Was going to mod you informative, until I read the maglev part. There are no commercial maglevs in Japan. JR has a test track in Yamagata Pref. (IIRC) and they've done some demonstration rides for journalists and lucky guests, but it certainly isn't in commercial use yet anywhere in Japan. The Shinkansen bullet trains run on ordinary iron rails.
Though what you said about TV phones is true. Not sure why US needs some special broadcasting system to send TV to celphones, when some Japanese celphones can display standard Japan OTA broadcast TV. They'd probably be able to pick up US OTA TV too, though the channel numbers would be wrong (different freq. assignments).
Holy crap, this is the first time I heard Richard Biggs died. I met him at a convention in 2002 I think, shook his hand, and then he ran off. I always thought I'd have another chance to grab an autograph or something...
Truly the loss of a great, if relatively unknown actor...
I live in Japan and often thought of building a box like this to leave in my family's house in the US, so that I can watch my favorite TV programs from here. Fortunately, thanks to bittorrent, I can download all my shows faster and in much higher quality than I could stream live from a home broadband connection. But if there is a worldwide crackdown on BT/P2P/etc., I'll definitely consider doing it myself. Should be easily under $400 to build a box like this.
That's the way Intel worked in the past, but they haven't done that for some time. The reason is that their yields (supply) on high-end chips are much higher than the demand for said chips. And the number of chips that fail to run at the higher speeds doesn't even begin to satisfy the demand for the lower speed grades.
If Intel sold every 3.4GHz-capable P4 as a 3.4GHz chip, then there would be a glut of those chips in the supply line. Distributers would have to price them down to keep them selling, and that means Intel can't charge as high a premium for their high-end chips, and can't recover their R&D costs as quickly. Meanwhile, with the stock of lower-end chips drying up, the demand can't be satisfied and Intel ends up getting out-priced/out-supplied on the low end. Not a good situation for them.
Instead, a great many 3.4GHz-capable chips are marked down (and hardware locked) at a slower speed, to satisfy the demands for each tier of chip. That's why overclocking is possible--maybe your 2.4GHz chip actually passed the tests for 3.4GHz, but Intel had already met their quota for the higher speed grades. Of course, you might also be getting a chip that failed at 2.5GHz and barely passed 2.4GHz, that's why overclocking is a risk.
Like all current high-res camera phones, it will likely have a 7MP mode which saves only to the memory card, and a low-res mode (320x240 or maybe 640x480) which can be sent by email.
I don't know about the current crop of American camera phones, but Japanese camera phones can automatically downsize your pics when you email them.
In Japan there are three ways to receieve TV broadcasts: OTA (terrestrial), BS (Broadcast Satellite, run by NHK), and CS110 (Communications Satellite, 110 is the lattitude or longitude of that particular satellite, I think). Cable TV makes up only a tiny, tiny fraction of the TV market as most cities aren't wired for it, and even in major cities like Tokyo, most buildings aren't wired for cable and most landlords won't let you install it.
OTA HD is only broadcast from Tokyo and Osaka for now. BS reaches the whole country, but only carries a couple of NHK-owned channels (free HD recent movies though, like LOTR and T3). CS is run by SkyPerfect (like DirecTV) but I don't think they have any HD channels yet.
Japan's phones are mostly using the same tech as the USA (i.e. W-CDMA or CDMA2000, at least in those areas which have upgraded)... just on different frequencies. This is because many of the frequencies used by US phones were already allocated for other uses in Japan. Its the same reason why the US's GSM network is 1.9GHz and the rest of the world's GSM is 1.8GHz (I think... might have that backwards).
But no worry... you can now buy a number of phones that work on 3G in Japan, and both GSM variants for the US/rest-of-world.
I've tried several versions of iTunes now, and I just don't like it. Where are the customization options? I'm not just talking about skins and interface and such... everything just seems very inflexible. If you use iTunes and only iTunes for all of your ripping/downloads, then I'm sure its great. But if you're using other programs to aquire and manage music, it sucks.
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders. You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them. (You can list them with the duplicate tracks tool, but I find it to be FAR too loose with its rules, for example, it thinks "Intro Theme (3:20)" and "Intro Theme (TV version) (0:30)" are the same track.) Meanwhile, Winamp 5 can very quickly and automatically rescan my music folder for new songs or changed tags.
Also, after using iTunes to edit some ID3 tags, my database ended up corrupted and I had to delete it. Fortunately I had only been using iTunes for a few hours, or I would have lost all of my song play counts, playlists, etc. Go to Apple's support forums and you'll see database corruption is a frequently occurring and very annoying issue.
I can understand the iPod not being able to play WMA/OGG/FLAC/etc. for now due to limited CPU power (even though lots of other MP3 players can do it just fine), but I don't see any reason why iTunes shouldn't be able to play them.
For me, Winamp 5 is the only tool that gets the job done, and I'm relieved to see it will be sticking around!
I had two of my US Visa cards rejected for no known reason... my billing address matched the address on file with the card. I guess the problem was that I'm living in Japan and they must be checking that your IP address is in the same country as your credit card. Never had that problem with any other online retailers, though. I was finally able to register using my Japanese credit card.
I feel really sorry for my military friends who live off-base here, though. The guys on-base should have no problem, but the guys off-base will have Japan IP addresses and no Japanese credit cards. Guess they'll have to buy the retail version (in a few months when the translated version goes on sale), and learn to speak Japanese if they want to play it...
So what happens when some reasearcher jams the laser shield open with a crate, and subsequently blows a hole in the side of the Lamda research complex?
Having a single My Documents folder does make one thing a lot easier though, and that's backup.
My "My Documents" folder contains basically my entire life--papers dating back through high school, address book and email archive, all my pictures, music, save games, application backups, drivers & other updates, backup of my Palm files, scans of important life documents (birth certificate, etc.) All neatly sorted of course.
I sync my My Documents folder between my desktop, laptop, and an external drive, plus occasional off-site DVD or CD backups of really important stuff. I take great comfort knowing that in the event of a major disaster, I can just grab my laptop and run, without worrying about what important data might be left behind.
He knows what he's talking about, unlike most of the Insightful-modded posts so far.
Since this article is talking about elementary school students, I'm really disgusted by the number of Funny-modded jokes about tentacle rape and spooge and what not. Sickos. You know, those kinds of anime & manga are much more popular in the US than in Japan, so despite its origin, what does that say about who are really the pervs?
But, for what its worth, despite Japan's reputation for being a safe country (which it generally is when talking about violent crime/theft/drug crimes), there is a disproportionately high rate of child abuse, kidnapping, rape, and violent attacks against young children.
I don't think RFID tags on kids is the answer, though. Its a big social problem and needs to be worked on from more than just the preventative angle.
But I thought that's exactly what this experiment accomplished. The Physics Web article and diagram certainly suggest that they're teleporting a known state, via the use of a third particle to influence one side of the pair; am I reading them wrong?
IANAQP, but my interpretation of their diagram: Basically, you start with your source particle S and destination particle D. The goal in quantum teleportation is to copy the exact state from S to D. They suggest doing this by creating an entangled pair, A and B. Fire A and S, and B at D. When A collides with S, A's state will be fixed by that interaction, which will instantaneously cause B's state to be changed in the same way, which will impart an identical state onto D when they collide.
The problem is, of course, that A and B have to travel from some half-way point to S and D, and being particles, they cannot travel FTL. So, this method allows us to teleport an exact duplicate of S to D, but not at FTL speeds.
I'd assume you just repeatedly observe it at fixed intervals to generate a bitstream (or whatever-stream) of incoming information.
You can't observe a particle of an entangled pair more than once. After its been observed and their possible states collapse into one definite state, the entanglement stops.
Once you observe either particle of an entangled pair, the entanglement ends and the state is fixed to a single possibility. You can't flip a particle back and forth and still observe changes to its former mate.
What you're thinking of doing is creating an entangled pair, and keeping one particle on Earth, and keepting the other on a spaceship. Then by changing the state of the Earth particle, you could affect the state of the spaceship particle. Right?
The problem is, we have no way to choose what state the particles will go into when we observe one. Its a random outcome, and you can't acheive any communication if the output is just random noise.
Furthermore, from the spaceship's viewpoint, how do you tell if your particle's state has changed due to an incoming transmission? The only way to know would be to observe it. But, we don't know if that particle had been observed by Earth yet. If it had, then we just disturbed the state that Earth had set. If it hadn't, then we just forced it (and Earth's particle) to a random state. True, the Earth's particle will now be set to the same random value, but random values are still uselss for communication.
For it to work, you'd need a second channel of information, which could transmit some kind of key to decoding the random states into data. Of course, this channel of information would have to go FTL too, so its a Catch-22...
How long until viruses/zombie software get smart and learn how to manipulate the ISP's site for opening up ports? It could grab the user ID, hostname, and any passwords needed right off the host's PC...
Except that the countries with the most advanced cellphones (Japan and South Korea) are using proprietary and incompatible standards just like the USA did, so your argument doesn't hold up.
I'm not saying standards like GSM are bad, but if this really was a standards issue, wouldn't we all be ooh-ing and aah-ing over Europe's awesome high-tech GSM phones, instead of Japan's awesome high-tech (insert random 2.5G/3G celphone standard here) phones?
If anything, Japan has proven that GSM isn't the best technology for densely populated urban areas.
Sorry dude, but you really haven't thought this one through, have you?
They will when the alternatives are 1) having to change one's e-mail address every week because your ISP just got on SPEWS blacklist and 2) drown in spam.
By your logic, nobody would be using the current e-mail system either, because these things are happening already. Sure lots of people are complaining, but I don't see too many abandoning e-mail for good...
No it doesn't. Passports work. I don't see why this would be any different.
Passports didn't come into use overnight, and even after many many years they still have flaws. Fortunately, most individuals don't have to use them very often, and they have a pretty good (but not perfect) physical security system. If the transition time is really short, then whoever is in charge of e-mail passports will be immediately overwhelmed by applications. If the time is long, then everyone is going to apply at the last minute anyway. Furthermore, until a vast vast majority of users have the passport software installed, you'll still need to receive regular SMTP mail (which means, you'll still get spam until the cutoff date). For a total cutoff, you're talking about replacing billions of mail clients, mail servers, celphones, PDAs, program libraries, etc etc... not something that will happen overnight.
Have worms on your Windows box: your ID is revoked.
Ohhh boy, I don't know where to begin with this one. You're saying that if a Code Red-type worm infects 10 million innocent users, that these people should lose e-mail access FOR LIFE? If not for life, people will just claim ignorance, get a pardon, be back online in a few days, and we'll still get plenty of spam from infested machines. If you're talking about a one-strike-you're-out rule, do you suggest some agency be in charge of re-instating access after some prohibationary period? If so, first off, you'd need a server to store all the blacklisted passports, and you'd need to check it EVERY TIME you send or receive an email. What agency will you give the authority and technical capability to pull that off (we're talking millions of transactions per second)? Do they have the capacity to re-instate millions of users within a very short time period, should a new internet worm hit? What if I've been falsely accused, or blacklisted because my government decided to censor me? Or what if this central authority just decides one day "oh by the way, from now on we're charging a hundred bucks a month to maintain your e-mail passport, have a nice day?" What if they get DDoSed?
Again, passports work. This should work too.
Passports work because they are used somewhat infrequently on an individual basis. They have a relatively reliable security measure (facial recognition) and require a physical presence to operate. Still, there are many weaknesses and failures in the system. If someone uses a copy of my passport to commit a crime, there's a good chance I can defend myself with an alibi. If the same is true with your proposed e-mail passports, then spammers will simply hop from stolen ID to stolen ID. They don't have to deal with facial recognition or physical presence online. Personally, I think revoking someone's e-mail access for life, just because some spammer successfully guessed/copied their passport key, to be a rather harsh way to rule.
Also, a corrupt government can easily deny passports to their citizens. At present, it is much more difficult to deny them e-mail, but your proposal changes that. We would lose any hope of having an e-mail free speech movement in China or North Korea.
No-one has even tried because the ideas got shot down by professional hand-wringers.
So, even though a vast reward of fame and fortune is waiting for whomever can solve the e-mail problem, the tens of thousands of smart people who have been thinking about this problem for years, are just hand-wringing? "Hmm, I could solve this problem and be super r
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable (x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck (x) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome (x) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
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Was going to mod you informative, until I read the maglev part. There are no commercial maglevs in Japan. JR has a test track in Yamagata Pref. (IIRC) and they've done some demonstration rides for journalists and lucky guests, but it certainly isn't in commercial use yet anywhere in Japan. The Shinkansen bullet trains run on ordinary iron rails.
Though what you said about TV phones is true. Not sure why US needs some special broadcasting system to send TV to celphones, when some Japanese celphones can display standard Japan OTA broadcast TV. They'd probably be able to pick up US OTA TV too, though the channel numbers would be wrong (different freq. assignments).
Holy crap, this is the first time I heard Richard Biggs died. I met him at a convention in 2002 I think, shook his hand, and then he ran off. I always thought I'd have another chance to grab an autograph or something...
Truly the loss of a great, if relatively unknown actor...
I live in Japan and often thought of building a box like this to leave in my family's house in the US, so that I can watch my favorite TV programs from here. Fortunately, thanks to bittorrent, I can download all my shows faster and in much higher quality than I could stream live from a home broadband connection. But if there is a worldwide crackdown on BT/P2P/etc., I'll definitely consider doing it myself. Should be easily under $400 to build a box like this.
That's the way Intel worked in the past, but they haven't done that for some time. The reason is that their yields (supply) on high-end chips are much higher than the demand for said chips. And the number of chips that fail to run at the higher speeds doesn't even begin to satisfy the demand for the lower speed grades.
If Intel sold every 3.4GHz-capable P4 as a 3.4GHz chip, then there would be a glut of those chips in the supply line. Distributers would have to price them down to keep them selling, and that means Intel can't charge as high a premium for their high-end chips, and can't recover their R&D costs as quickly. Meanwhile, with the stock of lower-end chips drying up, the demand can't be satisfied and Intel ends up getting out-priced/out-supplied on the low end. Not a good situation for them.
Instead, a great many 3.4GHz-capable chips are marked down (and hardware locked) at a slower speed, to satisfy the demands for each tier of chip. That's why overclocking is possible--maybe your 2.4GHz chip actually passed the tests for 3.4GHz, but Intel had already met their quota for the higher speed grades. Of course, you might also be getting a chip that failed at 2.5GHz and barely passed 2.4GHz, that's why overclocking is a risk.
Like all current high-res camera phones, it will likely have a 7MP mode which saves only to the memory card, and a low-res mode (320x240 or maybe 640x480) which can be sent by email.
I don't know about the current crop of American camera phones, but Japanese camera phones can automatically downsize your pics when you email them.
In Japan there are three ways to receieve TV broadcasts: OTA (terrestrial), BS (Broadcast Satellite, run by NHK), and CS110 (Communications Satellite, 110 is the lattitude or longitude of that particular satellite, I think). Cable TV makes up only a tiny, tiny fraction of the TV market as most cities aren't wired for it, and even in major cities like Tokyo, most buildings aren't wired for cable and most landlords won't let you install it.
OTA HD is only broadcast from Tokyo and Osaka for now. BS reaches the whole country, but only carries a couple of NHK-owned channels (free HD recent movies though, like LOTR and T3). CS is run by SkyPerfect (like DirecTV) but I don't think they have any HD channels yet.
Japan's phones are mostly using the same tech as the USA (i.e. W-CDMA or CDMA2000, at least in those areas which have upgraded)... just on different frequencies. This is because many of the frequencies used by US phones were already allocated for other uses in Japan. Its the same reason why the US's GSM network is 1.9GHz and the rest of the world's GSM is 1.8GHz (I think... might have that backwards).
But no worry... you can now buy a number of phones that work on 3G in Japan, and both GSM variants for the US/rest-of-world.
I've tried several versions of iTunes now, and I just don't like it. Where are the customization options? I'm not just talking about skins and interface and such... everything just seems very inflexible. If you use iTunes and only iTunes for all of your ripping/downloads, then I'm sure its great. But if you're using other programs to aquire and manage music, it sucks.
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders. You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them. (You can list them with the duplicate tracks tool, but I find it to be FAR too loose with its rules, for example, it thinks "Intro Theme (3:20)" and "Intro Theme (TV version) (0:30)" are the same track.) Meanwhile, Winamp 5 can very quickly and automatically rescan my music folder for new songs or changed tags.
Also, after using iTunes to edit some ID3 tags, my database ended up corrupted and I had to delete it. Fortunately I had only been using iTunes for a few hours, or I would have lost all of my song play counts, playlists, etc. Go to Apple's support forums and you'll see database corruption is a frequently occurring and very annoying issue.
I can understand the iPod not being able to play WMA/OGG/FLAC/etc. for now due to limited CPU power (even though lots of other MP3 players can do it just fine), but I don't see any reason why iTunes shouldn't be able to play them.
For me, Winamp 5 is the only tool that gets the job done, and I'm relieved to see it will be sticking around!
I had two of my US Visa cards rejected for no known reason... my billing address matched the address on file with the card. I guess the problem was that I'm living in Japan and they must be checking that your IP address is in the same country as your credit card. Never had that problem with any other online retailers, though. I was finally able to register using my Japanese credit card.
I feel really sorry for my military friends who live off-base here, though. The guys on-base should have no problem, but the guys off-base will have Japan IP addresses and no Japanese credit cards. Guess they'll have to buy the retail version (in a few months when the translated version goes on sale), and learn to speak Japanese if they want to play it...
It's the beards. ;)
CD lasers are infrared
DVD lasers are red
Blu-ray lasers are blue
Sugar is sweet
And I love you
640k breasts per second should be enough for everyone...
So what happens when some reasearcher jams the laser shield open with a crate, and subsequently blows a hole in the side of the Lamda research complex?
DaNG, DeNG, DiNG, DoNG, DuNG.
;-)
Well, at least, one of the five is a non-dirty word.
No, that's Betacam (SP/SX/Digi). Completely different from Betamax.
Having a single My Documents folder does make one thing a lot easier though, and that's backup.
My "My Documents" folder contains basically my entire life--papers dating back through high school, address book and email archive, all my pictures, music, save games, application backups, drivers & other updates, backup of my Palm files, scans of important life documents (birth certificate, etc.) All neatly sorted of course.
I sync my My Documents folder between my desktop, laptop, and an external drive, plus occasional off-site DVD or CD backups of really important stuff. I take great comfort knowing that in the event of a major disaster, I can just grab my laptop and run, without worrying about what important data might be left behind.
I suggest you say "Tea." before "Earl Gray. Hot," otherwise you might end up with a flaming Duke. ;-)
He knows what he's talking about, unlike most of the Insightful-modded posts so far.
Since this article is talking about elementary school students, I'm really disgusted by the number of Funny-modded jokes about tentacle rape and spooge and what not. Sickos. You know, those kinds of anime & manga are much more popular in the US than in Japan, so despite its origin, what does that say about who are really the pervs?
But, for what its worth, despite Japan's reputation for being a safe country (which it generally is when talking about violent crime/theft/drug crimes), there is a disproportionately high rate of child abuse, kidnapping, rape, and violent attacks against young children.
I don't think RFID tags on kids is the answer, though. Its a big social problem and needs to be worked on from more than just the preventative angle.
IANAQP, but my interpretation of their diagram: Basically, you start with your source particle S and destination particle D. The goal in quantum teleportation is to copy the exact state from S to D. They suggest doing this by creating an entangled pair, A and B. Fire A and S, and B at D. When A collides with S, A's state will be fixed by that interaction, which will instantaneously cause B's state to be changed in the same way, which will impart an identical state onto D when they collide.
The problem is, of course, that A and B have to travel from some half-way point to S and D, and being particles, they cannot travel FTL. So, this method allows us to teleport an exact duplicate of S to D, but not at FTL speeds.
I'd assume you just repeatedly observe it at fixed intervals to generate a bitstream (or whatever-stream) of incoming information.You can't observe a particle of an entangled pair more than once. After its been observed and their possible states collapse into one definite state, the entanglement stops.
Once you observe either particle of an entangled pair, the entanglement ends and the state is fixed to a single possibility. You can't flip a particle back and forth and still observe changes to its former mate.
What you're thinking of doing is creating an entangled pair, and keeping one particle on Earth, and keepting the other on a spaceship. Then by changing the state of the Earth particle, you could affect the state of the spaceship particle. Right?
The problem is, we have no way to choose what state the particles will go into when we observe one. Its a random outcome, and you can't acheive any communication if the output is just random noise.
Furthermore, from the spaceship's viewpoint, how do you tell if your particle's state has changed due to an incoming transmission? The only way to know would be to observe it. But, we don't know if that particle had been observed by Earth yet. If it had, then we just disturbed the state that Earth had set. If it hadn't, then we just forced it (and Earth's particle) to a random state. True, the Earth's particle will now be set to the same random value, but random values are still uselss for communication.
For it to work, you'd need a second channel of information, which could transmit some kind of key to decoding the random states into data. Of course, this channel of information would have to go FTL too, so its a Catch-22...
How long until viruses/zombie software get smart and learn how to manipulate the ISP's site for opening up ports? It could grab the user ID, hostname, and any passwords needed right off the host's PC...
Except that the countries with the most advanced cellphones (Japan and South Korea) are using proprietary and incompatible standards just like the USA did, so your argument doesn't hold up.
I'm not saying standards like GSM are bad, but if this really was a standards issue, wouldn't we all be ooh-ing and aah-ing over Europe's awesome high-tech GSM phones, instead of Japan's awesome high-tech (insert random 2.5G/3G celphone standard here) phones?
If anything, Japan has proven that GSM isn't the best technology for densely populated urban areas.
Sorry dude, but you really haven't thought this one through, have you?
They will when the alternatives are 1) having to change one's e-mail address every week because your ISP just got on SPEWS blacklist and 2) drown in spam.
By your logic, nobody would be using the current e-mail system either, because these things are happening already. Sure lots of people are complaining, but I don't see too many abandoning e-mail for good...
No it doesn't. Passports work. I don't see why this would be any different.
Passports didn't come into use overnight, and even after many many years they still have flaws. Fortunately, most individuals don't have to use them very often, and they have a pretty good (but not perfect) physical security system. If the transition time is really short, then whoever is in charge of e-mail passports will be immediately overwhelmed by applications. If the time is long, then everyone is going to apply at the last minute anyway. Furthermore, until a vast vast majority of users have the passport software installed, you'll still need to receive regular SMTP mail (which means, you'll still get spam until the cutoff date). For a total cutoff, you're talking about replacing billions of mail clients, mail servers, celphones, PDAs, program libraries, etc etc... not something that will happen overnight.
Have worms on your Windows box: your ID is revoked.
Ohhh boy, I don't know where to begin with this one. You're saying that if a Code Red-type worm infects 10 million innocent users, that these people should lose e-mail access FOR LIFE? If not for life, people will just claim ignorance, get a pardon, be back online in a few days, and we'll still get plenty of spam from infested machines. If you're talking about a one-strike-you're-out rule, do you suggest some agency be in charge of re-instating access after some prohibationary period? If so, first off, you'd need a server to store all the blacklisted passports, and you'd need to check it EVERY TIME you send or receive an email. What agency will you give the authority and technical capability to pull that off (we're talking millions of transactions per second)? Do they have the capacity to re-instate millions of users within a very short time period, should a new internet worm hit? What if I've been falsely accused, or blacklisted because my government decided to censor me? Or what if this central authority just decides one day "oh by the way, from now on we're charging a hundred bucks a month to maintain your e-mail passport, have a nice day?" What if they get DDoSed?
Again, passports work. This should work too.
Passports work because they are used somewhat infrequently on an individual basis. They have a relatively reliable security measure (facial recognition) and require a physical presence to operate. Still, there are many weaknesses and failures in the system. If someone uses a copy of my passport to commit a crime, there's a good chance I can defend myself with an alibi. If the same is true with your proposed e-mail passports, then spammers will simply hop from stolen ID to stolen ID. They don't have to deal with facial recognition or physical presence online. Personally, I think revoking someone's e-mail access for life, just because some spammer successfully guessed/copied their passport key, to be a rather harsh way to rule.
Also, a corrupt government can easily deny passports to their citizens. At present, it is much more difficult to deny them e-mail, but your proposal changes that. We would lose any hope of having an e-mail free speech movement in China or North Korea.
No-one has even tried because the ideas got shot down by professional hand-wringers.
So, even though a vast reward of fame and fortune is waiting for whomever can solve the e-mail problem, the tens of thousands of smart people who have been thinking about this problem for years, are just hand-wringing? "Hmm, I could solve this problem and be super r
This article advocates a
(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.