My company provides Fractional T1 to numerous corporations who have higher needs for the Internet than almost any home user. In my experience (this is with engineering companies as well as graphics design companies) we've been VERY lucky capping the Frac at about 6Kb/user. One of our offices has 50 users and does extremely well with a 384/384 T1 (not DSL or cable). The latency is very low and the bandwidth is more than enough except for extremely large files.
At home right now I am testing a 10Mb solution and it is TOO FAST. No one "needs" this speed (although I just laughed as I downloaded Quicktime in seconds). Somewhere between 56k and 10m is reasonable, but where?
That's for the free market to decide. Public ISPs, once connected, will rarely offer improvements. Competitive ISPs have to compete on price, bandwidth and uptime. They HAVE to. If they don't, someone else will lower the price, increase the bandwidth or guarantee better uptime.
Look at web hosts. If we had to settle on one municipal host, we'd be living in a nightmare. We have thousands of possible companies to choose from and the price is so cheap it is almost free, yet we get the service we want (unlike the DMV or the department of revenue or any other government organization).
I can't wait until some citizen can't connect to the public WiFi and gets the "Not my department" run around when they call their town's tech support line.
I am no Republican and no Republican has ever truly accepted the free market, they just use the term in order to sound pro-liberty. The Republican Party started it platform with Lincoln who was anti-free market and pro-government welfare of corporations.
I actually believe that much of what you listed (bridges, levees, streets, and building codes) could be better provided by a competitive free market. Building codes, I believe, are the number one reason we see such losses as Katrina brought. Megabuilders lobby cities to set the building code standards. These cities know if the building codes don't mandate the right build quality as needed, FEMA will save the day with public dollars. Dismantle FEMA and remove building codes and require that the insurance companies set the standard that buildings should be built at. If you don't build it per their requirements, you won't get insured. Problem solved if the insurance companies have to pay the piper when another hurricane comes. Government intrusion created this maassive loss.
Streets and electricity has, time and again, been proven higher quality and safer and cheaper in private hands. California's backed up highway system was proven to be a public creation when they allowed a private highway to be built. When you add up the costs the public roads incur to the average person, you'd be shocked and how much of your hard earned money is going to the cement and highway maintenance unions.
Even bridges can be privatized and paid for by the users (or even the businesses that want the inflow to their area). Fire protection, flood control and other "public needs" would be better addresses by insurance companies that aren't protected by FEMA in the event that they failed to set the right standards.
I think we've all been indoctrinated way too much by what government has provided to actually understand that much of what we want to see public is actually costing us way more than it would if it was in competitive, private hands.
1) You decided to live far away from a major metropolitan area, and in the mountains. This is your decision, and living far away from a mass of people means you'll also have limited access to more than just wifi (limited grocery stores, limited movie theaters, limited restaurants, etc).
2) Your decision to live far away from the hubs also reduces your income and your job opportunities.
3) You use massive bandwidth which is not the intent of free WiFi (porn, movies, and music are not public need).
4) You want other taxpayers who actually have a little extra money to give it to you so you can have the Internet you can't normally afford so you can download porn, movies and music.
I think I see exactly why so many people are progressives lately -- they're lazy and they make bad life decisions.
I am against publicly-licensed corporations entirely (anarchocapitalists generally are).
The main reason many municipalities don't have decent broadband has to do with the towns' own laws regarding who can run cable. So many towns have been bribed by megacomm corporations to writing laws restricting the ability of others in running information cables.
Running cable or communication wire is not that expensive by any means (I worked with a company that used to provide maintenance for private trunks). You can run your own ISP if you co-op with 10-40 of your neighbors at a very decent price.
So? You can blame your city for the lack of broadband -- many towns have impossible laws regarding communications companies, or they're paid off by the main megacomm company to restrict what smaller businesses can do.
You can do what I did for a few years: get together with 20 of your neighbors and co-op a T1 line. Run a decent central antenna for WiFi service, cap it at 1MB or so, and you're setup. You'd pay about $35/household. Don't blame your town for your lack of initiative.
I see the digital divide as caused by inept social programs, not fixed by them. The anti-poor and anti-minority regulations we have today destroy the access you want. Look at how the minimum wage destroys job opportunities for the poor and for minorities. The tax system we have in this country is even worse (most people pay only a tiny amount in actual IRS income tax but everyone pays a huge amount of their income for all the other taxes) for the poor.
If you want to help the poor and the minorities break this digital divide, you need for them to have opportunities in life that give them reason to learn about the Internet and about information freedom. Our public education system does the absolutely opposite, as it gives the poor a basically free daycare system that offers their offspring the indoctrination in the system that hurt their parents' desire to break free.
The only thing that really helps bring wealth to the poor is work -- hard work. Both my parents came to the U.S. with absolutely nothing, not even good comprehension of the language. Yet they both busted their rears so that my siblings and I would have better lives, and I work hard so that my children will have an even better opportunity.
Don't blame the lack of Internet knowledge on ISPs. I'd rather see privated completely deregulated electrical service as well.
Note that nothing a government offers is truly free, even in the case here where the hardware is mostly donated.
Government-run programs are generally maintained by unionized public workers. These programs have little competition and often cost more than a private competitive market (note municipal water reclamation costs).
The city mentions they'll outsource the program to private companies, but do you believe these companies won't be owned by cronies? Even New Orleans has their own version of Haliburton.
Is providing Internet access ever a city's responsible? In my town we have 3 city-wide free WiFi providers and 20 local "coffee shop" providers. I don't see why New Orleans feels that they're needing a taxpayer funded ISP when what they really need is a tax hiatus to bring businesses and entrepreneurs to LA to create jobs and better lives that jobs help to build.
The hurricane damage is evidence to me of the decay of government projects and the wasted taxpayer money. That money would produce a safer city with more jobs if it was left to the citizens.
I'm not sure that chaos would happen for very long, really.
ISPs need to make sure their customers can get where they need to get. If ICANN disappeared today, not much would change as ISPs would probably band together to form a new organization, or some government body to take over again.
But I look at information connection points over the years, and I continue to see information becoming either more censored, or more underground.
Consider the phone. Almost everyone has just numbers (my 800 number is a memorable word, so I do have a monopoly on something), and we've done just fine with phone books and contact managers. There are more IP addresses than phone numbers, surely.
I remember Fidonet. It was name@numbers, and it worked very decently, considering it was not real-time at all. There were far fewer Fidonet addresses than IP addresses, of course.
I bet there are many more domain names than IP addresses (I didn't look up the ratio though). Domain names do make life easier, and I think they'll continue to do so.
My only fear is that those who control DNS will continue to build incredible power that they could use at any point in the future, and I don't want to see that happen. Hell, the Deborah Davis incident is part of the reason I've always been against IDs, and for years I was ridiculed for fearing what would never happen (but did).
I watch the FEC regulations very closely, and I see how close we are getting to having all our online speech moderated by those in power. I don't want to see this, and I see ICANN as a really big control mechanism of those in power. I'm just requesting others to contemplate how we could use our beloved Internet without government having any control on any mechanism.
Also, your DNS ranting is just bizarre. It works fine for what it does. It's the proliferation of retarded TLDs like.museum and.biz that are the real problem.
Really? Bizarre?
You must like the fact that the top two authoritarian political parties in the U.S. are pushing very hard to make it impossible for anyone else to speak against them or for others. Our FEC is one of the most tyrannical groups within our government, and most people actually think they're doing a good job by limiting our basic right to speak freely with our words and our dollars.
You must like the fact that a fairly small minority of our population in the U.S. (called the voters on the winning side of an issue) have the ability to restrict what you can say.
You must like the fact that the organization in charge of holdin the Internet together as we know it (ICANN) is a pseudo-government agency with an incredible amount of power. Giving that power to the U.N. or any other pseudo-government authority is not a good idea.
You must like the fact that when you own a domain name such as burgers.com, you're basically given a monopoly on that word even though it is a basic word in one of the most popular languages in the world. Even a specific word such as McDonalds is currently available to the McDonalds food corporation and not Tim McDonald web development. How many times have domain names (MikeRowesoft) been stolen from a minority and given to another minority with a little bit more power or money?
I don't like DNS. I want to find a distributed DNS solution, but I don't have the best way to describe what is in my head. I'm no nihilist -- I like order and I believe order comes from disorder through the decision consumers make in a free market. DNS currently is no free market, it is becoming heavily burdened with various laws of various coercive organizations known as government. Soon those coercive organizations will be able to turn off a site because it violated something that would normally be protected free speech, but as time goes on, will not be.
I don't have an "idea" really. All I have is the knowledge that there is an ever-growing amount of information online, and that most information is currently not finding its target well. Is this to blame on DNS? Not really.
Yet in the future, as governing regimes continue to get their way and are allowed to censor and limit speech, we'll need a better way to control the flow of information. I don't see the web in 10 years anywhere near what we have today. Web pages that used to be composed mostly of one document are quickly becoming a combination of many different sources and destinations. DNS currently helps this, but it can also be a very easy to control single-source for censorship.
We had Napster for transfering (legal and "illegal") data. Napster was easily toppled as it had a single-source for operation: their server. Today we're heading in new directions that make it very hard to stop that information. Am I a fan of "illegal" files? Sure, I don't believe in copyright as it is today. In fact, illegal information tends to create many avenues for information travel that is considered legal or at least moral. Look at how much porn does for information flow, and in how many areas of the world porn is illegal.
What is free speech today may not be free speech tomorrow. Control of DNS by a pseudo-government organization is not my idea of a safe solution to keeping one of my most important basic human rights. Will I figure out the right solution to what I know will be a problem 5 or 10 or 20 years from now? Not likely. But I can continue to keep people thinking, and if 1 out of 10,000,000 readers of my comments figures out the solution, I at least did my part.
You're correct. I'm not saying dump DNS and rely completely on search engines.
There have been a few distributed DNS solutions that have come up over the years, and many of them have merit but aren't fully ready for prime time. For now, DNS isn't a huge problem, but I do see it getting into the twilight years of its life.
As time goes on, though, it will show its age. I don't have the replacement solution, and if I did it would either be ahead of its time or I'd be a billionaire. I will, however, keep looking at options and theories and debate the subject here and elsewhere. I feel DNS is not a good solution. I just don't have a replacement solution, yet. I don't think that precludes me from not liking what we have.
The funny thing is, many/. readers are pro-F/OSS and all that. I'm surprised more aren't pro F/OSS DNS solutions (not just the software but the underlying mechanisms).
Yet the Internet (initially) really gained ground when people heard "Use AOL keyword SONY!"
Of course, AOL keywords were a private form of DNS, but they worked well. Sure, corporations with money could own the most powerful keywords, but that is true of domain names as well.
I think, as time goes on, we will see more need for SEO over DNS. Right now I know of at least 20% of my customer base that spends 100 times more on SEO than they ever will on getting a good domain name. If that isn't proof of the limited need for DNS, I don't know what is.
A hosts file is not necessarily equivalent to DNS because it doesn't share the data with others nor does it accept power of another PC over my judgement call.
I accept that we need something in place of direct IP addresses, but I also don't want to have to listen to ICANN or whoever is in charge of the system. It isn't really necessary, in my opinion. The majority of sites that I access are not dynamic IPs, and in the event of IPv6 actually going live for 100% of the network, dynamic IPs will be useless.
What about domain names and subs that use the same IP? My own blog uses a shared IP. For now, I'm not 100% using a hosts system, but my test PC is offering me a lot of insight into the upside and downside of the current DNS structure we're using. It also opened my eyes to the need for SEO and proper treatment beyond just buying a domain name.
I've been debating with some others I met here and elsewhere on how an open standard style DNS system could work. From what I can tell, there would need to be many changes necessary, but I think there is hope for it in the long haul.
As our freedoms online are more and more restricted, we'll see more and more reason to abandon ICANN and whatever other power corporations (read: government) control the transfer of information. The web will be very different from what we're using today, especially as we find ourselves limited to what we can say. The fact that blogs will continue to be pushed into extremely limited speech by the US election-speech regulators will be a big help to gaining momentum in dissolving ICANN as a power, or even a need.
I've read that article and the author (Masugi) as well as the publisher (NRO) seems to ignore any credible referencing on their retort. DiLorenzo's book has dozens of pages of references to Lincoln's actual speeches and letters, where as hundreds of pro-Lincoln books generally cross-reference each other.
I grew up in Illinois (The Land of Lincoln) and always believed him to be the best President, even after I accepted my anti-State stance. It wasn't until I read DiLorenzo and then read some pro-Lincoln books that I realized that Lincoln was likely one of the worst Presidents, and that his party (the Republican party) is following in Clay/Hamilton's American System of Mercantilism. I'm no liberal, and to call DiLorenzo a liberal is to try to cloud the issue.
All are links to LRC but they are all different authors (Dieteman, DiLorenzo and Ostrowski).
I offer a pretty decent deal to anyone interested in reading The Real Lincoln. Buy a copy, read it, and if you don't like it I'll reimburse you 100% for the cost and shipping (keep it realistic, no FedEx same day shipping please). I've bought back about a dozen but I know of at least 100 more that were purchased that the readers kept and that changed their minds greatly on this American myth.
Domain names, on the whole, seem particularly useless. Sure, I understand it is easier to go to google.com than to 100.100.100.1 based on your memory, but how many people are entering dozens of domain names even in a year of web use? The reason google and yahoo and other sites are so popular is, in large part, their search engine. Search engines can (and will) easily work around a lack of domain names.
In the long haul, money is better spent on SEO than it is getting a.com. Just like the yellow pages lists "AAA Plumbing" first (the yellow pages is a search engine of sorts), accessing the top 10 list on your favorite search engines will take more and more priority.
Don't believe it? As domain names continue to be bought up, people will get more and more confused if the site they want is thomasengineering.com or thomas-engineers.com or thomasenginc.org or who knows what. Instead they'll google Thomas Engineering, Manitoba, CA and likely find what they're looking for.
I'm sick of DNS. I recently built a PC for use at home that doesn't use DNS at all. So far, I have been able to access the majority of my MAIN sites fairly easily by creating my own hosts file. Is it pretty? Not really, but I am working against the tide. I can see google toolbar or some other toolbar (in a future domain-name-less world) saying "Add this website to your favorites?" and adding it to your online favorite list via its IP address and a memory name you pick.
Will it happen? Probably not. But it is good proof that governments and major corporations of the world seem to have no understanding of the future -- they're chasing control of what is basically a 1990s commodity that, over time, will be found to be worthless in the Internet of tomorrow.
This is for certain. If you go to google to find my blog, and type dadasays as the only search string, you'll find me instantly. Sure, a competitor can go to google and get SEO so dadasays goes to jonkatzsays.blogspot.com, but you can also go to the yellow pages under plumbers and find the competition as well. This is not that different.
Yes. If people would learn to provide contracts to protect themselves, we wouldn't need laws to protect them. Time creates intelligence, government takes it away.
I pass on so many contracts daily because the power of contract is now only a corporate priviledge. I won't sign anything without cutting out portions, and often companies won't let me be a customer without accepting their contract. In a market where people's expectations are tied to a contract, I doubt this would happen.
Con men take advantage of people who think they have government to protect them. Guess what? Government protection of your stupidity comes from robbing me of my money. No thanks.
It was the Perception PVR, good memory! It was only 10 years ago that we purchased it, I can't believe how far PC video has come in just a decade. Scary.
It doesn't sound right, was there a name before Perception?. I remember the picture on the box was of a VCR monster eating a tape. It came in a huge box that was very thin (maybe an inch and a half) with a cardboard sleeve with that image. The software was terrible and didn't support sound until the Win-version was released.
Maybe it was DPS, hmm. Memories, either way:) I remember entire weekends blown when the tape deck ate the tape before the PVR.
...what percentage of them are trolls? We once tried to use about 300 windows in a high rise to display a picture using lights. What a fias o getting people to follow directions.
This is interesting as the image progresses quickly.
What does your "believing" in it have anything to do with whether it exists?
Belief means placing trust or confidence in something. I don't believe (trust) that cybercrime exists beyond the basic property crimes we already have laws against.
Slashdot Mirror
The United Nation is not a for-profit organization? Really?
were arrested over bribery involving millions of dollars
in which one U.N. staffer, Alexander Yakovlev, was convicted in a Manhattan federal court this past August
step down from his post Monday amid allegations that he and the governing
Bailey's Compass Sacks Three Execs In UN Scandal
Germany Shocked by Damning Report On UN Scandal
More?
Thanks for the honest reply :)
My company provides Fractional T1 to numerous corporations who have higher needs for the Internet than almost any home user. In my experience (this is with engineering companies as well as graphics design companies) we've been VERY lucky capping the Frac at about 6Kb/user. One of our offices has 50 users and does extremely well with a 384/384 T1 (not DSL or cable). The latency is very low and the bandwidth is more than enough except for extremely large files.
At home right now I am testing a 10Mb solution and it is TOO FAST. No one "needs" this speed (although I just laughed as I downloaded Quicktime in seconds). Somewhere between 56k and 10m is reasonable, but where?
That's for the free market to decide. Public ISPs, once connected, will rarely offer improvements. Competitive ISPs have to compete on price, bandwidth and uptime. They HAVE to. If they don't, someone else will lower the price, increase the bandwidth or guarantee better uptime.
Look at web hosts. If we had to settle on one municipal host, we'd be living in a nightmare. We have thousands of possible companies to choose from and the price is so cheap it is almost free, yet we get the service we want (unlike the DMV or the department of revenue or any other government organization).
I can't wait until some citizen can't connect to the public WiFi and gets the "Not my department" run around when they call their town's tech support line.
I am no Republican and no Republican has ever truly accepted the free market, they just use the term in order to sound pro-liberty. The Republican Party started it platform with Lincoln who was anti-free market and pro-government welfare of corporations.
I actually believe that much of what you listed (bridges, levees, streets, and building codes) could be better provided by a competitive free market. Building codes, I believe, are the number one reason we see such losses as Katrina brought. Megabuilders lobby cities to set the building code standards. These cities know if the building codes don't mandate the right build quality as needed, FEMA will save the day with public dollars. Dismantle FEMA and remove building codes and require that the insurance companies set the standard that buildings should be built at. If you don't build it per their requirements, you won't get insured. Problem solved if the insurance companies have to pay the piper when another hurricane comes. Government intrusion created this maassive loss.
Streets and electricity has, time and again, been proven higher quality and safer and cheaper in private hands. California's backed up highway system was proven to be a public creation when they allowed a private highway to be built. When you add up the costs the public roads incur to the average person, you'd be shocked and how much of your hard earned money is going to the cement and highway maintenance unions.
Even bridges can be privatized and paid for by the users (or even the businesses that want the inflow to their area). Fire protection, flood control and other "public needs" would be better addresses by insurance companies that aren't protected by FEMA in the event that they failed to set the right standards.
I think we've all been indoctrinated way too much by what government has provided to actually understand that much of what we want to see public is actually costing us way more than it would if it was in competitive, private hands.
Let us look at your situation:
1) You decided to live far away from a major metropolitan area, and in the mountains. This is your decision, and living far away from a mass of people means you'll also have limited access to more than just wifi (limited grocery stores, limited movie theaters, limited restaurants, etc).
2) Your decision to live far away from the hubs also reduces your income and your job opportunities.
3) You use massive bandwidth which is not the intent of free WiFi (porn, movies, and music are not public need).
4) You want other taxpayers who actually have a little extra money to give it to you so you can have the Internet you can't normally afford so you can download porn, movies and music.
I think I see exactly why so many people are progressives lately -- they're lazy and they make bad life decisions.
I am against publicly-licensed corporations entirely (anarchocapitalists generally are).
The main reason many municipalities don't have decent broadband has to do with the towns' own laws regarding who can run cable. So many towns have been bribed by megacomm corporations to writing laws restricting the ability of others in running information cables.
Running cable or communication wire is not that expensive by any means (I worked with a company that used to provide maintenance for private trunks). You can run your own ISP if you co-op with 10-40 of your neighbors at a very decent price.
So? You can blame your city for the lack of broadband -- many towns have impossible laws regarding communications companies, or they're paid off by the main megacomm company to restrict what smaller businesses can do.
You can do what I did for a few years: get together with 20 of your neighbors and co-op a T1 line. Run a decent central antenna for WiFi service, cap it at 1MB or so, and you're setup. You'd pay about $35/household. Don't blame your town for your lack of initiative.
I see the digital divide as caused by inept social programs, not fixed by them. The anti-poor and anti-minority regulations we have today destroy the access you want. Look at how the minimum wage destroys job opportunities for the poor and for minorities. The tax system we have in this country is even worse (most people pay only a tiny amount in actual IRS income tax but everyone pays a huge amount of their income for all the other taxes) for the poor.
If you want to help the poor and the minorities break this digital divide, you need for them to have opportunities in life that give them reason to learn about the Internet and about information freedom. Our public education system does the absolutely opposite, as it gives the poor a basically free daycare system that offers their offspring the indoctrination in the system that hurt their parents' desire to break free.
The only thing that really helps bring wealth to the poor is work -- hard work. Both my parents came to the U.S. with absolutely nothing, not even good comprehension of the language. Yet they both busted their rears so that my siblings and I would have better lives, and I work hard so that my children will have an even better opportunity.
Don't blame the lack of Internet knowledge on ISPs. I'd rather see privated completely deregulated electrical service as well.
Note that nothing a government offers is truly free, even in the case here where the hardware is mostly donated.
Government-run programs are generally maintained by unionized public workers. These programs have little competition and often cost more than a private competitive market (note municipal water reclamation costs).
The city mentions they'll outsource the program to private companies, but do you believe these companies won't be owned by cronies? Even New Orleans has their own version of Haliburton.
Is providing Internet access ever a city's responsible? In my town we have 3 city-wide free WiFi providers and 20 local "coffee shop" providers. I don't see why New Orleans feels that they're needing a taxpayer funded ISP when what they really need is a tax hiatus to bring businesses and entrepreneurs to LA to create jobs and better lives that jobs help to build.
The hurricane damage is evidence to me of the decay of government projects and the wasted taxpayer money. That money would produce a safer city with more jobs if it was left to the citizens.
I'm not sure that chaos would happen for very long, really.
ISPs need to make sure their customers can get where they need to get. If ICANN disappeared today, not much would change as ISPs would probably band together to form a new organization, or some government body to take over again.
But I look at information connection points over the years, and I continue to see information becoming either more censored, or more underground.
Consider the phone. Almost everyone has just numbers (my 800 number is a memorable word, so I do have a monopoly on something), and we've done just fine with phone books and contact managers. There are more IP addresses than phone numbers, surely.
I remember Fidonet. It was name@numbers, and it worked very decently, considering it was not real-time at all. There were far fewer Fidonet addresses than IP addresses, of course.
I bet there are many more domain names than IP addresses (I didn't look up the ratio though). Domain names do make life easier, and I think they'll continue to do so.
My only fear is that those who control DNS will continue to build incredible power that they could use at any point in the future, and I don't want to see that happen. Hell, the Deborah Davis incident is part of the reason I've always been against IDs, and for years I was ridiculed for fearing what would never happen (but did).
I watch the FEC regulations very closely, and I see how close we are getting to having all our online speech moderated by those in power. I don't want to see this, and I see ICANN as a really big control mechanism of those in power. I'm just requesting others to contemplate how we could use our beloved Internet without government having any control on any mechanism.
Also, your DNS ranting is just bizarre. It works fine for what it does. It's the proliferation of retarded TLDs like .museum and .biz that are the real problem.
Really? Bizarre?
You must like the fact that the top two authoritarian political parties in the U.S. are pushing very hard to make it impossible for anyone else to speak against them or for others. Our FEC is one of the most tyrannical groups within our government, and most people actually think they're doing a good job by limiting our basic right to speak freely with our words and our dollars.
You must like the fact that a fairly small minority of our population in the U.S. (called the voters on the winning side of an issue) have the ability to restrict what you can say.
You must like the fact that the organization in charge of holdin the Internet together as we know it (ICANN) is a pseudo-government agency with an incredible amount of power. Giving that power to the U.N. or any other pseudo-government authority is not a good idea.
You must like the fact that when you own a domain name such as burgers.com, you're basically given a monopoly on that word even though it is a basic word in one of the most popular languages in the world. Even a specific word such as McDonalds is currently available to the McDonalds food corporation and not Tim McDonald web development. How many times have domain names (MikeRowesoft) been stolen from a minority and given to another minority with a little bit more power or money?
I don't like DNS. I want to find a distributed DNS solution, but I don't have the best way to describe what is in my head. I'm no nihilist -- I like order and I believe order comes from disorder through the decision consumers make in a free market. DNS currently is no free market, it is becoming heavily burdened with various laws of various coercive organizations known as government. Soon those coercive organizations will be able to turn off a site because it violated something that would normally be protected free speech, but as time goes on, will not be.
I don't have an "idea" really. All I have is the knowledge that there is an ever-growing amount of information online, and that most information is currently not finding its target well. Is this to blame on DNS? Not really.
Yet in the future, as governing regimes continue to get their way and are allowed to censor and limit speech, we'll need a better way to control the flow of information. I don't see the web in 10 years anywhere near what we have today. Web pages that used to be composed mostly of one document are quickly becoming a combination of many different sources and destinations. DNS currently helps this, but it can also be a very easy to control single-source for censorship.
We had Napster for transfering (legal and "illegal") data. Napster was easily toppled as it had a single-source for operation: their server. Today we're heading in new directions that make it very hard to stop that information. Am I a fan of "illegal" files? Sure, I don't believe in copyright as it is today. In fact, illegal information tends to create many avenues for information travel that is considered legal or at least moral. Look at how much porn does for information flow, and in how many areas of the world porn is illegal.
What is free speech today may not be free speech tomorrow. Control of DNS by a pseudo-government organization is not my idea of a safe solution to keeping one of my most important basic human rights. Will I figure out the right solution to what I know will be a problem 5 or 10 or 20 years from now? Not likely. But I can continue to keep people thinking, and if 1 out of 10,000,000 readers of my comments figures out the solution, I at least did my part.
You're correct. I'm not saying dump DNS and rely completely on search engines.
/. readers are pro-F/OSS and all that. I'm surprised more aren't pro F/OSS DNS solutions (not just the software but the underlying mechanisms).
There have been a few distributed DNS solutions that have come up over the years, and many of them have merit but aren't fully ready for prime time. For now, DNS isn't a huge problem, but I do see it getting into the twilight years of its life.
As time goes on, though, it will show its age. I don't have the replacement solution, and if I did it would either be ahead of its time or I'd be a billionaire. I will, however, keep looking at options and theories and debate the subject here and elsewhere. I feel DNS is not a good solution. I just don't have a replacement solution, yet. I don't think that precludes me from not liking what we have.
The funny thing is, many
Yet the Internet (initially) really gained ground when people heard "Use AOL keyword SONY!"
Of course, AOL keywords were a private form of DNS, but they worked well. Sure, corporations with money could own the most powerful keywords, but that is true of domain names as well.
I think, as time goes on, we will see more need for SEO over DNS. Right now I know of at least 20% of my customer base that spends 100 times more on SEO than they ever will on getting a good domain name. If that isn't proof of the limited need for DNS, I don't know what is.
...on anyone who made a skin flute that actually works. At least no one from /.
A hosts file is not necessarily equivalent to DNS because it doesn't share the data with others nor does it accept power of another PC over my judgement call.
I accept that we need something in place of direct IP addresses, but I also don't want to have to listen to ICANN or whoever is in charge of the system. It isn't really necessary, in my opinion. The majority of sites that I access are not dynamic IPs, and in the event of IPv6 actually going live for 100% of the network, dynamic IPs will be useless.
What about domain names and subs that use the same IP? My own blog uses a shared IP. For now, I'm not 100% using a hosts system, but my test PC is offering me a lot of insight into the upside and downside of the current DNS structure we're using. It also opened my eyes to the need for SEO and proper treatment beyond just buying a domain name.
I've been debating with some others I met here and elsewhere on how an open standard style DNS system could work. From what I can tell, there would need to be many changes necessary, but I think there is hope for it in the long haul.
As our freedoms online are more and more restricted, we'll see more and more reason to abandon ICANN and whatever other power corporations (read: government) control the transfer of information. The web will be very different from what we're using today, especially as we find ourselves limited to what we can say. The fact that blogs will continue to be pushed into extremely limited speech by the US election-speech regulators will be a big help to gaining momentum in dissolving ICANN as a power, or even a need.
I've read that article and the author (Masugi) as well as the publisher (NRO) seems to ignore any credible referencing on their retort. DiLorenzo's book has dozens of pages of references to Lincoln's actual speeches and letters, where as hundreds of pro-Lincoln books generally cross-reference each other.
I grew up in Illinois (The Land of Lincoln) and always believed him to be the best President, even after I accepted my anti-State stance. It wasn't until I read DiLorenzo and then read some pro-Lincoln books that I realized that Lincoln was likely one of the worst Presidents, and that his party (the Republican party) is following in Clay/Hamilton's American System of Mercantilism. I'm no liberal, and to call DiLorenzo a liberal is to try to cloud the issue.
For some decent debate on the Masugi articles:
A Reply to Ken Masugi -- with references
By DiLorenzo - A direct rebuttal
Dilorenzo critics
All are links to LRC but they are all different authors (Dieteman, DiLorenzo and Ostrowski).
I offer a pretty decent deal to anyone interested in reading The Real Lincoln. Buy a copy, read it, and if you don't like it I'll reimburse you 100% for the cost and shipping (keep it realistic, no FedEx same day shipping please). I've bought back about a dozen but I know of at least 100 more that were purchased that the readers kept and that changed their minds greatly on this American myth.
Domain names, on the whole, seem particularly useless. Sure, I understand it is easier to go to google.com than to 100.100.100.1 based on your memory, but how many people are entering dozens of domain names even in a year of web use? The reason google and yahoo and other sites are so popular is, in large part, their search engine. Search engines can (and will) easily work around a lack of domain names.
In the long haul, money is better spent on SEO than it is getting a.com. Just like the yellow pages lists "AAA Plumbing" first (the yellow pages is a search engine of sorts), accessing the top 10 list on your favorite search engines will take more and more priority.
Don't believe it? As domain names continue to be bought up, people will get more and more confused if the site they want is thomasengineering.com or thomas-engineers.com or thomasenginc.org or who knows what. Instead they'll google Thomas Engineering, Manitoba, CA and likely find what they're looking for.
I'm sick of DNS. I recently built a PC for use at home that doesn't use DNS at all. So far, I have been able to access the majority of my MAIN sites fairly easily by creating my own hosts file. Is it pretty? Not really, but I am working against the tide. I can see google toolbar or some other toolbar (in a future domain-name-less world) saying "Add this website to your favorites?" and adding it to your online favorite list via its IP address and a memory name you pick.
Will it happen? Probably not. But it is good proof that governments and major corporations of the world seem to have no understanding of the future -- they're chasing control of what is basically a 1990s commodity that, over time, will be found to be worthless in the Internet of tomorrow.
This is for certain. If you go to google to find my blog, and type dadasays as the only search string, you'll find me instantly. Sure, a competitor can go to google and get SEO so dadasays goes to jonkatzsays.blogspot.com, but you can also go to the yellow pages under plumbers and find the competition as well. This is not that different.
Yes. If people would learn to provide contracts to protect themselves, we wouldn't need laws to protect them. Time creates intelligence, government takes it away.
I pass on so many contracts daily because the power of contract is now only a corporate priviledge. I won't sign anything without cutting out portions, and often companies won't let me be a customer without accepting their contract. In a market where people's expectations are tied to a contract, I doubt this would happen.
Con men take advantage of people who think they have government to protect them. Guess what? Government protection of your stupidity comes from robbing me of my money. No thanks.
It was the Perception PVR, good memory! It was only 10 years ago that we purchased it, I can't believe how far PC video has come in just a decade. Scary.
It doesn't sound right, was there a name before Perception?. I remember the picture on the box was of a VCR monster eating a tape. It came in a huge box that was very thin (maybe an inch and a half) with a cardboard sleeve with that image. The software was terrible and didn't support sound until the Win-version was released.
:) I remember entire weekends blown when the tape deck ate the tape before the PVR.
Maybe it was DPS, hmm. Memories, either way
A long dead group of 3D animators back when 3D Studio ran in DOS. I owned a render farm that put out about 50 frames per day, haha.
I can't remember the name of the video output board that replaced my single frame recording deck. Something PVR, hmm. Ahh, memories.
as if millions of pixels suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly blanked.
...what percentage of them are trolls?
We once tried to use about 300 windows in a high rise to display a picture using lights. What a fias o getting people to follow directions.
This is interesting as the image progresses quickly.
The human scanner, 1 person per pixel.
Awesome data, thanks.
I couldn't RTA or google as my PDA wasn't getting DNS except what was cached.
What does your "believing" in it have anything to do with whether it exists?
Belief means placing trust or confidence in something. I don't believe (trust) that cybercrime exists beyond the basic property crimes we already have laws against.