So reducing someone's market for their IP constitutes theft in any reasonable ethical system?
Doesn't that mean that offering a competing product also constitutes theft in such a system? Or any of the other legal things one can do which might result in a lessening of the market for a particular product?
So you want to be pedantic...
Lessening the market by offering a competing product is one thing, lessening the market by offering the same product is another.
Let us take a real world example. Say you are a computer programmer - as many of us on/. are - and you have an idea for a nifty bit of software to automate some tasks in a travel agency. You quit your job, spend six months writing the software, and begin to sell (actually license) it for $500 per seat.
Now if someone else independantly writes a similar piece of software, and chooses to sell it for $250 per seat, that is your tough luck. If someone writes it and gives it away free, that is your tough luck.
However, if someone else buys 1 seat of your software for $500, then makes it available for for $250, or for free, to many of your potential customers, they've unfairly diminished the value of your work. You may have (reasonably) expected to sell $500,000 worth of your program over the next 5 years. Now that the work is available for free, you may only sell $100,000 over the same time period. $400,000 has been stolen from you.
It's not just a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor.
So, Linus... why don't you tell us what you really think of RMS?
Good point! Note that Linus didn't say "It's not a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor." The word "just" implies that it is indeed "a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor" but that there is more to it.
You're lucky. Most companies don't offer escrow agreements and most that end up having escrow agreements with companies largely don't have them with companies such as Microsoft. While it's an answer, it's not QUITE as good as Open/Free Software- it's nowhere near the same thing.
While we didn't use it with the likes of Oracle and Microsoft, it came in useful when a small code shop had a product we wanted. If your company consists of a half-dozen programmers working in your basement, and a firm with 120,000 people deployed worldwide - most with their own PC - wants to license your software, you do whatever they want.
Don't stake your business on a piece of OSS that you aren't sure is going to be around for awhile.
Same goes for commercial software, fork or no. What if the developing company goes out of business?
When I was working for a major global firm, and we dealt with small closed source development companies, we always had code escrow agreements. If the vendor went out of business or dropped support of the product, we had the ability to get the source and support it ourselves.
You see, by forking from where you left off before, the end users have the option to use the original fork, or use the new "mutation" of the software. Thus, allowing for a form of evolution. Whatever is best for the end user will get used, and whatever is useless will die.
While you are correct that forking leads to evolution, it is not a perfect model. In OSS, frequently only one tyne of the fork survives very long. But when the features do start to diverge, each of the two projects tend to imitate the more successful features of the other. Eventually, the forks will often merge, which is something that doesn't generally happen in evolution.
It never ceases to amaze me how completely unaware of the world around them my fellow US Citizens can be.
London (by most accounts) traces her founding to Roman times, around 43 AD to be specific. Now, the widespread use of the automobile doesn't really occur until the early 20th century. By my count that gives the people of London approximately 1,857 years (give or take a few) to build houses with the reasonable expectation that the loudest thing they'd hear would be "clip clop clip clop."
In the United States the rage is a little less stark. Here we've had since about 1600 or somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 years with the reasonable expectation of "clip clop" noise pollution and little else.
Obviously this is a somewhat sarcastic way of explaining this. My point is that not everyone has the choice to build their homes around the interstate highway plans (or the M? for you Brits) of the government.
I guess this is one of the many examples of European liberalism. You know, the political ideology that expresses the radical notion that the government should look out for its citizens rather than spending all its money bombing someone else's.
If you're going to use sarcasm, so am I:)
You are absolutely right. I will immediately write any MP I can find, telling them that I support a program which will help original owners of Roman era homes upgrade the sound proofing.
I agree that if people had no reason to foresee the kind of development that creates this noise (building a highway where ther was none, for instance) they should be in some way compensated. My point is that if I move into a home next to a highway or airport or factory, I've made a choice to live there. I'm responsible for that choice. I shouldn't expect the taxpayers to take up a collection for me to mitigate a circumstance I chose for myself.
I myself live adjacent to a commercial zone. I probably saved 50,000 USD on my house because there is a car wash and a strip mall on the other side of my fence. I frequently hear the roar of the industrial vacuums at the car was as well as the smell of chines food from a restarant. I happily took the savings, and I have no right to expect that I should get both the savings and compensation from my neighbors.
I guess this is one of the many examples of American Conservatism. You know, the political ideology that expresses the radical notion that the citizens should look out for themselves as much as possible rather than the government making them poor with high taxes then giving some of it back.
Sometimes I wish the U.S. government wasn't spending so much trying to build up the military and instead redirect those funds to building up the national infrastructure.
So the Canadian hordes could come pouring in through our infrastructure unopposed? Screw that!
I've seen the same sort of short-sighted buying in the US in rural areas. I've seen places where people have built new houses a half mile from a livestock farm that has been there for 50 years, then when they finally move in, they discover that when the wind is blowing the right way, there's a smell. Then they try to get zoning changed, or they sue, or some other tactic, to try to get the farm closed. What, you didn't think pigs smelled? Or did you even check to see who your neighbors were?
My personal favorite are the people of Ozone Park (Queens, NY). Most of these people gladly purchased homes adjacent to JFK International Airport (one of the busier in the world) then complain about the jet noise.
Welcome to a mixed economy, in which the government has some influence over private industry in the interest of the common good. I kind of like living here; maybe you'll take to it. Or maybe you'd like to have the private airlines put in a new runway and start bringing 747s in low over your back yard, with no power to do squat about it.
Be very careful about your argument here. The details are important.
If I own a piece of residential property, and an airline buys up nearby land and builds a new airport, I have every right to receive redress. The activity from the airport has reduced my ability to enjoy my own property.
If, however, I buy property close to an existing airport, I should have been able to foresee that noise might be an issue. I should have no recourse.
I purchased a house on a border line between a residential zone and a commercial zone, so this is not theory for me. I've become friendly with the owners of the car wash that partially abutts my yard. He told me one day that he was getting complaints from some people in the neighborhood about the noise from his (industrial size) vacuum cleaners and blowers. I told him that I bought the house after he was here, I knew he was operating a car wash, so I have no right to complain.
Maybe if you consider that spending money improving problems in residential areas (like doing stuff about traffic noise) that raises the value of the area and make it a more desirable place to live might have some beneficial, if not immediate effects for everyone.
Certainly, but it would be much more effective to treat the cause rather than the effect. Would soundproofing people's homes really do that much good in improving the neighborhood if people couldn't open a window or sit in their yard for fear of the noise? Better that the noise be mitigated nearer to the source. Let people enjoy their yards and local parks to.
I know this is Slashdot, but don't you ever go outside? Not much you can do to sound proof your yard, is there. I assume you never open your windows either? Personally, I do both and if I were in England, I would hope the government would be spending a little effort to make living areas a little more liveable.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the original comment was discussing the soundproofing of walls in homes. No matter how much money the government gives people to sound insulate their walls, it isn't going to help their yard. (Unless, of course, the major source of sound pollution is in their home. Turn the Stereo down!)
There are reasonable steps that governments can take to reduce outdoor noise pollution at its source. For many years now various agencies have been mandating the use of quieter jet engines. Highways are frequently built with noise barriers. These steps reduce all noise pollution, and allow people to enjoy their gardens as well as their homes.
Sometimes I wish the U.S. government wasn't spending so much trying to build up the military and instead redirect those funds to building up the national infrastructure.
It especially pangs me when I read about things like this where the British government is spending lots of excess government funds on sound-proofing people's homes.
Please explain this to me. Someone purchases a house with walls that aren't very sound proof. They presumably knew this at the time of purchase, it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. Someone else spends the time to investigate their choices, and eventually spends more money on a house with more sound proof walls. Why should the person who spent extra to buy a house with soundproof walls now have to pay additional taxes to soundproof someone else's home - someone else who didn't care enough about it to shop for that feature in the first place?
If you bought a four bedroom home, and your neighbor only bought a two bedroom home, would you expect that the tax man would come and empty your bank account so that you neighbor could get an addition built?
All this does is encourage people to do the cheapest thing possible, then use some ill concieved government program to clean up the mess afterwards.
Please note: I'm not talking about a situation where the government built an airport or some such thing near a previously quiet neighborhood. I'm talking about cases where the home-owner knew (or should have known) the conditions prior to purchase.
OK, I've wondered about this since the dawn of PCs, and wonder about it every time I have to install nVidia drivers: Why do this? Onceupponatime, you bought hardware and drivers were just kinda there with it. Then they started putting copyright callouts on 'em. Now they're treating 'em as if they were standalone programs....
If the driver spec is floating around in the open, that's a value-add for me as a comsumer (the company can't force-obsolete the cards by yanking drivers away, easier to switch OSes) and for the company (it makes the devices marketable to more people, and they get free optimizations and ports from the OSS community)....
So, why be all grabby about drivers anyway?....
In ye olde days, drivers did nothing more thancanfigure and move data back and forth to a piece of hardware. They were fairly trivial pieces of software, and so no one cared if they were protected. Many types of drivers are still like this today. Network card drivers typically do nothing magical.
A few generations ago, hardware designers realized that they could offload some of the task traditionally done in hardware to the driver. Thus they could simplify the hardware and save money. The driver for a WinModem doesn't just configure and communicate with a hardware modem, it actually performs in software some tasks that were usually done in the modem hardware itself.
At this point, drivers aren't trivial programs, but represent substantial investment and competative edge for the hardware manufacturer. If WinModem company B could look at WinModem company A's driver, they would see the tricks that they used in order to reduce the part count that much further. Company B could immitate Company A, and match their price.
Video cards are like WinModems, although the competititon is not based price but performance. The card manufacturers are using tricks in the driver in order to boost the performance of their hardware. Those tricks may confer to them a competetive advantage, so they won't open source the drivers.
Smart companies are quick to release software as open source when the software doesn't give them a specific and compelling competitive advantage. Cisco released CUPS as OSS because they felt they would benefit far more from having a community enhance their internal printing system than the would be hurt because Bay Networks could reduce their overhead a few hundred thousand dollars. Cisco is not going to open source their routing software anytime soon, because other router manufacturers could use it to compete against Cisco.
Well, there is a low pressure system to my NE. Lows rotate counter clockwise (in the Northern hemisphere. Therefore, my wind would be coming from a generally NW direction. In addition, there is a high pressure system to my W. Highs rotat clockwise. That is moving the wind point a little more to the N.
If you go to the weatherunderground sight and look at the last several days, you'll see the wind coming from the West on the afternoon of December 4th. Over the next several days, you'll see the wind shift to the NE as the Nor'Easter hits, then swing N as the Nor'easter moves NE of me.
Answer No.
- Choose again.
- Choose the SAME one.
- Get new printout.
- Repeat.
[...]
- Stuff N printouts into audit box.
The day after, call for printout recount.
Boom, profit.
You're right, but it isn't too hard to take care of this flaw. Every printout needs a serial number of some sort. When a "corrected" ballot is printed, it needs to contain a reference that states "Revoke ballots [prior serial number],... [prior serial number]". Then only the last ballot will get counted in the recount.
Re:On this note, but something completely differen
on
Perfect Weather on the Net
·
· Score: 4, Informative
How about an 802.11 weather station?
I'm just looking for something that sits outside my house, collects weather data and other such simple stuff, and relays that data back to a server to build a web page with or whatever.
I run a Davis VantagePro Weather station. It relays data from a sensor cluster up on my roof to a console in my computer room via 900MHz radio. Then Davis' WeatherLink software submists it to weatherunderground and to my own website.
would you have to file a flight plan anytime you wanted to take off?
In good weather, you can fly under VFR (visual flight rules). You are not required to file a flight plan, although some people do anyway. You are rersponsible for staying clear of other aircraft and of various restricted flight space. Since 9/11 large portions of previously unrestricted flight space around major cities has become restricted.
In poor weather, you can fly under IFR (instrument flight rules). An air traffic controller is responsible for routing you around the sky, moving you from point A to point B. This requires a flight plan.
It is not particularly difficult to get an pilot's license to fly a single engine propeller aircraft under VFR. Most people could do it given sufficient practice. The IFR endorsement for the license takes a lot of effort and intelligence.
1) Leading Edge Model D This PC was the first important "low cost" PC that was nearly 100% IBM compatible. I remember it having quite a following and marketshare back in the day.
2) Wells American A*Star This AT class machine came with a full set of schematics for the motherboard. I remember reading Peter Norton's guides about the interaction of the various chips, then following the traces in the schematics. There is no better way to learn "internals" than that.
Any good developer who paid attention in their software engineering course would know the further down the development cycle you get when you discover a problem with your specifications the more expensive it becomes to repair the problem.
One of the positive aspects of XP and other Agile methodologies is that they explicitly attempt to reduce the cost of fixing "bad" code later in the project. Refactoring is built into the project, and unit testing is built to support refactoring with a high confidence of not breaking other parts of the system.
Any developer who doesn't understand this would fall into the same boat as these "non-developer administrators" in my opinion. Go pick up a software engineering book and re-read it. And make sure it's not eXtreme Programming, that book is how Windows-like disasters are made.
I'm not an XP zealot, though you appear to be an anti-XP zealot. I think there is a lot of value to the ideas of 1) build it simple, 2) build it quickly, 3) refactor what doesn't work properly. If you can get a fully developed and stable requirements and specifications document from your users, good for you. I've never seen it once in ten years. The only really successful projects I've worked on have delivered a subset of functionality very quickly, then worked in a tight feedback loop with the user to refine and extend.
Consider the common scenario in which a user marks his outbound mail as coming from domain X -- but X is only a forwarding service for inbound e-mail, like, say pobox.com or arrl.net. The outbound e-mail gets sent out through some other ISP. From the description in the article, it appears that somehow someone with the private key for domain X is somehow supposed to add something to the outbound e-mail; but that e-mail never goes anywhere near domain X.
The obvious extension of this idea is if you have the private key for the forwarding service, you would be able to configure your mail client to create the validating token before your ISP even sees it.
Let's say you use bigisp.com for your internet connectivity, but you use JoeSchmoe@mydomain.org as your email address. Your mail client would use the private key associated with JoeSchmoe@mydomain.org to transmit the email. Then smtp.bigisp.com would see that there is alread a token in the message, and so it wouldn't add its own while forwarding the message. The destination mail server would get the message, then query mydomain.org for the public key associated with JoeSchmoe@mydomain.org.
When mail is sent to you, there also is no big deal. The message token is encrypted by the sender. The message is transmitted to mydomain.org, who forwards it to pop.bigisp.com. That pop server checks the key agaisnt the senders public key. The mail is delivered to your client.
How do they propose to keep the encrypted private key secure? I did RTFA but couldn't find any explanation of how the encrypted version of the private key could not be spoofed since it is part of the message header.
If the spammer...or anyone for that matter is spoofing a header anyway, it shouldn't be difficult to find out the encrypted private key, since it is sent out with every message originating from the domain.
I could, presumably send an email from my secure email address to a non-existent email address of the domain whose encrypted private key I wish to find out: eg bounce@email.com. The bounced message should have it in the header.
The authentication token would likely be some sort of hash of the message contents. In that way, a token is only valid for that particular message. The sender would generate a checksum of the message, encrypt it with a private key, then transmit the encrypted checksum as the token. The receiver would generate the same hash of the message contents, and decrypt the token with the public key. If the decrypted checksum equals the generated checksum, then one can be confident that the message came from the server it said it came from.
Summary of his argument: You couldn't send mail as foo@mydomain.net thorugh the mailservers at operated by your ISP.
That really doesn't need to be an issue. If you legitimately own mydomain.net, you need to generate a public key/private key pair for that domain. Then configure mydomain.net to offer that public key. When you send mail through any server with a "from" of mydomain.net, you need to also use the mydomain.net private key. Your mail client should be able to do this easy enough. The mail server at bigisp.com will detect that there is already a encrypted token and won't add its own.
It can be open sourced, but that doesn't mean anything about preventing lock-in.
Presumably a 'domain key' is some cryptographic element that authenticates that your domain is who it claims to be. To me this sounds an awful lot like SSL where a third party issues the keys, or acts as a clearinghouse for self-issued keys.
Either way, Yahoo could be the man in the middle acting as either issuer or clearinghouse. Think of it this way, OpenSSL is open sourced, but that doesn't keep the SSL issuers from having a lock on that market.
I don't see how lock in will be an issue. Imagine the following scenario:
Originating mail software sends a message, including some token in the header that is encrypted using the sending mail server's private key.
Zero or more intermediate mail server pass along the message.
The destination mail server receives the message.
The destination mail server looks up the domain of the message originator and requests that domain's public key.
The destination mail server attempts to decrypt the token.
If the token is successfully decrypted, the mail is delivered. The receiver knows the identify of the sending system with certainty. Email domains can't be spoofed.
Otherwise the message is dropped.
I can't see how this would neccesitate a clearinghouse.
Slashdot Mirror
So you want to be pedantic...
Lessening the market by offering a competing product is one thing, lessening the market by offering the same product is another.
Let us take a real world example. Say you are a computer programmer - as many of us on /. are - and you have an idea for a nifty bit of software to automate some tasks in a travel agency. You quit your job, spend six months writing the software, and begin to sell (actually license) it for $500 per seat.
Now if someone else independantly writes a similar piece of software, and chooses to sell it for $250 per seat, that is your tough luck. If someone writes it and gives it away free, that is your tough luck.
However, if someone else buys 1 seat of your software for $500, then makes it available for for $250, or for free, to many of your potential customers, they've unfairly diminished the value of your work. You may have (reasonably) expected to sell $500,000 worth of your program over the next 5 years. Now that the work is available for free, you may only sell $100,000 over the same time period. $400,000 has been stolen from you.
The value of Bob's copyright is diminished, because the potential market for Bob's work has been reduced.
Copyright violations may not be classified as theft in the criminal code, but certainly qualify as theft in any reasonable ethical system.
Good point! Note that Linus didn't say "It's not a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor." The word "just" implies that it is indeed "a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor" but that there is more to it.
While we didn't use it with the likes of Oracle and Microsoft, it came in useful when a small code shop had a product we wanted. If your company consists of a half-dozen programmers working in your basement, and a firm with 120,000 people deployed worldwide - most with their own PC - wants to license your software, you do whatever they want.
When I was working for a major global firm, and we dealt with small closed source development companies, we always had code escrow agreements. If the vendor went out of business or dropped support of the product, we had the ability to get the source and support it ourselves.
On a more serous note...
While you are correct that forking leads to evolution, it is not a perfect model. In OSS, frequently only one tyne of the fork survives very long. But when the features do start to diverge, each of the two projects tend to imitate the more successful features of the other. Eventually, the forks will often merge, which is something that doesn't generally happen in evolution.
Sure, lots of work is wasted by forks that no one but a select few use, but the real thing is that forks that no one uses will die off...
Is that an extremely subtle "*BSD is dying" troll hidden in there? :)
If you're going to use sarcasm, so am I :)
You are absolutely right. I will immediately write any MP I can find, telling them that I support a program which will help original owners of Roman era homes upgrade the sound proofing.
I agree that if people had no reason to foresee the kind of development that creates this noise (building a highway where ther was none, for instance) they should be in some way compensated. My point is that if I move into a home next to a highway or airport or factory, I've made a choice to live there. I'm responsible for that choice. I shouldn't expect the taxpayers to take up a collection for me to mitigate a circumstance I chose for myself.
I myself live adjacent to a commercial zone. I probably saved 50,000 USD on my house because there is a car wash and a strip mall on the other side of my fence. I frequently hear the roar of the industrial vacuums at the car was as well as the smell of chines food from a restarant. I happily took the savings, and I have no right to expect that I should get both the savings and compensation from my neighbors.
I guess this is one of the many examples of American Conservatism. You know, the political ideology that expresses the radical notion that the citizens should look out for themselves as much as possible rather than the government making them poor with high taxes then giving some of it back.
My personal favorite are the people of Ozone Park (Queens, NY). Most of these people gladly purchased homes adjacent to JFK International Airport (one of the busier in the world) then complain about the jet noise.
Be very careful about your argument here. The details are important.
If I own a piece of residential property, and an airline buys up nearby land and builds a new airport, I have every right to receive redress. The activity from the airport has reduced my ability to enjoy my own property.
If, however, I buy property close to an existing airport, I should have been able to foresee that noise might be an issue. I should have no recourse.
I purchased a house on a border line between a residential zone and a commercial zone, so this is not theory for me. I've become friendly with the owners of the car wash that partially abutts my yard. He told me one day that he was getting complaints from some people in the neighborhood about the noise from his (industrial size) vacuum cleaners and blowers. I told him that I bought the house after he was here, I knew he was operating a car wash, so I have no right to complain.
Certainly, but it would be much more effective to treat the cause rather than the effect. Would soundproofing people's homes really do that much good in improving the neighborhood if people couldn't open a window or sit in their yard for fear of the noise? Better that the noise be mitigated nearer to the source. Let people enjoy their yards and local parks to.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the original comment was discussing the soundproofing of walls in homes. No matter how much money the government gives people to sound insulate their walls, it isn't going to help their yard. (Unless, of course, the major source of sound pollution is in their home. Turn the Stereo down!)
There are reasonable steps that governments can take to reduce outdoor noise pollution at its source. For many years now various agencies have been mandating the use of quieter jet engines. Highways are frequently built with noise barriers. These steps reduce all noise pollution, and allow people to enjoy their gardens as well as their homes.
Please explain this to me. Someone purchases a house with walls that aren't very sound proof. They presumably knew this at the time of purchase, it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. Someone else spends the time to investigate their choices, and eventually spends more money on a house with more sound proof walls. Why should the person who spent extra to buy a house with soundproof walls now have to pay additional taxes to soundproof someone else's home - someone else who didn't care enough about it to shop for that feature in the first place?
If you bought a four bedroom home, and your neighbor only bought a two bedroom home, would you expect that the tax man would come and empty your bank account so that you neighbor could get an addition built?
All this does is encourage people to do the cheapest thing possible, then use some ill concieved government program to clean up the mess afterwards.
Please note: I'm not talking about a situation where the government built an airport or some such thing near a previously quiet neighborhood. I'm talking about cases where the home-owner knew (or should have known) the conditions prior to purchase.
In ye olde days, drivers did nothing more thancanfigure and move data back and forth to a piece of hardware. They were fairly trivial pieces of software, and so no one cared if they were protected. Many types of drivers are still like this today. Network card drivers typically do nothing magical.
A few generations ago, hardware designers realized that they could offload some of the task traditionally done in hardware to the driver. Thus they could simplify the hardware and save money. The driver for a WinModem doesn't just configure and communicate with a hardware modem, it actually performs in software some tasks that were usually done in the modem hardware itself.
At this point, drivers aren't trivial programs, but represent substantial investment and competative edge for the hardware manufacturer. If WinModem company B could look at WinModem company A's driver, they would see the tricks that they used in order to reduce the part count that much further. Company B could immitate Company A, and match their price.
Video cards are like WinModems, although the competititon is not based price but performance. The card manufacturers are using tricks in the driver in order to boost the performance of their hardware. Those tricks may confer to them a competetive advantage, so they won't open source the drivers.
Smart companies are quick to release software as open source when the software doesn't give them a specific and compelling competitive advantage. Cisco released CUPS as OSS because they felt they would benefit far more from having a community enhance their internal printing system than the would be hurt because Bay Networks could reduce their overhead a few hundred thousand dollars. Cisco is not going to open source their routing software anytime soon, because other router manufacturers could use it to compete against Cisco.
How come all your wind is coming from the North?
Well, there is a low pressure system to my NE. Lows rotate counter clockwise (in the Northern hemisphere. Therefore, my wind would be coming from a generally NW direction. In addition, there is a high pressure system to my W. Highs rotat clockwise. That is moving the wind point a little more to the N.
If you go to the weatherunderground sight and look at the last several days, you'll see the wind coming from the West on the afternoon of December 4th. Over the next several days, you'll see the wind shift to the NE as the Nor'Easter hits, then swing N as the Nor'easter moves NE of me.
You're right, but it isn't too hard to take care of this flaw. Every printout needs a serial number of some sort. When a "corrected" ballot is printed, it needs to contain a reference that states "Revoke ballots [prior serial number], ... [prior serial number]". Then only the last ballot will get counted in the recount.
I run a Davis VantagePro Weather station. It relays data from a sensor cluster up on my roof to a console in my computer room via 900MHz radio. Then Davis' WeatherLink software submists it to weatherunderground and to my own website.
would you have to file a flight plan anytime you wanted to take off?
In good weather, you can fly under VFR (visual flight rules). You are not required to file a flight plan, although some people do anyway. You are rersponsible for staying clear of other aircraft and of various restricted flight space. Since 9/11 large portions of previously unrestricted flight space around major cities has become restricted.
In poor weather, you can fly under IFR (instrument flight rules). An air traffic controller is responsible for routing you around the sky, moving you from point A to point B. This requires a flight plan.
It is not particularly difficult to get an pilot's license to fly a single engine propeller aircraft under VFR. Most people could do it given sufficient practice. The IFR endorsement for the license takes a lot of effort and intelligence.
I have two nominees:
1) Leading Edge Model D This PC was the first important "low cost" PC that was nearly 100% IBM compatible. I remember it having quite a following and marketshare back in the day.
2) Wells American A*Star This AT class machine came with a full set of schematics for the motherboard. I remember reading Peter Norton's guides about the interaction of the various chips, then following the traces in the schematics. There is no better way to learn "internals" than that.
One of the positive aspects of XP and other Agile methodologies is that they explicitly attempt to reduce the cost of fixing "bad" code later in the project. Refactoring is built into the project, and unit testing is built to support refactoring with a high confidence of not breaking other parts of the system.
I'm not an XP zealot, though you appear to be an anti-XP zealot. I think there is a lot of value to the ideas of 1) build it simple, 2) build it quickly, 3) refactor what doesn't work properly. If you can get a fully developed and stable requirements and specifications document from your users, good for you. I've never seen it once in ten years. The only really successful projects I've worked on have delivered a subset of functionality very quickly, then worked in a tight feedback loop with the user to refine and extend.
The obvious extension of this idea is if you have the private key for the forwarding service, you would be able to configure your mail client to create the validating token before your ISP even sees it.
Let's say you use bigisp.com for your internet connectivity, but you use JoeSchmoe@mydomain.org as your email address. Your mail client would use the private key associated with JoeSchmoe@mydomain.org to transmit the email. Then smtp.bigisp.com would see that there is alread a token in the message, and so it wouldn't add its own while forwarding the message. The destination mail server would get the message, then query mydomain.org for the public key associated with JoeSchmoe@mydomain.org.
When mail is sent to you, there also is no big deal. The message token is encrypted by the sender. The message is transmitted to mydomain.org, who forwards it to pop.bigisp.com. That pop server checks the key agaisnt the senders public key. The mail is delivered to your client.
The authentication token would likely be some sort of hash of the message contents. In that way, a token is only valid for that particular message. The sender would generate a checksum of the message, encrypt it with a private key, then transmit the encrypted checksum as the token. The receiver would generate the same hash of the message contents, and decrypt the token with the public key. If the decrypted checksum equals the generated checksum, then one can be confident that the message came from the server it said it came from.
Summary of his argument: You couldn't send mail as foo@mydomain.net thorugh the mailservers at operated by your ISP.
That really doesn't need to be an issue. If you legitimately own mydomain.net, you need to generate a public key/private key pair for that domain. Then configure mydomain.net to offer that public key. When you send mail through any server with a "from" of mydomain.net, you need to also use the mydomain.net private key. Your mail client should be able to do this easy enough. The mail server at bigisp.com will detect that there is already a encrypted token and won't add its own.
I don't see how lock in will be an issue. Imagine the following scenario:
I can't see how this would neccesitate a clearinghouse.