I haven't seen a single one which calls out this simple fact: it's blockable
Who cares what MS says about blocking it? Who believes them?
This is about making money. I can't believe even 1 in 400 people actually swallowed that line.
Nintendo sued for copyright infringement, and lost.
Ah, but: nothing in that case is being copied in a form which the user can access. A web page is being published across the web and the user actually has the result in a form that they can save to disk and access at will.
Could MS be sued for copyright breach on the grounds that the displayed page is now a derived work?
Some peole have suggested that since it is just a question of display there is no more grounds to attack than if you don't like the fonts the browser uses but I think that it could be argued that the meaning of an HTML-work is changed when the links are changed and that this takes it into the realm of a derived work.
For example, if I put up a page giving company x's products a negative review and your browser links 'company x' to their advertising then the meaning of my page has at least been confused (why am I advertising a product I'm saying I don't like?) and at worse totaly reversed, depending on the context.
Personally, I think I'll just block IE6 or whatever version has this with a redirect to www.opera.com.
Unless...maybe...you mean copying is stealing, but, nah! that's just stupid.
Copying is not stealing. Copying something you don't own and don't have permission to copy is stealing.
The problem with theives like Napster is that they make it harder for the rest of us that want "fair use" to continue to exist in the digital age. By blatantly ignoring copyright they make it easier to justify "tightening up" the law.
So you've never, ever seen someone with an @yahoo.com email address?
My email address is [at]tww.cx, does that imply the existance of a thing called "tww mail"?
But Yahoo has lots of great stuff...google, maps, yahoo mail, the entire newsgroup archive.
Well, apart from Yahoo mail (never even heard of it) the rest of these can be found via google with a good search engine attached. Generally I search for things with google and if they're any good I bookmark them. I've never seen the attraction of portals which exist only to filter your view of the net - I don't want it filtered, I want it all.
Geography may be an issue here, I'm in the UK and YahooUK is just junk; perhaps the US site is better.
I've never knowingly been on an AOL page, I've been on MS about 3 times per year, Napster once (just long enough to confirm that, yes, it was an on-line fence for stolen goods), and I left Yahoo behind about three years ago.
MS and AOL I can understand since they're default homepages for people who don't know what a URL is, but the other two are hard to believe.
Er, no I didn't. I said that there was no reason to assume they did not recover. In fact there is a slight piece of evidence in the Odyssey that they did recover.
I did not say there was no link between the Odyssey and 2001. The point is that the link is very loose. There are three in the team and they are doing a survey during which they are disabled but there are lots of differences between even the old Rieu translation (which I have too) and the film. So many, in fact, that any viewer/reader not actually trying to find connections would conclude that either the "symbolism" is quite half-hearted or just a coincidence.
Kubrick simply was not the sort of person to carry on deep symbolic schemes. He certainly did have his share of "nods" to various other works but what is claimed here (for the whole work, that is, not this particular scene) is simply out of character.
By implication they remain in irons
By your inference they may be but mine is that having been rescued within the framework of a (even the) heroic tale and it should be assumed that they recover (ie, that the hero has succeeded). Interestingly at the island of the Laestrygonians another party of three is sent ashore, one of whom is again choosen for his running ability. Perhaps the same three crewmen?
if you can't accept even three analogies where most symbolism rests on just one, then you simply do not understand literary symbolism.
Personally I would accept that perhaps this particular scene is a reference to the Odyssey.
What I do know, though, is bullshitting to sell a book.
TWW
Re:A better solution: eliminate TLDs entirely
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 2
Except why should a user have to know whether a hospital is for-profit or non-profit when trying to type in a URL to visit their site?
Why should I have to know if St Mary's Hospital is on Main Street or Castle Street? Because they are two different addresses.
Do you want to make it illegal for the second Hospital to set up just because we've already got one with the same name somewhere else?
On the web, if you go to domain.org and don't find what you want it's not hard to try domain.com instead.
It's moot anyway since most people use a search engine to find things like that so it could be a random number for all they care.
TWW
Re:This whole thing makes my blood boil....
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 2
Why can't they handle that with a couple phone calls and maybe a 20 minute teleconference??
They can but they don't want the MONEY from.biz to go to someone else. They know as well as anyone that.biz will be a goldmine once it's "blessed" as a TLD because every company in the world with a.com will have to register the equivilent.biz domain to avoid cyber-squatters.
Every company except ICANN's special friends, that is. They can just wait for someone to buy a.biz domain they want and then get ICANN to give it over to them, which ICANN couldn't do if it did not control.biz.
TWW
Re:RFC's?! We don't need no stinking RFC's!!
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 2
That's all fine and all but actually finding a replacement solution is a non-trivial exercise.
We all know what the problem is with central authority and the DNS. What we don't know is what to do about it.
Some idiot posts with a few points which are all addressed in the linked-to papers which he/she/it has obviously not read and it gets moderated to (4, Insightful). Fucking magic.
Re:A better solution: eliminate TLDs entirely
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 2
should a hospital be a ".com" or an ".org"?
.org, why would it be.com?
they recognize ".com" as the default TLD and don't care about its alleged purpose.
Yes, and now we're having trouble with squeezing everyone into.com. You have correctly identified the problem; do you have a suggestion for a solution?
The people who want to "improve" DNS by adding more gTLDs are falling into the same trap.
No, they're trying to solve the problem you identified above, the polution of.com has rendered it meaningless and absorbed a large number of domain names which other people would like to use. Since the "default" namespace is packed-out they need a new namespace. I assume that your answer would to be to progress on to polluting.org,.net,.mil,.int etc too. "Unfortunately" ICANN wouldn't go for that either as it would offend their friends who are passing them big bucks in bribes to prevent the namespace being extended in any way which, for example, would allow Mr Arnold O'Leary to buy AOL.org or AOL.net or AOL.biz
A better system would be to allow AOL.person (or dot something) and simplly not allow bastards like ICANN to take it off Mr O'Leary when they get that call from a well known network with limited Internet facilities.
TWW
Re:I don't see a problem with ICANN
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 1
In terms of branding, corporate or personal, you want as simple a domain name as you can get.
Yes, that's why the current system is breaking down. For those from whom ICANN has stolen domains, the system has already broken down.
TWW
Re:Can we stop calling "Titanic" realistic, please
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 2
Maybe maybe not. We'll never truly know.
Well, when there are lots of adult witnesses who didn't mention it and only one child that "remembered" it years later I think we're quite safe in thorwing out the outlying data point and keeping the rest.
It seems pretty clear that the ship split on the way down, but how far down is hard to know.
...and dispite the fact that the Odyssey parts of this theory are the best fit it shows why it doen't really fly.
I'm going to quote the whole of the Lotus-eaters bit since it is quite short (Robert Fagles trans, Penguin 1996):
Once we'd had our fill of food and drink I sent
a detail ahead, two picked men and a third, a runner,
to scout out who might live there-men like us perhaps,
who live on bread? So off they went and soon enough
they mingled among the natives, Lotus-eaters, Lotus-eaters
who had no notion of killing my companions, not at all,
they simply gave them the lotus to taste instead...
Any crewmen who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit,
lost all desire to send a message back, much less return,
their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,
grazing on Lotus, all memory of the journey home
dissolved forever. But I brought them back, back
to the hollow ships, and streaming tears-I forced them,
hauled them under the rowing benches, lashed them fast
and shouted out commands to my other, steady comrades
`Quick, no time to lose, embark in the racing ships'
so none could eat the lotus, forget the voyage home.
They swung aboard at once, they sat to the oars in ranks
and in rhythm churned the water wite with stroke on stroke.
The similarities with 2001 are indeed there but the real issue is the differences.
One of the crewmen is picked out as a scout with a particular skill (running). All the crew return to the ship and more to the point they are specifically rescued by Odysseus. The fact that they are not mentioned again indicates to me that the crewmembers recovered (which is needed if their "rescue" is to be worth anything). The lotus are not fatal either.
What this tells us is not that 2001 isn't based on the Odyssey but that it is loosely inspired by it.
Unfortunately Wheat needs the trailing of events in what might be called the "source material" to be very close-to the point where Dave's buring his hand on the food is symbolic for events in the sacking of Ismarus (figurative events at that) and a space pod having a passing resembance to an insect is a parallel to the launching of 1000 ships to reclaim Helen of Troy!
What we have here is a classic example of the fact that if you pick, choose, and stretch your evidence you can find parallels of all sorts of things in a story. Particularly if the story does actually draw some elements or make references to the material inquestion.
The wooden horse anagram (not subtle, just weak) is the work of a mind overly devoted to a theory as is Frank Poole's non-anagram where Wheat actually admits that he started off looking for an anagram which meant something like "rope dancer" and that he never found one ("Frank Poole is what I call a 90 percent anagram". Yeah - and what the rest of us call "not an anagram") .
The Nietzsche stuff is mindless. Once more we're required to believe that 2001's following of TSZ is so close that the reason the pod sneaks up behind Frank is not so that he can't see it but because we're following a detailed piece of symbolism. Well, if it were that close, why does the pod not jump over Frank and the knock him off?
Wheat happily chooses when the symbolism is tight and when it is "subtle" to match his line. The Nietzsche parallel in 2001, like the Odyssey parallel, is there in the journey of Dave from man to superman but the details are in Wheat's head.
If who have seen Kubrick at work you will know how often he changed his mind about things and their meanings (that's why AI didn't get made while he was alive). The possibility that he constructed this complex and subtle web of symbolism and carried it through to completion simply isn't like him.
Plus, of course, we ignore the contribution of everyone else: Clarke, obviously, but also Wally Veevers and Douglas Trumbull who's input into the phyical aspects of the Discovery were huge and generally unrelated to bathroom floors. Were they all symbol-nuts too?
Next on the list of "things to ignore" are the physics: where exactly should a rocket have it's exhausts? Probably at the back. If you wanted to spin a space station to get artificial gravity how would ships dock? In the middle where there is no gravity and it's a lot easier generally (assuming the docking craft wears a condom, I suppose!).
And finally, because I need to go to bed, why 2001? Well, it could be that it's a reference to Zoraster returning in 9001 but it seems more likely that it's because in 1968 that seemed a looong way in the future but within the audience's possible life times and Clarke is intelligent to know that the new millenium started in 2001, not in 2000. So the connection with Zoraster is simply that both knew that milleniums start on the '01.
This sort of thing is fun to play with but given enough effort I imagine someone like Wheat could find more similarities between The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T and TSZ than he has for 2001.
TWW
Can we stop calling "Titanic" realistic, please?
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 2
Titanic went to no lengths to be accurate. The characters were so misrepresented that law cases were started and settled out of court because there was no justification for it, the ship did not split apart on the surface - that was a story told years later by one survivor who was 4 years old at the time. The social tensions were grossly overstated and both laughable and patronising. The whole thing of the paintings supposed to have been lost (you know, the Degas and Picassos you can still see in museums) is pathetic.
AND... I had family that worked on the Titanic, I was born in Belfast and the story of the ship was taught in schools and survivors appeared on local TV from time to time. In all of that NOONE ever called the damn thing "Titanic" - it's "The Titanic".
I agree in theory with what you are saying but in practice I can't see a reliable way to avoid a central system. In the long term this would have to work on a global (or even beyond) level and the issues with latency, not to mention availability of participants make it hard to work.
On the other hand, the problem with the corruption that now runs through the whole ICANN system is not such a big deal with numbers. Look at the assignment of IP addresses: no trademark issues means no lawyers and no big profits so it works.
The real problem with the current system is not the system - it's the value of the names themselves. Numbers have a lot less intrinsic value. That's why I'm not too worried about centralised control. It would be better if it was decentralised but I don't think it has to be.
It creates easy to remember labels for a particular computer.
It is this which dooms it to a slow death at the hands of the world's trademark lawyers. I know it's hard to move away from something so attractive but it is unsustainable in the long run.
(minor quibble: 1.2.3.4 is a valid IP address, so it can't also be a domain name without confusion.)
Yes, the system would have to use a different separator character to work properly in association with IPs. On the other hand, this would undermine the possibility of using current versions of Bind with it. Hmmm
To solve the second problem, we have to have some sort of listing service
Yes, that's what I was driving at when I was talking about the telephone directory. Given a numerical system then this is the only way forward.
You got a lot of replies about why it wouldn't work - and decided they were stupid because you didn't agree with them.
Mostly they had nothing positive to say, such as alternatives. Anyone who is arguing that the current system should be left alone is being stupid in my book.
Search engines don't work!
DNS doesn't work! I''ll not bother saying it again.
You want to buy a spark plug on the net. Do you go to sparkplug.co.uk (or.com etc)? Well you can but chances are slim that it will be any use to you. The domain names are very limited in usefulness as ways of finding things in themselves, particularly when they are applied globally. Saying that search engines don't work is ignoring the fact that they work better than relying on the domain name to find what you want.
If enough of the ISPs start to use alternate roots (and new.net has signed up some already, not to mention that ORSC and Pacific Root have been around for years)
Big deal. There are too many alt--roots and if any of them get popular it's ten minutes work for VS to kill them by adding their popular TLDs to the "real" DNS. Instant death. The fact that they've been around for years and have had zero impact indicates how little interest there is in buying a domain name that will be shat on by VS as soon as it looks valuable.
The attraction of numbers is that there isn't any big money in it for VS to be tempted and if we have a UNITED alt-root system there is a better chance of getting enough momentum up to start getting it installed as part of default settings. Who should RedHat or SUSE include in their DNS systems at the moment beyond the standard roots? Why would they pick any of them over the others?
Current attempts at alt-roots are doomed to failure because they are simply repeating the mistakes that are destroying the original root system.
I don't mean to scrap the current system but to introduce a new system alongside it where the sites are free of the whole trademark.squatting/globalisation effects of the old system. No one would have to give up their domain names.
As to the AOL effect, my experience is that most such users actually DON'T use the DNS system at all! They enter a site name in the search field and click on the result. Looking through our access logs at work reveals many people who "found" us by entering our URL into a search engine. These people would not even notice the change.
We have the technology now. Installed in our machines (Assuming Bind 9+).
I've suggested this before and got loads of stupid replies as to why it wuldn't work (not many about what would, though) but I'm going to do it again:
Get rid of alphabetical domain names.
Every problem we have with the bastards at NS/VS comes from the fact that names are valuable. Numbers aren't (in the vast number of cases).
I have been reliably informed that the current version of Bind will accept numerical domain names (e.g., 1.293.1)
Someone (VA, Linus, FSF? Anyone!) set up a single new root server and start selling off the "numerical roots" starting at 1 , 2, 3 etc. If you buy a numerical root you can sell or use the subdomains 1.1, 2.1,.3.1 etc... for whatever charge you want.
How would you find sites? Use a search engine! Or start a new type of search engine bsaed on normal telephone books.
In fact, if you can use a telephone system without keying in letters, why should a web based on the same idea be so hard to use?
No letters means no trademarks, no trademarks means no stupid squatting or bullying by large companies.
No letters means local companies are not at a disadvantage (Mr McDonald's electricity shop appears on the search engine beside Ronald's dead cow emporium and you simply click on the one you actually wanted).
With the roots all being numerical there is no danger of VeriShit ever duplicating the system (no money in it for a start) and taking it over, which is the reason alternative roots will NEVER work. If I set up.bit and VS start one up too, who's going to win?
We have to do this or the web will be taken from us.
If someone has a rational reason why this would be worse than letting things carry on as they are, I'd be surprised and interested in their argument.
Names were good when the net was small but they are strangling it now.
This would initally only work in the Bind-world but it would work with very little effort from the users (yet another killer for many alt-root systems) and we could build up some momentium until one day M$ has to add the new root to their software.
ICANN's only purpose is to keep everyone focused on "fixing" the current system by adding more pointless root domains and finding ways to abuse the ccTLDs. Forget that: the current system is NOT fixable.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen a single one which calls out this simple fact: it's blockable
Who cares what MS says about blocking it? Who believes them? This is about making money. I can't believe even 1 in 400 people actually swallowed that line.
TWW
I wonder if the links appear if you save the page.
TWW
Ah, but: nothing in that case is being copied in a form which the user can access. A web page is being published across the web and the user actually has the result in a form that they can save to disk and access at will.
I think a good lawyer could give it a go.
TWW
Some peole have suggested that since it is just a question of display there is no more grounds to attack than if you don't like the fonts the browser uses but I think that it could be argued that the meaning of an HTML-work is changed when the links are changed and that this takes it into the realm of a derived work.
For example, if I put up a page giving company x's products a negative review and your browser links 'company x' to their advertising then the meaning of my page has at least been confused (why am I advertising a product I'm saying I don't like?) and at worse totaly reversed, depending on the context.
Personally, I think I'll just block IE6 or whatever version has this with a redirect to www.opera.com.
TWW
Copying is not stealing. Copying something you don't own and don't have permission to copy is stealing.
The problem with theives like Napster is that they make it harder for the rest of us that want "fair use" to continue to exist in the digital age. By blatantly ignoring copyright they make it easier to justify "tightening up" the law.
TWW
TWW
Well, apart from Yahoo mail (never even heard of it) the rest of these can be found via google with a good search engine attached. Generally I search for things with google and if they're any good I bookmark them. I've never seen the attraction of portals which exist only to filter your view of the net - I don't want it filtered, I want it all.
Geography may be an issue here, I'm in the UK and YahooUK is just junk; perhaps the US site is better.
TWW
I've never knowingly been on an AOL page, I've been on MS about 3 times per year, Napster once (just long enough to confirm that, yes, it was an on-line fence for stolen goods), and I left Yahoo behind about three years ago.
MS and AOL I can understand since they're default homepages for people who don't know what a URL is, but the other two are hard to believe.
TWW
But you deny that they became disabled,
Er, no I didn't. I said that there was no reason to assume they did not recover. In fact there is a slight piece of evidence in the Odyssey that they did recover.
I did not say there was no link between the Odyssey and 2001. The point is that the link is very loose. There are three in the team and they are doing a survey during which they are disabled but there are lots of differences between even the old Rieu translation (which I have too) and the film. So many, in fact, that any viewer/reader not actually trying to find connections would conclude that either the "symbolism" is quite half-hearted or just a coincidence.
Kubrick simply was not the sort of person to carry on deep symbolic schemes. He certainly did have his share of "nods" to various other works but what is claimed here (for the whole work, that is, not this particular scene) is simply out of character.
By implication they remain in irons
By your inference they may be but mine is that having been rescued within the framework of a (even the) heroic tale and it should be assumed that they recover (ie, that the hero has succeeded). Interestingly at the island of the Laestrygonians another party of three is sent ashore, one of whom is again choosen for his running ability. Perhaps the same three crewmen?
if you can't accept even three analogies where most symbolism rests on just one, then you simply do not understand literary symbolism.
Personally I would accept that perhaps this particular scene is a reference to the Odyssey.
What I do know, though, is bullshitting to sell a book.
TWW
Why should I have to know if St Mary's Hospital is on Main Street or Castle Street? Because they are two different addresses. Do you want to make it illegal for the second Hospital to set up just because we've already got one with the same name somewhere else?
On the web, if you go to domain.org and don't find what you want it's not hard to try domain.com instead.
It's moot anyway since most people use a search engine to find things like that so it could be a random number for all they care.
TWW
They can but they don't want the MONEY from .biz to go to someone else. They know as well as anyone that .biz will be a goldmine once it's "blessed" as a TLD because every company in the world with a .com will have to register the equivilent .biz domain to avoid cyber-squatters.
Every company except ICANN's special friends, that is. They can just wait for someone to buy a .biz domain they want and then get ICANN to give it over to them, which ICANN couldn't do if it did not control .biz.
TWW
We all know what the problem is with central authority and the DNS. What we don't know is what to do about it.
TWW
Some idiot posts with a few points which are all addressed in the linked-to papers which he/she/it has obviously not read and it gets moderated to (4, Insightful). Fucking magic.
.org, why would it be .com?
they recognize ".com" as the default TLD and don't care about its alleged purpose.
Yes, and now we're having trouble with squeezing everyone into .com. You have correctly identified the problem; do you have a suggestion for a solution?
The people who want to "improve" DNS by adding more gTLDs are falling into the same trap.
No, they're trying to solve the problem you identified above, the polution of .com has rendered it meaningless and absorbed a large number of domain names which other people would like to use. Since the "default" namespace is packed-out they need a new namespace. I assume that your answer would to be to progress on to polluting .org, .net, .mil, .int etc too. "Unfortunately" ICANN wouldn't go for that either as it would offend their friends who are passing them big bucks in bribes to prevent the namespace being extended in any way which, for example, would allow Mr Arnold O'Leary to buy AOL.org or AOL.net or AOL.biz
A better system would be to allow AOL.person (or dot something) and simplly not allow bastards like ICANN to take it off Mr O'Leary when they get that call from a well known network with limited Internet facilities.
TWW
Yes, that's why the current system is breaking down. For those from whom ICANN has stolen domains, the system has already broken down.
TWW
Well, when there are lots of adult witnesses who didn't mention it and only one child that "remembered" it years later I think we're quite safe in thorwing out the outlying data point and keeping the rest.
It seems pretty clear that the ship split on the way down, but how far down is hard to know.
TWW
TWW
I'm going to quote the whole of the Lotus-eaters bit since it is quite short (Robert Fagles trans, Penguin 1996):
The similarities with 2001 are indeed there but the real issue is the differences.
One of the crewmen is picked out as a scout with a particular skill (running). All the crew return to the ship and more to the point they are specifically rescued by Odysseus. The fact that they are not mentioned again indicates to me that the crewmembers recovered (which is needed if their "rescue" is to be worth anything). The lotus are not fatal either.
What this tells us is not that 2001 isn't based on the Odyssey but that it is loosely inspired by it.
Unfortunately Wheat needs the trailing of events in what might be called the "source material" to be very close-to the point where Dave's buring his hand on the food is symbolic for events in the sacking of Ismarus (figurative events at that) and a space pod having a passing resembance to an insect is a parallel to the launching of 1000 ships to reclaim Helen of Troy!
What we have here is a classic example of the fact that if you pick, choose, and stretch your evidence you can find parallels of all sorts of things in a story. Particularly if the story does actually draw some elements or make references to the material inquestion.
The wooden horse anagram (not subtle, just weak) is the work of a mind overly devoted to a theory as is Frank Poole's non-anagram where Wheat actually admits that he started off looking for an anagram which meant something like "rope dancer" and that he never found one ("Frank Poole is what I call a 90 percent anagram". Yeah - and what the rest of us call "not an anagram") .
The Nietzsche stuff is mindless. Once more we're required to believe that 2001's following of TSZ is so close that the reason the pod sneaks up behind Frank is not so that he can't see it but because we're following a detailed piece of symbolism. Well, if it were that close, why does the pod not jump over Frank and the knock him off?
Wheat happily chooses when the symbolism is tight and when it is "subtle" to match his line. The Nietzsche parallel in 2001, like the Odyssey parallel, is there in the journey of Dave from man to superman but the details are in Wheat's head.
If who have seen Kubrick at work you will know how often he changed his mind about things and their meanings (that's why AI didn't get made while he was alive). The possibility that he constructed this complex and subtle web of symbolism and carried it through to completion simply isn't like him.
Plus, of course, we ignore the contribution of everyone else: Clarke, obviously, but also Wally Veevers and Douglas Trumbull who's input into the phyical aspects of the Discovery were huge and generally unrelated to bathroom floors. Were they all symbol-nuts too?
Next on the list of "things to ignore" are the physics: where exactly should a rocket have it's exhausts? Probably at the back. If you wanted to spin a space station to get artificial gravity how would ships dock? In the middle where there is no gravity and it's a lot easier generally (assuming the docking craft wears a condom, I suppose!).
And finally, because I need to go to bed, why 2001? Well, it could be that it's a reference to Zoraster returning in 9001 but it seems more likely that it's because in 1968 that seemed a looong way in the future but within the audience's possible life times and Clarke is intelligent to know that the new millenium started in 2001, not in 2000. So the connection with Zoraster is simply that both knew that milleniums start on the '01.
This sort of thing is fun to play with but given enough effort I imagine someone like Wheat could find more similarities between The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T and TSZ than he has for 2001.
TWW
AND... I had family that worked on the Titanic, I was born in Belfast and the story of the ship was taught in schools and survivors appeared on local TV from time to time. In all of that NOONE ever called the damn thing "Titanic" - it's "The Titanic".
TWW
On the other hand, the problem with the corruption that now runs through the whole ICANN system is not such a big deal with numbers. Look at the assignment of IP addresses: no trademark issues means no lawyers and no big profits so it works.
The real problem with the current system is not the system - it's the value of the names themselves. Numbers have a lot less intrinsic value. That's why I'm not too worried about centralised control. It would be better if it was decentralised but I don't think it has to be.
TWW
It is this which dooms it to a slow death at the hands of the world's trademark lawyers. I know it's hard to move away from something so attractive but it is unsustainable in the long run.
(minor quibble: 1.2.3.4 is a valid IP address, so it can't also be a domain name without confusion.)
Yes, the system would have to use a different separator character to work properly in association with IPs. On the other hand, this would undermine the possibility of using current versions of Bind with it. Hmmm
To solve the second problem, we have to have some sort of listing service
Yes, that's what I was driving at when I was talking about the telephone directory. Given a numerical system then this is the only way forward.
TWW
Mostly they had nothing positive to say, such as alternatives. Anyone who is arguing that the current system should be left alone is being stupid in my book.
Search engines don't work!
DNS doesn't work! I''ll not bother saying it again.
You want to buy a spark plug on the net. Do you go to sparkplug.co.uk (or .com etc)? Well you can but chances are slim that it will be any use to you. The domain names are very limited in usefulness as ways of finding things in themselves, particularly when they are applied globally. Saying that search engines don't work is ignoring the fact that they work better than relying on the domain name to find what you want.
If enough of the ISPs start to use alternate roots (and new.net has signed up some already, not to mention that ORSC and Pacific Root have been around for years)
Big deal. There are too many alt--roots and if any of them get popular it's ten minutes work for VS to kill them by adding their popular TLDs to the "real" DNS. Instant death. The fact that they've been around for years and have had zero impact indicates how little interest there is in buying a domain name that will be shat on by VS as soon as it looks valuable.
The attraction of numbers is that there isn't any big money in it for VS to be tempted and if we have a UNITED alt-root system there is a better chance of getting enough momentum up to start getting it installed as part of default settings. Who should RedHat or SUSE include in their DNS systems at the moment beyond the standard roots? Why would they pick any of them over the others?
Current attempts at alt-roots are doomed to failure because they are simply repeating the mistakes that are destroying the original root system.
TWW
As to the AOL effect, my experience is that most such users actually DON'T use the DNS system at all! They enter a site name in the search field and click on the result. Looking through our access logs at work reveals many people who "found" us by entering our URL into a search engine. These people would not even notice the change.
TWW
I've suggested this before and got loads of stupid replies as to why it wuldn't work (not many about what would, though) but I'm going to do it again:
Get rid of alphabetical domain names.
Every problem we have with the bastards at NS/VS comes from the fact that names are valuable. Numbers aren't (in the vast number of cases).
I have been reliably informed that the current version of Bind will accept numerical domain names (e.g., 1.293.1)
Someone (VA, Linus, FSF? Anyone!) set up a single new root server and start selling off the "numerical roots" starting at 1 , 2, 3 etc. If you buy a numerical root you can sell or use the subdomains 1.1, 2.1,.3.1 etc... for whatever charge you want.
How would you find sites? Use a search engine! Or start a new type of search engine bsaed on normal telephone books. In fact, if you can use a telephone system without keying in letters, why should a web based on the same idea be so hard to use?
No letters means no trademarks, no trademarks means no stupid squatting or bullying by large companies.
No letters means local companies are not at a disadvantage (Mr McDonald's electricity shop appears on the search engine beside Ronald's dead cow emporium and you simply click on the one you actually wanted).
With the roots all being numerical there is no danger of VeriShit ever duplicating the system (no money in it for a start) and taking it over, which is the reason alternative roots will NEVER work. If I set up .bit and VS start one up too, who's going to win?
We have to do this or the web will be taken from us.
If someone has a rational reason why this would be worse than letting things carry on as they are, I'd be surprised and interested in their argument.
Names were good when the net was small but they are strangling it now.
This would initally only work in the Bind-world but it would work with very little effort from the users (yet another killer for many alt-root systems) and we could build up some momentium until one day M$ has to add the new root to their software.
ICANN's only purpose is to keep everyone focused on "fixing" the current system by adding more pointless root domains and finding ways to abuse the ccTLDs. Forget that: the current system is NOT fixable.
TWW
TWW