I've actually had a long-standing interest in the Electoral college (originating in an odd incident when I was very small, which led me to ponder it as a mathematical puzzle throughout my teen years in the late 70's). I first heard of Natapoff's work just after he testified before Congress in 1977. The "Electoral college problem" was one of those math problems I gnawed on for most of 1978-9 -- and I am very surprised to see it make a resurgence because in the years since, I realized that it makes a few very flawed assumptions which invalidate the mathematics.
First, since the article doesn't give it, here's a citation of the Natapoff article:
Natapoff, Alan; "A Mathematical One-Man One-Vote Rationale for Madisonian Presidential Voting Based on Maximum Individual Voting Power"; Public Choice; Vol. 88, No. 3-4; September, 1996; 259-273; #2722.
And here are the primary flaws:
1) It does not properly generalize to larger groups of candidates -- i.e. most of the world's 'democracies' are raucous lively pluralities that make the institutionally fossilized "two party system" (which is propped up by many paternalistic -at best- state and local laws that act to exclude or disadvantage other parties, locking the existing power structures in place.)
2) It assumes that greater volatility means greater power for the individual voter (i.e. the easier it is for a small group to alter the outcome, the more "power" the voter has, right?) In reality, volatility does not suggest fairness, in fact, it suggests quite the opposite. If small changes in voting alter the outcome, the outcome is merely more chaotic, and hence more likely to be 'unfair' (like a 'bad bounce' in sports). The once situation where small changes actually reflect a switch in overall voter intent is when the small change straddles a 50-50 split (i.e. increased sensitivity to small degrees of actual measured preference are "fair") Natapoff himself notes that direct voting is actually fairer in the case where the election is very close (e.g. 49.99% to 50.01%)
The analogy to sports is extremely misleading. First few of us ever consider the huge amount of structure, rules, and effort each professional league puts in place to prevent the "best possible team" (or two otherwise unbeatable teams, which would produce the most skilled possible game when they play against each other). Everything from the draft to the rules of the game itself are altered to make everything more mediocre -"a more even match"- where even the worst team in the league has a finite chance of beating the best.
Note that in most *non-professional* leagues, the best team stands nearly no chance of beating the best, because these balancing mechanisms are not in place. Pro leagues seek to maximize excitement and profits for all teams. Volatility is fine for entertainment, but not for any system we actually rely on. I would not throw random chaotic volatility into ANY control system (even 'fuzzy logic' systems are more defined) An election that can be swayed by a small district, in the face of a distinct national majority is like a sportscar that bounces off a pebble in the road.
Professional sports seek to maximize excitement, spread the popularity around, and increase the (real or apparent) significance of each individual game. In politics, this would correspond to rigging the game to favor every politician in the 'stable' getting a shot at election; and oppose the formation of a political dream team that the overwhelming body of voters would overwhelmingly support (i.e. "unbeatable")
It is foolish to discuss "increasing the power of the individual voter" because we must ask what the increase in power means -- it means "more power against the other voters", in some ill-defined sense. The bottom line is that ALL VOTERS SHOULD HAVE EQUAL REPRESENTATION (direct voting does this). Given that "increasing the power" of any one voter can be seen as meaningless or even undesirable
I will admit that there are many other ways to phrase this that sound very appealing (and given the tenor of the 70's, and the fact that I was a teenager, I propbably believed eevery one of them -- anything that seemed to stick it to The Powers That Be must be good.
Their first set of instructions was deceptive
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It's worth noting that the first set of instructions MS released were just a deceptive sop to the German authorities. If you followed those instructions, the defragger (and all the iles you deleted) would be automatically restored from internal backup no later than the next reboot after you deleted them.
Not that anyone would want to actually answer the original question posted in the article or anything, but WIPO has a number of resources that might help.
In fact, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) or OMPI (Organization Mondiale Proprietaire Intellectuelle - pardon my French) has recently put a lot of new materials on its website, so it's worth a second visit, even if you thought you were familiar with WIPO offerings
And finally, there's WipoNET which is gradually providing access to all the IP offices in the WIPO member nations.
When the contest was first announced (not here) my old impromptu rocket group looked into the rules, and decided against even considering a run for it [okay, we were paranoid about getting credit-- but it's a serious investment of work in a field where the "milestone that didn't count" is as common as the "one that got away" in fishing]
One of us was curious about the exact details of the CATS official payload, but could never seem to get a straight answer out of them. Obviously it is not a solid Aluminum cylinder, as one response seemed to imply (Al is 2.7 g/cc, or more than twice the density of the 100mm(r) x 200mm right cylinder specified) He joked that it was "a Semtex payload" designed to guarantee no one succeeded.
I'm sure my friend's irreverence could easily have rubbed CATS the wrong way. I am curious if anyone "more busineslike" than my friend managed to get a detailed spec from CATS.
For a drive standard to be widely adopted you have to meet both of those reasonably well. Backing up a 10 GB drive with a 100 MB ZIP is obviously a return to the problems of swapping floppies and is one reason CD-RW is picking up steam over ZIP.
Hmm... those puny little 640 MB CD-RW's harken back to "swapping floppies" a lot more than the 2 GB Iomega Jaz drives do...
Yes, CD-R's do harken to floppys -- but in a *GOOD* way: modestly inconvenient but dirt cheap.
The cheapest 2GB Jaz cartridge on Pricewatch today was $68 (the 1 GB cartridge is the same, which, in my experience, tends to suggest a faltering medium -- i.e. it suggests a weak market)
That means $340 to back up the hypothetical 10GB hard drive, at a time when a 30GB HDD hovers at about $100 (and dropping), and I think you'll agree that Jaz (or Zip) is impractical for large scale backup. It's a transport medium, not a back-up medium. Short of a catastrophic equipment failure (theft, fire, direct lighning strike, etc) multiple backups to $340 worth of HDDs (100+ GB of storage or 30+ GB of RAID) is vastly preferable to a single Jaz backup of 10GB -- and with a lot faster/more reliable recovery too!)
Compare that to the $.50 CD-RW or the $.25 CD-R (based on my most recent on-line spindle puchases) with backup costs of $7.50, or $3.75 for 10 GB.
$340 vs $3.75 -- which approximates the floppy? Which solution would you use? (especially for weekly backups!) I like the Jaz, but it priced itself out of the market. Look at their sales and market penetrance, and you'll see that this is the market consensus.
I respect Thad Starner's work, but like a lot of peopel today (especially twigs, like him), he vastly overestimates the energy in those dreaded fat grams. There are 9 "small calories" (=4.19 J)
not 9000, as he says. He's thinking of "large calories.
Quick reality check, burn a gram of fat (1/28th oz - or a fingernail-sized blob). Does he really think that this will raise the temperature of a liter (quart) of water by 9 C (16 F). Even with the inefficiencies of combustion and heating, it's clear he's a few orders of magnitude off
Please adjust his calculations accordingly when you read the article.
Was I the only one who had the same feeling at the end of Kubrick's 2001, after endless shots of Bowman's (? - it's been almost 30 years) iris, shot in various colors? (I was 9 or 10 and just getting into photography at the time, and all I
could think was that it was like some kid had
just learned about sepia and other "false-color"
printing, and was running hog-wild: "look what I
can do!" in fifty different color combos)
I imagine they took that tedious section out in later re-releases and video. It was utterly pointless. At least Solaris' tunnel scenes meant something (lo-o-ong drive)
Moreover, that might well be one of the *few* practical uses for it, due to a flaw in the underlying principle.
Pornography (in its current state) is based on the illusion of the viewer's immersion in a distant environment. The system described may handle this kind of one-way immersion someday (though perhaps on ultra-DVD ROM, rather than on-line) It would be difficult to support mutual immersion in each others environments (as opposed to limited interaction, like teledildonics), even without the bandwidth issue. In general, I think you'll find that true immersion and interactivity would "break the metaphor" of real life in too many ways to ever be useful.
I have a sneaking suspicion Miss November is quite happy she doesn't have to experience her many viewers and their environments. Mutual immersion in telecommuting is, quite possibly, just as undesirable. In the UNC experiment, the remote sites in NY and Philly couldn't percieve the lab, but if they could, it would be unuseful, at best, and confusing at worst. Which environment would they be be immersed in - their office, or the lab?
I call the currently imaginable one-way immersion "Tele-insertion" (no lewd pun intended) because it places one person in a distant environment. In the distant environment, the remote viewer, himself, should have only a limited representation. This becomes increasingly important when multiple remote streams interact with the same office - and each other. Once you make this distinction, and abandon the dream of full mutual immersion, it becomes clear that you might as well stick to video conferencing. Teleinsertion, as an end to itself, is only useful in limited settings, like hazardous environments and exploration - and even then, I woun't be holding my breath for the suitable hardware (yes, I know about all the stuff their doing at NASA, etc. -- *they* can hold their breaths if they like. Not me)
A more "practical solution" might be to build telecommuting home-office-cum-studios that resemble generic corporate office and dress office-appropriate at home (But no one wants to see you in your boxers and the piles of laundry in your bedroom; your client may fail to be charmed by your children playing their usual game of screeming meemies, chasing each other up and down the hall outside your door, wailing at the top of their lungs; and your spouse better not barge into your office, fuming, when she sees the $10K you racked up this month in teledildonics charges)
Sometimes limited interaction is a good thing.
Sometimes more realism is pointless - That's why we don't have CD-quality quadrophonic telephones.
Hey, I'm not knocking these guys. It's research - and I'd venture to say some relatively mainstream communications innovations probably came came out of the decades old (and, as of yet, fruitless) dream of 'a video phone in every house'. But on its own merits, it's hard to imagine why we'd want 'immersive environments' *except* for entertainment.
A practical application of this are new forceps used in brain surgery. A human hair is ~100-300 microns in diameter, while these forceps are ~0.6-1 microns in diameter. Brain surgens use these to hold brain neurons while performing surgery.
I think that is amazing. Just in case you were wondering what a grammar nazi knows about Materials Science, don't.
Also, don't ask what a Grammar Nazi knows about neurosurgery. "Brain surgeons" don't hold individual neurons during surgery. In fact, you would be very surprised to that common standard brain surgery tools include tongue depressors, spatulas (the tiny ones used to measure out chemicals, not the ones you use to flip burgers) and other 'blunt' devices rather than scalpels/forceps, etc. Despite its delicacy, the texture/consistency of the brain (especially as contrasted to the vascular structures within it) lends itself to certain rather unexpected techniques of manipulation.
Further, medical science is nowhere near the level of manipulating individual neurons, and it is questionable whether it would ever want to -- the brain isn't like a microchip, where a single miswired trace causes a logic unit to fail. Single neurons are not that important, and a general principle of neurosurgery is to ablate (destroy) a region, and let the brain rewire itself around it (like the Net). If specific neurons are ever targeted (in our lifetime) it will be chemically (e.g. with tailored antibodies, etc.) With 10 billion neurons (and single axons that may run a tangled path many centimeters long) -not to mention the 100 billion 'support cells'- the brain is not amenable to 'simple rewiring by hand'. Have you considered the problem of locating and manipulating, any significant number of indivdual neurons.
That is not to say that *researchers* don't often manipulate individual neurons for any number of reasons (in lab apparatus, not in patients). I'm sure that they will find a use for such micro-forceps in their work.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a neurosurgeon, but I am a physician. I was also raised by a neurosurgeon, and spent way too much of my early 20's doing things like "emptying (squid) interneurons" -- squeezing them out like toothpaste tubes, so we could perform experiments on the cell membrane.
If the RIAA is getting its cut, we have the possibility of a far more efficient system -- and far cheaper than the RIAA would ever have willingly created on its own.
1) Though you see it as "provide-for-a-fee" or "share-it-for-free", the "paid provider of user-supplied content" model has been very successful -- e.g. AOL forums/chat; subscription technical forums on the Web, etc. User-provided content is the basis of eerything from Slashdot on down. (up?)
You're actually better off with a system of client-shared files, if they are available, simply because of bandwidth considerations Would you rather send $5 to a Napster as sluggish as an over-subscribed ISP, that didn't share client files -- or one that is as responsive as today's Napster, which distributes *bandwidth demand* among its many clients?
Maybe there would end up being two levels of service: nonsharing (preferred by modem users) and sharing (preferred by those with fatter pipes) -- but I'd rather not go down *that* road. There's too much opportunity for RIAA meddling.
2) Napster could now legitmately keep a database of its own MP3s. [in addition to the logged-in clients files] This would greatly increase availability of 'rare' MP3's that aren't always available (and are often 'partials' anyway, due to lack of downloader patience)
2) Pipe dream: RIAA gets a big check -- therefore its members want their share of that check, forcing RIAA to divvy up the pie among the rights holders. Suddenly, all those guys sitting on rights to out-of-production music find the only way to get a piece of the pie is to have their music ported to MP3 (a cheap job) and traded. The availability/quality MP3s from the vinyl years (i.e *MOST* recorded music) is likely to improve quickly.
4) It would be a relatively small additional step to *independent* music creators to get a cut, too. They wouldn't probably get much more per download than the banner ads pay per click, but if consumers can 'taste' new stuff with abandon, then the musicians and audience benefit from enhanced exposure.
Record stores would probably survive as smaller specialty outfits (sorry, Tower Records, that's what you get for being a buggy-whip industry) and (insert-name-of-crapola-teenybopper-band) would survive as theatrical swoonfests for those who like such things.
CAVEAT:
All this would suggest better record-keeping of who gets downloaded (and therefore, potentially, who downloads what) - and all the marketeering games that will come from that.
A smart move? A move this big is a major strategy play.
The NASDAQ listing shows Corel's Market Capitalization at $270.9 (US) when the announcement was made.
My first reaction was that this was begging for DoJ action: 24M shares * $5.65 = $135.6M or just over 50% of Corel: voting or non-voting, MS would become the majority profitmaker in Corel. Moreover, they can really hurt the other shareholders by selling ("MS does not feel that Corel policy is consistent with its own interests, and feels it would be better foa all in volved to divest its shares.") Slowly dumping *that* many shares could keep the price down long enough to make shareholders, financiers, and others lose faith (just one of the many ways that a big chunk of nonvoting stock turns into clout)
Fortunately, the press release was in CDN$ ($5.65 is close to the closing price on the Toronto exchange, and Corel *is* Canadian, after all), If that was existing stock, MS would own 1/3 of the 73.6M outstanding shares - but I doubt Corel has 24M shares in a closet somewhere, and they probably wouldn't give it all up at once if they did
CNET reported that the actual figure was 24.6%, suggesting the 24M were newly issued shared. Does Canadian law let a company issue a huge chunk of stock like that without shareholder action - or does this deal need to be approved?
This much new stock would dilute the ownership of all existing stockholders quite a bit, which might upset existing shareholders.
The pundits (and management) might have been worried about Corel, but shareholders can flee a stock fairly easily. There's certainly as much reason for optimism as at any time in the last 2 years, except during the failed Inprise merger.
I think most shareholders are in a stock because they are optimistic about it -- and now their ownership of the company has been cut by a quarter
(if you owned 1% of the company before, you, now own 3/4%, and the $.27/share profit in their 1999 10K405 filing with the SEC becomes $.20/share)
Actually, the media does a terrible job of policing itself, and one should not assume that because it delights in revealing the foibles of every other aspect of society, it doesn't shy away from revealing the transgressions of other media 'competitor-colleagues'.
Actually, it is not difficult to find examples of media abuses. Not only are they daily occurences, but even reporting of them is not uncommon. However, they rarely get the constant barrage of repitition and reinforcement of corresponding stories in other fields -- a factor that cannot be overestimated. For decades, even issues that were prominently showcased on shows like like, say '60 Minutes' at its height often fizzled without constant multi-source reinforcement. Some of these issues became major issues many years later when the media felt comfortable with making a full barrage
Interestingly, I happened to stumble on an archived article in the June 1968 Atlantic Monthly called "The Media Barons and the Public Interest: An FCC Commissioner's Warning" which predicts many of the risks that we face today. This has been a hot issue since long before Marshal "the medium is the message" McLuhan (60's), and Noam Chomsky [70's] (prominent in AI and natural language beore he went social activist -- and also known for being Marvin Minsky's arch-foe) However, as the risks have come closer to fruition, we hear less and less aboiut them... predictably
Yes, you may be bold now, but just wait until our secret administrative courts run a few of your employees through the ringer.
You'll install it, you have no choice. But I doubt you'll be nearly as brazen in the announcement that it was installed as you were in your announcement that it would not be.
An excellent point. it may not even be legal to disclose a FISA warrant. So if an ISP backs down, they may not be legally permitted to admit it.
A FISA warrant can even authorize the FBI to do a black-bag job installing Carnivore (or whatever) without even notifying the ISP, under Clinton's most recent executive order on FISA (though of course, as a practical matter, this could probably only be done at the other end of the wide pipe to the ISP)
Witness the "NSA key" in Windows 95/98/NT/W2K.
Here I must disagree with you. the idea that this was actually an NSA backdoor has been fairly well discredited by code analysis. Too bad. It was a juicy tale!
Note how long until we found out about Echelon.
if you didn't know about Echelon 20 years ago, it was simply because you didn't care. It was mentioned in a few non-fiction New York Times best sellers in the 70's, and described in some detail in "The Puzzle Palace" in 1981. I can't address any earlier public information, because I was only born in the 60's
Read how cryptography.. essentially a collection of mathematical formulas.. is classified as "munitions".
The same could be said of, say, much bomb-related or artillery related (e.g. supergun artillery) physics. Just equations.
The CDA, the DMCA, and a plethora of riders to innocent-sounding bills that we probably still haven't become public knowledge.
I agree, and at least as important as the actual laws is the *interpretation* of those laws, which we have not yet seen, and which may take decades to fully evolve.
Scroll quickly through this discussion, hovering over the links, and tell me that the archive of this very discussion will be legal or visible to future generations, if this law passes,
Anybody want to set up a website along the lines of Mr. Cranky , but rating politicians instead? Or a place to read legislation converted into 'everyday language' - can't be harder than explaining computer code in everyday language. Politics is o so very dry. Somebody should do something about that.
I love code. I love the law. I love them both for the same reason: logic and intricacy. What the law lacks in consistency, it makes up in rock-hard 'sneak up behind you with a 2x4' relevance. Both are dry, but if anything code is drier, in the sense of being 'impersonal'
You can't *truly* translate law into common language for the same reason that the only true description of a program is the program itself: namely, any layman's description is likely to gloss over precisely the elements of phraseology or punctuation that will turn out to be most ambiguous (and hence critical) later. Most laymen could do as little with such a lay explanation as they could with an explanation of Perl or APL code. Debugging is a skilled art in law or software.
That doesn't mean that I don't advocate study. i most certainly do. I wish more people were taught a bit more about the law in their (roughly) 12 years of state-mandated education. If ignorance of the law is no excuse [unless you're a NZ judge] [R.S., c.C-34, s.19 in Canadian law] [Code of Hammurabi;->) [random cool article on the general subject] [Google search] then shouldn't the state take a bit better care to assure we aren't ignorant?
Nah, we can't even teach spelling, grammar, math, science, history, geography or sex.
I don't justify what Mitnick did, but when I hear about this case, I am reminded of the ancient Roman punishment "aqua et igni interdictus" ("to be denied water and fire", a form of ostracism that was more common in Greece, but I'll be damned if I can remember the Greek name for it)
In under six months, we'll be in the 21st century (no flames, we're all sick of that debate, and either way you look at it, the statement is true) and Mitnick's parole conditions will pass into history as a testament to our irrationality.
If a mechanic with several DUIs plows into a crowd and kills several people, we may take away his license (to prevent further deaths) and sentence him to prison (for his reckless disregard, etc.), but we don't prevent him from ever working on cars, buying or selling cars, being a paid anti- drunk driving activist, or examining the car being used as evidence against him during his trial. [the link above includes many articles about the unusual handling of his case]
We wouldn't do such things even if he was a vehicular serial killer. I think using a car or computer are roughly comparable in the coming decades. many might argue that the computer would be even more omnipresent and valuable.
Are we so messed up that the courts are actually willing to openly state that corporate damages and evading the police are worse crimes than sniffing out than several human lives?
I must agree. Time and again, I see sites listed that were covered recently or are below-average exemplars of a class. If you're going for Quake/Doom humor, this is far from the best.
I love humor. Its one of the major reasons i come here (though I suppose many posts wouldn't be as funny if they weren't surrounded by chaff), but there's no joy in an out-of-control kludge fortune cookie program that ships original gems on a regular basis, but is clearly falling apart, and may serve your password or customer info up to a user any day now.
(And regarding redundant articles: it is *so* much to ask that that they do a quick search before posting? I'd think they would have had a pop-up search window incorporated into their 'accept process.)
I consider myself a guest here, but increasingly I feeling like an unwelcome guest whose hosts are cordial - so long as I stay out of their way. I agree that Slashdot is providing a service, but in creasingly I am uncertain what the service is. And they seem to be uncertain, too.
It's still a good party but our "hosts":
1) don't themselves read the site. If they don't taste tha pate' how will they know it;s any good? If they don't think the siite is interesting to them, will it stay interesting to us?) 2) provide no official reader feedback option It's hard not to see this glaring lack (this late in the game) as a real warning sign. In fact, it's stunning that Slashcode hasn't incorporated the "view all submisions"; "Score submissions... posted articles... etc." stuff tha's been given to them. It's pretty counter to the original 'feel' of this joint, and certainly they (haughtily and condescendingly) tell us to fork off to another site/code if we don't like the way it is here: take it or leave it.
4) They go to the store and come back with pigs feet, beef tongue, and tofu burritos -- even when primo munchies are shovelled into the cart (submissions) they throw them out and restock with pigs feet.
5) They throw stuff in they closet when it's fresh (rejecting articles dozens of times) and then dig it out and serve it when its stale (months later) -- a clear sign that they are not managing things well.
6) They have come to view themselves as the One True Party. Why else would they not mix?
7) Many of us are only coming for the guests (not the host) now, but some guests are gettting rowdy (Trolls, spam, junk of every description)
Look, they're human. A few very busy people are very likely to fall into a microculture that diminishes the value of their judgement in the eyes of outsiders. It's an insidious problem, but one we have seen a million times in history, in/., in life, and in school.
it's especially bad since the Slashot editors don't eat they own dogfood. They don't read/. The Slashcode is not the dogfood here, the content is.
If Slashdot cares about the readers, they will implement more user intereactivity, so that the readers can help keep the site on track. If they don't care about the reader (and we all know that even nice guys can quit caring or respecting the customers in subtle ways), they will become another soulless behemoth who things size and market share proves quality and judgement.
But I don't think Katz will write about the Soulless Slashdot. It's the nature of the beast that it cannot be seen up close.
If not, then I have no doubt they will remain large and well known -- and immensely successful by many standards -- but their product will grow crappier every month. How many companies do you knw that followed precisely that path?
"WE" are not better than "THEM"; "WE" have a chance to note and avoid the perfectly human pitfalls inherent in such ventures. and if "WE" don't, "WE" will end up in the tarpit with all the other fat dumb dinosaurs, who were sleek and cutting edge once.
[Yeah, I'm not sure who I mean by "we: eaither -- and I certainly don't speak for anyone but me]
It's pretty clear in their user agrement that you can't sue them. their only liability is to correct any error (and in my experience, it'd take a lawsuit to get them to do *that*)
The reason NSI is giving until the end of the billing cycle is so they can sell off large blocks of expired domains at once to these name-stealing services, saving a lot of hassles.
I disgree. I think the reason they hold suctions is reduce the chances that the name will be registered via some other registry. Basically, if you buy at auction, you end up registering via NSI
This, in effect, gives preference to 'devoted NSI customers' (which soon will mean: "anyone willing to do business with us vs. all those geek scum") and assures that once a name is registered with NSI, it will be re-registered with NSI
Don't think it's so easy to 'do business with others' if you already have a domain (I have domains going back 5 years)
1) your registrar still has to pay NSI a fee.
2) they can and will refuse to acknowledge the transfer on any minor technicality. And if that technicality is an error in their customer data -- as it often is, you'll have the devil's time getting it corrected (in my experience)
3) The dirty secret of their 'auction' is that it really hides the fact that it guarantees that any NSI-registered domain is registered via NSI by the new owner.
4) NSI expressed doubts as to my 'validity' and refused to honor a transfer of one of my domains last year (I'd have been okay if my ISP had cooperated, but they seemed frightened of having to learn to learnother registrars, or registrar transfers, and actually chastised me for trying to leave NSI) So, since it was a minor domain, I let it expire, figuring I could probably pick it up via another registrar in a few weeks/months. No dice. I ended up re-registering the expired domain via NSI (with a check, hoping that I could use the correct info on the check as proof). They took my money but still refuse to correct my info (even though the e-mail address and phone number they had for me are both dead now)
Well, the problem is simple. They can cause a lot of people a lot of problems if they try to obstruct the changeover. They can pretend negligence on this ("it is no longer a priority"), and they have done this many times.
I, for example, have been fighting to get the registry entry on my domain name corrected for a long time (eight months) but they simply refuse to make the changes. Twice I was asked "why it mattered so much to me" that the owner e-mail was correct, when the rest of the entry (including technical contacts) was fine [duh - billing!]. Once I was asked point blank, in an accusing tone, if I was planning to transfer my registration.
You bet I am. Even if I wasn't before, I'd do it now, after dozens of calls, letters and faxes have gone ignored. (BTW, while others have had much better experiences, I have never had anything fixed by NSI in under 2 months, three calls, and two written correspondences...
Except payment (due to their mistakenly putting me down for a 1-year reg when I paid for more, my domain name expired for several days last year. Of course all e-mail went to my erroneous e-mail address. Paying for another year with them is the only cost-effective way to resolve this when delay means more days off-line. The reinstatement started propagating within hours of my e-payment.
Actually, they are. NSI is still the monopoly on the Central Registry. No matter who you register through... rigister.com, joker.com, etc., that registrar has to pay NSI a fee to put you in the central registry.
Frankly, I think this runs counter to the concept of independent registries. I'd even go so far as to say that the central registry owner should not be allowed to compete with other registrars by selling names directly to the end user.
They act like a monopoly, too. Remember when their (monopoly) contract was taken away by the same US Department of Commerse that granted it? The Govt had to allow allow extension after extension. Then they similarly 'negotiated' with ICANN, when ICANN is supposed to regulate them.
Fundamentally NSI is holding DNS hostage. They can do (or more specifically, 'allow' through pretend negligence during a handover) enormous damage to the integrity of the system and nobody wants that. I'd almost be tempted to say we should take the hit now (i.e it will only get worse with time) but too many people are hoping to avoid 'the great DNS blackout of 200X' altogether.
Re:Public needs to stop pretending there is no iss
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CNet On Online Freedom
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This article has a link that starts exactly at the 4096 character (default) cut-of for long articles. Due to a bug in Slashcode, this renders the "read More" link inoperative.
If you go to your user page, select "Customize Comments" and change "Max Comment Size" to 8192, this bug will almost never show up (Few comments are much longer than 4096, so having a cut-off there doesn't save you much)
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I've actually had a long-standing interest in the Electoral college (originating in an odd incident when I was very small, which led me to ponder it as a mathematical puzzle throughout my teen years in the late 70's). I first heard of Natapoff's work just after he testified before Congress in 1977. The "Electoral college problem" was one of those math problems I gnawed on for most of 1978-9 -- and I am very surprised to see it make a resurgence because in the years since, I realized that it makes a few very flawed assumptions which invalidate the mathematics.
First, since the article doesn't give it, here's a citation of the Natapoff article:
Natapoff, Alan; "A Mathematical One-Man One-Vote Rationale for Madisonian Presidential Voting Based on Maximum Individual Voting Power"; Public Choice; Vol. 88, No. 3-4; September, 1996; 259-273; #2722.
And here are the primary flaws:
1) It does not properly generalize to larger groups of candidates -- i.e. most of the world's 'democracies' are raucous lively pluralities that make the institutionally fossilized "two party system" (which is propped up by many paternalistic -at best- state and local laws that act to exclude or disadvantage other parties, locking the existing power structures in place.)
2) It assumes that greater volatility means greater power for the individual voter (i.e. the easier it is for a small group to alter the outcome, the more "power" the voter has, right?) In reality, volatility does not suggest fairness, in fact, it suggests quite the opposite. If small changes in voting alter the outcome, the outcome is merely more chaotic, and hence more likely to be 'unfair' (like a 'bad bounce' in sports). The once situation where small changes actually reflect a switch in overall voter intent is when the small change straddles a 50-50 split (i.e. increased sensitivity to small degrees of actual measured preference are "fair") Natapoff himself notes that direct voting is actually fairer in the case where the election is very close (e.g. 49.99% to 50.01%)
The analogy to sports is extremely misleading. First few of us ever consider the huge amount of structure, rules, and effort each professional league puts in place to prevent the "best possible team" (or two otherwise unbeatable teams, which would produce the most skilled possible game when they play against each other). Everything from the draft to the rules of the game itself are altered to make everything more mediocre -"a more even match"- where even the worst team in the league has a finite chance of beating the best.
Note that in most *non-professional* leagues, the best team stands nearly no chance of beating the best, because these balancing mechanisms are not in place. Pro leagues seek to maximize excitement and profits for all teams. Volatility is fine for entertainment, but not for any system we actually rely on. I would not throw random chaotic volatility into ANY control system (even 'fuzzy logic' systems are more defined) An election that can be swayed by a small district, in the face of a distinct national majority is like a sportscar that bounces off a pebble in the road.
Professional sports seek to maximize excitement, spread the popularity around, and increase the (real or apparent) significance of each individual game. In politics, this would correspond to rigging the game to favor every politician in the 'stable' getting a shot at election; and oppose the formation of a political dream team that the overwhelming body of voters would overwhelmingly support (i.e. "unbeatable")
It is foolish to discuss "increasing the power of the individual voter" because we must ask what the increase in power means -- it means "more power against the other voters", in some ill-defined sense. The bottom line is that ALL VOTERS SHOULD HAVE EQUAL REPRESENTATION (direct voting does this). Given that "increasing the power" of any one voter can be seen as meaningless or even undesirable
I will admit that there are many other ways to phrase this that sound very appealing (and given the tenor of the 70's, and the fact that I was a teenager, I propbably believed eevery one of them -- anything that seemed to stick it to The Powers That Be must be good.
It's worth noting that the first set of instructions MS released were just a deceptive sop to the German authorities. If you followed those instructions, the defragger (and all the iles you deleted) would be automatically restored from internal backup no later than the next reboot after you deleted them.
Not that anyone would want to actually answer the original question posted in the article or anything, but WIPO has a number of resources that might help.
.INT TLD! Also, be aware that the default search page is Java-enabled, so pick HTML-only, if you aren't]
There's the WIPO Collection of Laws for International Access (CLEA) [Note the the
You might enjoy browsing the "International Patent Data Collections (When it's complete, it hopes to cover the world - not yet complete, however)
In fact, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) or OMPI (Organization Mondiale Proprietaire Intellectuelle - pardon my French) has recently put a lot of new materials on its website, so it's worth a second visit, even if you thought you were familiar with WIPO offerings
And finally, there's WipoNET which is gradually providing access to all the IP offices in the WIPO member nations.
When the contest was first announced (not here) my old impromptu rocket group looked into the rules, and decided against even considering a run for it [okay, we were paranoid about getting credit-- but it's a serious investment of work in a field where the "milestone that didn't count" is as common as the "one that got away" in fishing]
One of us was curious about the exact details of the CATS official payload, but could never seem to get a straight answer out of them. Obviously it is not a solid Aluminum cylinder, as one response seemed to imply (Al is 2.7 g/cc, or more than twice the density of the 100mm(r) x 200mm right cylinder specified) He joked that it was "a Semtex payload" designed to guarantee no one succeeded.
I'm sure my friend's irreverence could easily have rubbed CATS the wrong way. I am curious if anyone "more busineslike" than my friend managed to get a detailed spec from CATS.
For a drive standard to be widely adopted you have to meet both of those reasonably well. Backing up a 10 GB drive with a 100 MB ZIP is obviously a return to the problems of swapping floppies and is one reason CD-RW is picking up steam over ZIP.
... those puny little 640 MB CD-RW's harken back to "swapping floppies" a lot more than the 2 GB Iomega Jaz drives do ...
Hmm
Yes, CD-R's do harken to floppys -- but in a *GOOD* way: modestly inconvenient but dirt cheap.
The cheapest 2GB Jaz cartridge on Pricewatch today was $68 (the 1 GB cartridge is the same, which, in my experience, tends to suggest a faltering medium -- i.e. it suggests a weak market)
That means $340 to back up the hypothetical 10GB hard drive, at a time when a 30GB HDD hovers at about $100 (and dropping), and I think you'll agree that Jaz (or Zip) is impractical for large scale backup. It's a transport medium, not a back-up medium. Short of a catastrophic equipment failure (theft, fire, direct lighning strike, etc) multiple backups to $340 worth of HDDs (100+ GB of storage or 30+ GB of RAID) is vastly preferable to a single Jaz backup of 10GB -- and with a lot faster/more reliable recovery too!)
Compare that to the $.50 CD-RW or the $.25 CD-R (based on my most recent on-line spindle puchases) with backup costs of $7.50, or $3.75 for 10 GB.
$340 vs $3.75 -- which approximates the floppy? Which solution would you use? (especially for weekly backups!) I like the Jaz, but it priced itself out of the market. Look at their sales and market penetrance, and you'll see that this is the market consensus.
I respect Thad Starner's work, but like a lot of peopel today (especially twigs, like him), he vastly overestimates the energy in those dreaded fat grams. There are 9 "small calories" (=4.19 J)
not 9000, as he says. He's thinking of "large calories.
Quick reality check, burn a gram of fat (1/28th oz - or a fingernail-sized blob). Does he really think that this will raise the temperature of a liter (quart) of water by 9 C (16 F). Even with the inefficiencies of combustion and heating, it's clear he's a few orders of magnitude off
Please adjust his calculations accordingly when you read the article.
Was I the only one who had the same feeling at the end of Kubrick's 2001, after endless shots of Bowman's (? - it's been almost 30 years) iris, shot in various colors? (I was 9 or 10 and just getting into photography at the time, and all I
could think was that it was like some kid had
just learned about sepia and other "false-color"
printing, and was running hog-wild: "look what I
can do!" in fifty different color combos)
I imagine they took that tedious section out in later re-releases and video. It was utterly pointless. At least Solaris' tunnel scenes meant something (lo-o-ong drive)
Moreover, that might well be one of the *few* practical uses for it, due to a flaw in the underlying principle.
Pornography (in its current state) is based on the illusion of the viewer's immersion in a distant environment. The system described may handle this kind of one-way immersion someday (though perhaps on ultra-DVD ROM, rather than on-line) It would be difficult to support mutual immersion in each others environments (as opposed to limited interaction, like teledildonics), even without the bandwidth issue. In general, I think you'll find that true immersion and interactivity would "break the metaphor" of real life in too many ways to ever be useful.
I have a sneaking suspicion Miss November is quite happy she doesn't have to experience her many viewers and their environments. Mutual immersion in telecommuting is, quite possibly, just as undesirable. In the UNC experiment, the remote sites in NY and Philly couldn't percieve the lab, but if they could, it would be unuseful, at best, and confusing at worst. Which environment would they be be immersed in - their office, or the lab?
I call the currently imaginable one-way immersion "Tele-insertion" (no lewd pun intended) because it places one person in a distant environment. In the distant environment, the remote viewer, himself, should have only a limited representation. This becomes increasingly important when multiple remote streams interact with the same office - and each other. Once you make this distinction, and abandon the dream of full mutual immersion, it becomes clear that you might as well stick to video conferencing. Teleinsertion, as an end to itself, is only useful in limited settings, like hazardous environments and exploration - and even then, I woun't be holding my breath for the suitable hardware (yes, I know about all the stuff their doing at NASA, etc. -- *they* can hold their breaths if they like. Not me)
A more "practical solution" might be to build telecommuting home-office-cum-studios that resemble generic corporate office and dress office-appropriate at home (But no one wants to see you in your boxers and the piles of laundry in your bedroom; your client may fail to be charmed by your children playing their usual game of screeming meemies, chasing each other up and down the hall outside your door, wailing at the top of their lungs; and your spouse better not barge into your office, fuming, when she sees the $10K you racked up this month in teledildonics charges)
Sometimes limited interaction is a good thing.
Sometimes more realism is pointless - That's why we don't have CD-quality quadrophonic telephones.
Hey, I'm not knocking these guys. It's research - and I'd venture to say some relatively mainstream communications innovations probably came came out of the decades old (and, as of yet, fruitless) dream of 'a video phone in every house'. But on its own merits, it's hard to imagine why we'd want 'immersive environments' *except* for entertainment.
I think that is amazing. Just in case you were wondering what a grammar nazi knows about Materials Science, don't.
Also, don't ask what a Grammar Nazi knows about neurosurgery. "Brain surgeons" don't hold individual neurons during surgery. In fact, you would be very surprised to that common standard brain surgery tools include tongue depressors, spatulas (the tiny ones used to measure out chemicals, not the ones you use to flip burgers) and other 'blunt' devices rather than scalpels/forceps, etc. Despite its delicacy, the texture/consistency of the brain (especially as contrasted to the vascular structures within it) lends itself to certain rather unexpected techniques of manipulation.
Further, medical science is nowhere near the level of manipulating individual neurons, and it is questionable whether it would ever want to -- the brain isn't like a microchip, where a single miswired trace causes a logic unit to fail. Single neurons are not that important, and a general principle of neurosurgery is to ablate (destroy) a region, and let the brain rewire itself around it (like the Net). If specific neurons are ever targeted (in our lifetime) it will be chemically (e.g. with tailored antibodies, etc.) With 10 billion neurons (and single axons that may run a tangled path many centimeters long) -not to mention the 100 billion 'support cells'- the brain is not amenable to 'simple rewiring by hand'. Have you considered the problem of locating and manipulating, any significant number of indivdual neurons.
That is not to say that *researchers* don't often manipulate individual neurons for any number of reasons (in lab apparatus, not in patients). I'm sure that they will find a use for such micro-forceps in their work.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a neurosurgeon, but I am a physician. I was also raised by a neurosurgeon, and spent way too much of my early 20's doing things like "emptying (squid) interneurons" -- squeezing them out like toothpaste tubes, so we could perform experiments on the cell membrane.
If the RIAA is getting its cut, we have the possibility of a far more efficient system -- and far cheaper than the RIAA would ever have willingly created on its own.
1) Though you see it as "provide-for-a-fee" or "share-it-for-free", the "paid provider of user-supplied content" model has been very successful -- e.g. AOL forums/chat; subscription technical forums on the Web, etc. User-provided content is the basis of eerything from Slashdot on down. (up?)
You're actually better off with a system of client-shared files, if they are available, simply because of bandwidth considerations Would you rather send $5 to a Napster as sluggish as an over-subscribed ISP, that didn't share client files -- or one that is as responsive as today's Napster, which distributes *bandwidth demand* among its many clients?
Maybe there would end up being two levels of service: nonsharing (preferred by modem users) and sharing (preferred by those with fatter pipes) -- but I'd rather not go down *that* road. There's too much opportunity for RIAA meddling.
2) Napster could now legitmately keep a database of its own MP3s. [in addition to the logged-in clients files] This would greatly increase availability of 'rare' MP3's that aren't always available (and are often 'partials' anyway, due to lack of downloader patience)
2) Pipe dream: RIAA gets a big check -- therefore its members want their share of that check, forcing RIAA to divvy up the pie among the rights holders. Suddenly, all those guys sitting on rights to out-of-production music find the only way to get a piece of the pie is to have their music ported to MP3 (a cheap job) and traded. The availability/quality MP3s from the vinyl years (i.e *MOST* recorded music) is likely to improve quickly.
4) It would be a relatively small additional step to *independent* music creators to get a cut, too. They wouldn't probably get much more per download than the banner ads pay per click, but if consumers can 'taste' new stuff with abandon, then the musicians and audience benefit from enhanced exposure.
Record stores would probably survive as smaller specialty outfits (sorry, Tower Records, that's what you get for being a buggy-whip industry) and (insert-name-of-crapola-teenybopper-band) would survive as theatrical swoonfests for those who like such things.
CAVEAT:
All this would suggest better record-keeping of who gets downloaded (and therefore, potentially, who downloads what) - and all the marketeering games that will come from that.
A smart move? A move this big is a major strategy play.
The NASDAQ listing shows Corel's Market Capitalization at $270.9 (US) when the announcement was made.
My first reaction was that this was begging for DoJ action: 24M shares * $5.65 = $135.6M or just over 50% of Corel: voting or non-voting, MS would become the majority profitmaker in Corel. Moreover, they can really hurt the other shareholders by selling ("MS does not feel that Corel policy is consistent with its own interests, and feels it would be better foa all in volved to divest its shares.") Slowly dumping *that* many shares could keep the price down long enough to make shareholders, financiers, and others lose faith (just one of the many ways that a big chunk of nonvoting stock turns into clout)
Fortunately, the press release was in CDN$ ($5.65 is close to the closing price on the Toronto exchange, and Corel *is* Canadian, after all), If that was existing stock, MS would own 1/3 of the 73.6M outstanding shares - but I doubt Corel has 24M shares in a closet somewhere, and they probably wouldn't give it all up at once if they did
CNET reported that the actual figure was 24.6%, suggesting the 24M were newly issued shared. Does Canadian law let a company issue a huge chunk of stock like that without shareholder action - or does this deal need to be approved?
This much new stock would dilute the ownership of all existing stockholders quite a bit, which might upset existing shareholders.
The pundits (and management) might have been worried about Corel, but shareholders can flee a stock fairly easily. There's certainly as much reason for optimism as at any time in the last 2 years, except during the failed Inprise merger.
I think most shareholders are in a stock because they are optimistic about it -- and now their ownership of the company has been cut by a quarter
(if you owned 1% of the company before, you, now own 3/4%, and the $.27/share profit in their 1999 10K405 filing with the SEC becomes $.20/share)
DISCLAIMER: I am not a corporate raider.
Actually, the media does a terrible job of policing itself, and one should not assume that because it delights in revealing the foibles of every other aspect of society, it doesn't shy away from revealing the transgressions of other media 'competitor-colleagues'.
... predictably
Actually, it is not difficult to find examples of media abuses. Not only are they daily occurences, but even reporting of them is not uncommon. However, they rarely get the constant barrage of repitition and reinforcement of corresponding stories in other fields -- a factor that cannot be overestimated. For decades, even issues that were prominently showcased on shows like like, say '60 Minutes' at its height often fizzled without constant multi-source reinforcement. Some of these issues became major issues many years later when the media felt comfortable with making a full barrage
Interestingly, I happened to stumble on an archived article in the June 1968 Atlantic Monthly called "The Media Barons and the Public Interest: An FCC Commissioner's Warning" which predicts many of the risks that we face today. This has been a hot issue since long before Marshal "the medium is the message" McLuhan (60's), and Noam Chomsky [70's] (prominent in AI and natural language beore he went social activist -- and also known for being Marvin Minsky's arch-foe) However, as the risks have come closer to fruition, we hear less and less aboiut them
Yes, you may be bold now, but just wait until our secret administrative courts run a few of your employees through the ringer.
You'll install it, you have no choice. But I doubt you'll be nearly as brazen in the announcement that it was installed as you were in your announcement that it would not be.
An excellent point. it may not even be legal to disclose a FISA warrant. So if an ISP backs down, they may not be legally permitted to admit it.
A FISA warrant can even authorize the FBI to do a black-bag job installing Carnivore (or whatever) without even notifying the ISP, under Clinton's most recent executive order on FISA (though of course, as a practical matter, this could probably only be done at the other end of the wide pipe to the ISP)
Witness the "NSA key" in Windows 95/98/NT/W2K.
Here I must disagree with you. the idea that this was actually an NSA backdoor has been fairly well discredited by code analysis. Too bad. It was a juicy tale!
Note how long until we found out about Echelon.
if you didn't know about Echelon 20 years ago, it was simply because you didn't care. It was mentioned in a few non-fiction New York Times best sellers in the 70's, and described in some detail in "The Puzzle Palace" in 1981. I can't address any earlier public information, because I was only born in the 60's
Read how cryptography.. essentially a collection of mathematical formulas.. is classified as "munitions".
The same could be said of, say, much bomb-related or artillery related (e.g. supergun artillery) physics. Just equations.
The CDA, the DMCA, and a plethora of riders to innocent-sounding bills that we probably still haven't become public knowledge.
I agree, and at least as important as the actual laws is the *interpretation* of those laws, which we have not yet seen, and which may take decades to fully evolve.
Scroll quickly through this discussion, hovering over the links, and tell me that the archive of this very discussion will be legal or visible to future generations, if this law passes,
Anybody want to set up a website along the lines of Mr. Cranky , but rating politicians instead? Or a place to read legislation converted into 'everyday language' - can't be harder than explaining computer code in everyday language. Politics is o so very dry. Somebody should do something about that.
;->) [random cool article on the general subject] [Google search] then shouldn't the state take a bit better care to assure we aren't ignorant?
I love code. I love the law. I love them both for the same reason: logic and intricacy. What the law lacks in consistency, it makes up in rock-hard 'sneak up behind you with a 2x4' relevance. Both are dry, but if anything code is drier, in the sense of being 'impersonal'
You can't *truly* translate law into common language for the same reason that the only true description of a program is the program itself: namely, any layman's description is likely to gloss over precisely the elements of phraseology or punctuation that will turn out to be most ambiguous (and hence critical) later. Most laymen could do as little with such a lay explanation as they could with an explanation of Perl or APL code. Debugging is a skilled art in law or software.
That doesn't mean that I don't advocate study. i most certainly do. I wish more people were taught a bit more about the law in their (roughly) 12 years of state-mandated education. If ignorance of the law is no excuse [unless you're a NZ judge] [R.S., c.C-34, s.19 in Canadian law] [Code of Hammurabi
Nah, we can't even teach spelling, grammar, math, science, history, geography or sex.
I don't justify what Mitnick did, but when I hear about this case, I am reminded of the ancient Roman punishment "aqua et igni interdictus" ("to be denied water and fire", a form of ostracism that was more common in Greece, but I'll be damned if I can remember the Greek name for it)
In under six months, we'll be in the 21st century (no flames, we're all sick of that debate, and either way you look at it, the statement is true) and Mitnick's parole conditions will pass into history as a testament to our irrationality.
If a mechanic with several DUIs plows into a crowd and kills several people, we may take away his license (to prevent further deaths) and sentence him to prison (for his reckless disregard, etc.), but we don't prevent him from ever working on cars, buying or selling cars, being a paid anti- drunk driving activist, or examining the car being used as evidence against him during his trial. [the link above includes many articles about the unusual handling of his case]
We wouldn't do such things even if he was a vehicular serial killer. I think using a car or computer are roughly comparable in the coming decades. many might argue that the computer would be even more omnipresent and valuable.
Are we so messed up that the courts are actually willing to openly state that corporate damages and evading the police are worse crimes than sniffing out than several human lives?
I love humor. Its one of the major reasons i come here (though I suppose many posts wouldn't be as funny if they weren't surrounded by chaff), but there's no joy in an out-of-control kludge fortune cookie program that ships original gems on a regular basis, but is clearly falling apart, and may serve your password or customer info up to a user any day now.
(And regarding redundant articles: it is *so* much to ask that that they do a quick search before posting? I'd think they would have had a pop-up search window incorporated into their 'accept process.)
I consider myself a guest here, but increasingly I feeling like an unwelcome guest whose hosts are cordial - so long as I stay out of their way. I agree that Slashdot is providing a service, but in creasingly I am uncertain what the service is. And they seem to be uncertain, too.
It's still a good party but our "hosts":
Look, they're human. A few very busy people are very likely to fall into a microculture that diminishes the value of their judgement in the eyes of outsiders. It's an insidious problem, but one we have seen a million times in history, in
it's especially bad since the Slashot editors don't eat they own dogfood. They don't read
If Slashdot cares about the readers, they will implement more user intereactivity, so that the readers can help keep the site on track. If they don't care about the reader (and we all know that even nice guys can quit caring or respecting the customers in subtle ways), they will become another soulless behemoth who things size and market share proves quality and judgement.
But I don't think Katz will write about the Soulless Slashdot. It's the nature of the beast that it cannot be seen up close.
If not, then I have no doubt they will remain large and well known -- and immensely successful by many standards -- but their product will grow crappier every month. How many companies do you knw that followed precisely that path?
"WE" are not better than "THEM"; "WE" have a chance to note and avoid the perfectly human pitfalls inherent in such ventures. and if "WE" don't, "WE" will end up in the tarpit with all the other fat dumb dinosaurs, who were sleek and cutting edge once.
[Yeah, I'm not sure who I mean by "we: eaither -- and I certainly don't speak for anyone but me]
It's pretty clear in their user agrement that you can't sue them. their only liability is to correct any error (and in my experience, it'd take a lawsuit to get them to do *that*)
The reason NSI is giving until the end of the billing cycle is so they can sell off large blocks of expired domains at once to these name-stealing services, saving a lot of hassles.
I disgree. I think the reason they hold suctions is reduce the chances that the name will be registered via some other registry. Basically, if you buy at auction, you end up registering via NSI
This, in effect, gives preference to 'devoted NSI customers' (which soon will mean: "anyone willing to do business with us vs. all those geek scum") and assures that once a name is registered with NSI, it will be re-registered with NSI
Don't think it's so easy to 'do business with others' if you already have a domain (I have domains going back 5 years)
1) your registrar still has to pay NSI a fee.
2) they can and will refuse to acknowledge the transfer on any minor technicality. And if that technicality is an error in their customer data -- as it often is, you'll have the devil's time getting it corrected (in my experience)
3) The dirty secret of their 'auction' is that it really hides the fact that it guarantees that any NSI-registered domain is registered via NSI by the new owner.
4) NSI expressed doubts as to my 'validity' and refused to honor a transfer of one of my domains last year (I'd have been okay if my ISP had cooperated, but they seemed frightened of having to learn to learnother registrars, or registrar transfers, and actually chastised me for trying to leave NSI) So, since it was a minor domain, I let it expire, figuring I could probably pick it up via another registrar in a few weeks/months. No dice. I ended up re-registering the expired domain via NSI (with a check, hoping that I could use the correct info on the check as proof). They took my money but still refuse to correct my info (even though the e-mail address and phone number they had for me are both dead now)
How difficult would it be to replace NSI?
Well, the problem is simple. They can cause a lot of people a lot of problems if they try to obstruct the changeover. They can pretend negligence on this ("it is no longer a priority"), and they have done this many times.
I, for example, have been fighting to get the registry entry on my domain name corrected for a long time (eight months) but they simply refuse to make the changes. Twice I was asked "why it mattered so much to me" that the owner e-mail was correct, when the rest of the entry (including technical contacts) was fine [duh - billing!]. Once I was asked point blank, in an accusing tone, if I was planning to transfer my registration.
You bet I am. Even if I wasn't before, I'd do it now, after dozens of calls, letters and faxes have gone ignored. (BTW, while others have had much better experiences, I have never had anything fixed by NSI in under 2 months, three calls, and two written correspondences...
Except payment (due to their mistakenly putting me down for a 1-year reg when I paid for more, my domain name expired for several days last year. Of course all e-mail went to my erroneous e-mail address. Paying for another year with them is the only cost-effective way to resolve this when delay means more days off-line. The reinstatement started propagating within hours of my e-payment.
Well, technically NSI is no longer a monopoly...
... rigister.com, joker.com, etc., that registrar has to pay NSI a fee to put you in the central registry.
Actually, they are. NSI is still the monopoly on the Central Registry. No matter who you register through
Frankly, I think this runs counter to the concept of independent registries. I'd even go so far as to say that the central registry owner should not be allowed to compete with other registrars by selling names directly to the end user.
They act like a monopoly, too. Remember when their (monopoly) contract was taken away by the same US Department of Commerse that granted it? The Govt had to allow allow extension after extension. Then they similarly 'negotiated' with ICANN, when ICANN is supposed to regulate them.
Fundamentally NSI is holding DNS hostage. They can do (or more specifically, 'allow' through pretend negligence during a handover) enormous damage to the integrity of the system and nobody wants that. I'd almost be tempted to say we should take the hit now (i.e it will only get worse with time) but too many people are hoping to avoid 'the great DNS blackout of 200X' altogether.
This article has a link that starts exactly at the 4096 character (default) cut-of for long articles. Due to a bug in Slashcode, this renders the "read More" link inoperative.
If you go to your user page, select "Customize Comments" and change "Max Comment Size" to 8192, this bug will almost never show up (Few comments are much longer than 4096, so having a cut-off there doesn't save you much)