There is more to it than federal research subsidies and politics. There is genuine fear. Fear does not need a basis in fact to be real.
A large part of the public is afraid of anything radioactive. It's invisible, has no smell, can not be felt or heard and it can kill you. It's the perfect bogey-man. I have found that facts don't usually matter when someone is truly afraid.
Then there's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The people there are afraid for their jobs. The result is paranoia in regulation. If they decide that high-tech pipe B might possibly be even slightly better than high-tech pipe A, they will mandate an upgrade for all plants still under construction, even if it means jack-hammering 12 ft of reinforced concrete to replace the pipes.
When you factor in the lawsuits from self-appointed watchdog groups it becomes impossible to estimate either the total cost or when the plant will come online. With those in doubt it is impossible to determine whether the plant will be a good investment, and thus no private firm will take the risk.
There is a very real possibility that ISP's will be required to enforce copyright laws in the same way that convenience stores are required to enforce age limits for alcohol and tobacco. ISP's might also lose the "safe harbor" provisions and become "accessories" to the actions of their users.
If either of these possibilities becomes law the ISP's will be required to shut down IP infringing traffic. So it could be evidence that ISP's are looking for a way to comply with such laws should they be passed.
It would not be the first time that the U.S. Congress has put a deadline on a technology which did not exist yet.
"No man's life, liberty or property is safe when congress is in session."
Another feature is software simplicity. This may not be an issue for the laptop, but it is an issue for the embedded system. Or it can be during development.
USB is a complex protocol which requires a fair amount of code and data structures to support. A serial port on the other hand requires less than a page of code (in it's most simple form). The result is that when a system crashes, a serial port has a much better chance of being operational than a USB interface. Many systems with serial ports are designed so that a break signal on the line will interrupt the processor from whatever it's doing and send it directly to the debugger. When you can examine the entrails it is much easier to divine the cause.
Of course it is possible to design a bit of hardware which looks like a USB serial port adapter to a laptop and a serial port to the embedded system. Even better would be a new USB interface which gives full access to system memory and processor state.
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
When the equipment for reading these starts to become museum pieces people will migrate the data to whatever the state of the art is at the time. Then these stone DVD's will last a long time in the landfill.
It does raise some fun things to speculate about though.
There are some ancient writings which no one knows how to read anymore. Will future archaeologists wonder what the microscopic pits in our coasters with holes in them are all about?
Will they suffer from data overload?
What will future archaeologists, with PhD's, think when they read what you, personally, wrote in a forum? Now that's scary.
This device sounds a lot like a non-contact polygraph. Now polygraph testing has been somewhat discredited of late, but that does not mean that it's useless.
It could become a useful supplement to the current search process by indicating who the agents should spend extra time on, or who needs to be checked by a more experienced screener.
Detroit didn't come up with SUVs to dupe anybody. SUVs were popular because of their versatility, perceived sturdiness and their status.
The Big 3 have labor costs about three times higher than other auto makers in America. They also pay pension and health care benefits for about twice as many people as are currently working. In order to make a profit they had to sell large high-priced cars.
The high gas prices scared a lot of people away from SUVs for now, but what Americans want in their cars has not changed.
First of all, the automobile represents freedom. Freedom to go where you want, when you want. You are not tied to mass transit schedules and routes.
Americans still want cars that are status symbols. Even those who buy hybrids do so to show how much they care about the environment.
Americans want cars that are safe and useful. A family of five wants a car that can comfortably haul the family plus a couple of friends plus their stuff.
While everybody likes something for nothing, I think that
this is a bad idea for a couple of reasons:
The incompetence of the government.
Whatever
the government pays for, the government will control. You can be sure that any
government-subsidized connection will have strings attached. Think monitoring, access restrictions,
port blocking, etc.
When
the government steps into a business, the private operators either become
wards of the state or are forced out completely. Thus, instead of having a choice we will
have to settle for the government's one-size-fits-all solution.
It's
going to cost us one way or another, and with bureaucrats involved it will probably
wind up costing more. There is no
such thing as a free lunch.
The government isn't the solution to everything and I think
that this is one of the things that the government should say out of.
Technology is moving too fast for the USPTO to keep up with any more. Also, I don't think the taxpayers want to foot the bill for this.
A better idea is to go to a "loser pays" legal system. You receive a bad pattent, you try to enforse it, you loose the case, you pay all the lawyers. This will make it much less of a burden for a developer to defend himself from a bad pattent.
This may not stop all bad pattents from being issued, but it will stop the enforcement of them.
While it is true that companies try to erect barriers to entry, the primary tool for doing this has historically been government regulation.
What drives consolidation is not an effort to limit competition, or even to eliminate a competitor. It is an attempt to lower the marginal cost of providing service, and thereby obtain a cost advantage over the competitors.
The problems come when the minimum marginal cost occurs at a volume which is a substantial fraction of the total demand. If, for example, the minimum marginal cost occurs at 1/3 the total market demand, the supply side of the market will stabilize at around three companies. Examples of this are the breakfast cereal and aircraft industries which have a small number of very large suppliers. The case where the minimum marginal cost occurs at nearly the total volume of the demand is called a "natural monopoly".
The communications industry is an example of an industry where the minimum marginal cost occurs at a large volume and therefore we can expect there to be a small number of providers. The consolidation occurs as a result of an effort to achieve minimum cost, not monopolistic tendencies per se.
One typical characteristic of these high volume marginal cost curves is that they tend to be "near minimum" for a long time before they hit "minimum". Consequently, these companies do not have to "push their advantage" price-wise very much before it becomes feasible for a competitor to come in at a much lower volume. This, along with the threat of losing market share to their large competitors tends to keep them honest.
This is according to the general rules you can find in any decent Micro Economics text book. For every rule there are exceptions, and that is what the Justice Department is for. They did it to "Ma Bell" and they can do it again if need be.
Therefore I am not as worried about companies asking for permission to set prices the way they want to, as I am about companies asking for new rules to frustrate the entry of new competitors.
Ouch! An now you know why I am neither a diplomat nor a congressman. I seem to have a talent for writing things which are interpreted to imply things I never meant to say! No, judges are not supposed to be robots.
You wrote of how the law now is while I was referring to how it got that way. Now, both copyright and patent laws have been tinkered with a time or three since 1976, and I would suggest that this was done more in reaction to what was happening in the courts rather than proactively. You can read some interesting history of software copyrights at http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop /software-copyright.html
You can decide for yourself whether the courts' actions were appropriate, but you will have a hard time proving that the courts were not heavily involved in expanding the scope of copyrights.
Now, I would have to spend longer than lunch hour digging out the whole legislative history, but it would not be atypical to find that congress was, in fact, writing what the courts had already decided into law, in order to ensure uniformity, etc. Further, you can be sure that established software developers were lobbying to get their expanded rights codified since they provide such a splendid barrier to new competitors.
Congress, as i recall, moved all patent cases to a single federal court for the purpose of providing uniformity in the interpretation of the law. It appears that this court has a reputation for tending to favor patent holders and for expanding the scope of patents.
I would prefer to see congress adjusting intellectual property in response to the will of the people rather than tweaking it after the fact in response to industry lobbyists.
The obvious question is: "Do the current copyright and patent law do what the constitution says they are supposed to do?" The answer is of course both "yes" and "no". And don't ask me how to fix it!
But it is fun to see a major beneficiary of current patent and copyright law get hoist by their own petard.
...corrupt politicians have allowed what should have been copyright law become patent law.
I beg to differ. It was, in fact, judges who decided that computer algorithms and business models could be patented. It was also a federal judge who decided that user interfaces could be copyrighted, resulting in gratuitous incompatibility and user lock-in.
And if I may step up on the soap box for a bit, I am convinced that it is far safer to have judges who will rule according to what is written in black and white rather than those who rule according to the subtle nuances written between the lines. If you don't like a "conservative" judges ruling, you can change the law or amend the constitution, and the judge will rule according to the law/constitution even if he doesn't like it. A "liberal" judge may find an excuse not to.
All this sounds very utopian until you start thinking about
how all this technology can, and will, be abused.
E-Mail was great until the spammers and phishers started
using it.
After that, think about the unintended side effects.
The automobile was great until we started having car crashes
and pollution problems.
Everything can be used for good or for ill. The time to think about minimizing the down
side of a technology is at the time the technology is being developed, rather
than waiting until it is widely deployed.
This is obvious to some, but IPSEC is a good tool to secure network links in general. If you reqire IPSEC for anything that comes in from you WLAN, a cracker may connect to the link but he won't connect to your servers.
I connect the wireless access points to a dedicated ethernet card on my gateway computer. That way all wireless traffic must pass through the gateway and it is easy to require ESP for the wireless link.
I use the "onion layers" approach to security.
MAC address filtering
Turn off SSID broadcast (and make SSID hard to guess)
WAP (with randomly chosen key)
IPSEC ESP (with another randomly chosen key)
Packet filter at gateway host
This should be enough to make most leaches go on down the street and find an easier target.
Given the honesty and competence demonstrated by the U.N. in its management of the Iraq "Oil for Food" program, what kind of job can we expect them to do with the Internet?
The U.N. needs to show the world that it can consistently manage its programs in a competent, honest and equitable manner before we trust it with such an important piece of world-wide infrastructure.
At least the U.S.A. has a vested self-interest in the internet continuing to work well.
If you provide people the opportunity to steal, someone will take advantage. It does not matter whether the person is rich or poor. Certain corporate executives are being prosecuted for looting their companies even though their salaries were in the millions per year.
If one employee can walk off with thousands of customers' private data, then the system is putridly designed.
Three things need to happen:
Track down and prosecute the employee.
Find out who else is doing the same thing and prosecute them.
Fix the system to provide access to private information only when it's needed and improve oversight in general.
Just increasing the workers' pay is not going to help. They are already rich compared to most of their countrymen.
An intrusion can be extremely consumptive of both users' and administrators' time.
I was working for a major firm when its networks of Unix and VMS systems were penetrated by outsiders.
The first thing the administrators did was lock out all user accounts.
The next thing they did was reboot all the computers.
The administrators spent the next three working days reloading operating systems from the distribution media while we users were left trying to look busy.
When the administrators were finally sure that all the systems were clean, the user accounts were reenabled one at a time with new passwords.
With a few thousand users idled at approximately $100/Hr. each (including all the taxes, benefits and other overhead) it does not take very long to add up to real money.
Given the number of systems compromised, I am surprised that the damages were not higher.
Some say that I'm "certifiable", but I like to tinker with my computers and software. For that reason I prefer open source everything, including games.
I have not yet seen any open source games available for consoles. A console is a black box of hardware that will be obsolete in half a year with no upgrade path.
Nothing kills a technology faster than
irrational public fear. Test results are irrelevant.
Safety analysis is futile. Prepare to be buried.
The "people who know what they're talking about" are
often people firmly entrenched in companies that are out to make a
buck, and are possibly more than willing (as history has proven) to
ignore potential dangers in that quest.
The same can be said of the aviation industry. I have worked in
the aviation industry for more than twenty years and I have never
seen a safety decision go the wrong way. There are good reasons for
this:
The managers would rather spend millions making sure a
product is safe than risk the damage to the company's reputation.
It is hard to sell a product that people don't trust.
The potential cost of product liability suits and judgments
is big enough to justify a lot of expense to be as sure as possible
they won't happen.
Every employee was aware that sooner or later either the
employee himself or a close family member would be flying on one of
the airplanes we were building.
Don't be so quick to assume that companies are only interested in
a quick buck. Companies consist of employees who do not want
themselves or anyone else to get hurt.
Somewhere in my storeroom I have an 8-inch CP/M format floppy disk. The hardware (and software) to read it are long gone.
Given the current half life of media readers and writers, you can expect to migrate your data every five years or so. When 5 1/4 disks became an endangered species, I moved what was important to 3 1/2 disks. When 3 1/2 drives start to become scarse, the data on 3 1/2 disks that I still care about will be to moved to whatever technology seems likely to hang around the longest at the time.
Apparently Patrick Leahy is ignoring just how easy it is to move phishing opperations off shore. This looks more like a means to keep Leahy in the news rather than an effective crime-fighting law.
In the horse and buggy days people learned not to walk right behind a horse unless willing to get kicked. When automobiles came out everyone learned to look both ways before crossing the street. As any new technology appears, a new set of safety rules comes with it, and each individual needs to learn the new rules.
Many institutions are busy educating their users and now law is needed to force them to do this as it is already in their best interest.
Slashdot Mirror
There is more to it than federal research subsidies and politics. There is genuine fear. Fear does not need a basis in fact to be real.
A large part of the public is afraid of anything radioactive. It's invisible, has no smell, can not be felt or heard and it can kill you. It's the perfect bogey-man. I have found that facts don't usually matter when someone is truly afraid.
Then there's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The people there are afraid for their jobs. The result is paranoia in regulation. If they decide that high-tech pipe B might possibly be even slightly better than high-tech pipe A, they will mandate an upgrade for all plants still under construction, even if it means jack-hammering 12 ft of reinforced concrete to replace the pipes.
When you factor in the lawsuits from self-appointed watchdog groups it becomes impossible to estimate either the total cost or when the plant will come online. With those in doubt it is impossible to determine whether the plant will be a good investment, and thus no private firm will take the risk.
There is a very real possibility that ISP's will be required to enforce copyright laws in the same way that convenience stores are required to enforce age limits for alcohol and tobacco. ISP's might also lose the "safe harbor" provisions and become "accessories" to the actions of their users.
If either of these possibilities becomes law the ISP's will be required to shut down IP infringing traffic. So it could be evidence that ISP's are looking for a way to comply with such laws should they be passed.
It would not be the first time that the U.S. Congress has put a deadline on a technology which did not exist yet.
"No man's life, liberty or property is safe when congress is in session."
Another feature is software simplicity. This may not be an issue for the laptop, but it is an issue for the embedded system. Or it can be during development.
USB is a complex protocol which requires a fair amount of code and data structures to support. A serial port on the other hand requires less than a page of code (in it's most simple form). The result is that when a system crashes, a serial port has a much better chance of being operational than a USB interface. Many systems with serial ports are designed so that a break signal on the line will interrupt the processor from whatever it's doing and send it directly to the debugger. When you can examine the entrails it is much easier to divine the cause.
Of course it is possible to design a bit of hardware which looks like a USB serial port adapter to a laptop and a serial port to the embedded system. Even better would be a new USB interface which gives full access to system memory and processor state.
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
When the equipment for reading these starts to become museum pieces people will migrate the data to whatever the state of the art is at the time. Then these stone DVD's will last a long time in the landfill.
It does raise some fun things to speculate about though.
There are some ancient writings which no one knows how to read anymore. Will future archaeologists wonder what the microscopic pits in our coasters with holes in them are all about?
Will they suffer from data overload?
What will future archaeologists, with PhD's, think when they read what you, personally, wrote in a forum? Now that's scary.
This device sounds a lot like a non-contact polygraph. Now polygraph testing has been somewhat discredited of late, but that does not mean that it's useless.
It could become a useful supplement to the current search process by indicating who the agents should spend extra time on, or who needs to be checked by a more experienced screener.
Rail has been a popular environmentalist cure for traffic, pollution and fossil fuel use since at least the Arab oil embargo of 1972.
The issues which have prevented its universal adoption across the United States are still here.
Don't hold your breath on rail.
The Big 3 have labor costs about three times higher than other auto makers in America. They also pay pension and health care benefits for about twice as many people as are currently working. In order to make a profit they had to sell large high-priced cars.
The high gas prices scared a lot of people away from SUVs for now, but what Americans want in their cars has not changed.
First of all, the automobile represents freedom. Freedom to go where you want, when you want. You are not tied to mass transit schedules and routes.
Americans still want cars that are status symbols. Even those who buy hybrids do so to show how much they care about the environment.
Americans want cars that are safe and useful. A family of five wants a car that can comfortably haul the family plus a couple of friends plus their stuff.
Since when do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when you are visible from a public street?
I'm going to take a wild guess here: Some folks have never lived in a small town.
While everybody likes something for nothing, I think that this is a bad idea for a couple of reasons:
The government isn't the solution to everything and I think that this is one of the things that the government should say out of.
Technology is moving too fast for the USPTO to keep up with any more. Also, I don't think the taxpayers want to foot the bill for this.
A better idea is to go to a "loser pays" legal system. You receive a bad pattent, you try to enforse it, you loose the case, you pay all the lawyers. This will make it much less of a burden for a developer to defend himself from a bad pattent.
This may not stop all bad pattents from being issued, but it will stop the enforcement of them.
While it is true that companies try to erect barriers to entry, the primary tool for doing this has historically been government regulation.
What drives consolidation is not an effort to limit competition, or even to eliminate a competitor. It is an attempt to lower the marginal cost of providing service, and thereby obtain a cost advantage over the competitors.
The problems come when the minimum marginal cost occurs at a volume which is a substantial fraction of the total demand. If, for example, the minimum marginal cost occurs at 1/3 the total market demand, the supply side of the market will stabilize at around three companies. Examples of this are the breakfast cereal and aircraft industries which have a small number of very large suppliers. The case where the minimum marginal cost occurs at nearly the total volume of the demand is called a "natural monopoly".
The communications industry is an example of an industry where the minimum marginal cost occurs at a large volume and therefore we can expect there to be a small number of providers. The consolidation occurs as a result of an effort to achieve minimum cost, not monopolistic tendencies per se.
One typical characteristic of these high volume marginal cost curves is that they tend to be "near minimum" for a long time before they hit "minimum". Consequently, these companies do not have to "push their advantage" price-wise very much before it becomes feasible for a competitor to come in at a much lower volume. This, along with the threat of losing market share to their large competitors tends to keep them honest.
This is according to the general rules you can find in any decent Micro Economics text book. For every rule there are exceptions, and that is what the Justice Department is for. They did it to "Ma Bell" and they can do it again if need be.
Therefore I am not as worried about companies asking for permission to set prices the way they want to, as I am about companies asking for new rules to frustrate the entry of new competitors.
You wrote of how the law now is while I was referring to how it got that way. Now, both copyright and patent laws have been tinkered with a time or three since 1976, and I would suggest that this was done more in reaction to what was happening in the courts rather than proactively. You can read some interesting history of software copyrights at http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop /software-copyright.html
You can decide for yourself whether the courts' actions were appropriate, but you will have a hard time proving that the courts were not heavily involved in expanding the scope of copyrights.
Now, I would have to spend longer than lunch hour digging out the whole legislative history, but it would not be atypical to find that congress was, in fact, writing what the courts had already decided into law, in order to ensure uniformity, etc. Further, you can be sure that established software developers were lobbying to get their expanded rights codified since they provide such a splendid barrier to new competitors.
Congress, as i recall, moved all patent cases to a single federal court for the purpose of providing uniformity in the interpretation of the law. It appears that this court has a reputation for tending to favor patent holders and for expanding the scope of patents.
I would prefer to see congress adjusting intellectual property in response to the will of the people rather than tweaking it after the fact in response to industry lobbyists.
The obvious question is: "Do the current copyright and patent law do what the constitution says they are supposed to do?" The answer is of course both "yes" and "no". And don't ask me how to fix it!
But it is fun to see a major beneficiary of current patent and copyright law get hoist by their own petard.
I beg to differ. It was, in fact, judges who decided that computer algorithms and business models could be patented. It was also a federal judge who decided that user interfaces could be copyrighted, resulting in gratuitous incompatibility and user lock-in.
And if I may step up on the soap box for a bit, I am convinced that it is far safer to have judges who will rule according to what is written in black and white rather than those who rule according to the subtle nuances written between the lines. If you don't like a "conservative" judges ruling, you can change the law or amend the constitution, and the judge will rule according to the law/constitution even if he doesn't like it. A "liberal" judge may find an excuse not to.
All this sounds very utopian until you start thinking about how all this technology can, and will, be abused.
E-Mail was great until the spammers and phishers started using it.
After that, think about the unintended side effects.
The automobile was great until we started having car crashes and pollution problems.
Everything can be used for good or for ill. The time to think about minimizing the down side of a technology is at the time the technology is being developed, rather than waiting until it is widely deployed.
Just my .02
I connect the wireless access points to a dedicated ethernet card on my gateway computer. That way all wireless traffic must pass through the gateway and it is easy to require ESP for the wireless link.
I use the "onion layers" approach to security.
-
MAC address filtering
-
Turn off SSID broadcast (and make SSID hard to guess)
-
WAP (with randomly chosen key)
-
IPSEC ESP (with another randomly chosen key)
-
Packet filter at gateway host
This should be enough to make most leaches go on down the street and find an easier target.The U.N. needs to show the world that it can consistently manage its programs in a competent, honest and equitable manner before we trust it with such an important piece of world-wide infrastructure.
At least the U.S.A. has a vested self-interest in the internet continuing to work well.
If one employee can walk off with thousands of customers' private data, then the system is putridly designed.
Three things need to happen:
Just increasing the workers' pay is not going to help. They are already rich compared to most of their countrymen.
I was working for a major firm when its networks of Unix and VMS systems were penetrated by outsiders.
The first thing the administrators did was lock out all user accounts.
The next thing they did was reboot all the computers.
The administrators spent the next three working days reloading operating systems from the distribution media while we users were left trying to look busy.
When the administrators were finally sure that all the systems were clean, the user accounts were reenabled one at a time with new passwords.
With a few thousand users idled at approximately $100/Hr. each (including all the taxes, benefits and other overhead) it does not take very long to add up to real money.
Given the number of systems compromised, I am surprised that the damages were not higher.
I have not yet seen any open source games available for consoles. A console is a black box of hardware that will be obsolete in half a year with no upgrade path.
Nothing kills a technology faster than irrational public fear. Test results are irrelevant. Safety analysis is futile. Prepare to be buried.
The "people who know what they're talking about" are often people firmly entrenched in companies that are out to make a buck, and are possibly more than willing (as history has proven) to ignore potential dangers in that quest.
The same can be said of the aviation industry. I have worked in the aviation industry for more than twenty years and I have never seen a safety decision go the wrong way. There are good reasons for this:
The managers would rather spend millions making sure a product is safe than risk the damage to the company's reputation. It is hard to sell a product that people don't trust.
The potential cost of product liability suits and judgments is big enough to justify a lot of expense to be as sure as possible they won't happen.
Every employee was aware that sooner or later either the employee himself or a close family member would be flying on one of the airplanes we were building.
Don't be so quick to assume that companies are only interested in a quick buck. Companies consist of employees who do not want themselves or anyone else to get hurt.
This was done during the oil crisis of the early '70s. Children were going to school in the dark. It was highly unpopular.
Given the current half life of media readers and writers, you can expect to migrate your data every five years or so. When 5 1/4 disks became an endangered species, I moved what was important to 3 1/2 disks. When 3 1/2 drives start to become scarse, the data on 3 1/2 disks that I still care about will be to moved to whatever technology seems likely to hang around the longest at the time.
Don't forget Illegal Use of Trademark.
Apparently Patrick Leahy is ignoring just how easy it is to move phishing opperations off shore. This looks more like a means to keep Leahy in the news rather than an effective crime-fighting law. In the horse and buggy days people learned not to walk right behind a horse unless willing to get kicked. When automobiles came out everyone learned to look both ways before crossing the street. As any new technology appears, a new set of safety rules comes with it, and each individual needs to learn the new rules. Many institutions are busy educating their users and now law is needed to force them to do this as it is already in their best interest.