I don't think the simpleminded "But I didn't know it wouldn't work" excuse really carries any legal water. It might get a 5 year old out of a spanking for taking cookies from the cookie jar, but I don't think it allows someone to feign ignorance to sell magic pixie dust.
I thought one of the police jobs for the federal governemnt was investigating and arresting people for committing fraud. Why aren't they doing it to spam businesses?
Most people are pissed about spam because its unwanted email and the popular focus has been on limiting or controlling unwanted email. I think this is misguided, because the spammers (both the freelance mail senders and those who do their own sending for their own products) tend to join forces with the more legitimate direct marketing community and bring the debate about stopping spam to a standstill.
I think a better tactic would be to go after the products and services being sold via spam. IMHO nearly all (95%?) of them are fraudulent or illegal. If you eliminate the fraud businesses behind the spam, I think the spam itself will dramatically lighten up.
Going after the people that send the mail is also very difficult since you don't know where they are and many spams are impossible to track the origin. But in order to sell something you have to at least be reachable enough to be paid, and that should make it much easier and less resource intensive to find the fraudsters and put the screws to them.
While I like the idea that getting rid of the unsolicited email in and of itself, I think its also the least effective way to get rid of spam.
I like science fiction, but I'd hardly call myself a "fan". Some of what passes for popular in the sci fi community doesn't register at all with me, and in fact I'd often write off as just not very good.
Unfortunately I'd have to put Farscape in that column. I caught an episode or two and just didn't find it all that interesting. I'd guess that someone, somewhere decided that a show that lacks whatever elements make scifi popular to those people who don't count themselves as part of the sci fi fanbase.
I think that like any genre the true fans always have a greater level of appreciation for things that will never register with most people. Some things (Star Wars, Alien, Close Encounters, Blade Runner, etc) have an attraction that makes them attractive outside the genre's base. I don't think that Farscape was one of them.
And this is true of lots of genres of books, movies, music, or any other creative endeavor. It drives the fans batty, of course, because inevitably they are insulted when something they thought was a good representation of the genre gets cut because it just isn't popular with non fans.
What surprises me is that as many scifi fans as there are that they haven't started doing their own low-budget scifi films direct to video. The Born Again types have been doing this for a while now, making movies based on Revelations. Its pretty big in the Christian community but doesn't even register on Hollywood's radar.
I can do all those things with my RS/6000 and Sun servers, using SMIT and LiveUpgrade, on the local disks.
You can clone your disks and boot your CPU off of the cloned disks without taking your production system offline? In other words, you have a SAN infrastrucure under a different name -- shared disks, abstracted LUNs available to other CPUs on the same bus.
MS Marketing seems to be much more deeply involved in the early stages of product development, influencing the basic design of products.
I'm convinced that if product design was focused on robustness, security and function MS products could be best of breed all the way around. At some point marketing's desire to own markets forces too many directions to be taken at the same time, resulting in a lot of compomises in robustness and security.
But that's a separate, redundant network, and I'm sure a properly-designed iSCSI network would be separate and redundant as well.
Isn't the whole point of iSCSI that you leverage your existing investment in your network so that you're not duplicating your infrastructure? Not that some additional elements might not be added to rationalize or beef up a datacomm network to support iSCSI, but not a wholesale duplication.
Firstly: Why would you want to? Every one of our servers that are attached to the Brocade have their own pair of internal mirrored disks for booting. What's the point of doing it any other way? I guess, if you ever truly needed to boot from an iSCSI device, those issues will be addressed by OS vendors once there's enough uptake for iSCSI.
Upgrade testing? I've seen high end SAN devices that can clone/mirror/copy LUNs on the fly. If I'm booting off the SAN, I can clone my boot volume and use the copy on a test box before doing upgrades, patches or for any other kind of testing far faster than trying to build a seperate self-booting box and hope it's identical to the production machine.
Booting off the SAN also gives you the ability to replace dead hardware or upgrade hardware really fast, since you can insert a replacement box very quickly without having to worry about the OS boot volumes.
It can also speed rollouts; you setup a generic install once on a SAN LUN and when you're done you clone each time you need an additional box. The new boot LUNs can then be customized as needed.
Boot from the SAN will require iSCSI HBAs or boxes that can "own" one or more NICs and boot-config them as iSCSI HBAs, much in the same way that some on-board RAID controllers can "grab" SCSI channels as needed from the on-board SCSI controllers.
Personally I think iSCSI is cool, provided that some of the chicken-and-egg aspects of HBAs on NICs get sorted out.
SCSI drives still take the cake when it comes to performance and reliability, IMHO.
I'll give you the performance of the SCSI interface, but what do SCSI drives have in terms of mechnical reliability over IDE drives?
My perception of the disk drive design life cycle is something like this:
New mechanism "A" designed. Further pushes envelope of performance characteristics (seek, RPM, capacity, etc). Fitted with SCSI interface, sold primarily to server vendors for big dollars. Mechanism refined, with minor improvements to specs. New version sold to server vendors.
Ultimately a new high-end mechanism "B" is designed, further pushing envelope. Previous high-end mechanism now outfitted with IDE interface, SCSI version of "A" dropped.
Lather, rinse, repeat. It just seems that designing drives for the SCSI and IDE markets seperately would be unprofitable. The best way to be profitable would be to keep selling the older mechanism in the low-margin IDE market after you've made your margins in the SCSI market.
How weird. Given the number of people that are fabulously wealthy without making any more contribution to the microcomputer era than blowing Bill Gates, it's almost unfortunate that Dave Ahl has to do anything these days.
I wonder why he left the computer arena and moved to being a financial planner.
Wow, you're young. Classic for me is definitely the Atari 2600, Intellivision. I can even remember playing the Fairchild system (which I think was hardcoded with only a few pong-type games).
I also remember making lineprinter banners of Snoopy, Neil Armstrong's Moon photo, playing "Civil", a civil war stimulator on an HP3000 timesharing system, and hand-typing program listings from "Creative Computing" into my Apple ][.
They went through a process of changing Versign domain holders over to their new, improved system of authentication. On paper (or in my head) it was supposed to have been a question of assingning usernames and passwords and transparently changing the auth method.
What they actually DID do was rape the whole WHOIS database for lots of domains, changing zone contacts, technical contacts and in some cases administrative contacts to NO.VALID.EMAIL@blahblah, in many cases before or without EVER sending the stupid letters explaining what happened.
It was a TOTAL FUCKAROUND to get it fixed when it happened, especially when you got no information about specific domains (usernames, passwords).
I even had supervisors at Verisign tell me to make up my own letterhead and fax in changes for domains. They said all they looked for was info that looked vaguely professional. I eventually made a template in word that I faxed in when I pasted in new "logos" I ripped off from google.
I think the parent poster meant "Win 3.1 to Win95" and not "Dos 3.1 to Win95". I did a Win 95A install on a full-install DOS 6.22 machine many moon ago; I was left with a dual-boot scenario, not specifically an OS upgrade.
Other than that, I think the upgrade path he mentioned (Win 3.1, 95, 98, NT4, Win2k, XP) is actually possible on paper at least. It would probably be worthwhile to tack on Win ME in there someplace just for the sheer Sisyphean enjoyment.
An equally annoying scenerio would be a series of Redhat upgrades, like from 4.x to whatever the current Redhat release is. The funny thing is I would have more faith in the Windows upgrades actually working.
Except the US World Series champion will almost always have a couple Central/South American players, and might have a Japanese pitcher in their bullpen. Those guys would probably want to play representing their own countries, which would mean breaking the US team up, and juggling the rosters of every other team to shoe-horn their expatriot superstars back into the line-up. It would be a mess.
It would mean some juggling, but they manage to do it in World Cup soccer without too many problems. Maybe it would mean dropping players or making a "USA" team comprised of the best American baseball players, but it would still be worthwhile.
Don't many Japanese teams have a bunch of US players who weren't good enough for the US major leagues? I seem to recall 60 Minutes episode or something where they followed one American who's huge in Japan but relatively unknown in the US.
I keep struggling with the cost of Tivo+Service since I don't watch much TV and am generally disgusted with what I see when I channel surf.
However, I'm drawn to the idea that 10% or so of what's on TV is actually worth watching or is worth watching with the ability to FF through idiotic content or commercials.
Having some of that 10% available to me when the idea of watching TV is appealing intrigues me enough that I might actually get one when my coin can gets full.
World Series (2 teams from Canada, rest from States).
I'd imagine that non-Americans probably don't have this attitude towards the "world champions" in sports that they dominate, like cricket or something that's not played here.
I think when it comes to baseball it'd be hard to see that the team that wins the World Series isn't the best team in the world.
The same is true in basketball as has been amply demonstrated in the Olympics since the inclusion of professional players -- the US easily trounces the competition, despite the presence of a handfull of professional players on other national teams.
I'd like to see more international play in baseball, maybe a world-cup style competition where US World Series champions took on Japanese, Philipine and Central/South American and Carribean teams. I think the results would be pretty dominated by the Americans.
Problem is, the interests of Microsoft, HP, and Samsung are in much closer alignment with the interests of the RIAA and MPAA than they are with the interests of Joe Consumer.
Are they? Given that its 2002 and several iterations of products from MS, HP and Samsung have supported MP3, much to the profitability of those companies but we STILL DON'T have any move forward technologically from the RIAA, I wonder how badly they really want to anchor themselves to the RIAAs intrasingence and lack of growth or flexibility?
I'd give you that MS has more in common with RIAA than the hardware vendors, but I'll bet that a lot of leaders at the hardware companies just wish the best they had to do was change the color of their products every 12-18 months and not get their clocks cleaned by their competitors.
Polar bears! I saw a teevee special about the polar bears near Hudson Bay and they viewed polar bears through some heat-detecting camera and the polar bear insulation was so good that they barely showed up.
but getting much more than that like, say, the entire album at decent quality from same artist, is like trying to extract blood from a rock.
I (sadly) only started using Napster about a year before it got shut down, but I never found it a particularly good source for downloading an entire album, especially one in the same bitrate and overall quality. I thought that was nearly impossible.
I'd say overall that only about 75% of the stuff was worth keeping (eg, 128kbps+, no skips/cutoffs/distortion) and I searched for mostly mainstream stuff (rock n roll). I got a fair amount of cutoff tunes, tunes with skips in the middle or just bad overall audio quality.
I'd agree thought that the RIAA has effectively killed off P2P, except for people that make a serious effort at maintaining their own networks or of putting real resources towards mining gnutella-type networks.
It also doesn't do much for your heat signiture. Since so much military surveillance is done with IR, you'd think that the extra heat generated by the thing being cloacked and the cloaking mechanism that it'd glow like a light bulb under IR.
Ignoring the way the wires run to your house, why aren't there associations that run a phone switch, in addition to providing internet access? They could provide far more features (multiline, hold, smart forwarding, voicemail, etc) for far less per month than the phone company would and long distance could probably be negotiated in bulk as well.
What prevents somebody from starting their own TLD and just claiming it for use? Are there laws? Trust issues? Or is it just that everyone's DNS server would filter out/be incompatable with it?
I've always assumed its just the latter. We've run a totally bogus TLD for some time where I work due to the cryptically idiotic configuration of an application server to have a host name of "foo.bar.bar" (not the real host name, but you get it..). Even better, some of the client applications are configured with "server=foo.bar.bar". Rather than create a hosts entry on each machine, we just decided, WTF, let's be authoritative for the.bar TLD. The software (BIND and clients) didn't care it wasn't an ICANN approved TLD.
The biggest stumbling block is that most people's DNS servers wouldn't know where to find arbitrary TLDs, since they'd only be setup to use the "official" root servers. If some group decided they wanted a new TLD like ".bar" they could convince everyone that ".bar" was for real, announce they were hosting the root service for ".bar" and try to convince everyone to add the new root servers to their DNS server's hints list.
AFAIK this has been tried before and failed because ISPs and other key DNS providers didn't buy into it by including these DNS hints, rendering most of the new TLDs unresolvable. There may be some diehard groups that bought in and just don't care that no one else can resolve their TLDs, but...
The lack of resolvability is the killer issue. ICANN can't really stop it other than to just not agree to put these new TLDs in their root servers, which pretty much ensures the lack of resolvability.
My own soapbox position on all this is that we need no TLDs; the 2nd LD should be the TLD (eg, slashdot not slashdot.org). The presumption that we need TLDs to categorize the net was a nice idea until Network Solutions sold.net,.org to anyone with a checkbook. Due to copyright/trademark reasons and corporate greed, a lot of domain names will be owned across mulitiple TLDs, limiting the "expansion" new TLDs are to provide. The marketplace for names would operate much more efficiently if there was a sense that scarcity of namespace was real.
I wouldn't eliminate all TLDs, since some organizations (.gov and.mil) use these TLDs essentially the way other smaller organizations use 2nd LDs, and some entities seem to like existing within country code TLDs.
I also have to wonder how he can run together so many different chemicals ("recreational drugs") under a common effect. The chemical makeup of such a broad category of chemicals is pretty broad itself; how can they all have the same impact?
It's possible that many drugs used long-term by large numbers of people could be used as recreational drugs (valium, pain killers, even anti-depressants) so why haven't the users of these drugs developed HIV/AIDS?
I love these conspiracy theorists, though. I especially like the one that says it was a FBI/NSA/CIA biowarfare experiment that got out of control.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the simpleminded "But I didn't know it wouldn't work" excuse really carries any legal water. It might get a 5 year old out of a spanking for taking cookies from the cookie jar, but I don't think it allows someone to feign ignorance to sell magic pixie dust.
I thought one of the police jobs for the federal governemnt was investigating and arresting people for committing fraud. Why aren't they doing it to spam businesses?
Most people are pissed about spam because its unwanted email and the popular focus has been on limiting or controlling unwanted email. I think this is misguided, because the spammers (both the freelance mail senders and those who do their own sending for their own products) tend to join forces with the more legitimate direct marketing community and bring the debate about stopping spam to a standstill.
I think a better tactic would be to go after the products and services being sold via spam. IMHO nearly all (95%?) of them are fraudulent or illegal. If you eliminate the fraud businesses behind the spam, I think the spam itself will dramatically lighten up.
Going after the people that send the mail is also very difficult since you don't know where they are and many spams are impossible to track the origin. But in order to sell something you have to at least be reachable enough to be paid, and that should make it much easier and less resource intensive to find the fraudsters and put the screws to them.
While I like the idea that getting rid of the unsolicited email in and of itself, I think its also the least effective way to get rid of spam.
I like science fiction, but I'd hardly call myself a "fan". Some of what passes for popular in the sci fi community doesn't register at all with me, and in fact I'd often write off as just not very good.
Unfortunately I'd have to put Farscape in that column. I caught an episode or two and just didn't find it all that interesting. I'd guess that someone, somewhere decided that a show that lacks whatever elements make scifi popular to those people who don't count themselves as part of the sci fi fanbase.
I think that like any genre the true fans always have a greater level of appreciation for things that will never register with most people. Some things (Star Wars, Alien, Close Encounters, Blade Runner, etc) have an attraction that makes them attractive outside the genre's base. I don't think that Farscape was one of them.
And this is true of lots of genres of books, movies, music, or any other creative endeavor. It drives the fans batty, of course, because inevitably they are insulted when something they thought was a good representation of the genre gets cut because it just isn't popular with non fans.
What surprises me is that as many scifi fans as there are that they haven't started doing their own low-budget scifi films direct to video. The Born Again types have been doing this for a while now, making movies based on Revelations. Its pretty big in the Christian community but doesn't even register on Hollywood's radar.
I can do all those things with my RS/6000 and Sun servers, using SMIT and LiveUpgrade, on the local disks.
You can clone your disks and boot your CPU off of the cloned disks without taking your production system offline? In other words, you have a SAN infrastrucure under a different name -- shared disks, abstracted LUNs available to other CPUs on the same bus.
Then you don't need a SAN.
MS Marketing seems to be much more deeply involved in the early stages of product development, influencing the basic design of products.
I'm convinced that if product design was focused on robustness, security and function MS products could be best of breed all the way around. At some point marketing's desire to own markets forces too many directions to be taken at the same time, resulting in a lot of compomises in robustness and security.
But that's a separate, redundant network, and I'm sure a properly-designed iSCSI network would be separate and redundant as well.
Isn't the whole point of iSCSI that you leverage your existing investment in your network so that you're not duplicating your infrastructure? Not that some additional elements might not be added to rationalize or beef up a datacomm network to support iSCSI, but not a wholesale duplication.
Firstly: Why would you want to? Every one of our servers that are attached to the Brocade have their own pair of internal mirrored disks for booting. What's the point of doing it any other way? I guess, if you ever truly needed to boot from an iSCSI device, those issues will be addressed by OS vendors once there's enough uptake for iSCSI.
Upgrade testing? I've seen high end SAN devices that can clone/mirror/copy LUNs on the fly. If I'm booting off the SAN, I can clone my boot volume and use the copy on a test box before doing upgrades, patches or for any other kind of testing far faster than trying to build a seperate self-booting box and hope it's identical to the production machine.
Booting off the SAN also gives you the ability to replace dead hardware or upgrade hardware really fast, since you can insert a replacement box very quickly without having to worry about the OS boot volumes.
It can also speed rollouts; you setup a generic install once on a SAN LUN and when you're done you clone each time you need an additional box. The new boot LUNs can then be customized as needed.
Boot from the SAN will require iSCSI HBAs or boxes that can "own" one or more NICs and boot-config them as iSCSI HBAs, much in the same way that some on-board RAID controllers can "grab" SCSI channels as needed from the on-board SCSI controllers.
Personally I think iSCSI is cool, provided that some of the chicken-and-egg aspects of HBAs on NICs get sorted out.
Goddamn Descartes. It kind of whacked me upside the head in high school when we were taught his stuff in philosophy class.
SCSI drives still take the cake when it comes to performance and reliability, IMHO.
I'll give you the performance of the SCSI interface, but what do SCSI drives have in terms of mechnical reliability over IDE drives?
My perception of the disk drive design life cycle is something like this:
New mechanism "A" designed. Further pushes envelope of performance characteristics (seek, RPM, capacity, etc). Fitted with SCSI interface, sold primarily to server vendors for big dollars. Mechanism refined, with minor improvements to specs. New version sold to server vendors.
Ultimately a new high-end mechanism "B" is designed, further pushing envelope. Previous high-end mechanism now outfitted with IDE interface, SCSI version of "A" dropped.
Lather, rinse, repeat. It just seems that designing drives for the SCSI and IDE markets seperately would be unprofitable. The best way to be profitable would be to keep selling the older mechanism in the low-margin IDE market after you've made your margins in the SCSI market.
How weird. Given the number of people that are fabulously wealthy without making any more contribution to the microcomputer era than blowing Bill Gates, it's almost unfortunate that Dave Ahl has to do anything these days.
I wonder why he left the computer arena and moved to being a financial planner.
Wow, you're young. Classic for me is definitely the Atari 2600, Intellivision. I can even remember playing the Fairchild system (which I think was hardcoded with only a few pong-type games).
I also remember making lineprinter banners of Snoopy, Neil Armstrong's Moon photo, playing "Civil", a civil war stimulator on an HP3000 timesharing system, and hand-typing program listings from "Creative Computing" into my Apple ][.
An I'm only 35!
They went through a process of changing Versign domain holders over to their new, improved system of authentication. On paper (or in my head) it was supposed to have been a question of assingning usernames and passwords and transparently changing the auth method.
What they actually DID do was rape the whole WHOIS database for lots of domains, changing zone contacts, technical contacts and in some cases administrative contacts to NO.VALID.EMAIL@blahblah, in many cases before or without EVER sending the stupid letters explaining what happened.
It was a TOTAL FUCKAROUND to get it fixed when it happened, especially when you got no information about specific domains (usernames, passwords).
I even had supervisors at Verisign tell me to make up my own letterhead and fax in changes for domains. They said all they looked for was info that looked vaguely professional. I eventually made a template in word that I faxed in when I pasted in new "logos" I ripped off from google.
I think the parent poster meant "Win 3.1 to Win95" and not "Dos 3.1 to Win95". I did a Win 95A install on a full-install DOS 6.22 machine many moon ago; I was left with a dual-boot scenario, not specifically an OS upgrade.
Other than that, I think the upgrade path he mentioned (Win 3.1, 95, 98, NT4, Win2k, XP) is actually possible on paper at least. It would probably be worthwhile to tack on Win ME in there someplace just for the sheer Sisyphean enjoyment.
An equally annoying scenerio would be a series of Redhat upgrades, like from 4.x to whatever the current Redhat release is. The funny thing is I would have more faith in the Windows upgrades actually working.
- Stand in corner facing life-size printout of the Goatse.cx image.
- Lashing with wet towel, rat-tail style
- Post at -1 for one month
- Support Windows XP at Stumblefuck, Alabama call center for one month
- Blow Cowboy Neal
All of the above should take place on webcam and best stills should be interspersed with the normal banner ads.Except the US World Series champion will almost always have a couple Central/South American players, and might have a Japanese pitcher in their bullpen. Those guys would probably want to play representing their own countries, which would mean breaking the US team up, and juggling the rosters of every other team to shoe-horn their expatriot superstars back into the line-up. It would be a mess.
It would mean some juggling, but they manage to do it in World Cup soccer without too many problems. Maybe it would mean dropping players or making a "USA" team comprised of the best American baseball players, but it would still be worthwhile.
Don't many Japanese teams have a bunch of US players who weren't good enough for the US major leagues? I seem to recall 60 Minutes episode or something where they followed one American who's huge in Japan but relatively unknown in the US.
I keep struggling with the cost of Tivo+Service since I don't watch much TV and am generally disgusted with what I see when I channel surf.
However, I'm drawn to the idea that 10% or so of what's on TV is actually worth watching or is worth watching with the ability to FF through idiotic content or commercials.
Having some of that 10% available to me when the idea of watching TV is appealing intrigues me enough that I might actually get one when my coin can gets full.
World Series (2 teams from Canada, rest from States).
I'd imagine that non-Americans probably don't have this attitude towards the "world champions" in sports that they dominate, like cricket or something that's not played here.
I think when it comes to baseball it'd be hard to see that the team that wins the World Series isn't the best team in the world.
The same is true in basketball as has been amply demonstrated in the Olympics since the inclusion of professional players -- the US easily trounces the competition, despite the presence of a handfull of professional players on other national teams.
I'd like to see more international play in baseball, maybe a world-cup style competition where US World Series champions took on Japanese, Philipine and Central/South American and Carribean teams. I think the results would be pretty dominated by the Americans.
Problem is, the interests of Microsoft, HP, and Samsung are in much closer alignment with the interests of the RIAA and MPAA than they are with the interests of Joe Consumer.
Are they? Given that its 2002 and several iterations of products from MS, HP and Samsung have supported MP3, much to the profitability of those companies but we STILL DON'T have any move forward technologically from the RIAA, I wonder how badly they really want to anchor themselves to the RIAAs intrasingence and lack of growth or flexibility?
I'd give you that MS has more in common with RIAA than the hardware vendors, but I'll bet that a lot of leaders at the hardware companies just wish the best they had to do was change the color of their products every 12-18 months and not get their clocks cleaned by their competitors.
Polar bears! I saw a teevee special about the polar bears near Hudson Bay and they viewed polar bears through some heat-detecting camera and the polar bear insulation was so good that they barely showed up.
but getting much more than that like, say, the entire album at decent quality from same artist, is like trying to extract blood from a rock.
I (sadly) only started using Napster about a year before it got shut down, but I never found it a particularly good source for downloading an entire album, especially one in the same bitrate and overall quality. I thought that was nearly impossible.
I'd say overall that only about 75% of the stuff was worth keeping (eg, 128kbps+, no skips/cutoffs/distortion) and I searched for mostly mainstream stuff (rock n roll). I got a fair amount of cutoff tunes, tunes with skips in the middle or just bad overall audio quality.
I'd agree thought that the RIAA has effectively killed off P2P, except for people that make a serious effort at maintaining their own networks or of putting real resources towards mining gnutella-type networks.
I think you mean thermal imaging. Infrared really has nothing to do with heat as far as detection goes, just light spectrums.
Radiated heat is infrared, isn't it?
It also doesn't do much for your heat signiture. Since so much military surveillance is done with IR, you'd think that the extra heat generated by the thing being cloacked and the cloaking mechanism that it'd glow like a light bulb under IR.
Ignoring the way the wires run to your house, why aren't there associations that run a phone switch, in addition to providing internet access? They could provide far more features (multiline, hold, smart forwarding, voicemail, etc) for far less per month than the phone company would and long distance could probably be negotiated in bulk as well.
What prevents somebody from starting their own TLD and just claiming it for use? Are there laws? Trust issues? Or is it just that everyone's DNS server would filter out/be incompatable with it?
.bar TLD. The software (BIND and clients) didn't care it wasn't an ICANN approved TLD.
.net, .org to anyone with a checkbook. Due to copyright/trademark reasons and corporate greed, a lot of domain names will be owned across mulitiple TLDs, limiting the "expansion" new TLDs are to provide. The marketplace for names would operate much more efficiently if there was a sense that scarcity of namespace was real.
.mil) use these TLDs essentially the way other smaller organizations use 2nd LDs, and some entities seem to like existing within country code TLDs.
I've always assumed its just the latter. We've run a totally bogus TLD for some time where I work due to the cryptically idiotic configuration of an application server to have a host name of "foo.bar.bar" (not the real host name, but you get it..). Even better, some of the client applications are configured with "server=foo.bar.bar". Rather than create a hosts entry on each machine, we just decided, WTF, let's be authoritative for the
The biggest stumbling block is that most people's DNS servers wouldn't know where to find arbitrary TLDs, since they'd only be setup to use the "official" root servers. If some group decided they wanted a new TLD like ".bar" they could convince everyone that ".bar" was for real, announce they were hosting the root service for ".bar" and try to convince everyone to add the new root servers to their DNS server's hints list.
AFAIK this has been tried before and failed because ISPs and other key DNS providers didn't buy into it by including these DNS hints, rendering most of the new TLDs unresolvable. There may be some diehard groups that bought in and just don't care that no one else can resolve their TLDs, but... The lack of resolvability is the killer issue. ICANN can't really stop it other than to just not agree to put these new TLDs in their root servers, which pretty much ensures the lack of resolvability.
My own soapbox position on all this is that we need no TLDs; the 2nd LD should be the TLD (eg, slashdot not slashdot.org). The presumption that we need TLDs to categorize the net was a nice idea until Network Solutions sold
I wouldn't eliminate all TLDs, since some organizations (.gov and
Dig the craaazzzyyyy crackpot doc!
I also have to wonder how he can run together so many different chemicals ("recreational drugs") under a common effect. The chemical makeup of such a broad category of chemicals is pretty broad itself; how can they all have the same impact?
It's possible that many drugs used long-term by large numbers of people could be used as recreational drugs (valium, pain killers, even anti-depressants) so why haven't the users of these drugs developed HIV/AIDS?
I love these conspiracy theorists, though. I especially like the one that says it was a FBI/NSA/CIA biowarfare experiment that got out of control.
I like to wash my car floor mats in the dishwasher. They get cleaner than the washing machine.