The case law is quite clear on this: If you violate someone's copyright unintentionally (eg, you think the material is in the public domain), you can be ordered to stop, but no punitive damages will be awarded.
IANAL, but wouldn't the argument be that the closed code that incorporated the GPL'd code continues to be closed? Even if they change it in a new release of code, the closed code violates, and continues to violate, the GPL... at least until that source code ir released?
It seems to me that the only way for them to stop violating the GPL is to release the source code which violated the GPL. It doesn't really matter that they change some other piece of code that doesn't violate the GPL. Once the code contains GPL'd code, they're stuck with that license.
And it shouldn't matter that they didn't fully read or understand the license which they were implicitly agreeing to when they downloaded the code, either. Certainly, I'll be held accountable for licenses that I don't fully read, but open anyway. Won't I?
Someone help me on this one. Am I missing something?
I don't know if this story is true or not, becuase you never can tell what a PR guy will say when called to task on the truth. Still the fact that Be is denying it should be taken, in lieu of other evidence, as the only credible account.
But if it is true, why not release BeOS to open source? I mean, if you're already giving up on the product, why not give it away, instead of throw it away. Not only does it cost you nothing (in comparison to throwing it away), you get good PR from doing it!
I wasn't complaining about the MPL/NPL in any way at all. I was just trying to see if people who understood it better than me could explain some of its implications.
I'm surprised that my comment got moderated to "flamebait". It certainly wasn't intended that way.
So please don't tell me that ext2 is somehow 'more stable' than reiserfs.
You're not using a fair definition of stable. Does ReiserFS offer better reliability than ext2? Of course. Is ReiserFS more stable than ext2? Probably not.
Stability is a measure of whether or not the product does what you expect it to do. Which is to say that stability is inversely proportional to the number of outstanding bugs.
So what that ext2 doesn't offer journaling. What's important is how many more bugs does ReiserFS have? That makes ReiserFS less stable than ext2. And how many of those bugs in the ReiserFS code will cause the kernel to crash? That's the measure of stability that needs to be taken into account. From a top level point of view, yeah, ReiserFS may offer better reliability. But if it causes too many kernel crashes than it is less stable.
Or course, ReiserFS allows you to recover from all of those kernel crashes better than ext2. But that's not the point. Ext2 doesn't cause the kernel crashes in the first place, and is therefore more stable.
But a monolithic Microsoft, especially one stung by having to a) agree that it had done wrong, and b) sit under the eye of DOJ overseers, will be a mess.
There are two problems with this. The first problem is that once its OK for the DOJ to start overseeing MS, they will have the ability, if not the license, to oversee the entire industry. I don't think that's a good thing.
Second problem is that even if the DOJ limits their focus exclusively to MS, the DOJ can make mistakes that harm the consumer. DOJ oversight dosen't inherently increase the choices that a consumer has. What I want is to see consumers having choice, and let market forces improve the situation.
This is why I think a breakup is needed. On the other hand, a breakup is shortsighted. It only deals with the OS. If MS is smart, then they take all of their applications and port them to everything, and their OS drops off the face of the planet (one can hope!). So now we're not tied to the OS, but we're still tied to all of their applications.. like IE. However you break off IE at this point, MS will work hard to make sure that it is everwhere (on linux, bsd, mac, etc). And then they can be in the exact same situation they're in now, only instead of forcing a crappy OS on us, they'll force us into their crappy web server.
I don't think a long term solution to this is easy. I do think that a breakup and source code release is the best first step.
MCSEs serve as an adjunct sales force and technical support arm for Microsoft. They are the best trained group of networking professionals on the planet; the world listens to them, and follows their advice and insight.
The irony of this is that, looking at the wording very carefully, it might be true.
Best trained: maybe if you argue that they've taken the most training to get to their level of knowledge
The world listens to them and follows their advice: well, yeah, but only out of fear because MCSE's represent a monolithic monster!
Of course the article would have you believe that having an MCSE is a way of demonstrating highly skilled knowledge of technology.
IMHO, it's just not true. Over the last 4 years, I've interviewed lots of candidates for lots of different technical positions w/in my company. During that time, I've never run into someone with an MCSE that could do anything outside of point and click. I have no doubt that there are some very talented MCSE's out there. I hope someday to meet one. My experience so far would suggets that MCSE is a worthless certification.
Wanna prove it to yourself? See how many MCSE's can answer this questsion:
How do you delegate a DNS domain?
I'd wager that the majority of them don't mention anything about NS records, but instead describe how to manipulate the MS provided wizard.
My colleagues and I call them "clickers", because that's the only way that can work with a computer.
Does anyone know any pointers to the security surrounding the use of these cards? Specifically, if I use one of these setups can someone who happens to be w/in 1500 feet of me now snoop my communications? I know I could set up freeswan but I would like to know if I have to.
Linux, Solaris, or Windows is only secure if the system administrator constantly applies the latest security patches, and how many of you actually do that?
Well, since you asked, I do. But that's not to my credit, it's to the credit of my distribution (debian) that makes doing this extremely easy by integrating network based updates into the distribution.
This sort of ease of updating doesn't seem to be exclusive to Debian. MS does it for Win98, too. I think that Red Hat offers this, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it's only available as a for pay service.
After all, AOL is a flat rate service now. They get their monthly fee whether the user logs on or not, so they have little incentive to prevent anyone from logging on to other providers
That's not entirely true. AOL also sells advertising that they collect revenue on when they pop up those annoying windows. I would hazard to guess that they leverage the number of users they have in other ways than just advertising.
Remember, if you take AOL's market cap ($146 billion) and divide it by the number of users they have (20 million), you come up with $7300 per user! This to me is a clear sign that AOL sells itself in terms of the influence that it can have over its users, and the market is buying it.
And that's where the lion's share of AOL's wealth comes from. $20/mo * 20 mil = 4 bil. The monthly fee is only 2% of that company's worth. The monthly bill is not what they're going after. They want eyeballs and lots of 'em.
Very likely all three companies will do really well, just inflating Bill Gates' personal fortune into even more stratospheric heights. It happened to Rockerfeller when the government split up Standard Oil, don't be surprised to see it happen again.
I don't understand the preoccupation that people seem to have with the idea that a split up microsoft could be worth more than a whole microsoft. Who cares?
The point in splitting up Microsoft is not to make the resulting companies less successful than the parent. It's to keep the interaction of those individual businesses fair, so that MS Windows corp has to compete with {Linux,BeOS,MacOS,etc} on its own merits. Not on the fact that it can tie MS Applications corp's products into its products, and force MS Applications corp not to port to any other environment.
I just keep thinking of how cool it would be if suddenly MS Applications corp decided that it was in their financial interest to port to {Linux,BeOS,etc}. In such a situation, I *WANT* that company to succeed, and to be a pioneer in encouraging other applications companies in porting to {insert non-Windows OS here}.
By changing the regulations now they avoided losing the power of setting regulations. They can change the rules again next year.
I agree that this is true. However, isn't this a window of oppurtunity? Don't we have a chance, now to let the cat out of the bag, so that whatever regulations change later, it's too late?
Wouldn't it be a good idea to start exporting like crazy every implementation of everything you can think of related to encryption? That way if the DOC does pull the football back, it'll really be too late. Another football will already have been kicked.
The reason nothing happened is a direct result of the media blasting this home, so that businesses and governments would start moving their asses to get this looked after. If the media DIDN'T cover it we'd all probably be without a lot of infrastructure right now.
In general I agree with this. But I think that you can't ignore the fact that some of the Y2K hype just didn't pan out. Most of the reports about Y2K readiness seemed to suggest that the vast majority of businesses/goverments/whatever had not come anywhere near to completing their Y2K preparations.
If that's true, and I know it's true where I work, and Y2K were really as big a problem as everyone thought, then you'd expect to see some problems.. wouldn't you? I mean really, if we didn't manage to finish Y2K readiness, then shouldn't something have broken?
Practically nothing broke! We're talking about worldwide, here. I take this as evidence that Y2K was more hype than anything. I can't discount that the preparation probably fixed a great number of problems. But the fact that we didn't finish and that nothing broke suggests to me that, for the most part, nothing was broken in the first place.
The only downside to SFNB is that they have no local ATM's (unless you live in Atlanta) so if you'd like to avoid an ATM fee you have to find a local credit union ATM that doesn't charge fees.
Or you could find a local bank that offers free checking accounts. Usually this means that you don't generate any interest, but you don't pay for any of the services. Then set up an Automated Clearing House with SFNB. They will happily transfer, for free, money from your local account to your SFNB account on a regular basis.
I do essentially this. I direct deposit all of my pay checks to the local account. Then, I set up an ACH with SFNB to transfer all but a small amount on a regular basis (that coincides with receipt of my pay checks). The money that's left over, doesn't generate any interest but I can withdraw it from the any of the local bank's ATMs without incurring fees. The bulk of my money then goes to SFNB and I can get all the neat services that they offer.
The only drawbacks are 1) the lack of brick and mortar branches (which really isn't a problem unless you want something like a safe deposit box.) and 2) the lack of SFNB ATM's.
I address this issue by having my pay check direct deposited to a local bank with lots of ATM's, and then setting up an automated transfer of money into my SFNB account. I leave a little bit of money in the local bank so that I can get easy access to cash, then transfer most of it to SFNB so that I can pay bills, earn lots of interest, etc.
I'm fairly fond of Security First Network Bank. They have money market accounts that pay 4.5% APY, interest checking accounts (currently at 6%!) and 20 free electronic bill pays per month.
I know that they also have credit card accounts, but I don't use their credit card. Some time ago, they were setting up brokerage accounts, but I don't have one nor am I interested in one, so I don't know if it's the case anymore.
Hope this helps!
NOTE: I don't represent SFNB at all. I'm just a very satisfied customer.
The biggest problem with the unstable release in debian is that it changes so much. If you're stuck on an analog modem, daily 20Mb updates are tough to take.
I like to sometimes use bleeding edge stuff, where sometimes RPM (and I'm assuming DEB) would not be available. I know it is a real pain in the ass to deal with RPM's and your own compiled programs, is DEB pretty much the same in that respect?
There is a package in debian called debhelper. This assists in creating.debs, including determining dependancies. I package up everything that I want to install on my machine so that I know the dependancies. Learning to use debhelper is not that hard, either. Check out The Debian New Maintainer's Guide
I highly recommend packaging things up so that you can keep a good handle on your dependancies. Before I did this, I deleted some packages that I didn't know I needed to keep a program running. It was a real pain trying to figure out which one of those pkgs was the one that I needed to have back.
I'm really tempted to switch to debian, but there are times when I rely on linuxconf.
I don't use linuxconf, but it is available in the potato release of debian. I don't know how well it works, but presumably since it's in there, it must work at some level.
debian has update-rc.d, which makes life SO much better (i think redhat also has an initscript symlink manager, though)
It does. It's called chkconfig, and it's better than update-rc.d. With update-rc.d you add the priorities for start up and shutdown on the command line. So if you remove a script on day 1 that you want to reinstall on day 2, you have to remember what priority it was. With chkconfig a special comment line is added to the initscript that contains this information.
This is particularly important if there are certain things you want to run only in certain circumstances. A laptop, for example might not need NFS when it's not docked, so it should be removed. But when it's docked, you need to reinstall the initscript to start it up. With chkconfig, this process is somewhat cleaner IMHO.
Additionally, sndconfig has no equal in the debian world. I also like Xconfigurator from RedHat. But apt really rocks and far outweighs those few things.
There are two things that come with Red Hat, that are GPL'd, that I wish other distros would use: Xconfiguration and sndconfig. Those two programs are completely awesome!
I don't know if Corel's code is GPL'd or not, but I know that the Xconfigurator code under RedHat is GPL'd and that code ROCKS... if you have one of the known monitors.
Personally, I think the issue is driver code that every monitor manufacturer gives out on floppy disks that plug right into a window system. I think the idea that a previous poster had of trying to gather the appropriate info from those driver disks is a great idea.
Why not? Does Moore's law only apply to PC processors? Of course, not!
Moore's law applies generally to technology and its ability to improve speeds as time goes on. It applies to the ability to squeeze things into smaller and smaller spaces. Therefore it applies to the ability to squeeze more bits onto a physical piece of cable in a given slice of time. This is faster networking.
Honestly, per-meg pricing, IMHO, is THE way to go.
I respectfully disagree. First, (in the US) there are too many providers out there that offer flat rate pricing. So implementing usage pricing is next to impossible without all of them essentially agreeing simultaneously.
Second, Moore's Law suggests that performance will double every 18 months for the same cost. So as time goes on, that T3 will cost half as much to provide. 18 months after that, 1/4 as much. Sooner or later, someone will figure out that bandwidth availability is growing faster than the number of people getting connected. That person will make a killing as the only company to offer flat rate pricing. And then everyone else will be forced to offer it, too.
The only reason that AU and UK provide usage based pricing right now is that the cost to jump the pond is prohibative. Right now, most of the info on the net is in the US. You'll note that US users don't pay anything to get data from UK or AU. That's because for all practical purposes, the US gets very little data from them and provides huge amounts of data to them. As time goes on, that will even out, and they'll provide enough valuable data to merit a US company paying for a link to AU or UK, instead of the other way around. When that happens, prices will be alleviated in UK and AU, too.
The cost of technology always goes down over time. Usage based pricing of Internet services would not survive the market. I don't think it will ever happen in the US, and I think it will eventually become a dinosaur everywhere else, too.
If my very slight hypothesis is correct, and there were other factors at work aside from his suggestion, then i'll go on to say that if you don't like a law, you can't just go break it and say it's okay because it's a dumb law. You need to get it changed. Vote. Voice yourself. But don't try to be a martyr unless you're sure it will work right.
There are some laws that are unjust. And because these laws are unjust, generally speaking, it's considered morally correct to intentionally violate them. This is called civil disobedience.
But, just because you may be morally justified in breaking a law, this does not mean you are exempt from the legal consequences of breaking the law.
Voting is certainly one way to try and change a law, but it's not always effective when people are blind to the injustice of that law. At that point, your only choice to change the law is to break it so as to call attention to the injustice of the law. By doing so, though, you risk the consequences from breaking that law.
How does this relate to encryption? It seems obvious to me that encryption issues are more or less ignored by the general public. I've never read anything in the newspaper about encryption. I've never heard anything on NPR about it. Once, I saw something on C-SPAN on the issue. This issue has been hotly debated in tech circles for decades! Yet the general public is generally ignorant, and apathetic of the issue. There simply isn't enough general knowledge of the issue for lobbying and voting to be an effective tool for change. The only tool for change left may very well be civil disobedience. Which brings on the potential that you'll get investigated/harrassed/whatever by those who wish to continue this law.
When push comes to shove, who's willing to risk their careers, freedoms, and lifestyle for encryption? My honest answer is that I'd like to but I'll never know how I'll deal with federal persecution until it's happening to me. In the meantime, I'll continue to write my congressional representatives, and continue to use and advocate strong encryption, and continue to cast my vote appropriately. And if I export strong encryption, I will not feel remorse... until they catch me.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but wouldn't the argument be that the closed code that incorporated the GPL'd code continues to be closed? Even if they change it in a new release of code, the closed code violates, and continues to violate, the GPL... at least until that source code ir released?
It seems to me that the only way for them to stop violating the GPL is to release the source code which violated the GPL. It doesn't really matter that they change some other piece of code that doesn't violate the GPL. Once the code contains GPL'd code, they're stuck with that license.
And it shouldn't matter that they didn't fully read or understand the license which they were implicitly agreeing to when they downloaded the code, either. Certainly, I'll be held accountable for licenses that I don't fully read, but open anyway. Won't I?
Someone help me on this one. Am I missing something?
I don't know if this story is true or not, becuase you never can tell what a PR guy will say when called to task on the truth. Still the fact that Be is denying it should be taken, in lieu of other evidence, as the only credible account.
But if it is true, why not release BeOS to open source? I mean, if you're already giving up on the product, why not give it away, instead of throw it away. Not only does it cost you nothing (in comparison to throwing it away), you get good PR from doing it!
Sure would like to see that.
I'm surprised that my comment got moderated to "flamebait". It certainly wasn't intended that way.
Stability is a measure of whether or not the product does what you expect it to do. Which is to say that stability is inversely proportional to the number of outstanding bugs.
So what that ext2 doesn't offer journaling. What's important is how many more bugs does ReiserFS have? That makes ReiserFS less stable than ext2. And how many of those bugs in the ReiserFS code will cause the kernel to crash? That's the measure of stability that needs to be taken into account. From a top level point of view, yeah, ReiserFS may offer better reliability. But if it causes too many kernel crashes than it is less stable.
Or course, ReiserFS allows you to recover from all of those kernel crashes better than ext2. But that's not the point. Ext2 doesn't cause the kernel crashes in the first place, and is therefore more stable.
There are two problems with this. The first problem is that once its OK for the DOJ to start overseeing MS, they will have the ability, if not the license, to oversee the entire industry. I don't think that's a good thing.
Second problem is that even if the DOJ limits their focus exclusively to MS, the DOJ can make mistakes that harm the consumer. DOJ oversight dosen't inherently increase the choices that a consumer has. What I want is to see consumers having choice, and let market forces improve the situation.
This is why I think a breakup is needed. On the other hand, a breakup is shortsighted. It only deals with the OS. If MS is smart, then they take all of their applications and port them to everything, and their OS drops off the face of the planet (one can hope!). So now we're not tied to the OS, but we're still tied to all of their applications.. like IE. However you break off IE at this point, MS will work hard to make sure that it is everwhere (on linux, bsd, mac, etc). And then they can be in the exact same situation they're in now, only instead of forcing a crappy OS on us, they'll force us into their crappy web server.
I don't think a long term solution to this is easy. I do think that a breakup and source code release is the best first step.
The irony of this is that, looking at the wording very carefully, it might be true.
Of course the article would have you believe that having an MCSE is a way of demonstrating highly skilled knowledge of technology.
IMHO, it's just not true. Over the last 4 years, I've interviewed lots of candidates for lots of different technical positions w/in my company. During that time, I've never run into someone with an MCSE that could do anything outside of point and click. I have no doubt that there are some very talented MCSE's out there. I hope someday to meet one. My experience so far would suggets that MCSE is a worthless certification.
Wanna prove it to yourself? See how many MCSE's can answer this questsion:
I'd wager that the majority of them don't mention anything about NS records, but instead describe how to manipulate the MS provided wizard.
My colleagues and I call them "clickers", because that's the only way that can work with a computer.
Does anyone know any pointers to the security surrounding the use of these cards? Specifically, if I use one of these setups can someone who happens to be w/in 1500 feet of me now snoop my communications? I know I could set up freeswan but I would like to know if I have to.
Curious?
- Mark
Well, since you asked, I do. But that's not to my credit, it's to the credit of my distribution (debian) that makes doing this extremely easy by integrating network based updates into the distribution.
This sort of ease of updating doesn't seem to be exclusive to Debian. MS does it for Win98, too. I think that Red Hat offers this, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it's only available as a for pay service.
That's not entirely true. AOL also sells advertising that they collect revenue on when they pop up those annoying windows. I would hazard to guess that they leverage the number of users they have in other ways than just advertising.
Remember, if you take AOL's market cap ($146 billion) and divide it by the number of users they have (20 million), you come up with $7300 per user! This to me is a clear sign that AOL sells itself in terms of the influence that it can have over its users, and the market is buying it.
And that's where the lion's share of AOL's wealth comes from. $20/mo * 20 mil = 4 bil. The monthly fee is only 2% of that company's worth. The monthly bill is not what they're going after. They want eyeballs and lots of 'em.
I don't understand the preoccupation that people seem to have with the idea that a split up microsoft could be worth more than a whole microsoft. Who cares?
The point in splitting up Microsoft is not to make the resulting companies less successful than the parent. It's to keep the interaction of those individual businesses fair, so that MS Windows corp has to compete with {Linux,BeOS,MacOS,etc} on its own merits. Not on the fact that it can tie MS Applications corp's products into its products, and force MS Applications corp not to port to any other environment.
I just keep thinking of how cool it would be if suddenly MS Applications corp decided that it was in their financial interest to port to {Linux,BeOS,etc}. In such a situation, I *WANT* that company to succeed, and to be a pioneer in encouraging other applications companies in porting to {insert non-Windows OS here}.
I agree that this is true. However, isn't this a window of oppurtunity? Don't we have a chance, now to let the cat out of the bag, so that whatever regulations change later, it's too late?
Wouldn't it be a good idea to start exporting like crazy every implementation of everything you can think of related to encryption? That way if the DOC does pull the football back, it'll really be too late. Another football will already have been kicked.
thots?
In general I agree with this. But I think that you can't ignore the fact that some of the Y2K hype just didn't pan out. Most of the reports about Y2K readiness seemed to suggest that the vast majority of businesses/goverments/whatever had not come anywhere near to completing their Y2K preparations.
If that's true, and I know it's true where I work, and Y2K were really as big a problem as everyone thought, then you'd expect to see some problems.. wouldn't you? I mean really, if we didn't manage to finish Y2K readiness, then shouldn't something have broken?
Practically nothing broke! We're talking about worldwide, here. I take this as evidence that Y2K was more hype than anything. I can't discount that the preparation probably fixed a great number of problems. But the fact that we didn't finish and that nothing broke suggests to me that, for the most part, nothing was broken in the first place.
$.02
Or you could find a local bank that offers free checking accounts. Usually this means that you don't generate any interest, but you don't pay for any of the services. Then set up an Automated Clearing House with SFNB. They will happily transfer, for free, money from your local account to your SFNB account on a regular basis.
I do essentially this. I direct deposit all of my pay checks to the local account. Then, I set up an ACH with SFNB to transfer all but a small amount on a regular basis (that coincides with receipt of my pay checks). The money that's left over, doesn't generate any interest but I can withdraw it from the any of the local bank's ATMs without incurring fees. The bulk of my money then goes to SFNB and I can get all the neat services that they offer.
I address this issue by having my pay check direct deposited to a local bank with lots of ATM's, and then setting up an automated transfer of money into my SFNB account. I leave a little bit of money in the local bank so that I can get easy access to cash, then transfer most of it to SFNB so that I can pay bills, earn lots of interest, etc.
I know that they also have credit card accounts, but I don't use their credit card. Some time ago, they were setting up brokerage accounts, but I don't have one nor am I interested in one, so I don't know if it's the case anymore.
Hope this helps!
NOTE: I don't represent SFNB at all. I'm just a very satisfied customer.
I'm curious when/if you plan on releasing a newer version of the slash code? How far behind is the stuff that you've released?
The biggest problem with the unstable release in debian is that it changes so much. If you're stuck on an analog modem, daily 20Mb updates are tough to take.
There is a package in debian called debhelper. This assists in creating .debs, including determining dependancies. I package up everything that I want to install on my machine so that I know the dependancies. Learning to use debhelper is not that hard, either. Check out The Debian New Maintainer's Guide
I highly recommend packaging things up so that you can keep a good handle on your dependancies. Before I did this, I deleted some packages that I didn't know I needed to keep a program running. It was a real pain trying to figure out which one of those pkgs was the one that I needed to have back.
I don't use linuxconf, but it is available in the potato release of debian. I don't know how well it works, but presumably since it's in there, it must work at some level.
It does. It's called chkconfig, and it's better than update-rc.d. With update-rc.d you add the priorities for start up and shutdown on the command line. So if you remove a script on day 1 that you want to reinstall on day 2, you have to remember what priority it was. With chkconfig a special comment line is added to the initscript that contains this information.
This is particularly important if there are certain things you want to run only in certain circumstances. A laptop, for example might not need NFS when it's not docked, so it should be removed. But when it's docked, you need to reinstall the initscript to start it up. With chkconfig, this process is somewhat cleaner IMHO.
Additionally, sndconfig has no equal in the debian world. I also like Xconfigurator from RedHat. But apt really rocks and far outweighs those few things.
There are two things that come with Red Hat, that are GPL'd, that I wish other distros would use: Xconfiguration and sndconfig. Those two programs are completely awesome!
I don't know if Corel's code is GPL'd or not, but I know that the Xconfigurator code under RedHat is GPL'd and that code ROCKS... if you have one of the known monitors.
Personally, I think the issue is driver code that every monitor manufacturer gives out on floppy disks that plug right into a window system. I think the idea that a previous poster had of trying to gather the appropriate info from those driver disks is a great idea.
Why not? Does Moore's law only apply to PC processors? Of course, not!
Moore's law applies generally to technology and its ability to improve speeds as time goes on. It applies to the ability to squeeze things into smaller and smaller spaces. Therefore it applies to the ability to squeeze more bits onto a physical piece of cable in a given slice of time. This is faster networking.
I respectfully disagree. First, (in the US) there are too many providers out there that offer flat rate pricing. So implementing usage pricing is next to impossible without all of them essentially agreeing simultaneously.
Second, Moore's Law suggests that performance will double every 18 months for the same cost. So as time goes on, that T3 will cost half as much to provide. 18 months after that, 1/4 as much. Sooner or later, someone will figure out that bandwidth availability is growing faster than the number of people getting connected. That person will make a killing as the only company to offer flat rate pricing. And then everyone else will be forced to offer it, too.
The only reason that AU and UK provide usage based pricing right now is that the cost to jump the pond is prohibative. Right now, most of the info on the net is in the US. You'll note that US users don't pay anything to get data from UK or AU. That's because for all practical purposes, the US gets very little data from them and provides huge amounts of data to them. As time goes on, that will even out, and they'll provide enough valuable data to merit a US company paying for a link to AU or UK, instead of the other way around. When that happens, prices will be alleviated in UK and AU, too.
The cost of technology always goes down over time. Usage based pricing of Internet services would not survive the market. I don't think it will ever happen in the US, and I think it will eventually become a dinosaur everywhere else, too.
There are some laws that are unjust. And because these laws are unjust, generally speaking, it's considered morally correct to intentionally violate them. This is called civil disobedience.
But, just because you may be morally justified in breaking a law, this does not mean you are exempt from the legal consequences of breaking the law.
Voting is certainly one way to try and change a law, but it's not always effective when people are blind to the injustice of that law. At that point, your only choice to change the law is to break it so as to call attention to the injustice of the law. By doing so, though, you risk the consequences from breaking that law.
How does this relate to encryption? It seems obvious to me that encryption issues are more or less ignored by the general public. I've never read anything in the newspaper about encryption. I've never heard anything on NPR about it. Once, I saw something on C-SPAN on the issue. This issue has been hotly debated in tech circles for decades! Yet the general public is generally ignorant, and apathetic of the issue. There simply isn't enough general knowledge of the issue for lobbying and voting to be an effective tool for change. The only tool for change left may very well be civil disobedience. Which brings on the potential that you'll get investigated/harrassed/whatever by those who wish to continue this law.
When push comes to shove, who's willing to risk their careers, freedoms, and lifestyle for encryption? My honest answer is that I'd like to but I'll never know how I'll deal with federal persecution until it's happening to me. In the meantime, I'll continue to write my congressional representatives, and continue to use and advocate strong encryption, and continue to cast my vote appropriately. And if I export strong encryption, I will not feel remorse... until they catch me.