The way I see it, countries should be able to control their own domains. The U.S. will keep the null domain (i.e. no country suffix), but domain names in the.uk area will be controlled by an organization appointed by the UK government,.cn by the Chinese government, etc. and all countries should agree to propagate the changes.
You just described the status quo. And if you don't want the US to control your "." root, there are alternative roots, or you can create your own. The US only "controls" the root because thats where (almost) everyone in the world voluntarily points their name servers. The UN, the EU or any other corrupt body is free to set up their own "." and encourage networks to point at it.
WTF does any of this have to do with the "day to day operations of the net?" The day to day operations of the net are accomplished by obscure engineers toiling in relative anonymity at ISP's all across the globe. This is about editorial control (not even technical control) of the "." DNS zone file, and nothing more. This is such a non-issue technically and for the future "evolution" of the Internet that it's laughable watching all the anti-American slashbots get worked into a lather over it.
Basically what this boils down to is who gets to say what new TLDs (like.com,.net, etc.) will be created. Right now it is ICANN under contract with the Department of Commerce. Some think it should be the UN. Honestly, I really don't know why. It's a minor thing that has nothing to do with actually controlling anything. If you don't like the US DoC controlling your root (and remember it's just the file, not the servers themselves), you already have alternatives.
I didn't say they were geniuses, I just said they were smart enough. Big difference.
I know what you said, and you are wrong.
You have laid out a perfect argument for divine kingship. We should abandon this representational democracy, since people can't even bother to contact their representative every week. Leave it up to the experts, royal families.
Kings are not representatives, and never were. Kings were not selected because they were experts. Divine Right is not the same as expertise. There is no similarity between elected representatives, and annointed monarchs. But nice false dichotomy. Electing and interacting with representatives may be a short cut that you do not approve of, but you are in a very small minority.
The real point of direct democracy is taking power out of the hands of politicians, whose only qualification is able to make rousing speeches. Power corrupts, and we see this regularly as congresspeople are thrown in jail for bribery.
That's the argument for term limits.
Have you ever thought that people don't care about politics because they can't contact their representative, and they really don't influence legislation?
Have you visited each of your Congressmen at their local offices, Mr. Political Reformer? I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts the answer is no. But you'd have us believe that you'd take the time out of your life to not only vote in dozens of referendums each day, but also to generate legislation. Fah!
You seem to be unhappy with the quality of your representation. That doesn't mean that the system of representation is inherently bad.
People are smart enough to finance their homes, vehicles, and education; they are smart enough to run their own businesses, and they are smart enough to follow the law in everyday life.
That's a good one. In reality, huge numbers of people aren't smart enough to do any of the things you mention, and a tiny fraction are smart enough to do all of them. If "people" were as smart as you suppose, we would live in a utopia filled with well educated, wealthy, upstanding entrepeneurs. But we don't do we?
The fact of the matter is that if people were that smart, and actually gave a damn about the laws, we wouldn't need direct democracy. What you propose is an attempt to break people out of the apathy that they live in now, but what you miss is that most people are quite content to live in apathy (is that redundant?). Your suggestion that if we deployed direct democracy, the "people" would grow into it and flourish with new found power is reminiscent of the father who thinks he can teach his badu to swim by dumping him in the deep end. The people don't want to govern themselves, they can't even be bothered to spend an hour a week figuring out what's going on and communicating with their representatives about it.
Bwahaha, how do you like your nice free market NOW, capitalist-boy?... And in case you hadn't figured it out, we granted those cheap bastards a monopoly, gave them the public right of way in which to put their cables, they OWE us for that. If we want to regulate their sorry asses we will. If they don't like it, tough, we'll give out that monopoly to someone who'll appreciate it.
Yeah! Regulation caused this problem, so surely MORE regulation will solve it! Wait, err, um, no.
You can't point to an example of a higly regulated market as a failure of the free market. That's just stupid.
The fact that a regulated market got us into this mess doesn't mean we shouldn't free the market now. Maybe freeing the market will alllow things to shake out and stabilize in the future. Unless you want to continue with the regulatory equivilent of herding cats.
Re:15 Reasons to boycott IMDb
on
IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 1
Movies were an industry ever since Thomas Edison invented the kinetograph, which he developed specifically looking for new ways to make money.
And the people who make movies have been greedy bastards ever since then too. One of the main reasons the big studios moved to CA was to get far away from Edison and his desire for roaylties on his inventions.
Re:I'd like IMDB more if...
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
Don't get me wrong, IMDB is really neat, but there's no way for an individual to correct or limit the information about themselves.
So, what does the "Update information" link do:
You may report errors and omissions on this page to the IMDb database managers. They will be examined and if approved will be included in a future update. Clicking the button on the left will take you through a new improved step-by-step process.
I've seen the problem described as "Teh US h4xx0r administration can cut off a country from the rest of the Internet". Pray tell, how? Block a range of IPs from making DNS requests? All it takes is one server in a neutral country to forward / cache those requests. If this did happen, you'd likely have about a million sysadmins jump to the task.
The US gov't can't block access to the root servers, because the gov't doesn't run the root servers. Publishing the root zone is not the same as serving it. The worst thing the gov't can do is refuse to acknowledge someone's new TLD idea (see,.xxx).
How is that different than what we have now? Japan has full control of.jp zone, and UK has full control over the.uk zone. The only thing that the US DoC controls is the "." zone telling you which servers to ask about.jp or.uk. Someone has to manage this zone, but it isn't really that big of a deal, since the DoC doesn't actually run the servers serving the "." zone, and any monkey business wouldn't be tolerated by the root operators.
The pitch is even better now. If you are an L3 transit customer, Cogent will give you free service for a year. For L3's current customers this solves the immediate problem, and they wind up multi-homed, so they don't get bitten by this in the future.
If Apple was bankrupt already, how would open sourcing the materials hurt any worse?
There are still creditors and shareholders who are entitled to whatever value the assets have at liquidation. The copyrights to Apple's software will be of significant value, even if the company goes under (possibly even moreso). Google "fraudulent transfer".
If Apple were to go out of business, my last act as CEO would be to release all (non-3rd-party-licensed) Mac OS X kernel and GUI code under the GPL. I'm betting you really don't want that to happen.
And destroy any remaining assets the company might have in a breech of duty to the shareholders and creditors.
No, it doesn't. The owner of the copyright can stop releasing new versions under the GPL. Any code already licensed under the GPL would remain so, but nothing stops them from making all new versions closed, or something in between.
Why? Isn't Andreesen smart enough to implement sessions without using cookies? I guess not, since he isn't even smart enough to implement a "This site requires cookies" page.
Well, the way of lesser evil is still evil. Their motto isn't "do less evil", it's, "do no evil." Of course in The Real World, that isn't always an option.
However, no-one says a lawyer has to work for a major corporation whose actions strongly conflict with that lawyer's personal ethics.
And (usually) no defense attorney has to work for a particular client. But that doesn't mean that Dershowitz or Cochran are bad lawyers, or even bad people. What about the lawyers who are representing Saddam Hussein? Are they bad lawyers or bad people? No lawyer can have any kind of career only representing people or companies they like.
There has to be a balance between 'making the system work' and people acting in ethical way -- and yes, however scary you find it, that means individual human beings deciding and acting on their personal morals.
Lawyers have an ethical code which requires them to vigorously protect their clients' interests to the best of their ability within the law, regardless of their personal feelings. It would be foolish to attempt to determine a lawyers personal feelings based on their legal arguments. If you do so, you might conclude that Alan Dershowitz is a raping, wife killing, pornographer.
No thanks. I am not going to research a project which could take me days, if not weeks. You are asking for no small task.
I'm sorry. I assumed that since you have a strong opinion about this, that you'd have some data to back it up. That's what I get for assuming.
But are you implying that someone with NO experience is just as good as someone WITH experience? Because you will really need to back that up with some facts.
William Rehnquist.
Given that it was at the start of his first term, I do not have the name. Bush asked a number of people to join his cabinet, including active D-senators.
So, you are making it up, or just repeating something you heard. Let's see some facts!
Let's have some facts please. How has a lack of judicial experience affected previous justices? There are an abundance of justices with no judicial experience, so you should be able to point out all sorts of related flaws. Since you hold this opinion, I'm sure that you already have specific examples in mind.
That is why, in his first term, Bush selected Democratic senators to join his cabinet. He was able to say "look i am not partisan, i want to unite everyone" AND remove a democrat from the senate.
Who are you refering to? The only Democrat Senator in Bush's first cabinet was Norm Mineta, and he had already retired from Congress.
So, in your opinion, Rehnquist, Warren, Marshall, Jay, Rutledge, Ellsworth, et al were are lousy justices? Prior to Roberts, only 3 of 16 Chief Justices had judicial experience, and many associate justices had none. More than had judicial experience had political experience. Could you imagine if Bush had appointed a Republican Senator to the bench?
Why is judge experience neccesarry? It wasn't vogue to appoint judges to the Supreme Court until recently. Prior to that, we had governors, congressman, lawyers, etc. In fact, many of the most respected justices came to the court with no judicial experience.
It's like people expect lawyers to have scruples or something.
Yeah, lawyers who zealously represent their cllients even when they personally disagree are like those scumbag doctors who'll treat just about anyone. I mean, wouldn't the world be a better place if Christian doctors refused to treat homosexuals, and liberal doctors refused to treat Republicans? Of course not. And just like medical care, the legal system only works if everyone has the best counsel available to them.
Slashdot Mirror
The way I see it, countries should be able to control their own domains. The U.S. will keep the null domain (i.e. no country suffix), but domain names in the .uk area will be controlled by an organization appointed by the UK government, .cn by the Chinese government, etc. and all countries should agree to propagate the changes.
You just described the status quo. And if you don't want the US to control your "." root, there are alternative roots, or you can create your own. The US only "controls" the root because thats where (almost) everyone in the world voluntarily points their name servers. The UN, the EU or any other corrupt body is free to set up their own "." and encourage networks to point at it.
WTF does any of this have to do with the "day to day operations of the net?" The day to day operations of the net are accomplished by obscure engineers toiling in relative anonymity at ISP's all across the globe. This is about editorial control (not even technical control) of the "." DNS zone file, and nothing more. This is such a non-issue technically and for the future "evolution" of the Internet that it's laughable watching all the anti-American slashbots get worked into a lather over it.
.com, .net, etc.) will be created. Right now it is ICANN under contract with the Department of Commerce. Some think it should be the UN. Honestly, I really don't know why. It's a minor thing that has nothing to do with actually controlling anything. If you don't like the US DoC controlling your root (and remember it's just the file, not the servers themselves), you already have alternatives.
Basically what this boils down to is who gets to say what new TLDs (like
I didn't say they were geniuses, I just said they were smart enough. Big difference.
I know what you said, and you are wrong.
You have laid out a perfect argument for divine kingship. We should abandon this representational democracy, since people can't even bother to contact their representative every week. Leave it up to the experts, royal families.
Kings are not representatives, and never were. Kings were not selected because they were experts. Divine Right is not the same as expertise. There is no similarity between elected representatives, and annointed monarchs. But nice false dichotomy. Electing and interacting with representatives may be a short cut that you do not approve of, but you are in a very small minority.
The real point of direct democracy is taking power out of the hands of politicians, whose only qualification is able to make rousing speeches. Power corrupts, and we see this regularly as congresspeople are thrown in jail for bribery.
That's the argument for term limits.
Have you ever thought that people don't care about politics because they can't contact their representative, and they really don't influence legislation?
Have you visited each of your Congressmen at their local offices, Mr. Political Reformer? I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts the answer is no. But you'd have us believe that you'd take the time out of your life to not only vote in dozens of referendums each day, but also to generate legislation. Fah!
You seem to be unhappy with the quality of your representation. That doesn't mean that the system of representation is inherently bad.
People are smart enough to finance their homes, vehicles, and education; they are smart enough to run their own businesses, and they are smart enough to follow the law in everyday life.
That's a good one. In reality, huge numbers of people aren't smart enough to do any of the things you mention, and a tiny fraction are smart enough to do all of them. If "people" were as smart as you suppose, we would live in a utopia filled with well educated, wealthy, upstanding entrepeneurs. But we don't do we?
The fact of the matter is that if people were that smart, and actually gave a damn about the laws, we wouldn't need direct democracy. What you propose is an attempt to break people out of the apathy that they live in now, but what you miss is that most people are quite content to live in apathy (is that redundant?). Your suggestion that if we deployed direct democracy, the "people" would grow into it and flourish with new found power is reminiscent of the father who thinks he can teach his badu to swim by dumping him in the deep end. The people don't want to govern themselves, they can't even be bothered to spend an hour a week figuring out what's going on and communicating with their representatives about it.
Bwahaha, how do you like your nice free market NOW, capitalist-boy? ...
And in case you hadn't figured it out, we granted those cheap bastards a monopoly, gave them the public right of way in which to put their cables, they OWE us for that. If we want to regulate their sorry asses we will. If they don't like it, tough, we'll give out that monopoly to someone who'll appreciate it.
Yeah! Regulation caused this problem, so surely MORE regulation will solve it! Wait, err, um, no.
You can't point to an example of a higly regulated market as a failure of the free market. That's just stupid.
The fact that a regulated market got us into this mess doesn't mean we shouldn't free the market now. Maybe freeing the market will alllow things to shake out and stabilize in the future. Unless you want to continue with the regulatory equivilent of herding cats.
Movies were an industry ever since Thomas Edison invented the kinetograph, which he developed specifically looking for new ways to make money.
And the people who make movies have been greedy bastards ever since then too. One of the main reasons the big studios moved to CA was to get far away from Edison and his desire for roaylties on his inventions.
So, what does the "Update information" link do:
I've seen the problem described as "Teh US h4xx0r administration can cut off a country from the rest of the Internet". Pray tell, how? Block a range of IPs from making DNS requests? All it takes is one server in a neutral country to forward / cache those requests. If this did happen, you'd likely have about a million sysadmins jump to the task.
.xxx).
The US gov't can't block access to the root servers, because the gov't doesn't run the root servers. Publishing the root zone is not the same as serving it. The worst thing the gov't can do is refuse to acknowledge someone's new TLD idea (see,
How is that different than what we have now? Japan has full control of .jp zone, and UK has full control over the .uk zone. The only thing that the US DoC controls is the "." zone telling you which servers to ask about .jp or .uk. Someone has to manage this zone, but it isn't really that big of a deal, since the DoC doesn't actually run the servers serving the "." zone, and any monkey business wouldn't be tolerated by the root operators.
And furthermore, DNS != "The Internet"
If we turn kids into Soylent Green, we will shortly run out of old and poor people. There's a good reason to only eat the sick and the old.
The pitch is even better now. If you are an L3 transit customer, Cogent will give you free service for a year. For L3's current customers this solves the immediate problem, and they wind up multi-homed, so they don't get bitten by this in the future.
If Apple was bankrupt already, how would open sourcing the materials hurt any worse?
There are still creditors and shareholders who are entitled to whatever value the assets have at liquidation. The copyrights to Apple's software will be of significant value, even if the company goes under (possibly even moreso). Google "fraudulent transfer".
If Apple were to go out of business, my last act as CEO would be to release all (non-3rd-party-licensed) Mac OS X kernel and GUI code under the GPL. I'm betting you really don't want that to happen.
And destroy any remaining assets the company might have in a breech of duty to the shareholders and creditors.
Since when does copying a link from the article summary qualify as "more information" and get modded informative?
No, it doesn't. The owner of the copyright can stop releasing new versions under the GPL. Any code already licensed under the GPL would remain so, but nothing stops them from making all new versions closed, or something in between.
Why? Isn't Andreesen smart enough to implement sessions without using cookies? I guess not, since he isn't even smart enough to implement a "This site requires cookies" page.
Shitty design, bad start.
Well, the way of lesser evil is still evil. Their motto isn't "do less evil", it's, "do no evil." Of course in The Real World, that isn't always an option.
However, no-one says a lawyer has to work for a major corporation whose actions strongly conflict with that lawyer's personal ethics.
And (usually) no defense attorney has to work for a particular client. But that doesn't mean that Dershowitz or Cochran are bad lawyers, or even bad people. What about the lawyers who are representing Saddam Hussein? Are they bad lawyers or bad people? No lawyer can have any kind of career only representing people or companies they like.
There has to be a balance between 'making the system work' and people acting in ethical way -- and yes, however scary you find it, that means individual human beings deciding and acting on their personal morals.
Lawyers have an ethical code which requires them to vigorously protect their clients' interests to the best of their ability within the law, regardless of their personal feelings. It would be foolish to attempt to determine a lawyers personal feelings based on their legal arguments. If you do so, you might conclude that Alan Dershowitz is a raping, wife killing, pornographer.
No thanks. I am not going to research a project which could take me days, if not weeks. You are asking for no small task.
I'm sorry. I assumed that since you have a strong opinion about this, that you'd have some data to back it up. That's what I get for assuming.
But are you implying that someone with NO experience is just as good as someone WITH experience? Because you will really need to back that up with some facts.
William Rehnquist.
Given that it was at the start of his first term, I do not have the name. Bush asked a number of people to join his cabinet, including active D-senators.
So, you are making it up, or just repeating something you heard. Let's see some facts!
Experience is fundamental.
Let's have some facts please. How has a lack of judicial experience affected previous justices? There are an abundance of justices with no judicial experience, so you should be able to point out all sorts of related flaws. Since you hold this opinion, I'm sure that you already have specific examples in mind.
That is why, in his first term, Bush selected Democratic senators to join his cabinet. He was able to say "look i am not partisan, i want to unite everyone" AND remove a democrat from the senate.
Who are you refering to? The only Democrat Senator in Bush's first cabinet was Norm Mineta, and he had already retired from Congress.
So, in your opinion, Rehnquist, Warren, Marshall, Jay, Rutledge, Ellsworth, et al were are lousy justices? Prior to Roberts, only 3 of 16 Chief Justices had judicial experience, and many associate justices had none. More than had judicial experience had political experience. Could you imagine if Bush had appointed a Republican Senator to the bench?
Why is judge experience neccesarry? It wasn't vogue to appoint judges to the Supreme Court until recently. Prior to that, we had governors, congressman, lawyers, etc. In fact, many of the most respected justices came to the court with no judicial experience.
It's like people expect lawyers to have scruples or something.
Yeah, lawyers who zealously represent their cllients even when they personally disagree are like those scumbag doctors who'll treat just about anyone. I mean, wouldn't the world be a better place if Christian doctors refused to treat homosexuals, and liberal doctors refused to treat Republicans? Of course not. And just like medical care, the legal system only works if everyone has the best counsel available to them.
If all you want is a "." zone file not blessed by the US DoC, then you can have it today. Best of luck to you.