The big firms, and Sonnenschein as one, charge upwards of $600 an hour for their services, so this amounts to between one and two weeks of billable hours. For what they did, which really wasn't much, that sounds about right.
Seriously. You can do as much or as little PvP as you want. But even in high security space (hi-sec) you can still get your pasty ass ganked if you aren't careful. Hulkageddon is likely to occur with some regularity, and sticking your nose in a null-sec and even some lo-sec systems is just asking to get yourself jumped.
Granted, the community here is a lot smaller--probably around 150,000 active players as opposed to the millions sported by WoW--but they're pretty hardcore about the whole thing.
This is the President's job folks: to defend the laws passed by Congress and signed into law by a sitting President. It's implied by the Oath of Office. Presidents ignoring laws they don't like by refusing to defend them in court--which is what the DOJ is doing here--would be a pretty flagrant violation of the obligations of the executive.
This is not the first time and will not be the last that a President, through his officers, defends a law he isn't thrilled about. Just because DOJ lawyers show up with a brief in support of a law does not mean that the President--or even the DOJ lawyers, for crying out loud--believe either 1) that the law is worth defending, or 2) the validity of their own arguments. They're just doing their jobs.
See, I think this is on slashdot for two reasons:
1) Slashdot hates DRM and will publish just about any piece criticizing it, regardless of its bearing to reality.
2) Slashdot likes Cory Doctorow because he's a poster boy for item 1.
Being passionate is not the same thing as knowing what the hell you're talking about. If he were running a marketing seminar, I wouldn't have any objections. But he tends to wax philosophical on legal and historical subjects about which he has no real knowledge.
He's a political activist and passable young-adult sci-fi author who contributes to a geek blog. He's an expert on nothing. He has not formally studied anything. He mouths off about copyright all the time, but his grasp of law and legal history is laughable. Yet he consistently makes headlines for saying asinine things about subjects about which he has no expertise.
How do I get people to pay me for saying stupid things about fashionable subjects? What he does is way more glamorous and takes way less actual, you know, effort than what I do.
I think there's a basic unanswered question here that will determine which of the above types of solutions you aim for.
If you're trying to make the actual server room a more pleasant place to be, you really do need to look into additional A/C capacity, and that's just not gonna be cheap.
But if all you're trying to do is keep your servers from overheating, there may be other ways of doing this. It could involve dedicated A/C units, but needn't necessarily. Non-A/C options include installing fans (not Wal-Mart box fans, something more permanent; talk to a local HVAC contractor), opening windows, installing specialized vent ducts, etc.
Either way, you're probably going to want to get HVAC in there. Proper cooling for computers, especially servers, is something like proper insurance for driving a car: the question isn't whether you can afford it, it's whether you can afford not to have it.
The movie was brilliant overall, and Ledger's performance was particularly noteworthy. But the editing? Yes, we know Batman gets around and appears/disappears suddenly and without warning. But there are ways of communicating that while still enabling the audience to know what the hell is going on. Sometimes I was so confused that I wasn't sure whether or not I was supposed to be confused. Instead of "Oh, I wonder what happened there, they must explain it soon," a lot of the time the experience was more like "Okay, what just happened?"
If the FCC does move forward with this, Comcast is going to sue. Obviously.
What's likely to make this disappointing is that if the case does get to court, it is almost certainly not going to be decided on substantive grounds. The real question is one of administrative law: does the FCC's "statement of principles" constitute a legally enforcable document? The FCC can't point to a specific statutory provision that gives it what it wants. And as it classified cable modem service as an "information service"--a classification which was upheld in 2005 in the Brand-X case--Comcast is exempt from all of the Title II provisions in the Telecommunications Act, including the common carrier requirements. The FCC is going to have to rely upon its "ancillary authority" under Title I, and the question to be resolved is not whether net neutrality is a good idea but whether the FCC has the authority to do this under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.
Needless to say, unless you're an administrative law geek like me, this isn't going to be a very interesting case. But the FCC has largely trounced the cable industry in almost every conflict in the past ten years, so I'm optimistic.
Yeah, they can do that. I hate to put it this way, but the best answer is "They just can." Agencies do this all the time. Adjudications of this sort are entirely retroactive, and there doesn't seem to be any legal problem with this. Federal agencies like the FCC and SEC have broad authority to promulgate regulations in the public interest, and the fact that industry comes up with new and clever ways of acting against the public interest does not mean that agencies have to have a rule on the books to whack evildoers. They just have to show that their actions are not arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to statute, and that they are in the public interest. As you might imagine, this isn't particularly difficult.
Article I, section 9 of the Constitution says that Congress shall pass no ex post facto laws, but this has been pretty narrowly construed to prohibit the imposition of criminal liability for acts committed in the past. Civil liability, such as the FCC would impose here, is largely permissible.
Comcast hasn't violated any federal statute per se, but the FCC enforces its regulations--and its interpretation of those regulations--just as vigorously. Your point would be better directed at the fact that the FCC hasn't done a rulemaking on net neutrality.
This, however, doesn't mean the FCC can't do this. Federal agencies frequently make rules through enforcement actions like this. The SEC does it all the time, and the FCC certainly has the ability to do so. Telling federal agencies they can't do something is largely a loser in court.
This is especially true in this case, because judges are all cable customers, and cable customers almost all hate their providers. Not the best legal reasoning, but it's served the FCC very well for the past decade. Almost every time the cable industry challenges an FCC it actions, it loses.
This will have approximately zero benefits. As many users have already pointed out, such a system is still vulnerable to interception, and if you think the NSA will have trouble cracking commercial encryption, you're just wrong.
But more to the point, whether or not traffic is encrypted really doesn't matter. ISPs are perfectly capable of filtering and suppressing traffic without any idea of the content of the packets in question simply by analyzing the pattern of traffic.
For example, a BitTorrent connection can be pretty easily recognized by looking for activity on certain ports. But even if you switch ports, the large number of incoming/outgoing connections is a dead giveaway. You don't need to know exactly what's in the TCP packet to know that the IP traffic looks like a BitTorrent (or VoIP, or streaming video, or what have you) connection. And you can't encrypt IP headers or your ISP won't be able to route the traffic at all.
There really isn't a technical solution for this as far as I can tell. It's whack-a-mole at best. The real solution is regulation, but exactly what kind of regulation is still very much up in the air.
Say what you like about the people who actually operate the armed forces, they aren't stupid. They know what they have to do to win. Whether or not the civilian political classes will let them is a different issue, and whether or not they should is another one still. But if you really do want to suppress an insurgency, this is kind of what you have to do.
Sure, enhancing the penalties for such behavior is a bad idea. But this is unlikely to make a huge difference. Even though the bill purports to direct the Department of Justice to bring enforcement actions against small-time infringers... so does current law. And one of the few things Congress cannot do is tell the Executive how and where to prosecute crimes. That's a purely executive power, and I'm betting that no administration is going to have much to do with this.
Why? Well, in general, cause it's kinda stupid. More specifically, the Department of Justice doesn't think this kind of thing is sexy. It's much more fun to go after corrupt politicians (Gov. Spitzer, anyone?), terrorists, financial criminals (Enron types, etc.), Columbian drug lords (Russians too), and interstate child prostitution rings (there really are such things, and the feds don't like 'em)--the few types of crime that regularly receive significant federal attention these days--than after IP infringement. How many IP cases can you think of that have been brought by the government since the DMCA was enacted? Very few, and those were directed at large-scale counterfeiting operations, the kind that manufacture the bogus DVDs you buy on street corners. I've no problem shutting them down, and I don't think many others would either. But enforcement actions against private citizens? Yeah, none.
So Congress can take a tough stance if it wants to. It still has to get the Executive to cooperate, and I just don't see that happening.
The choice to fly to the Middle East rather than risk detection by federal authorities has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the lawyer believes PGP--or any other encryption--is capable of thwarting government attempts to eavesdrop. Why? Because encryption doesn't do you any good if a court orders you to turn over the key, as it's likely to do if criminal charges are ever filed.
The lawyers aren't nearly as concerned with having the content of their conversations intercepted as they are with having the fact of their conversations intercepted. In normal telecommunications, the police need no judicial authorization to record the fact of a telephone call, and they can use such a pattern to establish the likelihood of a conspiracy, which will enable them to get judicial authorization for a proper wiretap. Similarly, if authorities can establish the likelihood of a conspiracy using a pattern of emails, even encrypted ones, they can get a court order for the encryption key.
This isn't a lawyer stunt to bill more hours or take vacations in Dubai. It's the entirely rational legal instinct to avoid a paper trail where it has the possibility of coming back to haunt you.
First of all, this ruling was handed down two months ago, so I'm not sure why it's being discussed now.
But second, the Fifth Circuit struck down exactly the same part of the same law in 2000. See Chavez v. Arte Publico Press, 204 F.3d 601 (5th Cir. 2000). Though it hasn't made it to the Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit is the only federal appellate court to consider the issue, no court will allow Congress to abrogate state sovereign immunity under its Art. I powers. And Copyright is not a Fourteenth Amendment issue, so there's just no way to do this.
This really isn't a big deal.
Unsurprisingly enough, it doesn't seem that most people around here actually understand what they're talking about. But I've done research into telecommunications regulation, so I think I've got something to offer here.
Telecoms are businesses which exist to make money. They are not public service entities. They make money when the revenue they receive for their services is greater than the amount they spent on building their network, and when that revenue is at least as much as they could have made if they were to go into another business.
The problem that most people here don't seem to realize is that building a network, particularly to residential destinations, is expensive. I mean expensive. So expensive that most consumers are not capable of paying enough to make that service profitable without some form of subsidy. Using landlines as an example, it costs about $100/month for the telecom to provide that service. Yes, the cost is spent up front in some sense, but consider that they could have done something else with that money which would have made them that much. Essentially, unless the telecom makes $100/month from each and every residential connection, they're losing money.
Most people simply cannot afford to spend $1200 per connection to a network. With today's legacy divisions between phone and cable services, that would mean an annual bill of $2400. The few people who can afford such a price don't want to pay it.
So saying that the telecoms should just eat the cost of such a buildout really doesn't demonstrate any connection to reality. The only reason the current system works is from arcane franchise regulations. Part of the regulatory scheme allows telecoms to use commercial revenues to subsidize their residential activities. Businesses pay a lot more for their network services than individuals so. Another part allowed for monopoly franchises, guaranteeing the telecom a market and creating an incentive to reach everyone in a municipality. Exclusive franchises are no longer permitted under US law (Telecom Act of 1996 did away with them) but the fact is that networks are sufficiently expensive that a new player isn't likely to build on areas where there is an existing network, particularly with common-carrier laws in effect.
So the problem here is not a simple one, and it's not one that can be solved by spouting off one's "net neutrality" credentials. I do think some form of neutrality is desirable, but the blanket statements made here are not helpful.
As a member of the legal profession, I do a large amount of research online. My site of choice is Westlaw, produced by the largest legal publisher in the country (and thus probably the world). They have a feature on their website they call "Research Trails", which keeps a record of your navigation each time you log in. The list is fully linked, so you can access any document on the list easily. You can not only see what you looked at but see the order in which you looked at it, which helps in reconstructing thought patterns. This is a dramatically helpful feature for any research site, and they are to be commended for implementing it.
Their major competitor, LexisNexis, has a similar feature.
I know this doesn't help much for general-purpose multi-site research, but I can't say just how useful this feature is for a single site. I would recommend other site developers to create similar functionality as soon as convenient. Imagine how useful this could be for Wikipedia.
On second thought, scratch that. Sometimes I really don't want to know how I got from point A to point B on that site.
Have you even read the regulation? Because your comment doesn't suggest that you have. It does suggest that you're well versed in the language of conspiracy theory, but not the language of regulations.
There is no monitoring language in the proposed regulation. None. The "official purposes" term you quote from the regulation has to do what purposes non-REAL ID will be accepted by federal agencies, not adding more functionality to identification cards.
1) Though perhaps not on a information systems level, I would still maintain that there is a practical and legal difference between a federal database and linked state databases. Practically, a federal database would be the responsibility of a federal agency to maintain, and I don't really want to have the feds managing that kind of information. We've seen how good they are at that. The states might not be all that much better, but they're already got such databases, so why not let them just keep at it? Additionally, a database the feds can query but not control is a lot better than one which they can.
2) You can already get results from databases everywhere in the country with a single query. I know this because I've worked for insurance companies and would routinely pull DMV reports on insureds at their request for discount qualification purposes. That was 3 years ago, and even then there were only a handful of states that wouldn't pull the results directly to my screen. The rest of them had to be done by underwriters, but the results weren't any harder to get.
I still say you're being paranoid. The federal government isn't mandating anything that isn't already in place, and it isn't really mandating anything. States are free to opt out if they choose to do so.
Not sure what all the fuss is here. Has anyone actually read the proposed regulation? They aren't creating a national ID database. They're simply changing the requirements for state-issued ID that federal agencies can accept for official purposes. The new requirements would be: - full name - gender - date of birth - issue/expiration dates - unique license or ID number (not your Social Security Number) - permanent residence - signature - picture - machine-readability - counterfeit protection measures
The regulation would also require all state databases of qualifying IDs to be accessible by other state databases.
Frankly, my current drivers license has all of those things already. No one is talking about creating a federal national identification database. Such a thing is nowhere in the proposed regulation. The regulation doesn't even require the states to issue such ID cards. Congress couldn't pass such a law if it wanted to. States are entirely free to issue non-REAL ID licenses and identifications. The only drawback is that federal agencies won't accept them as official IDs. Which doesn't really matter, because they'll always accept a passport, and you can get one of those without a drivers license anyways.
Why does everyone have their panties in a bunch? Both Slashdot and BoingBoing have been going apeshit about this for weeks now, but it just looks paranoid. The proposed regulation would not enable identity tracing with any greater degree of ease than currently exists.
Actually, no, I meant "original amended". Thompson had already made one amendment, as allowed by Rule 15. He then tried to make two additional amendments without asking permission first, and the judge struck both of those from the record.
The case proceeds with the complaint as originally amended.
I'm not currently involved in litigation, but I am a law student. I'll be finished my first year in two weeks. I actually wrote my previous comment while in Civil Procedure II.
Actually, the case itself was not dismissed. The news story got the facts wrong. The judge struck the amended complaints from the record, but at this time the case is still pending on the original amended complaint. This ruling doesn't really mean anything.
The case was not dismissed. The judge simply called Thompson for failure to follow the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which only allows a complaint to be amended unilaterally once. If a party seeks to file a second amendment to their complaint, Rule 15(a) requires that that party seek the leave of the court or the consent of the adverse party, and such leave or consent must be granted "where justice requires".
Thompson is free to seek the consent of the adverse party or the leave of the court. If the case can't go forward unless the complaint be amended and the amendment required isn't too drastic, the FRCP generally require the amendment to be allowed. Thompson just forgot to ask is all. Still, the fact that he botched this uses up the judge's patience, and makes it marginally less likely that the amendment will be permitted.
I haven't read the complaint, so I don't know just how bad this is for Thompson, but his case is still pending.
Slashdot Mirror
Such a device already exists. It's called "Indianapolis." I swear, I can never get good GPS signal in that damn town.
The big firms, and Sonnenschein as one, charge upwards of $600 an hour for their services, so this amounts to between one and two weeks of billable hours. For what they did, which really wasn't much, that sounds about right.
Seriously. You can do as much or as little PvP as you want. But even in high security space (hi-sec) you can still get your pasty ass ganked if you aren't careful. Hulkageddon is likely to occur with some regularity, and sticking your nose in a null-sec and even some lo-sec systems is just asking to get yourself jumped. Granted, the community here is a lot smaller--probably around 150,000 active players as opposed to the millions sported by WoW--but they're pretty hardcore about the whole thing.
This is the President's job folks: to defend the laws passed by Congress and signed into law by a sitting President. It's implied by the Oath of Office. Presidents ignoring laws they don't like by refusing to defend them in court--which is what the DOJ is doing here--would be a pretty flagrant violation of the obligations of the executive.
This is not the first time and will not be the last that a President, through his officers, defends a law he isn't thrilled about. Just because DOJ lawyers show up with a brief in support of a law does not mean that the President--or even the DOJ lawyers, for crying out loud--believe either 1) that the law is worth defending, or 2) the validity of their own arguments. They're just doing their jobs.
See, I think this is on slashdot for two reasons: 1) Slashdot hates DRM and will publish just about any piece criticizing it, regardless of its bearing to reality. 2) Slashdot likes Cory Doctorow because he's a poster boy for item 1. Being passionate is not the same thing as knowing what the hell you're talking about. If he were running a marketing seminar, I wouldn't have any objections. But he tends to wax philosophical on legal and historical subjects about which he has no real knowledge.
...why anyone takes Cory Doctorow seriously?
He's a political activist and passable young-adult sci-fi author who contributes to a geek blog. He's an expert on nothing. He has not formally studied anything. He mouths off about copyright all the time, but his grasp of law and legal history is laughable. Yet he consistently makes headlines for saying asinine things about subjects about which he has no expertise.
How do I get people to pay me for saying stupid things about fashionable subjects? What he does is way more glamorous and takes way less actual, you know, effort than what I do.
I think there's a basic unanswered question here that will determine which of the above types of solutions you aim for.
If you're trying to make the actual server room a more pleasant place to be, you really do need to look into additional A/C capacity, and that's just not gonna be cheap.
But if all you're trying to do is keep your servers from overheating, there may be other ways of doing this. It could involve dedicated A/C units, but needn't necessarily. Non-A/C options include installing fans (not Wal-Mart box fans, something more permanent; talk to a local HVAC contractor), opening windows, installing specialized vent ducts, etc.
Either way, you're probably going to want to get HVAC in there. Proper cooling for computers, especially servers, is something like proper insurance for driving a car: the question isn't whether you can afford it, it's whether you can afford not to have it.
The movie was brilliant overall, and Ledger's performance was particularly noteworthy. But the editing? Yes, we know Batman gets around and appears/disappears suddenly and without warning. But there are ways of communicating that while still enabling the audience to know what the hell is going on. Sometimes I was so confused that I wasn't sure whether or not I was supposed to be confused. Instead of "Oh, I wonder what happened there, they must explain it soon," a lot of the time the experience was more like "Okay, what just happened?"
Did anyone else share this perception?
If the FCC does move forward with this, Comcast is going to sue. Obviously.
What's likely to make this disappointing is that if the case does get to court, it is almost certainly not going to be decided on substantive grounds. The real question is one of administrative law: does the FCC's "statement of principles" constitute a legally enforcable document? The FCC can't point to a specific statutory provision that gives it what it wants. And as it classified cable modem service as an "information service"--a classification which was upheld in 2005 in the Brand-X case--Comcast is exempt from all of the Title II provisions in the Telecommunications Act, including the common carrier requirements. The FCC is going to have to rely upon its "ancillary authority" under Title I, and the question to be resolved is not whether net neutrality is a good idea but whether the FCC has the authority to do this under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.
Needless to say, unless you're an administrative law geek like me, this isn't going to be a very interesting case. But the FCC has largely trounced the cable industry in almost every conflict in the past ten years, so I'm optimistic.
Yeah, they can do that. I hate to put it this way, but the best answer is "They just can." Agencies do this all the time. Adjudications of this sort are entirely retroactive, and there doesn't seem to be any legal problem with this. Federal agencies like the FCC and SEC have broad authority to promulgate regulations in the public interest, and the fact that industry comes up with new and clever ways of acting against the public interest does not mean that agencies have to have a rule on the books to whack evildoers. They just have to show that their actions are not arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to statute, and that they are in the public interest. As you might imagine, this isn't particularly difficult.
Article I, section 9 of the Constitution says that Congress shall pass no ex post facto laws, but this has been pretty narrowly construed to prohibit the imposition of criminal liability for acts committed in the past. Civil liability, such as the FCC would impose here, is largely permissible.
Comcast hasn't violated any federal statute per se, but the FCC enforces its regulations--and its interpretation of those regulations--just as vigorously. Your point would be better directed at the fact that the FCC hasn't done a rulemaking on net neutrality.
This, however, doesn't mean the FCC can't do this. Federal agencies frequently make rules through enforcement actions like this. The SEC does it all the time, and the FCC certainly has the ability to do so. Telling federal agencies they can't do something is largely a loser in court.
This is especially true in this case, because judges are all cable customers, and cable customers almost all hate their providers. Not the best legal reasoning, but it's served the FCC very well for the past decade. Almost every time the cable industry challenges an FCC it actions, it loses.
This will have approximately zero benefits. As many users have already pointed out, such a system is still vulnerable to interception, and if you think the NSA will have trouble cracking commercial encryption, you're just wrong. But more to the point, whether or not traffic is encrypted really doesn't matter. ISPs are perfectly capable of filtering and suppressing traffic without any idea of the content of the packets in question simply by analyzing the pattern of traffic. For example, a BitTorrent connection can be pretty easily recognized by looking for activity on certain ports. But even if you switch ports, the large number of incoming/outgoing connections is a dead giveaway. You don't need to know exactly what's in the TCP packet to know that the IP traffic looks like a BitTorrent (or VoIP, or streaming video, or what have you) connection. And you can't encrypt IP headers or your ISP won't be able to route the traffic at all. There really isn't a technical solution for this as far as I can tell. It's whack-a-mole at best. The real solution is regulation, but exactly what kind of regulation is still very much up in the air.
Say what you like about the people who actually operate the armed forces, they aren't stupid. They know what they have to do to win. Whether or not the civilian political classes will let them is a different issue, and whether or not they should is another one still. But if you really do want to suppress an insurgency, this is kind of what you have to do.
Next question?
Sure, enhancing the penalties for such behavior is a bad idea. But this is unlikely to make a huge difference. Even though the bill purports to direct the Department of Justice to bring enforcement actions against small-time infringers ... so does current law. And one of the few things Congress cannot do is tell the Executive how and where to prosecute crimes. That's a purely executive power, and I'm betting that no administration is going to have much to do with this.
Why? Well, in general, cause it's kinda stupid. More specifically, the Department of Justice doesn't think this kind of thing is sexy. It's much more fun to go after corrupt politicians (Gov. Spitzer, anyone?), terrorists, financial criminals (Enron types, etc.), Columbian drug lords (Russians too), and interstate child prostitution rings (there really are such things, and the feds don't like 'em)--the few types of crime that regularly receive significant federal attention these days--than after IP infringement. How many IP cases can you think of that have been brought by the government since the DMCA was enacted? Very few, and those were directed at large-scale counterfeiting operations, the kind that manufacture the bogus DVDs you buy on street corners. I've no problem shutting them down, and I don't think many others would either. But enforcement actions against private citizens? Yeah, none.
So Congress can take a tough stance if it wants to. It still has to get the Executive to cooperate, and I just don't see that happening.
The choice to fly to the Middle East rather than risk detection by federal authorities has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the lawyer believes PGP--or any other encryption--is capable of thwarting government attempts to eavesdrop. Why? Because encryption doesn't do you any good if a court orders you to turn over the key, as it's likely to do if criminal charges are ever filed.
The lawyers aren't nearly as concerned with having the content of their conversations intercepted as they are with having the fact of their conversations intercepted. In normal telecommunications, the police need no judicial authorization to record the fact of a telephone call, and they can use such a pattern to establish the likelihood of a conspiracy, which will enable them to get judicial authorization for a proper wiretap. Similarly, if authorities can establish the likelihood of a conspiracy using a pattern of emails, even encrypted ones, they can get a court order for the encryption key.
This isn't a lawyer stunt to bill more hours or take vacations in Dubai. It's the entirely rational legal instinct to avoid a paper trail where it has the possibility of coming back to haunt you.
First of all, this ruling was handed down two months ago, so I'm not sure why it's being discussed now. But second, the Fifth Circuit struck down exactly the same part of the same law in 2000. See Chavez v. Arte Publico Press, 204 F.3d 601 (5th Cir. 2000). Though it hasn't made it to the Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit is the only federal appellate court to consider the issue, no court will allow Congress to abrogate state sovereign immunity under its Art. I powers. And Copyright is not a Fourteenth Amendment issue, so there's just no way to do this. This really isn't a big deal.
Unsurprisingly enough, it doesn't seem that most people around here actually understand what they're talking about. But I've done research into telecommunications regulation, so I think I've got something to offer here.
Telecoms are businesses which exist to make money. They are not public service entities. They make money when the revenue they receive for their services is greater than the amount they spent on building their network, and when that revenue is at least as much as they could have made if they were to go into another business.
The problem that most people here don't seem to realize is that building a network, particularly to residential destinations, is expensive. I mean expensive. So expensive that most consumers are not capable of paying enough to make that service profitable without some form of subsidy. Using landlines as an example, it costs about $100/month for the telecom to provide that service. Yes, the cost is spent up front in some sense, but consider that they could have done something else with that money which would have made them that much. Essentially, unless the telecom makes $100/month from each and every residential connection, they're losing money.
Most people simply cannot afford to spend $1200 per connection to a network. With today's legacy divisions between phone and cable services, that would mean an annual bill of $2400. The few people who can afford such a price don't want to pay it.
So saying that the telecoms should just eat the cost of such a buildout really doesn't demonstrate any connection to reality. The only reason the current system works is from arcane franchise regulations. Part of the regulatory scheme allows telecoms to use commercial revenues to subsidize their residential activities. Businesses pay a lot more for their network services than individuals so. Another part allowed for monopoly franchises, guaranteeing the telecom a market and creating an incentive to reach everyone in a municipality. Exclusive franchises are no longer permitted under US law (Telecom Act of 1996 did away with them) but the fact is that networks are sufficiently expensive that a new player isn't likely to build on areas where there is an existing network, particularly with common-carrier laws in effect.
So the problem here is not a simple one, and it's not one that can be solved by spouting off one's "net neutrality" credentials. I do think some form of neutrality is desirable, but the blanket statements made here are not helpful.
As a member of the legal profession, I do a large amount of research online. My site of choice is Westlaw, produced by the largest legal publisher in the country (and thus probably the world). They have a feature on their website they call "Research Trails", which keeps a record of your navigation each time you log in. The list is fully linked, so you can access any document on the list easily. You can not only see what you looked at but see the order in which you looked at it, which helps in reconstructing thought patterns. This is a dramatically helpful feature for any research site, and they are to be commended for implementing it.
Their major competitor, LexisNexis, has a similar feature.
I know this doesn't help much for general-purpose multi-site research, but I can't say just how useful this feature is for a single site. I would recommend other site developers to create similar functionality as soon as convenient. Imagine how useful this could be for Wikipedia.
On second thought, scratch that. Sometimes I really don't want to know how I got from point A to point B on that site.
Have you even read the regulation? Because your comment doesn't suggest that you have. It does suggest that you're well versed in the language of conspiracy theory, but not the language of regulations.
There is no monitoring language in the proposed regulation. None. The "official purposes" term you quote from the regulation has to do what purposes non-REAL ID will be accepted by federal agencies, not adding more functionality to identification cards.
1) Though perhaps not on a information systems level, I would still maintain that there is a practical and legal difference between a federal database and linked state databases. Practically, a federal database would be the responsibility of a federal agency to maintain, and I don't really want to have the feds managing that kind of information. We've seen how good they are at that. The states might not be all that much better, but they're already got such databases, so why not let them just keep at it? Additionally, a database the feds can query but not control is a lot better than one which they can.
2) You can already get results from databases everywhere in the country with a single query. I know this because I've worked for insurance companies and would routinely pull DMV reports on insureds at their request for discount qualification purposes. That was 3 years ago, and even then there were only a handful of states that wouldn't pull the results directly to my screen. The rest of them had to be done by underwriters, but the results weren't any harder to get. I still say you're being paranoid. The federal government isn't mandating anything that isn't already in place, and it isn't really mandating anything. States are free to opt out if they choose to do so.
Not sure what all the fuss is here. Has anyone actually read the proposed regulation? They aren't creating a national ID database. They're simply changing the requirements for state-issued ID that federal agencies can accept for official purposes. The new requirements would be:
- full name
- gender
- date of birth
- issue/expiration dates
- unique license or ID number (not your Social Security Number)
- permanent residence
- signature
- picture
- machine-readability
- counterfeit protection measures
The regulation would also require all state databases of qualifying IDs to be accessible by other state databases.
Frankly, my current drivers license has all of those things already. No one is talking about creating a federal national identification database. Such a thing is nowhere in the proposed regulation. The regulation doesn't even require the states to issue such ID cards. Congress couldn't pass such a law if it wanted to. States are entirely free to issue non-REAL ID licenses and identifications. The only drawback is that federal agencies won't accept them as official IDs. Which doesn't really matter, because they'll always accept a passport, and you can get one of those without a drivers license anyways.
Why does everyone have their panties in a bunch? Both Slashdot and BoingBoing have been going apeshit about this for weeks now, but it just looks paranoid. The proposed regulation would not enable identity tracing with any greater degree of ease than currently exists.
Relax, people.
Actually, no, I meant "original amended". Thompson had already made one amendment, as allowed by Rule 15. He then tried to make two additional amendments without asking permission first, and the judge struck both of those from the record.
The case proceeds with the complaint as originally amended.
I'm not currently involved in litigation, but I am a law student. I'll be finished my first year in two weeks. I actually wrote my previous comment while in Civil Procedure II.
Actually, the case itself was not dismissed. The news story got the facts wrong. The judge struck the amended complaints from the record, but at this time the case is still pending on the original amended complaint. This ruling doesn't really mean anything.
The case was not dismissed. The judge simply called Thompson for failure to follow the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which only allows a complaint to be amended unilaterally once. If a party seeks to file a second amendment to their complaint, Rule 15(a) requires that that party seek the leave of the court or the consent of the adverse party, and such leave or consent must be granted "where justice requires".
Thompson is free to seek the consent of the adverse party or the leave of the court. If the case can't go forward unless the complaint be amended and the amendment required isn't too drastic, the FRCP generally require the amendment to be allowed. Thompson just forgot to ask is all. Still, the fact that he botched this uses up the judge's patience, and makes it marginally less likely that the amendment will be permitted.
I haven't read the complaint, so I don't know just how bad this is for Thompson, but his case is still pending.