Well I explained it better in another comment... But what I mean is control of the Internet should remain in the hands of those responsible for running the Internet. The network you are thinking of is actually ARPANET, which was only a small part of the 'Internet' and one of the last sections of it to embrace TCP/IP. But even ARPANET's standards were designed in the same manner: Those who would actually run the network (ARPA, Universities) got together and agreed on standard ways of doing things. That's where we get the RFC system (Read RFC 1 sometime, it's an awesome historical perspective for Comp Sci students) amongst other things. Ever since then, Internet standards have been decided on by consensus of the people in charge of running the networks.
A real good history of the Internet can be found at: this site. All in all, it's good to know your computer history... More Comp Sci undergrads really should understand how they truly are standing on the shoulders of giants (such as: Vint Serf, Dennis Ritchie, etc) as they do simple things on the 'Net everyday that they take for granted. But unfortunately most people I see at the Uni everyday know less and less of where that they do has come from.
And yes, I do remember CompuServe (though I was a wee lad when I last used it) though 'The Source' only evokes a very fuzzy memory. Scary to think I'm getting old already...
That said, the more important point is that the internet shouldn't be in the hands of any one government.
Exactly. That's why it shouldn't be in the hands of the UN. Control of the Internet belongs to those who own/run the networks that comprise it. Any authority that they follow exists and has its authority solely because they voluntarily follow it. Should those in charge of the root servers and those in charge of address allocation become intolerable dictators or ineffective leaders, they will find themselves ignored by the individuals who run the 'Net.
And that is the true beauty of the Internet; there is no governance. Things only work because people agree to make them work. Standards only exist because people agree to those standards. If some company decided they wanted to write a new protocol to replace TCP/IP that only their company's software could make use of, for instance, they would find their packets dropped at the first router they didn't own. Non-compliance of voluntary standards is seen by the Internet as damage and routed around. (See: Usenet Death Penalty)
This is how the Internet has been run in the past and should be run in the future: Those responsible for running and maintaining the networks should be the ones in charge of deciding how they are run.
Even if the UN decides they want control of the Internet, how can they enforce it? The only reason any authority exists on the Internet is because owners of the individual networks voluntarily agree to follow their direction. If the people in charge of domain registration or IP allocation suddenly became completely intolerable, the network operators could easily switch to some new system for handling it and once again 'the Internet routes around what it percieves to be damage'.
I really don't see the UN taking control. Developed nations won't allow it. The Internet should remain a private entity without direct government control. Especially not the UN's control... Considering how ineffective they are in running everything else, I shudder to think about how poorly they will manage something like the Internet.
I wouldn't be suprised if Bush wants a program to pump a whole bunch of tax dollars in to Boeing to keep it afloat.
Erm... Actually that was a program that started in Congress when Daschle was still speaker... And his wife was still Boeing's lobbyist... No connection to Bush whatever.
One its become pretty clear he is using the U.S. Treasury's credit card to borrow and spend the U.S. in to an economic boom to insure his reelection.
Keynes said governments should deficit spend during recessions and use booms to slash their budgets and recoup the deficit from the expanded economy. Most economists seem to like his theories. Government spending will NOT cause an economic boom, if anything it will hurt a vibrant economy by pushing out private firms. The economic recovery had nothing to do with government spending and EVERYTHING to do with tax cuts and increased sales.
And as someone else already pointed out... A moon base will be used to develop the technologies and procedures for a Mars mission... Much like the Mercury/Gemini missions developed the technologies for the Moon Shot.
I'd contend the major reason NASA is so much pork and so little performance is that they haven't had a mission--a dream, if you will--since the end of the Apollo program.
It's one thing to help my immediate family (parents, sibs) who has done alot to support me. But then again they're my most reasonable family members who let me get to it on my time instead of demanding it be taken care of yesterday.
A good example of the other type of family member is my Aunt, who while I was holding down a job and attending ~18 hours of classes right around midterm told my Mom "He needs to get his priorities straight" because I had not yet come to look at her computer a week after she called me... The only reason she called me of course is that she didn't feel like calling tech support for her months old Gateway (or better yet, bring it down the street to the local Gateway store) and instead assumed she could simply abuse me. Of course my Mom told her where she could go.
Excuse my late reply, but could you possibly pass on a short list of what you guys drink (Beerwise) over there? American's can do many things well, but Beer is not one of them.:)
Hmm that's funny I can do something like click "Advanced Froogle Search" and in the exact phrase box type "United Kingdom" and type what I'm looking for in the other boxes and I seem to get back results from shops in the UK. I imagine it would be the same for most nations with online retailers. You might want to e-mail Google and ask them to work on specialized Froogles for different regions much like you have specialized Googles.
HP laptops are better than what they used to be, but the best experience we've had has always been with IBM Thinkpads. Some people claim they're ugly, but the simple functional black design kinda grows on you. The new T40 or T41 models really make me drool... I'm an AMD guy but the Pentium M really is sweet.
Yeah, I have never bought a big name PC for myself, I always build them... But for friends/family, I don't have the time to be their tech support... So I wish I had someone good to suggest for Home users. For corporate it's Dell all the way, except we (naturally) prefer IBM laptops.
Actually it doesn't really have anything to do with the USA. Most of the world uses BIND and the BIND guys say it'd take them a year to get full UNICODE support, not to mention the security problems they'd have to worry about then. After reading the RFC, I have to say this is a pretty nifty hack to make it work since every string gets encoded into a unique punycode string that's compliant with the current DNS RFCs.
Plus the guy uses Amuro Namie in one of his examples, so he's gotta be cool.:P
One thing I've learned from working with Dell for the past few years is that they don't give a flip about their home users... But then again, why should they? They make money off corporate/government contracts, not supporting grannies who don't know where the any key is.
After having such good experiences with Dell in the Office, we started recommending people buy Dell for their home, too. Oh boy BIG mistake. The hardware is substandard, just about every default installation is munged somehow or another, and the things generally stop working within a year. *NO ONE* I know has gotten a good Dell home PC recently. Meanwhile we noticed a definite decrease in quality of customer support in the past year...
Me: Here's an article from Adobe that says there's a known issue between this motherboard and Adobe Acrobate 5.5, what's the solution? Faceless E-mail Tech: Here's an article on how to troubleshoot Windows 2000 startup problems. Me: Argh!
Ad infinitum.
On that note, is there any big name manufacturer that still makes/supports good home machines? People always ask me recommendations but I'm out of them, other than "Just buy a Mac".
Yahoo bought eGroups a while back, so those of us who are maintainers of mailing lists that used that free service are kinda stuck with them. There's really not an easier way to get a free mailing list setup that I've found.
This story had nothing to do with the US... The reactor is being built in South Africa. While South Africa itself is not a paragon of virtuous government, that doesn't change the fact that this reactor design is exceptionally safe. If you're so much smarter than me, tell me how you could convince these balls of graphite to ignore thermal expansion and explode? There are plenty of terrorists in this world that would love to know.
It's notoriously hard to cause fissionable material go super-critical and make the kind of explosion you're talking about. It generally involves compressing uranium or plutonium with a few thousand atmospheres of pressure in a an infinitesmally short period of time. That's not something that's possible with this reactor.
The example you cited before, 'nuking' the Ukraine, if I remember correctly was caused by an incredibly stupid design that made the Chernobyl reactor become more efficient as heat increased (not less efficient like Western designs) so that when the engineers removed the cooling source, the plant overheated and either hydrogen or steam blew the top off. Meanwhile in Three Mile Island, when that core overheated and melted, everything was held in the containment structure and no radiation was released.
How has the nuclear industry destroyed its credibility in the US? What pollution? What lies? What scams? Details, man! I need details! As many have pointed out before, coal plants release plenty of radioactive material into our atmosphere every day. What US nuclear reactor can you point to as irradiating its surroundings?
Of course since I'm taking the rational approach and backing my claims up with science instead of taking the scared sheep "Nuclear means things go boom!" and "Radiation is scary!" approach I must be on the take? Believe me, sometimes I wish I was instead of working tech support part time. I don't have any 'allegiance' to any form of power. From a realistic standpoint, Nuclear is probably one of the better options we have available for the time being. It's sustainable, much cleaner than our current coal plants, and much more efficient than many 'alternative' energy sources.
Until Fusion reaches the break-even point, we simply will NOT have a clean energy source that can sustain us. And then again, Fusion may have some unintended consequence that we don't realize yet. Personally I'd like to see Solar Arrays on the moon beaming back power to Earth, but people have already found things to complain about in that plan as well.
If you're going to argue against something, fine, do that. But at least back up your arguments with some science or logic. This pebble bed reactor can't go boom. Heat expansion prevents the chain reaction that causes the 'boom' from occuring.
My problem is that: 1) You could have written your reply without the "I'm smarter than you" tone and 2) Nuclear plants can be built in such a way that it's impossible for them to 'explode'. In the case of the pebble bed reactor, there's no way for the fuel to reach a critical configuration. You could blow it up by strapping enough TNT to it, but that still wouldn't make it go critical.
Actually AMD makes plenty of embedded chips that use both 32-bit x86 architecture or their own custom tailored architectures for whatever they're used for. So yes they are in the mobile market and actually it's a big part of their business strategy.
As far as 32-bit emulation on 64-bit chips... Intel had to eat crow and release a software emulator for the Itanium because of how lousy its hardware emulation was. The beauty (and only thing beautiful about it) of the x86-64 architecture is that it lets 32-bit code run side-by-side with 64-bit code with no performance loss. There's no emulation or anything of that sort. And once they get their yields up, there will be no reason a Hammer based CPU couldn't be priced similarly to current 32-bit Athlons, and it will still offer superior 32-bit performance compared to the current Athlon without the 64-bit portions of the chip ever being touched.
Yes, 32-bit only CPUs will still be quite useful in the embedded market (much like the Z80 and M68k CPUs live on) but the way things are going we may be running 32-bit apps on 64-bit CPUs in the not too distant future (kinda like running 16-bit Windows 3.x on a 386)
I prefer government-run to big-business-run. At least governments are accountable to voters.
As I said before to someone else... Apparently you've never worked for a municipal government. Yes, in theory, the government is accountable to voters but that depends on the voters actually being diligent in keeping up with what their government is up to. Having worked for a Government myself I can tell you the average citizen is completely oblivious to the day-to-day activities of his or her government and only a very vocal minority bothers to pester the government over its actions.
Meanwhile just about every consumer knows "Starkist is killin' the dolphins!"... Government is only accountable to those who pay attention to them, which are the vast minority compared to the indifferent and dependent masses of voters. Businesses however are accountable to their employees, consumers, AND the Government. If a business gets out of line, the Government has the authority to destroy it. If the Government gets out of line, the best you can do is hope they allow you to sue them.
Governments are just as corruptable as businesses, if not more so.
I work for the Local Government in Lafayette, Louisiana and we've been rolling out fiber for years now all over the city... Businesses and residents can buy access through numerous resellers which all specialize in different things... Including one or two that specialize in delivering high-speed wireless access to your house. Of course LARGE cities end up in the news for mentioning they'll be rolling out fiber someday now, while us smaller cities that have had a fiber network for a couple years never get mentioned.:)
Actually, yes I *AM* a developer. STL has nothing to do with this, there's plenty of safe C functions (ie: strncpy() instead of strcpy()) and anyone can do bounds checking. This isn't legacy code we're talking about here, this was an application that was written long after buffer overflows had become popularized.
This also isn't about a game... Gamespy isn't game software, it's matchmaking software. And it's trivial to do bounds checking on the frickin' IRC protocol for Christ's sake! I was reading the IRC RFCs and writing code to handle them when I was 16!:P
Now, as someone pointed out in an earlier reply to me, in this case the individual's a dork and should be introduced to a speargun to the head.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I explained it better in another comment... But what I mean is control of the Internet should remain in the hands of those responsible for running the Internet.
The network you are thinking of is actually ARPANET, which was only a small part of the 'Internet' and one of the last sections of it to embrace TCP/IP. But even ARPANET's standards were designed in the same manner: Those who would actually run the network (ARPA, Universities) got together and agreed on standard ways of doing things. That's where we get the RFC system (Read RFC 1 sometime, it's an awesome historical perspective for Comp Sci students) amongst other things. Ever since then, Internet standards have been decided on by consensus of the people in charge of running the networks.
A real good history of the Internet can be found at: this site. All in all, it's good to know your computer history... More Comp Sci undergrads really should understand how they truly are standing on the shoulders of giants (such as: Vint Serf, Dennis Ritchie, etc) as they do simple things on the 'Net everyday that they take for granted. But unfortunately most people I see at the Uni everyday know less and less of where that they do has come from.
And yes, I do remember CompuServe (though I was a wee lad when I last used it) though 'The Source' only evokes a very fuzzy memory. Scary to think I'm getting old already...
That said, the more important point is that the internet shouldn't be in the hands of any one government.
Exactly. That's why it shouldn't be in the hands of the UN. Control of the Internet belongs to those who own/run the networks that comprise it. Any authority that they follow exists and has its authority solely because they voluntarily follow it. Should those in charge of the root servers and those in charge of address allocation become intolerable dictators or ineffective leaders, they will find themselves ignored by the individuals who run the 'Net.
And that is the true beauty of the Internet; there is no governance. Things only work because people agree to make them work. Standards only exist because people agree to those standards. If some company decided they wanted to write a new protocol to replace TCP/IP that only their company's software could make use of, for instance, they would find their packets dropped at the first router they didn't own. Non-compliance of voluntary standards is seen by the Internet as damage and routed around. (See: Usenet Death Penalty)
This is how the Internet has been run in the past and should be run in the future: Those responsible for running and maintaining the networks should be the ones in charge of deciding how they are run.
Even if the UN decides they want control of the Internet, how can they enforce it? The only reason any authority exists on the Internet is because owners of the individual networks voluntarily agree to follow their direction. If the people in charge of domain registration or IP allocation suddenly became completely intolerable, the network operators could easily switch to some new system for handling it and once again 'the Internet routes around what it percieves to be damage'.
I really don't see the UN taking control. Developed nations won't allow it. The Internet should remain a private entity without direct government control. Especially not the UN's control... Considering how ineffective they are in running everything else, I shudder to think about how poorly they will manage something like the Internet.
I wouldn't be suprised if Bush wants a program to pump a whole bunch of tax dollars in to Boeing to keep it afloat.
Erm... Actually that was a program that started in Congress when Daschle was still speaker... And his wife was still Boeing's lobbyist... No connection to Bush whatever.
One its become pretty clear he is using the U.S. Treasury's credit card to borrow and spend the U.S. in to an economic boom to insure his reelection.
Keynes said governments should deficit spend during recessions and use booms to slash their budgets and recoup the deficit from the expanded economy. Most economists seem to like his theories. Government spending will NOT cause an economic boom, if anything it will hurt a vibrant economy by pushing out private firms. The economic recovery had nothing to do with government spending and EVERYTHING to do with tax cuts and increased sales.
And as someone else already pointed out... A moon base will be used to develop the technologies and procedures for a Mars mission... Much like the Mercury/Gemini missions developed the technologies for the Moon Shot.
I'd contend the major reason NASA is so much pork and so little performance is that they haven't had a mission--a dream, if you will--since the end of the Apollo program.
It's one thing to help my immediate family (parents, sibs) who has done alot to support me. But then again they're my most reasonable family members who let me get to it on my time instead of demanding it be taken care of yesterday.
A good example of the other type of family member is my Aunt, who while I was holding down a job and attending ~18 hours of classes right around midterm told my Mom "He needs to get his priorities straight" because I had not yet come to look at her computer a week after she called me... The only reason she called me of course is that she didn't feel like calling tech support for her months old Gateway (or better yet, bring it down the street to the local Gateway store) and instead assumed she could simply abuse me. Of course my Mom told her where she could go.
I love my Mom.
Excuse my late reply, but could you possibly pass on a short list of what you guys drink (Beerwise) over there? American's can do many things well, but Beer is not one of them. :)
Hmm that's funny I can do something like click "Advanced Froogle Search" and in the exact phrase box type "United Kingdom" and type what I'm looking for in the other boxes and I seem to get back results from shops in the UK. I imagine it would be the same for most nations with online retailers. You might want to e-mail Google and ask them to work on specialized Froogles for different regions much like you have specialized Googles.
Google has a specialized tool to access their search engine specifically to do shopping/price comparison... So yes, you are missing something. :)
Besides, these sites were using hacks to artificially inflate their pagerank instead of providing a higher quality site to increase it.
HP laptops are better than what they used to be, but the best experience we've had has always been with IBM Thinkpads. Some people claim they're ugly, but the simple functional black design kinda grows on you. The new T40 or T41 models really make me drool... I'm an AMD guy but the Pentium M really is sweet.
Yeah, I have never bought a big name PC for myself, I always build them... But for friends/family, I don't have the time to be their tech support... So I wish I had someone good to suggest for Home users. For corporate it's Dell all the way, except we (naturally) prefer IBM laptops.
Actually it doesn't really have anything to do with the USA. Most of the world uses BIND and the BIND guys say it'd take them a year to get full UNICODE support, not to mention the security problems they'd have to worry about then. After reading the RFC, I have to say this is a pretty nifty hack to make it work since every string gets encoded into a unique punycode string that's compliant with the current DNS RFCs.
:P
Plus the guy uses Amuro Namie in one of his examples, so he's gotta be cool.
One thing I've learned from working with Dell for the past few years is that they don't give a flip about their home users... But then again, why should they? They make money off corporate/government contracts, not supporting grannies who don't know where the any key is.
After having such good experiences with Dell in the Office, we started recommending people buy Dell for their home, too. Oh boy BIG mistake. The hardware is substandard, just about every default installation is munged somehow or another, and the things generally stop working within a year. *NO ONE* I know has gotten a good Dell home PC recently. Meanwhile we noticed a definite decrease in quality of customer support in the past year...
Me: Here's an article from Adobe that says there's a known issue between this motherboard and Adobe Acrobate 5.5, what's the solution?
Faceless E-mail Tech: Here's an article on how to troubleshoot Windows 2000 startup problems.
Me: Argh!
Ad infinitum.
On that note, is there any big name manufacturer that still makes/supports good home machines? People always ask me recommendations but I'm out of them, other than "Just buy a Mac".
Or it's just society deciding to protect itself from dangerous individuals.
Yahoo bought eGroups a while back, so those of us who are maintainers of mailing lists that used that free service are kinda stuck with them. There's really not an easier way to get a free mailing list setup that I've found.
This story had nothing to do with the US... The reactor is being built in South Africa. While South Africa itself is not a paragon of virtuous government, that doesn't change the fact that this reactor design is exceptionally safe. If you're so much smarter than me, tell me how you could convince these balls of graphite to ignore thermal expansion and explode? There are plenty of terrorists in this world that would love to know.
It's notoriously hard to cause fissionable material go super-critical and make the kind of explosion you're talking about. It generally involves compressing uranium or plutonium with a few thousand atmospheres of pressure in a an infinitesmally short period of time. That's not something that's possible with this reactor.
The example you cited before, 'nuking' the Ukraine, if I remember correctly was caused by an incredibly stupid design that made the Chernobyl reactor become more efficient as heat increased (not less efficient like Western designs) so that when the engineers removed the cooling source, the plant overheated and either hydrogen or steam blew the top off. Meanwhile in Three Mile Island, when that core overheated and melted, everything was held in the containment structure and no radiation was released.
How has the nuclear industry destroyed its credibility in the US? What pollution? What lies? What scams? Details, man! I need details! As many have pointed out before, coal plants release plenty of radioactive material into our atmosphere every day. What US nuclear reactor can you point to as irradiating its surroundings?
Of course since I'm taking the rational approach and backing my claims up with science instead of taking the scared sheep "Nuclear means things go boom!" and "Radiation is scary!" approach I must be on the take? Believe me, sometimes I wish I was instead of working tech support part time. I don't have any 'allegiance' to any form of power. From a realistic standpoint, Nuclear is probably one of the better options we have available for the time being. It's sustainable, much cleaner than our current coal plants, and much more efficient than many 'alternative' energy sources.
Until Fusion reaches the break-even point, we simply will NOT have a clean energy source that can sustain us. And then again, Fusion may have some unintended consequence that we don't realize yet. Personally I'd like to see Solar Arrays on the moon beaming back power to Earth, but people have already found things to complain about in that plan as well.
If you're going to argue against something, fine, do that. But at least back up your arguments with some science or logic. This pebble bed reactor can't go boom. Heat expansion prevents the chain reaction that causes the 'boom' from occuring.
My problem is that:
1) You could have written your reply without the "I'm smarter than you" tone and
2) Nuclear plants can be built in such a way that it's impossible for them to 'explode'. In the case of the pebble bed reactor, there's no way for the fuel to reach a critical configuration. You could blow it up by strapping enough TNT to it, but that still wouldn't make it go critical.
No, I'd say it was modded as a troll because there's no "Incoherent Babbling Jerk" mod :P
So it's kind've like painting goat's blood over your door...
I don't know, I just can't see McBride as the angel of death.
Godwinson's law, you lose. You should've said 'fascists'.
If the educational system doesn't get dismatled by greedy administrations like the current one
Is that comment meant just to snare morons like me, or do you have some proof to back that comment up, sparky?
Those of us over here on the right are angry that the current administration increased spending on school way too much...
Actually AMD makes plenty of embedded chips that use both 32-bit x86 architecture or their own custom tailored architectures for whatever they're used for. So yes they are in the mobile market and actually it's a big part of their business strategy.
As far as 32-bit emulation on 64-bit chips... Intel had to eat crow and release a software emulator for the Itanium because of how lousy its hardware emulation was.
The beauty (and only thing beautiful about it) of the x86-64 architecture is that it lets 32-bit code run side-by-side with 64-bit code with no performance loss. There's no emulation or anything of that sort. And once they get their yields up, there will be no reason a Hammer based CPU couldn't be priced similarly to current 32-bit Athlons, and it will still offer superior 32-bit performance compared to the current Athlon without the 64-bit portions of the chip ever being touched.
Yes, 32-bit only CPUs will still be quite useful in the embedded market (much like the Z80 and M68k CPUs live on) but the way things are going we may be running 32-bit apps on 64-bit CPUs in the not too distant future (kinda like running 16-bit Windows 3.x on a 386)
I prefer government-run to big-business-run. At least governments are accountable to voters.
As I said before to someone else... Apparently you've never worked for a municipal government. Yes, in theory, the government is accountable to voters but that depends on the voters actually being diligent in keeping up with what their government is up to. Having worked for a Government myself I can tell you the average citizen is completely oblivious to the day-to-day activities of his or her government and only a very vocal minority bothers to pester the government over its actions.
Meanwhile just about every consumer knows "Starkist is killin' the dolphins!"... Government is only accountable to those who pay attention to them, which are the vast minority compared to the indifferent and dependent masses of voters. Businesses however are accountable to their employees, consumers, AND the Government. If a business gets out of line, the Government has the authority to destroy it. If the Government gets out of line, the best you can do is hope they allow you to sue them.
Governments are just as corruptable as businesses, if not more so.
read not controlled by draconian corporations
... Obviously, you've never worked for a municipal government.
I work for the Local Government in Lafayette, Louisiana and we've been rolling out fiber for years now all over the city... Businesses and residents can buy access through numerous resellers which all specialize in different things... Including one or two that specialize in delivering high-speed wireless access to your house. :)
Of course LARGE cities end up in the news for mentioning they'll be rolling out fiber someday now, while us smaller cities that have had a fiber network for a couple years never get mentioned.
Actually, yes I *AM* a developer. STL has nothing to do with this, there's plenty of safe C functions (ie: strncpy() instead of strcpy()) and anyone can do bounds checking. This isn't legacy code we're talking about here, this was an application that was written long after buffer overflows had become popularized.
:P
This also isn't about a game... Gamespy isn't game software, it's matchmaking software. And it's trivial to do bounds checking on the frickin' IRC protocol for Christ's sake! I was reading the IRC RFCs and writing code to handle them when I was 16!
Now, as someone pointed out in an earlier reply to me, in this case the individual's a dork and should be introduced to a speargun to the head.