's also some 2.3 GHz ("WCS") licensed spectrum available (for lease) in a few places, though it's a bit tricky to use due to high-power satellite radio terrestrial relays on adjacent frequencies. The new 3.65 GHz band rules do NOT allow WiMax, at least not yet -- the FCC has been petitioned for reconsideration of the rules.
I know someone using a "pre-WiMax" system to do telephony, on leased licensed spectrum. (There is no certified WiMax stuff out yet.) It is working pretty well in early tests, and he hopes to roll out local phone service, as well as megabit data service, over a decent sized area. Towerstream, AFAIK, is mainly unlicensed, so it requires fairly costly directional antennas to get a decent path.
You're describing what Verizon, SBC and BellSouth want, not what exists.
In the US, DSL consists of two distinct entities. At the bottom is common carriage, provided to an ISP by a telephone company under FCC tariff. When you buy Verizon Online DSL, you're buying from the FCC, but under current FCC rules, Verizon Online, a separate accounting entity, pays your state's Verizon Telephone Company a price for raw DSL common carriage. This create an opportunity for other ISPs to provide the same ISP service, buying the raw DSL from the same tariff. The price may vary, however, based on volume discounts.
Cable companies, WiFi ISPs, and ISPs who string cable around office parks are not common carriers. The latest Supreme Court ruling simply upheld that with regard to cable. So ISPs can't turn to them for serice; they turn to common carriers instead. Phone companies.
The Bells have asked the FCC to change the law, so that they will no longer be common carriers. Then they can cut off service to all independent ISPs, and impose their own censorship across their wire. Of course they insist that this is okay, since there's usually also cable, and two competitors is all they can stand.
This has not happened yet. So Verizon (Telus' parent company) still has to let other ISPs use its wire. But Verizon Online can censor to its little heart's content (not that it has one).
It was 1986, and the IBM PC-class machines were expensive and boring. My home PC was a PDP-11 with 8" floppies and a VT52-compatible terminal. Time to upgrade. The Macintosh was out, but far too right-brained for my taste -- I liked a keyboard more than a mouse. Plus I didn't dress well enough to fit into the Mac world. No, Amiga was the slick machine. Nice Motorola CPU, graphics, sound.
But hey, there was this other machine, the Atari ST. The original 520ST (half megabyte of RAM) had an external floppy, but the followup 1040ST had a nicer package. Color or b/w monitor. A lot like an Atari, it seemed, but at least $100 cheaper. Being based on the same CPU as a Mac, and having a WIMPS GUI, its nickname was the Jackintosh, after Jack Tramiel, Atari's grand high poobah.
But it turned out to be less of a bargain. Atari didn't have Amiga's or Apple's software skills. Instead, it turned to CP/M producer Digital Research, who adapted GEM to the Atari, under the name TOS (T for either "The" or "Tramiel"). TOS was in ROM, under a soldered-down RF shield. And it was way premature. So it crashed a lot. Did I mention the shield was soldered down? No trivial project to upgrade.
Not that an upgrade came out within a reasonable time. And the successor TT was late, if it ever happened. Atari went down the tubes, leaving a rather less devoted user base than Amiga's. But that's a long story of its own...
So there are still efforts to revive pieces of the Amiga, but the ST is little more than a footnote to computing history. And the PC steamroller ran them all over, except the devoted Mac users.
Mod the parent up! The original story is a puff piece, designed, I suspect, to help the company sell stock.
The cable industry has standards for cable modems, called DOCSIS. DOCSIS 1.x speeds are basically up to 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps (more often less) upstream. That's common now. DOCSIS 2.0 speed goes to 40/30. That's in production now, being phased in. DOCSIS 3.0 is basically outlined but not yet final -- no products until 2006 or later -- and it combines TV channels (analog bandwidth) in order to give more (digital) bandwidth. It will go over 100 Mbps.
So it's coming to the US, but not in the form described in the original post. Standards are critical. DOCSIS compatibility means you can buy $75 cable modems and your cable company can buy its head end CMTSs from multiple vendors, interchangeably. Think "Ethernet". Proprietary technology means vendor lock-in, high prices, and obsolescence. So it's not going anywhere.
BTW, upstream speeds in the US are limited by the "low split" used in cable, where upstream is below 42 MHz in order to have Channel 2 (54-60 MHz) on the downstream. FCC rules require cable systems to carry TV broadcasters on their own channel, if they request. European TV doesn't have much VHF left at all, and European cable splits higher, so the upstream is good to about 68 MHz. That helps. But there is still enough upstream bandwidth in American cable systems, with DOCSIS 2 or later, to more than satisfy consumer demand. DOCSIS 1 gets by by having fewer subscribers share each upstream than each downstream (typically 4 upstream ports per downstream port on the CMTS).
If you follow activities deep in the telecom industry, you'll see some scary trends, which Martin is gearing up to support. Note that he uses "broadband" as a noun, not as an adjective. The WSJ interviewer talks "Internet" but Martin rarely does. He is talking about something else entirely, which he calls "broadband". A better term might be "Fat Wasteband", because it is a fat pipe, but it's a waste of bandwidth, the Internet's evil twin.
One such industry initiative is called IMS (IP Multimedia Services). This comes from the mobile side. You know how wide open that Wireless Web is, right? A "walled garden" of pay-per-view services, mostly, not the Internet at all! With 3G cellular, the speed is faster, but the mobile operators do not want to give up their greedy fingers in every pie. They want to have fast "services" they can sell, but not the public Internet. Hence IMS. If you follow the trade press, though, you'll see that there's lots of talk about IMS moving to the wireline world too.
An even more onerous project is called IPsphere http://www.ipsphere.org/. This replaces the public Internet with walled garden applications that are each associated with specific network Quality of Service levels. Now I actually do like QoS (controversial in the Internet world) but not walled gardens! But the wire owners do not want to "get Skyped", with services using their wire that do not pay them extra. IPspheres would allow the wire owner to take a cut off of e-commerce (selected vendors only), charge you by the message for mail from any server or web site, and filter exactly what you may or may not read. Think "Great Firewall of China" on steroids, and done for profit, not merely protection of a regime. Or think AOL (which is a charter member), especially if they don't need those pesky outside services. Lucent, Intel and HP are chomping at the bit for this, since the requisite "deep packet inspection" requires lots of CPU power.
This doesn't work if the public has a choice! Most people would choose an ISP over a closed IPsphere Wasteband provider. So the Bells want to take away your choice. They've asked the FCC to be treated like cablecos, who, the court (correcly, under the law) ruled, are ISPs, not common carriers. So if the telcos (who were created explicitly to be common carriers) don't have to be common carriers either, they can kick all of the other ISPs off of their copper wire. And then the consumer gets a choice of telco or cable, if that.
That's the "broadband" that Martin is pushing. A Wasteband. Be warned, tell your friends, and put on some heat! Keep the Internet open to Americans.
Wilhelm Research says that the Vivera ink on HP paper lasts a long time (decades), though it has a much shorter life on some other brands of photo printer. Go figure. The chemistry is tricky.
For a thermal inkjet (HP) to work, the ink has to conduct electricity at just the right amount, so it boils when hit with a pulse of power. That means it needs conductive salts in it, but salt degrades most dyes. And the ink hits maybe 600 degrees F inside the cartridge, while printing, which probably degrades some dyes too.
So I give HP plenty of credit for getting it as good as it is. Epson's micropiezo technique doesn't need heat or conductivity, so it is able to use more obvious long-lasting dyes and even pigments. Third-party HP color inks aren't as good. I do however use third-party black inks in my HP, since most of that is used for short-lived text documents.
I'm old enough to have lived through the GOSIP debacle two decades ago. I see a replay.
GOSIP (Government OSI Profile, and the acronym was used separately by the US and UK) was a requirement to implement the OSI protocol stack by some date in the 1980s. It was a procurement requirement: Every system bought by the feds as of a certain date had to have OSI. Unless it got a waiver.
Some people took this to mean that the government would transition from TCP/IP to OSI by then. And this would lead the world to OSI. And so they invested heavily in OSI. (Remember DEC?) Come to think of it, the way the lead story is written here, you get the same impression, that by 2008 the feds really will be using IPv6.
But that's not what GOSIP meant. It meant that the equipment had to have OSI available, not that the government would actually use it. Having OSI was a checklist item. And eventually it got discarded, because nobody would actually use it; TCP/IP did the job well enough, and some of the early OSI implementations were, to be polite, a pile of crap. But a pile of crap still meets the checklist for an option that won't be used!
IPv6 is somewhat dumber, protocol-wise, than OSI. It has been around for well over a decade, solving non-problems with non-solutions, ignoring problems of the public Internet that developed since then, while promising higher overhead, obsolesence of equipment, difficult management and transtion, and more money for Cisco. So unless you're Cisco, there's no reason to go there. And nobody is going there.
Microsoft will meet the checkoff, as will other vendors, but I predict that in 2009, IPv6 will still see little use, even by the feds. Perhaps if we're lucky somebody will be talking about really fixing the problems in the current protocol stack, rather than going with a hack that was created for internal political reasons at IETF before the Internet was even open to the public.
The Telecom Act does not shut down analog TV in 2007.
The FCC does have a mandate to shut down analog TV -- TV stations now have two channels, one analog and one digital, and once the transition is complete, new users of former channels 52-70 (some of which have already been auctioned off) can go ahead with them.
But the date is not firm yet. The current rule is that it will be delayed a year at a time, until 2010 at the latest, until 85% of households have digital reception capability. That includes DTV sets, as well as cable boxes that convert.
The FCC has just passed a rule requiring most TV sets to have digital tuners by 2006. The channel election process (by which stations choose which of their two channels to keep and which to give up -- for instance, some VHF stations will stick with UHF DTV, some won't -- is being accelerated. See the FCC web site.
But it's highly unlikely that analog will be shut down before 2008. And since that's an election year....
You may have a hard time believing that Linux acts as it does, but it does.
Windows did not detect motherboard sound -- the BIOS had disabled it and Windows did not get around that. I don't know whether the BIOS disabler is just a flag that Windows knows to look for and Linux doesn't, or if it really turns something off, but that's not my job to know.
No "device manager" exists in Linux. Each subsystem grabs what hardware resources it wants. So everybody "saw" the Blaster as the second sound card, but many apps provide no choice, and only take the first (because its developer doesn't have two sound subsystems in his hardware, and nobody "beta tests" Linux uniformly. You talk like a real expert but you really come off as a fanboy who talks above his level of knowledge.
Uh, Linux still doesn't Get It with regard to many desktop features, of which sound is certainly a good example.
I have Mandrake (aka Old Man Driva) 10.1 and SimplyMEPIS on my machine. Sound doesn't work out-of-the-box on either. I have a plain vanilla Sound Blaster Live! Basic. Supported. Right?
Well, there's a catch. My motherboard has VIA sound on it. That's supported too. And it worked. But the hardware MIDI port on the motherboard was pathological, so I plugged in the Blaster in order to use its MIDI port -- the slightly better audio was a bonus. I turned off motherboard audio in the BIOS. Windows was happy. It saw the new card and everything went there.
The Linux kernel, though, insists on probing the mobo and discovering the VIA audio even though it's turned off. So it assigns the applications to that. Some applications bypass ALSA or whatever it is in KDE and allow me to specify a different audio device. But that's whacking a mole one at a time, and basic sound functions still don't work. I got Mandrake to work once by building a custom kernel from which I had carefully extirpated every vestige of VIA audio support, so it *had* to go to the Blaster. But that's a kludge.
Just another example of Linux' failures on the desktop. My heart's with Linux, and I couldn't imagine using Windows servers for much, but the preponderance of my computer time is spent on Windows 2000, which is reasonably stable.
And while Bose is a fine American company, most of their manufacturing is, indeed, offshore. I don't have a Wave but my guess is that it is made in China. My Tivoli radio (cheaper competitor) was.
The FCC was using BPL as a substitute for real competition. Powell's policy -- Martin has not made his positions clear yet -- was that telephone wires belonged to the telephone company, period, and that they were not obligated to let other companies use them. In other words, he was completely flouting the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as well as a century of Common Carrier law.
Because the law requires some competition to be permitted, Powell chose to emphasize "intermodal" competition. In other words, the cable company was The Competitor. And if you think two isn't enough, there was BPL, the Third Pipe.
Note that under his model, none of these had to allow ANY independent ISPs to have access to their wires. (Right now, telephone companies are required to, but not cable, BPL, or wireless providers. BellSouth and Verizon have explicitly Petitioned to be relieved of that obligation, and Powell himself had put a docket [02-33] on the table to that effect, though they never got a majority to act on it.) So you'd get your Fox News through three channels, and, ISPs being "information" providers, nobody would be obligated to allow you to access sites they didn't like. Think about what kind of BPL "information" service you're likely to get from an electric utility, given the current regime's close relationship with the energy industry.
Tinfoil hat time: BPL's interference with radio is a feature, not a bug. It is the super-duper shortwave jamming system that the Soviets dreamed of but never succeeded in building! Take a country like, say, Saudi Arabia. They could buy BPL and provide their filtered, Wahhabi-safe, royalist-safe "broadband" service to the public, and they would lose their ability to get shortwave radio broadcasts, which in some parts of the world are still an important source of information. The ham bands are notched; shortwave broadcast bands are not! So BPL is for export, to countries like China too. Whether the USA gets that censored remains to be seen. Shortwave listening here is extremely obscure, but it does theoretically provide another channel for hearing about the world.
The Slashdot cover story gets it wrong. The CRTC is not regulating all VoIP providers. It is regulating Incumbent telephone companies.
There are two types of local phone companies. Incumbents were given legal monopolies until recently, with Canada following the USA in opening up competition. So Bell Canada, Aliant, Telus and Sasktel are Incumbents in Canada. They all have much more than a 50% market share. This is generally accepted as giving them monopoly power -- the ability to set prices in a manner that no competitor can equal.
All other telephone companies are Competitive. They are startups, or at least new to the phone business. In the USA, the term of art is CLEC, and they range from big cable companies down to one-man shops. (I personally know some of the latter.) They have no market power to speak of. Vonage is not a phone company, at least under US rules, but it does provide something resembling local phone service. (Technically it's reselling the services of other CLECs, such as Focal and Paetec.)
The CRTC decided (it's not formally out yet) that Incumbent local phone companies, whose prices are regulated because they have monopoly power, cannot offer VoIP services at unregulated prices. They can't offer cut-rate service that puts their competitors out of business (remember John D. Rockefeller -- sell cheap until the competitor is gone, then raise the price big time). EVERYBODY ELSE can do as they please. Shaw, Rogers, Vonage, Broadvoice, Yukon Dave's Trading Post and Telephone Service Company -- they can offer VoIP withut price regulation.
The CRTC is doing a far better job than the US FCC has been doing over the past few years. This decision is quite reasonable.
Depends a whole lot on your applications. I couldn't possibly switch my day-to-day desktop to Linux because the apps just don't cut it for me. The idea of a Windows server makes me cringe, but for me the Linux desktop is a spare-time toy.
Top of the list is email! There's nothing on Linux like Eudora, which some people may have kind of gotten working under WINE, but it beats me how. (Of course getting anything working under WINE is a challenge, given the "programmer's toy" setup. I am not a programmer or a Unix wizard.) Nothing on Linux supports POP3 like Eudora for multiple-client users (delete mail from server after x days, mark individual messages or selection-ranges for deletion from server, to get spam off while leaving the mail on).
Then there's Access, a perfectly straigtforward MS hack GUI front end for its mediocre Jet db engine. Linux has lots of programmer's databases, but nothing as easy to use (for fairly elaborate multi-table queries) as Access, and -- more importantly -- nothing that can read MDB databases. Since there are plenty of mission-critical applications written in Access (remember, IANAP so I don't write 'em, I just use 'em), this gap is serious. Maybe Crossover can handle it by now, but that's proof of why WINE is still needed, but not yet adequately stable.
I also use MapInfo, a commercial GIS program. Sure, Linux supports GRASS, but that's a different type of GIS, an older-style command-line system that is quite hard to learn and which doesn't support the same set of commercial databases that MapInfo does -- quite a bit of vertical application files, to be sure. (The FCC uses MapInfo and posts quite a few nice free files.) I don't recall how close WINE came to supporting this; it wasn't 100%, but if it were, it would again fill in a real gap.
Those are just three examples of Windows apps that I use very frequently. Yes, Linux comes with a lot. I generally use "Old Man Driva", installation of which is like a trip to a software store with somebody else's credit card. And the Debian repositories used by many systems are likewise rich. But there's a lot of repetitive software in the (virtual) box (lookie! I am 1337 h4X0r! I can code the same function in *that* language!), a lot of developer's tools, and a lot of special-purpose little programs. Since nobody really owns it, nobody's paying to fill in the holes. Praise be to Sun for giving us OpenOffice. Praise be to Mozilla for its fine work. But the bulk of the world's desktop developers are still coding for Windows.
Graphite is not a metal; its a form of carbon. Chernobyl was a bad Russian design, based on graphite as the moderator and IIRC gas as the coolant, not based on liquid metal at all.
Many American reactors do use pressurized water, not liquid sodium, for cooling. The primary (really "hot" in both senses) loop runs at several hundred degrees, but pressure keeps it from boiling. There's also the Boiling Water reactor design, which does indeed let the primary water boil and generate steam, which condenses in the heat exchanger and is returned as a liquid.
This law works on two levels. Its primary backing, of course, is Hollywood, and they have a decent case that file leaking -- especially review DVDs loaned under nondisclosure -- can undermine their business model. Okay, I get it, though the penalties do look awfully harsh.
But this also appears to apply to anyone who "leaks" information that the owner doesn't really want out there, ever. Without a deadline on the "release" date, material can be embargoed forever. That's how Big Brother can put information into a Memory Hole, and put anyone who lets it out into Room 101. It accompanies the DMCA stream that makes information Go Away Permanently when its DRM is made unreadable: If it's on a short-lived medium (some DVDs and CDs) and can't be copied, or uses a DRM that is time-limited, then once it goes, it goes, and trying to keep the information alive becomes a Crime Against The State. These secondary agendas are not obvious to the mainstream press, but the Fatherland Security Police apparatus is well aware of how these laws can be used against political opponents.
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The base article (from UPI) is about what you'd expect from the Moonies, who bought the UPI brand in bankruptcy. It's a day late and an ounce of their precious gold short. So let's clarify what's going on.
Cellular and other commercial wireless telecommunications is all based on recycled spectrum. The original cellular 800 MHz licenses were taken from TV channels 70-83, which were deleted from broadcasting some years ago. PCS 1800 MHz licenses were largely taken away from fixed terrestrial microwave systems, used by many types of utilities -- and the licensees had to pay to relocate the utilities. In rural areas, there are still a lot of microwave systems on PCS frequencies. (I actually downloaded the FCC microwave license database and mapped those frequencies in a GIS program, just to see. Alas, while it's easy with commercial MS Access and MapInfo, the open source answer would probably be Postgresql and GRASS, which are much less user-friendly.)
The frequencies in question (1700/2100 MHz) were allocated about two years ago to the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS). That's a new set of auctioned licenses which, like PCS, could be used for "3G" services, though American rules do not dictate how auctioned frequencies actually are used. AWS frequencies are being transferred from government to civilian use by an Act of Congress a few years ago, which ordered the government to give up a little of its spectrum. Congress also wants auctions, because it maximizes federal revenue -- they actually anticipate auction revenues in the federal budget and use them as part of general revenues.
So in June's auction, we're likely to see Verizon Wireless, Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint and Alltel bid as usual. A few small bidders will pop up here and there. The big-market bidding will be defensive, mostly VZW and Cingular bidding up the spectrum in order to keep anyone else from using it to compete with them. If "3G" data services are offered, they'll probably be the usual "Wireless Web" walled gardens, or at best heavily-restricted data services like VZW's Broadband Access (with more Thou Shalt Nots than the King James Version).
It's a very good thing that the United States has a system of judicial review, wherein legislative folly can be overturned by courts. HOWEVER, there's a downside. Legislators know that they can pass anything they want, since their mistakes are subject to being overturned anyway. This lets them legislate recklessly. It's a free pass to allow them to pander to the religious right, for instance, by passing laws that will sound good to the party "base", and getting a double benefit by being able to rail against "activist judges" who are predictably bound by law and precedent.
To clarify your informative comment:
They sued Nortel Networks. They lost. The Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit affirmed that decision.
The specific function -- selecting 10xxx codes -- was done long before their first patent was filed for. Even if it was done dialing 7-digit access numbers in a PBX, as it was in 1979 before 10xxx was implemented, that was technically the same as "customer premise equipment" dialing a "carrier access code".
Weinberger just patented something that already existed, omitting prior art from the application. Purely fraudulent.
OSPF? You're not even touching a huge well of prior art that predates OSPF by years! This goes right back to telephone network switches and direct distance dialing. By the late 1970s, most major PBX systems had least-cost routing features, some more sophisticated than that named in the Weinberger "patent". And after Equal Access created 10xxx codes, there were boxes that updated tables to decide which 10xxx was cheapest for any given call. All of this directly wipes out the patent in question. (And yes, I've offered information about this to a high-placed person in Google.)
However, the VoIP service doesn't even seem to infringe upon the patent itself, as if the patent were valid, so the case fails on those grounds too. This looks like a blatant attempt to use a trash patent against a deep-pocketed victim in hopes of getting quick cash, rather than dealing with a lawsuit that might somehow upset investors.
And yet HP printer drivers still manage to suck.
Not all -- you may be working your butt off on some fine ones. I've had no trouble with the LJ1100. But the LIDIL driver package (OfficeJet 5510) is a bloated mess. It sometimes eats 80 Mbytes of RAM, under XP. With Word Perfect Presentations, it doesn't align the black and color inks correctly. If you try to print to it from Linux, it hangs, and you have to reboot XP to free the printer. Yes, that is unsupported, but it shouldn't hang the Windows print system.
Moving things back to user mode will probably help a lot.
Sure, this company can come up with its own naming scheme, and charge big bucks for a position in their registry. But so what? It reminds me of the "International Star Registry", or whatever it's called, that advertises all over the place as a special gift. They have their own registry, and take puny little numbered stars, and assign them names for $49. The name is local to their registry, which they dutifully mail to the Library of Congress, as if that mattered (okay, so it might give them a useless copyright). But the astronomy community doesn't give a rat's kiester about their names.
There's one born every minute.
It stands for Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed.
Fortunately the term is obsolete, and instead we have really accurate metrics like PR-ratings, NetBurst MHz and AMD's "+" numbers.
Yes, actually -- separate the Bells into companies who own wire and cable (on behalf of any user) and companies that provide retail service to end users (in competition with CLECs and ISPs). The former is a natural monopoly (i.e., the economies of scale militate against competitive entry) while the latter is naturally competitive.
The Bells do not want anyone else to use their wire. This is not just turning back post-1996 competition; it's turning back pre-1900 common carriage! It *is* that bad. By denying access to competing ISPs (which the FCC just told them they could do), the Bells gain the ability to literally control content, determine what web sites you can visit, what sites you can shop at, what applications you can use, and who you can get email from.
The Bells and their fully bought-and-paid-for FCC use the word "broadband", but they rarely say "Internet". They don't want people to have what we call the Internet. Their model for "broadband" is closer to the old French Minitel, or pre-1992 Prodigy, or VZW's WAP. It's a walled garden of pay-to-view sites. Tellywood loves it too, since they'll be able to sell (for a fee) DRM'd drivel. Intel loves it, because the "deep packet inspection" filters that companies like Bytemobile and other "IPsphere" and "IMS" vendors are trying to sell the Bells are very CPU-intensive. (Think Great Firewall of China, with precise per-application billing added.)
This isn't Broadband, it's a Fat Wasteband. The FCC is supposed to protect the public interest, but it's part of the conspiracy (I know, dangerous word, and I don't mean literal black helicopters) to screw the public for profit and political gain. Telephone companies were "utilities", regulated monopolies. They have nominal competition in most places from cable, but that's hardly a wide-open market. They don't want to be utilities any more, they want to be the gatekeepers of information.
And the topic article's exaggerated view of the value of unlicensed spectrum plays into the FCC's and Bells' hand. Physical reality (Shannon's law, for instance) and power limits prevent unlicensed radios from really becoming competitive, except perhaps in some small town and semi-rural areas. But it's a good cover story to use -- incipient competition from imaginary sources is used to justify taking out the entire ISP industry.
Splitting them into a wire company (no content, open to all) and a service company (just let it try to sell Fat Wasteband in a competitive market -- fat chance!) would be the correct remedy. Alas, it probably requires a major change in power in Washington for that to happen.
It correctly notes that WiMax is capable of the following:
- 30 mile range
- 75 Mbps burst speed
- unlicensed or licensed operation
What it misses is the key: Pick One!
WiMax, like any other radio, trades off range for bandwidth (speed). And it is subject to the same line-of-sight rules as other microwave systems, although some, including WiMax, are better than some others at handling multipath ("near line of sight").
Unlicensed bands have strict power limits, and WiMax is not magic, so while it typically outperforms WiFi for distance, unlicensed power levels are very limiting. In Europe, the 3.5 GHz band seems popular for it. There is no such band in the USA. The 2.5 GHz (EBS/BRS) band is suitable for TDD operation. Sprint/Nextel owns most of the commercial spectrum there; the other half is owned by lots of "educational" institutions who are allowed to lease up to 75% to commercial users. The Roman Catholic Church and its affiliates are major licensees of this EBS (formerly "ITFS") spectrum. Another big licensee rents it to Clearwire in a lot of markets. There's also some 2.3 GHz ("WCS") licensed spectrum available (for lease) in a few places, though it's a bit tricky to use due to high-power satellite radio terrestrial relays on adjacent frequencies. The new 3.65 GHz band rules do NOT allow WiMax, at least not yet -- the FCC has been petitioned for reconsideration of the rules.
I know someone using a "pre-WiMax" system to do telephony, on leased licensed spectrum. (There is no certified WiMax stuff out yet.) It is working pretty well in early tests, and he hopes to roll out local phone service, as well as megabit data service, over a decent sized area. Towerstream, AFAIK, is mainly unlicensed, so it requires fairly costly directional antennas to get a decent path.
You're describing what Verizon, SBC and BellSouth want, not what exists.
In the US, DSL consists of two distinct entities. At the bottom is common carriage, provided to an ISP by a telephone company under FCC tariff. When you buy Verizon Online DSL, you're buying from the FCC, but under current FCC rules, Verizon Online, a separate accounting entity, pays your state's Verizon Telephone Company a price for raw DSL common carriage. This create an opportunity for other ISPs to provide the same ISP service, buying the raw DSL from the same tariff. The price may vary, however, based on volume discounts.
Cable companies, WiFi ISPs, and ISPs who string cable around office parks are not common carriers. The latest Supreme Court ruling simply upheld that with regard to cable. So ISPs can't turn to them for serice; they turn to common carriers instead. Phone companies.
The Bells have asked the FCC to change the law, so that they will no longer be common carriers. Then they can cut off service to all independent ISPs, and impose their own censorship across their wire. Of course they insist that this is okay, since there's usually also cable, and two competitors is all they can stand.
This has not happened yet. So Verizon (Telus' parent company) still has to let other ISPs use its wire. But Verizon Online can censor to its little heart's content (not that it has one).
I should have bought an Amiga.
It was 1986, and the IBM PC-class machines were expensive and boring. My home PC was a PDP-11 with 8" floppies and a VT52-compatible terminal. Time to upgrade. The Macintosh was out, but far too right-brained for my taste -- I liked a keyboard more than a mouse. Plus I didn't dress well enough to fit into the Mac world. No, Amiga was the slick machine. Nice Motorola CPU, graphics, sound.
But hey, there was this other machine, the Atari ST. The original 520ST (half megabyte of RAM) had an external floppy, but the followup 1040ST had a nicer package. Color or b/w monitor. A lot like an Atari, it seemed, but at least $100 cheaper. Being based on the same CPU as a Mac, and having a WIMPS GUI, its nickname was the Jackintosh, after Jack Tramiel, Atari's grand high poobah.
But it turned out to be less of a bargain. Atari didn't have Amiga's or Apple's software skills. Instead, it turned to CP/M producer Digital Research, who adapted GEM to the Atari, under the name TOS (T for either "The" or "Tramiel"). TOS was in ROM, under a soldered-down RF shield. And it was way premature. So it crashed a lot. Did I mention the shield was soldered down? No trivial project to upgrade.
Not that an upgrade came out within a reasonable time. And the successor TT was late, if it ever happened. Atari went down the tubes, leaving a rather less devoted user base than Amiga's. But that's a long story of its own...
So there are still efforts to revive pieces of the Amiga, but the ST is little more than a footnote to computing history. And the PC steamroller ran them all over, except the devoted Mac users.
Mod the parent up! The original story is a puff piece, designed, I suspect, to help the company sell stock.
The cable industry has standards for cable modems, called DOCSIS. DOCSIS 1.x speeds are basically up to 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps (more often less) upstream. That's common now. DOCSIS 2.0 speed goes to 40/30. That's in production now, being phased in. DOCSIS 3.0 is basically outlined but not yet final -- no products until 2006 or later -- and it combines TV channels (analog bandwidth) in order to give more (digital) bandwidth. It will go over 100 Mbps.
So it's coming to the US, but not in the form described in the original post. Standards are critical. DOCSIS compatibility means you can buy $75 cable modems and your cable company can buy its head end CMTSs from multiple vendors, interchangeably. Think "Ethernet". Proprietary technology means vendor lock-in, high prices, and obsolescence. So it's not going anywhere.
BTW, upstream speeds in the US are limited by the "low split" used in cable, where upstream is below 42 MHz in order to have Channel 2 (54-60 MHz) on the downstream. FCC rules require cable systems to carry TV broadcasters on their own channel, if they request. European TV doesn't have much VHF left at all, and European cable splits higher, so the upstream is good to about 68 MHz. That helps. But there is still enough upstream bandwidth in American cable systems, with DOCSIS 2 or later, to more than satisfy consumer demand. DOCSIS 1 gets by by having fewer subscribers share each upstream than each downstream (typically 4 upstream ports per downstream port on the CMTS).
One such industry initiative is called IMS (IP Multimedia Services). This comes from the mobile side. You know how wide open that Wireless Web is, right? A "walled garden" of pay-per-view services, mostly, not the Internet at all! With 3G cellular, the speed is faster, but the mobile operators do not want to give up their greedy fingers in every pie. They want to have fast "services" they can sell, but not the public Internet. Hence IMS. If you follow the trade press, though, you'll see that there's lots of talk about IMS moving to the wireline world too.
An even more onerous project is called IPsphere http://www.ipsphere.org/. This replaces the public Internet with walled garden applications that are each associated with specific network Quality of Service levels. Now I actually do like QoS (controversial in the Internet world) but not walled gardens! But the wire owners do not want to "get Skyped", with services using their wire that do not pay them extra. IPspheres would allow the wire owner to take a cut off of e-commerce (selected vendors only), charge you by the message for mail from any server or web site, and filter exactly what you may or may not read. Think "Great Firewall of China" on steroids, and done for profit, not merely protection of a regime. Or think AOL (which is a charter member), especially if they don't need those pesky outside services. Lucent, Intel and HP are chomping at the bit for this, since the requisite "deep packet inspection" requires lots of CPU power.
This doesn't work if the public has a choice! Most people would choose an ISP over a closed IPsphere Wasteband provider. So the Bells want to take away your choice. They've asked the FCC to be treated like cablecos, who, the court (correcly, under the law) ruled, are ISPs, not common carriers. So if the telcos (who were created explicitly to be common carriers) don't have to be common carriers either, they can kick all of the other ISPs off of their copper wire. And then the consumer gets a choice of telco or cable, if that.
That's the "broadband" that Martin is pushing. A Wasteband. Be warned, tell your friends, and put on some heat! Keep the Internet open to Americans.
Wilhelm Research says that the Vivera ink on HP paper lasts a long time (decades), though it has a much shorter life on some other brands of photo printer. Go figure. The chemistry is tricky.
For a thermal inkjet (HP) to work, the ink has to conduct electricity at just the right amount, so it boils when hit with a pulse of power. That means it needs conductive salts in it, but salt degrades most dyes. And the ink hits maybe 600 degrees F inside the cartridge, while printing, which probably degrades some dyes too.
So I give HP plenty of credit for getting it as good as it is. Epson's micropiezo technique doesn't need heat or conductivity, so it is able to use more obvious long-lasting dyes and even pigments. Third-party HP color inks aren't as good. I do however use third-party black inks in my HP, since most of that is used for short-lived text documents.
I'm old enough to have lived through the GOSIP debacle two decades ago. I see a replay.
GOSIP (Government OSI Profile, and the acronym was used separately by the US and UK) was a requirement to implement the OSI protocol stack by some date in the 1980s. It was a procurement requirement: Every system bought by the feds as of a certain date had to have OSI. Unless it got a waiver.
Some people took this to mean that the government would transition from TCP/IP to OSI by then. And this would lead the world to OSI. And so they invested heavily in OSI. (Remember DEC?) Come to think of it, the way the lead story is written here, you get the same impression, that by 2008 the feds really will be using IPv6.
But that's not what GOSIP meant. It meant that the equipment had to have OSI available, not that the government would actually use it. Having OSI was a checklist item. And eventually it got discarded, because nobody would actually use it; TCP/IP did the job well enough, and some of the early OSI implementations were, to be polite, a pile of crap. But a pile of crap still meets the checklist for an option that won't be used!
IPv6 is somewhat dumber, protocol-wise, than OSI. It has been around for well over a decade, solving non-problems with non-solutions, ignoring problems of the public Internet that developed since then, while promising higher overhead, obsolesence of equipment, difficult management and transtion, and more money for Cisco. So unless you're Cisco, there's no reason to go there. And nobody is going there.
Microsoft will meet the checkoff, as will other vendors, but I predict that in 2009, IPv6 will still see little use, even by the feds. Perhaps if we're lucky somebody will be talking about really fixing the problems in the current protocol stack, rather than going with a hack that was created for internal political reasons at IETF before the Internet was even open to the public.
The Telecom Act does not shut down analog TV in 2007.
The FCC does have a mandate to shut down analog TV -- TV stations now have two channels, one analog and one digital, and once the transition is complete, new users of former channels 52-70 (some of which have already been auctioned off) can go ahead with them.
But the date is not firm yet. The current rule is that it will be delayed a year at a time, until 2010 at the latest, until 85% of households have digital reception capability. That includes DTV sets, as well as cable boxes that convert.
The FCC has just passed a rule requiring most TV sets to have digital tuners by 2006. The channel election process (by which stations choose which of their two channels to keep and which to give up -- for instance, some VHF stations will stick with UHF DTV, some won't -- is being accelerated. See the FCC web site.
But it's highly unlikely that analog will be shut down before 2008. And since that's an election year....
You may have a hard time believing that Linux acts as it does, but it does.
Windows did not detect motherboard sound -- the BIOS had disabled it and Windows did not get around that. I don't know whether the BIOS disabler is just a flag that Windows knows to look for and Linux doesn't, or if it really turns something off, but that's not my job to know.
No "device manager" exists in Linux. Each subsystem grabs what hardware resources it wants. So everybody "saw" the Blaster as the second sound card, but many apps provide no choice, and only take the first (because its developer doesn't have two sound subsystems in his hardware, and nobody "beta tests" Linux uniformly. You talk like a real expert but you really come off as a fanboy who talks above his level of knowledge.
Uh, Linux still doesn't Get It with regard to many desktop features, of which sound is certainly a good example.
I have Mandrake (aka Old Man Driva) 10.1 and SimplyMEPIS on my machine. Sound doesn't work out-of-the-box on either. I have a plain vanilla Sound Blaster Live! Basic. Supported. Right?
Well, there's a catch. My motherboard has VIA sound on it. That's supported too. And it worked. But the hardware MIDI port on the motherboard was pathological, so I plugged in the Blaster in order to use its MIDI port -- the slightly better audio was a bonus. I turned off motherboard audio in the BIOS. Windows was happy. It saw the new card and everything went there.
The Linux kernel, though, insists on probing the mobo and discovering the VIA audio even though it's turned off. So it assigns the applications to that. Some applications bypass ALSA or whatever it is in KDE and allow me to specify a different audio device. But that's whacking a mole one at a time, and basic sound functions still don't work. I got Mandrake to work once by building a custom kernel from which I had carefully extirpated every vestige of VIA audio support, so it *had* to go to the Blaster. But that's a kludge.
Just another example of Linux' failures on the desktop. My heart's with Linux, and I couldn't imagine using Windows servers for much, but the preponderance of my computer time is spent on Windows 2000, which is reasonably stable.
And while Bose is a fine American company, most of their manufacturing is, indeed, offshore. I don't have a Wave but my guess is that it is made in China. My Tivoli radio (cheaper competitor) was.
The FCC was using BPL as a substitute for real competition. Powell's policy -- Martin has not made his positions clear yet -- was that telephone wires belonged to the telephone company, period, and that they were not obligated to let other companies use them. In other words, he was completely flouting the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as well as a century of Common Carrier law.
Because the law requires some competition to be permitted, Powell chose to emphasize "intermodal" competition. In other words, the cable company was The Competitor. And if you think two isn't enough, there was BPL, the Third Pipe.
Note that under his model, none of these had to allow ANY independent ISPs to have access to their wires. (Right now, telephone companies are required to, but not cable, BPL, or wireless providers. BellSouth and Verizon have explicitly Petitioned to be relieved of that obligation, and Powell himself had put a docket [02-33] on the table to that effect, though they never got a majority to act on it.) So you'd get your Fox News through three channels, and, ISPs being "information" providers, nobody would be obligated to allow you to access sites they didn't like. Think about what kind of BPL "information" service you're likely to get from an electric utility, given the current regime's close relationship with the energy industry.
Tinfoil hat time: BPL's interference with radio is a feature, not a bug. It is the super-duper shortwave jamming system that the Soviets dreamed of but never succeeded in building! Take a country like, say, Saudi Arabia. They could buy BPL and provide their filtered, Wahhabi-safe, royalist-safe "broadband" service to the public, and they would lose their ability to get shortwave radio broadcasts, which in some parts of the world are still an important source of information. The ham bands are notched; shortwave broadcast bands are not! So BPL is for export, to countries like China too. Whether the USA gets that censored remains to be seen. Shortwave listening here is extremely obscure, but it does theoretically provide another channel for hearing about the world.
The Slashdot cover story gets it wrong. The CRTC is not regulating all VoIP providers. It is regulating Incumbent telephone companies.
There are two types of local phone companies. Incumbents were given legal monopolies until recently, with Canada following the USA in opening up competition. So Bell Canada, Aliant, Telus and Sasktel are Incumbents in Canada. They all have much more than a 50% market share. This is generally accepted as giving them monopoly power -- the ability to set prices in a manner that no competitor can equal.
All other telephone companies are Competitive. They are startups, or at least new to the phone business. In the USA, the term of art is CLEC, and they range from big cable companies down to one-man shops. (I personally know some of the latter.) They have no market power to speak of. Vonage is not a phone company, at least under US rules, but it does provide something resembling local phone service. (Technically it's reselling the services of other CLECs, such as Focal and Paetec.)
The CRTC decided (it's not formally out yet) that Incumbent local phone companies, whose prices are regulated because they have monopoly power, cannot offer VoIP services at unregulated prices. They can't offer cut-rate service that puts their competitors out of business (remember John D. Rockefeller -- sell cheap until the competitor is gone, then raise the price big time). EVERYBODY ELSE can do as they please. Shaw, Rogers, Vonage, Broadvoice, Yukon Dave's Trading Post and Telephone Service Company -- they can offer VoIP withut price regulation.
The CRTC is doing a far better job than the US FCC has been doing over the past few years. This decision is quite reasonable.
Depends a whole lot on your applications. I couldn't possibly switch my day-to-day desktop to Linux because the apps just don't cut it for me. The idea of a Windows server makes me cringe, but for me the Linux desktop is a spare-time toy.
Top of the list is email! There's nothing on Linux like Eudora, which some people may have kind of gotten working under WINE, but it beats me how. (Of course getting anything working under WINE is a challenge, given the "programmer's toy" setup. I am not a programmer or a Unix wizard.) Nothing on Linux supports POP3 like Eudora for multiple-client users (delete mail from server after x days, mark individual messages or selection-ranges for deletion from server, to get spam off while leaving the mail on).
Then there's Access, a perfectly straigtforward MS hack GUI front end for its mediocre Jet db engine. Linux has lots of programmer's databases, but nothing as easy to use (for fairly elaborate multi-table queries) as Access, and -- more importantly -- nothing that can read MDB databases. Since there are plenty of mission-critical applications written in Access (remember, IANAP so I don't write 'em, I just use 'em), this gap is serious. Maybe Crossover can handle it by now, but that's proof of why WINE is still needed, but not yet adequately stable.
I also use MapInfo, a commercial GIS program. Sure, Linux supports GRASS, but that's a different type of GIS, an older-style command-line system that is quite hard to learn and which doesn't support the same set of commercial databases that MapInfo does -- quite a bit of vertical application files, to be sure. (The FCC uses MapInfo and posts quite a few nice free files.) I don't recall how close WINE came to supporting this; it wasn't 100%, but if it were, it would again fill in a real gap.
Those are just three examples of Windows apps that I use very frequently. Yes, Linux comes with a lot. I generally use "Old Man Driva", installation of which is like a trip to a software store with somebody else's credit card. And the Debian repositories used by many systems are likewise rich. But there's a lot of repetitive software in the (virtual) box (lookie! I am 1337 h4X0r! I can code the same function in *that* language!), a lot of developer's tools, and a lot of special-purpose little programs. Since nobody really owns it, nobody's paying to fill in the holes. Praise be to Sun for giving us OpenOffice. Praise be to Mozilla for its fine work. But the bulk of the world's desktop developers are still coding for Windows.
Graphite is not a metal; its a form of carbon. Chernobyl was a bad Russian design, based on graphite as the moderator and IIRC gas as the coolant, not based on liquid metal at all.
Many American reactors do use pressurized water, not liquid sodium, for cooling. The primary (really "hot" in both senses) loop runs at several hundred degrees, but pressure keeps it from boiling. There's also the Boiling Water reactor design, which does indeed let the primary water boil and generate steam, which condenses in the heat exchanger and is returned as a liquid.
This law works on two levels. Its primary backing, of course, is Hollywood, and they have a decent case that file leaking -- especially review DVDs loaned under nondisclosure -- can undermine their business model. Okay, I get it, though the penalties do look awfully harsh.
But this also appears to apply to anyone who "leaks" information that the owner doesn't really want out there, ever. Without a deadline on the "release" date, material can be embargoed forever. That's how Big Brother can put information into a Memory Hole, and put anyone who lets it out into Room 101. It accompanies the DMCA stream that makes information Go Away Permanently when its DRM is made unreadable: If it's on a short-lived medium (some DVDs and CDs) and can't be copied, or uses a DRM that is time-limited, then once it goes, it goes, and trying to keep the information alive becomes a Crime Against The State. These secondary agendas are not obvious to the mainstream press, but the Fatherland Security Police apparatus is well aware of how these laws can be used against political opponents.