I second that. I bought my Aeron a few months ago, and it's the best purchase I ever made. My back and shoulders were getting done in by sitting on a lesser chair, and now I get practically no backache, etc.
I know of at least two firms who have kitted their entire office (all employees) with Aerons. They're worth it in the long run.
However, not all is peachy... it's developed a wobble. Luckily, Herman Miller engineers are going to come and service it for me. =)
I switched from Demon tenner-a-month to Plus.Net's Surf 24/7 account last month. I was planning on keeping Demon, but Plus.Net's service seems to be better than Demon's.
I pay 20-odd quid a month for the BT Smurftime Anytime, and then about 6 quid a month to Plus.Net. That gets me 24/7 unmetered, with about 50,666 bps on my old BT line. Okay, it's 26 quid a month, but I don't mind paying, and getting a bit more support asskicking capability.
The service was set up quickly, and apart from a small fire at Plus.Net's main NOC, everything's been peachy. PlusNet also give you CGI/Shell access, PHP, MySQL, a free.co.uk, Mailing Lists, etc. Very good overall. They'll even get me a static IP if I want it.
Incidentally, I'm in Bristol with a pretty knackered BT line.
Okay, this one's going to be controversial, but I'm not trying to troll here.
I think VRML died because it was a technology without a purpose... okay, there are a lot of uses for VRML and VR in general, but they're pretty niche.
It's like all of those 'innovative new navigation schemes' the average Shockwave author comes out with: very pretty, but a list of links is usually more functional.
VRML was originally hyped as the technology 'the new web' would be based upon -- we'd stop writing flat pages and have everything 3D in cyberspace. It's a marketing person's wet dream, but it's easier to read Slashdot in a nice flat font than having to "explore" the latest JonKatz column from the surface of a texture mapped octahedron. Navigating my file hierarchy with a tree-like Explorer is bad enough, let alone leaping around it like Mario.
If three-dee was such a big deal for publishing, Playboy, GQ, et al would be pop-up books -- hey, that's not a bad idea... =)
The Apple notebooks are very price competitive with other notebooks.
Not just the 'parts are highly constrained' argument... The iBook is supposedly the world's best-selling laptop. I don't know about percentage market share with iMac, etc.
I saw a documentary about "The Usual Suspects" in which Chris McQuarrie (the writer) said that he and Bryan Singer (the Director/Producer) both knew who Keyser Soze was, but they disagreed. Gabriel Byrne had a different idea of who Keyser Soze was -- himself!
The Keyser Soze character was designed to be completely ambiguous. The most obvious interpretation was that it was Verbal Kint, but that's not the only interpretation.
I think Ridley Scott means that in his interpretation, Deckard was a replicant. However, it might've just been a soundbite for Channel 4! =)
I went to a pretty interesting seminar in London a while back, which focused on the business case for WAP.
It seems (and there's quite a lot of support for this theory) that WAP is really just a temporary hack put there until they get 3G services sorted. I'm damn glad of this -- ever since I started working on WAP I've hated it. It seems such a badly-thought-out solution.
Guesses are that there just aren't going to be enough WAP-capable handsets in circulation before 3G takes off two years hence. Nokia and the others can't make them fast enough.
The networks, the manufacturers, the content providers, all seem to be paying lip-service to WAP while focusing on 3G and other technologies. This is a fair point.
Most developers I've spoken to say this, though: "It's not worth getting into WAP. Let's wait for 3G". However, I'll put this to you: WAP is an experiment. Not an experiment in technology (3G tech is so different that WAP techie experience will be useless). It's an experiment in business models. How will we make money out of "m-Commerce" and "free" wireless services? How do people interact with wireless services? What are going to be the primary uses of wireless services?
We have all these great ideas like revenue sharing and loss-leading (based on building a membership base across mobile and traditional internet platforms). Do we know whether they're going to work? The best thing to do is dip our toes in the water while they're getting 3G ready. Once that comes, WAP will probably go the way of Gopher.
For now, the companies who pass over WAP for 3G will enter the arena of wireless internet with NO EXPERIENCE, and NO ESTABLISHED BRAND within the wireless domain.
Okay, I'm talking fluent Suit now. I run an internet games business and I'm also the main developer. I have to see both sides of the coin. Even so, I'm dreading having to write games for WAP.
Tally me up for a 'WAP really sucks' vote, though.
I guess that Palm is going to seriously screw with their user base in terms of compiled code, unless they do a DragonBall emulator (I guess that for most applications, you don't need balls-out performance for this to work just fine)
I'm going to cover a few other points here... I'm a longtime ARM user (back from the Acorn days) and I'm also writing apps for Palm OS right now.
Palm have always had a history of NOT being a "Microsoft". Their SDK is open and free. You can get a good-quality open and free C compiler: gcc. (It's also maintained by Palm) You can get a good-quality emulator for Mac, Windows and UN*X, partly supported by Palm (they don't support the UN*X version, AFAIK). They document their stuff well, and they answer technical questions.
You can develop for Palm without spending any money on software -- you don't even *need* a Palm -- you can download the ROM images from Palm if you sign an agreement.
So, not supporting the Dragonball is not an option. They will. It's as easy as that. Even if they didn't, since they use a pretty high-level API (it's C, but about as high-level C as you can get), targeting more than one processor isn't going to be a problem. Palm apps end up at a maximum of 64K in the large part (okay, some are bigger, but most are under 10K!). So what's the big deal of a recompile and distributing both? Most apps don't use any assembly -- the only time you need it is when there isn't support under your compiler of choice for, say for example, shared libraries.
I think a move to ARM would only affect about 2% of developers -- writers of hacks and things like Dreadling (www.dreadling.com).
On other notes, Palm have started bloating their range with color and other whizzy features -- mostly due to customer demand. What they haven't done is abandon their old models: the Palm III and V are still going strong, and the ranges have been enhanced with other variants. I have a IIIc, and color doesn't add much advantage (I bought it as a development platform, so it doesn't really matter to me!) They've also licensed Palm OS to others -- like Handspring, so they can concentrate on their core competency, the simple PDA. It's also pretty interesting that Palm have licensed to Nokia -- I guess that's thanks to the Symbian relationship.
Well, I digress. Bottom line: a month ago I left my contract job at HP and started working from home writing for Palm OS. In the past month, I've come to realise how much I hated the work I've been doing for the last five years. Writing for Palm OS has rejuvenated my enjoyment of programming. It's wonderful. (Oh, and the fact that I can write code for money while drinking beer at 1 a.m.) The pure satisfaction in writing for a well-designed API is the reason there's so much shareware/freeware for Palm, and hence, why they've got serious market share: three of my friends have recently bought Palms based on seeing how good mine is. Part of that is the wealth of good software -- the thing that's always nobbled Psion.
This isn't quite right. Mac OS X will support three API's (4 if you count Java) Classic, Carbon, and Coacoa.
AIUI, Cocoa is language independent, and the Java APIs are just Java representations of the Cocoa abstract APIs, the same way there'll be a C++ abstraction of the Cocoa APIs.
My dad's old "Juniero" kit was better than Meccano. It looked a bit like one of those throw-switches Dr Frankenstein used to fry his creation, but the idea was that you go to the local ironmongers and buy some steel strip (like Meccano but without the holes) and some steel rod.
The lever thing then had bits to bend, shear, thread and punch the metal. You effectively made all the meccano-like pieces by hand.
Unfortunately, it hit the old safety legislation. It was pretty easy to slice bits of yourself off with this thing. It was originally intended for kids/young teenagers!
I hear they're banning paper in schools soon -- too much risk of a fatal paper cut.
Nope.. the first 'base' phone in the range often has a '0'... most often "xx10", like the 6110, 5110, 7110, 8110, 2110, etc. The second digit starts as '1', but later phone ranges for the same market up that one (eg. 3110 was a consumer phone with no pro features, just like the 3210 is now).<p>
Often the last two digits represent a variant for a different type of network (2148 being a GSM-1800 variant of the 2110) or a functional change in design (6250 is a ruggedized phone similar to the 6210)<p>
<em>I would love to have one of those compact chrome phones</em><p>
Incidentally, IIRC, the chrome on the 8810 phones acts as RF shielding for the head, while the back (unplated) radiates. Neat idea. Probably explains the signal issues though.
I wouldnt go for the Nokia 7110 unless you REALLY need WAP
I recently got a 7110, and as long as you don't use WAP (it's crashy) and you've got a reasonably recent OS revision, it's fine... and a lot nicer than the 61xx range.
Plus, the Matrix-style springloaded cover is cool. =)
The antenna is a little banged up, but it still works like a charm
I've had Nokia phones since 1996, with a 21xx-series. The antenna broke (a major stress-point on a mobile), and my service provider allows a cheap upgrade every 12 months.
So I bought a 61xx series phone. After a year or so, the antenna was so broken, the phone kept crashing from intermittent contact.
Well, I've finally got my 7110 (you know.. the WAP one with the springloaded slider). Very nice -- software a bit crashy. However, the antenna's still the same design. I give it about four months before the antenna starts to crack. They're putting internal antennas on the 3210 and the new ruggedized 6250, but right now it's annoying.
Other than that, Nokia thrash Motorola. I had a Motorola while I was waiting for the 7110, and I had real fun destroying it last night. =)
The problem with the Intel platform isn't the processor... it's the rest of the hardware. For Mac OS X to support hardware other than Macintosh kit, Apple'd have to spend a hell of a lot of time writing drivers.
I bet Windows would be pretty stable if Microsoft could prescribe exactly what hardware is used.
I had a development contract a while ago which involved the handling of data imports via Excel.
The suppliers for the data used lots of different date formats and often entered dd/mm/yy data into an mm/dd/yy format sheet, thereby invalidating dates.
I wrote a nifty algorithm which trends the dates on the sheet and makes a guess at the intended format. When you have a load of dates, you can quite easily work out what the date should be 99% of the time, even if the dates were entered incorrectly.
Excel partly uses the separators (eg, whether a date is entered as 01/02/03 or 01-02-03) to determine the intended format.
Starting in 2001, just under half of all dates expressed with two-digit years are going to be thoroughly ambiguous. This will last until 2012!
...The point is to guarantee access to names that are clearly in the public perception....
That is hardly a problem, people can register, first come first serve.
You seem to be contradicting yourself... by having first-come first-served in the trademark domain, you'd be having Microsoft Pantyliners Inc. registering microsoft.tm before Microsoft Corporation -- no guarantee of access to names. It's just making the fight happen in a different set of people. Also, this still doesn't address international trademarking. To guarantee availability, you'd need country codes and trademark classes: like foobar.36.tm.us. At this point, the desirability of the names decreases to the point that no-one's going to bother with them -- pretty much the way no-one really bothers with ".us"
Network Solutions suggested a scheme where domain names take six months to register, and in the meantime you can have a randomly-generated domain name, like jozyxqk.com. Big frigging deal!
So, we have the option to "get the governments of the world out of the problem": the thing is, trademarks are pervasive. If you have *any* publically-accessible resource/product, it is subject to trademark law. The problem with DNS isn't that ICANN or NSI suck -- it's that the common-sense policy of "first-come-first-served" doesn't work in a court of law. Trademark law overrides it. The TM holder doesn't have to sign an agreement abiding to the FCFS rule before they file their lawsuit. The only way for your libertarian approach to work is if you could enforce an amnesty within the.tm space. At that point, why not enforce the amnesty on the entire DNS system, and go back to FCFS with no legal recourse? You can't.. not unless you get every (present and future) trademark holder to sign up to that (no chance!)
If ICANN is removed, EVERYONE will end up in the courts. The US courts, most likely, cocking up any chance of fairness when an international party is involved.
By far and away the best solution is to hide URLs, and use an integrated search engine of some sort: how about a system like Google? Microsoft are inherently protected since they're the people that most pages link to. The pantyliners company don't get a word in, and they have absolutely no legal recourse. It also has the added bonus of ditching both "Where it is" addressing (URLs) and "What it is" addressing (supposedly the nicest way of addressing). It uses "What people think of it" addressing, which is a boon to designers of proxy caches!
Another alternative is to scrap the existing GTLDs, and then replace them with new ones with $1,000,000 p.a. pricetags on each domain, thereby forcing all but big multinationals into the country code domains. (Multinationals can fight it out for themselves) Once that's done, let each country devise trademarking schemes most appropriate to their own laws. It wouldn't solve it, but it may help.
[Incidentally, you mention that it's amazing the public accepts URLs. Why? They accept phone numbers!]
Oh, RealNames sucks ass too... things like that don't get around the trademark protection issue -- they just delay it.
In regards your aliasing idea: I guess that's what bookmarks are for.
There'd have to be a scheme to correspond to trademark classes -- the same trademark can be registered by different organizations in different categories. If you didn't, the different registrants would fight within.tm
Most trademarkers wouldn't register their.tm anyway:
Something similar is available in the UK, where the.ltd.uk and.plc.uk domains are there so companies can guarantee that their unique name is available. My company is "Litebase Solutions Ltd.", so I can always get litebase-solutions.ltd.uk if I want it. Very few companies make use of this provision.
I think the only way for it to work is if some sort of trademark treaty recognises the problem, and allows a few TLDs to be "trademark-free", so that any trademark disputes are thrown out immediately. ICANN, being a tool of the US government, are NEVER going to represent the global commercial and non-commercial population fairly. The UN are probably the only ones that can. However, the likelyhood of any of this actually happening is pretty much zero.
Hmmm.. AFAICR, the French are powered predominantly by nuclear power. So, by switching this thing on, they'll generate a whole stack of plutonium. Handy!
Slashdot Mirror
I know of at least two firms who have kitted their entire office (all employees) with Aerons. They're worth it in the long run.
However, not all is peachy... it's developed a wobble. Luckily, Herman Miller engineers are going to come and service it for me. =)
I switched from Demon tenner-a-month to Plus.Net's Surf 24/7 account last month. I was planning on keeping Demon, but Plus.Net's service seems to be better than Demon's.
.co.uk, Mailing Lists, etc. Very good overall. They'll even get me a static IP if I want it.
I pay 20-odd quid a month for the BT Smurftime Anytime, and then about 6 quid a month to Plus.Net. That gets me 24/7 unmetered, with about 50,666 bps on my old BT line. Okay, it's 26 quid a month, but I don't mind paying, and getting a bit more support asskicking capability.
The service was set up quickly, and apart from a small fire at Plus.Net's main NOC, everything's been peachy. PlusNet also give you CGI/Shell access, PHP, MySQL, a free
Incidentally, I'm in Bristol with a pretty knackered BT line.
Okay, this one's going to be controversial, but I'm not trying to troll here.
I think VRML died because it was a technology without a purpose... okay, there are a lot of uses for VRML and VR in general, but they're pretty niche.
It's like all of those 'innovative new navigation schemes' the average Shockwave author comes out with: very pretty, but a list of links is usually more functional.
VRML was originally hyped as the technology 'the new web' would be based upon -- we'd stop writing flat pages and have everything 3D in cyberspace. It's a marketing person's wet dream, but it's easier to read Slashdot in a nice flat font than having to "explore" the latest JonKatz column from the surface of a texture mapped octahedron. Navigating my file hierarchy with a tree-like Explorer is bad enough, let alone leaping around it like Mario.
If three-dee was such a big deal for publishing, Playboy, GQ, et al would be pop-up books -- hey, that's not a bad idea... =)
Not just the 'parts are highly constrained' argument... The iBook is supposedly the world's best-selling laptop. I don't know about percentage market share with iMac, etc.
I saw a documentary about "The Usual Suspects" in which Chris McQuarrie (the writer) said that he and Bryan Singer (the Director/Producer) both knew who Keyser Soze was, but they disagreed. Gabriel Byrne had a different idea of who Keyser Soze was -- himself!
The Keyser Soze character was designed to be completely ambiguous. The most obvious interpretation was that it was Verbal Kint, but that's not the only interpretation.
I think Ridley Scott means that in his interpretation, Deckard was a replicant. However, it might've just been a soundbite for Channel 4! =)
3G will probably have enough coverage (in Europe at least) to make it worthwhile in a couple of years.
The thing is, it's not that doing things in WAP is hard.. it's that it's either reasonably straightforward or literally impossible.
You try designing any practical puzzle game for WAP. To make a move, you have to fill in a bunch of submit forms. It's practically useless.
I went to a pretty interesting seminar in London a while back, which focused on the business case for WAP.
It seems (and there's quite a lot of support for this theory) that WAP is really just a temporary hack put there until they get 3G services sorted. I'm damn glad of this -- ever since I started working on WAP I've hated it. It seems such a badly-thought-out solution.
Guesses are that there just aren't going to be enough WAP-capable handsets in circulation before 3G takes off two years hence. Nokia and the others can't make them fast enough.
The networks, the manufacturers, the content providers, all seem to be paying lip-service to WAP while focusing on 3G and other technologies. This is a fair point.
Most developers I've spoken to say this, though: "It's not worth getting into WAP. Let's wait for 3G". However, I'll put this to you: WAP is an experiment. Not an experiment in technology (3G tech is so different that WAP techie experience will be useless). It's an experiment in business models. How will we make money out of "m-Commerce" and "free" wireless services? How do people interact with wireless services? What are going to be the primary uses of wireless services?
We have all these great ideas like revenue sharing and loss-leading (based on building a membership base across mobile and traditional internet platforms). Do we know whether they're going to work? The best thing to do is dip our toes in the water while they're getting 3G ready. Once that comes, WAP will probably go the way of Gopher.
For now, the companies who pass over WAP for 3G will enter the arena of wireless internet with NO EXPERIENCE, and NO ESTABLISHED BRAND within the wireless domain.
Okay, I'm talking fluent Suit now. I run an internet games business and I'm also the main developer. I have to see both sides of the coin. Even so, I'm dreading having to write games for WAP.
Tally me up for a 'WAP really sucks' vote, though.
Yep. ARMs and StrongARMs are selling well, in PDAs (Palm may migrate to it soon) and network computerish type things. Very good for embedded devices.
I once heard about an ARM chip running off the waste heat of a Pentium, almost as fast. Sod the heatsink... shove a co-processor on there! =)
I'm going to cover a few other points here... I'm a longtime ARM user (back from the Acorn days) and I'm also writing apps for Palm OS right now.
Palm have always had a history of NOT being a "Microsoft". Their SDK is open and free. You can get a good-quality open and free C compiler: gcc. (It's also maintained by Palm) You can get a good-quality emulator for Mac, Windows and UN*X, partly supported by Palm (they don't support the UN*X version, AFAIK). They document their stuff well, and they answer technical questions.
You can develop for Palm without spending any money on software -- you don't even *need* a Palm -- you can download the ROM images from Palm if you sign an agreement.
So, not supporting the Dragonball is not an option. They will. It's as easy as that. Even if they didn't, since they use a pretty high-level API (it's C, but about as high-level C as you can get), targeting more than one processor isn't going to be a problem. Palm apps end up at a maximum of 64K in the large part (okay, some are bigger, but most are under 10K!). So what's the big deal of a recompile and distributing both? Most apps don't use any assembly -- the only time you need it is when there isn't support under your compiler of choice for, say for example, shared libraries.
I think a move to ARM would only affect about 2% of developers -- writers of hacks and things like Dreadling (www.dreadling.com).
On other notes, Palm have started bloating their range with color and other whizzy features -- mostly due to customer demand. What they haven't done is abandon their old models: the Palm III and V are still going strong, and the ranges have been enhanced with other variants. I have a IIIc, and color doesn't add much advantage (I bought it as a development platform, so it doesn't really matter to me!) They've also licensed Palm OS to others -- like Handspring, so they can concentrate on their core competency, the simple PDA. It's also pretty interesting that Palm have licensed to Nokia -- I guess that's thanks to the Symbian relationship.
Well, I digress. Bottom line: a month ago I left my contract job at HP and started working from home writing for Palm OS. In the past month, I've come to realise how much I hated the work I've been doing for the last five years. Writing for Palm OS has rejuvenated my enjoyment of programming. It's wonderful. (Oh, and the fact that I can write code for money while drinking beer at 1 a.m.) The pure satisfaction in writing for a well-designed API is the reason there's so much shareware/freeware for Palm, and hence, why they've got serious market share: three of my friends have recently bought Palms based on seeing how good mine is. Part of that is the wealth of good software -- the thing that's always nobbled Psion.
I'll shut up now. (Score: -1 Verbal Diarea)
AIUI, Cocoa is language independent, and the Java APIs are just Java representations of the Cocoa abstract APIs, the same way there'll be a C++ abstraction of the Cocoa APIs.
For a long time, I really thought the plural of moose was "meese".
No. "A clowder of cats" is the correct terminology -- not 'a herd'.
Anyway, think of it as sand: You may talk about grains of sand, but sand is treated as a substance. So is Lego.
My dad's old "Juniero" kit was better than Meccano. It looked a bit like one of those throw-switches Dr Frankenstein used to fry his creation, but the idea was that you go to the local ironmongers and buy some steel strip (like Meccano but without the holes) and some steel rod.
The lever thing then had bits to bend, shear, thread and punch the metal. You effectively made all the meccano-like pieces by hand.
Unfortunately, it hit the old safety legislation. It was pretty easy to slice bits of yourself off with this thing. It was originally intended for kids/young teenagers!
I hear they're banning paper in schools soon -- too much risk of a fatal paper cut.
Nope.. the first 'base' phone in the range often has a '0'... most often "xx10", like the 6110, 5110, 7110, 8110, 2110, etc. The second digit starts as '1', but later phone ranges for the same market up that one (eg. 3110 was a consumer phone with no pro features, just like the 3210 is now).<p>
Often the last two digits represent a variant for a different type of network (2148 being a GSM-1800 variant of the 2110) or a functional change in design (6250 is a ruggedized phone similar to the 6210)<p>
<em>I would love to have one of those compact chrome phones</em><p>
Incidentally, IIRC, the chrome on the 8810 phones acts as RF shielding for the head, while the back (unplated) radiates. Neat idea. Probably explains the signal issues though.
I recently got a 7110, and as long as you don't use WAP (it's crashy) and you've got a reasonably recent OS revision, it's fine... and a lot nicer than the 61xx range.
Plus, the Matrix-style springloaded cover is cool. =)
I've had Nokia phones since 1996, with a 21xx-series. The antenna broke (a major stress-point on a mobile), and my service provider allows a cheap upgrade every 12 months.
So I bought a 61xx series phone. After a year or so, the antenna was so broken, the phone kept crashing from intermittent contact.
Well, I've finally got my 7110 (you know.. the WAP one with the springloaded slider). Very nice -- software a bit crashy. However, the antenna's still the same design. I give it about four months before the antenna starts to crack. They're putting internal antennas on the 3210 and the new ruggedized 6250, but right now it's annoying.
Other than that, Nokia thrash Motorola. I had a Motorola while I was waiting for the 7110, and I had real fun destroying it last night. =)
The problem with the Intel platform isn't the processor... it's the rest of the hardware. For Mac OS X to support hardware other than Macintosh kit, Apple'd have to spend a hell of a lot of time writing drivers.
I bet Windows would be pretty stable if Microsoft could prescribe exactly what hardware is used.
I'm not affiliated with them -- just impressed.
I had a development contract a while ago which involved the handling of data imports via Excel.
The suppliers for the data used lots of different date formats and often entered dd/mm/yy data into an mm/dd/yy format sheet, thereby invalidating dates.
I wrote a nifty algorithm which trends the dates on the sheet and makes a guess at the intended format. When you have a load of dates, you can quite easily work out what the date should be 99% of the time, even if the dates were entered incorrectly.
Excel partly uses the separators (eg, whether a date is entered as 01/02/03 or 01-02-03) to determine the intended format.
Starting in 2001, just under half of all dates expressed with two-digit years are going to be thoroughly ambiguous. This will last until 2012!
Wrong again.. The middle number's the month in the UK. We don't have a fourteenth month. =)
...The point is to guarantee access to names that are clearly in the public perception. ...
That is hardly a problem, people can register, first come first serve.
You seem to be contradicting yourself... by having first-come first-served in the trademark domain, you'd be having Microsoft Pantyliners Inc. registering microsoft.tm before Microsoft Corporation -- no guarantee of access to names. It's just making the fight happen in a different set of people. Also, this still doesn't address international trademarking. To guarantee availability, you'd need country codes and trademark classes: like foobar.36.tm.us. At this point, the desirability of the names decreases to the point that no-one's going to bother with them -- pretty much the way no-one really bothers with ".us"
Network Solutions suggested a scheme where domain names take six months to register, and in the meantime you can have a randomly-generated domain name, like jozyxqk.com. Big frigging deal!
So, we have the option to "get the governments of the world out of the problem": the thing is, trademarks are pervasive. If you have *any* publically-accessible resource/product, it is subject to trademark law. The problem with DNS isn't that ICANN or NSI suck -- it's that the common-sense policy of "first-come-first-served" doesn't work in a court of law. Trademark law overrides it. The TM holder doesn't have to sign an agreement abiding to the FCFS rule before they file their lawsuit. The only way for your libertarian approach to work is if you could enforce an amnesty within the .tm space. At that point, why not enforce the amnesty on the entire DNS system, and go back to FCFS with no legal recourse? You can't.. not unless you get every (present and future) trademark holder to sign up to that (no chance!)
If ICANN is removed, EVERYONE will end up in the courts. The US courts, most likely, cocking up any chance of fairness when an international party is involved.
By far and away the best solution is to hide URLs, and use an integrated search engine of some sort: how about a system like Google? Microsoft are inherently protected since they're the people that most pages link to. The pantyliners company don't get a word in, and they have absolutely no legal recourse. It also has the added bonus of ditching both "Where it is" addressing (URLs) and "What it is" addressing (supposedly the nicest way of addressing). It uses "What people think of it" addressing, which is a boon to designers of proxy caches!
Another alternative is to scrap the existing GTLDs, and then replace them with new ones with $1,000,000 p.a. pricetags on each domain, thereby forcing all but big multinationals into the country code domains. (Multinationals can fight it out for themselves) Once that's done, let each country devise trademarking schemes most appropriate to their own laws. It wouldn't solve it, but it may help.
[Incidentally, you mention that it's amazing the public accepts URLs. Why? They accept phone numbers!]
Oh, RealNames sucks ass too... things like that don't get around the trademark protection issue -- they just delay it.
In regards your aliasing idea: I guess that's what bookmarks are for.
Something similar is available in the UK, where the .ltd.uk and .plc.uk domains are there so companies can guarantee that their unique name is available. My company is "Litebase Solutions Ltd.", so I can always get litebase-solutions.ltd.uk if I want it. Very few companies make use of this provision.
I think the only way for it to work is if some sort of trademark treaty recognises the problem, and allows a few TLDs to be "trademark-free", so that any trademark disputes are thrown out immediately. ICANN, being a tool of the US government, are NEVER going to represent the global commercial and non-commercial population fairly. The UN are probably the only ones that can. However, the likelyhood of any of this actually happening is pretty much zero.
Hmmm.. AFAICR, the French are powered predominantly by nuclear power. So, by switching this thing on, they'll generate a whole stack of plutonium. Handy!
Arizona's got Wet Beaver Creek... now tell me that wasn't a joke.
Here's my redraw/color of the 'At Last!' shot. Bit of a rush job, I'm afraid.