it really hurts to see so many intelligent people being so ignorant about the world at large and jumping to conclusions that seem to be based on McDonald's 'Geogfry' rather than a basic understanding of what's going on the world.
Firstly, mainland Malaysia has some of the best connections in the region. I fact the system is that good, that Thailand and Vietnam are routing most Internet traffic through leased lines in Malaysia.
Next, as Malaysia produces about 45% of the middle and lower end computer components of the world market, you should maybe refrain from making funny remarks about the tech know-how of the country. Chances are, without Made-in-Malaysia components your boxes wouldn't work - or would have cost about 20% more.
Also, Malaysia was the first country to start major government initiatives to make the country into an IT hub - and had the first cyberlaws, long before the US got their task force reports that told them to do something.
Finally, if things work as planned, the Malaysia and Expats living in Malaysia will give the next generation of Yank-geeks a run for their money.
So, next time when you see fancy photos of jungles and touristy performances by savages, think a while, get a map, browse for backgound info and then make up your mind.
Outside 'The Valley' and a few other 'Tech Focus' areas, the U.S. is as much an IT backwater as most other countries are. Having DSL, doesn't meen tha Joe Average would know how on Earth to get out of the AOL site and find his way around on the net.
"Who really NEEDS to view the web via their digital cell phone?"
--- well, fact is that in the developing world chances are that the Internet will be more often accessed with wireless devices [pda, cellphone, etc.] than with a regular PC by 2002.
There are several reasons for this:
-1- Cellphones are much more common in Southeast Asia than landlines.
-2- Many non-urban areas are not likely to get landlines anytime soon [and those that do, have to often live with congestions, polluted lines and frequent interruptions.
-3- Buying one cellphone is cheaper than buying a PC [well in Asia it is way cheaper].
-4- With the introduction of G3 in the region, towards the middle of next year, connection speeds are expected to average at 200kps - which obviously beats the 48kps you can get out of a 56 dial-up modem on a good day.
I certainly agree that it's a PITA ['pain in the ass'] for us poor developers who have to allow for two main types of display and two main types of browsers when developing web sites and applications, but the easiest way to allow for small [tiny] displays would be to simply script a 'device detect' into the of the homepage. From there you send visitors with small displays into a W@P subroutine. Meaning, they get their own pages, rather than finding the lowest common denominator. Which makes even more sense if you consider that XML/WML is likely to be the standard for webpages in the not too distant future. So, conventional visitors get the full XML site, while wireless get a slimmer WML version.
Europe -
claim to be canadian, show certain M$ tech experience and don't yell linux all the time;
explain the difficulties of open source without forcing your point on everyone. don't make jokes during the interview and let them ask a question or two and you should get a job;
Australia -
claim to from 'The Valley', use linux, bdss and oss in every sentence twice; violently oppose M$, wear slacks and bring iced beer to the interview;
Southeast Asia -
claim to be Bill Gates' illegitimite son or linus' long lost half brother - depending if you want to work for a big company or a start-up;
show keen interest in VC and expansion possibilities, claim to be 'connected' to VCs and buddies in 'The Valley', use catch phrase, invent new ones and make sure they don't understand what you say - if they do, they think you are just talking...
Okay, it's a bit over the top, but not much. Europeans hire Americans, only if they don't have a choice, Asians hire Americans, cause it's great to have 'first hand experts'.
Either case, salaries, bonuses, etc are lower than in the US. Much lower. But you can negotiate extra, un-official benefits, such as top accommodation, company car, first class travel, etc. - and, you get to play with the latest toys.
In Asia, getting approval for new hardware is a breeze [pick up the phone and say: "I want, because the competition doesn't have yet..." and you get anything you ask for.
Finally, job security is best in Europe, but they also expect loyalty in return. A job surfer has limited chances to be desirable after changing compies twice or trice - word passes fast.
In Asia, job security for foreign IT experts is the lowest. If the company is in trouble [or doing great] and/or if one of their cousins claims he can do your job, you are history [even if the cousin can't]. However, Asians headhunt like nuts. Meaning, you'd get job offers from collegues whose uncle is starting his own IT company, from customers who like dealing with you, although they have no clue what exactly it is you are doing and from everyone else you talk to...
With patenting the window[s] idea you are striking a nerve. as far as i know the first graphical user interface - the mother of all windows - was developed by Xerox's famed Palo Alta Labs.
Imagine they had taken out a patent on it. Not only would have Apple [then a tiny start-up] not been able to afford licensing fees, but M$ would have stuck to it's DOS for decades.
Without a wide acceptance of a GUI, it is unlikely that PCs would have found such a mass market and it's likely that this in turn would have profoundly influenced the history of the planet.
Whatever one thinks about M$, they certainly played a major role in the spread of PCs and in the 'ease' with which basic jobs can be done.
Let's face it, the majority of users, private and commercial, mainly used PCs as a fancy type writer and advanced calculator or to complete empty fields in proprietary software systems without much knowing / or caring, what happened behind the screen.
Without a move-there-click-here-open-that device, we would all be sitting in the basement next to huge boxes and follow Gate's [1980?] claim that 64Kb is all a user would ever need in Memory.
The fact that basic uses of PCs were understandable by anyone with an IQ above the plastic potplant in the corner was what drove the rapid spread of PCs - which in turn started the race of manufacturers to cut design-to-market time in an ongoing push to be faster, better, nicer AND cheaper.
So, while patents for specific fields should be granted, they should not enjoy the broad interpretation guidelines that are often applied.
issue a patent on a specific process of datamining, but don't patent search technology.
issue a patent on green shirts, but not on the idea of covering your upper torso with cloth.
Finally, when a company applies for a patent, part of the application should be what they plan to charge royalties on and how much. The PTO should then determine if granting the patent will stiffle development and possibly require the royalties to be lowered...
alternatively, grant patents only for short times, like, say 24 months. after which nobody can ever apply for a similar or related patent ever again.
imagine what type of development explosion this would create - and how many lawyers would be out of a job... =P
if you are smarter? we are in charge.
and we happily give up any type of dominance in exchange for good sex. so what is the problem?
be nice to us, ensure a steady supply of sex and we gladly turn over control to females.
isn't us 'getting some' what we are all about?
isn't that why we start wars, work our backsides off and follow trends to be 'in' and to 'get some'?
the male of the species is so easily manipulated. but then, all we'd have to do to get control back is saying that we love you...;-))).
Okay some of the comments are quite interesting, but most of them sound like the good old "I'm not sure what we rebel against, but it's good to oppose the establishment anyway".
I've been writing mails to ICANN's chairwoman for quite a while - and get replies to each of them, how's that for caring about the 'consumer'?
So, before yelling that your voice is not heard at each other, start yelling in ICANN's direction, so that they can hear you.
When I first contacted her, at was a matter of introducing a group I am a founding member of. We are concerned about what BigBadCorp and IgnorantImbecileGov were doing to 'Our' Internet.
We are in the process of formalizing our own articles and come forward with demands.
Instead of ignoring the announcement, she actually got back to methin a few hours, giving her opinion, voicing concerns and explaining a few things that they did and why.
Next, she actually started to make suggestions and raise issues in regards to our budding association that we hadn't really considered, while asking for our input in regards to the future of ICANN. If that is not listening to 'the people', what is?
Our initial plans were based on a democratic system in which owners of domain names have one vote to the 'commercial house', while everyone with an e-mail account that cares to identify him/herself get a vote in the 'public house'.
As counter-balance we suggested an appointed body that would consist of the companies that provide the backbone, with ISPs and HSPs as well as infrastructure providers being represented [Rep house].
The idea was that the Rep House and the public house had even power to introduce new net-laws, while the commercial house would supervise their implementation. Freedom and democracy, live and let live.
But then she pointed out just exactly what types of vested interests, lobbying groups etc, she has to deal with at ICANN, everyday and no matter how noble and honest our cause was, it was a matter of time until our association would either bring the net down due to anarchy and system break-downs or the association itself would fail to it's job because of [self-]interest groups, etc which tend to surface in any type of association.
So, we are back to the drawing board, trying to figure out what amounts pretty much to the ideal form of government for the Internet. A government that is not subject to any national laws or restrictions and that has only three tasks - keep the internet functioning and expanding; make the Internet secure for everyone ; keep any third party that wants to influence a free net out of the game;
However, for anything like this to happen, we need to act fast, before national legislation in various countries is passed and outlaws our attempts. So, if you guys are serious, get busy, don't just yell around.
In regards to ccTLDs having to pay tribute to ICANN, well I think it's a good idea. Not because it increases the power ICANN has, but because it decreases the possibility over major fuck-ups on nation levels - [self-]interest groups are such a pain. Apart from that, it ensures the smooth jumping from dot au to dot com to dot whatever-ccTLD, as everyone has to adhere by the same standards. Trust me on this one, I've travelled far more than most people on the planet and can tell you that if this sytem wasn't enforced, countries like Iran, Myanmar, Lybia, to name just three, would immediately come up with their own system and not give a darn, if it was compatible with the greater net or not.
As so often in heated/. discussions - why don't you try to step back, compare data against two or three possible scenarios, before hitting [Reply] and yelling 'fraud', 'conspiracy', etc.?
Most of us have to trouble shoot various sytems every now and then. Do we turn around and say, doesn't work, buy a new one - or do we try to find a way to make an existing system work, maybe slightly modify it over time, rather than buying new ones each time?
If the world was to follow your advise, then it would get very expensive as we'd need to change systems and overhaul constitutions twice a day [three times on fridays].
The world is lucky that we keep yelling. Just imagine, we would sit back, think, devise solutions to problems and then make a combined effort to implement them... Has it ever appearred to you people just exactly what immense power we have as a group?
this is exactly while politicians and organizations tend to listen if we start making arguments, rather than just bitch and whine. I have not met any high ranking public servant that wouldn't take a suggestion from techies serious enough to warrant it a personal reply. After all, they never know what we will do if they don't...
So use that brain power and your abilities trying to find solutions - then post them for discussion. Once we have something that appears workable, we can suggest it to the relevant people. And if that doesn't work and we are all really unhappy, well, then - you know...;-))).
But if we don't try, then we have only ourselves to blame. If we buy into the conspiracy theory and think that they are out to get us, well, then we can always come up with our own conspiracy.
And if we are more reasonable and don't believ in conspiracies as such, then one could almost say it is very much our 'civic duty' in a democracy to indicate flaws in the system and tooffer possible solutions.
Remember, indicationg flaws in others, but no solutions, that job is already taken. It's called 'Politician'.
Heck, where has the time gone? I just recalled being an unwashed kid with big eyes and Commmmodore 64.
Now I'm an unwashed adult with big eyes and a PDA.
Serious, somehow we lost the spirit when we grew up. At the same time, many of us experienced a type of excitement that modern script kiddies will never be able to comprehend.
Yet, it looks to me as if a revival of Gopher is pretty much an attempt to turn back the clock.
Resistance is futile, time has passed and Gopher won't make us young again.
So, it doesn't really make sense.
I read some comments here about Gopher being a good alternative for the developing world. Must have been from people who never left their apartment, let alone the developed world.
The problem that many people in underdeveloped countries have to overcome in order to bridge the digital divide are [IN REVERSE ORDER]:
-get fast access speeds
-learn to use the net beyond IRC and mail
-learn English [it IS the top language on Earth]
-explore the www
-get an internet connection
-get a computer
-feed, house, cloth your family
-get a job
-get an education
to achive that, counties must first:
-find means to feed their people
-house them
-provide basic health care
-estalish an electricity grid
-get a phone network
-provide public education
-build an economy
-make phones affordable
-offer higher learning
So, no gopher is not the solution for countries that have not enough power plants, let alone phone lines.
However, gopher could be a great solution for W@P as someone here suggested. Trouble is, by the time a standard would be established 3G and 4G sytems will be available and nobody would use a gopher-based system, if they can have streaming video instead.
While I really liked the stroll down Memory Lane, I am utterly disturbed that some IT's finest [/.ers;-)] can be so ignorant of life beyond their vision-impaired surroundings.
Are we heading for a quarreling, ignorant techelite on hand and 'all the others' on the other? This looks more and more like the plot of a SciFi B-movie, doesn't it?
Just on the side, we have no problems whatsoever with accessing gopher sites [evem the ones that have in the subject line that they can't be accessed with IE] using IE 5.5 - I dunno what some of you guys are raving on about again.
well, as I understand it, science has recently discovered that our brain's memory functions are much more complex than first thought. not only does it sort memories by cross referencing them [which is what intelligence is all about], but it also stores items it deems relevant in specific areas that seem to be getting the best oxygen and nutrient supply. Sort of a semi-permanent OS upgrade, I guess.
What the article does not address at all, is just exactly which type of memories are affected, to what extent and in which order. Let's face it, biological/organic systems never function 'cross-board'.
Therefore, if our brain develops data loss or even bad clusters, they are usually location specific, before starting to slowly spread.
And my wild guess is that the location that is affected is short term memory. So, even if the test subjects would have had proper sleep, their short-term memory might have still gone blank.
Seems people don't teach in schools that the best way to remember stuff is to store it in the long-term memory. And to force you brain to store data there, rather than in interim processing areas first, all you need to do, is come up with an image or association that your brain already knows and which you use frequently - your brain will immediately dig a thick set of synapses between that new data and well known one and hence store it long-term.
I used to invent sentences that were sort of funny and rhymed and then associate them with data i needed to pass exams in hated subjects [physics, chemistry...]. guess what, i passed with flying colours and still remember every single piece after over ten years - but forgot plenty of stuff about subjects i liked [maths, jogfry, etc.]
So, it's all about remembering by association, not processing while sleeping.
Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Hongkong, Taiwan
-50% of Urbanites have cell phones
-85% of urban 20-35 year olds have cell phones
-20% of 25-30 y/olds have more than one cell phone
Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines
7% of Urbanites have cell phones
41% of urban 20-35 year old have cell phones
Other Asian Stats:
Cellphone turnover period is about 11 months [every 11 months users buy the latest gadget];
Youngsters, Professionals and Bizpeople, use cell phones more often than land lines [and everywhere they are - incl. restaurants, airplanes, cinemas, funerals, operas, karaoke lounges...]
Cellphones are not a status symbol in most Asian countries anymore, but a must-have if one works in IT.
Real 'IN' people in cafes, carry multiple cellphones and use at least two at the same time -like "oh wow, wait I gotta call XYZ and tell them what you just told me, can you hold the line while I dial?"
General Gadget Info:
SE-E-Asia is gadget crazy.
On the odd chance that something comes out in Europe or the US first, shops that cater to the well-to-do just fly there and buy a suitcase or two of full the gadget and come staright back;
anything new that is not supported by local infrastrucure operators / service providers results in immediate feeding frenzy and competative push to be the first to support it, which results in plenty half-baked solutions, which are usually abandonned within a few months [and after spending XXX on development and XXX^10 on hype] for the next big 'IN' thing;
Southeast Asia is Tech Paradise, if you can live with occasional connection speeds of only 36kps and timed local calls, timed internet dial-up, etc.
I really hate to disapoint you, but actaully, well, we get the US movies before the US has them;
Really, we get movies on VCD befoe they are released in US movie theatres. We've seen the director's cut of Charlie's Angles in August,
Arnie's 'the 6th day' in September.
So, there is only one solution for insecure little puppies - move to Southeast Asia.
Hech we had the Pentium 4 processor before you even had a press release... but then, they make them accross the road from my place - no b/s - the intel plant is there...
are u talking about the great country that just redefined the meaning of 'democratic process' in order to entertain us all through x-mas or about canada?
this might be interesting for many non-us/.ers
any foreigner can apply for a patent in the u/s
and it's rather cheap, too.
even better, the uspo has a so-called 'provisional patent' option.
this permits you to submit a draft patent of sorts, pay about $200 and you are automatically granted a provisional patent for one year.
that gives you a whole year time to come up with a decent patent application, company structure, etc. should anyone else, have the same idea afterwads, then you are already protected as if you has a full patent.
check out the uspto site for details or mail me and i might give you some tips. we bought a software that helps us drafting patents and we patent just about everything we can think of to pre-empt big-bad-corp to do it.
we have no intention to ever enforce a patent, but are looking forward to kick the likes of amazon.com all the way to court and back, if they ever infringe on a patent of ours - we even denied accepting royalties from a big corp when they tried to get away with stealing an idea from us - instead we hired their programmer and forced them to drop the new feature completely... after a year we let the provisonal patent die.
the law says that if a provisional patent application is filed and later abandonned that the technology is the considered being in the public domain and therefore noone can patent it ever again - our contribution to a free Internet: act, don't chat.
Isn't this so very typical Australian? Wanting to play with the big boys, being part of the party and trying desperately to show that Oz is not a backwater place - and then messing it up badly - each time?
Reminds me of the Australians pioneering censorship... It's been law for quite a while now and there are still load of Australia based p0rn sites. One of our hosting clients that is in that field gets' most of his traffic [and paying users] from Australia. Nobody really talks about the subject anymore.
Of course Southeast asians are gloating, because now proud and oh-so-advanced-Australia is routing most of it's traffic through Singapore again.
I love it. As long as they don't grow up to realize that could be a valued partner if they weren't so imposing all the time, they will at least be a continuous source of entertainment.
i think it would be in everybody's interest if governments would take this even one step further:
high-speed internet access points should become part of building stadards, pretty much the same way power points and plumbing is.
if the industry is forced to comply, everyone will scramble [after outcries and court challenges of course] to get a piece of the action.
once it's normal that everyone only needs to plug-in a sufrving device to connect to the net, the digital divide will vanish - pretty much the same way as every houshold has tv and most have phone connections, if the net 'jack' is there and people only plug in to surf, they will give it a shot. especially if the monthly fees can not exceed a government enforced amount.
but then, this is good for the people and the countrry - ie. the U.S. would rather start a war with someone than implementing something that makes sense - and wasn't their idea to begin with...
Your comment about the numbers of IP being finite and people 'having' to share IPs is not entirely correct.
Firstly, as more and more providers adopt IPv6, the number of available IPs is in the high three-digit billions.
Secondly, many hosting service providers prefer to host several sites under shared IPs simply because that is cheper for them. IPs cost money, after all.
In our case, we even allocate individual IPs to subdomains we host- but then, that's us, and we are privately held with no interest whatsoever in an IPO.
About your assumption of me not valuing dotnet domains:
- it's not that much what we want or value, it's what the customer expects after everybody has drummed dotcom into him or her.
You might have noticed that we are dotnet, because when we first started we felt that as service proder we are dotnet - and we have regretted it ever since. The poeple who own the dotcom and dotorg are pushing us to give them the dotnet and we are trying to get the dotorg from them for a planned community project.
The reason why we settled for Cyberica in the first place, instead of the more logical CyberFrontier, is that some idiot had forgotten to pay the fees and someone else grabbed the dotcom, for no other apparent reason than being nasty.
while I honestly believe that the Australian system is too restrictive [whatever happened to peer groups, fan sites, etc?], I do get your point and it might make sense to adopt something like that for purely commercial TLDs, as long as other TLDs are also available.
However, regarding your claim that nobody can register a similar name, once you registered a business [trading as], that is not entirely correct. If you register Blue Couch in Sydney, then I can't register it in the same state [ie. NSW], but can just jump over to Canberra {ACT] and
register it there.
Furthermore, if you register it as a shop name in Sydney and if your business is resoably expected to be limited to the Sydney area, then I register a similar name, with a slight alteration [say, Blue Couch Furniture, Blue Couch Restaurant,...]
in the next town.
On top of that, if I register more or less the same name for a completely different type of business [say you do software, I do catering] and neither of us are 'reasonably likely' to ever infringe on each other's customers, then I will also get away with it.
The spirit of the rule, ie. the meaning or the essence, is that similar names can not serve as a tool to deceive customers. Within those broad guidelines, it's very much at the discretion of the Department of Fair Trading if they allow me to register the same or a very similar name. And that comes down to going to a Department of Fair Trading outlet and flirting with the girl that enters the applications into the computer [well, in Lismore they are mostly Ladies...].
Also, in my opinion, the main reason why there is not much of a rush on ccTLDs is simply because they are considered provincial - with dot.com being the top choice for everyone.
If that was not the case, theen Australian squatters would be likely to register Business names like nuts [which is pretty simple and staright forward] and then get the domain names anyway. After all, there is no rule that a company can not trade under infinite numbers of names [our Company has 16 lines of business and a different trading name for each].
It is also incorrect, that consumers can easily find out who is the operator of a site using the company registry. Firstly, Business Names are registered on a state level, while Companies are incorporated on federal level;
Secondly, a company [like ours] could register trading names for customers whose sites it hosts, for the sole purpose of obtaining the customer's domain name. So, while our company shows up as the owner of the Business Name, it does not claim to own or operate the business per say.
Our hosting contracts clearly exclude any type of involvement of our behalf in the day to day business and the site owners are fully liable.
However, due to fancy Australian privacy laws, we have to actually ask the site owner on a case to case base if we are permitted to diclose his or her identity and/or location when customers ask for it.
So, it boils down to the fact that the Australian system [like so often] seems to be smart on the surface but acts counterproductive, by making it too complicated for small people to get involved, while at the same permitting sharks and trash to find piles of loopholes that permit them to use the system against itself...
Why else would our company have left it's main base of business and registered elsewhere, pratically abolishing jobs and training for Australians?
Up front, I think ICANN has a tough job trying to please everyone. The logical result of such an attempt is that ICANN will never please anyone.
So, no matter what they do, nobody will ever be satisfied.
Next, new TLDs in any shape or form are useless.
The name of the game is dot-com.
dot-com is main street Slicon Valley and Wall Street [ny/ny] combined. Any other dot-ohheckimtoolateoricantaffordthedotcom has minute survival chances in a market that is hooked on dot-com.
Therefore, all new TLDs will only result in a land-grab of imbeciles and in money burning from doomed start-ups.
Would you do business with a company that doesn't have a dot-com? Maybe to buy chewing gum [caffeine] or an auction, well if it's cheap, you might. But would you buy thousands of dollars woth of goods from someone that can't be bothered to buy their dotcom domain?
Would you trust an online service provider or consultant that doesn't have his/her dotcom? Just how valuable could that service be, if the provider didn't even have the foresight to secure his/her dotcom?
So, who would take a domain, like say, dotbiz?
People who can't afford the dotcom, right? Why would I want do business with them? If they were reliable and successful, then the owner of the dotcom would have sued them out of their dotbiz by now, claiming 'prior art' and bad business practice.
Further, there are so much more dotcom domains available than meets the eye. heck, there are over 400 languages in use on the planet and the English name space is coming up with creative new terms [i-this, e-that, 1-more, 2-less, 1-4-u, etc.] on a regular base. So by adding new domain names, thgis creativity would be stifled for a short while, until everyone realizes that new TLDs didn't solve a problem, but created severl. Then we'll all be back to inventing new words and phrases like i_1_2_yell.com. Apart from that English is probably the language that assimilates new and foreign language words the easiest.
So, we are unlikely rto really ever run out of dotcom names.
Of course, the no-brainer names for people who have problems to articulate in their first language will be incresing in price on an ongoing base. But so what? Does it affect anyone here if someone makes a gazillion for iknewitfirst-dot-com? Aren't most people just pissed off that they didn't do it themselves, when they hear about a cybersquatter making a killing?
I think, there should be laws against taking someones dotcom brand and registering similar names only to sell it back to the original owner.
Remember the first guys that registered a go2...-dotcom? I think they should own the rights to all domain names that have a go2 in them. They had the idea first and should have the right to claim 'prior art'.
But they can't, because they are a bunch of young techies that had no idea what gold-mine their idea could be. Then came Go2Networks, snapped them all up, sold out to Disney and recently the people who can demonstrate that they registered the first ever domain name that had go2 in it received a letter from WIPO...
So, coming full circle, while Slashdotters love to trash issues, it seems that most of them miss the point. Copyrights, Open Source, Domain names, Legal system, they all fit in the same catgory - "things to be urgently reviewed"
While I do not share the script kiddies' hostility towards ICANN/M$/Business/their-mum, I do think that ICANN completely missed the picture [again]as well and tried to solve a problem that didn't really exist by isolating incidents and studying them in an artificial surrounding - the best recipe for questionable scientific results.
Instead of yelling and raining mayhem, Slashdotters should have combined forces and mailed ICANN when they first said that new TLDs will be introduced. Instead of isolating the fact that big-bad-corp is likely to benefit, we should have tried to explain to ICANN why it is they are missing the point and what potential damage they might cause.
Sure, we should have a dotsex or dotxxx and then make it law that adult material has to be on those TLDs. Would be so easy to please everyone, if people would put their heads together and talk instead of bumping them all the time.
If dotsex was the law, no dotcom would be permitted to ever display any adult material whatsover - and it even fits with the first ammendment...
I can not see any solution to the problem - which wasn't really there until everyone tried to fix it aprt from a drastic one that would require a complete system overhaul.
Unless IE6, 7 or 8 has it's own embedded system that resolves any type of entry to the closest matching IP [provided IPv6 is widely spread to permit huge numbers of new IPs]; and that our 24/7 connections are fed the latest IP updates on an ongoing base, dot-com will be Fifth Avenue and everything else will be slums.
Actually there are sone alternative, private NICs, but they only function when administrators add their DNS-es to the network querries - and then only for users of that particular network.
So, the Australian mob that operates one of those setups [name and url withheld] is basically a ripppp offff. As is everyone else that runs a non-ICANN authorized system.
reading through the article and then the comments here - especially the ones that address the abilities of the judge i can't help but point out that the whole system is perverted.
trial by jury, for example is based on Guild trials in the dark ages - members of the jury would be professionals/ craftsmen of a certain guild and would decide if another guild member was guilty of something or not.
do you see wher i'm getting here? any decission that involves technology should [can not] be made by a judge - not even by a panel of judges, let alone higher courts.
decissions such as in the DeCSS case should always be made by a jury - which consists of experts in the field.
why on earth do judges hear expert witnesses, if they don't really follow their advise? wouldn't it be better if those same experts passed the judgement - together with remedy advise - and then leave it up to the judge to decide on further action?
why do courts trial everyday stuff [murder and mayhem] in front of juries, while landmark decissions are usually done by judges alone, without anybody else being involved?
obviously they do that because that they believe that normal people are not qualified [but they are qualified to decide if someone is a murderer or not]. at the same time they believe that experts in the field are not qualified to pass a judgement on their own field of expertise.
judges on the other hand, may or may not know applicable law [provided there is any] and of course - well, what else do they know? nothing really.
the legal system basically decides that technically a judge is qualified to operate a network, drive a truck, pilot a plane, develop software, and do just about everything else - after all, why else would everyone rely on judges making decissions that affect network operators, truck drivers, pilots, software developers, respectively?
About Southeast Asia floowing suit, there seem to be some differences of opinon between US backbone operators and Asian Telcos.
The yanks argue that more traffic comes in from Asia than traffic goes out from the US to Asia.
Therefore they presented a rather large bill to various Asian Telcos/Governments;
The Telcos argue that this resembles colonization and that they'd be treated unfairly, etc. To make it short, they don't wanna pay.
And as long as that dispute is still not settled, it's unlikely that Asian Telco's finance the project that Malaysia and Singapore spearheaded last year.
That concept would route India and Southeast Asia through Malaysia and Singapore and then through the longest ever underwater cable.
[Note, Malaysian's are always into projects that bring the World longest, highest, fastest, biggest, whatever-est results -like they got the World tallest building - and to drive it home, they have it twice over - the Petronas Twin Towers in K/L]
Of course, it would also be the World largest dataline and whatever else in tru one-upmanship in every aspect.
Trouble is, the project is expected to cost about 13 billion and while everyone paid their first instalment, with Malaysia and Singapore also paying their secon and third, everyone else put it on a hold until the 'pay for routing dispute is settled'.
Stupid of the yanks, really, cause they would have not only provided about half of the components, but would have opened Asian markets once and for all to American commerce.
---to be continued in a galaxy near you - i suppose---
who cares about euro-law?
after all that is the same mob that just outlawed developing security tools and using hacking tool in order to test one's own network for security.
get a decent currency, mess up your elections, then you can talk...
well they have - got their arses kicked... remember?
it was the beginning of the end.
after all the confederates where about individual freedom and the union was/is about coporate rights. then - as now...
freeing the slaves was only an addition to get the the undecided states behind the union - some of the union states where still holding slaves well into the civil war.
then as now, american corporations ruled politics and presidents were bought and sold - or shot - if they breached their contracts...
Slashdot Mirror
it really hurts to see so many intelligent people being so ignorant about the world at large and jumping to conclusions that seem to be based on McDonald's 'Geogfry' rather than a basic understanding of what's going on the world.
Firstly, mainland Malaysia has some of the best connections in the region. I fact the system is that good, that Thailand and Vietnam are routing most Internet traffic through leased lines in Malaysia.
Next, as Malaysia produces about 45% of the middle and lower end computer components of the world market, you should maybe refrain from making funny remarks about the tech know-how of the country. Chances are, without Made-in-Malaysia components your boxes wouldn't work - or would have cost about 20% more.
Also, Malaysia was the first country to start major government initiatives to make the country into an IT hub - and had the first cyberlaws, long before the US got their task force reports that told them to do something.
Finally, if things work as planned, the Malaysia and Expats living in Malaysia will give the next generation of Yank-geeks a run for their money.
So, next time when you see fancy photos of jungles and touristy performances by savages, think a while, get a map, browse for backgound info and then make up your mind.
Outside 'The Valley' and a few other 'Tech Focus' areas, the U.S. is as much an IT backwater as most other countries are. Having DSL, doesn't meen tha Joe Average would know how on Earth to get out of the AOL site and find his way around on the net.
Just an informed opinion and a few facts...
"Who really NEEDS to view the web via their digital cell phone?"
--- well, fact is that in the developing world chances are that the Internet will be more often accessed with wireless devices [pda, cellphone, etc.] than with a regular PC by 2002.
There are several reasons for this:
-1- Cellphones are much more common in Southeast Asia than landlines.
-2- Many non-urban areas are not likely to get landlines anytime soon [and those that do, have to often live with congestions, polluted lines and frequent interruptions.
-3- Buying one cellphone is cheaper than buying a PC [well in Asia it is way cheaper].
-4- With the introduction of G3 in the region, towards the middle of next year, connection speeds are expected to average at 200kps - which obviously beats the 48kps you can get out of a 56 dial-up modem on a good day.
I certainly agree that it's a PITA ['pain in the ass'] for us poor developers who have to allow for two main types of display and two main types of browsers when developing web sites and applications, but the easiest way to allow for small [tiny] displays would be to simply script a 'device detect' into the of the homepage. From there you send visitors with small displays into a W@P subroutine. Meaning, they get their own pages, rather than finding the lowest common denominator. Which makes even more sense if you consider that XML/WML is likely to be the standard for webpages in the not too distant future. So, conventional visitors get the full XML site, while wireless get a slimmer WML version.
"Get a life - Torch AOL!"
from personal experience, I'd say:
Europe -
claim to be canadian, show certain M$ tech experience and don't yell linux all the time;
explain the difficulties of open source without forcing your point on everyone. don't make jokes during the interview and let them ask a question or two and you should get a job;
Australia -
claim to from 'The Valley', use linux, bdss and oss in every sentence twice; violently oppose M$, wear slacks and bring iced beer to the interview;
Southeast Asia -
claim to be Bill Gates' illegitimite son or linus' long lost half brother - depending if you want to work for a big company or a start-up;
show keen interest in VC and expansion possibilities, claim to be 'connected' to VCs and buddies in 'The Valley', use catch phrase, invent new ones and make sure they don't understand what you say - if they do, they think you are just talking...
Okay, it's a bit over the top, but not much. Europeans hire Americans, only if they don't have a choice, Asians hire Americans, cause it's great to have 'first hand experts'.
Either case, salaries, bonuses, etc are lower than in the US. Much lower. But you can negotiate extra, un-official benefits, such as top accommodation, company car, first class travel, etc. - and, you get to play with the latest toys.
In Asia, getting approval for new hardware is a breeze [pick up the phone and say: "I want, because the competition doesn't have yet..." and you get anything you ask for.
Finally, job security is best in Europe, but they also expect loyalty in return. A job surfer has limited chances to be desirable after changing compies twice or trice - word passes fast.
In Asia, job security for foreign IT experts is the lowest. If the company is in trouble [or doing great] and/or if one of their cousins claims he can do your job, you are history [even if the cousin can't]. However, Asians headhunt like nuts. Meaning, you'd get job offers from collegues whose uncle is starting his own IT company, from customers who like dealing with you, although they have no clue what exactly it is you are doing and from everyone else you talk to...
With patenting the window[s] idea you are striking a nerve. as far as i know the first graphical user interface - the mother of all windows - was developed by Xerox's famed Palo Alta Labs.
Imagine they had taken out a patent on it. Not only would have Apple [then a tiny start-up] not been able to afford licensing fees, but M$ would have stuck to it's DOS for decades.
Without a wide acceptance of a GUI, it is unlikely that PCs would have found such a mass market and it's likely that this in turn would have profoundly influenced the history of the planet.
Whatever one thinks about M$, they certainly played a major role in the spread of PCs and in the 'ease' with which basic jobs can be done.
Let's face it, the majority of users, private and commercial, mainly used PCs as a fancy type writer and advanced calculator or to complete empty fields in proprietary software systems without much knowing / or caring, what happened behind the screen.
Without a move-there-click-here-open-that device, we would all be sitting in the basement next to huge boxes and follow Gate's [1980?] claim that 64Kb is all a user would ever need in Memory.
The fact that basic uses of PCs were understandable by anyone with an IQ above the plastic potplant in the corner was what drove the rapid spread of PCs - which in turn started the race of manufacturers to cut design-to-market time in an ongoing push to be faster, better, nicer AND cheaper.
So, while patents for specific fields should be granted, they should not enjoy the broad interpretation guidelines that are often applied.
issue a patent on a specific process of datamining, but don't patent search technology.
issue a patent on green shirts, but not on the idea of covering your upper torso with cloth.
Finally, when a company applies for a patent, part of the application should be what they plan to charge royalties on and how much. The PTO should then determine if granting the patent will stiffle development and possibly require the royalties to be lowered...
alternatively, grant patents only for short times, like, say 24 months. after which nobody can ever apply for a similar or related patent ever again.
imagine what type of development explosion this would create - and how many lawyers would be out of a job... =P
if you are smarter? we are in charge.
;-))).
and we happily give up any type of dominance in exchange for good sex. so what is the problem?
be nice to us, ensure a steady supply of sex and we gladly turn over control to females.
isn't us 'getting some' what we are all about?
isn't that why we start wars, work our backsides off and follow trends to be 'in' and to 'get some'?
the male of the species is so easily manipulated. but then, all we'd have to do to get control back is saying that we love you...
Okay some of the comments are quite interesting, but most of them sound like the good old "I'm not sure what we rebel against, but it's good to oppose the establishment anyway".
/. discussions - why don't you try to step back, compare data against two or three possible scenarios, before hitting [Reply] and yelling 'fraud', 'conspiracy', etc.?
;-))).
I've been writing mails to ICANN's chairwoman for quite a while - and get replies to each of them, how's that for caring about the 'consumer'?
So, before yelling that your voice is not heard at each other, start yelling in ICANN's direction, so that they can hear you.
When I first contacted her, at was a matter of introducing a group I am a founding member of. We are concerned about what BigBadCorp and IgnorantImbecileGov were doing to 'Our' Internet.
We are in the process of formalizing our own articles and come forward with demands.
Instead of ignoring the announcement, she actually got back to methin a few hours, giving her opinion, voicing concerns and explaining a few things that they did and why.
Next, she actually started to make suggestions and raise issues in regards to our budding association that we hadn't really considered, while asking for our input in regards to the future of ICANN. If that is not listening to 'the people', what is?
Our initial plans were based on a democratic system in which owners of domain names have one vote to the 'commercial house', while everyone with an e-mail account that cares to identify him/herself get a vote in the 'public house'.
As counter-balance we suggested an appointed body that would consist of the companies that provide the backbone, with ISPs and HSPs as well as infrastructure providers being represented [Rep house].
The idea was that the Rep House and the public house had even power to introduce new net-laws, while the commercial house would supervise their implementation. Freedom and democracy, live and let live.
But then she pointed out just exactly what types of vested interests, lobbying groups etc, she has to deal with at ICANN, everyday and no matter how noble and honest our cause was, it was a matter of time until our association would either bring the net down due to anarchy and system break-downs or the association itself would fail to it's job because of [self-]interest groups, etc which tend to surface in any type of association.
So, we are back to the drawing board, trying to figure out what amounts pretty much to the ideal form of government for the Internet. A government that is not subject to any national laws or restrictions and that has only three tasks - keep the internet functioning and expanding; make the Internet secure for everyone ; keep any third party that wants to influence a free net out of the game;
However, for anything like this to happen, we need to act fast, before national legislation in various countries is passed and outlaws our attempts. So, if you guys are serious, get busy, don't just yell around.
In regards to ccTLDs having to pay tribute to ICANN, well I think it's a good idea. Not because it increases the power ICANN has, but because it decreases the possibility over major fuck-ups on nation levels - [self-]interest groups are such a pain. Apart from that, it ensures the smooth jumping from dot au to dot com to dot whatever-ccTLD, as everyone has to adhere by the same standards. Trust me on this one, I've travelled far more than most people on the planet and can tell you that if this sytem wasn't enforced, countries like Iran, Myanmar, Lybia, to name just three, would immediately come up with their own system and not give a darn, if it was compatible with the greater net or not.
As so often in heated
Most of us have to trouble shoot various sytems every now and then. Do we turn around and say, doesn't work, buy a new one - or do we try to find a way to make an existing system work, maybe slightly modify it over time, rather than buying new ones each time?
If the world was to follow your advise, then it would get very expensive as we'd need to change systems and overhaul constitutions twice a day [three times on fridays].
The world is lucky that we keep yelling. Just imagine, we would sit back, think, devise solutions to problems and then make a combined effort to implement them... Has it ever appearred to you people just exactly what immense power we have as a group?
this is exactly while politicians and organizations tend to listen if we start making arguments, rather than just bitch and whine. I have not met any high ranking public servant that wouldn't take a suggestion from techies serious enough to warrant it a personal reply. After all, they never know what we will do if they don't...
So use that brain power and your abilities trying to find solutions - then post them for discussion. Once we have something that appears workable, we can suggest it to the relevant people. And if that doesn't work and we are all really unhappy, well, then - you know...
But if we don't try, then we have only ourselves to blame. If we buy into the conspiracy theory and think that they are out to get us, well, then we can always come up with our own conspiracy.
And if we are more reasonable and don't believ in conspiracies as such, then one could almost say it is very much our 'civic duty' in a democracy to indicate flaws in the system and tooffer possible solutions.
Remember, indicationg flaws in others, but no solutions, that job is already taken. It's called 'Politician'.
GOOD ON YA!
They should mark this up...
Heck, where has the time gone? I just recalled being an unwashed kid with big eyes and Commmmodore 64.
;-)] can be so ignorant of life beyond their vision-impaired surroundings.
Now I'm an unwashed adult with big eyes and a PDA.
Serious, somehow we lost the spirit when we grew up. At the same time, many of us experienced a type of excitement that modern script kiddies will never be able to comprehend.
Yet, it looks to me as if a revival of Gopher is pretty much an attempt to turn back the clock.
Resistance is futile, time has passed and Gopher won't make us young again.
So, it doesn't really make sense.
I read some comments here about Gopher being a good alternative for the developing world. Must have been from people who never left their apartment, let alone the developed world.
The problem that many people in underdeveloped countries have to overcome in order to bridge the digital divide are [IN REVERSE ORDER]:
-get fast access speeds
-learn to use the net beyond IRC and mail
-learn English [it IS the top language on Earth]
-explore the www
-get an internet connection
-get a computer
-feed, house, cloth your family
-get a job
-get an education
to achive that, counties must first:
-find means to feed their people
-house them
-provide basic health care
-estalish an electricity grid
-get a phone network
-provide public education
-build an economy
-make phones affordable
-offer higher learning
So, no gopher is not the solution for countries that have not enough power plants, let alone phone lines.
However, gopher could be a great solution for W@P as someone here suggested. Trouble is, by the time a standard would be established 3G and 4G sytems will be available and nobody would use a gopher-based system, if they can have streaming video instead.
While I really liked the stroll down Memory Lane, I am utterly disturbed that some IT's finest [/.ers
Are we heading for a quarreling, ignorant techelite on hand and 'all the others' on the other? This looks more and more like the plot of a SciFi B-movie, doesn't it?
Just on the side, we have no problems whatsoever with accessing gopher sites [evem the ones that have in the subject line that they can't be accessed with IE] using IE 5.5 - I dunno what some of you guys are raving on about again.
well, as I understand it, science has recently discovered that our brain's memory functions are much more complex than first thought. not only does it sort memories by cross referencing them [which is what intelligence is all about], but it also stores items it deems relevant in specific areas that seem to be getting the best oxygen and nutrient supply. Sort of a semi-permanent OS upgrade, I guess.
What the article does not address at all, is just exactly which type of memories are affected, to what extent and in which order. Let's face it, biological/organic systems never function 'cross-board'.
Therefore, if our brain develops data loss or even bad clusters, they are usually location specific, before starting to slowly spread.
And my wild guess is that the location that is affected is short term memory. So, even if the test subjects would have had proper sleep, their short-term memory might have still gone blank.
Seems people don't teach in schools that the best way to remember stuff is to store it in the long-term memory. And to force you brain to store data there, rather than in interim processing areas first, all you need to do, is come up with an image or association that your brain already knows and which you use frequently - your brain will immediately dig a thick set of synapses between that new data and well known one and hence store it long-term.
I used to invent sentences that were sort of funny and rhymed and then associate them with data i needed to pass exams in hated subjects [physics, chemistry...]. guess what, i passed with flying colours and still remember every single piece after over ten years - but forgot plenty of stuff about subjects i liked [maths, jogfry, etc.]
So, it's all about remembering by association, not processing while sleeping.
Asian Stats:
Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Hongkong, Taiwan
-50% of Urbanites have cell phones
-85% of urban 20-35 year olds have cell phones
-20% of 25-30 y/olds have more than one cell phone
Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines
7% of Urbanites have cell phones
41% of urban 20-35 year old have cell phones
Other Asian Stats:
Cellphone turnover period is about 11 months [every 11 months users buy the latest gadget];
Youngsters, Professionals and Bizpeople, use cell phones more often than land lines [and everywhere they are - incl. restaurants, airplanes, cinemas, funerals, operas, karaoke lounges...]
Cellphones are not a status symbol in most Asian countries anymore, but a must-have if one works in IT.
Real 'IN' people in cafes, carry multiple cellphones and use at least two at the same time -like "oh wow, wait I gotta call XYZ and tell them what you just told me, can you hold the line while I dial?"
General Gadget Info:
SE-E-Asia is gadget crazy.
On the odd chance that something comes out in Europe or the US first, shops that cater to the well-to-do just fly there and buy a suitcase or two of full the gadget and come staright back;
anything new that is not supported by local infrastrucure operators / service providers results in immediate feeding frenzy and competative push to be the first to support it, which results in plenty half-baked solutions, which are usually abandonned within a few months [and after spending XXX on development and XXX^10 on hype] for the next big 'IN' thing;
Southeast Asia is Tech Paradise, if you can live with occasional connection speeds of only 36kps and timed local calls, timed internet dial-up, etc.
I really hate to disapoint you, but actaully, well, we get the US movies before the US has them;
Really, we get movies on VCD befoe they are released in US movie theatres. We've seen the director's cut of Charlie's Angles in August,
Arnie's 'the 6th day' in September.
So, there is only one solution for insecure little puppies - move to Southeast Asia.
Hech we had the Pentium 4 processor before you even had a press release... but then, they make them accross the road from my place - no b/s - the intel plant is there...
are u talking about the great country that just redefined the meaning of 'democratic process' in order to entertain us all through x-mas or about canada?
this might be interesting for many non-us /.ers
any foreigner can apply for a patent in the u/s
and it's rather cheap, too.
even better, the uspo has a so-called 'provisional patent' option.
this permits you to submit a draft patent of sorts, pay about $200 and you are automatically granted a provisional patent for one year.
that gives you a whole year time to come up with a decent patent application, company structure, etc. should anyone else, have the same idea afterwads, then you are already protected as if you has a full patent.
check out the uspto site for details or mail me and i might give you some tips. we bought a software that helps us drafting patents and we patent just about everything we can think of to pre-empt big-bad-corp to do it.
we have no intention to ever enforce a patent, but are looking forward to kick the likes of amazon.com all the way to court and back, if they ever infringe on a patent of ours - we even denied accepting royalties from a big corp when they tried to get away with stealing an idea from us - instead we hired their programmer and forced them to drop the new feature completely... after a year we let the provisonal patent die.
the law says that if a provisional patent application is filed and later abandonned that the technology is the considered being in the public domain and therefore noone can patent it ever again - our contribution to a free Internet: act, don't chat.
I've laughed my arse off when I heard it.
Isn't this so very typical Australian? Wanting to play with the big boys, being part of the party and trying desperately to show that Oz is not a backwater place - and then messing it up badly - each time?
Reminds me of the Australians pioneering censorship... It's been law for quite a while now and there are still load of Australia based p0rn sites. One of our hosting clients that is in that field gets' most of his traffic [and paying users] from Australia. Nobody really talks about the subject anymore.
Of course Southeast asians are gloating, because now proud and oh-so-advanced-Australia is routing most of it's traffic through Singapore again.
I love it. As long as they don't grow up to realize that could be a valued partner if they weren't so imposing all the time, they will at least be a continuous source of entertainment.
i think it would be in everybody's interest if governments would take this even one step further:
high-speed internet access points should become part of building stadards, pretty much the same way power points and plumbing is.
if the industry is forced to comply, everyone will scramble [after outcries and court challenges of course] to get a piece of the action.
once it's normal that everyone only needs to plug-in a sufrving device to connect to the net, the digital divide will vanish - pretty much the same way as every houshold has tv and most have phone connections, if the net 'jack' is there and people only plug in to surf, they will give it a shot. especially if the monthly fees can not exceed a government enforced amount.
but then, this is good for the people and the countrry - ie. the U.S. would rather start a war with someone than implementing something that makes sense - and wasn't their idea to begin with...
Your comment about the numbers of IP being finite and people 'having' to share IPs is not entirely correct.
Firstly, as more and more providers adopt IPv6, the number of available IPs is in the high three-digit billions.
Secondly, many hosting service providers prefer to host several sites under shared IPs simply because that is cheper for them. IPs cost money, after all.
In our case, we even allocate individual IPs to subdomains we host- but then, that's us, and we are privately held with no interest whatsoever in an IPO.
About your assumption of me not valuing dotnet domains:
- it's not that much what we want or value, it's what the customer expects after everybody has drummed dotcom into him or her.
You might have noticed that we are dotnet, because when we first started we felt that as service proder we are dotnet - and we have regretted it ever since. The poeple who own the dotcom and dotorg are pushing us to give them the dotnet and we are trying to get the dotorg from them for a planned community project.
The reason why we settled for Cyberica in the first place, instead of the more logical CyberFrontier, is that some idiot had forgotten to pay the fees and someone else grabbed the dotcom, for no other apparent reason than being nasty.
while I honestly believe that the Australian system is too restrictive [whatever happened to peer groups, fan sites, etc?], I do get your point and it might make sense to adopt something like that for purely commercial TLDs, as long as other TLDs are also available.
...]
However, regarding your claim that nobody can register a similar name, once you registered a business [trading as], that is not entirely correct. If you register Blue Couch in Sydney, then I can't register it in the same state [ie. NSW], but can just jump over to Canberra {ACT] and
register it there.
Furthermore, if you register it as a shop name in Sydney and if your business is resoably expected to be limited to the Sydney area, then I register a similar name, with a slight alteration [say, Blue Couch Furniture, Blue Couch Restaurant,
in the next town.
On top of that, if I register more or less the same name for a completely different type of business [say you do software, I do catering] and neither of us are 'reasonably likely' to ever infringe on each other's customers, then I will also get away with it.
The spirit of the rule, ie. the meaning or the essence, is that similar names can not serve as a tool to deceive customers. Within those broad guidelines, it's very much at the discretion of the Department of Fair Trading if they allow me to register the same or a very similar name. And that comes down to going to a Department of Fair Trading outlet and flirting with the girl that enters the applications into the computer [well, in Lismore they are mostly Ladies...].
Also, in my opinion, the main reason why there is not much of a rush on ccTLDs is simply because they are considered provincial - with dot.com being the top choice for everyone.
If that was not the case, theen Australian squatters would be likely to register Business names like nuts [which is pretty simple and staright forward] and then get the domain names anyway. After all, there is no rule that a company can not trade under infinite numbers of names [our Company has 16 lines of business and a different trading name for each].
It is also incorrect, that consumers can easily find out who is the operator of a site using the company registry. Firstly, Business Names are registered on a state level, while Companies are incorporated on federal level;
Secondly, a company [like ours] could register trading names for customers whose sites it hosts, for the sole purpose of obtaining the customer's domain name. So, while our company shows up as the owner of the Business Name, it does not claim to own or operate the business per say.
Our hosting contracts clearly exclude any type of involvement of our behalf in the day to day business and the site owners are fully liable.
However, due to fancy Australian privacy laws, we have to actually ask the site owner on a case to case base if we are permitted to diclose his or her identity and/or location when customers ask for it.
So, it boils down to the fact that the Australian system [like so often] seems to be smart on the surface but acts counterproductive, by making it too complicated for small people to get involved, while at the same permitting sharks and trash to find piles of loopholes that permit them to use the system against itself...
Why else would our company have left it's main base of business and registered elsewhere, pratically abolishing jobs and training for Australians?
Up front, I think ICANN has a tough job trying to please everyone. The logical result of such an attempt is that ICANN will never please anyone.
So, no matter what they do, nobody will ever be satisfied.
Next, new TLDs in any shape or form are useless.
The name of the game is dot-com.
dot-com is main street Slicon Valley and Wall Street [ny/ny] combined. Any other dot-ohheckimtoolateoricantaffordthedotcom has minute survival chances in a market that is hooked on dot-com.
Therefore, all new TLDs will only result in a land-grab of imbeciles and in money burning from doomed start-ups.
Would you do business with a company that doesn't have a dot-com? Maybe to buy chewing gum [caffeine] or an auction, well if it's cheap, you might. But would you buy thousands of dollars woth of goods from someone that can't be bothered to buy their dotcom domain?
Would you trust an online service provider or consultant that doesn't have his/her dotcom? Just how valuable could that service be, if the provider didn't even have the foresight to secure his/her dotcom?
So, who would take a domain, like say, dotbiz?
People who can't afford the dotcom, right? Why would I want do business with them? If they were reliable and successful, then the owner of the dotcom would have sued them out of their dotbiz by now, claiming 'prior art' and bad business practice.
Further, there are so much more dotcom domains available than meets the eye. heck, there are over 400 languages in use on the planet and the English name space is coming up with creative new terms [i-this, e-that, 1-more, 2-less, 1-4-u, etc.] on a regular base. So by adding new domain names, thgis creativity would be stifled for a short while, until everyone realizes that new TLDs didn't solve a problem, but created severl. Then we'll all be back to inventing new words and phrases like i_1_2_yell.com. Apart from that English is probably the language that assimilates new and foreign language words the easiest.
So, we are unlikely rto really ever run out of dotcom names.
Of course, the no-brainer names for people who have problems to articulate in their first language will be incresing in price on an ongoing base. But so what? Does it affect anyone here if someone makes a gazillion for iknewitfirst-dot-com? Aren't most people just pissed off that they didn't do it themselves, when they hear about a cybersquatter making a killing?
I think, there should be laws against taking someones dotcom brand and registering similar names only to sell it back to the original owner.
Remember the first guys that registered a go2...-dotcom? I think they should own the rights to all domain names that have a go2 in them. They had the idea first and should have the right to claim 'prior art'.
But they can't, because they are a bunch of young techies that had no idea what gold-mine their idea could be. Then came Go2Networks, snapped them all up, sold out to Disney and recently the people who can demonstrate that they registered the first ever domain name that had go2 in it received a letter from WIPO...
So, coming full circle, while Slashdotters love to trash issues, it seems that most of them miss the point. Copyrights, Open Source, Domain names, Legal system, they all fit in the same catgory - "things to be urgently reviewed"
While I do not share the script kiddies' hostility towards ICANN/M$/Business/their-mum, I do think that ICANN completely missed the picture [again]as well and tried to solve a problem that didn't really exist by isolating incidents and studying them in an artificial surrounding - the best recipe for questionable scientific results.
Instead of yelling and raining mayhem, Slashdotters should have combined forces and mailed ICANN when they first said that new TLDs will be introduced. Instead of isolating the fact that big-bad-corp is likely to benefit, we should have tried to explain to ICANN why it is they are missing the point and what potential damage they might cause.
Sure, we should have a dotsex or dotxxx and then make it law that adult material has to be on those TLDs. Would be so easy to please everyone, if people would put their heads together and talk instead of bumping them all the time.
If dotsex was the law, no dotcom would be permitted to ever display any adult material whatsover - and it even fits with the first ammendment...
I can not see any solution to the problem - which wasn't really there until everyone tried to fix it aprt from a drastic one that would require a complete system overhaul.
Unless IE6, 7 or 8 has it's own embedded system that resolves any type of entry to the closest matching IP [provided IPv6 is widely spread to permit huge numbers of new IPs]; and that our 24/7 connections are fed the latest IP updates on an ongoing base, dot-com will be Fifth Avenue and everything else will be slums.
Actually there are sone alternative, private NICs, but they only function when administrators add their DNS-es to the network querries - and then only for users of that particular network.
So, the Australian mob that operates one of those setups [name and url withheld] is basically a ripppp offff. As is everyone else that runs a non-ICANN authorized system.
reading through the article and then the comments here - especially the ones that address the abilities of the judge i can't help but point out that the whole system is perverted.
trial by jury, for example is based on Guild trials in the dark ages - members of the jury would be professionals/ craftsmen of a certain guild and would decide if another guild member was guilty of something or not.
do you see wher i'm getting here? any decission that involves technology should [can not] be made by a judge - not even by a panel of judges, let alone higher courts.
decissions such as in the DeCSS case should always be made by a jury - which consists of experts in the field.
why on earth do judges hear expert witnesses, if they don't really follow their advise? wouldn't it be better if those same experts passed the judgement - together with remedy advise - and then leave it up to the judge to decide on further action?
why do courts trial everyday stuff [murder and mayhem] in front of juries, while landmark decissions are usually done by judges alone, without anybody else being involved?
obviously they do that because that they believe that normal people are not qualified [but they are qualified to decide if someone is a murderer or not]. at the same time they believe that experts in the field are not qualified to pass a judgement on their own field of expertise.
judges on the other hand, may or may not know applicable law [provided there is any] and of course - well, what else do they know? nothing really.
the legal system basically decides that technically a judge is qualified to operate a network, drive a truck, pilot a plane, develop software, and do just about everything else - after all, why else would everyone rely on judges making decissions that affect network operators, truck drivers, pilots, software developers, respectively?
hey !!! mark this up. i had a good laugh, so take my measly karma points if you want and mark the parent of this to 5 - FUNNY!!!
well, now i might consider coming back to Aus...
About Southeast Asia floowing suit, there seem to be some differences of opinon between US backbone operators and Asian Telcos.
The yanks argue that more traffic comes in from Asia than traffic goes out from the US to Asia.
Therefore they presented a rather large bill to various Asian Telcos/Governments;
The Telcos argue that this resembles colonization and that they'd be treated unfairly, etc. To make it short, they don't wanna pay.
And as long as that dispute is still not settled, it's unlikely that Asian Telco's finance the project that Malaysia and Singapore spearheaded last year.
That concept would route India and Southeast Asia through Malaysia and Singapore and then through the longest ever underwater cable.
[Note, Malaysian's are always into projects that bring the World longest, highest, fastest, biggest, whatever-est results -like they got the World tallest building - and to drive it home, they have it twice over - the Petronas Twin Towers in K/L]
Of course, it would also be the World largest dataline and whatever else in tru one-upmanship in every aspect.
Trouble is, the project is expected to cost about 13 billion and while everyone paid their first instalment, with Malaysia and Singapore also paying their secon and third, everyone else put it on a hold until the 'pay for routing dispute is settled'.
Stupid of the yanks, really, cause they would have not only provided about half of the components, but would have opened Asian markets once and for all to American commerce.
---to be continued in a galaxy near you - i suppose---
who cares about euro-law?
after all that is the same mob that just outlawed developing security tools and using hacking tool in order to test one's own network for security.
get a decent currency, mess up your elections, then you can talk...
been done / in process:
http://www.opennic.unrated.net
well they have - got their arses kicked... remember?
it was the beginning of the end.
after all the confederates where about individual freedom and the union was/is about coporate rights. then - as now...
freeing the slaves was only an addition to get the the undecided states behind the union - some of the union states where still holding slaves well into the civil war.
then as now, american corporations ruled politics and presidents were bought and sold - or shot - if they breached their contracts...