In a long-haul environment, the most common speeds are 8kbps of compressed voice using some G.729 variant, optionally with silence suppression, such as Cisco's G.729ab. With IP overhead, this is typically about 22kbps unless you also add IPSEC, in which case it's worse. (There are ways to get ~11kbps, but not usually.) If you're doing silence suppression, average utilization is about 50-60%.
There are other environments which run uncompressed voice, but most or maybe all of the Cisco stuff can do compressed.
Hey, just because your government schoolteachers were telling *you* that you have to pledge to obey the laws made by the Flag and by the Republic doesn't mean that *they* worried about obeying the laws *themselves* or even knowing them. As I mentioned in a separate article, the Supremes invalidated mandatory flag-worship back in the 40s, even though the content back then was only the nationalist part and not the religious part.
The reason that students in US government-funded public schools are not legally required to say the Pledge of Allegiance is that the Supreme Court has already fixed that, mainly due to a bunch of lawsuits by the Jehovah's Witnesses in the 40s. They view the pledge to be idolatry, and their allegiance is to God and the Bible, not to any human government. They may have a bunch of other things wrong with them, but they're willing to stand up for their principles on issues like that, and good for them.
The article still has the Lesbian Porn in it, and it's The Straight Dope, so it goes out the way it goes out.
Most censorware only blocks pages that aren't algorithmically correct, but there's some out there that also deletes the dirty words, for whatever value of dirty the authors' dirty minds can imagine. Obviously, as you say, it's highly unlikely that your company has a Squadron of Elite Gorillas reading every page looking for political incorrectness; it's probably a word or phrase filter, like the kinds of things that take out the words CENSORED and CENSORED and MiddleCENSORED. .
The reason that the Constitution refers to "oath or affirmation" and US courts let you "affirm" instead of swearing isn't primarily to accommodate atheists - it's there to accommodate Christians, whose religion forbids swearing, particularly many of the puritanical types and also the Quakers, who were not only prominent politically (especially in Ben Franklin's Philadelphia), but who are quite adamant about not letting the government think it's more important than God or the truth. It's also useful for believers in other religions or in atheism, and as you say, if somebody who doesn't believe in a particular god takes an oath on that god or that god's religious symbols, that's pretty bogus at best.
But there's certainly no need for anyone to make a pledge like this anyway - the US isn't a feudal society requiring an oath of fealty to participate, as much as the current Presidential dynasty and Attorney General might like. It's a modern democracy - come buy a house or rent an apartment or sleep under a bridge, and understand that if you break the laws you might get thrown in jail. All the rest of it's decoration imposed by Congress and the bureaucracies. Most of my ancestors got here before the current government did, but the one or two latecomers still arrived before the potato famine, and there wasn't any of that nonsense needed, though later on you probably had to register with some county or town clerk if you wanted to vote.
And as far as making kids affirm every day that they're going to obey some piece of cloth and the government that claims to own it, well, that was pretty silly back when that socialist minister Francis Bellamy wrote it and started promoting it, and it was an internationalist thing - he was pretty torqued in 1923 when it was Americanized, because that wasn't what he'd had in mind at all, and his daughter also objected in the 1950s when the Red Scare folks added "Under God" to add the trappings of religion to the evils of nationalism in opposition to those Godless Commies.
As you almost but not quite point out, if you want to go back to the original internationalist socialist version, you need to get rid of the "United States of America" bit and go back to the "My Flag" version.
I didn't say anything was wrong with analog - when you want something to do what it does, it's fine. It's just that *counting* isn't one of the things that analog systems do - thus the *emphasis* on *Count*, and the pun about "discrete", and the reference to abacuses, which *can* count.
Bray appears to be going over the same territory that's been explored before, without the benefit of reading the previous analysis, so he's reinventing the hexagonal wheel when other people have already figured out that round wheels with axles work better. There are a variety of ways to build services like this, ranging from central-planners imposing artificial costs on senders to recipients charging for their attention using popular payment services. Bray's closer to the central-planning end of the spectrum.
Some of these solutions require changing your email sender client, some require changing your email receiving client, some require changing the sender's or receiver's mail transfer agent, some just require using different options (e.g. unique email addresses per sender-recipient pair to manage accounts), some require middlemen, some require digital signatures, etc. Almost all of them want to charge you something like $0.001 to 0.01 in cash or CPU time to send a message, making it cheap enough that it's not too annoying but expensive enough that 99% of spammers give up because they know they can't make money, and the other 1% who are stupid enough to try anyway lose some money before they give up.
Almost all of the proposed mechanisms require senders to get an account with either a mail forwarding service or a micropayment service if you want to send mail to a recipient who uses them, and either require you to include the account number in your message or a micropayment token in your message (which could require simple client changes) or to digitally sign your message or recognize you based on some login process or your IP address or something else that's out-of-band from your client. In some versions, if the recipient thinks your message wasn't spam, he keeps the money, and if he thinks it was spam (or more generally, thinks it wasn't worth his time to read it), he keeps the money. Most versions include some whitelisting mechanism so that legitimate mailing lists can continue to work for free.
A less radical alternative to paid messages is the auto-responder that requires an unknown sender to confirm that she really exists, either by replying to a "Please confirm" message or clicking a website, and often including some Turing Test such as typing in a number from an attached picture or answering some word puzzle, which prevents spammers from using forged From addresses to reach their recipients. That doesn't cut down on the amount of spam your mailbox receives, but it cuts down on the amount that you see.
All of these technical alternatives can be built in a decentralized fashion - either directly by the recipient, or by businesses that think they can get customers and sell mailboxes to people who don't want to receive spam. The catch is whether enough recipients are willing to annoy people who they want to get mail from in return for not getting spam. So far, the answer is "Not Yet", or you'd be getting a lot more confirm-you're-human requests. But maybe that's just because none of the version out there are friendly enough to become popular, and maybe YOU can write the next one. Most email-provider ISPs offer filtering or blacklisting services of various sorts, because from their perspective, they not only want to attract or retain customers, they want to cut down on the huge volume of relay-abuse spam and dictionary-attack spam because it costs them money, and it's harder to do that without changing the infrastructure.
You're missing the economics point - the reason big spammers spam is to make money, and the reason little spammers spam is that they think they can M4k3 M0n3y F4$$T using spamware than the big boys sell them. (By definition, big spammers make money or they wouldn't stay big....) The reason they make money is that the cost of spam is so low that the probability that an individual email hooks a customer can be very very low and they'll still make a profit. If one message per million gets you a $100 V14gr4 sale, that's a return of $0.0001 per message, so if it costs you $0.00001 to send a message, PR0F1T!, and if it costs you $0.001 to send a message, you lose money.
So if you could actually get the public to be willing to use penny-per-message email, the big spammers would die, because they wouldn't be able to make a profit, and there'd be fewer of them selling spamware to amateur spammers, and it'd be easier to find and kill the amateurs. The problem, of course, is that nobody really wants to pay for sending email, so businesses aren't going to set up their email that way because it annoys their customers, and home users aren't going to set up their email that way because it annoys their friends. But you could do it today if you wanted to - just set up a Paypal front end, or Peppercoin or something.
You weren't taking advantage of the older Federal laws on telemarketing - you tell them "Put Me On Your Don't Call List" when they call you and they have to do it. That's not the new national don't call list, it's just a list that they have to maintain. The next conversation you have with them is something like $500; any commercial telemarketing outfit takes this stuff seriously. Sure, you could try to ding them for the extra 35c if you went over your monthly minute bucket,
The only problems I've had with it are that they only have to keep you on the list for a year, and they aren't very bright about multiple phone lines per household (even with sequential phone numbers - but it took MCI a long time before they successfully called my second line at a time that I was home and didn't have a modem attached to it.:-)
The article's pretty good, though the author does spend a couple of paragraphs confusing what you can do with active vs. passive tracking systems.
It's really really hard for a passive system to track a specific car mixed in with a bunch of other cars, especially if you don't have a solid identification of when it enters and leaves the system, or when there are bridges, tunnels, etc. That's a good job for active systems, like GPS-transmitting bugs or simply the regular signals from cell phones. Passive systems are much better at telling you that _some_ airplane just showed up. Passive systems could tell you that the average speed of cars on the freeway is 25 mph, but it's probably easier to dig that kind of information out of a cell-phone system that tracks the motions of cars into and out of cells, or to use a video processor on a camera, or for that matter those old rubber-hose-across-the-road detectors.
My mother still has her old Mac dot-matrix printer; I forget which model, but it's a pin-feed thing that's better for single mailing labels. She's also got her old Mac (upgraded to 1 MB RAM), which she keeps because a few programs never did work under MacOS 7.x, but mostly she uses her new Mac - a Performa 630. It's hard getting it to keep working well with new printers (sigh), and the monitor and graphics are a bit wonky, and her eyesight's going, so we may have to just get her a new eMac or something.
I don't still have an abacus, but some of you more discrete folks might...
The slide rule that I can find easily is a Stevens Rally Indicator Model 25, circular slide rule that's maybe 9" across. It's not fancy - only one scale and a set of pointers - but you can get an extra half digit or so of precision out of it. I don't actually calculate with it; it's there as a decorative object along with the other toys on top of the monitor, but I still remember how. I bought it in about 1975, quite used - as the name indicates, it's designed for road-rally calculations like speed-vs-time.
I might have a normal slide rule in some drawer, probably with the slide broken off (or I might have tossed it when cleaning up.) The usual simple model, with six or seven scales. I had a 9-scaler that I used in high school and college, though I didn't use it much after I got my first HP calculator; the previous calculator didn't have trig functions so the slide rule was still useful, and of course in chemistry class you weren't allowed to use electronic calculators on exams, because that gave a substantial advantage to the kids who could afford them vs. the kids who only had slide rules. My father kept a circular slide rule in the car for figuring gas mileage, as well as using them at work.
The one cool analog tool that I inherited from my father-in-law that I never really learned to use was a polar planimeter, which is a wheelie thing that lets you measure areas on a map or drawing. There was an appendix in one of my high school calculus books on how to use it (or maybe it was one of my father's calculus books...)
OK, they've upgraded the FAQ since I last read it, and certifying public keys at login sounds like they're at least thinking about the problem.
They still should be doing Diffie Hellmann key exchange, so they can do some forward secrecy, with some kind of signature method, and there are still many ways to do RSA wrong (in particular, not getting message padding right, and reusing values if they have small encryption exponents), and they also need to do random number generation correctly (that's one thing that early Netscape SSL versions failed at), and there are ways to use RSA that still make it easy to rat out your users to the Feds, if they want to, or to crackers even if they don't help, and other ways to use it that don't have those problems.
Why is anybody still using 2MB of RAM on a disk controller? The stuff is _so_ cheap; the extra 6MB of RAM shouldn't add more than a dollar to the price of the system, probably less, and especially for slow rotation speeds, extra caching can be useful. Does this have something to do with an old disk controller chip that only has 2MB built in vs. a faster chip with 8MB and they don't want to spend the cash to redesign the older chip? Or are they just being cheap on the wrong parts? (By contrast, I assume the 5400 vs. 7200 comes from mechanical differences, where there's probably a good excuse, but that's partly because I'm not a mechanical engineer:-)
Perhaps MS operating systems are better at caching than they used to be, but being able to cache N whole tracks at once is pretty important - the disk rotational latency has been more important than seek time for probably a decade.
This story does appear to be about a couple of big Aussie email providers, and how their email servers are getting bogged down. Telstra and Optus are also IP bandwidth providers, but that's really a separate issue, and the article didn't say their pipes were getting bogged down (except maybe the pipes into their email servers.) Much different scale, much different set of problems and solutions.
If their usual 30 million messages/day goes up 20%, and the average message is 10 KB, that's an extra 60GB/day (* 8bits/byte / 86400 sec/day) -> 5.5 megabits/second. So they need an extra 3 E1 lines, or half a slow Ethernet. In practice they'd need more, because it's not spread out evenly across the day, but it shouldn't be killing them.
Now, Telstra always had the reputation of being the developed world's most data-clueless telco, with a stupidity and greed level similar to the US cable modem companies.... But even so, this shouldn't be that much strain on them as a bandwidth provider.
Enduser-to-Enduser, for which a CALEA-regulated telecom might be required to turn over the IP packets but has no control over whether they're encrypted. That means that if the end-to-end protocol does encryption properly, wiretappers can see who's talking but can't hear what they're saying, and if the VOIP call is using a VPN, they can't even see that they're talking, just that they're exchanging bits.
(CALEA originally didn't cover wiretapping ISPs, but if PATRIOT didn't, then PATRIOT 2 or 2.6 or 3.0 probably will, either to prevent foreign and homeland-betraying terrorists from selling drugs and pr0n0graphy to your children while committing insider trading or else to collect the Universal Service Fund tax and the Gore Tax that provides low-cost internet for schoolchildren, and non-legal wiretappers (whether they're police or crackerz) can often break in even without the ISP's help.)
Enduser-to-Oldfashioned-Telephone-Gateway, either provided by
CALEA-regulated phone company (who have to collaborate with legal wiretaps, and can see the VOIP and phone sides.)
Non-CALEA-regulated US gateway service provider (who would use a CALEA-regulated phone company to do the phone part, which does have to collaborate but doesn't have any direct information about the VOIP side of the call.)
Non-US telephone company, so no CALEA regulations apply, but might have local legal wiretappers or other mafiosi or might have the NSA's Echelon spooks wiretapping them.
Gateway operated by the recipient, such as a PBX at a business or building landlord, which isn't a carrier so no CALEA.
In some of these cases, the wiretappers can see who's talking to whom, at least at a per-building or per-IP-address level, but in other cases they can only see one side of the conversation, or can see two sides separately but may not be able to glue them together. That's a separate threat from actually listening to the conversation, and US wiretapping law has traditionally set much lower legal barriers to getting approval to wiretap that (on the dubious theory that the caller and callee information is a conversation with the phone company, and therefore has less expectation of privacy than the user-to-user voice conversations.)
That's actually one thing that Skype could do better than conventional VOIP, if it wanted to, not that you could easily tell because the protocol and implementation are proprietary and undocumented. It's a supernode-based system, so it's possible that if Alice and Bob are end users behind supernodes, that they could have end-to-end encryption but only have the IP addresses of their supernodes published to the world, with their real IP addresses only known to the supernode, which isn't a CALEA-regulated telecom carrier, it's just one of millions of random DSL users who has no clue how to find out who he's supernoding for or how to get Skype to cough up the information the Fedz or local police want for a subpoena, and that information might or might not be stored after Alice and Bob hang up.
There's absolutely no way to trust crypto that you can't inspect. It doesn't have to be GPL-compliant politically-correct Free Software, but you really do need to be able to see the source and the documentation. The problem isn't just that Kazaa has done spyware in the past, though that certainly doesn't increase their trustability. The problem is that with closed-source systems that deliberately don't implement standards, there's no way to tell how much security they're trying to give you whether they've done it competently or not.
For instance, Skype says they're using 256-bit AES to encrypt your voice. That's a really good start, but how do they exchange keys? Is there a way to steal the keys? Is there a way for a man-in-the-middle attack to get both you and the person you're talking with to pass your voice calls or key exchange messages through the attacker? Since it's a supernode-based system, there's a very convenient place to _locate_ a MITM... How do you even verify that the directory entry for the person you're trying to talk to is really theirs? Since Skype's documentation hypes the fact that it's using AES, and doesn't mention public key, that strongly implies there's no public key infrastructure to help you.
Microsoft's original PPTP had at least seven things wrong with its crypto, most of which were related to password handling or crypto key reuse (which is Rule Number 1 for what not to do when you're using RC4 encryption.) Some of their weaknesses were in their fundamental protocols, and some of them in their implementation of their protocols. As far as we can tell, Microsoft was trying to do the right thing, and could afford to hire real engineers, yet they screwed up inexcusably badly. Skype doesn't document their protocols, or their implementation, and at least their marketing people don't understand enough crypto to be able to tell if their engineers have a clue, much less whether there's deliberate spyware included, or who gets to be the spy if there is.
Disclaimer: I work for a large telecom company, but this is my rant, not theirs.
Inflammatory is good. The FBI, NSA, and their ilk have tried very hard to prevent private use of encryption, and folks like the EFF, academic crypto community, cypherpunks, Netscape, and VPN makers have done great work in stopping that. But in fact the Feds, mainly the FBI, have been trying very hard to interfere with end-to-end communications because it is hard to wiretap.
The CALEA wiretap laws are an immense pain in the ass to any voice telecom carrier trying to build a Voice Over IP system, because you need to buy equipment and modify your designs and operations to support meddling middlemen into something that's an end-to-end protocol, while competitors who *aren't* regulated voice telecom carriers don't have the same requirements so they only have to do Stupid Network things at the edges and can therefore use more standard equipment.
The real problem is how you make sure that the privacy is actually implemented adequately.
"they have the same rights to inspect your data in their system"? What THEIR are you talking about? The telecom networks aren't the FBI's system, they're the private sector's (at least in most of the world.)
You've got the rights and powers bits backwards. US courts have let the police get away with wiretapping because they haven't always valued privacy, and because traditional telephone companies were regulated monopolies, the courts have let police get warrants to force the phone companies to cooperate with wiretapping. The FBI has unfortunately been very successful in leveraging any bit of power they have into getting more power, and using that power as leverage to get even more. That's one of the reasons that end-to-end encryption is so critical, because it's the one part of the system that's clearly under your control - and even then, the wiretappers will try very hard to see _who_ you're talking to and when.
No, VOIP isn't free as in beer, but it's at least cheap as in drinking water. Most of the water you use in your house is for showers, toilets, and dishwashers, and the bit of extra that you actually drink doesn't change the total cost significantly (unless you're one of those environment-hostile Californians who insists on buying it in plastic bottles.) In particular, it doesn't make sense to radically increase the cost of billing to keep track of which bits are VOIP vs. web. A typical VOIP call uses 8kbps to carry the actual voice bits, which expands to about 20-24kbps by the time you include IP header overhead unless you do everything just right, in which case you can do 11kbps. It's pretty tight on a modem, and doesn't share nicely with big packets (MTU size is a REAL problem - a 1500 byte packet takes ~400ms on a 28.8kbps modem upstream), but on 128kbps it's usually tolerable and on faster circuits you're usually just fine. (But remember that your 3Mbps cable modem is usually 128kbps upstream...)
There is some benefit to QoS, but most ISPs that are evaluating it or providing it use a model like "X% of your bits are high priority for Y% extra price per month" or "$Z extra per month, all you can eat", because the primary impact of prioritization isn't on the fat backbone pipes, it's on the skinny line into your home or office, where you need to make sure that VOIP packets get on the wire before FTP/email/web packets (so it's really a router CPU cost.) The other big problem is that ISPs are using a random mixture of business models and technical settings, so in general you can't get your high-priority bits to go between ISPs.
There are two and a half main standards for VOIP. All of the standards use the same codecs - the big differences are in how you set up connections and calls.
H.323 is the old standard, which almost everybody supports. It's a bit complex and ugly, and looks a lot like the ISDN telco standards. Microsoft Netmeeting supports it for video as well as audio. If you just want to connect two things together, H.323 will work fine, but if you want to build any sort of complex system, it's pretty clumsy. If you want to connect two new fancy systems together, and they're not really compatible, they'll often fall back to H.323.
SIP is the main new standard, and everybody says they're going to use it Real Soon Now (particularly the VOIP router and PBX folks), though many of them don't actually have it implemented on all of their products yet because they've got too much embedded base. SIP is a much simpler and cleaner protocol, which looks like something written by Internet Unix developers who weren't worried about their embedded base of ISDN telco code.
The extra half is "Skinny", Cisco's proprietary protocol that most of their IP PBXs and IP phones use, developed before SIP was sufficiently standardized. H.323 was too much baggage, though most of that equipment can fall back to it, and most of it will handle SIP Real Soon Now.
Yes, Skype is proprietary and closed. Too bad, because it seems to be trying some interesting approaches to user interaction and directory service.
Speak Freely is one of the best open-but-non-standard systems out there - it was an early attempt to do a crypto phone. Unfortunately, its originator and main developer has decided that there's too much NAT in the world to make it worth continuing to develop it; getting around that takes a major redesign.
A lot of Instant Messaging systems of various sorts have added VOIP capability.
There's a LOT of open standards VOIP work - see openh323.org and other usual suspects. It turns out that many of the VOIP hardware makers are really happy to fund open standards development so there's something for their equipment to talk to, whether they make voice cards for PCs (either single-user or small PBX cards), or IP PBXs that want more features to make them interesting to users, or boxes that provide some glue function, or whatever, and even Cisco is funding some of them, and some of the little software companies are happy to do open standards work as part of consulting to the hardware people.
New PBXs are pretty much all migrating to IP-based; it's much easier to reuse low-cost PC hardware platforms and build good tools that way. The big PBX makers are generally taking their old PBXs and adding IP features on the side (as opposed to the big router makers adding VOIP boards to connect to old PBXs and telcos), and the real question for most of their customers is when to rip out the old stuff and replace it (for new buildings that need PBXs, it's obvious that IP PBXs are the way to go), because you really start to get operational benefits when you can interconnect multiple locations that way. The PBX industry could have gone to quasi-open standards with ISDN in the late 80s, to take advantage of the reduced development costs and simplicity, but it mostly didn't happen.
The real complexities are the interactions with existing public switched phone companies. There's a huge amount of economic and regulatory baggage built around who pays who how much money when a phone call gets handed off between parties. In the US, there's the originating local telco, the long distance telco (if it's long distance), the delivering telco (if it's not the originating telco), and the Gore Tax folks, all of whom want their cut of the money, and the settlements and pricing aren't really appropriate to the much lower costs of IP telephony, and the prices and regulators are different for intra-state vs. inter-state calls. In the international calling market, this
You've got it backwards. The reason that Comcast forbids server-like activities on customer machines is that they're suicidally clueless and they haven't figured out that their real competition isn't DSL - it's apathy on the part of people who would be customers if they were given the opportunity to do cool and interesting stuff instead of just faster-downloading couch-potato services. A few DSL providers get this - I'm using Sonic.net, and Speakeasy.net is pretty well-known, and even Earthlink mostly gets it - but too many DSL providers are inspired by clueless telcos who are learning cluelessness from the cable companies. Back when Excite@Home were the people who ran cable modems, their official policy mantra was "Ugh! Servers Bad! File-Stealers Bad! Bad! Bandwidth Theives Bad!", but some fraction of their employees had the clue ("Of _course_ we like Napster, that's why people _buy_ broadband, we just can't admit it anywhere our lawyers can hear us").
The right way to implement this is to have a carrier who has a clue and lets you use your Internet connection as a real full-scale internet connection, but has most kinds of world-to-user connections blocked by default and a friendly web menu for users to turn ports on and protocols if they want. Depending on hardware choices, this may be something you implement at the ISP's router, or may be something you implement at the customer premises equipment (cable modem or DSL box) -- the CPE approach scales better for performance, but sometimes you want to block things at the big end so that attackers don't flood your narrow DSL pipe or neighborhood cable segment.
That way you can get the best of both worlds - freedom to user your system to its fullest capacity, including applications that your ISP hadn't thought of in advance, but relative safety because most people don't turn things on that they don't understand, so broken applications and operating systems are kept protected behind firewalls unless there's a good reason to enable them.
It's pretty hard to tell a "Do Not Email" list from a "20 Million Fresh Verified Email Addresses" list.
There are ways to improve the process - instead of a list of raw email addresses, store the list as a set of hashes of email addresses, so you can check whether someuser@example.com is on the list, but the only way to extract lots of names from it is by dictionary-search. That's still not perfect, because it tends to break the username+tag@domain.com syntax, and doesn't easily allow wildcarding, and especially doesn't provide a good mechanism for mixing wildcarding with user validation - the people who manage the list really *do* have to verify that a user wants to be on it, because otherwise there'll be too much spoofing going on and some clever person will find a way to cause trouble by signing people up to it.
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There are other environments which run uncompressed voice, but most or maybe all of the Cisco stuff can do compressed.
The reason that students in US government-funded public schools are not legally required to say the Pledge of Allegiance is that the Supreme Court has already fixed that, mainly due to a bunch of lawsuits by the Jehovah's Witnesses in the 40s. They view the pledge to be idolatry, and their allegiance is to God and the Bible, not to any human government. They may have a bunch of other things wrong with them, but they're willing to stand up for their principles on issues like that, and good for them.
Most censorware only blocks pages that aren't algorithmically correct, but there's some out there that also deletes the dirty words, for whatever value of dirty the authors' dirty minds can imagine. Obviously, as you say, it's highly unlikely that your company has a Squadron of Elite Gorillas reading every page looking for political incorrectness; it's probably a word or phrase filter, like the kinds of things that take out the words CENSORED and CENSORED and MiddleCENSORED. .
But there's certainly no need for anyone to make a pledge like this anyway - the US isn't a feudal society requiring an oath of fealty to participate, as much as the current Presidential dynasty and Attorney General might like. It's a modern democracy - come buy a house or rent an apartment or sleep under a bridge, and understand that if you break the laws you might get thrown in jail. All the rest of it's decoration imposed by Congress and the bureaucracies. Most of my ancestors got here before the current government did, but the one or two latecomers still arrived before the potato famine, and there wasn't any of that nonsense needed, though later on you probably had to register with some county or town clerk if you wanted to vote.
And as far as making kids affirm every day that they're going to obey some piece of cloth and the government that claims to own it, well, that was pretty silly back when that socialist minister Francis Bellamy wrote it and started promoting it, and it was an internationalist thing - he was pretty torqued in 1923 when it was Americanized, because that wasn't what he'd had in mind at all, and his daughter also objected in the 1950s when the Red Scare folks added "Under God" to add the trappings of religion to the evils of nationalism in opposition to those Godless Commies.
As you almost but not quite point out, if you want to go back to the original internationalist socialist version, you need to get rid of the "United States of America" bit and go back to the "My Flag" version.
I didn't say anything was wrong with analog - when you want something to do what it does, it's fine. It's just that *counting* isn't one of the things that analog systems do - thus the *emphasis* on *Count*, and the pun about "discrete", and the reference to abacuses, which *can* count.
Some of these solutions require changing your email sender client, some require changing your email receiving client, some require changing the sender's or receiver's mail transfer agent, some just require using different options (e.g. unique email addresses per sender-recipient pair to manage accounts), some require middlemen, some require digital signatures, etc. Almost all of them want to charge you something like $0.001 to 0.01 in cash or CPU time to send a message, making it cheap enough that it's not too annoying but expensive enough that 99% of spammers give up because they know they can't make money, and the other 1% who are stupid enough to try anyway lose some money before they give up.
Almost all of the proposed mechanisms require senders to get an account with either a mail forwarding service or a micropayment service if you want to send mail to a recipient who uses them, and either require you to include the account number in your message or a micropayment token in your message (which could require simple client changes) or to digitally sign your message or recognize you based on some login process or your IP address or something else that's out-of-band from your client. In some versions, if the recipient thinks your message wasn't spam, he keeps the money, and if he thinks it was spam (or more generally, thinks it wasn't worth his time to read it), he keeps the money. Most versions include some whitelisting mechanism so that legitimate mailing lists can continue to work for free.
A less radical alternative to paid messages is the auto-responder that requires an unknown sender to confirm that she really exists, either by replying to a "Please confirm" message or clicking a website, and often including some Turing Test such as typing in a number from an attached picture or answering some word puzzle, which prevents spammers from using forged From addresses to reach their recipients. That doesn't cut down on the amount of spam your mailbox receives, but it cuts down on the amount that you see.
All of these technical alternatives can be built in a decentralized fashion - either directly by the recipient, or by businesses that think they can get customers and sell mailboxes to people who don't want to receive spam. The catch is whether enough recipients are willing to annoy people who they want to get mail from in return for not getting spam. So far, the answer is "Not Yet", or you'd be getting a lot more confirm-you're-human requests. But maybe that's just because none of the version out there are friendly enough to become popular, and maybe YOU can write the next one. Most email-provider ISPs offer filtering or blacklisting services of various sorts, because from their perspective, they not only want to attract or retain customers, they want to cut down on the huge volume of relay-abuse spam and dictionary-attack spam because it costs them money, and it's harder to do that without changing the infrastructure.
So if you could actually get the public to be willing to use penny-per-message email, the big spammers would die, because they wouldn't be able to make a profit, and there'd be fewer of them selling spamware to amateur spammers, and it'd be easier to find and kill the amateurs. The problem, of course, is that nobody really wants to pay for sending email, so businesses aren't going to set up their email that way because it annoys their customers, and home users aren't going to set up their email that way because it annoys their friends. But you could do it today if you wanted to - just set up a Paypal front end, or Peppercoin or something.
The only problems I've had with it are that they only have to keep you on the list for a year, and they aren't very bright about multiple phone lines per household (even with sequential phone numbers - but it took MCI a long time before they successfully called my second line at a time that I was home and didn't have a modem attached to it. :-)
It's really really hard for a passive system to track a specific car mixed in with a bunch of other cars, especially if you don't have a solid identification of when it enters and leaves the system, or when there are bridges, tunnels, etc. That's a good job for active systems, like GPS-transmitting bugs or simply the regular signals from cell phones. Passive systems are much better at telling you that _some_ airplane just showed up. Passive systems could tell you that the average speed of cars on the freeway is 25 mph, but it's probably easier to dig that kind of information out of a cell-phone system that tracks the motions of cars into and out of cells, or to use a video processor on a camera, or for that matter those old rubber-hose-across-the-road detectors.
Of course, a business with an address in the Langley Place building on Langley Road might just be hinting that it's really working for someone else...
My mother still has her old Mac dot-matrix printer; I forget which model, but it's a pin-feed thing that's better for single mailing labels. She's also got her old Mac (upgraded to 1 MB RAM), which she keeps because a few programs never did work under MacOS 7.x, but mostly she uses her new Mac - a Performa 630. It's hard getting it to keep working well with new printers (sigh), and the monitor and graphics are a bit wonky, and her eyesight's going, so we may have to just get her a new eMac or something.
The slide rule that I can find easily is a Stevens Rally Indicator Model 25, circular slide rule that's maybe 9" across. It's not fancy - only one scale and a set of pointers - but you can get an extra half digit or so of precision out of it. I don't actually calculate with it; it's there as a decorative object along with the other toys on top of the monitor, but I still remember how. I bought it in about 1975, quite used - as the name indicates, it's designed for road-rally calculations like speed-vs-time.
I might have a normal slide rule in some drawer, probably with the slide broken off (or I might have tossed it when cleaning up.) The usual simple model, with six or seven scales. I had a 9-scaler that I used in high school and college, though I didn't use it much after I got my first HP calculator; the previous calculator didn't have trig functions so the slide rule was still useful, and of course in chemistry class you weren't allowed to use electronic calculators on exams, because that gave a substantial advantage to the kids who could afford them vs. the kids who only had slide rules. My father kept a circular slide rule in the car for figuring gas mileage, as well as using them at work.
The one cool analog tool that I inherited from my father-in-law that I never really learned to use was a polar planimeter, which is a wheelie thing that lets you measure areas on a map or drawing. There was an appendix in one of my high school calculus books on how to use it (or maybe it was one of my father's calculus books...)
They still should be doing Diffie Hellmann key exchange, so they can do some forward secrecy, with some kind of signature method, and there are still many ways to do RSA wrong (in particular, not getting message padding right, and reusing values if they have small encryption exponents), and they also need to do random number generation correctly (that's one thing that early Netscape SSL versions failed at), and there are ways to use RSA that still make it easy to rat out your users to the Feds, if they want to, or to crackers even if they don't help, and other ways to use it that don't have those problems.
Perhaps MS operating systems are better at caching than they used to be, but being able to cache N whole tracks at once is pretty important - the disk rotational latency has been more important than seek time for probably a decade.
If their usual 30 million messages/day goes up 20%, and the average message is 10 KB, that's an extra 60GB/day (* 8bits/byte / 86400 sec/day) -> 5.5 megabits/second. So they need an extra 3 E1 lines, or half a slow Ethernet. In practice they'd need more, because it's not spread out evenly across the day, but it shouldn't be killing them.
Now, Telstra always had the reputation of being the developed world's most data-clueless telco, with a stupidity and greed level similar to the US cable modem companies.... But even so, this shouldn't be that much strain on them as a bandwidth provider.
(CALEA originally didn't cover wiretapping ISPs, but if PATRIOT didn't, then PATRIOT 2 or 2.6 or 3.0 probably will, either to prevent foreign and homeland-betraying terrorists from selling drugs and pr0n0graphy to your children while committing insider trading or else to collect the Universal Service Fund tax and the Gore Tax that provides low-cost internet for schoolchildren, and non-legal wiretappers (whether they're police or crackerz) can often break in even without the ISP's help.)
In some of these cases, the wiretappers can see who's talking to whom, at least at a per-building or per-IP-address level, but in other cases they can only see one side of the conversation, or can see two sides separately but may not be able to glue them together. That's a separate threat from actually listening to the conversation, and US wiretapping law has traditionally set much lower legal barriers to getting approval to wiretap that (on the dubious theory that the caller and callee information is a conversation with the phone company, and therefore has less expectation of privacy than the user-to-user voice conversations.)
That's actually one thing that Skype could do better than conventional VOIP, if it wanted to, not that you could easily tell because the protocol and implementation are proprietary and undocumented. It's a supernode-based system, so it's possible that if Alice and Bob are end users behind supernodes, that they could have end-to-end encryption but only have the IP addresses of their supernodes published to the world, with their real IP addresses only known to the supernode, which isn't a CALEA-regulated telecom carrier, it's just one of millions of random DSL users who has no clue how to find out who he's supernoding for or how to get Skype to cough up the information the Fedz or local police want for a subpoena, and that information might or might not be stored after Alice and Bob hang up.
For instance, Skype says they're using 256-bit AES to encrypt your voice. That's a really good start, but how do they exchange keys? Is there a way to steal the keys? Is there a way for a man-in-the-middle attack to get both you and the person you're talking with to pass your voice calls or key exchange messages through the attacker? Since it's a supernode-based system, there's a very convenient place to _locate_ a MITM... How do you even verify that the directory entry for the person you're trying to talk to is really theirs? Since Skype's documentation hypes the fact that it's using AES, and doesn't mention public key, that strongly implies there's no public key infrastructure to help you.
Microsoft's original PPTP had at least seven things wrong with its crypto, most of which were related to password handling or crypto key reuse (which is Rule Number 1 for what not to do when you're using RC4 encryption.) Some of their weaknesses were in their fundamental protocols, and some of them in their implementation of their protocols. As far as we can tell, Microsoft was trying to do the right thing, and could afford to hire real engineers, yet they screwed up inexcusably badly. Skype doesn't document their protocols, or their implementation, and at least their marketing people don't understand enough crypto to be able to tell if their engineers have a clue, much less whether there's deliberate spyware included, or who gets to be the spy if there is.
Inflammatory is good. The FBI, NSA, and their ilk have tried very hard to prevent private use of encryption, and folks like the EFF, academic crypto community, cypherpunks, Netscape, and VPN makers have done great work in stopping that. But in fact the Feds, mainly the FBI, have been trying very hard to interfere with end-to-end communications because it is hard to wiretap.
The CALEA wiretap laws are an immense pain in the ass to any voice telecom carrier trying to build a Voice Over IP system, because you need to buy equipment and modify your designs and operations to support meddling middlemen into something that's an end-to-end protocol, while competitors who *aren't* regulated voice telecom carriers don't have the same requirements so they only have to do Stupid Network things at the edges and can therefore use more standard equipment.
The real problem is how you make sure that the privacy is actually implemented adequately.
You've got the rights and powers bits backwards. US courts have let the police get away with wiretapping because they haven't always valued privacy, and because traditional telephone companies were regulated monopolies, the courts have let police get warrants to force the phone companies to cooperate with wiretapping. The FBI has unfortunately been very successful in leveraging any bit of power they have into getting more power, and using that power as leverage to get even more. That's one of the reasons that end-to-end encryption is so critical, because it's the one part of the system that's clearly under your control - and even then, the wiretappers will try very hard to see _who_ you're talking to and when.
There is some benefit to QoS, but most ISPs that are evaluating it or providing it use a model like "X% of your bits are high priority for Y% extra price per month" or "$Z extra per month, all you can eat", because the primary impact of prioritization isn't on the fat backbone pipes, it's on the skinny line into your home or office, where you need to make sure that VOIP packets get on the wire before FTP/email/web packets (so it's really a router CPU cost.) The other big problem is that ISPs are using a random mixture of business models and technical settings, so in general you can't get your high-priority bits to go between ISPs.
There's a LOT of open standards VOIP work - see openh323.org and other usual suspects. It turns out that many of the VOIP hardware makers are really happy to fund open standards development so there's something for their equipment to talk to, whether they make voice cards for PCs (either single-user or small PBX cards), or IP PBXs that want more features to make them interesting to users, or boxes that provide some glue function, or whatever, and even Cisco is funding some of them, and some of the little software companies are happy to do open standards work as part of consulting to the hardware people.
New PBXs are pretty much all migrating to IP-based; it's much easier to reuse low-cost PC hardware platforms and build good tools that way. The big PBX makers are generally taking their old PBXs and adding IP features on the side (as opposed to the big router makers adding VOIP boards to connect to old PBXs and telcos), and the real question for most of their customers is when to rip out the old stuff and replace it (for new buildings that need PBXs, it's obvious that IP PBXs are the way to go), because you really start to get operational benefits when you can interconnect multiple locations that way. The PBX industry could have gone to quasi-open standards with ISDN in the late 80s, to take advantage of the reduced development costs and simplicity, but it mostly didn't happen.
The real complexities are the interactions with existing public switched phone companies. There's a huge amount of economic and regulatory baggage built around who pays who how much money when a phone call gets handed off between parties. In the US, there's the originating local telco, the long distance telco (if it's long distance), the delivering telco (if it's not the originating telco), and the Gore Tax folks, all of whom want their cut of the money, and the settlements and pricing aren't really appropriate to the much lower costs of IP telephony, and the prices and regulators are different for intra-state vs. inter-state calls. In the international calling market, this
The right way to implement this is to have a carrier who has a clue and lets you use your Internet connection as a real full-scale internet connection, but has most kinds of world-to-user connections blocked by default and a friendly web menu for users to turn ports on and protocols if they want. Depending on hardware choices, this may be something you implement at the ISP's router, or may be something you implement at the customer premises equipment (cable modem or DSL box) -- the CPE approach scales better for performance, but sometimes you want to block things at the big end so that attackers don't flood your narrow DSL pipe or neighborhood cable segment.
That way you can get the best of both worlds - freedom to user your system to its fullest capacity, including applications that your ISP hadn't thought of in advance, but relative safety because most people don't turn things on that they don't understand, so broken applications and operating systems are kept protected behind firewalls unless there's a good reason to enable them.
There are ways to improve the process - instead of a list of raw email addresses, store the list as a set of hashes of email addresses, so you can check whether someuser@example.com is on the list, but the only way to extract lots of names from it is by dictionary-search. That's still not perfect, because it tends to break the username+tag@domain.com syntax, and doesn't easily allow wildcarding, and especially doesn't provide a good mechanism for mixing wildcarding with user validation - the people who manage the list really *do* have to verify that a user wants to be on it, because otherwise there'll be too much spoofing going on and some clever person will find a way to cause trouble by signing people up to it.