I go through all four pages, click the back button, and what do I get? A popup that urges me to buy Time. So I close it and click back again, and what do I get? Another popup that urges me to buy Time. So I close it and click back again...
Grr... The suits that request this kind of crap should be required to wade through it every day.
I hate it when people say this kind of thing. It IS stupid to not have backups available on a production machine, but that does NOT mean he "deserved" the attack. Disks did not fail, a power surge did not destroy the equipment. It was a deliberate, FELONIOUS attack and the person responsible needs to be held accountable for the damages.
Just because backups weren't available does NOT mean attacks are OK.
It's like saying a sysadmin DESERVED to be attacked because he didn't patch some obscure security hole. Nobody is perfect. These things slip through and it in NO WAY means that attacks are justified.
You have no idea how loudly I applaud when I hear news of some script kiddie being charged and prosecuted for the crap he pulls. All it takes is some work (sometimes very trivial work) tracking him down, recording everything that's happened, and he can be nailed.
Most script kiddies don't realize it, but these damages can easily reach the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. I simply cannot WAIT when more of these idiots start getting caught and their parents start losing things like their house or their car to pay for the damages.
I disagree. IMO, BY DEFINITION, script kiddies are "intelectually" [sic] challenged. Most cannot construct a simple, complete and properly spelled sentence. Most are high school or college age (but aren't necessarily in high school or college). Most are typically antisocial and surprisingly, most are *proud* of being a "script kiddie" and universally despised as a cockroach of the Internet community.
Hah, you know, I just realized, you fit the bill perfectly. What's the difference between a 16yo script kiddie and a 16yo "former" script kiddie anyways?
Something to consider about these testimonials
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The Myth of QWERTY
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I see a LOT of comments all saying things like:
I was doing QWERTY for a while, and then switched to Dvorak, and after a bit of retraining, I can type faster than I could with QWERTY.
Consider this:
If you desire to work at something (like a Dvorak conversion), you're going to work harder at it.
If you spend time learning something, you are going to be better at it than you were the month before.
If you stop learning something, you are not likely to get much better at it by this time next month.
Everyone making these types of testimonials should (in most cases) at least concede the possibility that they worked their way up to a high level of proficiency with Dvorak. The fact that they type slower with QWERTY could easily be because they don't *use* QWERTY all that much anymore, or that they work harder learning Dvorak. I've yet to see a truly "objective" testimonial (if there is such a thing) that was able to convince me of that person's obvious success with Dvorak because of the LAYOUT (vs. the person's own will to learn).
For those of you that want to put your faith in testimonials, all the power to you. For the rest of us, please look at everything with an objective eye.
Now, I'm NOT saying that Dvorak isn't a better layout than Qwerty. For typing English text, I will agree that Dvorak is much better, and if people are consistently typing up that sort of thing, it might be in their best interests to learn that layout. I, however, am a programmer. I hit perhaps 20% of my highest typing speed (~140WPM with prose) while I program, so layout here isn't a huge concern, and to be honest, I make more use of "obscure" keys (for obvious reasons), which makes QWERTY more efficient for me.
I do still tinker with Dvorak every once in a while (I have the machine set up so it's very easy to toggle layouts on a per-application basis), but I have yet to see a serious advantage to using it for things like this.
In the future, please read the article
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The reason you did not see any mention of your take on the "origins" of the QWERTY keyboard layout was that the article linked in this story covered that myth very completely and succinctly.
In the future, please take the time to actually read instead of just looking at the comments and posting your own thoughts.
God forbid you should have to do any research of your own...
So are all print publications just pulling fabricated crap out of their asses when they do quotes like this?
It would certainly be NICE if there were hyperlinks to appropriate publications, but what makes you think those other publications are available online?
That's what they want you to think: "Great story"
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The Myth of QWERTY
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Dvorak users consistantly type faster than Qwerty users. That's a fact, and I'm testomony to it. I typed Qwerty for years and go to 80 WPM, but it's impossible to avoid mistakes beyond about that - 80 WPM.
What statistics are you quoting? If there were actual trials done, consider this as a possible explanation: QWERTY typists account for all types of people from the computer veterans to the just-introduced high school mac user. Dvorak typists account for a small yet "elite" percentage of those that take their typing and computing seriously. These people WILL type faster on average than the average QWERTY person because most QWERTY people type slowly and most Dvorak people type quickly. Now if the time trials were done truly objectively, they must take this into account and get an appropriate cross-section of typists with similar typing abilities, independent of layout.
With respects to your 80WPM ceiling, I transcribe at ~140WPM with the QWERTY layout. I regularly go at 80-100WPM with few (if any) mistakes, but when my brain switches to a linear transcription mode, there's less thinking involved and I can hit 140WPM while correcting errors. Perhaps you are exaggarating the problem to help make your point? Or maybe you just aren't a good typist...?
Studies have found that the reason Dvorak users don't often type at the phyiscally possible rates of Dvorak (200 WPM+) is that their minds can't work that fast.
I'd appreciate URL's to statistics (unless you're just pulling some of these numbers out of your ass -- no offense). It's "physically possible" to type 1,000WPM using QWERTY, or 1 million WPM. I don't see where you get this ~200+WPM figure. When I'm transcribing, it feels like the bottleneck is in my hands, but when I'm just typing normal things like e-mail and this comment, the bottleneck is in my mind as I work to compose my thoughts and work out a nice way to say what I'm trying to say. This could be interpreted as an argument for the Dvorak layout, but I've not yet reached any form of proficiency with that layout to be able to say for certain that it is indeed better in this respect.
Dvorak is better, all around, and that article was defending (actually, denying) capitalism's inability to develop good standards. When it comes to keyboard layouts, folks, listen to science, not an economist.
Firstly, I do listen to science, and the first sentence here is an opinion, not a scientific conclusion, so you'll have to forgive me if I dismiss it as such. The article was not saying Dvorak was bad, and if that's the conclusion you drew, perhaps you should re-read it. They were saying that there hasn't been any conclusive evidence that the Dvorak layout is indeed conducive to fast typing.
It's about economics, not technical superiority
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The Myth of QWERTY
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Lastly, ask the average person who has taken the plunge and stayed with it and they will tell you they havn't regretted it at all.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you at all. I occasionally flirt with the Dvorak layout at home and at work, but your argument was just totally blown to pieces when you wrote that sentence above.
I mean c'mon, if someone regretted trying out Dvorak, would they have stayed with it?
Those plasma spheres and the flat panel Borg thing (and everything on that page) are VERY expensive. You can find just about everything there at about 25% of the price in any decently equipped novelty store.
I ordinarily just laugh at and disregard AC posts that start off with personal attacks/name-calling, but there was a bit of a point in your message so I'll address it. In the future, a polite rational message will get you a hell of a lot further than one like this, and it comes with the added benefit of not requiring you to hide your identity!
If you are having difficulties maintaining a single link to the Internet, you need to certainly get your upstream provider to provide secondary DNS services for you. You may also want to invest in a new engineering staff.
If you are talking to an ISP and the person you are talking to has no concept of secondary DNS, you are talking to the wrong person. You need to develop better communication skills. If the most clueful person at that ISP has no idea what secondary DNS is, you desperately need to find a new ISP to deal with. This is a fundamental of DNS that every single network person at an ISP should be familiar with.
What problems do a single DNS server impose upon you? Why do you even need to run your own DNS server to begin with? Can't your upstream provider do it for you if it's as difficult/painful as you make it sound? It's even possible to have you set up a DNS server locally that just feeds DNS information to your ISP's DNS servers, which are themselves the primary and authoritative servers for your domain/network. Have you considered any of this?
Just because you made bad decisions and lack the communication skills and/or technical competancy to perform the basics of network and system administration doesn't mean those levels of skill and competancy are good. If you can't do it, your ISP should be able to. If they can't, you should find a new ISP. Nobody should be *forced* to manage their own DNS servers and networks if they can't. The fees ISP's charge for this service should be negligible (and many/most do it for free as part of your connection).
True, but if an organization has any decent size to it, it may have multiple locations and multiple networks. If you put all of the DNS servers in one place, and that one local connection has problems, the rest of your organization is effectively unreachable from the outside (this includes e-mail).
I was speaking about "ftp.ds.internic.net" which resolves to "shutdown.ds.internic.net" at an unreachable IP. You can indeed retrieve domain name-specific forms and information from "ftp.internic.net".
Unfortunately, I can't locate anything on their web site that mentions these facilities are available. For the newcomer to the world of domain names, their web site leads them into believing they must subscribe to NetSol's value-added services.
Yes, they're a company, and yes they have a legal right to go out there and tout their wares, but InterNIC.net in the past was always handled as a public resource, with information and links that were used quite frequently by DNS administrators and the technically competant. NetSol has basically removed most all of these "public" services and have turned the previously community resources into something proprietary and decidedly commercial.
I was thinking he meant it was acceptable nowadays to only list a single IP and have that IP work with multiple physical DNS servers, but I guess if you use a form of IP aliasing to map 2 (or 3 or more) IP's to the same machine, InterNIC thinks you're playing fair and using valid secondary DNS servers when in fact you're using the one.
Obviously having only a single DNS server (or multiple DNS servers located on the same network) basically defeats the purpose of having secondary DNS servers to begin with. If your ethernet goes out or you have network problems, poof, no DNS (no web traffic, no e-mail, no nothing).
To be honest, I'd be perfectly happy if the InterNIC not only enforced having secondary DNS servers, but required those secondary servers to each be located on different networks. I imagine the cost of keeping track of this information would be prohibitive, though.
Where they are trying to "impose" *their* censorship beliefs on others, you are trying to do the same on them.
I am? How so, pray tell? There is a big difference between 'censorship' and 'lack of censorship'.
Regardless of that difference, you are saying that parents and communities must not be allowed to respect a parent's wishes to shelter their child from material that their child is neither mature nor responsible enough to handle. By prohibiting public schools from being allowed to deny a child access to certain materials available online, you are effectively denying their parents the ability to make that decision.
If, instead, you were to allow each community to set its own standards as far as censorship in public schools, parents can then be permitted to make that decision. If a parent wishes their child not to have access to information about building explosives, the school already prevents the child from having access to that material, so the parent is fine. If, on the other hand, a parent is anti-censorship to the point where they seem to *want* their child to have access to this type of destructive information, they can do this in the privacy of their own home.
If you deny a community/school system the ability to shelter its children from objectionable material, you deny the parents the ability to raise their child as they desire. If, instead, you permit a community and school system to make the decision regarding censorship in the libraries and classrooms on a community-by-community basis, everyone wins. Parents can relax knowing their child won't be exposed to materials they don't want them exposed to, and anti-censorship parents like yourself can expose their children to all of the profane and dangerous content they want. They just can't get to it while they're at school (and not under your supervision).
How does this work? It was my understanding that only the IP was used in a domain's name server mappings, not the hostname (which was how I understood round-robin DNS worked).
How can you get a single IP (as in the only listed DNS server for a particular domain) to map to multiple DNS servers?
Or did I misunderstand what you meant by round-robin DNS servers?
A lot of you seem to be missing an important point here. The government isn't angry because they're trying to make money, they're angry that NetSol is pulling much of the registry information from public view and treating it as if it were proprietary information. They've killed their telnet WHOIS service, killed ftp.internic.net (where most people pick up documents and forms for managing their domain names), made major changes to their existing WHOIS services, and completely obfuscated their web interface to all of that information so you're forced to deal with NetSol as a business rather than a custodian of information.
The WHOIS database has to date been treated as a community resource, but NetSol is making it as proprietary as they can, to suit their own business interests. In the process, they're making our lives extremely difficult by making it nearly impossible to retrieve information about domains and contacts or to retrieve domain name templates and the like to manage domains/contacts by any means other than NetSol's web forms (which many of you will agree are extremely painful when we're used to e-mail templates).
The bottom line is that they've taken information and services that were once very public and widely used and without any warning whatsoever either dropped many of these services altogether or bastardized them to the point where many are all but useless. They did this so that everyone would have to interact with them through a single interface: the Network Solutions corporate web site, where they can now mislead you and try and sell you hundreds of dollars of crap that you don't need. It's all about ethics.
1. name-calling/personal attack 2. "probable" facts not backed up with any form of fact, url or statistic
I think it would be hillarious to see what your children are like when they turned 18 and have watched nothing but PBS shows like Sesame Street and have never been to school.
I am tempted to say they'd be little name-calling AC's who never back up their arguments with facts, but then I figure you've probably been to school yourself, so they'd probably turn out a whole lot worse.
Let's say parent A wants to shelter their child from objectionable materials. Parent B objects to all form of censorship and wants their child to have access to everything there is.
If schools censor the content in their classrooms and libraries: Parent A is happy. Parent B can allow their child uncensored Internet access at home. Parent B is somewhat happy.
If schools choose not to censor the content in their classrooms and libraries: Parent A can longer can choose to censor content available to their child. Parent A is unhappy. Parent B is happy.
The practice of censoring objectionable content in schools gives *everyone* the chance to parent their child as they see fit. Denying schools the ability to censor objectionable material denies parents that choice.
The degree of censorship should be determined by the parents and local community.
A typical nine-year-old boy does NOT have the maturity or responsibility to handle information relating to the construction of pipe bombs. This has been demonstrated TIME and TIME again.
However, a nine-year-old son of an explosives expert might just defy that and actually be mature/responsible enough to handle that type of information. In this case the parent might be justified in allowing him/her access to that information.
Does this mean that we should allow ALL kids access to it? Of course not! It means we respect the parenting decisions of most of the children in our schools by keeping that knowledge out of the child's hands while they're at school.
Once they get home, you're free to give them a list of URL's on how to construct explosives from household chemicals ALL YOU WANT.
The only way you're going to be able to honor parents' wishes with regards to what their child can and cannot see is by finding a reasonable lowest common denominator and censoring content at that level. You can't please all parents, but you can please most and still maintain an educational atmosphere. This is precisely why the decision must be made at the smallest level possible. Ideally, the parents individually should be able to decide exactly how their child is educated and to what materials he/she is exposed to, but realistically, the smallest unit of responsibility ends up being the local school or school system, which is where the decision needs to stay.
If you abhor censorship, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from getting a censor-free Internet connection at home and letting your child surf unsupervised all you want. Like it or not, you are in the minority in this respect.
If you think monitoring by parents is the solution, how do you propose parents monitor their children's browsing habits while they're at school?
The school obviously doesn't, and even if they did, how could you be certain their monitoring habits were consistent with your goals as a parent? You can't. What can you do about it? Disallow your kid access to online resources while at school? Not a great solution.
Children are *not* entitled to 100% unrestricted access to Internet materials while they're at school. The local communities decide if censorship in the classroom is something that's desired, and if so, how much to censor. They need to catch as much material as to appease the majority of the parents while still allowing the child access to as much educational material as possible.
If you feel the policy your local school system is instituting is just plain evil, have your child make up a list of the sites he/she wasn't allowed to visit. Then, when he/she gets home, he/she can use your Internet link at home to browse each of those sites your school deemed questionable. Problem solved.
So you'd have no trouble with me walking up to your 8-year-old son, telling him that cocaine was really just as as harmful as powdered sugar, and since it was extracted from plants, its just as good as green vegetables? All you do is snort it up your nose and you won't have to eat green beans tonight! Maybe I could give him a pamphlet with directions to the nearest crack dealer.
Or what about hard pornography? You'd have no problem with me setting a stack of hard gay porn in front of your child's elementary school then?
What about directions on building pipe bombs? I noticed your 9-year-old has a thing for chemistry sets. This would be a cool little experiment and a fun way to get back at friends and teachers!
Do you honestly think that your child will be "too good" to partake in any of this? Do you really think you can prepare your child at age 9 for every possible bit of potentially misleading or desensitizing bit of imagery, sound and text that's out there and available? If you say yes, you desperately need to go take some parenting classes or counseling yourself.
Whether or not YOU think any form of parental censorship is evil or not is NOT THE ISSUE. You are no better than the people you're trying to insult. Where they are trying to "impose" *their* censorship beliefs on others, you are trying to do the same on them.
Parents are the ones that need as much control and flexibility in sheltering their child from material they do not feel their child is mature or responsible enough to handle. At home, this is easy to do, but once their kid is sent off to school, how can a parent be sure their wishes are being honored?
Public school systems thus try to accomodate as many people as they can. At the *community* level, it's decided if material censorship is something they desire in their schools, and if so, at what degree. Obviously, no single policy is appropriate for the entire nation. Certain communities will want very strict controls, while others won't. A balance must be found and honored, but this balance is only appropriate for that community and no other.
To censor or not to censor. You have no right dictating what other communities should and should not do and how they should interpret their local laws. It's up to the parents, the community and the schools to decide how to go about educating and parenting their children, not you.
I'm sure you already knew this and were just trying to pick on the poster, but for those that don't: is considered an HTML tag and Slashdot filters out HTML tags that aren't specifically allowed.
I see several comments that basically all say, "Why should there be certain things that children should not be able to see?"
Parents need the ability to shelter their children from material they do not feel their child is mature enough to handle. If I wanted to wait until my child was 12 before telling them about the birds and the bees, I'd rather them not find out misleading information from the Internet link in his/her school's library when he/she's 9 years old.
So, which causes the greater harm? Sheltering ("censoring") just enough Internet material to keep most all parenting concerns to a minimum, or leaving the Internet links wide open to keep our children from the evils of any form of information censorship?
That decision must be made at the community level. Remember: These are *children* we're talking about. They are not legal adults and are not *guaranteed* access to non-educational information in public educational institutions. The decision on how much (or if) to censor in the public schools should be made by the local school boards (with the input or vote of the parents themselves). A balance between the education of the child and the proper degree of parenting must be found and respected, and this is always a local, community decision, *not* something that we as a national community should impose.
Not to play down the problem any, but I really doubt that moderators will be attacking articles in "waves" like you suggest, with the first wave deciding the comment belongs demoted and the second wave deciding it should be promoted.
Chances are, it'll be bounced around "neutral" by the various independent moderators, getting knocked down, knocked back up, etc.
If it ends up being a very visible problem, we'll just have to deal with it when it happens. I haven't noticed any examples.
Hopefully the people that can't (won't) read the rules and moderate based upon less-than-ideal reasons will be outvoted by the number of people doing "real" moderating.
If Joe Abuser says, "This comment sucks. -1 it is!" Joe Cool will notice it next and say, "Hey, this doesn't deserve to be -1.. +2 it is!"
Slashdot Mirror
I go through all four pages, click the back button, and what do I get? A popup that urges me to buy Time. So I close it and click back again, and what do I get? Another popup that urges me to buy Time. So I close it and click back again ...
Grr... The suits that request this kind of crap should be required to wade through it every day.
I hate it when people say this kind of thing. It IS stupid to not have backups available on a production machine, but that does NOT mean he "deserved" the attack. Disks did not fail, a power surge did not destroy the equipment. It was a deliberate, FELONIOUS attack and the person responsible needs to be held accountable for the damages.
Just because backups weren't available does NOT mean attacks are OK.
It's like saying a sysadmin DESERVED to be attacked because he didn't patch some obscure security hole. Nobody is perfect. These things slip through and it in NO WAY means that attacks are justified.
You have no idea how loudly I applaud when I hear news of some script kiddie being charged and prosecuted for the crap he pulls. All it takes is some work (sometimes very trivial work) tracking him down, recording everything that's happened, and he can be nailed.
Most script kiddies don't realize it, but these damages can easily reach the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. I simply cannot WAIT when more of these idiots start getting caught and their parents start losing things like their house or their car to pay for the damages.
I disagree. IMO, BY DEFINITION, script kiddies are "intelectually" [sic] challenged. Most cannot construct a simple, complete and properly spelled sentence. Most are high school or college age (but aren't necessarily in high school or college). Most are typically antisocial and surprisingly, most are *proud* of being a "script kiddie" and universally despised as a cockroach of the Internet community.
Hah, you know, I just realized, you fit the bill perfectly. What's the difference between a 16yo script kiddie and a 16yo "former" script kiddie anyways?
I was doing QWERTY for a while, and then switched to Dvorak, and after a bit of retraining, I can type faster than I could with QWERTY.
Consider this:
- If you desire to work at something (like a Dvorak conversion), you're going to work harder at it.
- If you spend time learning something, you are going to be better at it than you were the month before.
- If you stop learning something, you are not likely to get much better at it by this time next month.
Everyone making these types of testimonials should (in most cases) at least concede the possibility that they worked their way up to a high level of proficiency with Dvorak. The fact that they type slower with QWERTY could easily be because they don't *use* QWERTY all that much anymore, or that they work harder learning Dvorak. I've yet to see a truly "objective" testimonial (if there is such a thing) that was able to convince me of that person's obvious success with Dvorak because of the LAYOUT (vs. the person's own will to learn).For those of you that want to put your faith in testimonials, all the power to you. For the rest of us, please look at everything with an objective eye.
Now, I'm NOT saying that Dvorak isn't a better layout than Qwerty. For typing English text, I will agree that Dvorak is much better, and if people are consistently typing up that sort of thing, it might be in their best interests to learn that layout. I, however, am a programmer. I hit perhaps 20% of my highest typing speed (~140WPM with prose) while I program, so layout here isn't a huge concern, and to be honest, I make more use of "obscure" keys (for obvious reasons), which makes QWERTY more efficient for me.
I do still tinker with Dvorak every once in a while (I have the machine set up so it's very easy to toggle layouts on a per-application basis), but I have yet to see a serious advantage to using it for things like this.
The reason you did not see any mention of your take on the "origins" of the QWERTY keyboard layout was that the article linked in this story covered that myth very completely and succinctly.
In the future, please take the time to actually read instead of just looking at the comments and posting your own thoughts.
God forbid you should have to do any research of your own...
So are all print publications just pulling fabricated crap out of their asses when they do quotes like this?
It would certainly be NICE if there were hyperlinks to appropriate publications, but what makes you think those other publications are available online?
Dvorak users consistantly type faster than Qwerty users. That's a fact, and I'm testomony to it. I typed Qwerty for years and go to 80 WPM, but it's impossible to avoid mistakes beyond about that - 80 WPM.
What statistics are you quoting? If there were actual trials done, consider this as a possible explanation: QWERTY typists account for all types of people from the computer veterans to the just-introduced high school mac user. Dvorak typists account for a small yet "elite" percentage of those that take their typing and computing seriously. These people WILL type faster on average than the average QWERTY person because most QWERTY people type slowly and most Dvorak people type quickly. Now if the time trials were done truly objectively, they must take this into account and get an appropriate cross-section of typists with similar typing abilities, independent of layout.
With respects to your 80WPM ceiling, I transcribe at ~140WPM with the QWERTY layout. I regularly go at 80-100WPM with few (if any) mistakes, but when my brain switches to a linear transcription mode, there's less thinking involved and I can hit 140WPM while correcting errors. Perhaps you are exaggarating the problem to help make your point? Or maybe you just aren't a good typist...?
Studies have found that the reason Dvorak users don't often type at the phyiscally possible rates of Dvorak (200 WPM+) is that their minds can't work that fast.
I'd appreciate URL's to statistics (unless you're just pulling some of these numbers out of your ass -- no offense). It's "physically possible" to type 1,000WPM using QWERTY, or 1 million WPM. I don't see where you get this ~200+WPM figure. When I'm transcribing, it feels like the bottleneck is in my hands, but when I'm just typing normal things like e-mail and this comment, the bottleneck is in my mind as I work to compose my thoughts and work out a nice way to say what I'm trying to say. This could be interpreted as an argument for the Dvorak layout, but I've not yet reached any form of proficiency with that layout to be able to say for certain that it is indeed better in this respect.
Dvorak is better, all around, and that article was defending (actually, denying) capitalism's inability to develop good standards. When it comes to keyboard layouts, folks, listen to science, not an economist.
Firstly, I do listen to science, and the first sentence here is an opinion, not a scientific conclusion, so you'll have to forgive me if I dismiss it as such. The article was not saying Dvorak was bad, and if that's the conclusion you drew, perhaps you should re-read it. They were saying that there hasn't been any conclusive evidence that the Dvorak layout is indeed conducive to fast typing.
Lastly, ask the average person who has taken the plunge and stayed with it and they will tell you they havn't regretted it at all.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you at all. I occasionally flirt with the Dvorak layout at home and at work, but your argument was just totally blown to pieces when you wrote that sentence above.
I mean c'mon, if someone regretted trying out Dvorak, would they have stayed with it?
Those plasma spheres and the flat panel Borg thing (and everything on that page) are VERY expensive. You can find just about everything there at about 25% of the price in any decently equipped novelty store.
I ordinarily just laugh at and disregard AC posts that start off with personal attacks/name-calling, but there was a bit of a point in your message so I'll address it. In the future, a polite rational message will get you a hell of a lot further than one like this, and it comes with the added benefit of not requiring you to hide your identity!
If you are having difficulties maintaining a single link to the Internet, you need to certainly get your upstream provider to provide secondary DNS services for you. You may also want to invest in a new engineering staff.
If you are talking to an ISP and the person you are talking to has no concept of secondary DNS, you are talking to the wrong person. You need to develop better communication skills. If the most clueful person at that ISP has no idea what secondary DNS is, you desperately need to find a new ISP to deal with. This is a fundamental of DNS that every single network person at an ISP should be familiar with.
What problems do a single DNS server impose upon you? Why do you even need to run your own DNS server to begin with? Can't your upstream provider do it for you if it's as difficult/painful as you make it sound? It's even possible to have you set up a DNS server locally that just feeds DNS information to your ISP's DNS servers, which are themselves the primary and authoritative servers for your domain/network. Have you considered any of this?
Just because you made bad decisions and lack the communication skills and/or technical competancy to perform the basics of network and system administration doesn't mean those levels of skill and competancy are good. If you can't do it, your ISP should be able to. If they can't, you should find a new ISP. Nobody should be *forced* to manage their own DNS servers and networks if they can't. The fees ISP's charge for this service should be negligible (and many/most do it for free as part of your connection).
True, but if an organization has any decent size to it, it may have multiple locations and multiple networks. If you put all of the DNS servers in one place, and that one local connection has problems, the rest of your organization is effectively unreachable from the outside (this includes e-mail).
I was speaking about "ftp.ds.internic.net" which resolves to "shutdown.ds.internic.net" at an unreachable IP. You can indeed retrieve domain name-specific forms and information from "ftp.internic.net".
Unfortunately, I can't locate anything on their web site that mentions these facilities are available. For the newcomer to the world of domain names, their web site leads them into believing they must subscribe to NetSol's value-added services.
Yes, they're a company, and yes they have a legal right to go out there and tout their wares, but InterNIC.net in the past was always handled as a public resource, with information and links that were used quite frequently by DNS administrators and the technically competant. NetSol has basically removed most all of these "public" services and have turned the previously community resources into something proprietary and decidedly commercial.
I was thinking he meant it was acceptable nowadays to only list a single IP and have that IP work with multiple physical DNS servers, but I guess if you use a form of IP aliasing to map 2 (or 3 or more) IP's to the same machine, InterNIC thinks you're playing fair and using valid secondary DNS servers when in fact you're using the one.
Obviously having only a single DNS server (or multiple DNS servers located on the same network) basically defeats the purpose of having secondary DNS servers to begin with. If your ethernet goes out or you have network problems, poof, no DNS (no web traffic, no e-mail, no nothing).
To be honest, I'd be perfectly happy if the InterNIC not only enforced having secondary DNS servers, but required those secondary servers to each be located on different networks. I imagine the cost of keeping track of this information would be prohibitive, though.
Regardless of that difference, you are saying that parents and communities must not be allowed to respect a parent's wishes to shelter their child from material that their child is neither mature nor responsible enough to handle. By prohibiting public schools from being allowed to deny a child access to certain materials available online, you are effectively denying their parents the ability to make that decision.
If, instead, you were to allow each community to set its own standards as far as censorship in public schools, parents can then be permitted to make that decision. If a parent wishes their child not to have access to information about building explosives, the school already prevents the child from having access to that material, so the parent is fine. If, on the other hand, a parent is anti-censorship to the point where they seem to *want* their child to have access to this type of destructive information, they can do this in the privacy of their own home.
If you deny a community/school system the ability to shelter its children from objectionable material, you deny the parents the ability to raise their child as they desire. If, instead, you permit a community and school system to make the decision regarding censorship in the libraries and classrooms on a community-by-community basis, everyone wins. Parents can relax knowing their child won't be exposed to materials they don't want them exposed to, and anti-censorship parents like yourself can expose their children to all of the profane and dangerous content they want. They just can't get to it while they're at school (and not under your supervision).
How does this work? It was my understanding that only the IP was used in a domain's name server mappings, not the hostname (which was how I understood round-robin DNS worked).
How can you get a single IP (as in the only listed DNS server for a particular domain) to map to multiple DNS servers?
Or did I misunderstand what you meant by round-robin DNS servers?
A lot of you seem to be missing an important point here. The government isn't angry because they're trying to make money, they're angry that NetSol is pulling much of the registry information from public view and treating it as if it were proprietary information. They've killed their telnet WHOIS service, killed ftp.internic.net (where most people pick up documents and forms for managing their domain names), made major changes to their existing WHOIS services, and completely obfuscated their web interface to all of that information so you're forced to deal with NetSol as a business rather than a custodian of information.
The WHOIS database has to date been treated as a community resource, but NetSol is making it as proprietary as they can, to suit their own business interests. In the process, they're making our lives extremely difficult by making it nearly impossible to retrieve information about domains and contacts or to retrieve domain name templates and the like to manage domains/contacts by any means other than NetSol's web forms (which many of you will agree are extremely painful when we're used to e-mail templates).
The bottom line is that they've taken information and services that were once very public and widely used and without any warning whatsoever either dropped many of these services altogether or bastardized them to the point where many are all but useless. They did this so that everyone would have to interact with them through a single interface: the Network Solutions corporate web site, where they can now mislead you and try and sell you hundreds of dollars of crap that you don't need. It's all about ethics.
1. name-calling/personal attack
2. "probable" facts not backed up with any form of fact, url or statistic
I think it would be hillarious to see what your children are like when they turned 18 and have watched nothing but PBS shows like Sesame Street and have never been to school.
I am tempted to say they'd be little name-calling AC's who never back up their arguments with facts, but then I figure you've probably been to school yourself, so they'd probably turn out a whole lot worse.
Let's say parent A wants to shelter their child from objectionable materials. Parent B objects to all form of censorship and wants their child to have access to everything there is.
If schools censor the content in their classrooms and libraries: Parent A is happy. Parent B can allow their child uncensored Internet access at home. Parent B is somewhat happy.
If schools choose not to censor the content in their classrooms and libraries: Parent A can longer can choose to censor content available to their child. Parent A is unhappy. Parent B is happy.
The practice of censoring objectionable content in schools gives *everyone* the chance to parent their child as they see fit. Denying schools the ability to censor objectionable material denies parents that choice.
The degree of censorship should be determined by the parents and local community.
The truth about what, Santa Claus?
A typical nine-year-old boy does NOT have the maturity or responsibility to handle information relating to the construction of pipe bombs. This has been demonstrated TIME and TIME again.
However, a nine-year-old son of an explosives expert might just defy that and actually be mature/responsible enough to handle that type of information. In this case the parent might be justified in allowing him/her access to that information.
Does this mean that we should allow ALL kids access to it? Of course not! It means we respect the parenting decisions of most of the children in our schools by keeping that knowledge out of the child's hands while they're at school.
Once they get home, you're free to give them a list of URL's on how to construct explosives from household chemicals ALL YOU WANT.
The only way you're going to be able to honor parents' wishes with regards to what their child can and cannot see is by finding a reasonable lowest common denominator and censoring content at that level. You can't please all parents, but you can please most and still maintain an educational atmosphere. This is precisely why the decision must be made at the smallest level possible. Ideally, the parents individually should be able to decide exactly how their child is educated and to what materials he/she is exposed to, but realistically, the smallest unit of responsibility ends up being the local school or school system, which is where the decision needs to stay.
If you abhor censorship, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from getting a censor-free Internet connection at home and letting your child surf unsupervised all you want. Like it or not, you are in the minority in this respect.
If you think monitoring by parents is the solution, how do you propose parents monitor their children's browsing habits while they're at school?
The school obviously doesn't, and even if they did, how could you be certain their monitoring habits were consistent with your goals as a parent? You can't. What can you do about it? Disallow your kid access to online resources while at school? Not a great solution.
Children are *not* entitled to 100% unrestricted access to Internet materials while they're at school. The local communities decide if censorship in the classroom is something that's desired, and if so, how much to censor. They need to catch as much material as to appease the majority of the parents while still allowing the child access to as much educational material as possible.
If you feel the policy your local school system is instituting is just plain evil, have your child make up a list of the sites he/she wasn't allowed to visit. Then, when he/she gets home, he/she can use your Internet link at home to browse each of those sites your school deemed questionable. Problem solved.
So you'd have no trouble with me walking up to your 8-year-old son, telling him that cocaine was really just as as harmful as powdered sugar, and since it was extracted from plants, its just as good as green vegetables? All you do is snort it up your nose and you won't have to eat green beans tonight! Maybe I could give him a pamphlet with directions to the nearest crack dealer.
Or what about hard pornography? You'd have no problem with me setting a stack of hard gay porn in front of your child's elementary school then?
What about directions on building pipe bombs? I noticed your 9-year-old has a thing for chemistry sets. This would be a cool little experiment and a fun way to get back at friends and teachers!
Do you honestly think that your child will be "too good" to partake in any of this? Do you really think you can prepare your child at age 9 for every possible bit of potentially misleading or desensitizing bit of imagery, sound and text that's out there and available? If you say yes, you desperately need to go take some parenting classes or counseling yourself.
Whether or not YOU think any form of parental censorship is evil or not is NOT THE ISSUE. You are no better than the people you're trying to insult. Where they are trying to "impose" *their* censorship beliefs on others, you are trying to do the same on them.
Parents are the ones that need as much control and flexibility in sheltering their child from material they do not feel their child is mature or responsible enough to handle. At home, this is easy to do, but once their kid is sent off to school, how can a parent be sure their wishes are being honored?
Public school systems thus try to accomodate as many people as they can. At the *community* level, it's decided if material censorship is something they desire in their schools, and if so, at what degree. Obviously, no single policy is appropriate for the entire nation. Certain communities will want very strict controls, while others won't. A balance must be found and honored, but this balance is only appropriate for that community and no other.
To censor or not to censor. You have no right dictating what other communities should and should not do and how they should interpret their local laws. It's up to the parents, the community and the schools to decide how to go about educating and parenting their children, not you.
I'm sure you already knew this and were just trying to pick on the poster, but for those that don't: is considered an HTML tag and Slashdot filters out HTML tags that aren't specifically allowed.
Thus:
#include <stdio.h>
became:
#include
I see several comments that basically all say, "Why should there be certain things that children should not be able to see?"
Parents need the ability to shelter their children from material they do not feel their child is mature enough to handle. If I wanted to wait until my child was 12 before telling them about the birds and the bees, I'd rather them not find out misleading information from the Internet link in his/her school's library when he/she's 9 years old.
So, which causes the greater harm? Sheltering ("censoring") just enough Internet material to keep most all parenting concerns to a minimum, or leaving the Internet links wide open to keep our children from the evils of any form of information censorship?
That decision must be made at the community level. Remember: These are *children* we're talking about. They are not legal adults and are not *guaranteed* access to non-educational information in public educational institutions. The decision on how much (or if) to censor in the public schools should be made by the local school boards (with the input or vote of the parents themselves). A balance between the education of the child and the proper degree of parenting must be found and respected, and this is always a local, community decision, *not* something that we as a national community should impose.
Not to play down the problem any, but I really doubt that moderators will be attacking articles in "waves" like you suggest, with the first wave deciding the comment belongs demoted and the second wave deciding it should be promoted.
Chances are, it'll be bounced around "neutral" by the various independent moderators, getting knocked down, knocked back up, etc.
If it ends up being a very visible problem, we'll just have to deal with it when it happens. I haven't noticed any examples.
Hopefully the people that can't (won't) read the rules and moderate based upon less-than-ideal reasons will be outvoted by the number of people doing "real" moderating.
If Joe Abuser says, "This comment sucks. -1 it is!" Joe Cool will notice it next and say, "Hey, this doesn't deserve to be -1.. +2 it is!"