Many people feel they have a sufficient quality of life until long after they would need assistance to commit suicide. Sir Pterry could do it right now, but almost certainly doesn't want to because as long as he *can* he does not need to.
In the UK there was a prominent case where a woman went to court to try to get a guarantee that her husband would not be prosecuted if he travelled with her to the Dignitas clinic - just to be there and to hold her hand and say goodbye. This is "teh government" affecting people's decisions in a very real way.
Nope - there are two pressing problems with IPv4: Address exhaustion and routing table explosion. IPv6 fixes one of them and helps with the other (if there was a solution to multihoming that was neater than SHIM6 and didn't require BGP then it would have completely fixed the routing table growth, but you can't have everything.)
And there's the same problem with nobody buying the IPv4 2.0 kit because nobody uses IPv4 2.0 And it doesn't have the built in cool stuff which nobody has worked out that they want yet (Mobile IPv6 + ubiquitous IPSec means no more half-arsed VPN software - hooray!)
And who wants the knowledge base to stay the same? If there's a better way to do things, lets do it!
Quite a large number of providers have been enabling IPv6 over the last couple of months[1] - depending on the infrastructure in the DSL network and commercial pressures on your ISP the change may happen surprisingly quickly.
Isn't IPv4 a subset of IPv6? So it shouldn't matter if my home router or modem is compatible, if the changeover is done properly. My ISP would do the equivalent of NAT routing with my IPv4 address being part of the IPv6 address the ISP sends out to the world.
Nope - IPv6 and IPv4 are essentially two similar, but distinct, protocols. This is why the transition is not a trivial thing to do.
Clearly, you've never heard of Multicast DNS which is convenient for IPv4 networks as well as IPv6 ones. If you must use an IPv6 address to access a device on your local network, you can also use a link-local address which is at least as easy to remember as an IPv4 one.
Or the totally simple approach: say that your IPv6 range is 2001:db8:0:1::/64 You want to FTP something from a laptop with an FTP server which has an address of 2001:db8:0:1:747f:698f:adf7:fd83, but that's too hard to remember.
So add an IP address of 2001:db8:0:1::21 to your laptop. Do the transfer, remove the address. Easy!
FWIW, I'd vote it as somewhat off-topic. That said...
You do know that television and other technology are reasonably successful in some countries where CAFR funding doesn't apply, don't you? That the FCC don't regulate in the vast majority of the world? That it's not wind that causes TV signals to flutter? I could go on...
Oh, that sarcasm tag was really necessary. There is no way anybody could have guessed that you were being sarcastic with that post if you hadn't included that.
TFA phrases things slightly differently and makes it clear that DeForest was *an* inventor who criticised TV, not the inventor of TV as the summary suggests.
Also, Philo Farnsworth probably deserves more credit that John Logie Baird for the TV we know and... erm... know today.
What kind of firewalls can't use names? All of the systems I've used in the last 5-10 years support some form of aliasing IPs to names - although they don't do it using DNS lookups because that would be an attack vector.
I'm no expert here, but I'd say: 1) To talk to a satellite requires a reasonable amount of radiated signal. This means either quite high power or quite big antennas - which may or may not be ideal depending on the nature of the disaster (it *can* be done with about 10W and a handheld antenna, but that doesn't mean that every ground station is going to be in a position to do that.) A low earth orbit sat would be over 100 miles away and if you are using it to talk to anybody closer than that then it will be more power efficient to do it directly. Power efficiency could be critical if there is no mains electricity, and the savings to talk to someone 10 miles away would be huge (several dB less would be required for the same signal...) 2) As I understand it, the geostationary orbit is more or less full. If you're trying to track a non-geostationary satellite then that is not a trivial thing to do, and again may be made even more difficult in a disaster. 3) You can't predict what effects a disaster is going to have. So having a plan which is basically "some folks who enjoy solving challenges will find a way for you to communicate" is a great last resort for when all your other careful plans have fallen apart for some reason.
When there's a massive infrastructure breakdown then a lack of bandwidth and speed are blips on the radar compared to being able to get a message through. A degraded infrastructure where you can still communicate (albeit with difficulty and with the communications having to go through message handlers) is better than not being able to communicate at all.
One person sees the simple method as "reboot the server"
Learning, experience and being woken up at 4am too many times teaches you that spending a couple of hours trying to find, correct and document the problem looks like an intractable, overly difficult method compared to just rebooting the server - but eventually you learn that keeping it simple sometimes means doing something complicated now to keep it simple in the future.
/64s mean that you can use the MAC address of the machine to form the host portion of the address. Setting up Router Advertisement assigned addresses is far simpler than DHCP - you tell your router to advertise it's a router on a particular interface, it tells listening hosts what its address and netmask are and they work out their own address./64s absolutely rock, and they mean that you never run into trouble because you need to expand your address space.
A system like the internet needs some sort of order and authority simply to be useful.
Let's assume that in our forked internet we want the ability to view web pages in a similar way to how we do currently - by typing an easily remembered name into a browser.
These names can either be unique - in which case there MUST be some form of authority to ensure their uniqueness - or there is no authority, therefore no guarantee of uniqueness and no way to tell if the Slashdot you are trying to visit is the Slashdot you want to visit. The same goes for IP addresses (or whatever the equivalent we use in our forked internet) and anything else where co-operation is required in order to keep things working correctly.
I'm happy to be told I'm wrong, but I can't see any technical way around the requirement to have certain parts of any network governed by a central authority.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys both fail at maths and R-ing TFA. 25,000 bitcoins were stolen. And at the exchange rate of about $20 to 1BTC, that gives... $500,000.
Sheesh, nerds today are rubbish.
You're performing for an audience? That'll be extra then!
Many people feel they have a sufficient quality of life until long after they would need assistance to commit suicide. Sir Pterry could do it right now, but almost certainly doesn't want to because as long as he *can* he does not need to.
In the UK there was a prominent case where a woman went to court to try to get a guarantee that her husband would not be prosecuted if he travelled with her to the Dignitas clinic - just to be there and to hold her hand and say goodbye. This is "teh government" affecting people's decisions in a very real way.
Which is odd, as most evil folks are monopolists.
Surely there could be a better source for this than one blog post (I know, high UID so I must be new here.)
But linking to something like http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/F16BtrfsDefaultFs or http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/149196/focus%3D149215 to lend a little authority might have been nice...
Nope - there are two pressing problems with IPv4: Address exhaustion and routing table explosion. IPv6 fixes one of them and helps with the other (if there was a solution to multihoming that was neater than SHIM6 and didn't require BGP then it would have completely fixed the routing table growth, but you can't have everything.)
And there's the same problem with nobody buying the IPv4 2.0 kit because nobody uses IPv4 2.0
And it doesn't have the built in cool stuff which nobody has worked out that they want yet (Mobile IPv6 + ubiquitous IPSec means no more half-arsed VPN software - hooray!)
And who wants the knowledge base to stay the same? If there's a better way to do things, lets do it!
Quite a large number of providers have been enabling IPv6 over the last couple of months[1] - depending on the infrastructure in the DSL network and commercial pressures on your ISP the change may happen surprisingly quickly.
[1] Source: IXP mailing lists
Isn't IPv4 a subset of IPv6? So it shouldn't matter if my home router or modem is compatible, if the changeover is done properly. My ISP would do the equivalent of NAT routing with my IPv4 address being part of the IPv6 address the ISP sends out to the world.
Nope - IPv6 and IPv4 are essentially two similar, but distinct, protocols. This is why the transition is not a trivial thing to do.
Clearly, you've never heard of Multicast DNS which is convenient for IPv4 networks as well as IPv6 ones. If you must use an IPv6 address to access a device on your local network, you can also use a link-local address which is at least as easy to remember as an IPv4 one.
Or the totally simple approach: say that your IPv6 range is 2001:db8:0:1::/64
You want to FTP something from a laptop with an FTP server which has an address of 2001:db8:0:1:747f:698f:adf7:fd83, but that's too hard to remember.
So add an IP address of 2001:db8:0:1::21 to your laptop. Do the transfer, remove the address. Easy!
Duh... it's extra craters that they made to hide the real alien crash site!
Concerned? They're just taking pre-emptive action against the zombie apocalypse!
FWIW, I'd vote it as somewhat off-topic. That said...
You do know that television and other technology are reasonably successful in some countries where CAFR funding doesn't apply, don't you? That the FCC don't regulate in the vast majority of the world? That it's not wind that causes TV signals to flutter? I could go on...
Oh, that sarcasm tag was really necessary. There is no way anybody could have guessed that you were being sarcastic with that post if you hadn't included that.
TFA phrases things slightly differently and makes it clear that DeForest was *an* inventor who criticised TV, not the inventor of TV as the summary suggests.
Also, Philo Farnsworth probably deserves more credit that John Logie Baird for the TV we know and... erm... know today.
What kind of firewalls can't use names?
All of the systems I've used in the last 5-10 years support some form of aliasing IPs to names - although they don't do it using DNS lookups because that would be an attack vector.
I don't think there's a lot which can be meaningfully said, but my thoughts are with any /.ers who are affected by this.
I'm no expert here, but I'd say:
1) To talk to a satellite requires a reasonable amount of radiated signal. This means either quite high power or quite big antennas - which may or may not be ideal depending on the nature of the disaster (it *can* be done with about 10W and a handheld antenna, but that doesn't mean that every ground station is going to be in a position to do that.) A low earth orbit sat would be over 100 miles away and if you are using it to talk to anybody closer than that then it will be more power efficient to do it directly. Power efficiency could be critical if there is no mains electricity, and the savings to talk to someone 10 miles away would be huge (several dB less would be required for the same signal...)
2) As I understand it, the geostationary orbit is more or less full. If you're trying to track a non-geostationary satellite then that is not a trivial thing to do, and again may be made even more difficult in a disaster.
3) You can't predict what effects a disaster is going to have. So having a plan which is basically "some folks who enjoy solving challenges will find a way for you to communicate" is a great last resort for when all your other careful plans have fallen apart for some reason.
When there's a massive infrastructure breakdown then a lack of bandwidth and speed are blips on the radar compared to being able to get a message through. A degraded infrastructure where you can still communicate (albeit with difficulty and with the communications having to go through message handlers) is better than not being able to communicate at all.
I'm confused... are you trying to pretend to be an Australian or a pirate?
One person sees the simple method as "reboot the server"
Learning, experience and being woken up at 4am too many times teaches you that spending a couple of hours trying to find, correct and document the problem looks like an intractable, overly difficult method compared to just rebooting the server - but eventually you learn that keeping it simple sometimes means doing something complicated now to keep it simple in the future.
/64s mean that you can use the MAC address of the machine to form the host portion of the address. Setting up Router Advertisement assigned addresses is far simpler than DHCP - you tell your router to advertise it's a router on a particular interface, it tells listening hosts what its address and netmask are and they work out their own address. /64s absolutely rock, and they mean that you never run into trouble because you need to expand your address space.
A bit like a marriage, then.
But with space travel.
A system like the internet needs some sort of order and authority simply to be useful.
Let's assume that in our forked internet we want the ability to view web pages in a similar way to how we do currently - by typing an easily remembered name into a browser.
These names can either be unique - in which case there MUST be some form of authority to ensure their uniqueness - or there is no authority, therefore no guarantee of uniqueness and no way to tell if the Slashdot you are trying to visit is the Slashdot you want to visit.
The same goes for IP addresses (or whatever the equivalent we use in our forked internet) and anything else where co-operation is required in order to keep things working correctly.
I'm happy to be told I'm wrong, but I can't see any technical way around the requirement to have certain parts of any network governed by a central authority.
You mean it's a DDoS of the postal service?