Just to tell you where the FCC really stands on VoIP... on the same "The Screen Savers go to Washington DC" special that the parent poster mentions, Mike Powell and Leo Laporte roamed a Best Buy store talking about HDTV, WiFi, and such... and Powell convinced Leo Laporte to buy the Vonage starter kit that they were selling. Powell loves the technology and uses it himself.
In general, Powell's stand on most technologies is that the FCC should try to stay out of their way as much as possible, while still trying to maintain the application-level quality of services that we presently enjoy.
The US Government isn't based entirely on the concept of "majority rules". There's a secondary concept that the minority must also be given rights, even if that's not what the "majority" wants.
Basically, the market can decide if Playboy Radio on XM is something they want to support or not... but nobody is forced to listen to that, you can't even accidently tune it on an XM device unless you're paying a monthly fee and then an extra monthly fee for that one channel.
"Broadcast" radio, as in the AM and FM bands, is a whole different venue altogether. That's a very public space because the receiver technology for those bands requires no authorizations and are very cheap and common. It's presumed kids could be watching, which is why there's content regulation there.
Freedom of speech gives you the right to express whatever you want, but it doesn't promise you the means with which to express anything. If you speak in private, you can definitely say anything you want to whomever's there to listen. However, if you are performing in front of a public audience, your presentation had better conform with the standards of the venue or you'll be pulled from the stage...
If there was no FCC licenses, then RF bandwidth would purely be on a first-come, first-serve basis under the common laws system that the courts were ironing out.
The problem is, in order for a court to shut down an offending station, that offending station would already have to be on the air and causing the pre-existing station a problem such that the pre-existing station deems it worth going to court, and the problem would continue until the case is heard.
The FCC system requires that those who want to broadcast have to ask for permission before starting. Anybody caught broadcasting a strong signal who didn't ask permission first is presumed to be a troublemaker instantly, and therefore is worthy of being shut down before we figure out what exactly you're bothering.
Any consumer electronics that uses RF signals has the potential to be mis-manufactured to the point that it becomes a strong unintentional radio station. Part of the FCC's responsiblity is to get such things off the market immediately so that the more important users of the RF space don't get bothered by those things going into mass production... imagine the mess we'd have if D-Link put out a WiFi router that bled signal so badly it put noise on the Air Traffic Control channels. Those things might be everywhere before people realize what's going on if the FCC wasn't keeping an eye on those things.
The FCC is a division of the executive branch of the US Government, which means its job is not to make laws, but to enforce and administer laws passed by the legislative branch.
FCC rules come in when the law doesn't make a definitive instruction, but tells the FCC to use its rulemaking process to make the call, and review its own decision periodically.
The FCC only has the powers Congress gives it. If you don't like what they're doing with it, tell Congress to change the law to override their mistake.
The USPS is well aware of that concept. That's why they have a Mail Recovery Centers (commonly called a Dead Letter Office) to which anything that has an invalid delivery address, and either a missing or invalid return address goes to.
These centers are the only part of the postal system allowed to open letters intentionally... as the privacy concern goes out the window in one last ditch attempt to try to figure out where it should be going. Any property that ends up there and has no address indications inside ends up going up for auction. Some charities take the letters addressed to Santa to find ones that indicate particularly needy families and grant wishes.
Snail mail just can't drop packets on the floor as easily...
The "partern" is a series of circles with the correct proportial relationship between the distance and the diameters of the circles. Therefore, you don't have to know what the 2008 currency design will look like, instead you can presume that the 2008 series designers are going to follow the patern that the code was already designed to notice.
The only way you could arrive at a T-Shirt with the five-circle patern is if you were intentionally starting with it and working around it. The formula for the patern is so complex you're not likely to hit it by happenstance.
The authorities would rather prevent the crime than catch the people who did it after they've done it. The hope is that the college student who casually copies a $20 bill to go see a movie will realize it's not that easy and then give up.
Sure, the determined copier of $1,000,000 worth of cash won't be stopped by this... but that's not the goal here. The goal is to stop the little guys so that more resources are free to go after the big guys in other ways.
Purely open source graphics software would be illegal, but you could just include in the license terms that you can't modify the section of code that calls the black-box library... that'd fix the legal problems right there. Sure, people could hack around, but then they've got an extra offense to go on top of the already illegal counterfieting act.
The true test would be how likely a consumer equipment made $20 bill would be accepted by randomly selected store cashiers among their normal traffic. Sure, such people should know to look for the stripe and other security features in a real $20, but among the hustle of their other business, would they think to check all the bills in a stack of seven handed to them for a $130 order?
A counterfeit bill doesn't have to be accepted by a bank to be profitable... the counterfeiter can pass the bill to any cash-accepting businesses to get value out of it.
Attacker signs up for an account with Foo ISP, and then intentionally sends five virus-attachment e-mails to Bar.com. Foo's e-mail servers are suddenly blocked from communicating with Bar.com... and any legit business can't be transacted by e-mail.
This will absolutely backfire under attack... during a virus crisis ISP mail servers will instantly get locked out after using their allotted virus attempts. However, a bot-created SMTP server will have a clean record and be allowed to send a few of its attacks through.
Good messages thrown away, bad messages allowed through... this isn't going to get much done.
I've got it the ultimate virus aquisition prevention system...
Whenever news of a worm is reported on Slashdot, the computer is locked down with the network connection halted, the disk drives unpowered, all processing stopped, and the video output suspsended. A nice side effect is that power consumption of the system is near zero when in this mode.
Not quite. The conversion only works if your music is in non-DRMed WMA files. If you ripped CDs with the "secure my music from unathorized copies" checkbox enabled, the conversion won't work.
It's cheaper than a preliminary hearing because there's no need to involve defense council.
Leaks happen in high-profile cases, but in low-profile cases there's really no chance for much to leak because the indictment is public, and the prosecution is going to have to show even more evidence at trial. Besides, the only people who can't speak are the jurors about what they heard... anybody who testifies in front of a grand jury is free to tell what they told the jury on the steps of the court house if they wish, but nobody can force them to until the trial.
A conventional grand jury session is like a factory for indictments. A police officer comes in, is put under oath, and then the prosecutor basically goes down the list of people the officer arrested recently and asks him why he did so. It really only takes one complaining eyewitness to create enough evidence to justify there being a trial at which point that eyewitness can be confronted by the defense.
It'd be very interesting if iTunes and the iPod were to suddenly support the WMA format... because aside from Apple's iTune's Music Store and RealNetwork's offerings, every other major downloadable music store is using WMA for DRM.
If the iPod were suddenly to support WMA files, wouldn't that mean that iPod owners would be able to comparison shop all of the music stores for the best price on any given track? BuyMusic.com and WalMart.com have already staked their claims at selling for less than 99 cents on the most popular tracks.
There's no reason why they couldn't put the FairPlay wrapper around Ogg Vorbis files the same way they do around Advanced Audio Codec files now.
However, MPEG formats have always been mindful of keeping the decoding processing load low, even if that sometimes comes at the expense of encoding time or quality. The idea is that they want to keep the playback devices as cheap as possible.
Apparently OGG sounds better, but its processor load is putting it out of reach of dumber consumer devices.
Well, true, but nobody ever says "MPEG Layer 3 Audio Only File" instead of just calling it "MP3". The tradition of having a three-letter file type extention usually sticks, and since Vorbis files are.ogg files, "Ogg" is the word that sticks.
A grand jury is a replacement for a preliminary hearing, done in secret so that the evidence doesn't have to be published or given to the defense at this stage. It's overseen by a judge to keep the prosecutor in line, but it really is the prosecutor's show. There's no defense lawyer to challenge the witnesses, but the jury members are usually allowed to directly question the witnesses.
The burden at such a proceedure is trivial, because all a grand jury can do is return an indictment. The common joke that a procecutor can talk a grand jury into indicting a ham sandwich is more or less correct, it's a real slap in the face for a grand jury to respond that they were not convinced the burden to get an indictment was met.
This process is done to prevent really pointless trials from even getting started.
The new crime is that it's now a "conspiracy to committ terrorism" rather than only murder... a conspiracy to disrupt a economically vital system without killing anybody has to be considered as well. If somebody is killed without the intent to do so, that's manslaughter rather than murder...
The man is charged with nothing at this point. He's just a "person of interest" who's being forced to testify in front of a grand jury, who is trying to figure out if he's worth charging or not.
And I think it also just proves that the regulations around companies like Monsanto are doing their job. They require people who are playing with biotech to document what they're doing... playing with such stuff without the papers in order should be a crime.
But that still leaves an unexplained death. When a married person dies, the spouse is an automatic suspect worthy of at least some investigation since they have the most to possibly gain by the death.
The fact that he's being questioned by a grand jury is not alarming... if he's charged then we're all going to deserve to see more proof as to why, but so far I see nothing wrong with trying to find out if there's a link to the suspect materials that we just haven't discovered yet.
One new power that the War on Terror is properly justifying is that encuraging somebody else to comitt a crime on your behalf needs to be a crime. The actual people who flew on the 9/11 planes are dead... however most of the people who funded and planned that operation are still alive and able to plan future attacks. We can't have that, we need to cut off the major act before it happens.
This isn't making a crime out having thoughts or expressing ones thoughts... it's making a crime out of the proactive action of training or assiting somebody who intends on comitting a big crime. That's one concept I have no problem with having established.
Since when was being an activist a defense to everything?
Burning an American flag should be tolerated, in fact, it's part of the official way to respectfully retire a worn out flag. If you want to burn it in protest, go right ahead.
However... if its not legal to burn a solid-colored piece of cloth in the way plan on burning a flag, then it's not going to be legal to burn that flag either. The flag had better be your property, you'd better have permission to be on the property you're buring the flag on, and you'd better comply with fire safety codes and get a permit if one is needed. There's sure a lot of ways you can screw up your flag burning activity and make it illegal...
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Just to tell you where the FCC really stands on VoIP... on the same "The Screen Savers go to Washington DC" special that the parent poster mentions, Mike Powell and Leo Laporte roamed a Best Buy store talking about HDTV, WiFi, and such... and Powell convinced Leo Laporte to buy the Vonage starter kit that they were selling. Powell loves the technology and uses it himself.
In general, Powell's stand on most technologies is that the FCC should try to stay out of their way as much as possible, while still trying to maintain the application-level quality of services that we presently enjoy.
The US Government isn't based entirely on the concept of "majority rules". There's a secondary concept that the minority must also be given rights, even if that's not what the "majority" wants.
Basically, the market can decide if Playboy Radio on XM is something they want to support or not... but nobody is forced to listen to that, you can't even accidently tune it on an XM device unless you're paying a monthly fee and then an extra monthly fee for that one channel.
"Broadcast" radio, as in the AM and FM bands, is a whole different venue altogether. That's a very public space because the receiver technology for those bands requires no authorizations and are very cheap and common. It's presumed kids could be watching, which is why there's content regulation there.
Freedom of speech gives you the right to express whatever you want, but it doesn't promise you the means with which to express anything. If you speak in private, you can definitely say anything you want to whomever's there to listen. However, if you are performing in front of a public audience, your presentation had better conform with the standards of the venue or you'll be pulled from the stage...
If there was no FCC licenses, then RF bandwidth would purely be on a first-come, first-serve basis under the common laws system that the courts were ironing out.
The problem is, in order for a court to shut down an offending station, that offending station would already have to be on the air and causing the pre-existing station a problem such that the pre-existing station deems it worth going to court, and the problem would continue until the case is heard.
The FCC system requires that those who want to broadcast have to ask for permission before starting. Anybody caught broadcasting a strong signal who didn't ask permission first is presumed to be a troublemaker instantly, and therefore is worthy of being shut down before we figure out what exactly you're bothering.
Any consumer electronics that uses RF signals has the potential to be mis-manufactured to the point that it becomes a strong unintentional radio station. Part of the FCC's responsiblity is to get such things off the market immediately so that the more important users of the RF space don't get bothered by those things going into mass production... imagine the mess we'd have if D-Link put out a WiFi router that bled signal so badly it put noise on the Air Traffic Control channels. Those things might be everywhere before people realize what's going on if the FCC wasn't keeping an eye on those things.
The FCC is a division of the executive branch of the US Government, which means its job is not to make laws, but to enforce and administer laws passed by the legislative branch.
FCC rules come in when the law doesn't make a definitive instruction, but tells the FCC to use its rulemaking process to make the call, and review its own decision periodically.
The FCC only has the powers Congress gives it. If you don't like what they're doing with it, tell Congress to change the law to override their mistake.
The USPS is well aware of that concept. That's why they have a Mail Recovery Centers (commonly called a Dead Letter Office) to which anything that has an invalid delivery address, and either a missing or invalid return address goes to.
These centers are the only part of the postal system allowed to open letters intentionally... as the privacy concern goes out the window in one last ditch attempt to try to figure out where it should be going. Any property that ends up there and has no address indications inside ends up going up for auction. Some charities take the letters addressed to Santa to find ones that indicate particularly needy families and grant wishes.
Snail mail just can't drop packets on the floor as easily...
The "partern" is a series of circles with the correct proportial relationship between the distance and the diameters of the circles. Therefore, you don't have to know what the 2008 currency design will look like, instead you can presume that the 2008 series designers are going to follow the patern that the code was already designed to notice.
The only way you could arrive at a T-Shirt with the five-circle patern is if you were intentionally starting with it and working around it. The formula for the patern is so complex you're not likely to hit it by happenstance.
The authorities would rather prevent the crime than catch the people who did it after they've done it. The hope is that the college student who casually copies a $20 bill to go see a movie will realize it's not that easy and then give up.
Sure, the determined copier of $1,000,000 worth of cash won't be stopped by this... but that's not the goal here. The goal is to stop the little guys so that more resources are free to go after the big guys in other ways.
Purely open source graphics software would be illegal, but you could just include in the license terms that you can't modify the section of code that calls the black-box library... that'd fix the legal problems right there. Sure, people could hack around, but then they've got an extra offense to go on top of the already illegal counterfieting act.
The true test would be how likely a consumer equipment made $20 bill would be accepted by randomly selected store cashiers among their normal traffic. Sure, such people should know to look for the stripe and other security features in a real $20, but among the hustle of their other business, would they think to check all the bills in a stack of seven handed to them for a $130 order?
A counterfeit bill doesn't have to be accepted by a bank to be profitable... the counterfeiter can pass the bill to any cash-accepting businesses to get value out of it.
How's this for a DOS...
Attacker signs up for an account with Foo ISP, and then intentionally sends five virus-attachment e-mails to Bar.com. Foo's e-mail servers are suddenly blocked from communicating with Bar.com... and any legit business can't be transacted by e-mail.
This will absolutely backfire under attack... during a virus crisis ISP mail servers will instantly get locked out after using their allotted virus attempts. However, a bot-created SMTP server will have a clean record and be allowed to send a few of its attacks through.
Good messages thrown away, bad messages allowed through... this isn't going to get much done.
I've got it the ultimate virus aquisition prevention system...
Whenever news of a worm is reported on Slashdot, the computer is locked down with the network connection halted, the disk drives unpowered, all processing stopped, and the video output suspsended. A nice side effect is that power consumption of the system is near zero when in this mode.
Not quite. The conversion only works if your music is in non-DRMed WMA files. If you ripped CDs with the "secure my music from unathorized copies" checkbox enabled, the conversion won't work.
It's cheaper than a preliminary hearing because there's no need to involve defense council.
Leaks happen in high-profile cases, but in low-profile cases there's really no chance for much to leak because the indictment is public, and the prosecution is going to have to show even more evidence at trial. Besides, the only people who can't speak are the jurors about what they heard... anybody who testifies in front of a grand jury is free to tell what they told the jury on the steps of the court house if they wish, but nobody can force them to until the trial.
A conventional grand jury session is like a factory for indictments. A police officer comes in, is put under oath, and then the prosecutor basically goes down the list of people the officer arrested recently and asks him why he did so. It really only takes one complaining eyewitness to create enough evidence to justify there being a trial at which point that eyewitness can be confronted by the defense.
It'd be very interesting if iTunes and the iPod were to suddenly support the WMA format... because aside from Apple's iTune's Music Store and RealNetwork's offerings, every other major downloadable music store is using WMA for DRM.
If the iPod were suddenly to support WMA files, wouldn't that mean that iPod owners would be able to comparison shop all of the music stores for the best price on any given track? BuyMusic.com and WalMart.com have already staked their claims at selling for less than 99 cents on the most popular tracks.
There's no reason why they couldn't put the FairPlay wrapper around Ogg Vorbis files the same way they do around Advanced Audio Codec files now.
However, MPEG formats have always been mindful of keeping the decoding processing load low, even if that sometimes comes at the expense of encoding time or quality. The idea is that they want to keep the playback devices as cheap as possible.
Apparently OGG sounds better, but its processor load is putting it out of reach of dumber consumer devices.
Well, true, but nobody ever says "MPEG Layer 3 Audio Only File" instead of just calling it "MP3". The tradition of having a three-letter file type extention usually sticks, and since Vorbis files are .ogg files, "Ogg" is the word that sticks.
A grand jury is a replacement for a preliminary hearing, done in secret so that the evidence doesn't have to be published or given to the defense at this stage. It's overseen by a judge to keep the prosecutor in line, but it really is the prosecutor's show. There's no defense lawyer to challenge the witnesses, but the jury members are usually allowed to directly question the witnesses.
The burden at such a proceedure is trivial, because all a grand jury can do is return an indictment. The common joke that a procecutor can talk a grand jury into indicting a ham sandwich is more or less correct, it's a real slap in the face for a grand jury to respond that they were not convinced the burden to get an indictment was met.
This process is done to prevent really pointless trials from even getting started.
The new crime is that it's now a "conspiracy to committ terrorism" rather than only murder... a conspiracy to disrupt a economically vital system without killing anybody has to be considered as well. If somebody is killed without the intent to do so, that's manslaughter rather than murder...
The man is charged with nothing at this point. He's just a "person of interest" who's being forced to testify in front of a grand jury, who is trying to figure out if he's worth charging or not.
And I think it also just proves that the regulations around companies like Monsanto are doing their job. They require people who are playing with biotech to document what they're doing... playing with such stuff without the papers in order should be a crime.
But that still leaves an unexplained death. When a married person dies, the spouse is an automatic suspect worthy of at least some investigation since they have the most to possibly gain by the death.
The fact that he's being questioned by a grand jury is not alarming... if he's charged then we're all going to deserve to see more proof as to why, but so far I see nothing wrong with trying to find out if there's a link to the suspect materials that we just haven't discovered yet.
One new power that the War on Terror is properly justifying is that encuraging somebody else to comitt a crime on your behalf needs to be a crime. The actual people who flew on the 9/11 planes are dead... however most of the people who funded and planned that operation are still alive and able to plan future attacks. We can't have that, we need to cut off the major act before it happens.
This isn't making a crime out having thoughts or expressing ones thoughts... it's making a crime out of the proactive action of training or assiting somebody who intends on comitting a big crime. That's one concept I have no problem with having established.
Since when was being an activist a defense to everything?
Burning an American flag should be tolerated, in fact, it's part of the official way to respectfully retire a worn out flag. If you want to burn it in protest, go right ahead.
However... if its not legal to burn a solid-colored piece of cloth in the way plan on burning a flag, then it's not going to be legal to burn that flag either. The flag had better be your property, you'd better have permission to be on the property you're buring the flag on, and you'd better comply with fire safety codes and get a permit if one is needed. There's sure a lot of ways you can screw up your flag burning activity and make it illegal...