Well, I hope the Congress can learn from this, and apply the lesson when the time comes to pass new legislation on patents.

[Reflective Surface, Via the Cincom Smalltalk Blog] I fear that the best outcome would be for Blackberry to lose the case, and for Congress to actually have to live with the system they've created for a change. If Congress succeeds in it's intervention, all it's learned is that they simply alter the rules for themselves whenever life gets awkward.

Today's Denver Post had a storyon the two sides of the spam war.  The white hats were represented by Scott Chasin of the Colorado Based MxLogic,the black hats by Alan Ralsky, a straw man for spam if there ever was one.  Ralsky, apparently having learned nothing from Sanford Wallace , is heir apparent to Wallace's "Spam King" title; he certainly seems to be cut from the same cloth.   The interesting part of the article for me was the revelation that this is Ralsky's second go at the good life, having abandoned a career as an insurance salesman after serving a 50 day prison term for selling unregistered securities.  Ralsky also revealed parts of his future plans, including spamming wireless devices, and using "systems built into Microsoft Windows to determine if a computer is online, then [sending the user] a pop-up ad, much like the kind that displays whenever a particular website is opened...The user could be reading e-mail or just idling, as longas he's connected to the Internet".  Lovely.
The distressing thing about Chasin's part of the story is that his best answer to the likes of Ralsky is to rewrite SMTP.  I think this is a non-starter. First, the replacement will likely replace the "S" in SMTP.  The success of the core Internet protocols lies is the ease of implementation and adoption.  There are lots of existing alternatives to SMTP, but they've all been abandoned or relegated to the corporate intranet, usually because they're proprietary, but also because SMTP works everywhere.  A SMTP replacement would likely require an Internet littered with gateways to accomodate the stragglers.  And those stragglers would likely hang around for years upon years.  I believe that the US Postal Service made the switch; in the early days of the republic, the recipient of a letter paid the postage.  But the USPS is a centralized, government run service,the precise opposite of the current situation.