IANAHM (history major), but the parallels between
the Internet now and the railroads at the end of the 20th century seem, at least, superficially interesting (both mostly relate to activity within the States, as that is what I'm most familiar with).
The price of transport is close to, if not below cost, due to exterme competition. The industries transporting, however, are behaving monopolistically, to the point of trying to `tax' competitor distribution (a la fees for DVD encoding). It is perceived to be driving the economy.
Of course, maybe I'm just wrong. It's a similar situation: people pioneering into a new industry, so maybe the parallels are unsurprising.
Is the Florida Supreme Court supposed to take into account the U.S. Constitution? They are a state court, so I would think their job was to intrepret state laws and the state constitution, not the federal one.
Fifty years in the future:
"We can reproduce for you a daughter of yours with a patent-pending gene revision that makes her immune to cancer. However, the licensing fee is a 1% of all income she receives throughout her lifetime."
An interesting, and quite conceivable, future situation. I'm not sure the legality of such an arrangement, but when enough money gets behind something, the law becomes quite flexible.
From the
US Patent Office:
If the invention has been described in a printed publication anywhere in the world, or if it has been in public use or on sale in this country before the date
that the applicant made his/her invention, a patent cannot be obtained. If the invention has been described in a printed publication anywhere, or has been in
public use or on sale in this country more than one year before the date on which an application for patent is filed in this country, a patent cannot be
obtained. In this connection it is immaterial when the invention was made, or whether the printed publication or public use was by the inventor
himself/herself or by someone else. If the inventor describes the invention in a printed publication or uses the invention publicly, or places it on sale, he/she
must apply for a patent before one year has gone by, otherwise any right to a patent will be lost.
I'm not sure on the definition of `printed publication' (must it be `wide-spread' or `public'?), but there are time-limits on patent applications. They also need to update those rules (or at least that web page), as `printed publication' would not, as I read it (IANAL), include web pages or e-mail.
The error induced by the sample size is overcome by the error in the sampling methodology.
They presume reverse DNS implies IP address usage. This is not correct, of course. There are many machines that don't reverse lookup. Also, there are many IP addresses that reverse lookup and aren't there. The most glaring data is to look at Lucent in their enterprise list Apparently, Lucent has 48 machines for each employee. Lucent will successfully reverse DNS every IP that they are asked about, into something like h135-1-1-1.outland.lucent.com. Splitrock.net apparently has a similar scheme, although the naming method is a little more opaque.
When your estimate is 87 million, of which 8.3 million of your count are highly suspect, it's not the 3 per cent sampling error that you should be concerned about.
The problem is that as soon as you get a packet, it tries to resolve the hostname of the source packet, which requires sending more packets, which requires determining more names, etc. Try tcpdump -n -i ppp0
The problem that you are alluding to with such patents is that they are not the original intent of the patent law, IMHO, IANAL. The idea of patent law is to protect developement time. If you agree with patents at all, I don't see how you could argue that Edison, for example, shouldn't receive a patent for this new fangled light bulb he just invented. He spent a large amount of time discovering how to do it, and finally discovered a working mechanism. However, if I find a way to create a light bulb using a different, non-derived technique, my way is also patentable and non-infringing.
Contrast that with some of the patents that we've been seeing, that are basically (at least as they are portrayed in media) ideas. OneClick shopping is an idea that someone had, and Amazon implemented it. That idea is not an invention (although it may be considered an innovation), although a particular non-obvious implementation might be (cookies is the obvious implementation).
This doesn't mean that software patent don't have a use, by the way. Algorithms are implementations of an idea. However, that idea is not an invention, it is just an idea.
The difficulty that we are currently having, as I see it, is the notion of derivation. If I implement the same idea, the default seems to be that it is a derivation. The courts have not yet discovered where they wish to draw the [fuzzy] line here, and hence the problem. I cannot think of any other case in which the idea -> implementation -> production time has been so small as it is in software, so the distinction may never have been grasped by the courts, so this error in distinction may never have come up before.
My concern is what effect will this have in the long term. The question is not this year or the next, but 20, 50, or 100 years from now. All of the currently `obvious' patents will have expired, but will we have an entirely new set of `obvious' patents to deal with?
M$'s marketing numbers are more like 100% of PCs, 100% of palm-tops, 100% of PDAs, and 110% of toasters (they hope to have 10% of the toasters dual booting Win2000 & Win CE).
Sorry, but it's doubtful that that'll help, if that's your concern. The databases can still be easily correlated, unless you have a dynamic IP or quite a few user on each machine. Just knowing who your ISP is and what your IP is gives a lot of information about where/who you are.
For example, my ISP is Bell Atlantic (*spit*), which means that I'm in northeastern United States. Add to that my IP address, and you get: hal-port$ whois -h whois.radb.net 151.201.X.Y route: 151.201.0.0/16 descr: Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions (hah!) Pittsburgh, PA [snip]
It's pretty difficult to hide where I am. Of course, YMMV. If you have your own address range, then it's likely the DNS system will give your exact identity.
Caveat: I have not seen a trace of a scan from Quova.
The difference between a ping scan from Quova and a ping scan from a hacker has nothing to do with the ping scan but what happens after the ping scan. Add to that the fact that not alarming on a ping scan could make you miss the precursing to an attack and you have the intrusion detection people in a bind.
As I can think of several (IM not so HO) non-harmless uses of the information for a company beyond the obvious use for advertisers, I'm not convince your implied assertion that Quova shouldn't throw alarms is actually valid.
DNS LOC is what I believe you're referring to. Look at rfc1876 for more information, or look here.
If you change the phrase 'comparitvely few' to 'effectively zero,' your statement was correct. Battling the 'it's difficult to determine and update lat/long and not worth it' problem, as well as the 'it's proprietary information where our boxes are at' problem means that DNS LOC is doubtful to be useful.
I also have Bell Atlantic ADSL (in Pittsburgh, PA). Their MTBF is about 2 weeks , with downtimes between 6 hours and 2 days. That's just a rough estimate; I gu ess I should start more scientific measurements.
However, I have not had the same problem that kurisuto has had wrt to Linux. They don't support it, but I just avoid expressing the problem as a computer problem and instead as a network problem (e.g., your router is not responding to ping s). First-tier questions can be pretty stupid: Me: My router won't respond to pings "Tech": What browser are you running? Me: I'm not running a browser. "Tech":...silence... However, normally I can convince them that I do have my modem on, and the connection is good, and I'm not a complete idiot, then I get pushed up to second-tier, which seems to be fairly knowledgable.
The only major problem I've had is when they had their stuff misconfigured so th at I was being barbarded by packets not addresses to me (it looked like two rout ers were bouncing packets back and forth, and broadcasting them to me as they bo unced them as well). They refused to acknowledge the problem, and told me that 'running a packet sniffer is against the terms of service.' (which I was unable to get a reference from them for, btw). Once I said "it looks like someone tryi ng to hack into my machine, except that IP address is wrong" (they were NetBIOS packets, as I recall), they kicked it into their security folks, who determined the problem.
They should implement some sort of 'clue' flag on certain numbers to just avoid the first-tier support altogether, as they've never been able to resolve my problem.
At this point, it's impossible. Due to the relative statelessness of the Internet (a design feature that is required for most of its scalability), there are not 'logs' to look through that would give you the answer. The packets that Slashdot received, if they were logged, aren't going to have any information about where the attack came from (or, at least, if the script kiddie was even half decent).
There are a variety of ways to trace DoS attacks back using the current infrastructure, including the 'manual traceback' technique that Christopher alluded to. However, they don't work very well for DDoS.
For DDoS, tracing back to he source still isn't good enough, as 'here's a list of 10,000 hosts that have been co-opted to do a DDoS' has made the problem simpler, but still pretty difficult (stopping those hosts from doing it again, making sure that a different set of 10,000 hosts are co-opeted, determining who co-opted the hosts in the original place, etc.). Also, I'm not convinced of Savage's trick with chunking working very well when you're talking about 10,000 traces.
The problem of 'finding out if you live in CO' shouldn't be that hard to remedy. New mail hosts:
iliveincolorado.net
coloradoans.org
colorado.com
email.co.us
hotmail/yahoo/juno/aol/etc.co.us
Certainly any university or company in colorado should 'obviously' have people from colorado on it (at least you could argue that the spammer had good reason to believe that you live in colorado, which i would think goes pretty far in courts)
Of course, that doesn't make collecting any easier, or proving that the company being advertised actually sent the e-mail.
Any sort of affirmative action can have the side-effect of reinforcing a prejudice. If the female undergrads at CMU are, in general, not as familiar with the males, then you are effectively verifying the prejudice already in many people's mind, which is not good.
A second alternative to what CMU did is that CMU just got more of the female first-year CS students than normal, so CMU took away from other schools. I'm not sure if that's good or bad; as more of a group generally means more of that same group will stay, this means that CMU is likely to have a higher graduation rate than usual, but others will have lower.
The third option is that CMU actually got more females to go into computer science. This was, of course, their goal. I hope they succeeded in this goal.
I'm a grad student in CS at CMU who just finished graded an oral homework. The females of the groups were just as qualified as the others, perhaps even more qualified. They were not, however, first year students, so this is not evidence to refute MaxVlast's claim.
Dave skirted around the issue, but didn't really address what needs to be done: fix the problem. Making system administrators more 'clueful' isn't a reasonable solution, as truthfully, there aren't enough sysadmins with enough experience for all the positions available, and the problem is, as far as I can tell, getting worse. Moreover, the ie0199.exe demonstrates that unclueful users can be as bad as unclueful sysadmins. A majority of Dave's points about 'fixing' the problem deal with identifying the source of a packet. In the case of a smurf attack, for example, you know who's responding to the attack, you're just not certain who is sending the initiator of the attack. Finding smurf hosts is easy, so you could probably automate the process to find tens of thousands of them, which would be difficult to handle. Even if you get 'security' which ensures that the packets initiate at the source host in the IP header, if you can break into enough machines, there's still a problem, although not nearly as bad. Either I have to get my local ISP to install a filter on their end, or I have to contact the sysadmins for each of those cracked machines and get them to fix their machines. DDoS is a problem without a good solution at this point, and I'm not sure if they'll ever be a good solution. If I can get 50,000 users to install a program on their Windoze box that will, at my command, continually initiate web connections to a host, how can we distinguish this from 50,000 people really trying to talk to that web site (one could argue that posting a URL on/. is a DDoS for that web site:)
I think this might upset Akamai a bit. Well, and you, if you ever look at sites like CNN, and many others. It'd also mess up yahoo, since the images are mostly loaded off of yimg.com.
If this was in the `standard install', the webvertisers could (and prolly would) work around it, by basically having their clients proxying their advertisements.
It would, however, fix this particular problem of sending cookies to that third party site, but you could do that just by having those third party connections not send cookies (since Netcrap and Exploder both have the option already not to set cookies when talking to such sites, methinks).
My guess would be that the people with this philosophy overlap pretty heavily with those who support banning books, so, yes, they might just object to some of that 'lewd and violent' Shakespeare, and that 'revelutionary' Thoreau. The legislative bills may be a bit hard to justify, however.
This sentiment is non-productive. Am I happy with the level of privacy I have wrt to personal data? Certainly not! Does that mean that I publish the list of books I order in the local newspaper? Well, not usually.
Just because we've lost a lot of privacy doesn't mean:
I should be happy about it
I shouldn't try to stop from losing more
I shouldn't try to regain that which I have lost
On a side note, I wonder if Amazon will sue Alibris (this was a criminal lawsuit, according to the article)
I would argue, in fact, that we need laws concerning these very strongly (although some of these may require international laws, not national)
First of all, local government (city, county, state, country?) cannot reasonably be expected to enforce most of the activity on the Internet, due to the Internet disregard for such political boundaries.
Second of all, are these being provided without law? Well, no, in many cases. Cyber-squatting is a huge problem, on both extremes (ppl obviously doing it, and ppl obviously not doing it, but being accused of it none-the-less). Digital signatures being legal is commerce, and requires the government laws, as is gun and alcohol sales, and net gambling. DB protection, I'm a little less clear on, but eBay should have the right, for example, to limit how their database is used.
As per online privacy, there's no question in my mind that there is a problem here, and its only going to get worse. The US government has always (recently) had its hand into encryption.
Now, filtering and network access are a little harrier, and I'm less apt to say 'something needs to be done' (esp wrt filtering). There are several ways to access the internet (even for broadband). While in each access method there may be a monopoly, the variety of access methods rules out (short term) monopolistic activity.
That all said, the government has shown incompetence in the past in general, but every once in a while, they get something close to right, IMHO. I'd be more willing to say "our community (well, the US portion) needs to help the US government get it right" than "our community needs to tell the US goverment to keep their grubby paws to themselves."
At any given temperature, the average energy of an element is independent of its mass. More mass => slower. Less mass => faster => may exceed escape velocity.
Or it may just be they couldn't get past the 'noise' of the star, as seems to be the common hypothesis.
'Open Source' is sucessful because the coders can get good jobs? Give me a break.
The sucessfulness of open source should be base on usage, not on how much the people working on it make. Microsoft is not successful, IMHO, because it makes a lot of money, but because they sell so much stuff. Of course, they make a lot of money because they sell a lot of stuff, so there is a linkage.
Apache is successful because it is wide-spread in usage.
Linux is quasi-successful because it is wide-spread in usage for servers (but not nearly so for personal machines)
Has Linus become rich? To the best of my knowledge, no. However, I would call Linux, as a open source example, much more successful than Midnight Commander (this is not a judgement about the quality of either program, just usage).
I don't understand. If 'the sector moves fast' and the case will be 'irrelevent' in five/ten years, isn't this exactly what Microsoft said is the case, and there's no point to get the government involved in doing something that will be done normally in this time span? (BTW, I personally believe that it will not be irrelevent in five/ten years, but will be very bad if it takes that long)
Slashdot Mirror
Where's the surprise here?
The price of transport is close to, if not below cost, due to exterme competition. The industries transporting, however, are behaving monopolistically, to the point of trying to `tax' competitor distribution (a la fees for DVD encoding). It is perceived to be driving the economy.
Of course, maybe I'm just wrong. It's a similar situation: people pioneering into a new industry, so maybe the parallels are unsurprising.
Is the Florida Supreme Court supposed to take into account the U.S. Constitution? They are a state court, so I would think their job was to intrepret state laws and the state constitution, not the federal one.
"We can reproduce for you a daughter of yours with a patent-pending gene revision that makes her immune to cancer. However, the licensing fee is a 1% of all income she receives throughout her lifetime."
An interesting, and quite conceivable, future situation. I'm not sure the legality of such an arrangement, but when enough money gets behind something, the law becomes quite flexible.
If the invention has been described in a printed publication anywhere in the world, or if it has been in public use or on sale in this country before the date that the applicant made his/her invention, a patent cannot be obtained. If the invention has been described in a printed publication anywhere, or has been in public use or on sale in this country more than one year before the date on which an application for patent is filed in this country, a patent cannot be obtained. In this connection it is immaterial when the invention was made, or whether the printed publication or public use was by the inventor himself/herself or by someone else. If the inventor describes the invention in a printed publication or uses the invention publicly, or places it on sale, he/she must apply for a patent before one year has gone by, otherwise any right to a patent will be lost.
I'm not sure on the definition of `printed publication' (must it be `wide-spread' or `public'?), but there are time-limits on patent applications. They also need to update those rules (or at least that web page), as `printed publication' would not, as I read it (IANAL), include web pages or e-mail.
They presume reverse DNS implies IP address usage. This is not correct, of course. There are many machines that don't reverse lookup. Also, there are many IP addresses that reverse lookup and aren't there. The most glaring data is to look at Lucent in their enterprise list Apparently, Lucent has 48 machines for each employee. Lucent will successfully reverse DNS every IP that they are asked about, into something like h135-1-1-1.outland.lucent.com. Splitrock.net apparently has a similar scheme, although the naming method is a little more opaque.
When your estimate is 87 million, of which 8.3 million of your count are highly suspect, it's not the 3 per cent sampling error that you should be concerned about.
The problem is that as soon as you get a packet, it tries to resolve the hostname of the source packet, which requires sending more packets, which requires determining more names, etc. Try tcpdump -n -i ppp0
Contrast that with some of the patents that we've been seeing, that are basically (at least as they are portrayed in media) ideas. OneClick shopping is an idea that someone had, and Amazon implemented it. That idea is not an invention (although it may be considered an innovation), although a particular non-obvious implementation might be (cookies is the obvious implementation).
This doesn't mean that software patent don't have a use, by the way. Algorithms are implementations of an idea. However, that idea is not an invention, it is just an idea.
The difficulty that we are currently having, as I see it, is the notion of derivation. If I implement the same idea, the default seems to be that it is a derivation. The courts have not yet discovered where they wish to draw the [fuzzy] line here, and hence the problem. I cannot think of any other case in which the idea -> implementation -> production time has been so small as it is in software, so the distinction may never have been grasped by the courts, so this error in distinction may never have come up before.
My concern is what effect will this have in the long term. The question is not this year or the next, but 20, 50, or 100 years from now. All of the currently `obvious' patents will have expired, but will we have an entirely new set of `obvious' patents to deal with?
M$'s marketing numbers are more like 100% of PCs, 100% of palm-tops, 100% of PDAs, and 110% of toasters (they hope to have 10% of the toasters dual booting Win2000 & Win CE).
For example, my ISP is Bell Atlantic (*spit*), which means that I'm in northeastern United States. Add to that my IP address, and you get:
hal-port$ whois -h whois.radb.net 151.201.X.Y
route: 151.201.0.0/16
descr: Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions (hah!)
Pittsburgh, PA
[snip]
It's pretty difficult to hide where I am. Of course, YMMV. If you have your own address range, then it's likely the DNS system will give your exact identity.
The difference between a ping scan from Quova and a ping scan from a hacker has nothing to do with the ping scan but what happens after the ping scan. Add to that the fact that not alarming on a ping scan could make you miss the precursing to an attack and you have the intrusion detection people in a bind.
As I can think of several (IM not so HO) non-harmless uses of the information for a company beyond the obvious use for advertisers, I'm not convince your implied assertion that Quova shouldn't throw alarms is actually valid.
If you change the phrase 'comparitvely few' to 'effectively zero,' your statement was correct. Battling the 'it's difficult to determine and update lat/long and not worth it' problem, as well as the 'it's proprietary information where our boxes are at' problem means that DNS LOC is doubtful to be useful.
However, I have not had the same problem that kurisuto has had wrt to Linux. They don't support it, but I just avoid expressing the problem as a computer problem and instead as a network problem (e.g., your router is not responding to ping s). First-tier questions can be pretty stupid: ...silence...
Me: My router won't respond to pings
"Tech": What browser are you running?
Me: I'm not running a browser.
"Tech":
However, normally I can convince them that I do have my modem on, and the connection is good, and I'm not a complete idiot, then I get pushed up to second-tier, which seems to be fairly knowledgable.
The only major problem I've had is when they had their stuff misconfigured so th at I was being barbarded by packets not addresses to me (it looked like two rout ers were bouncing packets back and forth, and broadcasting them to me as they bo unced them as well). They refused to acknowledge the problem, and told me that 'running a packet sniffer is against the terms of service.' (which I was unable to get a reference from them for, btw). Once I said "it looks like someone tryi ng to hack into my machine, except that IP address is wrong" (they were NetBIOS packets, as I recall), they kicked it into their security folks, who determined the problem.
They should implement some sort of 'clue' flag on certain numbers to just avoid the first-tier support altogether, as they've never been able to resolve my problem.
There are a variety of ways to trace DoS attacks back using the current infrastructure, including the 'manual traceback' technique that Christopher alluded to. However, they don't work very well for DDoS.
For DDoS, tracing back to he source still isn't good enough, as 'here's a list of 10,000 hosts that have been co-opted to do a DDoS' has made the problem simpler, but still pretty difficult (stopping those hosts from doing it again, making sure that a different set of 10,000 hosts are co-opeted, determining who co-opted the hosts in the original place, etc.). Also, I'm not convinced of Savage's trick with chunking working very well when you're talking about 10,000 traces.
New mail hosts:
Certainly any university or company in colorado should 'obviously' have people from colorado on it (at least you could argue that the spammer had good reason to believe that you live in colorado,
which i would think goes pretty far in courts)
Of course, that doesn't make collecting any easier, or proving that the company being advertised actually sent the e-mail.
A second alternative to what CMU did is that CMU just got more of the female first-year CS students than normal, so CMU took away from other schools. I'm not sure if that's good or bad; as more of a group generally means more of that same group will stay, this means that CMU is likely to have a higher graduation rate than usual, but others will have lower.
The third option is that CMU actually got more females to go into computer science. This was, of course, their goal. I hope they succeeded in this goal.
I'm a grad student in CS at CMU who just finished graded an oral homework. The females of the groups were just as qualified as the others, perhaps even more qualified. They were not, however, first year students, so this is not evidence to refute MaxVlast's claim.
Dave skirted around the issue, but didn't really address what needs to be done: fix the problem. Making system administrators more 'clueful' isn't a reasonable solution, as truthfully, there aren't enough sysadmins with enough experience for all the positions available, and the problem is, as far as I can tell, getting worse. Moreover, the ie0199.exe demonstrates that unclueful users can be as bad as unclueful sysadmins. A majority of Dave's points about 'fixing' the problem deal with identifying the source of a packet. In the case of a smurf attack, for example, you know who's responding to the attack, you're just not certain who is sending the initiator of the attack. Finding smurf hosts is easy, so you could probably automate the process to find tens of thousands of them, which would be difficult to handle. Even if you get 'security' which ensures that the packets initiate at the source host in the IP header, if you can break into enough machines, there's still a problem, although not nearly as bad. Either I have to get my local ISP to install a filter on their end, or I have to contact the sysadmins for each of those cracked machines and get them to fix their machines. DDoS is a problem without a good solution at this point, and I'm not sure if they'll ever be a good solution. If I can get 50,000 users to install a program on their Windoze box that will, at my command, continually initiate web connections to a host, how can we distinguish this from 50,000 people really trying to talk to that web site (one could argue that posting a URL on /. is a DDoS for that web site :)
If this was in the `standard install', the webvertisers could (and prolly would) work around it, by basically having their clients proxying their advertisements.
It would, however, fix this particular problem of sending cookies to that third party site, but you could do that just by having those third party connections not send cookies (since Netcrap and Exploder both have the option already not to set cookies when talking to such sites, methinks).
Someone moderate the FBI down for spreading FUD
- Huckleberry Finn
- Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- Madame Bovary
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Odyssey
- Grapes of Wrath
- Of Mice and Men
My guess would be that the people with this philosophy overlap pretty heavily with those who support banning books, so, yes, they might just object to some of that 'lewd and violent' Shakespeare, and that 'revelutionary' Thoreau. The legislative bills may be a bit hard to justify, however.Just because we've lost a lot of privacy doesn't mean:
- I should be happy about it
- I shouldn't try to stop from losing more
- I shouldn't try to regain that which I have lost
On a side note, I wonder if Amazon will sue Alibris (this was a criminal lawsuit, according to the article)First of all, local government (city, county, state, country?) cannot reasonably be expected to enforce most of the activity on the Internet, due to the Internet disregard for such political boundaries.
Second of all, are these being provided without law? Well, no, in many cases. Cyber-squatting is a huge problem, on both extremes (ppl obviously doing it, and ppl obviously not doing it, but being accused of it none-the-less). Digital signatures being legal is commerce, and requires the government laws, as is gun and alcohol sales, and net gambling. DB protection, I'm a little less clear on, but eBay should have the right, for example, to limit how their database is used.
As per online privacy, there's no question in my mind that there is a problem here, and its only going to get worse. The US government has always (recently) had its hand into encryption.
Now, filtering and network access are a little harrier, and I'm less apt to say 'something needs to be done' (esp wrt filtering). There are several ways to access the internet (even for broadband). While in each access method there may be a monopoly, the variety of access methods rules out (short term) monopolistic activity.
That all said, the government has shown incompetence in the past in general, but every once in a while, they get something close to right, IMHO. I'd be more willing to say "our community (well, the US portion) needs to help the US government get it right" than "our community needs to tell the US goverment to keep their grubby paws to themselves."
Or it may just be they couldn't get past the 'noise' of the star, as seems to be the common hypothesis.
The sucessfulness of open source should be base on usage, not on how much the people working on it make. Microsoft is not successful, IMHO, because it makes a lot of money, but because they sell so much stuff. Of course, they make a lot of money because they sell a lot of stuff, so there is a linkage.
Apache is successful because it is wide-spread in usage.
Linux is quasi-successful because it is wide-spread in usage for servers (but not nearly so for personal machines)
Has Linus become rich? To the best of my knowledge, no. However, I would call Linux, as a open source example, much more successful than Midnight Commander (this is not a judgement about the quality of either program, just usage).
I don't understand. If 'the sector moves fast' and the case will be 'irrelevent' in five/ten years, isn't this exactly what Microsoft said is the case, and there's no point to get the government involved in doing something that will be done normally in this time span? (BTW, I personally believe that it will not be irrelevent in five/ten years, but will be very bad if it takes that long)