Credibility of the source article is harmed by being dated "December 30, 2015." I realize it must be a typo, but if they can't get that right it makes me wonder.
What I meant is that C-friendly processors have machine (assembly language) instructions that reference the stack. How the stack is implemented by the processor at the microcode level is not quite what I was talking about, although it is an interesting point.
One of the design philosophies driving C, but not Java, was to keep the language close to the machine implementaiton, which is why C has lots of non-orthogonal but really efficient features such as "increment" and "decrement" operators. Most machines do have stacks accessible with machine instructions.
Taken to its logical conclusion, your point eventually reduces to the observation that it is all just ones and zeroes!
C is carefully designed so that it does not assume that the underlying platform on which it runs is natively using ASCII. A number of relatively obscure features, especially trigraphs, were put into the language specifically to make this work.
While case-folding is fairly easy in ASCII because upper and lower case letters are exactly one bit distant, it would substantially complicate compilation on other platforms. It is relatively unnatural for the computer to allow case-insensitivity, even in ASCII, and in machines that natively use something other than ASCII it can be quite tedious.
Having dealt with C implementations that are targeted for machines which are radically different from what most people are used to using, I have a lot of respect for the portability of C. For example, I once worked with a C implementation on an IBM mainframe processor that had no stack, so the C stack had to be synthesized using machine registers and memory conventions, but this worked!
C was designed to be small AND portable. Java was designed to be, well, portable. No matter how careful you try to be, dropping case-sensitivity from the language would lead to nightmares when trying to achieve portability.
No, "malicious prosecution" applies in a civil proceeding, too. It refers to the case being prosecuted maliciously, not the defendant. What you are thinking of, by the way, is "abuse of process."
I agree with your legal analysis of the jurisdiction question, but this is certainly not malicious prosecution. There is a huge difference in collecting for a tort from someone who knows he is wrong as distinct from someone who merely happens to be wrong.
The pleading on Cryptome (opposing the motion to quash for lack of jurisdiction) is quite strange. One of the issues here is not simply multiplicity of proceedings, but an actual multiplicity of laws. This goes to the heart of the Interstate Commerce Clause. That is, suppose someone in Texas takes an action which is legal in Texas and illegal in California? The pleading essentially asserts that an aggrieved party in California would have the right to call the party in Texas into the state courts of California to answer for the action. That would be very, very dangerous. Insterstate commerce would grind to an abrupt halt if such a practice were to be allowed.
What do you expect from a bunch of accountants?
on
GAO On ICANN
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· Score: 1
The big question, in my mind, is not what the GAO says. They were attempting to answer a set of specific questions given to them by the Congress, mainly related to whether ICANN had the power to assess fees upon registrants or whether such a scheme would constitute an unauthorized (and therefore unlawful) tax.
Rather, I think that any challenges to the legitimacy of ICANN and its structure will end up having to be settled in either the legal or political arena. By this I mean that, if the Congress does not provide clear policy on the issue soon, the question will end up in court. There are numerous disgruntled parties who are dissatisfied with the situation as it is evolving under ICANN, not least the international (non-US) constituency who do not appreciate everything being run from California.
It also seems unlikely to me that the Congress will be able to resist the temptation to meddle in Internet governance. Although the average member of Congress may not quite "get it," every one of them understands by now that there are billions of dollars at stake with a direct impact on national competitiveness.
DNS requires a top-level centralized authority
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Pirate DNS?
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· Score: 1
Hey, folks... DNS is not like Gnutella. The namespace managed by DNS cannot allow collisions. That means, if I call myself something, then no one else in the world is allowed to call themselves the same thing. If this basic principle is not followed, then people can steal each others' mail and all sorts of similarly nasty things will happen.
A namespace administered by mutual trust cannot work, since it only takes one uncooperative jerk to louse it up. Cooperative arrangements are only possible when a certain limited number of jerks can be tolerated, and social pressure placed upon them to stop being jerks. Where the system itself is vulnerable to collapse with even a single jerk, there is no hope.
Now, mutual trust does have a critical place in DNS. In fact, the DNS root is established by mutual trust and consensus. Since the death of Jon Postel, who once had all of the root servers refreshing for a week from his (B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) instead of NSI's (A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) just to make a point to NSI, it has not been clear who, if anyone, is the central authority established by mutual trust and consensus. Claims have been made by NSI (in its registry capacity), ICANN, and several international organizations.
Last week, the US General Accounting Office, which is an arm of the US Congress, released a study which touches on this issue. Their view is that the US Department of Commerce are the authority over the DNS root, and that any actions involving changes, such as creating new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), are subject to their approval.
Some people may not like the idea that a US government agency is the trusted authority over the DNS root, but this is probably better than a lot of alternatives. US government agencies are subject to laws and procedures, and there are significant protections in US statutes against giving commercial advantage to one party at the expense of another, against making decisions in smoke-filled rooms, and so on. Any private organization, whether commerical like NSI or non-commercial like FSF, would have its own agenda and could make up its own procedures as it went along.
Considering that Jon Postel saw himself, by all accounts, as serving in a quasi-governmental capacity as a contractor, first under the Defense Department and then the Commerce Department, this is not a surprising result. Postel's authority was in practice more personal, having evolved over the years as a direct result of his actual performance, but that is not something which can be transferred from one individual to another and provide a stable basis for a transition.
Slashdot Mirror
Credibility of the source article is harmed by being dated "December 30, 2015." I realize it must be a typo, but if they can't get that right it makes me wonder.
What I meant is that C-friendly processors have machine (assembly language) instructions that reference the stack. How the stack is implemented by the processor at the microcode level is not quite what I was talking about, although it is an interesting point.
One of the design philosophies driving C, but not Java, was to keep the language close to the machine implementaiton, which is why C has lots of non-orthogonal but really efficient features such as "increment" and "decrement" operators. Most machines do have stacks accessible with machine instructions.
Taken to its logical conclusion, your point eventually reduces to the observation that it is all just ones and zeroes!
C is carefully designed so that it does not assume that the underlying platform on which it runs is natively using ASCII. A number of relatively obscure features, especially trigraphs, were put into the language specifically to make this work.
While case-folding is fairly easy in ASCII because upper and lower case letters are exactly one bit distant, it would substantially complicate compilation on other platforms. It is relatively unnatural for the computer to allow case-insensitivity, even in ASCII, and in machines that natively use something other than ASCII it can be quite tedious.
Having dealt with C implementations that are targeted for machines which are radically different from what most people are used to using, I have a lot of respect for the portability of C. For example, I once worked with a C implementation on an IBM mainframe processor that had no stack, so the C stack had to be synthesized using machine registers and memory conventions, but this worked!
C was designed to be small AND portable. Java was designed to be, well, portable. No matter how careful you try to be, dropping case-sensitivity from the language would lead to nightmares when trying to achieve portability.
No, "malicious prosecution" applies in a civil proceeding, too. It refers to the case being prosecuted maliciously, not the defendant. What you are thinking of, by the way, is "abuse of process."
I agree with your legal analysis of the jurisdiction question, but this is certainly not malicious prosecution. There is a huge difference in collecting for a tort from someone who knows he is wrong as distinct from someone who merely happens to be wrong.
The pleading on Cryptome (opposing the motion to quash for lack of jurisdiction) is quite strange. One of the issues here is not simply multiplicity of proceedings, but an actual multiplicity of laws. This goes to the heart of the Interstate Commerce Clause. That is, suppose someone in Texas takes an action which is legal in Texas and illegal in California? The pleading essentially asserts that an aggrieved party in California would have the right to call the party in Texas into the state courts of California to answer for the action. That would be very, very dangerous. Insterstate commerce would grind to an abrupt halt if such a practice were to be allowed.
The big question, in my mind, is not what the GAO says. They were attempting to answer a set of specific questions given to them by the Congress, mainly related to whether ICANN had the power to assess fees upon registrants or whether such a scheme would constitute an unauthorized (and therefore unlawful) tax.
Rather, I think that any challenges to the legitimacy of ICANN and its structure will end up having to be settled in either the legal or political arena. By this I mean that, if the Congress does not provide clear policy on the issue soon, the question will end up in court. There are numerous disgruntled parties who are dissatisfied with the situation as it is evolving under ICANN, not least the international (non-US) constituency who do not appreciate everything being run from California.
It also seems unlikely to me that the Congress will be able to resist the temptation to meddle in Internet governance. Although the average member of Congress may not quite "get it," every one of them understands by now that there are billions of dollars at stake with a direct impact on national competitiveness.
Hey, folks... DNS is not like Gnutella. The namespace managed by DNS cannot allow collisions. That means, if I call myself something, then no one else in the world is allowed to call themselves the same thing. If this basic principle is not followed, then people can steal each others' mail and all sorts of similarly nasty things will happen.
A namespace administered by mutual trust cannot work, since it only takes one uncooperative jerk to louse it up. Cooperative arrangements are only possible when a certain limited number of jerks can be tolerated, and social pressure placed upon them to stop being jerks. Where the system itself is vulnerable to collapse with even a single jerk, there is no hope.
Now, mutual trust does have a critical place in DNS. In fact, the DNS root is established by mutual trust and consensus. Since the death of Jon Postel, who once had all of the root servers refreshing for a week from his (B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) instead of NSI's (A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) just to make a point to NSI, it has not been clear who, if anyone, is the central authority established by mutual trust and consensus. Claims have been made by NSI (in its registry capacity), ICANN, and several international organizations.
Last week, the US General Accounting Office, which is an arm of the US Congress, released a study which touches on this issue. Their view is that the US Department of Commerce are the authority over the DNS root, and that any actions involving changes, such as creating new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), are subject to their approval.
Some people may not like the idea that a US government agency is the trusted authority over the DNS root, but this is probably better than a lot of alternatives. US government agencies are subject to laws and procedures, and there are significant protections in US statutes against giving commercial advantage to one party at the expense of another, against making decisions in smoke-filled rooms, and so on. Any private organization, whether commerical like NSI or non-commercial like FSF, would have its own agenda and could make up its own procedures as it went along.
Considering that Jon Postel saw himself, by all accounts, as serving in a quasi-governmental capacity as a contractor, first under the Defense Department and then the Commerce Department, this is not a surprising result. Postel's authority was in practice more personal, having evolved over the years as a direct result of his actual performance, but that is not something which can be transferred from one individual to another and provide a stable basis for a transition.