Theory X is not merely controversial but cynically rejected without ever being tested, yet turns out to be true anyway.
Method of evaluating theories is deduced to be broken, as it becomes apparent that theories are being deemed false without having been falsified.
Method is refined, the same way ALL theories are refined when they are found wanting.
Theory Y is controversial, but examined from a more enlightened perspective. It turns out to be false, but it is found to be false honestly, openly and verifiably, following a procedure that is repeatable by any future scientists.
There is no claim that all that is controversial is true, there is however a claim that because something is controversial it need not be false ("Possibly not false" is not the same as "Definitely true") and there is also a claim that when something is true, the controversy is less important than the truth (as far as is known).
I'll assume that anyone on Slashdot who would confuse the sequence has done so by accident, but there are many disingenuous fools who would confuse them deliberately for the purpose of confusing the issue in general. The best deceptions are based on truth, because you see the truth and therefore believe the rest. Political speeches and disinformation campaigns are often based on this technique. It is foolish and irrational, and only heightens the arguments I've made here and on the Smithsonian debate, that truth as best as we can establish it MUST take precedence over personal beliefs, no matter what the opposition, and that because truth is not "revealed" but must be established, the only way it can take precedence is by actively pursuing and espousing knowledge and simultaneously teaching that the truth is neither fixed nor stagnant, but evolves continuously, and that no-one can own the "final" answer. (Including those scientists who have a habit of blocking those who would usurp their supposed crown earned by achieving but one step amongst a billion.)
I told my computer to evaluate Pi once, but it got so irrational that it beat the machine up and kicked it downstairs. Which was impressive, as I lived on the ground floor at the time.
But I don't think things are usually that bad. (Am I naive?)
And now, a news report from 2145: "Researchers have finally established a correlation between advance bookings at cemetaries and the publication of new theories, a new report has said. When asked for comment, three aged critics of the claim were run over by a car registered to a student working for one of the new researchers."
Just finished reading "The Map That Changed The World", the story of the discovery of plate tectonics. The reaction from the community was apparently not healthy skepticism but hostility bordering on fanaticism.
I'm not entirely sure how they'd do that. With LinuxBIOS installed, there's no conventional BIOS to work from. The use of AMD chips may or may not be a problem, as WinCE is designed with Intel specifically in mind and therefore any subtle differences (particularly for Intel-specific optimizations) may break WinCE on the AMD.
In either case, OLPC is shipping and supporting their Linux derivative only, and the odds of anyone taking the time and risk of installing CE is at best low. Which, of course, is why Linux has been slow on being adopted by Joe Average. It's not pre-installed.
You are perfectly correct that there are times that moderation and respect are important, and that barging in like a raging bull is indeed going to get you treated like a lunatic. I know this for a fact, having experienced that reaction more than once by charging in. Moderation and diplomacy can be painfully slow, though - slow enough to put the organization at far greater risk than a change would, in a few cases I've been involved in. Yes, the consequences on those occasions were personally bad, and many times no change resulted, but every so often there is an astonishing success and I've experienced those as well.
The successes I've experienced, and similar stories described in history, reveal something interesting. Human understanding isn't a continuum, it is quantized. It has to jump the gaps in one go. It has to receive sufficient impetus to make that state change in a single leap. When my efforts were exactly what was needed, the change produced was impressive.
The failures reveal something else - direct challenges to thinking might sometimes be what is needed, but that isn't even close to being the most common method required. More moderate, respectful methods produce better results far more often. Even when direct challenges work, they might not be the only method that would have produced the desired result.
Ultimately, though, the methods that work will not be "quiet" in all respects. In their own way, whatever way that is, they must be just as dramatic and just as powerful. There are no half quantum leaps.
Finally, I'll briefly cover your point that a museum is not the same as a University with life tenure. A museum holds our collective memories of our past. That is its job. It's often used for public amusement, but its primary role is remembering and its secondary role is to educate the present on those memories. It's certainly not there to make money, although many are run that way, and is most definitely not there as a political mouthpiece for any party or organization. Now, I don't know how you best achieve this. The BBC is far more independent, neutral and outspoken than any US media outlet, despite being Government-funded, because of the charter system. However, that's a different scenario operating in a different country with a radically different culture. I don't know how you'd make museums truly free to be honest, in the US, or what the best method of achieving that would be. All I can tell you is that this needs to be the goal and a method needs to be found.
...the public damn well should be pissed off. The public has no more of a monopoly on the truth than anyone else, and mythistory can have unexpected and dangerous consequences. Sure, pacifying the public give a nice feel-good glow to life, but it's no different from claiming that we've always been at war with Eurasia.
Whether the museum curator in the parent posting existed or not, I salute anyone with the guts and gall to question assumptions and place integrity above deceit. And, yes, such people probably will lose jobs and - in rare cases - possibly a whole lot more. History teaches us, however, that in the long run, inaccuracies do get weeded out. Nobody these days uses Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the British Kings as a textbook, and popular Victorian school texts (which depicted Iron Age Britain as filled with unkempt cave-dwelling barbarians with no language or culture) have been replaced with more reliable and infinitely more believable studies of Celtic life.
Pissing off the public with the truth is inevitable. It will happen, sooner or later. May as well get it over and done with quickly, even if that carries risk. Life is all about risk - so why not take risks that might make a difference?
This would be better done as a Murray Walker impression, complete with totally inaccurate predictions and a pants-on-fire delivery. Or, at least, it would reflect rankings and prognostications in IT better than the athletic commentators who are generally more sober.
Well, since they're sending him up on the manned Mars mission, they obviously wanted him to have a look first at where he was going to cra..., uh, land.
They're getting one hell of a cartload of free publicity, just after the release of their new OS, and projects like the One Laptop Per Child (which runs Linux but does not run Windows) are dependent for survival on orders that have not yet been placed. Intel's legally-questionable pressure on OLPC at the same time as this FUD may be part of a cooperative effort to destroy serious competition in new markets. It wouldn't be the first Wintel effort to crush rivals with anti-competitive actions, if that is what it is.
(I'm looking at OLTP, because that's a worldwide non-Microsoft venture that could seriously dent Microsoft revenue in growing markets and because it's the biggest event due any time soon. Microsoft's FUD is generally not random but very purposeful and has a specific goal in mind. There simply isn't another goal on a comparable scale on any kind of near-term timeframe.)
There are a few other avenues that Linux could be doing well in, but Microsoft is growing faster in the server market despite inferior performance, reliability or security, and that's the only other area Linux and Microsoft have any serious rivalry at this time. Linux could be doing well on the desktop, but not while it is playing catch-up. It would have to invent a whole new metaphor before it could seriously threaten Microsoft in the home market.
What if your industry is computer-related, just in a different field? Compared the cost of Intel's C/C++ compiler to GCC lately? If you're, oh, making one laptop per child, perhaps you'd use the Linux kernel and LinuxBIOS as a starting point. I'm not entirely sure what edge Linux gives IBM's mainframe market - they're not exactly worried about Microsoft, Windows just isn't going to be ported to the POWER chip any time soon - but you can safely bet the bank that IBM has churned the numbers and found them most definitely positive. I'd also be willing to bet that the makers of the LEON had reasons far beyond "religion", although I'd be happy to reconsider if someone can supply evidence that the ESA uses "The Golden Bough" as a reference manual.
The truth is, the author quoted in the article clearly states that they are a troll and that what they are writing is intentionally flammage. The only value in discussing the issue is in using the examples people are giving to extend their own knowledge of what is being done and by whom. That is valuable - far too many Open Source people are ignorant of the scope of their own field - but there are better ways to achieve it.
There are many possible interpretations, but they're all highly sexist and/or insulting. Right about now, the team should be sharpening up their spiked boots to walk all over the NASA guy who came up with the name.
Bookmarks, URLs, etc, would need to contain unicode information, whether the Unicode is implicit or explicit as far as the user is concerned. All I'd do is move it from choosing which set of glyphs to use to being something entered as a name by the user. It could be as trivial as having a pseudo domain level that stores a short name which identifies the unicode encoding and level. It could be a modification to the way you write URLs - in the same way that you have : for port, @ for username, etc, you could have something that signified encoding. You've now eliminated the need to display multiple languages, without eliminating the range of names.
Is this necessary? Well, yes. You can't get ASCII network tools (such as lynx) to talk to a unicode domain name unless you can explicitly state the encoding in ASCII, with no need for wide characters. So such a system must be invented anyway, or you'll break a lot of software that's out there.
If this mechanism exists, it can exist for any network tool and can therefore serve to distinguish between sites that cannot be distinguished if displayed in the stated encodings. Thus, I'm not restricting domain names, I'm not suggesting that everyone stick to the latin character set, I'm not limiting people wanting to spell things in their native language and character set, all I am doing is ensuring that nobody can use similar glyphs in other character sets to deceive them. Anything that's non-native is expanded out. It's still bookmarkable and the bookmarks will work anywhere.
(eg: Slashdot might have a URL of http://slashdot.orglatin1/ in countries in which LATIN1 was not in use. If that same URL was used in England, where LATIN1 is used everywhere other than Civil Service documents, the browser would identify that the specified encoding is your current encoding and do nothing with that extra information.)
Make a theory as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Do not ascribe to malice that which can equally be described by incompetence.
Never multiply elements unnecessarily.
The vast majority of errors blamed on computers are human errors.
A high probability event is more likely than a low probability event.
Having worked in nuclear labs as a programmer and totally thrashed their internal networks when stress-testing, I can say from personal experience that these people don't buy third-rate components.
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light.
No, this would not be translation, it would be character-by-character transliteration (not even word-by-word). Besides which, translation defeats the objective, which is to purposely break spoofed names. Translation (which can't be perfectly bi-directional and so wouldn't work) can't be guaranteed to break spoofing by fonts.
Unicode maps character sets, but the advantage of unicode over other such schemes is the manner in which character numbers are picked. They're not random, but are designed to produce a level of consistency across all character sets. Ergo, mapping one unicode font onto another unicode font should always work.
The language thing is very simple. The browser identifies what language it is currently using and what font is used for that language. The font is the important part, because that allows the software to map one character to another. The language is merely the mechanism by which you guarantee that the resulting characters are readable by you AND that the characters you type in are translated back to the correct unicode encoding. The system has to work both ways to be useful. (Nobody can remember a large enough set of 24-bit unicode numbers to do this directly. Names are the only practical method.)
Yes, yes, I know, multiple languages use the same character set. So what. It's not the language that I'm concerned with, that's just a key field that happens to be useful. The font is the only thing that matters, and there is absolutely no issue with the French or Italians using the same font as the English or Welsh. I'm concerned with spoofing via fonts, so the language is quite unimportant. What is important is ensuring that the font you get breaks foreign character sets that use the same symbols, and that is what this system does. End of story.
Writing to the people working on this is about as effective as writing to the President of the United States or the CEO of Microsoft. Individual contributions, even if they were 100% perfect, flawless and utterly beyond question, will be utterly ignored. Individuals, in a modern society, are nobodies and nothings. It is nothing more than delusion to imagine otherwise. The only effective action is collective action, but there simply aren't enough socialist ITers to be effective. Many are libertarian - which is a wonderful system for individuals, but is completely ineffective at bringing about change on a large scale.
So is posting on Slashdot any better? Not really. True, sometimes important, key people do read Slashdot. It does happen. It happens often enough for Intel to have set up a Q&A section on it, but not often enough for Slashdotters to have any real impact on attitudes or society. So why post here? Because at least it isn't going out into the void. I don't expect anything I write here to have any widespread impact, but I do hope that once in a while someone will take something I post and use the idea in some way. Doesn't matter how. But even if one post in ten thousand triggers a chain of thought in even a single individual that leads to action, I'll have done more towards providing positive contributions to life than 90% of the world's population.
Without IT unions, ideas have no value until tens of millions (never mind tens of thousands) share them passionately enough to apply pressure. That's not going to happen. Not when I post, not when you post, not when anybody posts. There's nobody on Slashdot who has that much power. The best I can ever hope for is to very occasionally throw out an idea that is ever so slightly useful or interesting to someone.
Very close. I was thinking something more like this. Let's say the unicode font, say, is for the Cyrillic alphabet but the broser's language is set to EN and the EN language is mapped to the Arial font. The "obvious" thing to do is to display the output in Arial, as you have specified that is your language, but indicate via an icon or some other means that it was originally in Cyrillic. Entering such an address would work the same way. You'd tag it with the language it is supposed to be in, but write in your own. Problem solved.
(Well, almost. This works for browsers, but telnet, ftp and ssh don't have language parameters. You'd have to do something similar, though, precisely because they don't have language parameters and therefore entering wide characters could be problematic for them.)
I could be wrong, but I think X.400 was dominant in Europe prior to SMTP. And I certainly know that Europe used X.25 extensively before mass-migrating over to TCP/IP. One big reason IPv6 hasn't taken off is that there's been no cutover date. Why do today what you can put off till tomorrow?
Having said that, yes, I know damn well that my idea is simply not going to happen. The level of political and economic inertia is far too great, even if ICANT decided that it was something worth doing. As a speculation on what will happen, it is patently absurd. As an addendum which adds an important analysis of growing problems (namespace pollution, performance, reliability), it's far from absurd and no discussion on DNS could be complete if it didn't examine these problems.
Well, as I understand it, the theory of having the.com domain is that the corporation buys their name and puts in subdomains below it. So, you might have cornflakes.kellogs.com, for example. One corporation, one namespace. Makes things very simple. The problem with moving the corporations to top-level is that they'll do exactly the same thing they did with.com, which is pollute the namespace as much as possible. At which point, the whole system becomes totally unworkable and unusable.
I'd personally prefer it if the.com domain was cleared of all products, individuals, trademarks and other superfluous crap. If you aren't a company, you aren't a.com. If you're an organization, you're an.org, and that's final. In fact, I'd go one further - anything that is directly off a.com,.org,.net or.gov should be international in some respect. If it's more local than that, the name should reflect that. (For example, I would exile the US Government to.gov.us, the same way most other governments do their websites. There should be no exceptions.) When something expands in scope, it can always buy the name for the next scope out.
Wouldn't this impinge on privacy, freedom, etc? Not really. Whilst governments should be honest about location (I can dream - they're rarely honest about anything else), the only constraint I'm suggesting is that the type of name should reflect the type of scope. If you're running a website for a metropolitan area, I'd say you should have a metropolitan-level domain name. Doesn't have to be the same metro, the same country or (when NASA gets round to it) even the same planet. This gives people plenty of room for satirical/joke names, etc. It just adds a few more dots to it. Big deal.
It'd be almost trivial to make the DNS hierarchy deeper. Most users would be unaffected as most people outside of the US already add country codes to the names and as far as US users are concerned, Slashdot is an international forum. Everything else you get to through links.
This really would help for domain spoofing, because when unicode domain names start to come online, it will be possible to generate visually identical domain names that are physically different. That's been the claimed problem all along, although since browsers have a language attribute, I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no. Given that, I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases. In such a system, spoofing names should be impossible.
I believe this is the nuke plant that is supposedly using Windows NT to handle SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) functions, and I know it's the plant that has shown gross incompetence in relation to fires (see assorted other postings). Internal systems are not supposed to be connected to external networks. It's unlikely this one was - not because they're smart, but because I'm not certain they'd know how. We can therefore eliminate external causes. Sadly, we have passed from the Age of Englightenment and the Age of Reason into the Age of Paranoia and the Age of Dementia, so that is likely the attribution we can expect from the Department of Homeland Insecurity.
A random fluctuation in internal traffic levels seems equally unlikely. Why? Because it has worked for some time, and I doubt the reactor was doing anything unusual at the time. A true network storm is unlikely - the term exists, but describes an astronomically rare situation. If a network is flooded, it is either near or at capacity. A network storm is when capacity is exceeded in a way that is self-perpetuating. The last time I remember the term being used in a public forum was I think over twelve years ago when a public demonstration of the multibone caused a cascading router flap that shut down a large segment of the Internet backbone due to total gridlock. It wasn't just that nothing else could get through - nothing AT ALL could get through.
What does this leave us? It makes it extremely unlikely that the network traffic per se had anything to do with the shutdown. Much more likely is a cumulative error in the devices involved that merely happened to turn into a fatal bug at roughly the same time as the network spiked. It might be network related, but nobody here can seriously believe it was network caused. Networks may be polled, in which case network traffic that escapes being polled is simply never seen. Network drivers may also be event-driven, but if the interrupt handler is buggy - which would usually mean the handler can be interrupted by itself indefinitely - it's hardly the fault of the network.
In other words, this is a gross programming error that the coders and managers are desperately trying to blame on something - anything - other than their own ineptness. It might merit Scott Adams making a Dilbert cartoon over, but that's it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no claim that all that is controversial is true, there is however a claim that because something is controversial it need not be false ("Possibly not false" is not the same as "Definitely true") and there is also a claim that when something is true, the controversy is less important than the truth (as far as is known).
I'll assume that anyone on Slashdot who would confuse the sequence has done so by accident, but there are many disingenuous fools who would confuse them deliberately for the purpose of confusing the issue in general. The best deceptions are based on truth, because you see the truth and therefore believe the rest. Political speeches and disinformation campaigns are often based on this technique. It is foolish and irrational, and only heightens the arguments I've made here and on the Smithsonian debate, that truth as best as we can establish it MUST take precedence over personal beliefs, no matter what the opposition, and that because truth is not "revealed" but must be established, the only way it can take precedence is by actively pursuing and espousing knowledge and simultaneously teaching that the truth is neither fixed nor stagnant, but evolves continuously, and that no-one can own the "final" answer. (Including those scientists who have a habit of blocking those who would usurp their supposed crown earned by achieving but one step amongst a billion.)
I told my computer to evaluate Pi once, but it got so irrational that it beat the machine up and kicked it downstairs. Which was impressive, as I lived on the ground floor at the time.
And now, a news report from 2145: "Researchers have finally established a correlation between advance bookings at cemetaries and the publication of new theories, a new report has said. When asked for comment, three aged critics of the claim were run over by a car registered to a student working for one of the new researchers."
Just finished reading "The Map That Changed The World", the story of the discovery of plate tectonics. The reaction from the community was apparently not healthy skepticism but hostility bordering on fanaticism.
In either case, OLPC is shipping and supporting their Linux derivative only, and the odds of anyone taking the time and risk of installing CE is at best low. Which, of course, is why Linux has been slow on being adopted by Joe Average. It's not pre-installed.
The successes I've experienced, and similar stories described in history, reveal something interesting. Human understanding isn't a continuum, it is quantized. It has to jump the gaps in one go. It has to receive sufficient impetus to make that state change in a single leap. When my efforts were exactly what was needed, the change produced was impressive.
The failures reveal something else - direct challenges to thinking might sometimes be what is needed, but that isn't even close to being the most common method required. More moderate, respectful methods produce better results far more often. Even when direct challenges work, they might not be the only method that would have produced the desired result.
Ultimately, though, the methods that work will not be "quiet" in all respects. In their own way, whatever way that is, they must be just as dramatic and just as powerful. There are no half quantum leaps.
Finally, I'll briefly cover your point that a museum is not the same as a University with life tenure. A museum holds our collective memories of our past. That is its job. It's often used for public amusement, but its primary role is remembering and its secondary role is to educate the present on those memories. It's certainly not there to make money, although many are run that way, and is most definitely not there as a political mouthpiece for any party or organization. Now, I don't know how you best achieve this. The BBC is far more independent, neutral and outspoken than any US media outlet, despite being Government-funded, because of the charter system. However, that's a different scenario operating in a different country with a radically different culture. I don't know how you'd make museums truly free to be honest, in the US, or what the best method of achieving that would be. All I can tell you is that this needs to be the goal and a method needs to be found.
But what about the other forms of public key encryption? Wikipedia also lists Diffe-Hellman, ElGammel, Eliptic Curve and others.
(Cue screen of XRoach for no obvious reason)
(Images from DOOM, for the oblig. explosions and gratuitous violence)
(Typing on an XChat console, the first related scene so far but still stupid)
(Scene shifts to Sun Microsystems and then to the OpenOffice group - vaguely related, sort of)
(Switch to any old virus research lab, nobody can tell them apart)
(Switch to a movie certificate for Open Virus, the Movie, rated C++)
Whether the museum curator in the parent posting existed or not, I salute anyone with the guts and gall to question assumptions and place integrity above deceit. And, yes, such people probably will lose jobs and - in rare cases - possibly a whole lot more. History teaches us, however, that in the long run, inaccuracies do get weeded out. Nobody these days uses Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the British Kings as a textbook, and popular Victorian school texts (which depicted Iron Age Britain as filled with unkempt cave-dwelling barbarians with no language or culture) have been replaced with more reliable and infinitely more believable studies of Celtic life.
Pissing off the public with the truth is inevitable. It will happen, sooner or later. May as well get it over and done with quickly, even if that carries risk. Life is all about risk - so why not take risks that might make a difference?
This would be better done as a Murray Walker impression, complete with totally inaccurate predictions and a pants-on-fire delivery. Or, at least, it would reflect rankings and prognostications in IT better than the athletic commentators who are generally more sober.
Well, since they're sending him up on the manned Mars mission, they obviously wanted him to have a look first at where he was going to cra..., uh, land.
There is a patch that'll do that, but it only comes in spearmint.
(I'm looking at OLTP, because that's a worldwide non-Microsoft venture that could seriously dent Microsoft revenue in growing markets and because it's the biggest event due any time soon. Microsoft's FUD is generally not random but very purposeful and has a specific goal in mind. There simply isn't another goal on a comparable scale on any kind of near-term timeframe.)
There are a few other avenues that Linux could be doing well in, but Microsoft is growing faster in the server market despite inferior performance, reliability or security, and that's the only other area Linux and Microsoft have any serious rivalry at this time. Linux could be doing well on the desktop, but not while it is playing catch-up. It would have to invent a whole new metaphor before it could seriously threaten Microsoft in the home market.
The truth is, the author quoted in the article clearly states that they are a troll and that what they are writing is intentionally flammage. The only value in discussing the issue is in using the examples people are giving to extend their own knowledge of what is being done and by whom. That is valuable - far too many Open Source people are ignorant of the scope of their own field - but there are better ways to achieve it.
There are many possible interpretations, but they're all highly sexist and/or insulting. Right about now, the team should be sharpening up their spiked boots to walk all over the NASA guy who came up with the name.
Is this necessary? Well, yes. You can't get ASCII network tools (such as lynx) to talk to a unicode domain name unless you can explicitly state the encoding in ASCII, with no need for wide characters. So such a system must be invented anyway, or you'll break a lot of software that's out there.
If this mechanism exists, it can exist for any network tool and can therefore serve to distinguish between sites that cannot be distinguished if displayed in the stated encodings. Thus, I'm not restricting domain names, I'm not suggesting that everyone stick to the latin character set, I'm not limiting people wanting to spell things in their native language and character set, all I am doing is ensuring that nobody can use similar glyphs in other character sets to deceive them. Anything that's non-native is expanded out. It's still bookmarkable and the bookmarks will work anywhere.
(eg: Slashdot might have a URL of http://slashdot.orglatin1/ in countries in which LATIN1 was not in use. If that same URL was used in England, where LATIN1 is used everywhere other than Civil Service documents, the browser would identify that the specified encoding is your current encoding and do nothing with that extra information.)
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light.
Unicode maps character sets, but the advantage of unicode over other such schemes is the manner in which character numbers are picked. They're not random, but are designed to produce a level of consistency across all character sets. Ergo, mapping one unicode font onto another unicode font should always work.
The language thing is very simple. The browser identifies what language it is currently using and what font is used for that language. The font is the important part, because that allows the software to map one character to another. The language is merely the mechanism by which you guarantee that the resulting characters are readable by you AND that the characters you type in are translated back to the correct unicode encoding. The system has to work both ways to be useful. (Nobody can remember a large enough set of 24-bit unicode numbers to do this directly. Names are the only practical method.)
Yes, yes, I know, multiple languages use the same character set. So what. It's not the language that I'm concerned with, that's just a key field that happens to be useful. The font is the only thing that matters, and there is absolutely no issue with the French or Italians using the same font as the English or Welsh. I'm concerned with spoofing via fonts, so the language is quite unimportant. What is important is ensuring that the font you get breaks foreign character sets that use the same symbols, and that is what this system does. End of story.
Writing to the people working on this is about as effective as writing to the President of the United States or the CEO of Microsoft. Individual contributions, even if they were 100% perfect, flawless and utterly beyond question, will be utterly ignored. Individuals, in a modern society, are nobodies and nothings. It is nothing more than delusion to imagine otherwise. The only effective action is collective action, but there simply aren't enough socialist ITers to be effective. Many are libertarian - which is a wonderful system for individuals, but is completely ineffective at bringing about change on a large scale.
So is posting on Slashdot any better? Not really. True, sometimes important, key people do read Slashdot. It does happen. It happens often enough for Intel to have set up a Q&A section on it, but not often enough for Slashdotters to have any real impact on attitudes or society. So why post here? Because at least it isn't going out into the void. I don't expect anything I write here to have any widespread impact, but I do hope that once in a while someone will take something I post and use the idea in some way. Doesn't matter how. But even if one post in ten thousand triggers a chain of thought in even a single individual that leads to action, I'll have done more towards providing positive contributions to life than 90% of the world's population.
Without IT unions, ideas have no value until tens of millions (never mind tens of thousands) share them passionately enough to apply pressure. That's not going to happen. Not when I post, not when you post, not when anybody posts. There's nobody on Slashdot who has that much power. The best I can ever hope for is to very occasionally throw out an idea that is ever so slightly useful or interesting to someone.
(Well, almost. This works for browsers, but telnet, ftp and ssh don't have language parameters. You'd have to do something similar, though, precisely because they don't have language parameters and therefore entering wide characters could be problematic for them.)
Having said that, yes, I know damn well that my idea is simply not going to happen. The level of political and economic inertia is far too great, even if ICANT decided that it was something worth doing. As a speculation on what will happen, it is patently absurd. As an addendum which adds an important analysis of growing problems (namespace pollution, performance, reliability), it's far from absurd and no discussion on DNS could be complete if it didn't examine these problems.
I'd personally prefer it if the .com domain was cleared of all products, individuals, trademarks and other superfluous crap. If you aren't a company, you aren't a .com. If you're an organization, you're an .org, and that's final. In fact, I'd go one further - anything that is directly off a .com, .org, .net or .gov should be international in some respect. If it's more local than that, the name should reflect that. (For example, I would exile the US Government to .gov.us, the same way most other governments do their websites. There should be no exceptions.) When something expands in scope, it can always buy the name for the next scope out.
Wouldn't this impinge on privacy, freedom, etc? Not really. Whilst governments should be honest about location (I can dream - they're rarely honest about anything else), the only constraint I'm suggesting is that the type of name should reflect the type of scope. If you're running a website for a metropolitan area, I'd say you should have a metropolitan-level domain name. Doesn't have to be the same metro, the same country or (when NASA gets round to it) even the same planet. This gives people plenty of room for satirical/joke names, etc. It just adds a few more dots to it. Big deal.
It'd be almost trivial to make the DNS hierarchy deeper. Most users would be unaffected as most people outside of the US already add country codes to the names and as far as US users are concerned, Slashdot is an international forum. Everything else you get to through links.
This really would help for domain spoofing, because when unicode domain names start to come online, it will be possible to generate visually identical domain names that are physically different. That's been the claimed problem all along, although since browsers have a language attribute, I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no. Given that, I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases. In such a system, spoofing names should be impossible.
Looks like omg.ponies.ms is free as well. There almost has to be 179 other people willing to chip in a dollar to get this for CmdrTaco.
A random fluctuation in internal traffic levels seems equally unlikely. Why? Because it has worked for some time, and I doubt the reactor was doing anything unusual at the time. A true network storm is unlikely - the term exists, but describes an astronomically rare situation. If a network is flooded, it is either near or at capacity. A network storm is when capacity is exceeded in a way that is self-perpetuating. The last time I remember the term being used in a public forum was I think over twelve years ago when a public demonstration of the multibone caused a cascading router flap that shut down a large segment of the Internet backbone due to total gridlock. It wasn't just that nothing else could get through - nothing AT ALL could get through.
What does this leave us? It makes it extremely unlikely that the network traffic per se had anything to do with the shutdown. Much more likely is a cumulative error in the devices involved that merely happened to turn into a fatal bug at roughly the same time as the network spiked. It might be network related, but nobody here can seriously believe it was network caused. Networks may be polled, in which case network traffic that escapes being polled is simply never seen. Network drivers may also be event-driven, but if the interrupt handler is buggy - which would usually mean the handler can be interrupted by itself indefinitely - it's hardly the fault of the network.
In other words, this is a gross programming error that the coders and managers are desperately trying to blame on something - anything - other than their own ineptness. It might merit Scott Adams making a Dilbert cartoon over, but that's it.
However, neither of these should be confused with "ex pyre i", which is what happens when you burn a dyslexic witch.
That he played a banjo and sang "...and keep good company".