The analogy to land ownership is a good one. The basic problem with the patent system today is similar to that of a dysfunctional system of land tenure.
In imperfectly-settled systems of land tenure, people will invest substantial amounts of time and money into improving a tract of land, only to have the fruits of their labors taken by previously unknown (and sometimes unknowable) claimants to ownership of the land. This is quite unfair, and acts as a disincentive to progress.
Similarly, the granting of patents on obvious and non-novel 'inventions', and the prevalence of 'submarine' patents (patents granted after years of secrecy) all tend to retard progress by instilling the fear that some patentee will pop out of nowhere and steal the rewards due to real innovators, as opposed to those skilled in paper shuffling.
In essence, the opposition to bogus patents is an affirmation of property rights. The worker should enjoy the fruits of his labor, and not have it stolen from him by the arcane processes of a fusty, hidebound bureaucracy.
It's almost certain that some malicious people will take considerable trouble to exploit this, given the extremely wide distribution of sendmail servers on the Internet.
It is true that, as has been mentioned, sendmail runs on many different environments, and therefore one exploit will not hit every server. However, exploits for the most common environments (e.g., Red Hat, Solaris) will almost certainly be seen eventually. The difficulty of exploitation will only buy us time (and perhaps not much of that). When the exploits are out there, we'll see how well people have patched their servers. (My prediction: not well enough.)
Q: How many Frenchmen does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: That is a stupid question, reflecting the profound and abysmal ignorance of every American regarding Europe in general, and France in particular. And besides, THAT'S NOT FUNNY!
Actually, an alternate mailbox does solve the problem.
You can make up a 'custom' address (e.g. zathrus-amazon@example.com) for autoresponders from each such company you do business with, and put mail to these addresses on an automatic whitelist. If one of these addresses gets sold to a spammer (it's never happened to me yet), you just kill it and end your relationship with that vendor.
People don't assume this. What they do assume is that, by and large, people who try to get money from US residents are actually situated in the USA, regardless of where the e-email might have originated. Even those who are not in the USA will mostly use a US agency to get their money. That is their Achilles heel: Follow The Money.
Stop the flow of money from US residents, and you will be effectively making everyone in the world obey US law, with respect to spamming within and into the USA.
I was interested to read in the article that FTTH is utterly impossible now, and may be impossible for the next 100 years. While it may be impossible for today's commercial telecom providers, which have to satisfy Wall Street's ultra-short-term financial perspective, municipal utilities can afford to take a longer view.
FTTH is real, and it is growing. Although it is near the cutting edge of technology now, that edge is moving forward at light speed (sorry, I couldn't resist). There are dozens of FTTH systems in the USA right now, and many more being considered. In Concord, MA, a new system is being proposed for a vote in April. Although the question of FTTH vs. HFC (copper) is still a close one, the long-term view must favor FTTH as an almost "future-proof" technology.
[BTW, if you live in Concord, go to Town Meeting in April and vote YES on Article 26!]
"You go anywhere and people speak English because we are big tourists."
No, they speak English because the tourists don't speak any other languages.
No, it's because English is the new lingua franca. Anyone who wants to get along in international business had better learn English. Even businessmen with no customers in anglophone countries learn English, because it's the new common tongue. I once spoke with an anti-aircraft artilleryman in the Finnish military. To learn about the complex systems his unit uses, he had go to classes where they were manufactured: in Russia and France. What language do you think the classes were held in? English, of course!
This is not to say that Americans should not learn more foreign languages (I myself speak French, German and Italian), but we are often in the enviable position of being able to expect other people to learn our language. This is, of course, unfair, but it's also reality.
It's hardly original with Bill. For example, in Robert Heinlein's 1966 book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", he outlines a similar scheme. In Heinlein's book, he deals with actual visitors at the door, but the basic concepts (pay for interruption, and only collect if the interruption was unwarranted) are the same.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if the idea even predated Heinlein.
Well, the NRA certainly tries to uphold its version of the Second Amendment. In some circles, it seems like the Second Amendment, and the NRA's interpretation thereof, were handed down from Mt. Sinai just after the Ten Commandments. However, you might keep in mind that some people think that the phrase
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state
is just as important as the phrase
the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
I and many others believe that some measures are quite reasonable in supporting a "well regulated" (i.e., well-disciplined*) militia:
universal registration of guns, similar to the registration of cars now, and
universal licensing of those who keep and bear arms, similar to driver licensing now.
In spite of what the NRA says, these measures would be upholding the Constitution, as it is actually written. I don't expect you to believe this, since closed-mindedness on this subject is rampant, but please at least recognize that reasonable people believe differently than you, and that your views are not necessarily as "moderate" as you think. --- *see the Oxford English Dictionary for contemporary citation of "well-regulated"
She is a spammer. She says that she is using an opt-in list, and you believe her? The WSJ reporter was gullible enough to repeat her claim, but I've seen hundreds of spams that bill themselves as using an 'opt-in' address list, when that is a provably false claim for that e-mail address.
Spammers lie. When she says that she honors 'unsubscribe' messages, she probably means that she doesn't use their addresses herself any more. That doesn't mean that she won't sell them for a premium as 'fresh' validated addresses, ensuring a new flood of spams to the hapless victim.
FUD? I wish. Nothing would please me more than to see the 8-VSB system live up to the claims of its proponents. For all that the spectrum giveaway was a colossal injustice, we've made our bed and now must lie in it.
Unfortunately, my own personal observations at home (and I'm not living in the urban canyons, but in a typical suburb) have soured me on the future of 8-VSB. I hope I'm wrong.
Well, bully for you. In my suburban Boston home, the best I can get is spotty DTV reception, some of the time. I live in a prime reception area, and have a rooftop antenna with rotator. I do not expect that I will ever get reliable OTA (over-the-air) HDTV.
I've come to the conclusion that free OTA HDTV is merely a chimera, a figleaf to allow the Congress to give away hugely valuable spectrum to its friends in the broadcast industry. Now that the broadcasters have their hands on new full 6-MHz channels (free of charge), all this HDTV silliness will be forgotten, and the broadcasters will eventually sell their ill-gotten excess digital capacity to the highest bidder.
However, the broadcasters may be hoist by their own petard. In order to swindle the taxpayers out of more spectrum, the broadcasters had to pretend to support OTA HDTV. They then had to live with HDTV bitrate requirements in the modulation system design, ultimately resulting in 8-VSB. Now the gift from their Congressional pals may be worth substantially less then they expected, if it's hobbled by a marginally functional modulation scheme.
Well, if all spam is indistinguishable from the legitimate spamlike messages you want to see, then no filter will help you.
However, it seems more likely that a large proportion of spam is distinguishable from mail you want to see. It's quite plausible that you don't want to see messages about nympho sluts, or penis enlargement, or breast enlargement (or at least not all three), and that a naive Bayesian filter could easily distinguish these and other spams from mail you do want to see.
Microsoft does not have "Windows" tied up trademark wise. They have it registered, but that only gives them a presumption of validity. Lindows can and has rebutted that presumption in court. Even a regstration cannot transform a generic term into a valid trademark.
'Statutory?' In the USA, the relevant wage and hour statute exempts a large number of tech workers, so for them there is no 'statutory full-time workweek'.
The more important point is that you assume that overtime without overtime pay is ipso facto exploitation. Suppose someone offered you a job at $1,000,000/year, but the job would occasionally require 45 hours/week with no overtime pay. Would that be exploitation? If not, then you're just quibbling about whether the salary is high enough.
The huge up-front expenses are not really the problem for XM and Sirius, since they are now sunk costs. As Sirius stockholders are now finding out to their chagrin, such sunk costs can we wiped away with the stroke of a pen. These costs would be a big deal for anyone who wanted to build yet another new satellite radio network, but I don't think that's going to be a problem any time soon.
To just stay in business (as opposed to saving the shareholders' investments), all the satellite radio companies have to do is cover their operating expenses, although that seems difficult enough so far.
While a claim of uniqueness can only be proven by an exhaustive survey of world legal systems, one might more easily chanacterize the USA as "exceptional" in the degree to which it protects the freedom of the press.
The Swedish Fundamental Law is an illustrative example. While a good law for physical media, TV, and radio, AFAIK it does not apply to the Internet. Until ACLU v. Reno, the First Amendment didn't necessarily apply to the Intenet either. In that case, the US Supreme Court extended full protection to the Internet. While important, this decision wasn't really suprising, since it merely extended the doctrine established in a long line of free-speech/free-press cases.
Another contrast is with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While it has a valuable guarantee of freedom of expression, that guarantee has a huge loophole. Via the "notwithstanding" clause, the Charter can be bypassed by a simple legislative vote every 5 years. This sort of thing is inconceivable in the US system.
Another illustration is in the divergent development of libel law in the UK and US. Starting from the same common-law base, US libel law (under the influence of the First Amendment) has diverged so much from that of the UK that, upon learning how UK libel law works, and how much it impinges on freedom of expression, Americans are either amused (if they are not directly involved) or aghast (if they are).
Since I'm lazy, I make no claim that US guarantees of freedom of expression are unique, but I do clain that they are distinctive.
The fact that the trial judge in the deCSS case was stupid is not of great concern. The fact that two appeals-court judges agreed with him is.
Because of the appeals-court decision, DMCA censorship is now the law of the land in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. Unless a foreign site could somehow prevent access from those states (a difficult proposition), the only way to be really safe is to exclude the entire US, as these people have done.
How can you be sure that RIAA is right? The 512(h) subpoena depends on a 512(c) notification, which only deals with
...infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider...
If the supboena depends on a bogus notification (because the allegedly infringing copies do not reside on a system or network controlled by Verizon), how can it have any validity?
I'm afraid that Brody is slanting the case a bit. It's interesting that she says
in a major report last week, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies emphasized the importance of balance of nutrients...
while the report actually says
The lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life is apparently zero, provided that adequate amounts of protein and fat are consumed. However, the amount of dietary carbohydrate that provides for optimal health in humans is unknown.
The report goes on to develop minimum carbohydrate reccomendations explicitly based on the need to avoid ketosis. Now, that may well be a worthwhile goal, and there are clearly some problems associated with ketosis (such as kidney stones), but one can hardly use that report as another, independent reason for rejecting high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets.
I am awed by your rigorous, scientific analysis of the question. After reading your comment, I see that I must be a figment of my own imagination. I exercise over an hour a day, and don't eat any of the disgusting "foods" you mention, yet the gov't guidelines label me quite conclusively as "obese".
But don't let that stop you from your sweeping generalizations. It's so much easier than actually thinking.
The real key to all of this is that people are different. Something that works for you may not work for me. (In fact, you realize this when you comment on your own metabolism.)
Myself, I exercise over an hour a day, and eat a healthy diet, but I'm still fat (less fat than I would be otherwise, but still fat). Yet some writers treat fat people as if they were filthy scum with zero willpower and no motivation to better themselves.
It's REALLY annoying when someone assumes that if something's trivially easy for them, it should be trivially easy for anyone else.
I'm sorry, but I didn't see the part of the TiVo agreement that makes the mere allegation of copyright infringement grounds for immediate termination (as the SonicBlue agreement does).
Without this, the TiVo agreement is not 'identical'.
I see this argument (offshore spammers are immune to anti-spam laws) in the US as well.
The flaw in the argument is that while the spammer may be offshore, the commercial transaction it solicits is often domestic. (Does 'domestic' apply to intra-EU things? Is there another word to use?) So, even if you can't get the offshore spammer directly, you can quite possibly get the business it's trying to promote.
I'm afraid you're behind the times. The Congress, in its infinite wisdom (and its infinite solicitude toward the TV stations that decide whether they the voters get to see them or not), has decreed that each TV broadcaster has the option to either:
force the local cable company to carry it, or
prohibit the cable company from carrying it, unless it pays the station a mutually-agreed fee, or other agreed compensation.
Small independent stations generally take the first option, while big network stations take the second. Therefore, you are probably already paying the networks from your cable bill, via their affiliated stations.
Slashdot Mirror
The analogy to land ownership is a good one. The basic problem with the patent system today is similar to that of a dysfunctional system of land tenure.
In imperfectly-settled systems of land tenure, people will invest substantial amounts of time and money into improving a tract of land, only to have the fruits of their labors taken by previously unknown (and sometimes unknowable) claimants to ownership of the land. This is quite unfair, and acts as a disincentive to progress.
Similarly, the granting of patents on obvious and non-novel 'inventions', and the prevalence of 'submarine' patents (patents granted after years of secrecy) all tend to retard progress by instilling the fear that some patentee will pop out of nowhere and steal the rewards due to real innovators, as opposed to those skilled in paper shuffling.
In essence, the opposition to bogus patents is an affirmation of property rights. The worker should enjoy the fruits of his labor, and not have it stolen from him by the arcane processes of a fusty, hidebound bureaucracy.
It's almost certain that some malicious people will take considerable trouble to exploit this, given the extremely wide distribution of sendmail servers on the Internet.
It is true that, as has been mentioned, sendmail runs on many different environments, and therefore one exploit will not hit every server. However, exploits for the most common environments (e.g., Red Hat, Solaris) will almost certainly be seen eventually. The difficulty of exploitation will only buy us time (and perhaps not much of that). When the exploits are out there, we'll see how well people have patched their servers. (My prediction: not well enough.)
Q: How many Frenchmen does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: That is a stupid question, reflecting the profound and abysmal ignorance of every American regarding Europe in general, and France in particular. And besides, THAT'S NOT FUNNY!
Actually, an alternate mailbox does solve the problem.
You can make up a 'custom' address (e.g. zathrus-amazon@example.com) for autoresponders from each such company you do business with, and put mail to these addresses on an automatic whitelist. If one of these addresses gets sold to a spammer (it's never happened to me yet), you just kill it and end your relationship with that vendor.
People don't assume this. What they do assume is that, by and large, people who try to get money from US residents are actually situated in the USA, regardless of where the e-email might have originated. Even those who are not in the USA will mostly use a US agency to get their money. That is their Achilles heel: Follow The Money.
Stop the flow of money from US residents, and you will be effectively making everyone in the world obey US law, with respect to spamming within and into the USA.
I was interested to read in the article that FTTH is utterly impossible now, and may be impossible for the next 100 years. While it may be impossible for today's commercial telecom providers, which have to satisfy Wall Street's ultra-short-term financial perspective, municipal utilities can afford to take a longer view.
FTTH is real, and it is growing. Although it is near the cutting edge of technology now, that edge is moving forward at light speed (sorry, I couldn't resist). There are dozens of FTTH systems in the USA right now, and many more being considered. In Concord, MA, a new system is being proposed for a vote in April. Although the question of FTTH vs. HFC (copper) is still a close one, the long-term view must favor FTTH as an almost "future-proof" technology.
[BTW, if you live in Concord, go to Town Meeting in April and vote YES on Article 26!]
"You go anywhere and people speak English because we are big tourists."
No, they speak English because the tourists don't speak any other languages.
No, it's because English is the new lingua franca. Anyone who wants to get along in international business had better learn English. Even businessmen with no customers in anglophone countries learn English, because it's the new common tongue. I once spoke with an anti-aircraft artilleryman in the Finnish military. To learn about the complex systems his unit uses, he had go to classes where they were manufactured: in Russia and France. What language do you think the classes were held in? English, of course!
This is not to say that Americans should not learn more foreign languages (I myself speak French, German and Italian), but we are often in the enviable position of being able to expect other people to learn our language. This is, of course, unfair, but it's also reality.
It's hardly original with Bill. For example, in Robert Heinlein's 1966 book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", he outlines a similar scheme. In Heinlein's book, he deals with actual visitors at the door, but the basic concepts (pay for interruption, and only collect if the interruption was unwarranted) are the same.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if the idea even predated Heinlein.
is just as important as the phrase
I and many others believe that some measures are quite reasonable in supporting a "well regulated" (i.e., well-disciplined*) militia:
In spite of what the NRA says, these measures would be upholding the Constitution, as it is actually written. I don't expect you to believe this, since closed-mindedness on this subject is rampant, but please at least recognize that reasonable people believe differently than you, and that your views are not necessarily as "moderate" as you think.
---
*see the Oxford English Dictionary for contemporary citation of "well-regulated"
She is a spammer. She says that she is using an opt-in list, and you believe her? The WSJ reporter was gullible enough to repeat her claim, but I've seen hundreds of spams that bill themselves as using an 'opt-in' address list, when that is a provably false claim for that e-mail address.
Spammers lie. When she says that she honors 'unsubscribe' messages, she probably means that she doesn't use their addresses herself any more. That doesn't mean that she won't sell them for a premium as 'fresh' validated addresses, ensuring a new flood of spams to the hapless victim.
FUD? I wish. Nothing would please me more than to see the 8-VSB system live up to the claims of its proponents. For all that the spectrum giveaway was a colossal injustice, we've made our bed and now must lie in it.
Unfortunately, my own personal observations at home (and I'm not living in the urban canyons, but in a typical suburb) have soured me on the future of 8-VSB. I hope I'm wrong.
Well, bully for you. In my suburban Boston home, the best I can get is spotty DTV reception, some of the time. I live in a prime reception area, and have a rooftop antenna with rotator. I do not expect that I will ever get reliable OTA (over-the-air) HDTV.
I've come to the conclusion that free OTA HDTV is merely a chimera, a figleaf to allow the Congress to give away hugely valuable spectrum to its friends in the broadcast industry. Now that the broadcasters have their hands on new full 6-MHz channels (free of charge), all this HDTV silliness will be forgotten, and the broadcasters will eventually sell their ill-gotten excess digital capacity to the highest bidder.
However, the broadcasters may be hoist by their own petard. In order to swindle the taxpayers out of more spectrum, the broadcasters had to pretend to support OTA HDTV. They then had to live with HDTV bitrate requirements in the modulation system design, ultimately resulting in 8-VSB. Now the gift from their Congressional pals may be worth substantially less then they expected, if it's hobbled by a marginally functional modulation scheme.
Well, if all spam is indistinguishable from the legitimate spamlike messages you want to see, then no filter will help you.
However, it seems more likely that a large proportion of spam is distinguishable from mail you want to see. It's quite plausible that you don't want to see messages about nympho sluts, or penis enlargement, or breast enlargement (or at least not all three), and that a naive Bayesian filter could easily distinguish these and other spams from mail you do want to see.
Microsoft does not have "Windows" tied up trademark wise. They have it registered, but that only gives them a presumption of validity. Lindows can and has rebutted that presumption in court. Even a regstration cannot transform a generic term into a valid trademark.
'Statutory?' In the USA, the relevant wage and hour statute exempts a large number of tech workers, so for them there is no 'statutory full-time workweek'.
The more important point is that you assume that overtime without overtime pay is ipso facto exploitation. Suppose someone offered you a job at $1,000,000/year, but the job would occasionally require 45 hours/week with no overtime pay. Would that be exploitation? If not, then you're just quibbling about whether the salary is high enough.
The huge up-front expenses are not really the problem for XM and Sirius, since they are now sunk costs. As Sirius stockholders are now finding out to their chagrin, such sunk costs can we wiped away with the stroke of a pen. These costs would be a big deal for anyone who wanted to build yet another new satellite radio network, but I don't think that's going to be a problem any time soon.
To just stay in business (as opposed to saving the shareholders' investments), all the satellite radio companies have to do is cover their operating expenses, although that seems difficult enough so far.
While a claim of uniqueness can only be proven by an exhaustive survey of world legal systems, one might more easily chanacterize the USA as "exceptional" in the degree to which it protects the freedom of the press.
The Swedish Fundamental Law is an illustrative example. While a good law for physical media, TV, and radio, AFAIK it does not apply to the Internet. Until ACLU v. Reno, the First Amendment didn't necessarily apply to the Intenet either. In that case, the US Supreme Court extended full protection to the Internet. While important, this decision wasn't really suprising, since it merely extended the doctrine established in a long line of free-speech/free-press cases.
Another contrast is with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While it has a valuable guarantee of freedom of expression, that guarantee has a huge loophole. Via the "notwithstanding" clause, the Charter can be bypassed by a simple legislative vote every 5 years. This sort of thing is inconceivable in the US system.
Another illustration is in the divergent development of libel law in the UK and US. Starting from the same common-law base, US libel law (under the influence of the First Amendment) has diverged so much from that of the UK that, upon learning how UK libel law works, and how much it impinges on freedom of expression, Americans are either amused (if they are not directly involved) or aghast (if they are).
Since I'm lazy, I make no claim that US guarantees of freedom of expression are unique, but I do clain that they are distinctive.
The fact that the trial judge in the deCSS case was stupid is not of great concern. The fact that two appeals-court judges
agreed with him is.
Because of the appeals-court decision, DMCA censorship is now the law of the land in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. Unless a foreign site could somehow prevent access from those states (a difficult proposition), the only way to be really safe is to exclude the entire US, as these people have done.
If the supboena depends on a bogus notification (because the allegedly infringing copies do not reside on a system or network controlled by Verizon), how can it have any validity?
while the report actually says
The report goes on to develop minimum carbohydrate reccomendations explicitly based on the need to avoid ketosis. Now, that may well be a worthwhile goal, and there are clearly some problems associated with ketosis (such as kidney stones), but one can hardly use that report as another, independent reason for rejecting high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets.
I am awed by your rigorous, scientific analysis of the question. After reading your comment, I see that I must be a figment of my own imagination. I exercise over an hour a day, and don't eat any of the disgusting "foods" you mention, yet the gov't guidelines label me quite conclusively as "obese".
But don't let that stop you from your sweeping generalizations. It's so much easier than actually thinking.
The real key to all of this is that people are different. Something that works for you may not work for me. (In fact, you realize this when you comment on your own metabolism.)
Myself, I exercise over an hour a day, and eat a healthy diet, but I'm still fat (less fat than I would be otherwise, but still fat). Yet some writers treat fat people as if they were filthy scum with zero willpower and no motivation to better themselves.
It's REALLY annoying when someone assumes that if something's trivially easy for them, it should be trivially easy for anyone else.
I'm sorry, but I didn't see the part of the TiVo agreement that makes the mere allegation of copyright infringement grounds for immediate termination (as the SonicBlue agreement does).
Without this, the TiVo agreement is not 'identical'.
I see this argument (offshore spammers are immune to anti-spam laws) in the US as well.
The flaw in the argument is that while the spammer may be offshore, the commercial transaction it solicits is often domestic. (Does 'domestic' apply to intra-EU things? Is there another word to use?) So, even if you can't get the offshore spammer directly, you can quite possibly get the business it's trying to promote.
Small independent stations generally take the first option, while big network stations take the second. Therefore, you are probably already paying the networks from your cable bill, via their affiliated stations.