Fact is, you're not. Nobody is forcing you to spend money to incorporate. But just like if you want to sell on the internet, you need to pay for a website, if you want a certifying authority to certify your identity, then you need to meet the requirements for being certified. Nobody is FORCING you to do it, but if you're not willing to prove your identity by getting incorporated, then the certifying authority isn't willing to certify your identity either.
The principle is well-taken, and your example is certainly okay, but there is a real-world interference in the theoretical system here. It's advertising, otherwise known as raising the awareness of the marketplace.
The corporate entities doing this are in business to increase share-holder value, not to recognise the needs of a changing market place. There is no benefit to them in advertising to the public a complex message (ie. one with three variables): it's in their interest to advertise a very simple one: Green is okay, Anything else is an evil black-hat hacker.
People en masse respond to extremely clear, unambiguous saturation advertising (you need only look at the political success of the Republican party, or if you're a student of history look at the epochal presedential debate between JFK and Nixon, and the different ways that was perceived by the radio and the television audiences, to see that this is true and has been for at least two generations now). So in this case, they're going to get exactly that, and it isn't going to deal adequately with the grey areas.
So, in the real world, the kind of consumer who makes up the mass of the online shopping market is going to receive a simple message: Green is good, Other stuff ain't. Which is all very well and good, but it carries an unspoken correlatory message: businesses of above a certain size are good, businesses below that size are not. And that can be argued to be a sub-optimal economic outcome, regardless of political beliefs and opinons of specific companies. In a capitalist, quasi-free market economy, obstructing the availability of supply to demand diminishes the efficiency of the system, and that is sub-optimal.
o_0 No Western journalist I've ever come across who reported the war was reticent about documenting and condemning the attrocities commited against locals and US servicemen by the North Vietnamese, still less those commited by the VC. I still know Americans who quite genuinely, physically, fear anyone they run into who they become aware is Vietnamese, because of the media treatment of the VC. The main difference in the Press attitude then is that they expected their own side not to be as bad, and they expected the government to provide good reasons for their wars. They no longer seem to particularly expect either of those things [1], though I'll admit even the US press did have a bit of a rant about Abu Ghraib. I did notice it went off the air on Fox and CNN a very long time before it went off the air on Deutsche Welle or the BBC World Service.
Regarding your second paragraph: abberations? Aye, My Lai was an abberation, but really only by scale, not by nature. Spending any kind of time interviewing veterans gets you pretty aware pretty quickly of how unpleasant some of the jungle warfare was. Having actually been around during a third-world guerrilla war also gives one a handle.
The media, like many Americans, go from one extreme to the other, spending little time at the balanced point.
On this point, however, we are in 100% agreement. The only caveat I would put in is that I would use the word 'humans' where you used the word 'Americans': humans are, ime, not terribly good at balance or moderation, but much prefer penduluum swings from extreme to extreme.
~cHris
[1] It all started to erode after Watergate, and the Iran/Contra scandal was about the last time I can think of the US press exposing government corruption simply because it was happening and shouldn't be. Pretty much everything since then has either been bloody stupid 'bread and circuses' media events like the Lewinsky scandal, or information published via the internet by actual people, which the press eventually pick up on (like Abu Ghraib).
Er, the Vietnamese won on their chosen battlefield, which was covert warfare. The US lost, repeatedly, for years.
That the Vietnamese 'won' on TV is simply an artefact of the atrocities commited by their opponents, and the fact that in those days the USA had a real journalism industry which told its people about the horrible things the government didn't want them to know: frequently in very simple, very hideous photographs like the Kim Phuc picture from a napalm attack^Waccident.
It should be pointed out that I'm not arguing with your association of the two situations. I think that they are indeed very similar.
You are aware that the French did used to run Iraq, yes? Treaty of Paris, 1916, what caused the first Gulf War? [1]
~cHris
[1] Britain got Iran and Palestine, France got Iraq and Syria, they hadn't found the huge oil fields in southern Iran yet, so the 9th state of Iraq (Qwait) was hacked off and given to the British to even up the oil futures...
Religion, as it is commonly understood [...] has nothing to offer anyone who is aware of the world around them.
I hope you won't mind if I substitute 'spirtuality' for 'religion' here: I'm only doing so to be clear that I'm not talking about churches, or other human organisations that accrete around spiritual understandings, but am talking about the actual thing itself.
I've thought for many years that a very good description of spirituality (religion) is precisely "being aware of the world around [one]".
Just in case you were wondering, RTFM is very rarely a flame. If someone says RTFM, chances are they know what they are talking about and the information you are seeking is in TFM. So go read it. By providing a pointer to the information, they have in fact answered your question.
Technically, yes.
Now, it may be that you lack the experience to discern what portion of TFM is the information you are seeking. If so, say so! Say that you have looked in TFM and not found an answer. Ask for help explaining specific parts of TFM, or ask for a more specific pointer to what part of TFM you should be looking in.
Things may have changed, but certainly my usual experience is that this draws the response 'Then you should have someone competent doing this for you, go away and get some clue'.
This is not helpful. Nor does this qualify as 'encouraging you to learn that skillset'. Many manuals read as if delibearately obfuscated, because they weren't written for beginners: some, however, are really good (I'd point at procmailrc(5) as an example). If you're trying to find stuff in one of the badly-designed and written man pages, then the way someone encourages you to learn that skill-set is by explaining the man page with reference both to your immediate problem, and to the more general art of extracting useful information from the immense quantity of slightly organised data which most manual pages consist of, ime.
This was much less of a problem when 99% of people messing with Unix were ubergeeks. They are the kind of people who inhale documentation and turn it into useful structures in their head, it's an aptitude. I'm not one of them. I can learn from the manual, but I can also learn a great deal faster with access to someone who can explain the thought-processes behind the documentation to me, and with a box to poke (labs++). Many, many people who now find themselves using one or other Unix-like system are perfectly capable of learning clue, but are not necessarily likely to respond well to most of the existing mechanisms provided for gaining clue.
~cHris
Re:Apple not licensing is not a Marketing mistake
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 1
Market share is just one of many factors determining the success of a company, but it's not the only one. Apple has higher revenues than Dell right now, and is making sweet profits, which is an even bigger factor in success.
o_0 Is this true? I can believe it if you're comparing apples to oranges (ie. the total revenues of the companies) but not if you're comparing Apples to Dells (ie. the personal desktop computer markets, which we're, you know, talking about). As I understand it the only reason Apple is seeing decent figures is their recent revolutionary entry into the portable music market: in other words, this is only true if you're talking iPods, rather than about personal computers.
On the other hand, you do have a support for your point in this example: the portable music appliance market which Apple entered was massively dominated by two players in Creative and Sony, and Apple took an immense amount of market share very quickly by making a product which both worked, and was liked by consumers. Good trick, that.
at least the Romans made an effort to bring culture and civilisation, aside from destruction, AND they were also politically adept, AND they endured for a thousand years
While I agree entirely with your general point I am going to have to pedant you on the last bit. The Romans did really well as a culture for some 600 years, right up until they actually became an actual empire, rather than just having a very strong sphere of influence. From the beginning of the actual Empire up to the point where you could argue it had failed (partitioning into Eastern and Western) was at most 300 years, by most counts less.
living under the chaos that has been the dictatorial aftermath of communism in africa
While I take your point on the general case, I'd point to a counter-example (Ghana, where I grew up). A 'Communist Dictator' there (Jerry Rawlings) who a) fixed the economy, which is a damn good trick in Africa, particularly in the 80s and b) once he'd attained national stability threw open elections, served the two terms he was elected for and then retired. Compare and contrast with the Houphet-Boigny era in Cote D'Ivoire, next door.
Would that this were true. One major problem with American politics is that the vast majority of the 'interest groups' who are capable of making any kind of real contribution to Washington's financial waterfall are corporate interest groups. IE. people who will give vast sums of money to both sides. If the same people weren't buying representatives in both parties, there'd still be some hope for actual debate rather than tabloid mudslinging. Banning soft money altogether would be better, but ensuring that if you give a dime to a rep of Party A at any level, anywhere in the US in a given election you are then banned from giving any to the other side at any level, anywhere would be a good start.
Illiterate people have just as much right to choose who represents them as literate people do.
There's an argument for saying that in a democracy, this is not true, but it's not a popular one. It goes like this:
Statement: in the modern world, to be informed about current affairs requires the ability to interact with the printed word.
Statement: in a working democracy, one absolute requirement is that the members of the electorate be informed.
Conclusion: Therefore, in the modern world, the illiterate do not fulfill one of the requirements for being part of a functioning democracy.
Now, you can quite easily contest the first statement, but you can also quite easily argue in favour of it. The second statement hasn't really been contestible since Plato. The conclusion, while (as I say) it can be contested, goes a long way to explaining why the two most famous Western Democracies are both so badly broken.
I rather disagree. The Democratic party has been moving further and further towards the right wing of the political spectrum, chasing the Republicans as they drove out into the wilds beyond conservatism and found the PNAC cabal, or 'Neo-Conservative Movement', waiting there. Something quite similar is happening in Britain, though driven by different socio-economic and political trends.
The problem is that the political environment of America has been re-defined such that even wanting to be a moderate centerist will be, and is, presented to the population as left-wing extremism (and yes, there is also a loony fringe, but I'd define them as being at right-angles to reality and therefore not really left-wing at all). And the things is, even the Democrats themselves have bought into this re-definition of terms. They seem to genuinely believe that not wanting to invade people is extremism, these days.
Also, certainty is more saleable to the (almost entirely uninformed) electorate than accuracy, subtlety or a thorough understanding of the complexity of the issues that confront us in the modern world. The Republican party have very effectively established their pitch as the purveyors of absolutely certain, deity-sponsored, and above all short solutions to problems that neither they nor the general public seem to feel the need to understand [1]. The Democrats used to stand for comprehensive solutions to complex problems: along the way, they lost the perception battle and are now seen as not standing for anything, simply because they historically didn't offer this kind of simplicty and certainty. Of course, now, they largely don't seem to actually stand for anything.
In summary, the Republicans worked out years ago that if you change the public perception of the terms of the debate, you take control of the rules. That provides a great advantage in winning, and the Republicans have very successfully executed that policy.
~cHris
[1] An example is that both the Republican Party and the general populace seemed to believe somehow that attacking Iraq was in some way a direct, simple solution to the problem of Saudis wanting to blow up America. The marginalisation and dissaffection of certain populations in the modern era of globalisation and changing concepts of sovreignty is a very complex issue, and declaring War on Terror won't solve it. However, it's very marketable.
Big exchanges like the AMS-IX (biggest public IX worldwide)
Hi. Point of information: last time I looked that was the LINX, and I'm reasonably sure it still is. Also, I'd be interested in your terms here: is 'biggest' meaning 'broadest peering matrix'? Or does it mean 'largest traffic volume on the switch fabric'? Or some other measure?
Um. You seem to have failed to notice that the UN not thinking something should happen stopped being a viable reason to prevent at least one major space-faring nation from doing it at least four years ago. Your analysis depends on people giving a shit what the UN thinks, and the USA does not.
While I entirely understand the problems with anthropocentrism, misanthropy is no more sensible. Why is what humans do not a part of a natural process? We evolved naturally, what we evolved was the ability to engineer, we use it, it's natural...
It's a controversial point, but it's one of those ones where only one side of the controversy ever gets aired.
Packet Exchange and the ilk are, however, practically irrelevant when it comes to network significance in Europe. Compare and contrast the amount of traffic exchanged by peers through PX with the amount shipped across the LINX. Compare and contrast the variety and significance of the ASNs who will peer across PX with those at LINX. And so on. That was kind of my point in responding to the GP.
If American corporate interests were going to try and "embrace and extend" (ie. purchase and sabotage) the infrastructure which makes Europe's bi-lateral peering tradition work, they'd need to get LINX, AMS-IX, DE-CIX and a couple of others, and in most cases those entities are not subject to that kind of purchase.
I said in my original post that "I used to be a network architect in a Tier 1 telco". It's been 5 years since. I am no longer in this part of the industry so many thanks for the updated numbers and the corrections.
Thank you:)
As far as your opinion about Google and Yahoo not knowing how to run a decent IX I will not hold my breath about that. They have enough money to buy one of the companies involved in peering-like activities in the EU in a cash and carry fashion.
One of the great advantages of how the LINX was set up is precisely that they can't. One of the reasons the LINX is so soccessful is precisely that part of its organisation: that it is a member establishment with a commitment to a charter and a governing body elected by and from among members. The most successful of the continental IXs follow the same model (eg. AMS-IX). I wonder if the corporates will recognise the correlation, and draw the appropriate conclusion that the internet runs best when the organisation is communal and operated by consensus?
Traffic is carried between two autonomous systems on the Internet if there is a transit or peering agreement. In your example either Covad or Comcast is paying for transit from AT&T. Otherwise they will not get the routing table entries for each other. AT&T is definitely not doing it for free. If Covad and Comcast were directly connected it could have been either a peering agreement under which they exchange traffic at no cost to each other or once again a transit (one of the buying from the other).
Credentials: I'm a network architect (if we want to use that term) in a major AltNet. What you say here is entirely true.
What is happening here and what Net neutrality is all about is that in the US the public peering points used to be run by big telcos like MCI (f.e MAE East or MAE West). MCI and friends deliberately made them suck really bad around 7 years ago so that people switch to buying transit. The telcos themselves switched to private peering agreements. Thus, the tier 1 cartel creation was complete (it started to coalesce around 3-4 years prior to that). As a result in the US an ISP like the ones you mention usually has 2-3 transit connections for which it pays and very few private peerings where it exchanges traffic.
Compared to that in EU a similar ISP has 2-3 transit connections and 20-30+ peering agreements across public peering points.
This is a lot more complicated. Yes, the MAEs are a bit shit. That's because they're ATM peering IXs, as much as any kind of volition on anyone's part. To name one of the few decent US ethernet IXs, PAIX is a pretty active exchange point which ships a lot of peering traffic. However, you're absolutely right that it's in Europe that the world-leading IXs are: LINX and AMS-IX in particular. Which happen to be the two major IXs my company is involved in, them being a founder member of LINX.
On average, a similar sized ISP in Britain or with access to Amsterdam has 1-3 hundred peering partners, not 20 to 30. Chances are you'll get peering with more than 50% of the LINX if you join at all, and that's around a hundred peers right there, even without connecting to any other IXs. Regarding transit: we, as an example, have transit agreements with five global carriers. Many ISPs of competent size will have simlar levels of transit. Quite a few of them have transit agreements with us as their upstream.
Something that we're noticing as a growing trend over in Europe is that private peering agreements are being established laterally across IX infrastructures (the LINX, for example, provide cheap dark fibre within the Telehouses for this kind of purpose) simply to free up bandwidth on IX interfaces on over-subscribed routers. 2-4Gb at LINX is rapidly becoming not enough capacity for the number of peers one can get there, and we along with many others are using private peering to work around this with peers we exchange very large amounts of traffic with.
My previous company I was working in the London office of a provider based out of Alameda Island. I've therefore been more involved in the USA than many engineers over here, and I do find it fascinating how what is considered 'normal' over there has diverged from what is considered 'normal' over here in the last 8 years.
Not really disagreeing with you, I guess, just providing a transatlantic perspective.
"The UK Internet backbone consists of one floor in a building in Docklands".
Yeah, it worried us a bit. Mind you, it also isn't true, and hasn't been since at the very latest 2000: for a start, the LINX is distributed across rather more than one building in the Docklands. That the LINX is crucially important to the telecommunications infrastructure of the UK, however, is beyond doubt.
Frankly, I would be surprised if we do not see Google Peering or Yahoo Peering by the end of the year
Uh, I would say it was pretty clear I was discussing the difference in the tactics of the PNAC-led regime in Washington concerning North Korea and Iraq. However, more significantly, I was pointing out a piece of very popular double-think that's flying around at the moment. People are absolutely convinced that the USA maintains a nuclear arsenal for deterrent purposes. This presumes that they hold it as axiomatic that the nuclear deterrent works (and there is, indeed, a good deal of evidence for this: only one government in history has been aggressive enough to employ nuclear weapons against significant targets during a war). Logically, people must therefore assume that the Bush regime are aware of the effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent. Logically, therefore, the Bush regime would be deterred from attacking any nation which was known to have working nukes, say on a 45-minute deployment capability. Logically, therefore, the Bush regime knew Iraq did not have nuclear capacity.
Somehow people have forgotten that if the nuclear deterrent works, it works bi-laterally. Of course Iran wants nukes, it's the only way that any modern nation can guarantee itself safe from a unilateral invasion.
I do wish there was a +3 Damn Right moderation setting.
Try this match-the-answers puzzle:
Nation A has: no oil, working nukes
Nation B has: oil, no working nukes
Take a wild guess at which one got invaded. And yes, of course this is an oversimplification. In the modern era of soundbite education that's the only way to get anyone to understand what you're saying. It's an oversimplification, but it's also true in every clause.
Obviously, what exactly we're going to do is something I'm unable to discuss in public given that the products have not finished design and thus details haven't been released to our own customers yet.
What's the problem with that, is that in order to provide reliable service across our whole customer base, we need to protect the network: as the OP was pointing out, profit margins in the ISP world are pretty much reliant on theoretical contention. Note the difference between theoretical and actual contention. Actual contention happenign is something we strive to avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Fact is, you're not. Nobody is forcing you to spend money to incorporate. But just like if you want to sell on the internet, you need to pay for a website, if you want a certifying authority to certify your identity, then you need to meet the requirements for being certified. Nobody is FORCING you to do it, but if you're not willing to prove your identity by getting incorporated, then the certifying authority isn't willing to certify your identity either.
The principle is well-taken, and your example is certainly okay, but there is a real-world interference in the theoretical system here. It's advertising, otherwise known as raising the awareness of the marketplace.
The corporate entities doing this are in business to increase share-holder value, not to recognise the needs of a changing market place. There is no benefit to them in advertising to the public a complex message (ie. one with three variables): it's in their interest to advertise a very simple one: Green is okay, Anything else is an evil black-hat hacker.
People en masse respond to extremely clear, unambiguous saturation advertising (you need only look at the political success of the Republican party, or if you're a student of history look at the epochal presedential debate between JFK and Nixon, and the different ways that was perceived by the radio and the television audiences, to see that this is true and has been for at least two generations now). So in this case, they're going to get exactly that, and it isn't going to deal adequately with the grey areas.
So, in the real world, the kind of consumer who makes up the mass of the online shopping market is going to receive a simple message: Green is good, Other stuff ain't. Which is all very well and good, but it carries an unspoken correlatory message: businesses of above a certain size are good, businesses below that size are not. And that can be argued to be a sub-optimal economic outcome, regardless of political beliefs and opinons of specific companies. In a capitalist, quasi-free market economy, obstructing the availability of supply to demand diminishes the efficiency of the system, and that is sub-optimal.
~cHriso_0 No Western journalist I've ever come across who reported the war was reticent about documenting and condemning the attrocities commited against locals and US servicemen by the North Vietnamese, still less those commited by the VC. I still know Americans who quite genuinely, physically, fear anyone they run into who they become aware is Vietnamese, because of the media treatment of the VC. The main difference in the Press attitude then is that they expected their own side not to be as bad, and they expected the government to provide good reasons for their wars. They no longer seem to particularly expect either of those things [1], though I'll admit even the US press did have a bit of a rant about Abu Ghraib. I did notice it went off the air on Fox and CNN a very long time before it went off the air on Deutsche Welle or the BBC World Service.
Regarding your second paragraph: abberations? Aye, My Lai was an abberation, but really only by scale, not by nature. Spending any kind of time interviewing veterans gets you pretty aware pretty quickly of how unpleasant some of the jungle warfare was. Having actually been around during a third-world guerrilla war also gives one a handle.
The media, like many Americans, go from one extreme to the other, spending little time at the balanced point.
On this point, however, we are in 100% agreement. The only caveat I would put in is that I would use the word 'humans' where you used the word 'Americans': humans are, ime, not terribly good at balance or moderation, but much prefer penduluum swings from extreme to extreme.
~cHris[1] It all started to erode after Watergate, and the Iran/Contra scandal was about the last time I can think of the US press exposing government corruption simply because it was happening and shouldn't be. Pretty much everything since then has either been bloody stupid 'bread and circuses' media events like the Lewinsky scandal, or information published via the internet by actual people, which the press eventually pick up on (like Abu Ghraib).
Er, the Vietnamese won on their chosen battlefield, which was covert warfare. The US lost, repeatedly, for years.
That the Vietnamese 'won' on TV is simply an artefact of the atrocities commited by their opponents, and the fact that in those days the USA had a real journalism industry which told its people about the horrible things the government didn't want them to know: frequently in very simple, very hideous photographs like the Kim Phuc picture from a napalm attack^Waccident.
It should be pointed out that I'm not arguing with your association of the two situations. I think that they are indeed very similar.
~cHrisYou are aware that the French did used to run Iraq, yes? Treaty of Paris, 1916, what caused the first Gulf War? [1]
~cHris
[1] Britain got Iran and Palestine, France got Iraq and Syria, they hadn't found the huge oil fields in southern Iran yet, so the 9th state of Iraq (Qwait) was hacked off and given to the British to even up the oil futures...
Religion, as it is commonly understood [...] has nothing to offer anyone who is aware of the world around them.
I hope you won't mind if I substitute 'spirtuality' for 'religion' here: I'm only doing so to be clear that I'm not talking about churches, or other human organisations that accrete around spiritual understandings, but am talking about the actual thing itself.
I've thought for many years that a very good description of spirituality (religion) is precisely "being aware of the world around [one]".
~cHrisJust in case you were wondering, RTFM is very rarely a flame. If someone says RTFM, chances are they know what they are talking about and the information you are seeking is in TFM. So go read it. By providing a pointer to the information, they have in fact answered your question.
Technically, yes.
Now, it may be that you lack the experience to discern what portion of TFM is the information you are seeking. If so, say so! Say that you have looked in TFM and not found an answer. Ask for help explaining specific parts of TFM, or ask for a more specific pointer to what part of TFM you should be looking in.
Things may have changed, but certainly my usual experience is that this draws the response 'Then you should have someone competent doing this for you, go away and get some clue'.
This is not helpful. Nor does this qualify as 'encouraging you to learn that skillset'. Many manuals read as if delibearately obfuscated, because they weren't written for beginners: some, however, are really good (I'd point at procmailrc(5) as an example). If you're trying to find stuff in one of the badly-designed and written man pages, then the way someone encourages you to learn that skill-set is by explaining the man page with reference both to your immediate problem, and to the more general art of extracting useful information from the immense quantity of slightly organised data which most manual pages consist of, ime.
This was much less of a problem when 99% of people messing with Unix were ubergeeks. They are the kind of people who inhale documentation and turn it into useful structures in their head, it's an aptitude. I'm not one of them. I can learn from the manual, but I can also learn a great deal faster with access to someone who can explain the thought-processes behind the documentation to me, and with a box to poke (labs++). Many, many people who now find themselves using one or other Unix-like system are perfectly capable of learning clue, but are not necessarily likely to respond well to most of the existing mechanisms provided for gaining clue.
~cHrisMarket share is just one of many factors determining the success of a company, but it's not the only one. Apple has higher revenues than Dell right now, and is making sweet profits, which is an even bigger factor in success.
o_0 Is this true? I can believe it if you're comparing apples to oranges (ie. the total revenues of the companies) but not if you're comparing Apples to Dells (ie. the personal desktop computer markets, which we're, you know, talking about). As I understand it the only reason Apple is seeing decent figures is their recent revolutionary entry into the portable music market: in other words, this is only true if you're talking iPods, rather than about personal computers.
On the other hand, you do have a support for your point in this example: the portable music appliance market which Apple entered was massively dominated by two players in Creative and Sony, and Apple took an immense amount of market share very quickly by making a product which both worked, and was liked by consumers. Good trick, that.
~cHris$2 per gallon. It's practically $2 per litre in most of the rest of the world...
at least the Romans made an effort to bring culture and civilisation, aside from destruction, AND they were also politically adept, AND they endured for a thousand years
While I agree entirely with your general point I am going to have to pedant you on the last bit. The Romans did really well as a culture for some 600 years, right up until they actually became an actual empire, rather than just having a very strong sphere of influence. From the beginning of the actual Empire up to the point where you could argue it had failed (partitioning into Eastern and Western) was at most 300 years, by most counts less.
~cHris
living under the chaos that has been the dictatorial aftermath of communism in africa
While I take your point on the general case, I'd point to a counter-example (Ghana, where I grew up). A 'Communist Dictator' there (Jerry Rawlings) who a) fixed the economy, which is a damn good trick in Africa, particularly in the 80s and b) once he'd attained national stability threw open elections, served the two terms he was elected for and then retired. Compare and contrast with the Houphet-Boigny era in Cote D'Ivoire, next door.
~cHris
About a month ago, check the news regarding the great foiled 'terror plot' and the hand-luggage restrictions that were enacted after it.
Would that this were true. One major problem with American politics is that the vast majority of the 'interest groups' who are capable of making any kind of real contribution to Washington's financial waterfall are corporate interest groups. IE. people who will give vast sums of money to both sides. If the same people weren't buying representatives in both parties, there'd still be some hope for actual debate rather than tabloid mudslinging. Banning soft money altogether would be better, but ensuring that if you give a dime to a rep of Party A at any level, anywhere in the US in a given election you are then banned from giving any to the other side at any level, anywhere would be a good start.
~cHris
Illiterate people have just as much right to choose who represents them as literate people do.
There's an argument for saying that in a democracy, this is not true, but it's not a popular one. It goes like this:
Statement: in the modern world, to be informed about current affairs requires the ability to interact with the printed word.
Statement: in a working democracy, one absolute requirement is that the members of the electorate be informed.
Conclusion: Therefore, in the modern world, the illiterate do not fulfill one of the requirements for being part of a functioning democracy.
Now, you can quite easily contest the first statement, but you can also quite easily argue in favour of it. The second statement hasn't really been contestible since Plato. The conclusion, while (as I say) it can be contested, goes a long way to explaining why the two most famous Western Democracies are both so badly broken.
~cHris
I rather disagree. The Democratic party has been moving further and further towards the right wing of the political spectrum, chasing the Republicans as they drove out into the wilds beyond conservatism and found the PNAC cabal, or 'Neo-Conservative Movement', waiting there. Something quite similar is happening in Britain, though driven by different socio-economic and political trends.
The problem is that the political environment of America has been re-defined such that even wanting to be a moderate centerist will be, and is, presented to the population as left-wing extremism (and yes, there is also a loony fringe, but I'd define them as being at right-angles to reality and therefore not really left-wing at all). And the things is, even the Democrats themselves have bought into this re-definition of terms. They seem to genuinely believe that not wanting to invade people is extremism, these days.
Also, certainty is more saleable to the (almost entirely uninformed) electorate than accuracy, subtlety or a thorough understanding of the complexity of the issues that confront us in the modern world. The Republican party have very effectively established their pitch as the purveyors of absolutely certain, deity-sponsored, and above all short solutions to problems that neither they nor the general public seem to feel the need to understand [1]. The Democrats used to stand for comprehensive solutions to complex problems: along the way, they lost the perception battle and are now seen as not standing for anything, simply because they historically didn't offer this kind of simplicty and certainty. Of course, now, they largely don't seem to actually stand for anything.
In summary, the Republicans worked out years ago that if you change the public perception of the terms of the debate, you take control of the rules. That provides a great advantage in winning, and the Republicans have very successfully executed that policy.
~cHris
[1] An example is that both the Republican Party and the general populace seemed to believe somehow that attacking Iraq was in some way a direct, simple solution to the problem of Saudis wanting to blow up America. The marginalisation and dissaffection of certain populations in the modern era of globalisation and changing concepts of sovreignty is a very complex issue, and declaring War on Terror won't solve it. However, it's very marketable.
Hi. Point of information: last time I looked that was the LINX, and I'm reasonably sure it still is. Also, I'd be interested in your terms here: is 'biggest' meaning 'broadest peering matrix'? Or does it mean 'largest traffic volume on the switch fabric'? Or some other measure?
~cHrisUm. You seem to have failed to notice that the UN not thinking something should happen stopped being a viable reason to prevent at least one major space-faring nation from doing it at least four years ago. Your analysis depends on people giving a shit what the UN thinks, and the USA does not.
~cHrisWhile I entirely understand the problems with anthropocentrism, misanthropy is no more sensible. Why is what humans do not a part of a natural process? We evolved naturally, what we evolved was the ability to engineer, we use it, it's natural...
It's a controversial point, but it's one of those ones where only one side of the controversy ever gets aired.
~cHrisPacket Exchange and the ilk are, however, practically irrelevant when it comes to network significance in Europe. Compare and contrast the amount of traffic exchanged by peers through PX with the amount shipped across the LINX. Compare and contrast the variety and significance of the ASNs who will peer across PX with those at LINX. And so on. That was kind of my point in responding to the GP.
If American corporate interests were going to try and "embrace and extend" (ie. purchase and sabotage) the infrastructure which makes Europe's bi-lateral peering tradition work, they'd need to get LINX, AMS-IX, DE-CIX and a couple of others, and in most cases those entities are not subject to that kind of purchase.
~cHrisThank you :)
One of the great advantages of how the LINX was set up is precisely that they can't. One of the reasons the LINX is so soccessful is precisely that part of its organisation: that it is a member establishment with a commitment to a charter and a governing body elected by and from among members. The most successful of the continental IXs follow the same model (eg. AMS-IX). I wonder if the corporates will recognise the correlation, and draw the appropriate conclusion that the internet runs best when the organisation is communal and operated by consensus?
~cHrisCredentials: I'm a network architect (if we want to use that term) in a major AltNet. What you say here is entirely true.
This is a lot more complicated. Yes, the MAEs are a bit shit. That's because they're ATM peering IXs, as much as any kind of volition on anyone's part. To name one of the few decent US ethernet IXs, PAIX is a pretty active exchange point which ships a lot of peering traffic. However, you're absolutely right that it's in Europe that the world-leading IXs are: LINX and AMS-IX in particular. Which happen to be the two major IXs my company is involved in, them being a founder member of LINX.
On average, a similar sized ISP in Britain or with access to Amsterdam has 1-3 hundred peering partners, not 20 to 30. Chances are you'll get peering with more than 50% of the LINX if you join at all, and that's around a hundred peers right there, even without connecting to any other IXs. Regarding transit: we, as an example, have transit agreements with five global carriers. Many ISPs of competent size will have simlar levels of transit. Quite a few of them have transit agreements with us as their upstream.
Something that we're noticing as a growing trend over in Europe is that private peering agreements are being established laterally across IX infrastructures (the LINX, for example, provide cheap dark fibre within the Telehouses for this kind of purpose) simply to free up bandwidth on IX interfaces on over-subscribed routers. 2-4Gb at LINX is rapidly becoming not enough capacity for the number of peers one can get there, and we along with many others are using private peering to work around this with peers we exchange very large amounts of traffic with.
My previous company I was working in the London office of a provider based out of Alameda Island. I've therefore been more involved in the USA than many engineers over here, and I do find it fascinating how what is considered 'normal' over there has diverged from what is considered 'normal' over here in the last 8 years.
Not really disagreeing with you, I guess, just providing a transatlantic perspective.
Yeah, it worried us a bit. Mind you, it also isn't true, and hasn't been since at the very latest 2000: for a start, the LINX is distributed across rather more than one building in the Docklands. That the LINX is crucially important to the telecommunications infrastructure of the UK, however, is beyond doubt.
I would
Uh, I would say it was pretty clear I was discussing the difference in the tactics of the PNAC-led regime in Washington concerning North Korea and Iraq. However, more significantly, I was pointing out a piece of very popular double-think that's flying around at the moment. People are absolutely convinced that the USA maintains a nuclear arsenal for deterrent purposes. This presumes that they hold it as axiomatic that the nuclear deterrent works (and there is, indeed, a good deal of evidence for this: only one government in history has been aggressive enough to employ nuclear weapons against significant targets during a war). Logically, people must therefore assume that the Bush regime are aware of the effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent. Logically, therefore, the Bush regime would be deterred from attacking any nation which was known to have working nukes, say on a 45-minute deployment capability. Logically, therefore, the Bush regime knew Iraq did not have nuclear capacity.
Somehow people have forgotten that if the nuclear deterrent works, it works bi-laterally. Of course Iran wants nukes, it's the only way that any modern nation can guarantee itself safe from a unilateral invasion.
~cHrisUh, that's the kind of thing the French do. You don't want people to think you're French, do ya? Ya can get yerself shot for that kind of thing...
There are time I wish my cynicism was not justified.
~cHrisI do wish there was a +3 Damn Right moderation setting.
Try this match-the-answers puzzle:
Nation A has: no oil, working nukes
Nation B has: oil, no working nukes
Take a wild guess at which one got invaded. And yes, of course this is an oversimplification. In the modern era of soundbite education that's the only way to get anyone to understand what you're saying. It's an oversimplification, but it's also true in every clause.
~cHrisIIRC 3rd most holy: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, etc... But I could be wrong.
~cHrisObviously, what exactly we're going to do is something I'm unable to discuss in public given that the products have not finished design and thus details haven't been released to our own customers yet.
What's the problem with that, is that in order to provide reliable service across our whole customer base, we need to protect the network: as the OP was pointing out, profit margins in the ISP world are pretty much reliant on theoretical contention. Note the difference between theoretical and actual contention. Actual contention happenign is something we strive to avoid.
~cHris