You essentially ask: what use is fundamental physics research?
You can't ever predict what applications fundamental research will have on technology. Sometimes, things are immediate: after Roengten discovered X-rays in 1895, the medical application was obvious. On the other hand, in 1905 Einstein predicted that objects moving fast experience time dilation relative to stationary objects. In 1915 he also predicted that the same would hold for objects higher up in a gravitational well. This was completely irrelevant to then-current technology: Nothing man-made moved faster than 500mph, or got high enough off the ground, and anyway time couldn't be measured accurately enough for these effects to matter. Swing around to the 1980s. The US government is now launching the GPS system, which depends on exteremly precise timing synchronization between a satellite in orbit and the unit on the ground. It turns out that the two relativistic time-dilation effects have to be taken into account for the system to work at all. Who'd have thunk this in 1915?
Moreover, progress is usually incremental. No single discovery will "cure HIV" or give us infinite energy. New physics beyond the standard model might have technological applications in 80 years. Does that mean we shouldn't discover it today?
Indeed the recent patent rampage is mostly due to the court of appeals making everything patentable. What I have in minds are cases where there are two patents for a better break pedal and then a patent for a break pedal with both features, not examples for new applications for old techniques.
You may also want to read this about a case currently pending before the USSC (which will hopefully reverse). Essentially the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that for an invention to be "obvious" someone had to have said that it is possible. This leads to the perverse situation where if an extension is so easy that no-one bothered to point it out, it counts as "non-obvious", while if someone did write to say "x could probably be done" then doing x becomes obvious.
Re:Our system of law allows and even encourages th
on
Supreme Court spurns RIM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
To make your points for you, I'll take a closer look at the case of NTP. In principle, they are fulfulling an important economic function: buying obscure patents and filing infringement lawsuits based on them make them money, but also makes money for the inventors from whom the patents were bought (who probably can't afford to sue RIM!). Also, there's strength in numbers -- and it's possible that NTP bought patents from several inventors, who probably won't have filed suit together otherwise.
The reason this feels wrong to you (and me) is that it's likely that NTP paid the inventors much less that what they are about to make from the lawsuit. This says nothing about NTP (who are simply trying to profit from the system as much as possible), but tell us a lot about the system. What this tell us is that the most important ingredient in the lawsuit was provided by NTP, or in other words, that you can lawyering $100m out of a patent is easier than developing a product worth $100m from it. In my opinion this comes from two deplorable problems in the USA:
Lawsuits are hard to win, independenly of the case at hand. Whenver you can bring to bear a lot of firepower (lawyers, expert witenesses, jury experts,...), winning or losing a case in the US justice system is not sufficiently correlates with the merits of the claim. Since the jury deciding the case is chosen to know very little about the subject matter (else one party or the other will object to its membership) and hence are likely to be uninformed people in general, and since modern technology is complicated, winning the patent case will depend on the good lawyering much more than on the technical merits of the underlying patent. The US first-to-invent patent filing system, with its due dilligence requirements adds all kinds to twists to this.
Patents are easy to get. It seems that what I'd call "obvious" and what the USPTO and the courts are calling "obvious" are very different. Perhaps that's because I'm a mathematician but I'm not so sure. If your creative genius was to combine already-existing devices A and B together the way there were designed (many examples of this in the car industry), then you aren't creative enough to get monopoly on this. If your grand idea is to have a computer do what a person did before (think most e-commerce patents), then the patent office should say "duh" and send you home. Also, extending patent protection to things like "business methods" is getting silly. If you can make good money off it directly (think most "business methods"), you don't need patent protection to develop it! And we have yet to reach software patents.
I have no sympathy for anyone who files bogus lawsuits, but not every lawsuit is bogus. And just because you are right, doesn't mean you'll win. Especially if you are a small investor suing a big company. They can hire top-notch lawyers, jury-selection advisors and expert witnesses. At the end the case will be decided by a jury of random people who have no idea about science, "obviousness" or engineering, and after the trial they can drag the appeals for years and years. Note that they can do all that independently of they merits of their case. I hate the US legal landscape, but for now it is the way it is, and as long as patent litigation is really expensive, small inventors will need seriuos financing to protect their patents.
Re:Our system of law allows and even encourages th
on
Supreme Court spurns RIM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think you miss a level of complexity in economics here. Patents exist not to protect inventors, but to give them a monetary incentive to innovate: we (the people) promise them a limited monopoly in return for a disclosure of their invention. I say nothing about the merits of the patents in the instant lawsuit since I haven't read them.
Now there are different ways a patent-holding inventor can make money off his monopoly. Remeber -- the inventor is good at inventing things, but not necessarily at the business end of things, at marketing, or at using patent law to protect the monopoly he's supposed to have. Therefore, one way for the inventor to make money from his monopoly without being a businessman or a lawyer is to sell the rights for the invention. Along the way it's important to remember that money today is worth more than money tomorrow.
For example, a venture capitalist might buy the rights for the patent and make a product. The inventor gets money up front (before any units are sold!), and everyone is happy. The risk was shared (the inventor took the risk that the research won't get far enough to be patentable; the venture capitalist that there will be no product or that it will fail), and the same is true for the income. The capitalist moved moeny from the future to the present for the inventor, and this is also worth something. You should compare both the risk assumption and the financing issues of this scenario with the one where the inventor goes to the bank, gets a loan, and tries to develop and market the product himself.
Elsewhere, someone else is selling a product which infringes on the patents held by our inventor. He has no way of profiting from his past work on the invention unless he can effectuate the monopoly we promised him by suing the patent infringers. However, our inventor is not a lawyer. As in the case above, he probably doesn't have the capital to invest in a lawsuit. So one way for him to make money off his investment is to sell the patent to the lawyer. This way he gets the money up front, while the lawyer agrees to pay for the legal costs and takes the risk that the lawsuit will fail. That's no different from the case above.
Think of the transaction as follows: you want a lawyer to defend your patent, but you don't have the cash to pay the lawyer. You therefore pay the lawyer with the rights to the patent itself. Of course you expect the patent to be worth more than the laywer's fees, so the lawyer has to pay you back up front for the difference. Again compare this with the scenario where the inventor takes a loan to pay the lawyer. What happens if the lawsuit fails?
Symantec's "NProtect" is a service similar to the recycle bin: when you delete a file, it is moved to a special directory and its metadata is preserved. This allows for easy undelete. As with any internal state of a program, users mucking about the special directory could cause problems (e.g. what should you do if the users deletes a file from the NProtect directory?). This has nothing to do with "root" privileges.
That's a good point. I don't know where you're from, but in Israel there are at least 3 or 4 different broadband options. If there's only one option where you are then certainly they should be regulated (both price-wise and offering-wise).
But you pay extra for the ports used by Skype, IRC, or BitTorrent.
The difference is that the cable company has costs assocaited with additional channels. Not so with opening ports.
I think you miss my point -- the question is not what their costs are, but what the prices are -- and this mostly depends on what the customers will pay for. It's true that opening a port doesn't cost them anything (assuming they charge for bandwidth some other way), but this doesn't mean they can't decide you have to pay for it. And if you don't like it you can decide to switch ISPs. That's how the market works.
Which is why I said that this would be silly for technical reasons -- the assignments of ports to services can easily be changed, and certainly having an agreed-upon assignment simplifies routing and bandwidth allocation. But this shouldn't prevent any individual ISP from trying to do it and see if they make more or less money as a result.
Exactly. It's not like everyone has a constitutional right to unlimited-bandwidth free internet access.
Moreover, there's nothing wrong with charging more for premium service. You want faster internet service -- pay more. In fact, why not make it like cable? Group TCP channels into packages and serve them separately. Put HTTP,HTTPS,SMTP,POP3,IMAP,TELNET,SSH etc in the "basic package". But you pay extra for the ports used by Skype, IRC, or BitTorrent. For technical reasons, this would be a bad move, but if the ISPs want to try it -- let them.
Call me an old-fashioned nit-picker, but I still think that for people who will need to write serious programs, writing 20-line programs in C is the right way to learn basic programming skills. User-interface design etc can wait until people understand how to interate over a table, how to do arithmetic, and most importantly how to convert ideas about solutions to computer code. I've seen CS students who were started on OOP in Java (or C++). Of course the Profs found OOP cool and important, but this meant the students had to deal with software design issues (which is what OOP is all about) before they understood how to write a function that accomplished something. Once you've learned how to program (in C, Fortran, or LOGO for that matter), you can start thinking about user-interface issues, program design issues, efficiency of algorithms, etc. But the bottom-up approach to learning how to programming works better than the top-down style.
With this Google is continuing to move in the all-the-info-you-need-in-one-place direction, also known as a web portal. They are doing it in their cool and effective ways, but that's where they seem to be going.
If this were 1985, we would all be talking about how IBM has decided to publish the specifications for their IBM-PC and IBM-XT machines (down to the motherboard wiring diagrams and the BIOS listing), which are based on off-the-shelf components. This while other kinds of personal computers (e.g. the Apple Macintosh that was introduced last year [1984]) are closed-hardware and can only be bought from specific vendors. The popularity of cheap IBM-PC clones is helping the sales of IBM's machines and making them the de-facto standard, despite the technical superiority of the competition from Apple.
To the people of the UK -- be afraid. In fact, be very afraid:
From the head of the comission: "I believe that Intellectual Property is at the heart of Britain's success in the knowledge economy. This review will ensure that we maintain a world-class environment for creativity, design and innovation."
In other words it is the legal scheme (IP) and not the ideas, creativity or innovation which what lies at the heart of Britain's success. an environment for innovation usually means an environment rewarding past innovation with infinite monopoly reducing the motivation for future innovation (consider US copyright law).
"The Gowers Review will be actively consulting stakeholders throughout its duration.".
This sentence is usually a sign that the public, the largest stakeholder in the business, is about to be excluded.
And at least according to Linus Torvalds, the creator and chief architect of Linux, code linked against GPL code -- say, against libavl, the GNU library for balanced binary trees -- isn't subject to reciprocity, either.
While I respet Linus's views, I don't think he's licensed to give legal opinion on copyright law in any jurdisdiction. Of course since he's the copyright holder for much of the Linux kernel, he has the right to interpret the GPL as it applies to Linux. However, this does not mean that GNU software from the FSF should be treated the same. If anything, since the FSF are the authors of the GPL you'd expect the reverse.
I think's things are not so simple. While this is a rootkit, "infected" systems don't display the normal symptoms: no (appreciable) slowdown, no annoying popups, no self-propagation or open ports. Moreover, the "phone home" behaviour is very limited. Since the average user didn't notice, there were no complaints. Do you expect the AV companies to buy and test music CDs for malware before this broke out (not in hindsight!). Since it took a Windows guru to figure out something was wrong, I'd expect these companies to take a few days. Several (including Microsoft, in fact) already classify it as malware and look for it.
A more serious problem for AV makers is that removing this rootkit is a very delicate business, so they can't offer a solution before they ensure it actually works. Also, since this stuff comes from music CDs people might listen to again, it's not clear what the right thing to do is. What happens if the (cluelss) user inserts the CD again? What is a (better informed) user wants to play the CD despite the rootkit?
Not quite true -- Sony is "distributing" the software as defined by the GPL. Moreover, the work was preformed by First4Internet as agents of Sony. These both seem to indicate they are liable. On the DMCA side, they are "trafficking" in an anti-circumvention device (assuming the software does actually activate the codepath in question).
I think there's a difference between regulating people's behaviour and regulating the infrastructure. If it's illegal to sell porn in the street, why shouldn't it be illegal to see on the internet? Conversely, since it's legal to publish anonymous pamphlets on the street (important founding-era right implicit in the First Amendment), it should be legal to publish anonymous websites. It's for this reason that people who own printing presses ("infrastructure") cannot be forced to keep a copy of everything they print, or to provide a sample page to the government for future comparison (this was the case in the USSR -- even for typewriters!).
Indeed the government has always wanted to control the infrastrcture, but it won't necessarily happen. What they mostly want is to ban things that are already illegal -- and we should give them that to keep the infrastructure safe. We can late ask why consensual porn is illegal at all -- but not with the republicrats in power.
I think they decided it's easier to present this as a debate over an "unfunded mandate" than over "invasion of privacy". It's probably also easier to make a consitutional argument this way.
Some examples: they can try forcing adult-oriented websites into.xxx 'because of all the poor children'. They can also charge a fee for TLD (.com,.biz,.net) domains, in effect levying a world-wide internet tax not unlike the world-wide oil tax we pay to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela etc). They can decide who gets to control the domain.iq rather than letting the new Iraqi government do it. They can ensure that internet protocols and standards are selected to benefit US business interest. They can ensure that domain-name disputes are resolved in a big-business-friendly atmosphere where you don't have a right to your own name even if you paid for the domain, assuming some compancy has decided to sell a product with a similar name, or if someone with the same name happens to be a movie star.
There's still the possibility of an alternate internet. The US can't enforce rules online.
The situation is more complicated than that. You can't have conflicting IP addresses without having completely separate networks, which is impractical (everyone will want to be able to connect to sites under the American Hegemony), and you don't want to have conflicting DNS records either. Indeed the rest of the world can set up their own DNS servers for a new TLD (say '.earth'), but they can't force anyone to contact the root server for that domain. The result will be chaos.
Now, the US stands to benefit from controlling a global resource (just like oil-producing countries benefit from controlling the oil supply). The article seems to hint that it's wrong. You can hardly fault a government from wielding its power to make the world better for its citizens (isn't that's their function, after all?). Of course the US government doens't always seem to have the benefit of all its citizens in mind most of the time, but that's a separate issue. If we don't like what the US government does, we can ask our governments to negotiate with them to change their behaviour. And naturally we will have to offer them something in return -- TANSTAAFL.
For details and analysis you can't beat Groklaw's
coverage,
including notes by twobloggers who attended the meeting.
Also note that the hearing was convened by a senator who seems to confuse "OpenDocument" and "OpenOffice" and "open standards" with "open source software".
Slashdot Mirror
You essentially ask: what use is fundamental physics research?
You can't ever predict what applications fundamental research will have on technology. Sometimes, things are immediate: after Roengten discovered X-rays in 1895, the medical application was obvious. On the other hand, in 1905 Einstein predicted that objects moving fast experience time dilation relative to stationary objects. In 1915 he also predicted that the same would hold for objects higher up in a gravitational well. This was completely irrelevant to then-current technology: Nothing man-made moved faster than 500mph, or got high enough off the ground, and anyway time couldn't be measured accurately enough for these effects to matter. Swing around to the 1980s. The US government is now launching the GPS system, which depends on exteremly precise timing synchronization between a satellite in orbit and the unit on the ground. It turns out that the two relativistic time-dilation effects have to be taken into account for the system to work at all. Who'd have thunk this in 1915?
Moreover, progress is usually incremental. No single discovery will "cure HIV" or give us infinite energy. New physics beyond the standard model might have technological applications in 80 years. Does that mean we shouldn't discover it today?
'nuff said
Indeed the recent patent rampage is mostly due to the court of appeals making everything patentable. What I have in minds are cases where there are two patents for a better break pedal and then a patent for a break pedal with both features, not examples for new applications for old techniques.
You may also want to read this about a case currently pending before the USSC (which will hopefully reverse). Essentially the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that for an invention to be "obvious" someone had to have said that it is possible. This leads to the perverse situation where if an extension is so easy that no-one bothered to point it out, it counts as "non-obvious", while if someone did write to say "x could probably be done" then doing x becomes obvious.
To make your points for you, I'll take a closer look at the case of NTP. In principle, they are fulfulling an important economic function: buying obscure patents and filing infringement lawsuits based on them make them money, but also makes money for the inventors from whom the patents were bought (who probably can't afford to sue RIM!). Also, there's strength in numbers -- and it's possible that NTP bought patents from several inventors, who probably won't have filed suit together otherwise.
The reason this feels wrong to you (and me) is that it's likely that NTP paid the inventors much less that what they are about to make from the lawsuit. This says nothing about NTP (who are simply trying to profit from the system as much as possible), but tell us a lot about the system. What this tell us is that the most important ingredient in the lawsuit was provided by NTP, or in other words, that you can lawyering $100m out of a patent is easier than developing a product worth $100m from it. In my opinion this comes from two deplorable problems in the USA:
I have no sympathy for anyone who files bogus lawsuits, but not every lawsuit is bogus. And just because you are right, doesn't mean you'll win. Especially if you are a small investor suing a big company. They can hire top-notch lawyers, jury-selection advisors and expert witnesses. At the end the case will be decided by a jury of random people who have no idea about science, "obviousness" or engineering, and after the trial they can drag the appeals for years and years. Note that they can do all that independently of they merits of their case. I hate the US legal landscape, but for now it is the way it is, and as long as patent litigation is really expensive, small inventors will need seriuos financing to protect their patents.
I think you miss a level of complexity in economics here. Patents exist not to protect inventors, but to give them a monetary incentive to innovate: we (the people) promise them a limited monopoly in return for a disclosure of their invention. I say nothing about the merits of the patents in the instant lawsuit since I haven't read them.
Now there are different ways a patent-holding inventor can make money off his monopoly. Remeber -- the inventor is good at inventing things, but not necessarily at the business end of things, at marketing, or at using patent law to protect the monopoly he's supposed to have. Therefore, one way for the inventor to make money from his monopoly without being a businessman or a lawyer is to sell the rights for the invention. Along the way it's important to remember that money today is worth more than money tomorrow.
For example, a venture capitalist might buy the rights for the patent and make a product. The inventor gets money up front (before any units are sold!), and everyone is happy. The risk was shared (the inventor took the risk that the research won't get far enough to be patentable; the venture capitalist that there will be no product or that it will fail), and the same is true for the income. The capitalist moved moeny from the future to the present for the inventor, and this is also worth something. You should compare both the risk assumption and the financing issues of this scenario with the one where the inventor goes to the bank, gets a loan, and tries to develop and market the product himself.
Elsewhere, someone else is selling a product which infringes on the patents held by our inventor. He has no way of profiting from his past work on the invention unless he can effectuate the monopoly we promised him by suing the patent infringers. However, our inventor is not a lawyer. As in the case above, he probably doesn't have the capital to invest in a lawsuit. So one way for him to make money off his investment is to sell the patent to the lawyer. This way he gets the money up front, while the lawyer agrees to pay for the legal costs and takes the risk that the lawsuit will fail. That's no different from the case above.
Think of the transaction as follows: you want a lawyer to defend your patent, but you don't have the cash to pay the lawyer. You therefore pay the lawyer with the rights to the patent itself. Of course you expect the patent to be worth more than the laywer's fees, so the lawyer has to pay you back up front for the difference. Again compare this with the scenario where the inventor takes a loan to pay the lawyer. What happens if the lawsuit fails?
Symantec's "NProtect" is a service similar to the recycle bin: when you delete a file, it is moved to a special directory and its metadata is preserved. This allows for easy undelete. As with any internal state of a program, users mucking about the special directory could cause problems (e.g. what should you do if the users deletes a file from the NProtect directory?). This has nothing to do with "root" privileges.
That's a good point. I don't know where you're from, but in Israel there are at least 3 or 4 different broadband options. If there's only one option where you are then certainly they should be regulated (both price-wise and offering-wise).
I think you miss my point -- the question is not what their costs are, but what the prices are -- and this mostly depends on what the customers will pay for. It's true that opening a port doesn't cost them anything (assuming they charge for bandwidth some other way), but this doesn't mean they can't decide you have to pay for it. And if you don't like it you can decide to switch ISPs. That's how the market works.
Which is why I said that this would be silly for technical reasons -- the assignments of ports to services can easily be changed, and certainly having an agreed-upon assignment simplifies routing and bandwidth allocation. But this shouldn't prevent any individual ISP from trying to do it and see if they make more or less money as a result.
Exactly. It's not like everyone has a constitutional right to unlimited-bandwidth free internet access.
Moreover, there's nothing wrong with charging more for premium service. You want faster internet service -- pay more. In fact, why not make it like cable? Group TCP channels into packages and serve them separately. Put HTTP,HTTPS,SMTP,POP3,IMAP,TELNET,SSH etc in the "basic package". But you pay extra for the ports used by Skype, IRC, or BitTorrent. For technical reasons, this would be a bad move, but if the ISPs want to try it -- let them.
Call me an old-fashioned nit-picker, but I still think that for people who will need to write serious programs, writing 20-line programs in C is the right way to learn basic programming skills. User-interface design etc can wait until people understand how to interate over a table, how to do arithmetic, and most importantly how to convert ideas about solutions to computer code. I've seen CS students who were started on OOP in Java (or C++). Of course the Profs found OOP cool and important, but this meant the students had to deal with software design issues (which is what OOP is all about) before they understood how to write a function that accomplished something. Once you've learned how to program (in C, Fortran, or LOGO for that matter), you can start thinking about user-interface issues, program design issues, efficiency of algorithms, etc. But the bottom-up approach to learning how to programming works better than the top-down style.
\end{rant}With this Google is continuing to move in the all-the-info-you-need-in-one-place direction, also known as a web portal. They are doing it in their cool and effective ways, but that's where they seem to be going.
If this were 1985, we would all be talking about how IBM has decided to publish the specifications for their IBM-PC and IBM-XT machines (down to the motherboard wiring diagrams and the BIOS listing), which are based on off-the-shelf components. This while other kinds of personal computers (e.g. the Apple Macintosh that was introduced last year [1984]) are closed-hardware and can only be bought from specific vendors. The popularity of cheap IBM-PC clones is helping the sales of IBM's machines and making them the de-facto standard, despite the technical superiority of the competition from Apple.
To the people of the UK -- be afraid. In fact, be very afraid:
In other words it is the legal scheme (IP) and not the ideas, creativity or innovation which what lies at the heart of Britain's success. an environment for innovation usually means an environment rewarding past innovation with infinite monopoly reducing the motivation for future innovation (consider US copyright law).
This sentence is usually a sign that the public, the largest stakeholder in the business, is about to be excluded.
While I respet Linus's views, I don't think he's licensed to give legal opinion on copyright law in any jurdisdiction. Of course since he's the copyright holder for much of the Linux kernel, he has the right to interpret the GPL as it applies to Linux. However, this does not mean that GNU software from the FSF should be treated the same. If anything, since the FSF are the authors of the GPL you'd expect the reverse.
Easy solution: why does every *****ing appliance need to tell me what time it is?
I think's things are not so simple. While this is a rootkit, "infected" systems don't display the normal symptoms: no (appreciable) slowdown, no annoying popups, no self-propagation or open ports. Moreover, the "phone home" behaviour is very limited. Since the average user didn't notice, there were no complaints. Do you expect the AV companies to buy and test music CDs for malware before this broke out (not in hindsight!). Since it took a Windows guru to figure out something was wrong, I'd expect these companies to take a few days. Several (including Microsoft, in fact) already classify it as malware and look for it.
A more serious problem for AV makers is that removing this rootkit is a very delicate business, so they can't offer a solution before they ensure it actually works. Also, since this stuff comes from music CDs people might listen to again, it's not clear what the right thing to do is. What happens if the (cluelss) user inserts the CD again? What is a (better informed) user wants to play the CD despite the rootkit?
Not quite true -- Sony is "distributing" the software as defined by the GPL. Moreover, the work was preformed by First4Internet as agents of Sony. These both seem to indicate they are liable. On the DMCA side, they are "trafficking" in an anti-circumvention device (assuming the software does actually activate the codepath in question).
I think there's a difference between regulating people's behaviour and regulating the infrastructure. If it's illegal to sell porn in the street, why shouldn't it be illegal to see on the internet? Conversely, since it's legal to publish anonymous pamphlets on the street (important founding-era right implicit in the First Amendment), it should be legal to publish anonymous websites. It's for this reason that people who own printing presses ("infrastructure") cannot be forced to keep a copy of everything they print, or to provide a sample page to the government for future comparison (this was the case in the USSR -- even for typewriters!).
Indeed the government has always wanted to control the infrastrcture, but it won't necessarily happen. What they mostly want is to ban things that are already illegal -- and we should give them that to keep the infrastructure safe. We can late ask why consensual porn is illegal at all -- but not with the republicrats in power.
I think they decided it's easier to present this as a debate over an "unfunded mandate" than over "invasion of privacy". It's probably also easier to make a consitutional argument this way.
Some examples: they can try forcing adult-oriented websites into .xxx 'because of all the poor children'. They can also charge a fee for TLD (.com, .biz, .net) domains, in effect levying a world-wide internet tax not unlike the world-wide oil tax we pay to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela etc). They can decide who gets to control the domain .iq rather than letting the new Iraqi government do it. They can ensure that internet protocols and standards are selected to benefit US business interest. They can ensure that domain-name disputes are resolved in a big-business-friendly atmosphere where you don't have a right to your own name even if you paid for the domain, assuming some compancy has decided to sell a product with a similar name, or if someone with the same name happens to be a movie star.
The situation is more complicated than that. You can't have conflicting IP addresses without having completely separate networks, which is impractical (everyone will want to be able to connect to sites under the American Hegemony), and you don't want to have conflicting DNS records either. Indeed the rest of the world can set up their own DNS servers for a new TLD (say '.earth'), but they can't force anyone to contact the root server for that domain. The result will be chaos.
Now, the US stands to benefit from controlling a global resource (just like oil-producing countries benefit from controlling the oil supply). The article seems to hint that it's wrong. You can hardly fault a government from wielding its power to make the world better for its citizens (isn't that's their function, after all?). Of course the US government doens't always seem to have the benefit of all its citizens in mind most of the time, but that's a separate issue. If we don't like what the US government does, we can ask our governments to negotiate with them to change their behaviour. And naturally we will have to offer them something in return -- TANSTAAFL.
oops.. should be confuse "OpenDocument" with "OpenOffice".
For details and analysis you can't beat Groklaw's coverage, including notes by two bloggers who attended the meeting.
Also note that the hearing was convened by a senator who seems to confuse "OpenDocument" and "OpenOffice" and "open standards" with "open source software".