Exactly. If I'd known this is all one needs to do to get "published" as a journalist I'd've just submitted any diary week from the last year-and-a-half.
He seems to miss the fact that one doesn't suddenly transit to pure-'net from "regular life". One gradually sinks into it. There are no sudden food/deodorant emergencies. That's what housemates/roommates are for. Wire the house up and get cable/DSL so they get addicted to the technology. Wiggle the wires at the router when food starts getting low and when they look to you to fix it, convince them to go to the grocery while you slave over the logs. "Get some sun! It's a wonderful day out. Here, I'll also write up a shopping list/budgeting tool on our intranet web server." Go to freshmeat. etc.
Even now, the US government has an interest in trying to prevent strong crypto from existing outside this country, and in point of fact, most currently existing crypto DOES originate from inside US borders (SSH included)
Hmm? Tatu Ylönen is a Finnish programmer and SSH Communications Security Ltd is a Finnish company.
Now, take this one step further...
This would imply that US export restrictions have the most effect upon US citizens and corporations. Since the rest of the world merely goes to an archive (in say Finland) and doesn't bother going to the US for crypto, US citizens, being used to getting nearly everything from American sites, go to American sites and have to fill out forms and sign agreements and do a two-step to download crypto components.
Net result -- the US government knows who has crypto, and also puts barriers in the way of those trying to get crypto (every additional click and form submission reduces the % of Americans likely to download crypto). Why would they care???
Because they're concerned with spying upon the American people -- and crypto slows that down.
Drop the export restrictions and there's no good excuse to make Americans fill out forms to get crypto.
Starting to make sense?
[ by the way, mr. 3-letter agency, I use PGP, GPG, SSH, SSH2, OpenSSH (now), IPsec/IKE/ photurisd/isakmpd, PGPNet, anonymizer.com, the new beta of Freedom (zeroknowledge.com), DES, 3DES, blowfish, StegFS, outguess, twofish, Kerberos, and I'm sure some others that I've forgotten. I'm a US citizen. Screw you criminal bastards. ]
extra credit: (a) if the turnip uses RSA instead of 3DES how many U.S. laws has the general broken (assume he is considered a visiting diplomat). (b) for which of these crimes may he claim "diplomatic immunity"? (c) if the Lieutenant eats the turnip is this destruction of evidence? (d)... and if the turnip contains cyanide is the Lieutenant's death murder, homicide, an act of war...?
You could probably commit a war crime with turnips, too.
Certainly... Gen. Evil Criminal sends a an encrypted message carved into a turnip to his trusted Lieutenant ordering the killing of all held prisoners of war.
bonus question: if Gen. Evil Criminal mails the turnip from Washington, D.C. to his Lieutenant in Libya is he in violation of the munitions regulations controlling the export of strong cryptography (assume the turnip contains a 3DES encrypted message)?
I don't much like that idea. Somebody might want to send you a legitimate email to the address given here and you wouldn't read it for several days
I generally don't have a problem with that:-) However, if there is a time when I need to be able to publish an address for immediate correspondence I can grab another excite/hotmail/whatever address and publish it, check it for a few days and then stop checking it forever. Similarly, since I run sendmail I could give out a new address on my home site, and expire it after a while (make sendmail drop mail to that address).
I agree with the principle of the Spam Arms Race, however, content-based filtering, coupled with some forethought can deal with the majority of spam/viruses. I use a system which has two components: separate email addresses and content- based filtering.
Simply, I have a "spam drop" email address (that's the one you see by my name) which I use in all public postings. Whenever I fill out a web form with an email address I give them that one. I use hotmail because (1) Microsoft deserves to waste their time and space storing my spam after all the money they've cost me (I'm talking about downtime not software prices -- I'd never pay for their products, but that doesn't imply that my employers are so flexible), and (2) I don't have to worry about a virus running when I get spam. I go to their web interface if I need to pick up a password to have a site membership, delete the spam, and maybe come back next month. All my other email goes through personal and/or business accounts that I don't give out.
This cuts down drastically on the amount of spam I have to filter.
The content-based filtering uses procmail and a perl script which acts like: (1) consult a list of regex's for mail to *keep* regardless (this is taken from my aliases list and a list of a few common domains) (2) match mail against a list of spam phrases (if you look at most spam there are generally phrases there which RARELY ever appear in regular mail) and file away spam in a special spam "folder.
Nobody knows my set of rules, and if they find them and get around them it takes very little time to add a new rule. In a sense every spam that gets through lets me train my system to avoid a new class of spam.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah..." you say. Well, over the past 3 years (all personal and business accounts combined) I have received 181 spam mails -- around 80% of them were automatically filtered. I have about 1 false positive every couple of months. On the hotmail spam drop I would estimate about 4000 spam mails in the past year alone.
Of course, procmail, Perl scripts, and do-it-yourself mail filtering aren't for every one. But then again spam's not for everyone either.:-)
I honestly thought about going to RedHat as well, but I already have so many bad experiences with it at work, that I honestly don't want to be bothered ( hint, I hate linuxconf, and generally speaking any gui program that does things behind my back)
I generally agree with everything you've said, but just a note: don't use linuxconf if you don't like it. My main desktop box runs a mishmash of RH and Mandrake packages (was originally RH5.1 IIRC) and compiled tarballs. Linuxconf is pretty much useless to me, an annoyance, and ultimately a commented line in inetd.conf. I find bash and perl scripts to be far superior to GUI tools for my uses.
Do you work for Microsoft or are you just a Microsoft Solutions Provider?
Your statement is akin to saying "What's good for Microsoft is good for America. Everyone in the know knows that Microsoft can't get split up."
A decision to include in the Dow has nothing to do with the outcome of this litigation, better or worse. It's about capitalization, shares traded, volume, etc. Microsoft is considered a "Blue Chip" stock and a good candidate for the Dow. If Microsoft gets split then all components may be removed from the Dow, maybe just one, maybe neither, who knows? No one knows. And no one will make that decision until it must be made (if ever).
The only person in the country (unless there's been a leak) who knows what will be in the finding of fact is the Judge. Given the contents of the finding no one knows whether MS and Justice will settle (which is one of the reasons a finding of fact is presented). If they don't, no one knows the outcome of the trial, and no one knows what remedies might be taken. If you had any true insight you'd make a very very good living as an analyst in the matter.
This may be a bit of late-night idiocy, but, allow me to think "out loud" if you will for a moment.
I am a firm believer in Open Source for a number of good reasons of which we are all likely aware. The issue of licensing always comes up and often good Open Source code can't work together with other good Open Source code because of incompatibilities with licenses.
Often, a developer will release code under one license, and since s/he's the developer, also later release it under another license (it's proprietary and then GPL'ed, or Qt-licensed then GPL'ed, etc.). What would happen if, given that there are say 5 "blessed" Open Source licenses which happen to be incompatible with one another, a developer took his code and released a copy under every one of these 5 blessed licenses?
While this is not sufficient to solve incompatibilities, since the next developer on the BSD (say) branch adds his code in and just keeps it BSD-licensed; if everyone were doing it then the new code could be released under all the blessed licenses. This of course does nothing to make currently GPL'ed code compatible with BSD-licensed code, but is something gained by doing this for later code?
Is there a license that one could write which is something of a meta-GPL? In the sense of saying: "Code under this license must be redistributed under this license and under (blessed licenses 1-5)"... I'm not sure that's particularly cogent, but maybe someone gets my drift.
It's late enough that I can't tell if this is absolutely idiotic or somewhat sensible. Oh well, that's what flames and moderation are for.
I don't expect anyone to jump to something other than a Microsoft product based on this pricing
Too late. This was the final nail in the coffin for M$ at our site. We have been haggling about whether to ditch NT/IIS for *BSD-Linux and Apache for some time now, and have been evaluating Win2k as possible. The only real tie to IIS we have is the use of ASP (and we don't have any ASP pages yet -- just a number of Access forms which could be exported to ASP). After we read about this the final architecture plan was finished: goodbye IIS, goodbye NT.
The clincher -- the only benefits of NT were that we had servers here already and they support ASP in IIS. For the cost difference in switching to a Freenix/Apache setup (and yes, we'd rather be adminstering those types of systems; seeing as how one doesn't really "administer" NT anyway) we can afford to hire an additional person to evaluate ASP clones and ASP->PHP[34] conversion solutions.
I am not a bleeding heart. I am not an optimist. I am a realist. I agree with the sentiment you express which can be summarized as "The government does what it will, and occasionally attempts to convince the people otherwise."
Your pessimism is, however, unfounded. The government does as it will because you, and every other ironic cynical fuck in this nation parroting your sentiment are too lazy and ignorant to get up off your collective asses and stop the government from doing so.
The government, in actuality, is exercising exactly the majority will of the people -- unfortunately the will is apathetic and undirected. This is permission for the government to do whatever IT deems best. You got a complaint about how things are run? Fix them. I am.
Why is backing out of such treaties stupid? Because we lose the trust of the nations of the world? Any nation with a clue doesn't trust us already. We're sniffing all the communications we can get, and barging into everyone else's business. Fact of the matter is, we're also being dragged into everyone else's business as the (currently) most powerful member of the U.N.
We don't set a good example, and our government (& big business) doesn't really care so long as we run things one way or another, supress those we don't like, and support those we do -- and keep our companies stronger (or apparently so) than the competition. Part of that big business is the military, and it's good business to build weapons, defense systems, and promote the occasional conflict to boost sales.
But, the real crux of the issue is this: Those treaties were signed as part of detente. At a time when the USSR could be as capable as we were, at any given moment, of possibly figuring out how to put together an ABM, or a more effective ICBM, treaties were a way of diplomatically legislating around not-so-mutually assured destruction. To deploy such inventions would be breaking the treaty. Breaking the treaty could start a war, and possibly a nuclear exchange, and the end of the world, (etc.).
There is no M.A.D. now. If the treaties are broken there won't be a war or a nuclear exchange. There is no country out there (and it would be difficult to find an alliance of them even) capable of waging an effective war against this country -- and none crazy enough to launch a massive nuclear strike (of the few capable). So the treaty is unenforced. The detente ideology which got us to the signing table is gone. The treaty is worthless to us, and unenforceable. Screw it (say the talking heads).
Shades of Manifest Destiny, certainly, but those now-flimsy treaties stand in the way of very big dollars and more visible world domination -- backed up by a manufactured mandate to eliminate the threat of nuclear terrorism from "rogue nations like Iraq, N. Korea, Libya, etc."
So, the abolition of the treaties is in America's industrial interest (both by increasing the flow of money in the defense industry, and by potentially making our government force other governments to trade with us more readily), in both major political parties' public image interests, in our nation's military interest (reasserting ourselves as the biggest boys on the block), and in the interest of the American people (by decreasing the likelihood that an ICBM will obliterate some number of them).
While it's all well and good to be a bleeding heart wishing for a better world, the global economy and the stage of foreign diplomacy are run by the strongest nations. Whenever a people give away power they are eventually conquered (in the past it was by military might, today it is more often economically) without remorse. I am personally glad to be a citizen of the most militarily/industrially/economically powerful nation this world has ever seen, and (even though I don't agree with most that I let the government get away with -- and am fighting them when possible on a number of fronts) think it is idiotic to try to stop them from maintaining our power.
An ISO on my DSL takes about an hour to pull down. While I can't speak for the original poster, my "ISP" has me patched almost directly into their backbone and makes more money off me than their average dialup customer (do some research on how your provider routes your service and their average cost on different types of media). As for frivolous bandwidth usage... If one does not use a mirror system, and is trying to pull ISOs off some rinky-dink machine, or a central server, then, yes, they are screwing it for everyone else. However, a good user uses mirrors - fast ones with little load, and close to a backbone (it's not only in the downloader's interest but everyone else's as well). If you can't figure out how to tell which mirrors to use try constructively using traceroute (it is a network tool after all) occasionally before pulling down mondo data.
The backbones laugh at a DSL download. The back-river lines don't. Be selective. Once we have respected our responsibilities with regard to the Internet Commons we are free to utilize our purchased service to its utmost. If there is a bandwidth crisis the prices will rise.
an open site where anyone can submit the name of their project and get counted, and with it a search engine of all of the projects, and possible hosting options
I thought this already existed and was called freshmeat...
It sounds like a lot of people commenting on this thread don't have to take care of over 5000 machines running multiple flavors AND versions of *ix, NT, along with multiple NFS servers offering terrabytes of data, AFS servers also offering a ton of data, with everything working across multiple physical sites.
On the contrary. If you need to force host names to understand which machines are which you are in for trouble somewhere down the road: when you are forced to change from an HP/UX box to a Sun Box for whatever reason for a major service and now all your clients expect HPUX239435 to be that server, which is now a Sun: so do you change all the clients or have a Sun named HPUX239435? Oops.
You need additional information independent of the hostname (ESPECIALLY for bigger networks). DNS tables, LDAP, your own proprietary information, etc., but don't key functionality/architecture on hostname in a big network or you'll be out of a job because of it.
I have been annoyed for a number of years now at the self-righteousness of the digital Madison Avenues: "If you don't click-through then your favorite websites will be forced to charge subscriptions." This is one of the arguments against mass-filtering of ads (I wrote a 40-line ad filter proxy server in Perl two years ago -- but I didn't feel like taking the time to keep the ad server list updated, and would sometimes forget to run it (hassle)).
The reality is: if you were to make it easy for any and everyone to filter out all ads on all web pages, yes, some sites would suffer and probably go out of business. But if there is a demand for the service they provided someone will come up with a free (non subscription) version of the site and a way to get it funded. There are plenty of subscription sites out there and having been on the Internet since the late 80's, and on the web obsessively since about '94 I don't subscribe to ANY of them. There's always a free site, and there always will be. If it comes right down to it I will donate to a free site to keep it free if it is truly useful (google comes to mind).
Advertisers are doing noone but themselves a favor. Banner ads are generally exploitation. Think about how much bandwidth is used per day just delivering banner ads. And we get (I do for sure) pent up about how much spam costs in a network model...
Even in the NYC metro area broadband service is hard to come by, and often price inefficient. Here in NashVegas I got 1.5Mbit down, 256K up for $59/month (wondrous) installed within 2 weeks of checking BellSouth's web page. My friends in Queens have been fighting for months just to get 384/384 for ~$79 a month. Most of them can't even get it (usually with no explanation of why not). Similarly with cable (and who wants to trade their free HBO/TittyMax for no premium channels, possible cable modem, likely jail cell:-).
I don't know if companies like Dell and gateway "mark-up" the windows OS at all, but given the low margins on computers, I doubt it matters anyway.
Anecdotal evidence: the fellow from whom we buy some of our boxen (for company purchasing -- our own boxen we put together ourselves) gets copies of Win98SE for $11 -- for resale to customers [i.e., with all the bullshit packaging] I'm sure of it because he gives them to us at cost for various reasons, and he wouldn't undercut himself on cost (he's nice to us but he ain't stupid). He's hardly a Dell or a GW2k.
MS and GPL. That would be a beautiful thing, in my opinion -- users see Microsoft being forced to use OSS (which forces users to realize the FUD is untrue and the rumors of greener pastures over the OSS fence to be true), OSS software gets distributed even more widely, the cost of MS products would ideally drop, and MS products become more usable. I hate M$ as much as anyone, but the major reason why is they ship crappy bloatware for major $. If they shipped flexible software for a more reasonable price with GNU tools installed (so long as they honor the requirements of the GPL (there's the catch:-)) then I'd complain less when using their systems.
Sorry to continue this offtopice thread, but... IE can't crash Windows? Would you mind telling that to my mother, father, brother, boss, former boss, roommates, me (again), etc. I can't tell you how many times I've seen IE start off the cascade of crashing that either immediately (when IE goes down the machine comes down with it) or within a matter of a minute (includes 3-5 BSODs) eliminates all hope of continuing the session and keeping any and all valuable data. Doesn't matter if it's in a separate process or not. When windows' memory management fscks up it's only a matter of time before the whole machine is hosed.
Of course, I could argue, if I'm using Windows then I don't have any valuable data -- but that would be a Troll and it'd be moderated down...
Okay, I know CORBA is still everybody's dream baby. I started out thinking that it was glorified RPC. And now, after being well chastised and doing some research I realize that it is object oriented RPC. But it does have its purposes.
Fortunately, we don't have to depend on CORBA for what you're talking about. Why not look into MOSIX to see how this is going to be done? (btw, this funded by VALinux now...)
I think [he] would be a valuable asset to the Marca team, but [also] to the open source comunity as well.
Indeed he would be. If he, or someone they could tout of similar caliber (whom they would be touting at this point, and aren't), wasn't asked then this stellar management team isn't. If he, or similar others, declined, there is likely to be a reason -- i.e., he's smart enough to judge this as a failure up front, or it's not an interesting project (or conflicts with his philosophy/ambitions/etc.). Since it would be philosophically acceptable, in theory, to some good designer/hacker and no Great One is present, I would take a wild guess and say those with any sense know this isn't going any where (for whatever reasons).
You can't develop a big system like this (and expect to take on IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, RedHat, etc.) without a good technical team. If they had it we'd know about it. So, I guess, count me among the DoomSayers on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
He seems to miss the fact that one doesn't suddenly transit to pure-'net from "regular life". One gradually sinks into it. There are no sudden food/deodorant emergencies. That's what housemates/roommates are for. Wire the house up and get cable/DSL so they get addicted to the technology. Wiggle the wires at the router when food starts getting low and when they look to you to fix it, convince them to go to the grocery while you slave over the logs. "Get some sun! It's a wonderful day out. Here, I'll also write up a shopping list/budgeting tool on our intranet web server." Go to freshmeat. etc.
Now, take this one step further...
This would imply that US export restrictions have the most effect upon US citizens and corporations. Since the rest of the world merely goes to an archive (in say Finland) and doesn't bother going to the US for crypto, US citizens, being used to getting nearly everything from American sites, go to American sites and have to fill out forms and sign agreements and do a two-step to download crypto components.
Net result -- the US government knows who has crypto, and also puts barriers in the way of those trying to get crypto (every additional click and form submission reduces the % of Americans likely to download crypto). Why would they care???
Because they're concerned with spying upon the American people -- and crypto slows that down.
Drop the export restrictions and there's no good excuse to make Americans fill out forms to get crypto.
Starting to make sense?
[ by the way, mr. 3-letter agency, I use PGP, GPG, SSH, SSH2, OpenSSH (now), IPsec/IKE/ photurisd/isakmpd, PGPNet, anonymizer.com, the new beta of Freedom (zeroknowledge.com), DES, 3DES, blowfish, StegFS, outguess, twofish, Kerberos, and I'm sure some others that I've forgotten. I'm a US citizen. Screw you criminal bastards. ]
puffy synthetic air-puffed cheese which smears in your hands and makes your teeth gritty.
wait, have I been drinking again?
(a) if the turnip uses RSA instead of 3DES how many U.S. laws has the general broken (assume he is considered a visiting diplomat).
(b) for which of these crimes may he claim "diplomatic immunity"?
(c) if the Lieutenant eats the turnip is this destruction of evidence?
(d)
(f)Have I had too many beers?
Certainly... Gen. Evil Criminal sends a an encrypted message carved into a turnip to his trusted Lieutenant ordering the killing of all held prisoners of war.
bonus question: if Gen. Evil Criminal mails the turnip from Washington, D.C. to his Lieutenant in Libya is he in violation of the munitions regulations controlling the export of strong cryptography (assume the turnip contains a 3DES encrypted message)?
I generally don't have a problem with that :-) However, if there is a time when I need to be able to publish an address for immediate correspondence I can grab another excite/hotmail/whatever address and publish it, check it for a few days and then stop checking it forever. Similarly, since I run sendmail I could give out a new address on my home site, and expire it after a while (make sendmail drop mail to that address).
Simply, I have a "spam drop" email address (that's the one you see by my name) which I use in all public postings. Whenever I fill out a web form with an email address I give them that one. I use hotmail because (1) Microsoft deserves to waste their time and space storing my spam after all the money they've cost me (I'm talking about downtime not software prices -- I'd never pay for their products, but that doesn't imply that my employers are so flexible), and (2) I don't have to worry about a virus running when I get spam. I go to their web interface if I need to pick up a password to have a site membership, delete the spam, and maybe come back next month. All my other email goes through personal and/or business accounts that I don't give out.
This cuts down drastically on the amount of spam I have to filter.
The content-based filtering uses procmail and a perl script which acts like:
(1) consult a list of regex's for mail to *keep* regardless (this is taken from my aliases list and a list of a few common domains)
(2) match mail against a list of spam phrases (if you look at most spam there are generally phrases there which RARELY ever appear in regular mail) and file away spam in a special spam "folder.
Nobody knows my set of rules, and if they find them and get around them it takes very little time to add a new rule. In a sense every spam that gets through lets me train my system to avoid a new class of spam.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah..." you say. Well, over the past 3 years (all personal and business accounts combined) I have received 181 spam mails -- around 80% of them were automatically filtered. I have about 1 false positive every couple of months. On the hotmail spam drop I would estimate about 4000 spam mails in the past year alone.
Of course, procmail, Perl scripts, and do-it-yourself mail filtering aren't for every one. But then again spam's not for everyone either. :-)
Go to your preferences page and turn off der blinkenlighten.
I generally agree with everything you've said, but just a note: don't use linuxconf if you don't like it. My main desktop box runs a mishmash of RH and Mandrake packages (was originally RH5.1 IIRC) and compiled tarballs. Linuxconf is pretty much useless to me, an annoyance, and ultimately a commented line in inetd.conf. I find bash and perl scripts to be far superior to GUI tools for my uses.
Your statement is akin to saying "What's good for Microsoft is good for America. Everyone in the know knows that Microsoft can't get split up."
A decision to include in the Dow has nothing to do with the outcome of this litigation, better or worse. It's about capitalization, shares traded, volume, etc. Microsoft is considered a "Blue Chip" stock and a good candidate for the Dow. If Microsoft gets split then all components may be removed from the Dow, maybe just one, maybe neither, who knows? No one knows. And no one will make that decision until it must be made (if ever).
The only person in the country (unless there's been a leak) who knows what will be in the finding of fact is the Judge. Given the contents of the finding no one knows whether MS and Justice will settle (which is one of the reasons a finding of fact is presented). If they don't, no one knows the outcome of the trial, and no one knows what remedies might be taken. If you had any true insight you'd make a very very good living as an analyst in the matter.
I am a firm believer in Open Source for a number of good reasons of which we are all likely aware. The issue of licensing always comes up and often good Open Source code can't work together with other good Open Source code because of incompatibilities with licenses.
Often, a developer will release code under one license, and since s/he's the developer, also later release it under another license (it's proprietary and then GPL'ed, or Qt-licensed then GPL'ed, etc.). What would happen if, given that there are say 5 "blessed" Open Source licenses which happen to be incompatible with one another, a developer took his code and released a copy under every one of these 5 blessed licenses?
While this is not sufficient to solve incompatibilities, since the next developer on the BSD (say) branch adds his code in and just keeps it BSD-licensed; if everyone were doing it then the new code could be released under all the blessed licenses. This of course does nothing to make currently GPL'ed code compatible with BSD-licensed code, but is something gained by doing this for later code?
Is there a license that one could write which is something of a meta-GPL? In the sense of saying: "Code under this license must be redistributed under this license and under (blessed licenses 1-5)"... I'm not sure that's particularly cogent, but maybe someone gets my drift.
It's late enough that I can't tell if this is absolutely idiotic or somewhat sensible. Oh well, that's what flames and moderation are for.
Too late. This was the final nail in the coffin for M$ at our site. We have been haggling about whether to ditch NT/IIS for *BSD-Linux and Apache for some time now, and have been evaluating Win2k as possible. The only real tie to IIS we have is the use of ASP (and we don't have any ASP pages yet -- just a number of Access forms which could be exported to ASP). After we read about this the final architecture plan was finished: goodbye IIS, goodbye NT.
The clincher -- the only benefits of NT were that we had servers here already and they support ASP in IIS. For the cost difference in switching to a Freenix/Apache setup (and yes, we'd rather be adminstering those types of systems; seeing as how one doesn't really "administer" NT anyway) we can afford to hire an additional person to evaluate ASP clones and ASP->PHP[34] conversion solutions.
Your pessimism is, however, unfounded. The government does as it will because you, and every other ironic cynical fuck in this nation parroting your sentiment are too lazy and ignorant to get up off your collective asses and stop the government from doing so.
The government, in actuality, is exercising exactly the majority will of the people -- unfortunately the will is apathetic and undirected. This is permission for the government to do whatever IT deems best. You got a complaint about how things are run? Fix them. I am.
We don't set a good example, and our government (& big business) doesn't really care so long as we run things one way or another, supress those we don't like, and support those we do -- and keep our companies stronger (or apparently so) than the competition. Part of that big business is the military, and it's good business to build weapons, defense systems, and promote the occasional conflict to boost sales.
But, the real crux of the issue is this:
Those treaties were signed as part of detente. At a time when the USSR could be as capable as we were, at any given moment, of possibly figuring out how to put together an ABM, or a more effective ICBM, treaties were a way of diplomatically legislating around not-so-mutually assured destruction. To deploy such inventions would be breaking the treaty. Breaking the treaty could start a war, and possibly a nuclear exchange, and the end of the world, (etc.).
There is no M.A.D. now. If the treaties are broken there won't be a war or a nuclear exchange. There is no country out there (and it would be difficult to find an alliance of them even) capable of waging an effective war against this country -- and none crazy enough to launch a massive nuclear strike (of the few capable). So the treaty is unenforced. The detente ideology which got us to the signing table is gone. The treaty is worthless to us, and unenforceable. Screw it (say the talking heads).
Shades of Manifest Destiny, certainly, but those now-flimsy treaties stand in the way of very big dollars and more visible world domination -- backed up by a manufactured mandate to eliminate the threat of nuclear terrorism from "rogue nations like Iraq, N. Korea, Libya, etc."
So, the abolition of the treaties is in America's industrial interest (both by increasing the flow of money in the defense industry, and by potentially making our government force other governments to trade with us more readily), in both major political parties' public image interests, in our nation's military interest (reasserting ourselves as the biggest boys on the block), and in the interest of the American people (by decreasing the likelihood that an ICBM will obliterate some number of them).
While it's all well and good to be a bleeding heart wishing for a better world, the global economy and the stage of foreign diplomacy are run by the strongest nations. Whenever a people give away power they are eventually conquered (in the past it was by military might, today it is more often economically) without remorse. I am personally glad to be a citizen of the most militarily/industrially/economically powerful nation this world has ever seen, and (even though I don't agree with most that I let the government get away with -- and am fighting them when possible on a number of fronts) think it is idiotic to try to stop them from maintaining our power.
The backbones laugh at a DSL download. The back-river lines don't. Be selective. Once we have respected our responsibilities with regard to the Internet Commons we are free to utilize our purchased service to its utmost. If there is a bandwidth crisis the prices will rise.
Cope with it.
I thought this already existed and was called freshmeat...
On the contrary. If you need to force host names to understand which machines are which you are in for trouble somewhere down the road: when you are forced to change from an HP/UX box to a Sun Box for whatever reason for a major service and now all your clients expect HPUX239435 to be that server, which is now a Sun: so do you change all the clients or have a Sun named HPUX239435? Oops.
You need additional information independent of the hostname (ESPECIALLY for bigger networks). DNS tables, LDAP, your own proprietary information, etc., but don't key functionality/architecture on hostname in a big network or you'll be out of a job because of it.
The reality is: if you were to make it easy for any and everyone to filter out all ads on all web pages, yes, some sites would suffer and probably go out of business. But if there is a demand for the service they provided someone will come up with a free (non subscription) version of the site and a way to get it funded. There are plenty of subscription sites out there and having been on the Internet since the late 80's, and on the web obsessively since about '94 I don't subscribe to ANY of them. There's always a free site, and there always will be. If it comes right down to it I will donate to a free site to keep it free if it is truly useful (google comes to mind).
Advertisers are doing noone but themselves a favor. Banner ads are generally exploitation. Think about how much bandwidth is used per day just delivering banner ads. And we get (I do for sure) pent up about how much spam costs in a network model...
Anecdotal evidence: the fellow from whom we buy some of our boxen (for company purchasing -- our own boxen we put together ourselves) gets copies of Win98SE for $11 -- for resale to customers [i.e., with all the bullshit packaging] I'm sure of it because he gives them to us at cost for various reasons, and he wouldn't undercut himself on cost (he's nice to us but he ain't stupid). He's hardly a Dell or a GW2k.
I'd say they mark it up just a bit.
Of course, I could argue, if I'm using Windows then I don't have any valuable data -- but that would be a Troll and it'd be moderated down...
Fortunately, we don't have to depend on CORBA for what you're talking about. Why not look into MOSIX to see how this is going to be done? (btw, this funded by VALinux now...)
Indeed he would be. If he, or someone they could tout of similar caliber (whom they would be touting at this point, and aren't), wasn't asked then this stellar management team isn't. If he, or similar others, declined, there is likely to be a reason -- i.e., he's smart enough to judge this as a failure up front, or it's not an interesting project (or conflicts with his philosophy/ambitions/etc.). Since it would be philosophically acceptable, in theory, to some good designer/hacker and no Great One is present, I would take a wild guess and say those with any sense know this isn't going any where (for whatever reasons).
You can't develop a big system like this (and expect to take on IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, RedHat, etc.) without a good technical team. If they had it we'd know about it. So, I guess, count me among the DoomSayers on this one.