Speaking of which, two/8s were just allocated to the APNIC RIR tonight. Take a look at the/8s that have been allocated this year. For the first time ever, the number of IP addresses allocated to RIRs now exceeds the total number of IP addresses remaining, meaning the number of IPs in the IANA pool has dropped by more than 50% this year, and 2010 is not actually over yet.
.. and we've run out of ipv4 addresses "in about a year" for the last decade or so..
Maybe you've been listening to too many different people's "one year" predictions too much, at different times, or something.
However, the potaroo IPv4 report has been very consistent with the Jun-Jul 2011 IANA exhaustion prediction and Spring 2012 RIR exchaustion prediction. In 2010 it has predicted those dates, back in 2009 and 2008, it was still predicting 2011
Your contention that the runout date is always being moved to "next year" does not hold water.
It doesn't account for availability and/or sustainability, and was never intended to do so.
When availability is significantly reduced, the price increases.
The second law of thermodynamics already has informed us that nothing is indefinitely sustainable, because entropy never decreases, and there is no such thing as 100% efficiency.
But as availability is reduced, supply is proportionally reduced, leading to gradual increase in price, which applies pressure, for industry and consumers of the resource to become more efficient, so they improve their financial outlook.
As efficiency increases, demand is reduced, and the duration of temporary sustainability is extended, possibly by orders of magnitude in duration.
I'll agree that it's generally going to be a better decision to go with the manufactured PC.
But not because it's cheaper... but that it costs
approximately the same, for sufficiently large enough numbers of PCs, and you probably get even better volume discounts if you're a large Enterprise buying in bulk.
When there's no significant percentage up front + support savings to be made by building in-house, in the best case, you have to ask "Is the risk worth it"?
There is a risk that something costly goes wrong; if you are building the PCs yourselves, you have nobody to sue a year later, when you discover a systemic failure in your workstations, resulting from your own employees' mistakes.
By outsourcing the risk to an outside vendor, some of the most likely, most expensive problems a PC can have are another company's problem to diag and fix.
AND the outside company has expertise to do that quickly and efficiently.
Allowing you and your staff to concentrate on things more critical and specific to your actual business.
A lot of distractions are removed from your IT department, not having to actually build PCs, which simplifies reporting and accounting, and enables greater internal efficiencies.
It takes some time to put together an initial PC and make sure everything works on it; no wonky printer drivers or something bizarre.
You can use a vendor who specializes in this to handle building an initial PC.
There are actually vendors who use white box hardware and can assemble an initial PC for you.
It's kind of a mess, and IMO doesn't scale very well to large deployments; you have problems with availability of parts you need in large enough quantities at unpredictable times in the future.
It then takes time to get the parts in. It takes time to get the PCs assembled and properly patched and flashed.
You just do that once with the initial PC.
Make sure all successive ones are identical to one of your 'prototypical hardware' configs,
then you simply image them, and apply the proper license codes.
Identical can get a bit hairy, in regards to hardware revision numbers, and new firmware releases; especially since you won't have a standard tool to maintain/update all firmware on the system, like you would with a Dell.
Document all the internal parts and serial numbers (you could skip this step, but then you would be a lousy IT manager).
You use software to capture any serial numbers that need recorded in your CMDB.
If you assemble and maintain your PCs in-house, you will have to pay US wages and benefits. You will need to maintain parts in inventory. You will need to hire someone to keep your home-brewed systems in repair. All of this costs money.
Management of a large corporation might go for that, if they perceive their IT/helpdesk people are a little underworked, or can do more, and they can order them to assemble or repair PCs while they're sitting around relaxing, otherwise just looking at graphs, waiting for a call to come in.
More people won't be hired, so in reality, there isn't a cost born to the large company.
In reality, the Salaried IT workers will just be expected to keep working until late at night, until they get their added quota of PC assembly jobs done, with no extra wages for that.
If they didn't manage to do it during the day at the same time they were answering calls, big corp must managers conclude the IT people were lazy.
If anyone of them was seen taking their 30 min break or eating Lunch at lunch time, that would be further evidence that they're underworked.
In this manner, the extra "costs" can be externalized, so the company itself doesn't incur them, and the workers incur them instead, this results in net savings to the company from buying the cheaper hardware
And is a win-win for the shareholders, and therefore the CEO and all the Managers involved can expect a big nice bonus for getting IT to work more efficiently.
In short: whether it can be a "savings" to the company or not, depends on the company, their size, and how much they know/care about IT workers and their morale.
You are not accounting for IT administration costs. Loss of ability to use Dell (or other corporate PC manufacturer's) central management and support tools.
Difficulty (or impossibility) of finding reliable replacement hardware.
Lack of professional QA in regards to workstation configurations.
Proliferation of new workstation configurations, leading to inability to have a 'standard image' supporting hardware in all workstations,
when every time you need a replacement, you are buying the cheapest generic parts that just happen to be available at the time replacement is needed.
The moment you try to start standardizing hardware in these "generic" workstations, you will quickly find that availability of exactly the same part is non-existent,
as the generic part you used 3 months ago is now discontinued, etc, etc.
At least by using mass-produced workstation models, you are assured of being able to continue to buy identical or near-identical hardware in the future to minimize new compatibility or stability issues.
You'll never be able to build and support hardware while maintaining your current net profits.
That's a pretty bold, outlandish claim to make without specific knowledge of the OP's organization, what resources are available, and how they are used.
What is your evidence to support that assertion that he'll never be able to do it?
Oh, well as long as you're being completely irrational about it, it doesn't matter.
There's nothing irrational about it at all.
Given the rate of expansion of the universe, there are only a very small number of galaxies that communication with could be measured in quantities smaller than billions of years.
How about they shorten it to LOffice, and make it short for Less office?
As in, how about a non-bloated Office suite that is still capable of doing anything anyone really needs (with the right AddOn at least, as in the Mozilla approach)...
I think we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
The same thing was about 32-bits for an IP address and 16 bits for an AS number... look where that got us?
The problem is sometimes, if you don't build the bridge, by the time you want to build it, the shore's all used up, or people constructed something else with the materials. In any case, it takes a long time to change these sorts of things, so you need to start early, as soon as you can anticipate the need.
Once your train "gets close enough to the bridge where you notice there is no bridge" its massive momentum will send you hurling into the water (or lava), at such a fast speed, that there is simply not enough time to physically be able to build that bridge in time to even apply the brakes safely, let-alone prevent the ensuing chaos.
mysidia, if you're going to challenge the multiplication of a number by 10, then we have a long way to the end of the proof.
A proof is something that takes propositions and applies well-define axioms to prove the claimed result.
Not something that arrives at a right conclusion through coincidence.
Integer and rational number multiplication is well-defined. The result of multiplying a repeating decimal, which is an infinite sequence is more complicated, and not obviously defined, particularly if you need to establish such basic things as 0.999... = 1.
So what axiom allows you to say 10 * 0.999.. = 9.999 without effecting the convergence of the fractional portion... ?
The proof leaves open the question to the reader of how do you arrive at an idea for a normally undefined operation of multiplication of a repeating decimal representation?
E.g. what tells you that you can take
10 * ( 9 / 10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 + 9/10000 + )...
and get
( 90 / 10 + 90/100 + 90/1000 + 90/10000 +.... )
Of course there is a rule that allows this in some circumstances, but the proof has not stated one of the conditions that allows it.
You're also going to have to give up on using 2-letter galaxy codes to differentiate between more than 100 billion galaxies.
I'm assuming only a small number of galaxies will be populated and need internet communications; the milkyway only has a very small number of immediately neighboring galaxies, that would have any chance at all of ever communicating with ours.
I assume that once more than a few star systems are populated, each astronomical body will be expanded to its full name instead of ".E" one letter for earth.
I admit it's rather Terracentric of me to concentrate on planetary and other astronomical bodies in our local solar system by giving them one-letter or two-letter monikers, but I think it's justifiable.
And I assume the '.MW.' would be omitted by most people, or trated as implicit (relying on their local resolver's domain suffix qualification to append the.MW.), just like the "." is often forgotten or ignored at the end of domain names, when typing a domain such as http://slashdot.org./ into your web browser.
The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures."
This is like calling gun movies where actors fire off blanks "Five times hollywood firms almost massacred their staff."
As a demonstration that gun movies should not be allowed to be made.
If the US was not handling things properly and carefully, there would be no concept of Arming the weapon.
Everything would simply be always armed.
This concept of 'arming' and 'disarming' is a special protection measure designed to prevent accidental activation, and the measure did exactly what it's supposed to do.
Show me a case where a plane crashed with an armed weapon over friendly or neutral area, and i'll agree with you, maybe.
Hell... show me a case where a plane flew over friendly airspace with a nuke armed, and i'll agree with you about incompetence.
The internet domain name system needs to be re-parented; it's too short sighted and will be quickly obsoleted once we need to interact with aliens, space stations, or colonies on other planets.
All the existing TLDs should be moved to thid-level domains under.GL.E.MW. (GL for ground level, E for Earth, MW for Milky-Way Galaxy)
That will provide for proper DNS hierarchy when stations on other planets need to communicate, for example....
WWW.GOOGLE.GSO15.MA.MW.
Referring to a Google site local to the internet community in geosynchronous orbit conduit #15 around Mars
if you take the "less than 100" literally, $49 is almost 2x $25. i dont' know much about renting a plane, but going by what you said, it actually IS POSSIBLE to get one for $75.
I don't think so. Rental rates from a reputable company start around $120 per hour the plane is running as indicated by the Hobbs meter, more if fuel is included in the price of the rental, of course.
This does not include a pilot.
The idea you might in theory get less is predicated on finding some person or company willing to make a special deal to rent their plane out, rather than a rental company.
It's kind of like saying "You're not going to be able to rent a car and drive across the state in it, for less than $50 a day."
Well, technically, you can, if you're willing to walk to the poorest part of down, and find the
guy with a $500 1980s-era vehicle that has more dents in it than a piece of used aluminum foil, and make a special deal.
It's worth noting, however, that even if you do that, you still have to pay for a driver, and you still have to buy the fuel for it
No renter in their right mind will provide and allow you to use fuel without charging the cost.
It's very easy to fall in love with this girl once you're on her.
There, fixed it for you.
Although I suppose it's possible you were talking about drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, candy, or pizza.
Some people call those things 'stuff'
But surely one doesn't really fall in love with a million dollar box that will be worth $100 in 5 years.
And your computer apps will adjust to the storage capabilities of your solid-state storage and require yet even more performance at even higher capacities.
You can probably get a plane and a pilot for less than 100 an hour.
Eh? Even if you dig for the lowest of the low, novice pilots you are paying the pilot $25 an hour, more unless they are your employee, which doesn't include things like plane, fuel, or insurance. Current typical airplane fuel costs are $5 [minimum] per gallon.
If flying even the lightest turboprop imaginable, this still will consumes approximately 7 gallons of fuel per hour, probably more by the time they've gotten all their various computer equipment and cameras on board for mapping.
All said and done, a minimum $50 for fuel + $25 pilot = $75.
Unless the plane is a 30 year old death trap, it's unlikely its owner will rent it to you for a mere $25 an hour.
It might be cheaper to just buy/license the media from some other company who already got that particular footage, or buy the assets from the company when they're having a fire sale / liquidation.
The idea that pictures over such a small area were taken from an aircraft is both simpler and more likely than a drone, a new technology that Google might (or might not) have plans to use to take pictures for Gmaps.
In this case however, it's as if all the big ISPs and mail providers implement the RBLS.
And the RBLs don't have any firm listing policies that are agreed upon by everyone, that warrant blackholing.
The RBLs list entities suspected of a crime like semding span, the accepted use.
However, later on, after everyone's using it, they start listing some people that didn't send spam, but actually, it's in the interests of the RBL operator that they be listed. For example, perhaps they were found sending an opt-in newsletter that contained articles critical of the RBL, or revealed information leaked by an insider.
Big ISPs implement the blocks indicated by RBL. Big ISPs shrug their shoulders, don't admit any responsibility due to what RBL listed.
RBL when questioned shrugs their shoulders... "it's just a watch list" "we don't force anyone to block what we list"
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of which, two /8s were just allocated to the APNIC RIR tonight. Take a look at the /8s that have been allocated this year. For the first time ever, the number of IP addresses allocated to RIRs now exceeds the total number of IP addresses remaining, meaning the number of IPs in the IANA pool has dropped by more than 50% this year, and 2010 is not actually over yet.
Maybe you've been listening to too many different people's "one year" predictions too much, at different times, or something. However, the potaroo IPv4 report has been very consistent with the Jun-Jul 2011 IANA exhaustion prediction and Spring 2012 RIR exchaustion prediction. In 2010 it has predicted those dates, back in 2009 and 2008, it was still predicting 2011
Your contention that the runout date is always being moved to "next year" does not hold water.
Result: the heat created by the humans is at most 0.04% of what the Earth dissipates into space naturally
I wonder if this takes into account the heat produced by the human population's biological processes, such as digestion of food.
And heat produced by biological processes of pets and livestock farmed to feed humans
It doesn't account for availability and/or sustainability, and was never intended to do so.
When availability is significantly reduced, the price increases.
The second law of thermodynamics already has informed us that nothing is indefinitely sustainable, because entropy never decreases, and there is no such thing as 100% efficiency.
But as availability is reduced, supply is proportionally reduced, leading to gradual increase in price, which applies pressure, for industry and consumers of the resource to become more efficient, so they improve their financial outlook.
As efficiency increases, demand is reduced, and the duration of temporary sustainability is extended, possibly by orders of magnitude in duration.
It should hopefully prevent them from being arrested on trumped up charges of pirating $200 USD OSes, $400 USD Office Software.
I'll agree that it's generally going to be a better decision to go with the manufactured PC.
But not because it's cheaper... but that it costs approximately the same, for sufficiently large enough numbers of PCs, and you probably get even better volume discounts if you're a large Enterprise buying in bulk.
When there's no significant percentage up front + support savings to be made by building in-house, in the best case, you have to ask "Is the risk worth it"?
There is a risk that something costly goes wrong; if you are building the PCs yourselves, you have nobody to sue a year later, when you discover a systemic failure in your workstations, resulting from your own employees' mistakes.
By outsourcing the risk to an outside vendor, some of the most likely, most expensive problems a PC can have are another company's problem to diag and fix.
AND the outside company has expertise to do that quickly and efficiently.
Allowing you and your staff to concentrate on things more critical and specific to your actual business.
A lot of distractions are removed from your IT department, not having to actually build PCs, which simplifies reporting and accounting, and enables greater internal efficiencies.
It takes some time to put together an initial PC and make sure everything works on it; no wonky printer drivers or something bizarre.
You can use a vendor who specializes in this to handle building an initial PC. There are actually vendors who use white box hardware and can assemble an initial PC for you.
It's kind of a mess, and IMO doesn't scale very well to large deployments; you have problems with availability of parts you need in large enough quantities at unpredictable times in the future.
It then takes time to get the parts in. It takes time to get the PCs assembled and properly patched and flashed.
You just do that once with the initial PC. Make sure all successive ones are identical to one of your 'prototypical hardware' configs, then you simply image them, and apply the proper license codes.
Identical can get a bit hairy, in regards to hardware revision numbers, and new firmware releases; especially since you won't have a standard tool to maintain/update all firmware on the system, like you would with a Dell.
Document all the internal parts and serial numbers (you could skip this step, but then you would be a lousy IT manager).
You use software to capture any serial numbers that need recorded in your CMDB.
If you assemble and maintain your PCs in-house, you will have to pay US wages and benefits. You will need to maintain parts in inventory. You will need to hire someone to keep your home-brewed systems in repair. All of this costs money.
Management of a large corporation might go for that, if they perceive their IT/helpdesk people are a little underworked, or can do more, and they can order them to assemble or repair PCs while they're sitting around relaxing, otherwise just looking at graphs, waiting for a call to come in.
More people won't be hired, so in reality, there isn't a cost born to the large company.
In reality, the Salaried IT workers will just be expected to keep working until late at night, until they get their added quota of PC assembly jobs done, with no extra wages for that. If they didn't manage to do it during the day at the same time they were answering calls, big corp must managers conclude the IT people were lazy. If anyone of them was seen taking their 30 min break or eating Lunch at lunch time, that would be further evidence that they're underworked.
In this manner, the extra "costs" can be externalized, so the company itself doesn't incur them, and the workers incur them instead, this results in net savings to the company from buying the cheaper hardware
And is a win-win for the shareholders, and therefore the CEO and all the Managers involved can expect a big nice bonus for getting IT to work more efficiently.
In short: whether it can be a "savings" to the company or not, depends on the company, their size, and how much they know/care about IT workers and their morale.
You are not accounting for IT administration costs. Loss of ability to use Dell (or other corporate PC manufacturer's) central management and support tools.
Difficulty (or impossibility) of finding reliable replacement hardware.
Lack of professional QA in regards to workstation configurations.
Proliferation of new workstation configurations, leading to inability to have a 'standard image' supporting hardware in all workstations, when every time you need a replacement, you are buying the cheapest generic parts that just happen to be available at the time replacement is needed.
The moment you try to start standardizing hardware in these "generic" workstations, you will quickly find that availability of exactly the same part is non-existent, as the generic part you used 3 months ago is now discontinued, etc, etc.
At least by using mass-produced workstation models, you are assured of being able to continue to buy identical or near-identical hardware in the future to minimize new compatibility or stability issues.
You'll never be able to build and support hardware while maintaining your current net profits.
That's a pretty bold, outlandish claim to make without specific knowledge of the OP's organization, what resources are available, and how they are used.
What is your evidence to support that assertion that he'll never be able to do it?
Oh, well as long as you're being completely irrational about it, it doesn't matter.
There's nothing irrational about it at all. Given the rate of expansion of the universe, there are only a very small number of galaxies that communication with could be measured in quantities smaller than billions of years.
How about they shorten it to LOffice, and make it short for Less office? As in, how about a non-bloated Office suite that is still capable of doing anything anyone really needs (with the right AddOn at least, as in the Mozilla approach)...
I think we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
The same thing was about 32-bits for an IP address and 16 bits for an AS number... look where that got us?
The problem is sometimes, if you don't build the bridge, by the time you want to build it, the shore's all used up, or people constructed something else with the materials. In any case, it takes a long time to change these sorts of things, so you need to start early, as soon as you can anticipate the need.
Once your train "gets close enough to the bridge where you notice there is no bridge" its massive momentum will send you hurling into the water (or lava), at such a fast speed, that there is simply not enough time to physically be able to build that bridge in time to even apply the brakes safely, let-alone prevent the ensuing chaos.
mysidia, if you're going to challenge the multiplication of a number by 10, then we have a long way to the end of the proof.
A proof is something that takes propositions and applies well-define axioms to prove the claimed result. Not something that arrives at a right conclusion through coincidence.
Integer and rational number multiplication is well-defined. The result of multiplying a repeating decimal, which is an infinite sequence is more complicated, and not obviously defined, particularly if you need to establish such basic things as 0.999... = 1.
So what axiom allows you to say 10 * 0.999.. = 9.999 without effecting the convergence of the fractional portion... ?
The proof leaves open the question to the reader of how do you arrive at an idea for a normally undefined operation of multiplication of a repeating decimal representation?
E.g. what tells you that you can take
10 * ( 9 / 10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 + 9/10000 + )...
and get ( 90 / 10 + 90/100 + 90/1000 + 90/10000 + .... )
Of course there is a rule that allows this in some circumstances, but the proof has not stated one of the conditions that allows it.
You're also going to have to give up on using 2-letter galaxy codes to differentiate between more than 100 billion galaxies.
I'm assuming only a small number of galaxies will be populated and need internet communications; the milkyway only has a very small number of immediately neighboring galaxies, that would have any chance at all of ever communicating with ours.
I assume that once more than a few star systems are populated, each astronomical body will be expanded to its full name instead of ".E" one letter for earth.
I admit it's rather Terracentric of me to concentrate on planetary and other astronomical bodies in our local solar system by giving them one-letter or two-letter monikers, but I think it's justifiable.
And I assume the '.MW.' would be omitted by most people, or trated as implicit (relying on their local resolver's domain suffix qualification to append the .MW.), just like the "." is often forgotten or ignored at the end of domain names, when typing a domain such as http://slashdot.org./ into your web browser.
The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures."
This is like calling gun movies where actors fire off blanks "Five times hollywood firms almost massacred their staff." As a demonstration that gun movies should not be allowed to be made.
If the US was not handling things properly and carefully, there would be no concept of Arming the weapon. Everything would simply be always armed.
This concept of 'arming' and 'disarming' is a special protection measure designed to prevent accidental activation, and the measure did exactly what it's supposed to do.
Show me a case where a plane crashed with an armed weapon over friendly or neutral area, and i'll agree with you, maybe.
Hell... show me a case where a plane flew over friendly airspace with a nuke armed, and i'll agree with you about incompetence.
This article shows neither.
You have a problem with making Persian the one language used by the whole world?
Approval of Unicode 1F4A9 as a TLD
The internet domain name system needs to be re-parented; it's too short sighted and will be quickly obsoleted once we need to interact with aliens, space stations, or colonies on other planets.
All the existing TLDs should be moved to thid-level domains under .GL.E.MW. (GL for ground level, E for Earth, MW for Milky-Way Galaxy)
That will provide for proper DNS hierarchy when stations on other planets need to communicate, for example....
WWW.GOOGLE.GSO15.MA.MW. Referring to a Google site local to the internet community in geosynchronous orbit conduit #15 around Mars
I tried to post it in a comment. But it seems one of those things that couldn't handle Unicode entry is the comment form on slashdot... Anyways:
try this
if you take the "less than 100" literally, $49 is almost 2x $25. i dont' know much about renting a plane, but going by what you said, it actually IS POSSIBLE to get one for $75.
I don't think so. Rental rates from a reputable company start around $120 per hour the plane is running as indicated by the Hobbs meter, more if fuel is included in the price of the rental, of course. This does not include a pilot.
The idea you might in theory get less is predicated on finding some person or company willing to make a special deal to rent their plane out, rather than a rental company.
It's kind of like saying "You're not going to be able to rent a car and drive across the state in it, for less than $50 a day."
Well, technically, you can, if you're willing to walk to the poorest part of down, and find the guy with a $500 1980s-era vehicle that has more dents in it than a piece of used aluminum foil, and make a special deal.
It's worth noting, however, that even if you do that, you still have to pay for a driver, and you still have to buy the fuel for it
No renter in their right mind will provide and allow you to use fuel without charging the cost.
It's very easy to fall in love with this girl once you're on her.
There, fixed it for you.
Although I suppose it's possible you were talking about drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, candy, or pizza. Some people call those things 'stuff'
But surely one doesn't really fall in love with a million dollar box that will be worth $100 in 5 years.
And your computer apps will adjust to the storage capabilities of your solid-state storage and require yet even more performance at even higher capacities.
Ooops... back to mechanical disks.
What, you haven't heard of C-x M-c butterfly ?
I'm not sure what the astronomical equivalent to that is, but i'm sure there's a command in Emacs for it.
You can probably get a plane and a pilot for less than 100 an hour.
Eh? Even if you dig for the lowest of the low, novice pilots you are paying the pilot $25 an hour, more unless they are your employee, which doesn't include things like plane, fuel, or insurance. Current typical airplane fuel costs are $5 [minimum] per gallon.
If flying even the lightest turboprop imaginable, this still will consumes approximately 7 gallons of fuel per hour, probably more by the time they've gotten all their various computer equipment and cameras on board for mapping.
All said and done, a minimum $50 for fuel + $25 pilot = $75.
Unless the plane is a 30 year old death trap, it's unlikely its owner will rent it to you for a mere $25 an hour.
It might be cheaper to just buy/license the media from some other company who already got that particular footage, or buy the assets from the company when they're having a fire sale / liquidation.
The idea that pictures over such a small area were taken from an aircraft is both simpler and more likely than a drone, a new technology that Google might (or might not) have plans to use to take pictures for Gmaps.
In this case however, it's as if all the big ISPs and mail providers implement the RBLS.
And the RBLs don't have any firm listing policies that are agreed upon by everyone, that warrant blackholing.
The RBLs list entities suspected of a crime like semding span, the accepted use.
However, later on, after everyone's using it, they start listing some people that didn't send spam, but actually, it's in the interests of the RBL operator that they be listed. For example, perhaps they were found sending an opt-in newsletter that contained articles critical of the RBL, or revealed information leaked by an insider.
Big ISPs implement the blocks indicated by RBL. Big ISPs shrug their shoulders, don't admit any responsibility due to what RBL listed.
RBL when questioned shrugs their shoulders... "it's just a watch list" "we don't force anyone to block what we list"
The USG put them on their watchlist. Moneybookers, not the US gov't, closed the account. This is all on Moneybookers.
Australia blacklists about anything that moves