The most compelling argument that this guy gives is that we all had to learn to read and write in order to adapt ourselves to our society. And it's not easy, either. We spend enormous amounts of time, money, and energy trying to ensure that our children learn these skill, and appropriately so, since they're a critical part of our society. Saying the same is true for computers and that we all have to adapt, somewhat, to how they work is a compelling argument.
Still, this sounds like the ramblings of someone who really dislikes windows... and I, myself, am a command line guy. I love pipes. I love how you can get them to do so many things. I'm a command line guy because I think it's a lot more powerful and much more flexible, and much more easily scriptable. But this guy seems to raise the command line to the level of worship.
It just seems to me that the entire purpose of computers is to make our lives easier by automating the mundane, error prone processes that we all have to do (e.g. calculating sums in spreadsheets). They're supposed to be user friendly because they're supposed to make our lives easier. No one would argue that the toilet makes our lives harder in comparison to an outhouse. Why should I need to know plumbing in order to use the toilet? Do we all now need to become mechanics in order to effectively drive to work? I don't think so.
There will always be someone behind the scenes who needs to know how it all works so that when something catastrophic happens, they can come fix it. But this requires two things to be true in order for computer specialists to be as ubiquitous as plumbers and mechanics:
We all need access to the source code. If we have that, then anyone who's willing to learn can be a fixer.
The computer systems we use need to be significantly more reliable than they currently are. And I mean by a huge amount. They need to be reliable enough so that the average user doesn't need to call in an expert on a daily or weekly basis because something bad happened.
That is the goal: make computers so reliable and so intuitive that they actually do make our lives easier. Don't get mad at microsoft because they tried to make computers easier to use (even if they really just copied someone else). Get mad at microsoft because they, single-handedly redefined the word "crash". They made computers so grossly unreliable that the average joe can't possibly comprehend what he needs to do on a daily basis to get his routine tasks to complete reliably. Get mad at microsoft for continuing to hide their source code so that expensive microsoft tech support can tell you that they're not going to fix that nagging problem. Get mad at microsoft for the things they do wrong. Attempting to make computers easier to use shouldn't be one of them.
There's no 100% reliable way to tag a message so that you can always detect replies to it, other than to use unique e-mail addresses when you send... and that's not a very useful approach
Why do you think this isn't very useful? It seems pretty useful to me for exactly the reason that you state: you can reliably detect if you sent the email.
Of course that's how TMDA does it. But tagged email addresses are not unique to TMDA. There are other systems that also use them. True, TMDA is only going to be able to decode TMDA's tagging. But that's not the point. The point is that this specific solution is not "owned" by TMDA.
First of all, I said that the problem with NAT specifically with the home user. I was talking about the impact to medium & larger corporate users. And the problem with corporate users isn't that it's not possible to get dual NAT to work. It certainly is possible. It's just difficult to maintain, especially when you're a large company with lots of external connections. Dual NAT is not a solution that scales well, even if it does work.
The biggest problem with NAT is not for the home user. It's for corporate users. If you're a medium sized or larger business, there's usually some third party that to whom you have to make a connection. If you've got all of your internal network running on RFC 1918 address space, and they've got all of their network running on the same address space, you're almost certainly screwed. You can hack it with dual NAT but it's almost always a maintenance nightmare to get it working right.
IPV6 is needed because RFC 1918 is a bandaid. We need to have globally unique IP addresses, whether we expose those IP addresses to the internet or not is irrelevant.
Well, if you use TMDA, you can configure it to avoid what you're talking about. With TMDA, it can detect whether or not an email was sent in response to an actual email that you sent. If so configured, then any challenges that you get from someone will only be delivered to your mailbox if you actually sent the original email. If a spammer, right now, sends an unsolicited challenge to my mailbox, I'll never see it.
So, exactly the contrary to what you're saying. The wider spread the use of C/R like TMDA, the less effective that your suggestion will be.
I wouldn't mind C/R if it merely had no effect on the problem, but I do mind the fact that C/R makes the problem worse by sending me a boatload of challenges that I have no business receiving.
I don't see how C/R makes the problem worse. My email address has been spoofed a number of times prior to my using TMDA. Mostly when I was with iname.com. Whenever that happened, the number of challenges that I received was *tiny* in comparison to the number of bounces I got. I'm talking about 5-10 challenges in comparison to 2000-2500 bounces. When it's happened to me in the past it just hasn't been nearly the problem that the bounces are. You don't have any business receiving the bounces either. And in the case where someone spoofed your email address in a spam, you'd have no business receiving the angry emails that a few people send when they get spam. The problem isn't C/R. The problem is spoofed email addresses, and unfortunately, C/R doesn't do anything to fix that.
Unless, of course, you used TMDA. In which case you would see neither bounces nor confirmations that resulted from someone spoofing your email address. If everyone used TMDA, no one would ever see spoofed bounces nor spoofed confirmations. Why? Because TMDA can detect whether or not you really sent the email that used your email address. If you didn't then it simply treats it like email from any other unknown address.
If a spam has a spoofed from address, then your C-R system will send a challenge to the spoofed from address
Without C/R, if a spam has a spoofed from address the owner of that from address is going to get a ton of bounced genereated as a result of the spammer's list having bad or non-existant email addreesses... and probably a few angry emails from the working addresses, too. This is a consequence of how email works. While it's true that C/R doesn't fix this problem, it also didn't create it.
If I reply to an email you sent using a different email account than the one that you sent your email to, then my other email account won't be on your whitelist and I'll receive a challenge. By itself this is merely annoying
Yes it's annoying. But I'm of the opinion that it isn't a terrible burdon to everyone if we all had to participate in a socially acceptable norm for introducing ourselves to each other electronically. Yes it's something of a pain, but if C/R were more widely deployed, I think it'd be less of a global pain than SPAM.
However if we both do it then our challenges never get through.
There's actually a specification written that specifies how automatically generated responses are supposed to be formed to avoid this exact problem. TMDA complies with that specification. So that even if you're not using TMDA, if you comply with that specification, the situation that you mention will not happen. There's a TMDA FAQ entry that talks about this, too.
You might think that problem 1 can be solved simply by challenging only non-spam emails, but then you have the problem of spam filtering all over again. Most people who use TMDA do so specifically because they think filtering is ineffective.
Actually, for a very long time, I used TMDA in conjunction with SpamAssassin and RBLs. See my FAQ entry. I did this specifically because SpamAssassin worked so well, and I wanted to use TMDA to catch the tiny percentage of stuff that got through SpamAssassin. I also liked being able to generate dated addresses, so I needed TMDA inline to get that to work.
But I eventually stopped using RBLs because they summarily cut off too many people without providing each individual a mechanism for getting legitimate email to me. And I eventually stopped using SpamAssassin because it was too effective. It marked a couple of emails that were NOT spam as spam and I ended up losing some contacts. It was a very low percentage, but enough to annoy me. So I switched entirely to TMDA. One could argue that a legitimate email that doesn't get confirmed is the functional equivalent of a "false positive", in which case I've had a few of those. But if you don't care enough to confirm your email, it must not have been something very important to talk about. Which is a very different situation than you sending me an email that, from your perspective, I completely ignore because my spam tool thought it was spam.
Of course, by all of this, I don't mean to suggest that C/R is the solution that everyone should use. I know it probably seems that way because I'm defending it. But I don't mean it that way. I really only want to understand why someone might not use C/R. I'm not trying to advocate that everyone choose C/R. If it doesn't work for you, I was just curious as to why.
The situation you describe exists already today, without widespread deployment of C/R. If I wanted to DDOS your email address, all I'd need do is send out an email with your address as the envelope header. And if I sent it to 3 million known bad addresses, your email server is going to have to handle all of those bounces. It's true that C/R doesn't fix this problem, but it's hardly fair to blame C/R for the fact that ALL email can be coopted as a DDOS tool.
C/R doesn't fix the DDOS problem. But neither does blacklisting. The blacklist that you said you maintain yourself has to have excluded huge swaths of people (e.g. Mainland China and Taiwan and the pink contractors at ATT, Verizon, SWBell and BT mainly). First, you've already convicted everyone in Mainland China who isn't a spammer. They were guilty until proven innocent. Second, if you do maintain it by individual IP address instead of netblocks, what happens when I set up a non-spam server on that previously spamming netblock? Sure you have a procedure for me to get off of your blacklist, but again, I'm guilty until I prove myself innocent. But also, if you try to maintain innocent until proven guilty, IPv4 has over 4 billion addresses. You either have to abandon "innocent until proven guilty" or the spammers will just continually move and still be able to DDOS you.
In my opinion, we all need to take the stance of guilty until proven innocent. And do it based not on IP addresses which can be tied to MANY MANY people, but rather do it based on email address which is typically only associated with an individual. Innocent until proven guilty works well in a situation where we're trying to preserve the rights of someone who may have committed an infraction. But in the situation with my mailbox, I'm the only person who has rights. You (nor anyone else) has any rights to my mailbox. You may have privileges in my mailbox if you meet my criteria. And my criteria is that you verify that you have a working email address.
Frankly, if C/R were more widely deployed, I think that it would have the opposite impact of what you're suggesting.
If confirming that you have a working email address were the social norm for introducing yourself to people, we'd all end up having a much higher trust in other people's email addresses. Consequently SPAM would be significantly less cost effective. SPAMMERS would become much more rare. Consequently, the only people who would do the things that you're talking about would be those who are just trying to be disruptive because they can be. C/R doesn't take care of those people, but they occupy a much smaller percentage of the population than those who are motivated by the money making potential of SPAM. So IMHO, the end effect of everyone using C/R would be fewer people trying to pry there way into my mailbox. Would it be zero? No, but in contrast to your suggestion, I think it'd be an improvement.
The only way to "spoof" a C-R system is to have a working email address. And, with that working email address, you need to automatically send back a reply to any email that you get. Which means that you, first, have to have sufficient bandwidth and storage space to deal with all of the bounces that you're going to get. If a spammer intent on spoofing C-R has a list of 30 million email addresses, and gets 10% bounce rate, that spammer is going to have to have the bandwidth and storage space for 3 million email addresses.
This costs money and lowers the cost-benefit of spam. Suppose that right now you only need to get a.001% respose rate from spam in order to make money. That's true only because the cost of spam is so astronomically cheap. But if your goal is to beat C-R, you have to pay for sufficient bandwidth to handle all of the bounces. At which point, your response rate shoots WAAAY up.
Automated defeats of C-R are possible but highly unlikely due to the economics of the situation.
I am unable to think of any other viable business model, so I conclude that it is absolutely clear that we need a strong patent system to make sure drug development continues.
This seems to be the crux of your argument. And it's true that I am unable to think of any other viable business model. Of course, I'm in very good company. Today, right this very minute, anyone is free to develop and use a business model for drug development that does not rely on patents. You can do it if you want. All you have to do is develop drugs and then not patent them. Then sell those non-patented drugs. Thus the exact legal structure that you are championing exists today.
But, of course, no company exists to try and exploit it. And it's not because I am personally not smart enough to think of a way to make money doing it. No one, of the 6 billion people in the world, has yet thought of a way to do it. Now, of course, it's completely true that just because no one's thought of a way, that it doesn't make it impossible. All it proves is that our species hasn't produced someone smart enough to figure out that business model. I'll be happy to say that I'm wrong when I see someone who's come up with a viable business model for drug development that does not rely on patents. Until then I feel pretty comfortable in my assertion even if it's not "proven" in the logical sense.
On the other hand, you might just be the person to do it. I don't want to discourage you from trying. If you have a business model that will work w/out patents, go for it. I wish you the best of luck.
Software development costs big money
The reason that your analogy fails is that software development does NOT cost big money. In fact, it's exceedingly cheap, by comparison. I do software development in my spare time, and all that took was some time spent at school. But that's because I'm relatively dense and I needed someone to show me how to do it. I know plenty of really smart people who figured out software development on their own and they do it. All it takes is their own individual time. Contrast this with drug development. No one does drug development on their own time. And the reason is that it's so expensive. The costs of just one of the many basic pieces of equipment to do the research is more than I make in a year. And that's just one piece of equipment. There's tons of stuff that you'd have to have in order to do drug development. The cost to get started doing software development is a computer.
Moreoever, testing is almost entirely free in the software development world. If I want to figure out how well software is going to work, especially in the Free/OSS world, I simply let people download it and submit bug reports. I don't have to pay for testing and certification. And in the proprietary world (e.g. Microsoft) we pay the developer to test their software. I give you Windows 95 and Millenium as examples. Testing costs next to nothing in the software development world.
Software developers don't even have to get certification. We don't have wait 10 years after we've come up with an idea just to get it through a federal organization before we can market our software. Drug companies do. And it's wholely appropriate that the FDA does it's job. There's lots to be frustrated about the FDA, but it's hard to complain about their basic purpose. They exist in order to ensure that the claims that a drug company makes actually hold true, and to identify the long term impacts of the usage of a particular drug. They do this because the only possible test subjects are people. If something catastrophic happens to software, and a computer "dies" that's something that can be recovered by lots of techniques, including rebooting, restoring from backup, component replacement, etc. But if something catastrophic happens with a drug, people don't have backups. When they die, there's no getting them back. So testing has to be d
Everyone in the world must jump through the painful, non-functioning hoops of whitelisting...
Just out of curiosity, what about whitelisting do you think is non-functional? I've been using a program that, among other things, is an automated whitelist management program. It's called TMDA and it works fantastically. There are other similar programs.
I'm just curious as to why you think whitelisting is non-functional.
Ok. I said that I was going to respond to this later on, but I've got a quick and dirty response right now, and I can give it.
The reason is that our health care industry needs drugs to be patented is because the cost of developing drugs is so high. One study
Research of the basic idea behind the drug - e.g. this chemical reacts favorably with the thing in the body we're trying to eliminate
Researching the metabolic pathways - e.g. here's some additional chemicals that we can use to ensure that the active chemicals will reach their destination, without doing any damage
Animal testing
Human testing: Phases 1 - 3
Mass production
FDA approval
Marketing
Contrast this with the cost to develop a post-patent generic:
Analysis of chemical structure of already developed, tested and FDA approved drug.
Mass production
Marketing
By far the biggest cost of developing the drug is the R&D. And of that expense, the biggest cost is the clincal human trials. These are costs that post-patent generic companies simply don't have to pay. Without patent protection, we'd end up with a world where the developer of a drug would incur *all* of the costs to develop that drug and the generic manufacturer would gain all of the profits. The drug developer would simply not be able to recover their costs without patents. Patents enable the drug developer to earn the profits from the sale of that drug to cover:
Research & Development of that drug
Research & Development of investigatory drugs - drugs that show promise but for some reason don't make it to market
Patents enable the pharmaceuticals to stay in business. I once read (although I can't find it now), that pharmaceuticals develop 200 failed drugs for every 1 drug that makes it to market. Inventing is a hard business, and without some sort of legal protection, we simply wouldn't have it.
Considering the wording of this in the GPL (IANAL so please correct me if I'm wrong) this paragraph effectively removes all rights for SCO to distribute ANY GPL software, not just Linux.
IANAL either, but I don't think that's the case. The license that you're looking at came with a specific piece of software. That license is only granting rights for that peice of software. If you disagree with the license being granted you for that piece of software, then you are not allowed to modify & distribute that piece of software. There's nothing in there that says if you disagree with the license for software A, that you're not allowed to modify and copy software B. Why? Because the copyrights for A are owned by someone other than the copyrights for B, and each person must agree or disagree with those licenses granted by each copyright owner.
Disagreeing with the GPL for software A does not mean that you disagree with the GPL for all other software that is licensed under it. Let's take TiVo for example. They agree to and comply with the terms of the GPL for the Linux kernel that they've modified and distribute. But they do not agree with the terms of MythTV (which I believe is GPL), so they don't modify and distribute it. And, more importantly, they don't incorporate Myth's code into their proprietary software because they don't wish to comply with the terms applied to that code. Just because they disagree with the license for MythTV software does not mean they are barred from distributing Linux.
First, thanks for the reply. I appreciate your thoughtful and thought provoking response. And I only have commentary with respect to one aspect
Without a patent regime, an inventor who invents only for money (likely, in my opinion, to be not the most important subset, but be that as it may) will still have a profit motive, the difference will be simply in the details of how to get from A to B - rather than rushing to file a patent before anyone else, he would instead work to produce and sell actual product before anyone else, to take and maintain an early lead in the field through trade secrets and continual research and refinement.
The problem that I see with this is that the process of bringing a product (any product) to market varies somewhat depending on the product, but not that much. The overall process is basically the same. Whereas inventing the product in the first place is a wildly varying process. Such marketing companies already exist. They exist even before an inventor has an idea for an invention. They can exist because marketing is a relatively static process.
Now contrast that with inventing. It's very difficult to be an invention company: A company with the sole purpose of producing inventions. The process of inventing is just not static enough. It's a dynamic thing that explicitly relies on seeing things differently than you saw them before. Invention absolutely depends on one person who has an inspiration about a way to do something better.
Now here's where the problem lies. Without patent protection the small guy has no chance of profiting from his inspiration. He can go and do all of this work, spend all of his time, spend a ton of money, and the day he puts up a sign post to try and sell it, is the day that the marketing firm, with a well established and stable process, swoops in, buys one version of the invention, and sells it to everyone. The inventor would be unlikely to even recover his costs.
Yes, there are problems with patents. Inventors who come up with the same idea at roughly the same time have problems. And the entire computer software industry is built on shared ideas, and absolutely relies on interoperability, so the concept of software patents seems absurd. But these problems merit, IMHO, fixing. They do not justify scrapping all patents everywhere.
An example of a nightmare scenario is Microsoft. Right now copyright protects GPL'd software from becoming embraced & extended into Microsoft. And anyone who thinks that Microsoft's business plan is a software creation company is misguided. They are a software marketing company. And, as an example, I ask you to cite one single thing that Microsoft has invented. I repeatedly can't think of anything. They buy up small companies, take all of their trade secrets (conveniently protected in binary executables) and then market them. Almost always the original members of the bought company suffers and Microsoft prospers. And this is in an environment where copyright protection exists. Without copyright, no software would be safe from becoming extinct due to Microsoft's practices.
And in the patent arena it's no different. People can argue all they want about drug companies, but patents are absolutely critical to those companies. The expense of developing a drug is so astronomically high, that without protections on those investments, no one would invent drugs. And if you think I'm kidding, ask yourself how long it takes after a drug patent expires for a low cost generic to be available. The answer is it's available the very day that the patent expires. Producing generics is a marketing process. Producing the initial drug is an invention process and it's very very expensive, with massive amounts of failures. Say what you want about drug companies, but IMHO, it is absolutely clear that we would not have the breadth and depth of health care if we didn't have patents protecting drug companies.
Still I agree that there are serious problems with patents (and other IP) that need to be fixed. I'm still not convinced that they should be scrapped altogether.
In general I agree with your original assessment. Patenting things that are obvious is absurd. However, on some of your more recent points, I have to disagree.
Basically, there is a corelation between the invention of patents and the industrial revolution. Whether that corelation is causitive or not I don't know. The original poster seems to believe that it is. And you seem to be arguing that it isn't. But your argument against the causitive nature is pretty weak:
You're assuming that technological progress would have stopped at that point, all over the world, just because the handful of countries that introduced relatively mild copyright and patent laws at this time did otherwise?
In order to say that it's causitive, yes he has to make the assumption that you stated. But that's alone isn't sufficient to say that it *isn't* causitive. Just strong enough to say that he's assuming it is without proving it.
In order for you to make the claim that it's the corelation is definately not causitive, you are assuming that technological progress would have continued w/out patents. This is something that's simply not testable. All we know at this point is that the industrial revolution corelated in time to the use of patents. If you want people to agree with you that there's definately no cause/effect relationship between the two, you're going to have to rely on something stronger than imagining something that can't be tested.
If anything, the bulk affect of these laws is to stifle progress, not to help it. Particularly with the current 'modern' implementations of these ideas.
Ok. I understand that you believe this, but you haven't provided any evidence that either of these statements are true. Personally, I agree with you on the 2nd point. But I'm unconvinced on the first point. And here's my logic:
Imagine I wrote a book. I spent lots of time and energy thinking about the book, developing the ideas, writing it down, editing it, getting it printed, and then bound into a book. If after doing all of that, anyone could simply take a copy of that work and duplicate it without consequence, I would be less inclined, next time, to write another book. Because someone would figure out how to streamline the process of copying books and selling them. At that point, writers would not be able to compete. They'd simply produce works from which someone else made money. The enormous amount of effort and cost it takes to produce the first copy of a book and publish it would disincent the vast majority of writers from writing, because they'd not even be able to recover their costs before someone else plugged it into their streamlined book copying process.
By having copyright, writers are given an incentive to produce, in that, at the very least, they can recover their costs. The current day implementations of copyright are insane, but the original implementation seems to have produced incentive to write.
Patents are almost exactly the same, except instead of covering books, they cover inventions. And the original implementation required that a sample of the invention be supplied with the patent application. As a consequence, someone who came up with a good idea and went to all of the effort to make it and prove that it worked, would have no incentive to publish that idea if the next guy down the line could simply copy it and sell it before you. Under the original implementation, it at least *seems* like patents rewarded real inventors. Now, I agree with you that the current day implementations have gone overboard and that they can reward people who haven't done a lick of work. But I'm going to need some convincing if I'm to believe what you're suggesting:
that patents were not causitive of the industrial revolution
that patents hindered it's progress
I'm not saying you're wrong. I just don't understand how you've come to that conclusion.
Disadvantages:
unreliable, although that's because of cable modem unreliability, not vonage.
hard to plug into existing house phone system - you have to run a wire from the root of the phone lines in your house to your router
What? I have Vonage, too. You're right about the reliability being dependant on the cable modem. But it is absolutely *NOT* hard to plug into the existing phone system. First you have to ensure that the existing phone system was disconnected from the LEC. This is done on the box outside the house and is very important to do. Otherwise you burn out the vonage device. Then you just plug the vonage device into any internal phone jack and the entire house will get dialtone.
This is exactly what I did, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work for you, too.
The FCC devised a set of conditions used to determine whether a provider's offering constituted phone-to-phone IP telephony.
In using the term 'phone-to-phone' IP telephony, we tentatively intend to refer to services in which the provider meets the following conditions: (1) it holds itself out as providing voice telephony or facsimile transmission service; (2) it does not require the customer to use CPE different from that CPE necessary to place an ordinary touch-tone call (or facsimile transmission) over the public switched telephone network; (3) it allows the customer to call telephone numbers assigned in accordance with the North American Numbering Plan, and associated international agreements; and (4) it transmits customer information without net change in form or content.
Id. 88, at 11543-44.
In applying the FCC's four phone-to-phone IP telephony conditions to Vonage, it is clear that Vonage does not provide phone-to-phone IP telephony service. Vonage's services do not meet the second and fourth requirements. Use of Vonage's service requires CPE different than what a person connected to the PSTN uses to make a touch-tone call. Further, a net change in form and content occurs when Vonage's customers place a call. If the end user is connected to the PSTN, the information transmitted over the Internet is converted from IP into a format compatible with the PSTN. Vonage's service is not a telecommunications service because "from the user's standpoint" the form of a transmission undergoes a "net change." Id. 89, at 11544.
This section is attempting to understand what the FCC thinks constitutes a regulated telecommunications service. And it's including "phone-to-phone" IP telephony, as defined by 4 characteristics. And according to this, it doesn't matter whether the CPE is rented or owned by the user. What is signficant is whether or not it's "different from that CPE necessary to place an ordinary touch-tone call (or facsimile transmission) over the public switched telephone network". A Cisco ATA 186 is clearly different than the normal CPE required to allow a person to make an ordinary touch-tone call. The judge concludes that Vonage is *not* phone-to-phone IP telephony because it doesn't meet 2 of the 4 requirements.
Well, in summary, it asserts that it can't be a telecommunications service because the law specifies that in order to be a telecommunications service it MUST operate with no additional Customer Premesis Equipment (CPE). In the case of VoIP, and specifically Vonage, this is not true. Vonage requires you to install a Cisco ATA186. Consequently, by the definition of "telecommunications service" Vonage can't be one. Second, it operates over the Internet, which congress has explicitly stated that it wishes to remain unencumbered by taxation in order to encourage a competitive environment. Since it runs over the Internet, and it can't be a telecommunications service, it must be an information service.
That's a very broad summary of the argument. Of course, you don't have to agree with it.
Did you read the article? It makes a very compelling argument for what is and isn't an information service and what the role of competition plays in the regulation of a telecommunications service. The answer to your first question is in the article.
After reading the Vonage v. MPUC ruling, it's clear that the judge made his ruling based on the "clear intent" of the congress to seperate information services from telecommunications services. The former being of the type which congress clearly wishes to remain regulation free, and the latter of the type which congress enforces regulation.
But this ruling is only as strong as congressional intent. MPUC (and for that matter any PUC) and all the LECs are going to start lobbying congress to change their intent w.r.t. VoIP. All that need happen is that congress clearly state that they did not intend to include VoIP as an information service and this ruling is moot.
Call, write, email your congress critters today. Do it now. Remind them that they should keep regulation to a minimum only in areas where "full competition has emerged" (quoting the ruling).
CNET has an article that is much more detailed than the voxilla article. This latter article makes me even more hopeful that the court's ruling is going in the direction that I'm hoping it will go.
While I'm glad that the MPUC's decision was thrown out, I don't think we know whether or not this is really good or just a speed bump for the MPUC (and by extension all other PUCs).
The problem is that we don't have the actual court ruling. We know that the court issued a permanant injunction agains the MPUC's ruling, but we don't know why. We don't know if it's been thrown out for procedural problems. If so, then MPUC simply corrects that procedural problem, makes a slightly different ruling that has the same effect. But if the ruling agrees with the VoIP providers as to what they're offering and why it's fundamentally different than what the LECs offer, then it sets a strong precedent and it impacts every PUC in the US.
Unfortunately, we don't know yet. And we won't know until the ruling is released on Oct 10. So while I'm cautiously optimistic, that's just me being hopeful. It's not reflective of any evidence.
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Still, this sounds like the ramblings of someone who really dislikes windows... and I, myself, am a command line guy. I love pipes. I love how you can get them to do so many things. I'm a command line guy because I think it's a lot more powerful and much more flexible, and much more easily scriptable. But this guy seems to raise the command line to the level of worship.
It just seems to me that the entire purpose of computers is to make our lives easier by automating the mundane, error prone processes that we all have to do (e.g. calculating sums in spreadsheets). They're supposed to be user friendly because they're supposed to make our lives easier. No one would argue that the toilet makes our lives harder in comparison to an outhouse. Why should I need to know plumbing in order to use the toilet? Do we all now need to become mechanics in order to effectively drive to work? I don't think so.
There will always be someone behind the scenes who needs to know how it all works so that when something catastrophic happens, they can come fix it. But this requires two things to be true in order for computer specialists to be as ubiquitous as plumbers and mechanics:
- We all need access to the source code. If we have that, then anyone who's willing to learn can be a fixer.
- The computer systems we use need to be significantly more reliable than they currently are. And I mean by a huge amount. They need to be reliable enough so that the average user doesn't need to call in an expert on a daily or weekly basis because something bad happened.
That is the goal: make computers so reliable and so intuitive that they actually do make our lives easier. Don't get mad at microsoft because they tried to make computers easier to use (even if they really just copied someone else). Get mad at microsoft because they, single-handedly redefined the word "crash". They made computers so grossly unreliable that the average joe can't possibly comprehend what he needs to do on a daily basis to get his routine tasks to complete reliably. Get mad at microsoft for continuing to hide their source code so that expensive microsoft tech support can tell you that they're not going to fix that nagging problem. Get mad at microsoft for the things they do wrong. Attempting to make computers easier to use shouldn't be one of them.MUST NOT READ THREAD...
Must not...
<struggles with mouse>
Aw, crap!
Of course that's how TMDA does it. But tagged email addresses are not unique to TMDA. There are other systems that also use them. True, TMDA is only going to be able to decode TMDA's tagging. But that's not the point. The point is that this specific solution is not "owned" by TMDA.
No. It works if the email system you use can reliably detect legitimate emails that you sent. TMDA can do this so it works with TMDA.
First of all, I said that the problem with NAT specifically with the home user. I was talking about the impact to medium & larger corporate users. And the problem with corporate users isn't that it's not possible to get dual NAT to work. It certainly is possible. It's just difficult to maintain, especially when you're a large company with lots of external connections. Dual NAT is not a solution that scales well, even if it does work.
The biggest problem with NAT is not for the home user. It's for corporate users. If you're a medium sized or larger business, there's usually some third party that to whom you have to make a connection. If you've got all of your internal network running on RFC 1918 address space, and they've got all of their network running on the same address space, you're almost certainly screwed. You can hack it with dual NAT but it's almost always a maintenance nightmare to get it working right.
IPV6 is needed because RFC 1918 is a bandaid. We need to have globally unique IP addresses, whether we expose those IP addresses to the internet or not is irrelevant.
Well, if you use TMDA, you can configure it to avoid what you're talking about. With TMDA, it can detect whether or not an email was sent in response to an actual email that you sent. If so configured, then any challenges that you get from someone will only be delivered to your mailbox if you actually sent the original email. If a spammer, right now, sends an unsolicited challenge to my mailbox, I'll never see it.
So, exactly the contrary to what you're saying. The wider spread the use of C/R like TMDA, the less effective that your suggestion will be.
Unless, of course, you used TMDA. In which case you would see neither bounces nor confirmations that resulted from someone spoofing your email address. If everyone used TMDA, no one would ever see spoofed bounces nor spoofed confirmations. Why? Because TMDA can detect whether or not you really sent the email that used your email address. If you didn't then it simply treats it like email from any other unknown address.
But I eventually stopped using RBLs because they summarily cut off too many people without providing each individual a mechanism for getting legitimate email to me. And I eventually stopped using SpamAssassin because it was too effective. It marked a couple of emails that were NOT spam as spam and I ended up losing some contacts. It was a very low percentage, but enough to annoy me. So I switched entirely to TMDA. One could argue that a legitimate email that doesn't get confirmed is the functional equivalent of a "false positive", in which case I've had a few of those. But if you don't care enough to confirm your email, it must not have been something very important to talk about. Which is a very different situation than you sending me an email that, from your perspective, I completely ignore because my spam tool thought it was spam.
Of course, by all of this, I don't mean to suggest that C/R is the solution that everyone should use. I know it probably seems that way because I'm defending it. But I don't mean it that way. I really only want to understand why someone might not use C/R. I'm not trying to advocate that everyone choose C/R. If it doesn't work for you, I was just curious as to why.
The situation you describe exists already today, without widespread deployment of C/R. If I wanted to DDOS your email address, all I'd need do is send out an email with your address as the envelope header. And if I sent it to 3 million known bad addresses, your email server is going to have to handle all of those bounces. It's true that C/R doesn't fix this problem, but it's hardly fair to blame C/R for the fact that ALL email can be coopted as a DDOS tool.
C/R doesn't fix the DDOS problem. But neither does blacklisting. The blacklist that you said you maintain yourself has to have excluded huge swaths of people (e.g. Mainland China and Taiwan and the pink contractors at ATT, Verizon, SWBell and BT mainly). First, you've already convicted everyone in Mainland China who isn't a spammer. They were guilty until proven innocent. Second, if you do maintain it by individual IP address instead of netblocks, what happens when I set up a non-spam server on that previously spamming netblock? Sure you have a procedure for me to get off of your blacklist, but again, I'm guilty until I prove myself innocent. But also, if you try to maintain innocent until proven guilty, IPv4 has over 4 billion addresses. You either have to abandon "innocent until proven guilty" or the spammers will just continually move and still be able to DDOS you.
In my opinion, we all need to take the stance of guilty until proven innocent. And do it based not on IP addresses which can be tied to MANY MANY people, but rather do it based on email address which is typically only associated with an individual. Innocent until proven guilty works well in a situation where we're trying to preserve the rights of someone who may have committed an infraction. But in the situation with my mailbox, I'm the only person who has rights. You (nor anyone else) has any rights to my mailbox. You may have privileges in my mailbox if you meet my criteria. And my criteria is that you verify that you have a working email address.
Frankly, if C/R were more widely deployed, I think that it would have the opposite impact of what you're suggesting.
If confirming that you have a working email address were the social norm for introducing yourself to people, we'd all end up having a much higher trust in other people's email addresses. Consequently SPAM would be significantly less cost effective. SPAMMERS would become much more rare. Consequently, the only people who would do the things that you're talking about would be those who are just trying to be disruptive because they can be. C/R doesn't take care of those people, but they occupy a much smaller percentage of the population than those who are motivated by the money making potential of SPAM. So IMHO, the end effect of everyone using C/R would be fewer people trying to pry there way into my mailbox. Would it be zero? No, but in contrast to your suggestion, I think it'd be an improvement.
The only way to "spoof" a C-R system is to have a working email address. And, with that working email address, you need to automatically send back a reply to any email that you get. Which means that you, first, have to have sufficient bandwidth and storage space to deal with all of the bounces that you're going to get. If a spammer intent on spoofing C-R has a list of 30 million email addresses, and gets 10% bounce rate, that spammer is going to have to have the bandwidth and storage space for 3 million email addresses.
.001% respose rate from spam in order to make money. That's true only because the cost of spam is so astronomically cheap. But if your goal is to beat C-R, you have to pay for sufficient bandwidth to handle all of the bounces. At which point, your response rate shoots WAAAY up.
This costs money and lowers the cost-benefit of spam. Suppose that right now you only need to get a
Automated defeats of C-R are possible but highly unlikely due to the economics of the situation.
This seems to be the crux of your argument. And it's true that I am unable to think of any other viable business model. Of course, I'm in very good company. Today, right this very minute, anyone is free to develop and use a business model for drug development that does not rely on patents. You can do it if you want. All you have to do is develop drugs and then not patent them. Then sell those non-patented drugs. Thus the exact legal structure that you are championing exists today.
But, of course, no company exists to try and exploit it. And it's not because I am personally not smart enough to think of a way to make money doing it. No one, of the 6 billion people in the world, has yet thought of a way to do it. Now, of course, it's completely true that just because no one's thought of a way, that it doesn't make it impossible. All it proves is that our species hasn't produced someone smart enough to figure out that business model. I'll be happy to say that I'm wrong when I see someone who's come up with a viable business model for drug development that does not rely on patents. Until then I feel pretty comfortable in my assertion even if it's not "proven" in the logical sense.
On the other hand, you might just be the person to do it. I don't want to discourage you from trying. If you have a business model that will work w/out patents, go for it. I wish you the best of luck.
The reason that your analogy fails is that software development does NOT cost big money. In fact, it's exceedingly cheap, by comparison. I do software development in my spare time, and all that took was some time spent at school. But that's because I'm relatively dense and I needed someone to show me how to do it. I know plenty of really smart people who figured out software development on their own and they do it. All it takes is their own individual time. Contrast this with drug development. No one does drug development on their own time. And the reason is that it's so expensive. The costs of just one of the many basic pieces of equipment to do the research is more than I make in a year. And that's just one piece of equipment. There's tons of stuff that you'd have to have in order to do drug development. The cost to get started doing software development is a computer.
Moreoever, testing is almost entirely free in the software development world. If I want to figure out how well software is going to work, especially in the Free/OSS world, I simply let people download it and submit bug reports. I don't have to pay for testing and certification. And in the proprietary world (e.g. Microsoft) we pay the developer to test their software. I give you Windows 95 and Millenium as examples. Testing costs next to nothing in the software development world.
Software developers don't even have to get certification. We don't have wait 10 years after we've come up with an idea just to get it through a federal organization before we can market our software. Drug companies do. And it's wholely appropriate that the FDA does it's job. There's lots to be frustrated about the FDA, but it's hard to complain about their basic purpose. They exist in order to ensure that the claims that a drug company makes actually hold true, and to identify the long term impacts of the usage of a particular drug. They do this because the only possible test subjects are people. If something catastrophic happens to software, and a computer "dies" that's something that can be recovered by lots of techniques, including rebooting, restoring from backup, component replacement, etc. But if something catastrophic happens with a drug, people don't have backups. When they die, there's no getting them back. So testing has to be d
Just out of curiosity, what about whitelisting do you think is non-functional? I've been using a program that, among other things, is an automated whitelist management program. It's called TMDA and it works fantastically. There are other similar programs.
I'm just curious as to why you think whitelisting is non-functional.
The reason is that our health care industry needs drugs to be patented is because the cost of developing drugs is so high. One study
Contrast this with the cost to develop a post-patent generic:
By far the biggest cost of developing the drug is the R&D. And of that expense, the biggest cost is the clincal human trials. These are costs that post-patent generic companies simply don't have to pay. Without patent protection, we'd end up with a world where the developer of a drug would incur *all* of the costs to develop that drug and the generic manufacturer would gain all of the profits. The drug developer would simply not be able to recover their costs without patents. Patents enable the drug developer to earn the profits from the sale of that drug to cover:
Patents enable the pharmaceuticals to stay in business. I once read (although I can't find it now), that pharmaceuticals develop 200 failed drugs for every 1 drug that makes it to market. Inventing is a hard business, and without some sort of legal protection, we simply wouldn't have it.
Disagreeing with the GPL for software A does not mean that you disagree with the GPL for all other software that is licensed under it. Let's take TiVo for example. They agree to and comply with the terms of the GPL for the Linux kernel that they've modified and distribute. But they do not agree with the terms of MythTV (which I believe is GPL), so they don't modify and distribute it. And, more importantly, they don't incorporate Myth's code into their proprietary software because they don't wish to comply with the terms applied to that code. Just because they disagree with the license for MythTV software does not mean they are barred from distributing Linux.
Now contrast that with inventing. It's very difficult to be an invention company: A company with the sole purpose of producing inventions. The process of inventing is just not static enough. It's a dynamic thing that explicitly relies on seeing things differently than you saw them before. Invention absolutely depends on one person who has an inspiration about a way to do something better.
Now here's where the problem lies. Without patent protection the small guy has no chance of profiting from his inspiration. He can go and do all of this work, spend all of his time, spend a ton of money, and the day he puts up a sign post to try and sell it, is the day that the marketing firm, with a well established and stable process, swoops in, buys one version of the invention, and sells it to everyone. The inventor would be unlikely to even recover his costs.
Yes, there are problems with patents. Inventors who come up with the same idea at roughly the same time have problems. And the entire computer software industry is built on shared ideas, and absolutely relies on interoperability, so the concept of software patents seems absurd. But these problems merit, IMHO, fixing. They do not justify scrapping all patents everywhere.
An example of a nightmare scenario is Microsoft. Right now copyright protects GPL'd software from becoming embraced & extended into Microsoft. And anyone who thinks that Microsoft's business plan is a software creation company is misguided. They are a software marketing company. And, as an example, I ask you to cite one single thing that Microsoft has invented. I repeatedly can't think of anything. They buy up small companies, take all of their trade secrets (conveniently protected in binary executables) and then market them. Almost always the original members of the bought company suffers and Microsoft prospers. And this is in an environment where copyright protection exists. Without copyright, no software would be safe from becoming extinct due to Microsoft's practices.
And in the patent arena it's no different. People can argue all they want about drug companies, but patents are absolutely critical to those companies. The expense of developing a drug is so astronomically high, that without protections on those investments, no one would invent drugs. And if you think I'm kidding, ask yourself how long it takes after a drug patent expires for a low cost generic to be available. The answer is it's available the very day that the patent expires. Producing generics is a marketing process. Producing the initial drug is an invention process and it's very very expensive, with massive amounts of failures. Say what you want about drug companies, but IMHO, it is absolutely clear that we would not have the breadth and depth of health care if we didn't have patents protecting drug companies.
Still I agree that there are serious problems with patents (and other IP) that need to be fixed. I'm still not convinced that they should be scrapped altogether.
Basically, there is a corelation between the invention of patents and the industrial revolution. Whether that corelation is causitive or not I don't know. The original poster seems to believe that it is. And you seem to be arguing that it isn't. But your argument against the causitive nature is pretty weak:
In order to say that it's causitive, yes he has to make the assumption that you stated. But that's alone isn't sufficient to say that it *isn't* causitive. Just strong enough to say that he's assuming it is without proving it.In order for you to make the claim that it's the corelation is definately not causitive, you are assuming that technological progress would have continued w/out patents. This is something that's simply not testable. All we know at this point is that the industrial revolution corelated in time to the use of patents. If you want people to agree with you that there's definately no cause/effect relationship between the two, you're going to have to rely on something stronger than imagining something that can't be tested.
Ok. I understand that you believe this, but you haven't provided any evidence that either of these statements are true. Personally, I agree with you on the 2nd point. But I'm unconvinced on the first point. And here's my logic:Imagine I wrote a book. I spent lots of time and energy thinking about the book, developing the ideas, writing it down, editing it, getting it printed, and then bound into a book. If after doing all of that, anyone could simply take a copy of that work and duplicate it without consequence, I would be less inclined, next time, to write another book. Because someone would figure out how to streamline the process of copying books and selling them. At that point, writers would not be able to compete. They'd simply produce works from which someone else made money. The enormous amount of effort and cost it takes to produce the first copy of a book and publish it would disincent the vast majority of writers from writing, because they'd not even be able to recover their costs before someone else plugged it into their streamlined book copying process.
By having copyright, writers are given an incentive to produce, in that, at the very least, they can recover their costs. The current day implementations of copyright are insane, but the original implementation seems to have produced incentive to write.
Patents are almost exactly the same, except instead of covering books, they cover inventions. And the original implementation required that a sample of the invention be supplied with the patent application. As a consequence, someone who came up with a good idea and went to all of the effort to make it and prove that it worked, would have no incentive to publish that idea if the next guy down the line could simply copy it and sell it before you. Under the original implementation, it at least *seems* like patents rewarded real inventors. Now, I agree with you that the current day implementations have gone overboard and that they can reward people who haven't done a lick of work. But I'm going to need some convincing if I'm to believe what you're suggesting:
- that patents were not causitive of the industrial revolution
- that patents hindered it's progress
I'm not saying you're wrong. I just don't understand how you've come to that conclusion.What? I have Vonage, too. You're right about the reliability being dependant on the cable modem. But it is absolutely *NOT* hard to plug into the existing phone system. First you have to ensure that the existing phone system was disconnected from the LEC. This is done on the box outside the house and is very important to do. Otherwise you burn out the vonage device. Then you just plug the vonage device into any internal phone jack and the entire house will get dialtone.
This is exactly what I did, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work for you, too.
This section is attempting to understand what the FCC thinks constitutes a regulated telecommunications service. And it's including "phone-to-phone" IP telephony, as defined by 4 characteristics. And according to this, it doesn't matter whether the CPE is rented or owned by the user. What is signficant is whether or not it's "different from that CPE necessary to place an ordinary touch-tone call (or facsimile transmission) over the public switched telephone network". A Cisco ATA 186 is clearly different than the normal CPE required to allow a person to make an ordinary touch-tone call. The judge concludes that Vonage is *not* phone-to-phone IP telephony because it doesn't meet 2 of the 4 requirements.
Well, in summary, it asserts that it can't be a telecommunications service because the law specifies that in order to be a telecommunications service it MUST operate with no additional Customer Premesis Equipment (CPE). In the case of VoIP, and specifically Vonage, this is not true. Vonage requires you to install a Cisco ATA186. Consequently, by the definition of "telecommunications service" Vonage can't be one. Second, it operates over the Internet, which congress has explicitly stated that it wishes to remain unencumbered by taxation in order to encourage a competitive environment. Since it runs over the Internet, and it can't be a telecommunications service, it must be an information service.
That's a very broad summary of the argument. Of course, you don't have to agree with it.
Did you read the article? It makes a very compelling argument for what is and isn't an information service and what the role of competition plays in the regulation of a telecommunications service. The answer to your first question is in the article.
I don't have an answer to the second question.
After reading the Vonage v. MPUC ruling, it's clear that the judge made his ruling based on the "clear intent" of the congress to seperate information services from telecommunications services. The former being of the type which congress clearly wishes to remain regulation free, and the latter of the type which congress enforces regulation.
But this ruling is only as strong as congressional intent. MPUC (and for that matter any PUC) and all the LECs are going to start lobbying congress to change their intent w.r.t. VoIP. All that need happen is that congress clearly state that they did not intend to include VoIP as an information service and this ruling is moot.
Call, write, email your congress critters today. Do it now. Remind them that they should keep regulation to a minimum only in areas where "full competition has emerged" (quoting the ruling).
CNET has an article that is much more detailed than the voxilla article. This latter article makes me even more hopeful that the court's ruling is going in the direction that I'm hoping it will go.
While I'm glad that the MPUC's decision was thrown out, I don't think we know whether or not this is really good or just a speed bump for the MPUC (and by extension all other PUCs).
The problem is that we don't have the actual court ruling. We know that the court issued a permanant injunction agains the MPUC's ruling, but we don't know why. We don't know if it's been thrown out for procedural problems. If so, then MPUC simply corrects that procedural problem, makes a slightly different ruling that has the same effect. But if the ruling agrees with the VoIP providers as to what they're offering and why it's fundamentally different than what the LECs offer, then it sets a strong precedent and it impacts every PUC in the US.
Unfortunately, we don't know yet. And we won't know until the ruling is released on Oct 10. So while I'm cautiously optimistic, that's just me being hopeful. It's not reflective of any evidence.