With a large enough majority (or the right minority) it's possible to butcher any form of government (except maybe robotic overloads and manifest god-kings that actively use their god powers).
It must look pretty horrible at smaller sizes too otherwise I think they might have shown us a sample, no?
Maybe not. The font is obviously designed to be printed not for on screen use. So while an on screen preview of the font at smaller size may look bad (I imaging those holes could alias badly), it is conceivable that in print (with higher DPI) it could look nice. It is even possible that at smaller sizes in print the eye might start to ignore those holes and see the letter as if it were solid.
I'm not saying it will look good when printed (my guess is it probably still wont), but looking at on screen previews is definitely not a fair test.
FYI, luxury taxes don't work. Because luxury items typically have very elastic demands (i.e. people buy it less if the price goes up because, well, it's a luxury), the tax burden if shifted to the makers/sellers of luxury items not the buyers. In other words, taxes on yachts hurt blue collar yacht builders while barely effecting rich yacht buyers. This is because if you raise taxes on yachts, the effective price payed by the buyer goes up. Since it is a luxury, rich people will go without rather than pay the higher price. This decreases the number of yachts sold. Yacht seller's profits decrease. Yacht sellers cut their prices to increase sales and thus profits effectively subsidizing part of the tax that the buyers on paying on the yachts.
I'm sure all sorts of people will argue both ways about whether taxing the rich who are buying luxury items is "fair". But those arguments don't actually matter since it can be shown that luxury taxes don't tax rich people buying luxury items.
Your question is a good one but to explain how the dynamics involved work out it would take a bit of more economic theory than can easily be taught in slashdot postings. Though if you really want me to try I could give it a go, just be ready for lots of math. (Even better take an intro micro-economics course. Or just read a micro-economics text book. It's fun, enlightening and an easy A+ for anyone with a moderate math background.)
The super simplified explanation is that (1) it makes no difference whether the buyer pays the tax man directly or if the buyer hands the tax to the seller who turns around and pays it to the tax man, (2) as a consequence the tax burden is split between the buyer and the seller but not evenly depending on the what is called the "elasticity" of the supply and demand, and finally, (3) higher taxes always (*) reduce the amount of goods that are traded thus maximizing the government's tax revenue is a ballance between higher tax rates which mean the government gets more money per transaction and lower tax rates which mean more transactions take place.
(*) Assuming lower prices make people want to buy more and higher prices make people want to sell more. There are a few goods where that is not the case.
I have seen great variability in how much spam my accounts get depending on how widely I spread the addresses. On the accounts I only give to people I have met personally, I get almost no spam (less than 1 per day). On the accounts I use to sign up for online web-sites (e.g. slashdot.org, orbitz.com, etc.), I get so much spam that they are useless for anything else.
Many people claim that they don't give their e-mail out but still get a lot of spam. Strangely, however, when I have observed these people's habits, I found they were giving out their e-mail addresses without thinking about it. Even asking them right after they had filled out a form for some website that included their e-mail address, they would deny giving out their e-mail. Or if pressed, they might claim that that particular web site was trustworthy, so it didn't count.
I would say that guarding your e-mail address as tightly as you guard your Social Security Number or Credit Card Number, but considering how many people are willing to give those out to just about anybody, I'm not so sure it's all that good of advice. All I can say is (1) paranoia is your friend when guarding your e-mail address and (2) segregating your addresses helps when you have to provide an address to a place you don't trust.
You are not granted a licence. The author is granted exlusivity on certain rights (see 17 USC 106). These rights are the right to copy, to make derivative works, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and digital audio transmission.
These are rights exclusive to the author. If someone other than the other does them, they have committed copyright infringement. But you can do anything else you want with them. You have the right to read, burn, soak, get laminated, use as toiletpaper, or do anything else you want to a copy of a copyrighted work.
Now the act of using a computer program usually involves making a copy of that computer program which is one of the rights reserved to the author. But 17 USC 117 grants a special exception. Under that section it is not an infringement to make a copy of a computer program if that copy is essential to using the computer program. This means you don't need any sort of license in order to install a program. You just need to own a legal copy (and since a copy is defined in 17 USC 101 to be the physical artifact not some abstraction of the data, owning a CD means owning a copy of the work on the CD.)
(Given the above EULA's on off the shelf software shouldn't be enforceable since the only "consideration" they give you is the right to install the software, which is a right you already have. Without a "consideration" there is no contract. Without a contract, they can't claim breach of contract and they can't claim copyright infringement either because of 17 USC 117. I never can figure out why they think EULA's are legal. (EULA's on online services and network installs are completely different since those don't trigger 17 USC 117, and thus they should be enforceable.))
The act of taking away the CD's was in the right (kid being disruptive, needing time to besure that the CD's weren't porn, etc.), but the words written to Ken were not.
After re-reading the original e-mail excerpt, was trying to be reasonable given what she thought she knew (e.g. "I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing", "I will research this as time allows"). However, what she thought she knew was distressingly incorrect.
Karen can be faulted for two things. First, the method by which she came to her original conclusions is evidently seriously flawed. This is a grave fault.
Second, she should have approached Ken in a way that was reasonable even if what she thought she knew was in fact wrong. For example, instead of saying "I am not sure what you are doing is legal", she could have phrased it as an honest question.
Unfortunately these seem to be problems that the whole human race shares (though that is no excuse) and while most people can act reasonably when what they think they know is right, it is rare to find someone who can act in a way that is reasonable even in the off chance that they are wrong. Being more careful about this is a lesson all of us could learn.
That is either one of the most informative posts I've seen on Slashdot or the most brazen piece of BS I've ever seen. Most technology topics I know enough to tell if what someone is saying makes sense. But what you are saying is so far out there I honestly can't tell if you are making this stuff up. Kudos either way.
Ironic that you would employ the slippery slope fallacy given your name.
I think the term you're looking for is reductio ad absurdum.
RaA is a valid form of reasoning but your argument does not validly apply it. RaA involves making a single temporary assumption that you show leads to a contradiction or a conclusion that we would reject and concluding that the temporary assumption must then be rejected.
Your argument includes not one but two assumptions. First is the assumption you are trying to argue against, namely that social needs may sometimes out way individual liberties. The second is that the social benefit of slavery could out way individual liberties. This leads to a conclusion that slavery is ok which we reject.
However, note that we could reject either assumption to avoid the conclusion while leaving the other assumption intact. And indeed I also hope we all do reject the second assumption. But because the second assumption has already been rejected but RaA utterly fails to have any relevance to the first assumption.
Nevertheless, you have attempted to argue that the second assumption (that for slavery social could out way individual) is valid and thus the first assumption must be rejected. However that overlooks the possibility that in some moral systems the social benefit of slavery couldn't out way the individual. Thus the second assumption becomes a form of contra-factual hypothetical which makes as little sense as asking if 7 would still be prime if 2 were odd. (I assume an objective morality here for technical reasons.)
It is perfectly logically consistent for a moral system to say that in the case of slavery social can't out way individual, but in other cases it can. This can be accomplished in a number of ways including adjusting the cost/benefit weights or adding a infinity weight or incorporating multidimensional weights. In fact this is what many practical systems do.
Thus I stand by my original assessment. The argument you have presented is invalid on account of arguing from extremes and generalizing from those to alternative situations which differ not only in quantity but also quality (enslaving people violates human dignity in ways that requiring a prescription to obtain antibiotics does not).
The examples you put forth are logical extremes. They are not logical conclusions.
A utilitarian (which by the way I am not) would state that it is about balancing individual needs against social needs. Your argument would only hold if social needs always won out. I never said that it does or that it should and I doubt a true utilitarian would either. In fact part of the point of utilitarianism is that sometimes one wins and sometimes the other wins.
Ironic that you would employ the slippery slope fallacy given your name.
It seems to me that if we leave it up to states, things in say, California would improve, but Texas might continue to build prisons and continue to put non-violent pot smokers in them.
Your biases are showing.
But seriously, that sort of legal diversity would probably be a good thing. If you don't like your state's laws, you can always move to another state. With laws passed at federal level on the other hand force the views of whoever happens to have the 51% majority this week on *everyone*.
In a way, this is basic statistics. With more samples, you make it more likely that you will get mostly "average" results with a few outliers. With only one sample (i.e. the federal level), there is a much larger risk that the one sample will be an outlier. (Insurance companies take advantage of exactly this property.)
(You could in theory move to another country but that is harder than moving to another state. Visas, citizenship, maybe different culture, maybe different language, etc.)
But someone making $100k will often usually own more than 5x someone making $20k because the later will likely rent an apartment and own a cheap car (if that). While the former will likely own a house a $20k car and maybe a boat.
(On top of this, a $20k car may also have a tax more than 2x that of a $10k car depending on local laws.)
I looks like somewhere in between $100k and $1m there will be a break point. Below that break it's progressive, above that break it's regressive.
(Note: I am assuming the living customs of the mid-west USA. Someone making $100k living in Manhattan probably doesn't own a house. So YMMV.)
Your comment is not insightful. The *site* isn't changed. The presentation of the site is the only thing that is being changed.
(Off topic: How did "mental gymnastics" become considered a bad thing? Being mentally adept at navigating complex concepts should be a good thing, no?)
I think every geek to use a mouse has experienced this to some extent. If the cursor travels more slowly over one particular part of the screen, it always feels to me like there is a physical resistance even though there actually is none.
I've had my mind think an entire building was part of my body.
The setup was that I took a nap in an awkward position so that when I woke up and looked "down" towards where I expected my body to be, I instead saw a beam that was part of the architecture. For a fraction of a second I had the sensation that that beam was part of my body.
It was the briefest second, but it was one of the strangest things I've ever felt.
Step 1: Use DNS to get address of site. Step 2: Use IP address to send packets to site (usually over HTTP).
The DNS server only ever sees the site name (not the path after the site name). It is only later in the HTTP protocol that the actual URL gets sent. At that point the browser is already using the IP address (though the server name may optionally be buried in the HTTP headers).
This means that URL based filtering is a non-starter (and every network operator knows it). Not only is it expensive for to filter higher level protocols like HTTP, but it is trivially easy for a site to change URL path just enough to bypass the filters.
It is much more likely that the government will give a list of domain names (e.g. foo.bar.com) or IP addressed to be blocked. Blocking IP addresses is actually quite easy for an ISP (routers are already segregating packets based on IP address). But if the government wants to block domain names then the ISPs will have to constantly keep looking up the DNS record for that domain. This would be expensive and onerous. Even then, someone could setup a DNS server that gives false information when queried by the Government/ISP and true information otherwise. This could be determined either by source address or by some password or secure authentication (there are numerous possibilities here).
Summary, URL and Domain blocking is out, IP address blocking will be in. Unfortunately, the later isn't technologically all that hard.
(Question: Suppose you wanted to get around IP address blocking, but didn't need the overhead of anonymity that Tor provides. You just need an automated way to find peers on the other side of "The Wall" to act as proxies. Is there something out there to do this that might perform better than Tor?)
You realize of course that if that were the case every open source developer out there would add a register-copyright hook to their revision-control check-in scripts promptly leading to an effective DDoS of the LoC. Not a happy picture if you ask me.
How would you quantify "out of print"?
If it's not commercially available it should be in the public domain.... If I contact you for a copy and you can't provide one, I shouldn't have to worry about your suing me if I get it from the Pirate Bay.
That law would be too easy to dodge to be effective. "Sure! You can have a copy of anything you want... for a billion dollars."
Don't get me wrong. I would love some kind of publication requirement to keep copyright protections, but you have make it neither to hard for the little guy to satisfy nor to easy to satisfy the letter but not the spirit. Simple purchasablity fails on the latter and anything stronger that I can think of fails in the former.
Anyone got a link to what the University wrote to the Court?
I would be very interested in seeing what sort of technical grounds were deemed legally sufficient (and comprehensible to a judge) to quash the subpoena.
Copyrights need to be registered again. Automatic granting of copyright is madness.
I have to disagree on this one. Registered copyright favors the labels and potentially harms Open Source development since labels have the money to throw at registration and Open Source projects generally don't (also getting intermediate versions registered would be a problem).
Out of print works should not be covered by copyright.
This one I agree with in principal but practice gets very thorny. How would you quantify "out of print"? What if it's shown in theaters or is the script to a play but not publicly purchasable? Or maybe the rights holder will sell you a copy for nothing less than $50,000. What if the company won't sell the source code at all but sells the binary? Crafting a law on this with no unintended effects would be very difficult.
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 (x) 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 ( ) 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 ( ) 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
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) 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 (x) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) 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:
( ) 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 ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) 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 ( ) 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 ( ) 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:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Slashdot Mirror
Good find, but does that sign mean photography prohibited of that area or just while in that area.
Go to ANY military airfield in the USA; there are signs specifying two things
Could you provide a photo of these signs to back up your claim?
With a large enough majority (or the right minority) it's possible to butcher any form of government (except maybe robotic overloads and manifest god-kings that actively use their god powers).
It must look pretty horrible at smaller sizes too otherwise I think they might have shown us a sample, no?
Maybe not. The font is obviously designed to be printed not for on screen use. So while an on screen preview of the font at smaller size may look bad (I imaging those holes could alias badly), it is conceivable that in print (with higher DPI) it could look nice. It is even possible that at smaller sizes in print the eye might start to ignore those holes and see the letter as if it were solid.
I'm not saying it will look good when printed (my guess is it probably still wont), but looking at on screen previews is definitely not a fair test.
I'd prefer the taxes on ... luxury cars...
FYI, luxury taxes don't work. Because luxury items typically have very elastic demands (i.e. people buy it less if the price goes up because, well, it's a luxury), the tax burden if shifted to the makers/sellers of luxury items not the buyers. In other words, taxes on yachts hurt blue collar yacht builders while barely effecting rich yacht buyers. This is because if you raise taxes on yachts, the effective price payed by the buyer goes up. Since it is a luxury, rich people will go without rather than pay the higher price. This decreases the number of yachts sold. Yacht seller's profits decrease. Yacht sellers cut their prices to increase sales and thus profits effectively subsidizing part of the tax that the buyers on paying on the yachts.
I'm sure all sorts of people will argue both ways about whether taxing the rich who are buying luxury items is "fair". But those arguments don't actually matter since it can be shown that luxury taxes don't tax rich people buying luxury items.
Your question is a good one but to explain how the dynamics involved work out it would take a bit of more economic theory than can easily be taught in slashdot postings. Though if you really want me to try I could give it a go, just be ready for lots of math. (Even better take an intro micro-economics course. Or just read a micro-economics text book. It's fun, enlightening and an easy A+ for anyone with a moderate math background.)
The super simplified explanation is that (1) it makes no difference whether the buyer pays the tax man directly or if the buyer hands the tax to the seller who turns around and pays it to the tax man, (2) as a consequence the tax burden is split between the buyer and the seller but not evenly depending on the what is called the "elasticity" of the supply and demand, and finally, (3) higher taxes always (*) reduce the amount of goods that are traded thus maximizing the government's tax revenue is a ballance between higher tax rates which mean the government gets more money per transaction and lower tax rates which mean more transactions take place.
(*) Assuming lower prices make people want to buy more and higher prices make people want to sell more. There are a few goods where that is not the case.
I have seen great variability in how much spam my accounts get depending on how widely I spread the addresses. On the accounts I only give to people I have met personally, I get almost no spam (less than 1 per day). On the accounts I use to sign up for online web-sites (e.g. slashdot.org, orbitz.com, etc.), I get so much spam that they are useless for anything else.
Many people claim that they don't give their e-mail out but still get a lot of spam. Strangely, however, when I have observed these people's habits, I found they were giving out their e-mail addresses without thinking about it. Even asking them right after they had filled out a form for some website that included their e-mail address, they would deny giving out their e-mail. Or if pressed, they might claim that that particular web site was trustworthy, so it didn't count.
I would say that guarding your e-mail address as tightly as you guard your Social Security Number or Credit Card Number, but considering how many people are willing to give those out to just about anybody, I'm not so sure it's all that good of advice. All I can say is (1) paranoia is your friend when guarding your e-mail address and (2) segregating your addresses helps when you have to provide an address to a place you don't trust.
You are not granted a licence. The author is granted exlusivity on certain rights (see 17 USC 106). These rights are the right to copy, to make derivative works, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and digital audio transmission.
These are rights exclusive to the author. If someone other than the other does them, they have committed copyright infringement. But you can do anything else you want with them. You have the right to read, burn, soak, get laminated, use as toiletpaper, or do anything else you want to a copy of a copyrighted work.
Now the act of using a computer program usually involves making a copy of that computer program which is one of the rights reserved to the author. But 17 USC 117 grants a special exception. Under that section it is not an infringement to make a copy of a computer program if that copy is essential to using the computer program. This means you don't need any sort of license in order to install a program. You just need to own a legal copy (and since a copy is defined in 17 USC 101 to be the physical artifact not some abstraction of the data, owning a CD means owning a copy of the work on the CD.)
(Given the above EULA's on off the shelf software shouldn't be enforceable since the only "consideration" they give you is the right to install the software, which is a right you already have. Without a "consideration" there is no contract. Without a contract, they can't claim breach of contract and they can't claim copyright infringement either because of 17 USC 117. I never can figure out why they think EULA's are legal. (EULA's on online services and network installs are completely different since those don't trigger 17 USC 117, and thus they should be enforceable.))
Of course IANAL and TINLA.
The act of taking away the CD's was in the right (kid being disruptive, needing time to besure that the CD's weren't porn, etc.), but the words written to Ken were not.
After re-reading the original e-mail excerpt, was trying to be reasonable given what she thought she knew (e.g. "I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing", "I will research this as time allows"). However, what she thought she knew was distressingly incorrect.
Karen can be faulted for two things. First, the method by which she came to her original conclusions is evidently seriously flawed. This is a grave fault.
Second, she should have approached Ken in a way that was reasonable even if what she thought she knew was in fact wrong. For example, instead of saying "I am not sure what you are doing is legal", she could have phrased it as an honest question.
Unfortunately these seem to be problems that the whole human race shares (though that is no excuse) and while most people can act reasonably when what they think they know is right, it is rare to find someone who can act in a way that is reasonable even in the off chance that they are wrong. Being more careful about this is a lesson all of us could learn.
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. -- Men in Black
Somehow I think a modified version of that applies to politics.
That is either one of the most informative posts I've seen on Slashdot or the most brazen piece of BS I've ever seen. Most technology topics I know enough to tell if what someone is saying makes sense. But what you are saying is so far out there I honestly can't tell if you are making this stuff up. Kudos either way.
Ironic that you would employ the slippery slope fallacy given your name.
I think the term you're looking for is reductio ad absurdum.
RaA is a valid form of reasoning but your argument does not validly apply it. RaA involves making a single temporary assumption that you show leads to a contradiction or a conclusion that we would reject and concluding that the temporary assumption must then be rejected.
Your argument includes not one but two assumptions. First is the assumption you are trying to argue against, namely that social needs may sometimes out way individual liberties. The second is that the social benefit of slavery could out way individual liberties. This leads to a conclusion that slavery is ok which we reject.
However, note that we could reject either assumption to avoid the conclusion while leaving the other assumption intact. And indeed I also hope we all do reject the second assumption. But because the second assumption has already been rejected but RaA utterly fails to have any relevance to the first assumption.
Nevertheless, you have attempted to argue that the second assumption (that for slavery social could out way individual) is valid and thus the first assumption must be rejected. However that overlooks the possibility that in some moral systems the social benefit of slavery couldn't out way the individual. Thus the second assumption becomes a form of contra-factual hypothetical which makes as little sense as asking if 7 would still be prime if 2 were odd. (I assume an objective morality here for technical reasons.)
It is perfectly logically consistent for a moral system to say that in the case of slavery social can't out way individual, but in other cases it can. This can be accomplished in a number of ways including adjusting the cost/benefit weights or adding a infinity weight or incorporating multidimensional weights. In fact this is what many practical systems do.
Thus I stand by my original assessment. The argument you have presented is invalid on account of arguing from extremes and generalizing from those to alternative situations which differ not only in quantity but also quality (enslaving people violates human dignity in ways that requiring a prescription to obtain antibiotics does not).
The examples you put forth are logical extremes. They are not logical conclusions.
A utilitarian (which by the way I am not) would state that it is about balancing individual needs against social needs. Your argument would only hold if social needs always won out. I never said that it does or that it should and I doubt a true utilitarian would either. In fact part of the point of utilitarianism is that sometimes one wins and sometimes the other wins.
Ironic that you would employ the slippery slope fallacy given your name.
It seems to me that if we leave it up to states, things in say, California would improve, but Texas might continue to build prisons and continue to put non-violent pot smokers in them.
Your biases are showing.
But seriously, that sort of legal diversity would probably be a good thing. If you don't like your state's laws, you can always move to another state. With laws passed at federal level on the other hand force the views of whoever happens to have the 51% majority this week on *everyone*.
In a way, this is basic statistics. With more samples, you make it more likely that you will get mostly "average" results with a few outliers. With only one sample (i.e. the federal level), there is a much larger risk that the one sample will be an outlier. (Insurance companies take advantage of exactly this property.)
(You could in theory move to another country but that is harder than moving to another state. Visas, citizenship, maybe different culture, maybe different language, etc.)
Does the government actually have to step in and say, it's all right to put these substances in your body, but not those?
In some cases, yes. As mentioned elsewhere antibiotics should be controlled in order to prevent widespread drug-resistant strains.
But someone making $100k will often usually own more than 5x someone making $20k because the later will likely rent an apartment and own a cheap car (if that). While the former will likely own a house a $20k car and maybe a boat.
(On top of this, a $20k car may also have a tax more than 2x that of a $10k car depending on local laws.)
I looks like somewhere in between $100k and $1m there will be a break point. Below that break it's progressive, above that break it's regressive.
(Note: I am assuming the living customs of the mid-west USA. Someone making $100k living in Manhattan probably doesn't own a house. So YMMV.)
Umm, sales tax is flat, thus it can't be regressive. The poor pay just as large a fraction as do the rich.
(As other point out, property tax may be another story.)
Your comment is not insightful. The *site* isn't changed. The presentation of the site is the only thing that is being changed.
(Off topic: How did "mental gymnastics" become considered a bad thing? Being mentally adept at navigating complex concepts should be a good thing, no?)
I think every geek to use a mouse has experienced this to some extent. If the cursor travels more slowly over one particular part of the screen, it always feels to me like there is a physical resistance even though there actually is none.
I've had my mind think an entire building was part of my body.
The setup was that I took a nap in an awkward position so that when I woke up and looked "down" towards where I expected my body to be, I instead saw a beam that was part of the architecture. For a fraction of a second I had the sensation that that beam was part of my body.
It was the briefest second, but it was one of the strangest things I've ever felt.
Umm, that's how most web browsers already work.
Step 1: Use DNS to get address of site.
Step 2: Use IP address to send packets to site (usually over HTTP).
The DNS server only ever sees the site name (not the path after the site name). It is only later in the HTTP protocol that the actual URL gets sent. At that point the browser is already using the IP address (though the server name may optionally be buried in the HTTP headers).
This means that URL based filtering is a non-starter (and every network operator knows it). Not only is it expensive for to filter higher level protocols like HTTP, but it is trivially easy for a site to change URL path just enough to bypass the filters.
It is much more likely that the government will give a list of domain names (e.g. foo.bar.com) or IP addressed to be blocked. Blocking IP addresses is actually quite easy for an ISP (routers are already segregating packets based on IP address). But if the government wants to block domain names then the ISPs will have to constantly keep looking up the DNS record for that domain. This would be expensive and onerous. Even then, someone could setup a DNS server that gives false information when queried by the Government/ISP and true information otherwise. This could be determined either by source address or by some password or secure authentication (there are numerous possibilities here).
Summary, URL and Domain blocking is out, IP address blocking will be in. Unfortunately, the later isn't technologically all that hard.
(Question: Suppose you wanted to get around IP address blocking, but didn't need the overhead of anonymity that Tor provides. You just need an automated way to find peers on the other side of "The Wall" to act as proxies. Is there something out there to do this that might perform better than Tor?)
Registration should be free...
You realize of course that if that were the case every open source developer out there would add a register-copyright hook to their revision-control check-in scripts promptly leading to an effective DDoS of the LoC. Not a happy picture if you ask me.
How would you quantify "out of print"?
If it's not commercially available it should be in the public domain.... If I contact you for a copy and you can't provide one, I shouldn't have to worry about your suing me if I get it from the Pirate Bay.
That law would be too easy to dodge to be effective. "Sure! You can have a copy of anything you want ... for a billion dollars."
Don't get me wrong. I would love some kind of publication requirement to keep copyright protections, but you have make it neither to hard for the little guy to satisfy nor to easy to satisfy the letter but not the spirit. Simple purchasablity fails on the latter and anything stronger that I can think of fails in the former.
Anyone got a link to what the University wrote to the Court?
I would be very interested in seeing what sort of technical grounds were deemed legally sufficient (and comprehensible to a judge) to quash the subpoena.
Copyrights need to be registered again. Automatic granting of copyright is madness.
I have to disagree on this one. Registered copyright favors the labels and potentially harms Open Source development since labels have the money to throw at registration and Open Source projects generally don't (also getting intermediate versions registered would be a problem).
Out of print works should not be covered by copyright.
This one I agree with in principal but practice gets very thorny. How would you quantify "out of print"? What if it's shown in theaters or is the script to a play but not publicly purchasable? Or maybe the rights holder will sell you a copy for nothing less than $50,000. What if the company won't sell the source code at all but sells the binary? Crafting a law on this with no unintended effects would be very difficult.
You asked and I'm happy to oblige. As spam systems go this one scores fairly well. The biggest problem is the "worm-ridden Windows boxes" checkbox.
----
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) 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
(x) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) 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
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) 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:
( ) 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
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) 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
( ) 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
( ) 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:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!