The Internet is a private system owned by private companies. Participation in the system is completely voluntary. There is absolutely no reason for the the government to get involved in it. If you don't like the rules given by the ISPs which own the system, then don't connect to the Internet. It's as simple as that.
If the ISPs want to get together and form a confederation of sorts, that's a completely different story. But for now, unless we're talking about a physical crime which merely uses the Internet as a medium (say, mail fraud), the government should mind its own business.
FreeBSD does this. HP/UX does this. I always assumed Linux did it too, it just wasn't turned on by default. I guess I was wrong.
As a side note, my first job out of college was to analyze core dumps from HP/UX. There's an awful lot you can learn from these things. Not just stack traces, the entire memory of the system is contained in the dump. It's time consuming, but a large portion of the time you can find out *exactly* what went wrong.
I've been to bitpass, but there isn't $3 worth of content out there accepting bitpass. I don't normally buy comic books, so whether it's $4 or 35 cents, it's not worth it to me. About the only thing I can think of that I'd personally be eager to pay $0.25 for is answers to questions. Like today I wanted to know how to self-sign a java applet. If my google search hadn't come up with any results within a few minutes of searching, I would have gladly paid someone $0.25 for the answer.
I do have 3 cents in my e-gold account though, just waiting for some content worth spending it on:).
Unfortunately, that would violate the agreements they signed to be allowed to accept credit cards. Otherwise I bet they'd already be doing it. Paypal is big, but not big enough to give the finger to Visa and Mastercard - yet.
The article itself lists seven micropayment companies. I compare the current situation to paid wifi. There are many companies selling access, but chances are you'll need to get accounts with a few to get access to all the places you want and you need to check what is covered by who. Not hassle free at all.
I suspect what's going to happen is that as soon as one of the micropayment companies starts to get a little too big, one of the credit card companies is going to sweep in and either buy it or destroy it. Already you can make one-time payments with a limit with a unique credit card number. The only two differences between that and a micropayment is that the credit card companies charge exorbitant fees on small transactions, that the credit card companies require name and address information in order to complete a transaction, and that the credit card companies don't guarantee payments in the case of a chargeback. All three of those problems could be solved simply by a policy change by the credit card company.
Actually, they'd be a perfect example of why micropayment systems DON'T work.
Considering that they are a micropayment system, and that they DO work, I think you're wrong there.
The reason the telephone charging system works is that people DON'T stop and think about it.
There's no reason an internet micropayment system couldn't work the exact same way. In fact, AOL used to work that way. It succeeded for a long time, and then the internet came along and undercut it with free content. But not all content is available for free. Music, movies, and highly specialized content (stock reports, collocated government data, etc) are still pay, and would work fine in a pay-per-use system. The only problem is that there's no universal infrastructure for such payments. Sure, you can get movies online through one service, and music online through another, and stock reports through yet another, but this requires longer-term commitments than just buying one song from here, another from there, one movie here, and one stock report there.
how many of you, honestly, actually think about what a call is costing, until you've been talking and suddenly say "oh crap, it's been two hours! This is gonna cost me a fortune!"
Well, as I said, I do since I don't have a long distance carrier on my home telephone. So it's 10-10-whatever, and I know what the cost is ahead of time for that service. But I admit I'm probably in a very small minority in that sense.
For a web-based micropayment system to work, it would have to follow the TelCo model - you hand the website in question your credit card, and then you don't hear a word about the cost of the services again except once a month in the mail. And this is, for reasons too obvious to bother typing out, NOT a good idea for internet-based systems. And that's why Internet micropayments don't really work.
No, for a web-based micropayment system to work, it would have to follow the TelCo model - you hand one company in question your credit card, and then you can use hundreds of others without hearing a aword about the cost of the services again except once a month in the mail. And thhat WOULD be a good idea for internete-based systems. It's just that no one with enough capital to actually pull it off has stepped up to the plate yet. It would pretty much have to be a credit card company. Only they have the reach to be able to pull something like this off.
The whole point of micropayments is supposed to be to avoid registration hassle. If all you had to do was put in your credit card number, and you could be guaranteed that you would only be charged a certain amount on that account, it wouldn't be too much of a hassle, would it? A properly implemented micropayment system would work even better than that. You'd only have to sign up once, and after that you'd only have to click a button to authorize a payment.
Sure, it's not going to work for content that is already free, because free is better than paying. But other sites which currently don't exist at all or are tedious to use would benefit greatly. For instance, I bet a lot of porn sites which currently force you to go through a long registration hassle so they can collect their $3/month fee would benefit from the system, especially if it could guarantee anonymity.
phone calls, local and long distance, often are pay per unit of some sort.
Long distance especially is an excellent example of a micropayment system, too. You could theoretically use a different long distance provider for every single long distance call you make. Sure, most people don't do that, but it is possible. I myself don't have any particular long distance provider set up on my home telephone line, but just use a 10-10-whatever whenever I for some reason am not using my cell phone for a long distance call.
but with micropayments, maybe it could be. DSL costs what, $50/month? Web hosting costs what, $5/month? Most computers could easily host 10 websites a month, and with micropayments the people paying for the hosting wouldn't have to commit to long term contracts. Just pay by the day, and have an automated script move you over if your provider goes down.
People mostly just want to do email and read the web. We should be providing them software that does this with absolute security.
We used to have it. It was called AOL. Then they added a bunch of fancy TCP/IP shit to it. That damn internet.
People want to do more than just email and web. They want to be able to download arbitrary software from random sites they come across. That's the whole point of the internet, in a sense, and when you have that you simply can't protect against viruses.
It's like the spread of any human virus, such as HIV. Windows is like the birth control pill. It doesn't protect you from viruses, and it makes absolutely no claim to protect you from viruses. You can provide users with software with "absolute security," but that isn't going to get them to use it.
What would prevent using the GPS without a warrant, and simply not crediting its use?
Hopefully internal affairs, or a whistleblower. Plus the fact that if it ever was discovered, it would jeoparize the entire case, and a guilty person could go free. Maybe not enough, but what more can you expect?
OTOH, do I want the police to have to wait to get a warrant before they can use this technology to trace, say, an actual violent criminal?
I have a hard time seeing why GPS would be necessary to track an actual violent criminal during the time it takes to get a warrant. Just monitor the person/vehicle/whatever physically while you wait for the warrant. Or if you're so sure you got the right person and can prove it, make an arrest.
On the other hand, what IS the difference between using a GPS device to track someone and just following him around?
There are some differences, but none of them should matter. If the police want to follow someone around for an extended period of time, they should have to obtain a warrant first.
Now constitutionally it's a completely different story. Is following someone around a search? Is using a GPS device to track someone a search? I'd say yes in both instances. Using the dictionary.com definition (which admittedly pays no attention to the definition at the time of the framing of the Constitution) we read "To make a thorough examination of; look over carefully in order to find something; explore." Now, is either an unreasonable search? I'd say yes in both instances. Apparently the court disagrees with regard to following someone around for an extended period of time.
Something that accounts for vehicle weight and miles driven. Those two together determine much of the road wear/tear.
True, but it probably isn't a very linear relationship. It seems to me the difference between a car and a truck would be a lot greater than the difference between a Cadallac and an Insight. And then there are a lot of costs which aren't affected at all by vehicle weight or miles driven. But then again, it seems only fair that these costs be divvyed up based on need/usage.
How about Oregon just taxes everyone the same and let gas usage determine fees - nahh that's too easy.
It's also filled with problems. First of all, I think you have to charge the trucks more, if for no other reason than that the roads are more important to them. Now, maybe it isn't a problem where you live, but a lot of places can't raise their gas prices too much because of competition from other states. People will just buy their gas out of state and then use it in the state. Also, what about people who travel mainly on private toll roads? Is it really fair that they should have to pay twice? And finally, as Oregon has become one of the first states to address, there are an increasing number of hybrid or electric vehicles starting to use the roadways. Now presumably someone calculated the average number of miles a hybrid vehicle drove, multiplied it by the part of the gas tax designated to be based on miles travelled and all the other factors like typical mpgs, and arrived at the figure of $30/year.
I think the system is fairly well constructed the way it is. One enhancement I just thought of is that the government should subsidize companies who maintain private toll roads based on the amount of traffic they take off the public road system. I know here in New Jersey the tolls for trucks to use the turnpike are enormous, but we should be encouraging trucks to use that road which was specifically built to accomodate them rather than the free and congested Route 1 which runs directly next to and parallel to that road.
You are right in that the weight of the vehicle doesn't enter into it, however, when the law was enacted, and even to this day, the hybrids tend to be lighter vehicles. Not necessarily because they're hybrids, but because they tend to be "showcase" vehicles of low mileage.
The Honda Civic Hybrid weighs more than my 98 Civic non-hybrid. So if you're going to lower the tax for them, you better lower it for me too.
The solution is not to rob from the rich and give to the poor, the solution is to avoid shitting on the poor in the first place, and let them make their own way.
How is it "shitting on the poor" to ask that they pay for the roads they use just like everyone else? The gas taxes charge people for using the roadways in the most practical way currently possible. If you think that's unfair because it hurts the poor too much, then let them write it off and get a tax credit somewhere else, or solve the problem some other way.
However, if you worked at a dealership/car manufacturer and made copies of the info required to do this (or aquired a set of the nice plastic outlines they use to make the keys) and happened to have a keymaker, we're talking maybe 5 minutes from reading VIN to having a key.
Or you could just steal a key from the company's keyring during your lunch break, make a copy, and then take the car at night.
Either way, you're very likely to get caught. The second method is a lot less work, though.
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If I clock in at 7:31 I am late, no questions asked. If I am late 3 times in one quarter I get a verbal warning.
Well, at least if you're running one minute late you can make the best of it and go out for breakfast, coming in 3 or 4 hours late.
My name address and phone number have been available in the Whois database since Jan 1997.
You updated it? My address from April 1997 and jfax voice mail number is listed in thhe whois database.
The Internet is a private system owned by private companies. Participation in the system is completely voluntary. There is absolutely no reason for the the government to get involved in it. If you don't like the rules given by the ISPs which own the system, then don't connect to the Internet. It's as simple as that.
If the ISPs want to get together and form a confederation of sorts, that's a completely different story. But for now, unless we're talking about a physical crime which merely uses the Internet as a medium (say, mail fraud), the government should mind its own business.
OTOH, you could simply deny all encrypted mail which wasn't signed, or was signed by a spammer.
If Nader runs again I'll probably vote for him again. Why?
IRIX will core dump to the swap partition.
FreeBSD does this. HP/UX does this. I always assumed Linux did it too, it just wasn't turned on by default. I guess I was wrong.
As a side note, my first job out of college was to analyze core dumps from HP/UX. There's an awful lot you can learn from these things. Not just stack traces, the entire memory of the system is contained in the dump. It's time consuming, but a large portion of the time you can find out *exactly* what went wrong.
What's the reason that just about every other unix does write to the HD after panic?
I've been to bitpass, but there isn't $3 worth of content out there accepting bitpass. I don't normally buy comic books, so whether it's $4 or 35 cents, it's not worth it to me. About the only thing I can think of that I'd personally be eager to pay $0.25 for is answers to questions. Like today I wanted to know how to self-sign a java applet. If my google search hadn't come up with any results within a few minutes of searching, I would have gladly paid someone $0.25 for the answer.
I do have 3 cents in my e-gold account though, just waiting for some content worth spending it on :).
So micropayments will not fail, because there are a lot of people out there with monopolies on content.
Expierence has shown that whenever people start trying to charge for content that people will find other sources which are free.
A billion dollar recording industry and 20 billion dollar movie rental industry has shown thhat you're wrong.
Unfortunately, that would violate the agreements they signed to be allowed to accept credit cards. Otherwise I bet they'd already be doing it. Paypal is big, but not big enough to give the finger to Visa and Mastercard - yet.
The article itself lists seven micropayment companies. I compare the current situation to paid wifi. There are many companies selling access, but chances are you'll need to get accounts with a few to get access to all the places you want and you need to check what is covered by who. Not hassle free at all.
I suspect what's going to happen is that as soon as one of the micropayment companies starts to get a little too big, one of the credit card companies is going to sweep in and either buy it or destroy it. Already you can make one-time payments with a limit with a unique credit card number. The only two differences between that and a micropayment is that the credit card companies charge exorbitant fees on small transactions, that the credit card companies require name and address information in order to complete a transaction, and that the credit card companies don't guarantee payments in the case of a chargeback. All three of those problems could be solved simply by a policy change by the credit card company.
Still, do any of those 10-10-whatever numbers let you buy simply 1 minute of long distance from them per month for less than 50 cents?
Yes. For example, 10-10-321 charges 18 cents a minute, and to quote their website:
18 cents is under 25, and qualifies as a micropayment, I'd say.
Actually, they'd be a perfect example of why micropayment systems DON'T work.
Considering that they are a micropayment system, and that they DO work, I think you're wrong there.
The reason the telephone charging system works is that people DON'T stop and think about it.
There's no reason an internet micropayment system couldn't work the exact same way. In fact, AOL used to work that way. It succeeded for a long time, and then the internet came along and undercut it with free content. But not all content is available for free. Music, movies, and highly specialized content (stock reports, collocated government data, etc) are still pay, and would work fine in a pay-per-use system. The only problem is that there's no universal infrastructure for such payments. Sure, you can get movies online through one service, and music online through another, and stock reports through yet another, but this requires longer-term commitments than just buying one song from here, another from there, one movie here, and one stock report there.
how many of you, honestly, actually think about what a call is costing, until you've been talking and suddenly say "oh crap, it's been two hours! This is gonna cost me a fortune!"
Well, as I said, I do since I don't have a long distance carrier on my home telephone. So it's 10-10-whatever, and I know what the cost is ahead of time for that service. But I admit I'm probably in a very small minority in that sense.
For a web-based micropayment system to work, it would have to follow the TelCo model - you hand the website in question your credit card, and then you don't hear a word about the cost of the services again except once a month in the mail. And this is, for reasons too obvious to bother typing out, NOT a good idea for internet-based systems. And that's why Internet micropayments don't really work.
No, for a web-based micropayment system to work, it would have to follow the TelCo model - you hand one company in question your credit card, and then you can use hundreds of others without hearing a aword about the cost of the services again except once a month in the mail. And thhat WOULD be a good idea for internete-based systems. It's just that no one with enough capital to actually pull it off has stepped up to the plate yet. It would pretty much have to be a credit card company. Only they have the reach to be able to pull something like this off.
Micropayments are even more of a hassle.
The whole point of micropayments is supposed to be to avoid registration hassle. If all you had to do was put in your credit card number, and you could be guaranteed that you would only be charged a certain amount on that account, it wouldn't be too much of a hassle, would it? A properly implemented micropayment system would work even better than that. You'd only have to sign up once, and after that you'd only have to click a button to authorize a payment.
Sure, it's not going to work for content that is already free, because free is better than paying. But other sites which currently don't exist at all or are tedious to use would benefit greatly. For instance, I bet a lot of porn sites which currently force you to go through a long registration hassle so they can collect their $3/month fee would benefit from the system, especially if it could guarantee anonymity.
phone calls, local and long distance, often are pay per unit of some sort.
Long distance especially is an excellent example of a micropayment system, too. You could theoretically use a different long distance provider for every single long distance call you make. Sure, most people don't do that, but it is possible. I myself don't have any particular long distance provider set up on my home telephone line, but just use a 10-10-whatever whenever I for some reason am not using my cell phone for a long distance call.
but with micropayments, maybe it could be. DSL costs what, $50/month? Web hosting costs what, $5/month? Most computers could easily host 10 websites a month, and with micropayments the people paying for the hosting wouldn't have to commit to long term contracts. Just pay by the day, and have an automated script move you over if your provider goes down.
People mostly just want to do email and read the web. We should be providing them software that does this with absolute security.
We used to have it. It was called AOL. Then they added a bunch of fancy TCP/IP shit to it. That damn internet.
People want to do more than just email and web. They want to be able to download arbitrary software from random sites they come across. That's the whole point of the internet, in a sense, and when you have that you simply can't protect against viruses.
It's like the spread of any human virus, such as HIV. Windows is like the birth control pill. It doesn't protect you from viruses, and it makes absolutely no claim to protect you from viruses. You can provide users with software with "absolute security," but that isn't going to get them to use it.
What would prevent using the GPS without a warrant, and simply not crediting its use?
Hopefully internal affairs, or a whistleblower. Plus the fact that if it ever was discovered, it would jeoparize the entire case, and a guilty person could go free. Maybe not enough, but what more can you expect?
OTOH, do I want the police to have to wait to get a warrant before they can use this technology to trace, say, an actual violent criminal?
I have a hard time seeing why GPS would be necessary to track an actual violent criminal during the time it takes to get a warrant. Just monitor the person/vehicle/whatever physically while you wait for the warrant. Or if you're so sure you got the right person and can prove it, make an arrest.
On the other hand, what IS the difference between using a GPS device to track someone and just following him around?
There are some differences, but none of them should matter. If the police want to follow someone around for an extended period of time, they should have to obtain a warrant first.
Now constitutionally it's a completely different story. Is following someone around a search? Is using a GPS device to track someone a search? I'd say yes in both instances. Using the dictionary.com definition (which admittedly pays no attention to the definition at the time of the framing of the Constitution) we read "To make a thorough examination of; look over carefully in order to find something; explore." Now, is either an unreasonable search? I'd say yes in both instances. Apparently the court disagrees with regard to following someone around for an extended period of time.
Something that accounts for vehicle weight and miles driven. Those two together determine much of the road wear/tear.
True, but it probably isn't a very linear relationship. It seems to me the difference between a car and a truck would be a lot greater than the difference between a Cadallac and an Insight. And then there are a lot of costs which aren't affected at all by vehicle weight or miles driven. But then again, it seems only fair that these costs be divvyed up based on need/usage.
How about Oregon just taxes everyone the same and let gas usage determine fees - nahh that's too easy.
It's also filled with problems. First of all, I think you have to charge the trucks more, if for no other reason than that the roads are more important to them. Now, maybe it isn't a problem where you live, but a lot of places can't raise their gas prices too much because of competition from other states. People will just buy their gas out of state and then use it in the state. Also, what about people who travel mainly on private toll roads? Is it really fair that they should have to pay twice? And finally, as Oregon has become one of the first states to address, there are an increasing number of hybrid or electric vehicles starting to use the roadways. Now presumably someone calculated the average number of miles a hybrid vehicle drove, multiplied it by the part of the gas tax designated to be based on miles travelled and all the other factors like typical mpgs, and arrived at the figure of $30/year.
I think the system is fairly well constructed the way it is. One enhancement I just thought of is that the government should subsidize companies who maintain private toll roads based on the amount of traffic they take off the public road system. I know here in New Jersey the tolls for trucks to use the turnpike are enormous, but we should be encouraging trucks to use that road which was specifically built to accomodate them rather than the free and congested Route 1 which runs directly next to and parallel to that road.
You are right in that the weight of the vehicle doesn't enter into it, however, when the law was enacted, and even to this day, the hybrids tend to be lighter vehicles. Not necessarily because they're hybrids, but because they tend to be "showcase" vehicles of low mileage.
The Honda Civic Hybrid weighs more than my 98 Civic non-hybrid. So if you're going to lower the tax for them, you better lower it for me too.
That's a fantastically socialist idea!
It was made tongue-in-cheek.
The solution is not to rob from the rich and give to the poor, the solution is to avoid shitting on the poor in the first place, and let them make their own way.
How is it "shitting on the poor" to ask that they pay for the roads they use just like everyone else? The gas taxes charge people for using the roadways in the most practical way currently possible. If you think that's unfair because it hurts the poor too much, then let them write it off and get a tax credit somewhere else, or solve the problem some other way.
it obviously isn't worth $65 billion.
However, if you worked at a dealership/car manufacturer and made copies of the info required to do this (or aquired a set of the nice plastic outlines they use to make the keys) and happened to have a keymaker, we're talking maybe 5 minutes from reading VIN to having a key.
Or you could just steal a key from the company's keyring during your lunch break, make a copy, and then take the car at night.
Either way, you're very likely to get caught. The second method is a lot less work, though.