Isn't this "secret location" in Palo Alto? Seems to me there are probably thousands of people (e.g. telco employees) that know where it is...
Nope, VeriSign was never in Palo Alto. It was dotCom era, rents in Palo Alto were way high by that time. VeriSign started in Redwood Shores and then moved to Mountain View. These days they own the old Netscape campus.
The operations center is another matter, those are in unmarked buildings at several locations. If you look at some of the displays of root server locations you will see blobs in the San Francisco and Washington D.C. areas. Well duhh! Who would have guessed that the DNS servers would be so close physically to MAE West and MAE East?
The Circle ID stories are both slashdotted. So we can't hear if Karl and co are saying 'nah, we don't need high bandwidth roots capable of a good slashdotting' which if they were would be somewhat ironic.
The point that the article does not really mention is that at the moment running the DNS roots is done on a voluntary basis. ICANN is getting a free ride here. After the DDoS event in 2002 it was clear that 1) the roots were a major target 2) There was a big difference in the quality of service.
Given the importance of the roots shouldn't we actually invest something so the people running them can afford to do the job well? VeriSign can afford to run its systems the way it does because it has revenue from other sources. How do you justify the cost of a high end four way server to be dedicated to root ops if you are a non-profit? ICANN could at least pay for hardware and bandwidth.
Roughly where is aluminium ranked? Is aluminium used because its a good conductor, or because its cheap and gets the job more or less done?
Alluminium is a wierd one. Basically it is so reactive that the outer layer oxidizes almost immediately. So you are not testing the conductivity of aluminium, you are testing the conductivity of aluminium surrounded by a thin layer of aluminium oxide.
As for being cheap, that is a recent thing. The top of the washington monument is a pyamid of solid aluminium, chosen because it is the best lightning conductor, will not corrode like copper and streak the stones and at the time was the most valuable metal in existence. (Lightning does not care about the thin layer of oxide.)
Software, once written, has absolutely no economic value. It's infinitely copyable, therefore supply is infinite. 1 million for the cost of duplication and media and whatever else it comes with sounds about right.
Actually the announcement said hardware and software. Microsoft is also donating machines to run the software on.
I find the VA-Linux vested interest editorial line somewhat tiresome.
Blah Blah, Microsoft eeevil, blah eeevil corporations, Linux good, Linux corporations good, blah eeevil corporations, looks like Microsoft, must be eeevil.
And if we don't have the facts we will just make them up to suit. There was no evidence for the '$1 million' claim and if you read the actual report it is clearly false.
Have you pointed its presence in Apache out to the USPTO?
No, instead I told the MIT prof concerned that if he did not withdraw the patent claim I would make a formal complaint to the MIT proctors of plagarism. He complied.
Although the USPTO does not publish patent applications the Europeans do.
Bruces says all that can be said, these patents are being given away to people who didn't invent what they claim. Basically it comes down to the ability to imagine a possibility.
Several people have filed patent claims on work I did, in one case 5 years after the idea had made its way into Apache.
actually mr US president had the idea for the LoN i believe, but opted out when they wouldnt incorporate some of his points... (which were later attributed as the reasons it faltered.)
and the points were things such as not having germany pay reparations(sp?), nothing too insane...
It was a party dispute. President Wilson proposed the League of Nations, the Republicans and others in Congress refused to ratify the treaty.
The surface debate had very little to do with the reasons for the rejection. Its like the revisionist claim touted in the Southern states that the civil war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery. You can make an argument that the immediate causes of the war were different, but the obvious fact is that there would have been no war without slavery.
Internment of japanese americans = designation of US citizens as 'enemy combattants' to deny civil rights
Oaklahoma City bombing = WTC bombing
Clinton perjury over sex = Bush perjury over weapons of mass destruction.
Dukakis in tank = Bush in flight suit on U.S. Liberty
Seriously guys just what is there you think is positive about this guy? He has validated every critics claim that he was a dimwitted rube.
Even if this is not his fault, can't you see that the poor clown is just completely unlucky? Just what has to go wrong before you GOP rubes get a clue?
So far he has not been caught selling arms to terrorists in Iran to illegally finance terrorists in Nicaragua. He has not fucked any interns or been attacked by a killer rabbit either.
I have to agree...it wasn't very professional to end the letter that way. Of course he was justified in saying so.
Actually not, it was exactly the right thing to do. What he said was don't waste your time and mine with any future letters unless you can state the specific code items that you claim ownership of.
This has a legal significance. Daryl has been put on notice that SCO's claims are in dispute and are not believed. What SCO want to do at this point is to get to a point where they could claim the infringement to be willful.
It is very clear that SCO have to state their claim with specificity if they want any further action. What the last paragraph does is in effect say 'I won't consider myself as having been put on notice until you address this issue'. The case history of SCO vs IBM shows this is an reasonable point of view.
In summary I don't think SCO would be sucessful in a claim of willful infringement and I don't think any further correspondence will have that effect either unless that point is met.
Are you completely stupid. Isolationism == Leave Iraq alone.
I just know the history, during the 'isolationist' period the US invaded Cuba, the Phillipeans, imposed the 'open door' (read colonial occupation) policy on China, engineered a coup in Panama for the sole purpose of building the canal under total US control. And so it goes on.
The term isolationism refers to the exercise of power without reference to any strategic alliances. It was certainly not a pacifist period in US history.
The isolationists disliked the league of nations for the same reason that they hate the UN, it would restrict exercise of US power at a time when the US was becomming a world power.
Any economist will tell you that deficit spending is a standard prctice for the govt. to get out of a recession. It worked for Reagan and looks like it's working for Bush as well.
Any economist of any reputation will tell you that the promise of a tax cut in ten years time has negligible effect on the economy. Also a tax cut that benefits people with very high disposable income already has little effect since these people usually run out of things to buy long before they run out of money.
I could easily go out an buy a new car, but I would have nowhere to put it. I could have the kitchen redone if I wanted to put up with the house being a wreck for 6 months and the associated stress.
I don't think you will find many economists with credibility outside the far right who will claim that cutting inheritance tax stimulates the economy short term.
The Bush tax cuts were justified by claims that the Clinton surplus would stretch out as far as the eye could see. You can hardly claim that they are crafted to bring about a recovery from recession unless you are willing to admit that Bush and the admin are total liars.
Ahh, good old NewsMax. Now, there's a reputable and unbiased source for news, comparable in every way to the Boston Globe (est. 1872)
The newsmax story is rather improbable, if illegal leaking had been going on Kenneth Starr would have investigated it. In fact the only illegal leaking going on was by Starr's office. It is somewhat unusual for a prosecutor to demand immuity from prosecution themselves as a condition of dismissing charges, yet that is exactly what Starr did.
I have a theory that GW Bush is trying to be the worst President in US history by repeating every one of the worst mistakes of his predecessors:
Watergate break in = Republicans spy on Democrats
Vietnam = Iraq
Reagan era deficits = Bush era deficits
Hoover recession = Bush recession
1876 vote fraud = 2000 vote fraud
Isolationism = Go it alone unilateralism
Tea pot dome = Enron, Halliburton, Harken, etc.
Some day the lapdog republican news media will suddenly realise that Bush has sold them down the river along with the rest of the country.
Do you really care how much you dislike or like the author of some code?
Not at all, I don't use his code. It is his contributions to the protocol debates that are at issue. Do it my way or I'm taking my ball home is not a very persuasive attitude.
Now, I also swore to follow the orders of the president of the united states. He was elected in a democratic election. There may have been problems with that election, he may not have had the popular vote, but he was elected by a democratic proccess, and I've followed his orders and the orders he has given to the officers appointed over me.
The point here is that although Bush and Co manifestly abused the spirit of the democratic process, the forms of that process were not affected. The decision of the Supreme Court is unlikely to be considered in a favorable light by future generations. However there is a consensus in the US polity that it is better for the Supreme court to make such decisions than have the military take them.
Karl Popper made a point which is very important here, it is impossible in the final analysis to arrive at a 100% satisfactory process for establishing the legitimacy of a government. What authority did the Continental Congress have? Certainly no democratic mandate direct or indirect. The key is not the legitimacy of a government, it is whether it can be replaced. The US constitution was not ratified by the people and even if it had been the people who ratified it would be long dead. The legitimacy of the constitution comes from the fact that the government can be replaced.
The GOP tried the Florida 2000 trick once before in 1876. in that case the Supreme Court was bribed to disqualify the votes that would have elected Tilden. The result was a government that rulled for four years with little authority and did little of long term consequence.
Bush will suffer the same fate. His administration has done nothing of positive consequence. When put to the test in 9/11 Bush failled, he spent the day flying arround on airforce one. it was three days before his speechwriters had crafted something that could pass for an adequate statement to the nation. CNN and Fox news can puff up a coward wearing a flight suit into a national hero but history will have a much harsher verdict.
History will after all be written by the children who are paying off the debt that Bush has run up with his reckless financial policies intended to benefit only the richest of the rich.
No, because all godwin's law does is serve as a tool for people with weak arguments to call "game over!" when they face an opponent who utters the H-word.
Actually this is pretty much the way Godwin's law came about. Godwin is himself a notorious flame artiste and he has a habit of taking arguments to ludicrous and vitriolic extreemes. His tactics are pretty reminiscent of the tactics used by the followers of totalitarian regimes to quell dissent.
Accusing Bush of being fascist is not something I do, it is an own goal because the people you are talking to will either already agree with you or they will be turned off. The problem here is that comparisons between Saddam and Hitler are certainly justified by his use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war. Although a closer parallel to Saddam's career would be that Saddam is the Napoleon of the middle east, only without the military capability.
The problem with the 'democracy' process in Iraq is that we have learned nothing from history. Instead of giving the people of Iraq democracy the US is trying to impose a sham democracy, one where the Iraqi people will get to choose which US puppet they get to rule them. This would not be quite as bad if the prime pentagon candidate, Chalabli was not a convicted corporate fraudster on the Enron/Parmalat scale, having embezzled hundreds of millions from the bank he ran in Jordan.
The history of sham democracies and puppet governments in the region is not good. Saddam himself was originally a CIA puppet, installed to keep out the commies. As far as the US was concerned there was nothing at all wrong with him despite his use of chemical weapons until he threatened US interests with the invasion of Kewait.
The main reason the US was supporting Saddam way back was of course because he started a war against Iran which has been a declared enemy of the US since the Iranian revolution. What the CNN newscasts don't tell US viewers is that fifty years ago Iran was a democracy. The US and the UK did not like this because the democratic government made the impertinent demand that they be allowed to inspect the books of the then Anglo-Persian oil company which had aquired the mineral rights to the entire country in a transaction typical of colonial times. The Iranians were being cheated, they did not even see the miserly fraction of the oil wealth that was due under the contract.
So in 1953 the CIA arranged a coup to replace the democracy in Iran by a dictatorship under the Shah. This was predictably every bit as brutal as Saddam's later dictatorship in Iraq. But the oil would flow to the West unencumbered by the rights of the people.
Not surprisingly this state of affairs was pretty unstable and twenty years ago the Shah was ousted in a coup. Not surprisingly the coup leaders remembered the role of the US in the previous coup and considered the US to be the enemy of democratic ambitions. This feeling was exploited by a group of clerics who actually played a negligible role in ousting the Shah but were the only group who had a cohesive political organization. As with the Russian revolution it was quickly subverted and the resulting constitution was not a real democracy but a sham. The people get to vote for a parliament but the real power is held by a clique of unaccountable clerics who claim to speak for God.
The Us papers have not been following the situation in Iran very closely but currently there is a major politica struggle between the democrats and the clique of clerics. The US is of course nowhere to be seen, the only intervention made by GW Bush was to strengthen the hand of the clique of clerics by branding Iran a member of the axis of evil at a time when the clerics were weak in the post 9/11 period. the result was that instead of ousting the clerics the democratic faction agreed with them that Iran should build a nuclear bomb.
Given the problems that the sham democracy has caused in Iran it is quite astonishing that the Bush administration would make the same
Dont underestimate this. Go read that letter. Its designed to appeal directly to the politician in every fasion you can possibly do so. It mentions tax revenue losses, US supremecy in world markets, degredation of copyright laws (which RIAA and the MPAA are yelling in the other ear about), and loss of american jobs
Quite so, respond appropriately.
Dear Congressman,
Every year the US government spends many hundreds of millions of dollars supporting research projects at universities and other public institutes that result in the creation of large quantities of computer software. There are some who are arguing that such software should only be used for private gain rather than being made freely available by the public at large who paid for it.
Fortunately the few who hold this view are a distinct minority in the computer industry. Leading companies such as IBM have taken a very contrary position, making major investments in Linux, an open source software application. Researchers know that making computer software freely avaliable for use is the best way to share ideas. The World Wide Web revolution was made possible by open source software developed at two institutions funded by public money, CERN and NCSA.
Even those companies such as Microsoft who have questioned certain details of the way the open source movement makes software available have not questioned the principle that software developed with public money should be freely available as a public good. Indeed Microsoft argues that such software should be made available for both commercial and non-commercial exploitation.
As a practical matter the minority in question consists of a single company with negligible revenues, a limited working capital and a huge negative cash flow. It is unlikely that any of that money is going to find its way into your campaign coffers matey so forget that one for a start. Moreover if you do start pandering to this pathetic excressence in the hope of a big payout you are going to find your contributions from the rest of the industry disappearing faster than Ossama Bin Laden.
So be a good chap, don't be an asshole on this one and maybe CNN won't have to find out about that business in Ohio involving a vaccum cleaner, large quantities of lubricants and the Alsatian.
Re:"unfortunately the rest of the world does"
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
Not ALL the rest of the world. One cannot deny the abarasive personality of it's creator if you're on his bad side (I'm not) but that is true of many things. Look at DJBDNS, if you're on the wrong side of Dan (I'm not) he comes off asa jerk, yet his code, I posit, is among the best, if not the best C code I've ever seen. One certainly cannot argue the performance merits of his software compared to bind by any metric.
Dan is the author of one of the two IPv8 proposals. He is certainly not a crank, nor generally considered as such, but the other guy is. Particularly when he started to propose IPv16 which compresses 16 bytes into 4.
But yes, even though DJB is not a crank, he is a jerk and he has the political sense of a wet sock and a mud brick combined. He does himself no favors by running a C/R system on all his incomming email with a particularly arrogant message 'Proff Bernstein far too important to talk to a mere peon like you' and refusing to whitelist anyone but people he thinks are super important. Effect is that he basically ends up telling the world that he thinks that they are complete nobodies when they try to contact him.
So even though he is not a crank he does get treated like one and it is his own fault.
It's probably worth mentioning that the article is focussing on microlights for this, not airships. Microlights are very small aeroplanes, resembling (and not much different to) a hang-glider with an engine.
Actually that is for testing purposes, they will fly microlights at low altitude. Presumably because it takes quite a bit of time getting a blimp up to 12 miles high and they are pretty pricey. You can do much more tweakage on a cheap microlight, send it up, test, bring it down, tweak, etc.
The production scheme would go on airships at 12 miles out. The reason for that is that they require less power to stay in place, most of the weather takes place at much lower altitudes. Thunderstorms tend to take place at under 6Km at those latitudes.
My meterologoist is not sure what the wind factor is up there, you are probably above the jet stream (good) but hey since you don't get much weather at those levels there is not a great deal of interest in tracking it.
Possibly the wind factor is small because you are so high up and the atmosphere is much thinner.
You would need some sort of solar array to power the networking gear. One cool aspect though is that you could have directional antanae focused on a particular area. So you would not need to share the same frequency band with everyone in the 40Km service area.
If you read the various followups to that posting you linked to, you'll see that there are two separate IPv8s. One was a proposal that competed with IPv6 and lost. It's dead. The other is a joke.
Erm do you mean here that Ipv8 is intended as a joke or that that is the result? The creator certainly thinks his scheme is not a joke, unfortunately the rest of the world does. Basically the idea is to compress an 8 byte address into 4 bytes. This part is of course quite possible provided you don't need to ever go the other way...
The big problem for the Internet at large is that the IPv6 scheme thunk up by the woolly headed academics of the IETF is about as practical. IPv4 can talk to IPv6 but not the other way arround. The plan is completely clueless when it comes to the business of how to deploy IPv6 in the real world.
Unfortunately the days are long gone when folk in the IETF could wield a cluebat and fix these guys. Most of the people with a real clue have drifted away. OK so Dave Clark may be nominally still a member of the IETF, but he has zero time to spend wielding cluebats these days.
What needs to happen is for folk to realize that NAT boxes are the way to deploy IPv6, not the enemy.
Basically a NAT box should be capable of talking IPv6 on either side of the bridge. It should be capable of talking IPv6 on the internal net and IPv4 externally, vice versa, or the same protocol (IPv4 or IPv6) on both sides. And in doing so it should be 100% transparent to the end user.
The first step is to write a protocol that allows an existing machine on the inside of a NAT box to make a request (which may be refused) to open up an external port to accept connections. Yes this needs support at the O/S level and possibly make the applications aware. This is no biggie because the main server applications that make sense are video-conferencing and home web servers. Both easily fixed.
Armed with that capability you can make an IPv4 network behind a NAT box work as if each machine had its own IPv4 address. Of course the loosers at the IETF are blocking this because they want to push IPv6 by withholding features from IPv4.
A NAT box of this type would be able to tell its provider that it is IPv6 transitional capable when it requests an IP address from its ISP. The ISP can then do similar IPv6 gating to IPv4 at the Internet level. This way you could run 10,000 residential Internet users off a pool of 256 IP addresses.
The key here is to decouple the deployment of IPv6 on internal and external networks so that both can operate independently. The router boys think they understand the Internet because they understand routing. Fact is that they simply have no clue about the business relations involved. Their solution at every turn is 'oh well it will take time for the business people to come round'. They just don't get the fact that the business people may never come arround to their way of thinking.
One thing is certain Harald Alvestrand is not going to convince ISPs to change over with his current tactics.
What does that have to do with a book being sold in the UK, but not in the US?
Do you want me to spell it out for you?
Thought so, that being my main point. Incidentally great move putting that dyslexic guy Webster in charge of the dictionary.
Talking about books not available in the US, Murdoch seems to have stopped publication of 'The Murdoch Archipelago' in the US. Having read it I can see why, the extreme right wing owner of Fox News would not want his viewers to know that he is quite happy spewing left wing propaganda if it suits him, or cozying up to the Chinese communists.
I'd like some sort of distributed list, with a web of trust type mechanism, and an indicion of the spam/email ratio.
The problem with that type of scheme is that it is really difficult to make it work when there are people trying to game the system. Try to apply the slashdot moderation system direct to political discussion and you will have teams of partisans desperately moderating down the other side. Moveon.org has been blacklisted by lists after a group of republicans organized a campaign where they subscribed to the list then reported it as spam. Same probably happens to republican lists (although grass roots does not really figure the same in their model)
On the IRTF ASRG list Vernon Schryer used to make a point of reporting posts he simply did not like as 'spam' to his distributed mod list scheme. If the designer of a scheme can commit that type of abuse in that type of forum there is little hope for the scheme being scalable.
SPEWS is such a cartoon cutout operation that I seriously wonder if it is being run by a spammer, certainly we will find at least one blacklist where this is the case. Think about it, other spammers are your competition, both for eyeballs and for the merchandise. So run a service that blocks their mail but not your mails when you choose.
Quite a lot of the anti-spam technologists have played both sides of the fence. Folk who are unsucessful at selling their anti-spam scheme frequently turn to spam to sell it.
Early on the ASRG list appeared to have been the target of a campaign to destroy the list by Vernon et al. It might just be that they are complete jerks or the gratuitous insults aimed at every practical suggestion may have been made with a purpose. It felt like there was a purpose, be as unpleasant as possible and hope you can drive people away.
What we have to start doing is to turn the issue arround, instead of trying to spot bad mail, look for the good stuff. Mail that is genuinely from Hotmail is pretty unlikely to be bulk sent because of their rate limiters. So it is pretty likely to be genuine. Schemes like SPF and Yahoo! Domain Keys are the way to go. Couple these with an accreditation scheme that can report the reputation of the sender as well and you have a scheme that can identify good mail with very high accuracy. If 50% of mail is authenticated then the spam filters can be twice as strict on the remaining 50%.
But on to how what SCO owns is relevant: take a look at IBM's motion to compel. Specifically paragraph 12.
IBM wants SCO to list all SCO-owned code in Linux (as in - everything they own, regardless of whether it's contested or not.) That is: everything in Linux that SCO owns the copyright to must be submitted before the case can proceed.
That is no biggie, if SCO says to the judge that there is a dispute as to who owns the code IBM simply replies show us the code that you assert you have an ownership claim in.
The next logical conclusion for them would be to ask the judge to postpone the discovery (effectively freezing the case) until the Novell case is settled.
Now, I'm not saying that this will fly, but it does strike me as the primary reason that SCO filed suit against Novell.
Agreed, but the tactic has a neligible chance of success. IBM could probably have the case put on hold because SCO has asserted that there is a dispute, but SCO has created this dispute.
They knew all along that they have no case against IBM - and since IBM is asking for their alleged infringing code, they can say "We believe we own it, but someone else is contesting our ownership - put this case on hold until that one is sorted out."
I agree that they are likely to try. But that is unlikely to help here because it is SCO that is contesting the second case and in any case it has absolutely no bearing on the IBM matter. The Novell sale took place after IBM acquired its license to UNIX from AT&T labs. Neither SCO nor Novell has any power to modify that agreement after the fact.
Regardless of who owns the copyrights to the material that SCO claims is being infringed, SCO still has to demonstrate infringement. The fact that SCO may not actually own the copyright is a secondary issue that is much more complex and does not have to be decided if the infringement issue is not proven.
I can't see a judge agreeing to put the IBM case aside while SCO start another bogus case with the clear intention of protracting the whole proceedings. A more likely outcome would be the consolidation of the two cases. The contract issue is a matter of law that does not require a jury to decide. I can't see a federal judge postponing a case while a plaintif tries to get a different judge to hear one particular issue.
Why do people read Forbes? There are good financial publications out there who actually have a clue - the Financial Times, The Ecomomist, Janes Defense Weekly, all tell it like it really is.
The common factor being that they are British publications. One could ask why anyone reads any US publication given that they are mostly devoted to reporting 'character' and 'personality' stories completely ignoring any political issues of any substance.
If CNN were reporting in Iran today they would have reduced the power struggle there to a series of stories on who had the best looking turban.
The FTs comments on Boeing are right on point. Boeing was once a great company, then they stopped being in the business of making planes and started to be about squeezing contracts out of the US federal government. What is most astonishing about this change in direction is the time it took place - right at the end of the cold war when it was pretty obvious to anyone but the Boeing CEO that military spending would be winding down.
Sic transit gloria. If you read the decline and fall of the great powers what is astonishing is the fact that while eventual decline is inevitable there is no reason why the Roman empire could not with better management have survived a couple more centuries, the fall of the great powers was usually the result of hubris, of stopping the work of empire building and started waving flags, declaring empire days and generally lording it over everyone else.
I believe that the greatest threat to the pre-eminent position of the US today is the folk who have adopted the Condit strategy, forget how the US became great - by leading the alliance of the free world and instead start lording it over folk. Forbes is merely one of the organ grinders who are playing the tune here.
Not just funny. This is a case where the grammar police should be flogging the editor with a soggy ramen noodle. I, too, read it as if Forbes was sympathizing with the poor & abusing fax.com.
Try reading "Eats, shoots and leaves", currently a top ten seller in the UK and due in the US sometime the colonials learn not to make tea with salt water.
Forbes magazine is a pale shadow of what it was under the senior Forbes. Steve Forbes the son was the clueless google eyed loonie who ran against GW Bush for the GOP presidential nomination claiming GW would not do enough for the ultra-rich (like himself).
It is somewhat rich to be given lectures in entepreneurship from a person who inherited every penny he owns. Come to that it was a bit much hearing the loonie prate on about 'familly values' and doing the standard GOP pander to the anti-gay bigots when Steve inherited his fortune from his gay father.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, VeriSign was never in Palo Alto. It was dotCom era, rents in Palo Alto were way high by that time. VeriSign started in Redwood Shores and then moved to Mountain View. These days they own the old Netscape campus.
The operations center is another matter, those are in unmarked buildings at several locations. If you look at some of the displays of root server locations you will see blobs in the San Francisco and Washington D.C. areas. Well duhh! Who would have guessed that the DNS servers would be so close physically to MAE West and MAE East?
The Circle ID stories are both slashdotted. So we can't hear if Karl and co are saying 'nah, we don't need high bandwidth roots capable of a good slashdotting' which if they were would be somewhat ironic.
The point that the article does not really mention is that at the moment running the DNS roots is done on a voluntary basis. ICANN is getting a free ride here. After the DDoS event in 2002 it was clear that 1) the roots were a major target 2) There was a big difference in the quality of service.
Given the importance of the roots shouldn't we actually invest something so the people running them can afford to do the job well? VeriSign can afford to run its systems the way it does because it has revenue from other sources. How do you justify the cost of a high end four way server to be dedicated to root ops if you are a non-profit? ICANN could at least pay for hardware and bandwidth.
Alluminium is a wierd one. Basically it is so reactive that the outer layer oxidizes almost immediately. So you are not testing the conductivity of aluminium, you are testing the conductivity of aluminium surrounded by a thin layer of aluminium oxide.
As for being cheap, that is a recent thing. The top of the washington monument is a pyamid of solid aluminium, chosen because it is the best lightning conductor, will not corrode like copper and streak the stones and at the time was the most valuable metal in existence. (Lightning does not care about the thin layer of oxide.)
Not a good choice for this application.
Actually the announcement said hardware and software. Microsoft is also donating machines to run the software on.
I find the VA-Linux vested interest editorial line somewhat tiresome.
Blah Blah, Microsoft eeevil, blah eeevil corporations, Linux good, Linux corporations good, blah eeevil corporations, looks like Microsoft, must be eeevil.
And if we don't have the facts we will just make them up to suit. There was no evidence for the '$1 million' claim and if you read the actual report it is clearly false.
No, instead I told the MIT prof concerned that if he did not withdraw the patent claim I would make a formal complaint to the MIT proctors of plagarism. He complied.
Although the USPTO does not publish patent applications the Europeans do.
Several people have filed patent claims on work I did, in one case 5 years after the idea had made its way into Apache.
And do't get me started on shopping carts...
It was a party dispute. President Wilson proposed the League of Nations, the Republicans and others in Congress refused to ratify the treaty.
The surface debate had very little to do with the reasons for the rejection. Its like the revisionist claim touted in the Southern states that the civil war had absolutely nothing to do with slavery. You can make an argument that the immediate causes of the war were different, but the obvious fact is that there would have been no war without slavery.
- Watergate break in = Republicans spy on Democrats
- Vietnam = Iraq
- Reagan era deficits = Bush era deficits
- Hoover recession = Bush recession
- 1876 vote fraud = 2000 vote fraud
- Isolationism = Go it alone unilateralism
- Tea pot dome = Enron, Halliburton, Harken, etc.
Sorry I forgot to mentionSeriously guys just what is there you think is positive about this guy? He has validated every critics claim that he was a dimwitted rube.
Even if this is not his fault, can't you see that the poor clown is just completely unlucky ? Just what has to go wrong before you GOP rubes get a clue?
So far he has not been caught selling arms to terrorists in Iran to illegally finance terrorists in Nicaragua. He has not fucked any interns or been attacked by a killer rabbit either.
Actually not, it was exactly the right thing to do. What he said was don't waste your time and mine with any future letters unless you can state the specific code items that you claim ownership of.
This has a legal significance. Daryl has been put on notice that SCO's claims are in dispute and are not believed. What SCO want to do at this point is to get to a point where they could claim the infringement to be willful.
It is very clear that SCO have to state their claim with specificity if they want any further action. What the last paragraph does is in effect say 'I won't consider myself as having been put on notice until you address this issue'. The case history of SCO vs IBM shows this is an reasonable point of view.
In summary I don't think SCO would be sucessful in a claim of willful infringement and I don't think any further correspondence will have that effect either unless that point is met.
Rudeness can have a useful legal effect.
I just know the history, during the 'isolationist' period the US invaded Cuba, the Phillipeans, imposed the 'open door' (read colonial occupation) policy on China, engineered a coup in Panama for the sole purpose of building the canal under total US control. And so it goes on.
The term isolationism refers to the exercise of power without reference to any strategic alliances. It was certainly not a pacifist period in US history.
The isolationists disliked the league of nations for the same reason that they hate the UN, it would restrict exercise of US power at a time when the US was becomming a world power.
Any economist of any reputation will tell you that the promise of a tax cut in ten years time has negligible effect on the economy. Also a tax cut that benefits people with very high disposable income already has little effect since these people usually run out of things to buy long before they run out of money.
I could easily go out an buy a new car, but I would have nowhere to put it. I could have the kitchen redone if I wanted to put up with the house being a wreck for 6 months and the associated stress.
I don't think you will find many economists with credibility outside the far right who will claim that cutting inheritance tax stimulates the economy short term.
The Bush tax cuts were justified by claims that the Clinton surplus would stretch out as far as the eye could see. You can hardly claim that they are crafted to bring about a recovery from recession unless you are willing to admit that Bush and the admin are total liars.
The newsmax story is rather improbable, if illegal leaking had been going on Kenneth Starr would have investigated it. In fact the only illegal leaking going on was by Starr's office. It is somewhat unusual for a prosecutor to demand immuity from prosecution themselves as a condition of dismissing charges, yet that is exactly what Starr did.
I have a theory that GW Bush is trying to be the worst President in US history by repeating every one of the worst mistakes of his predecessors:
- Watergate break in = Republicans spy on Democrats
- Vietnam = Iraq
- Reagan era deficits = Bush era deficits
- Hoover recession = Bush recession
- 1876 vote fraud = 2000 vote fraud
- Isolationism = Go it alone unilateralism
- Tea pot dome = Enron, Halliburton, Harken, etc.
Some day the lapdog republican news media will suddenly realise that Bush has sold them down the river along with the rest of the country.Not at all, I don't use his code. It is his contributions to the protocol debates that are at issue. Do it my way or I'm taking my ball home is not a very persuasive attitude.
The point here is that although Bush and Co manifestly abused the spirit of the democratic process, the forms of that process were not affected. The decision of the Supreme Court is unlikely to be considered in a favorable light by future generations. However there is a consensus in the US polity that it is better for the Supreme court to make such decisions than have the military take them.
Karl Popper made a point which is very important here, it is impossible in the final analysis to arrive at a 100% satisfactory process for establishing the legitimacy of a government. What authority did the Continental Congress have? Certainly no democratic mandate direct or indirect. The key is not the legitimacy of a government, it is whether it can be replaced. The US constitution was not ratified by the people and even if it had been the people who ratified it would be long dead. The legitimacy of the constitution comes from the fact that the government can be replaced.
The GOP tried the Florida 2000 trick once before in 1876. in that case the Supreme Court was bribed to disqualify the votes that would have elected Tilden. The result was a government that rulled for four years with little authority and did little of long term consequence.
Bush will suffer the same fate. His administration has done nothing of positive consequence. When put to the test in 9/11 Bush failled, he spent the day flying arround on airforce one. it was three days before his speechwriters had crafted something that could pass for an adequate statement to the nation. CNN and Fox news can puff up a coward wearing a flight suit into a national hero but history will have a much harsher verdict.
History will after all be written by the children who are paying off the debt that Bush has run up with his reckless financial policies intended to benefit only the richest of the rich.
Actually this is pretty much the way Godwin's law came about. Godwin is himself a notorious flame artiste and he has a habit of taking arguments to ludicrous and vitriolic extreemes. His tactics are pretty reminiscent of the tactics used by the followers of totalitarian regimes to quell dissent.
Accusing Bush of being fascist is not something I do, it is an own goal because the people you are talking to will either already agree with you or they will be turned off. The problem here is that comparisons between Saddam and Hitler are certainly justified by his use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war. Although a closer parallel to Saddam's career would be that Saddam is the Napoleon of the middle east, only without the military capability.
The problem with the 'democracy' process in Iraq is that we have learned nothing from history. Instead of giving the people of Iraq democracy the US is trying to impose a sham democracy, one where the Iraqi people will get to choose which US puppet they get to rule them. This would not be quite as bad if the prime pentagon candidate, Chalabli was not a convicted corporate fraudster on the Enron/Parmalat scale, having embezzled hundreds of millions from the bank he ran in Jordan.
The history of sham democracies and puppet governments in the region is not good. Saddam himself was originally a CIA puppet, installed to keep out the commies. As far as the US was concerned there was nothing at all wrong with him despite his use of chemical weapons until he threatened US interests with the invasion of Kewait.
The main reason the US was supporting Saddam way back was of course because he started a war against Iran which has been a declared enemy of the US since the Iranian revolution. What the CNN newscasts don't tell US viewers is that fifty years ago Iran was a democracy. The US and the UK did not like this because the democratic government made the impertinent demand that they be allowed to inspect the books of the then Anglo-Persian oil company which had aquired the mineral rights to the entire country in a transaction typical of colonial times. The Iranians were being cheated, they did not even see the miserly fraction of the oil wealth that was due under the contract.
So in 1953 the CIA arranged a coup to replace the democracy in Iran by a dictatorship under the Shah. This was predictably every bit as brutal as Saddam's later dictatorship in Iraq. But the oil would flow to the West unencumbered by the rights of the people.
Not surprisingly this state of affairs was pretty unstable and twenty years ago the Shah was ousted in a coup. Not surprisingly the coup leaders remembered the role of the US in the previous coup and considered the US to be the enemy of democratic ambitions. This feeling was exploited by a group of clerics who actually played a negligible role in ousting the Shah but were the only group who had a cohesive political organization. As with the Russian revolution it was quickly subverted and the resulting constitution was not a real democracy but a sham. The people get to vote for a parliament but the real power is held by a clique of unaccountable clerics who claim to speak for God.
The Us papers have not been following the situation in Iran very closely but currently there is a major politica struggle between the democrats and the clique of clerics. The US is of course nowhere to be seen, the only intervention made by GW Bush was to strengthen the hand of the clique of clerics by branding Iran a member of the axis of evil at a time when the clerics were weak in the post 9/11 period. the result was that instead of ousting the clerics the democratic faction agreed with them that Iran should build a nuclear bomb.
Given the problems that the sham democracy has caused in Iran it is quite astonishing that the Bush administration would make the same
Quite so, respond appropriately.
Dear Congressman,
Every year the US government spends many hundreds of millions of dollars supporting research projects at universities and other public institutes that result in the creation of large quantities of computer software. There are some who are arguing that such software should only be used for private gain rather than being made freely available by the public at large who paid for it.
Fortunately the few who hold this view are a distinct minority in the computer industry. Leading companies such as IBM have taken a very contrary position, making major investments in Linux, an open source software application. Researchers know that making computer software freely avaliable for use is the best way to share ideas. The World Wide Web revolution was made possible by open source software developed at two institutions funded by public money, CERN and NCSA.
Even those companies such as Microsoft who have questioned certain details of the way the open source movement makes software available have not questioned the principle that software developed with public money should be freely available as a public good. Indeed Microsoft argues that such software should be made available for both commercial and non-commercial exploitation.
As a practical matter the minority in question consists of a single company with negligible revenues, a limited working capital and a huge negative cash flow. It is unlikely that any of that money is going to find its way into your campaign coffers matey so forget that one for a start. Moreover if you do start pandering to this pathetic excressence in the hope of a big payout you are going to find your contributions from the rest of the industry disappearing faster than Ossama Bin Laden.
So be a good chap, don't be an asshole on this one and maybe CNN won't have to find out about that business in Ohio involving a vaccum cleaner, large quantities of lubricants and the Alsatian.
Dan is the author of one of the two IPv8 proposals. He is certainly not a crank, nor generally considered as such, but the other guy is. Particularly when he started to propose IPv16 which compresses 16 bytes into 4.
But yes, even though DJB is not a crank, he is a jerk and he has the political sense of a wet sock and a mud brick combined. He does himself no favors by running a C/R system on all his incomming email with a particularly arrogant message 'Proff Bernstein far too important to talk to a mere peon like you' and refusing to whitelist anyone but people he thinks are super important. Effect is that he basically ends up telling the world that he thinks that they are complete nobodies when they try to contact him.
So even though he is not a crank he does get treated like one and it is his own fault.
Actually that is for testing purposes, they will fly microlights at low altitude. Presumably because it takes quite a bit of time getting a blimp up to 12 miles high and they are pretty pricey. You can do much more tweakage on a cheap microlight, send it up, test, bring it down, tweak, etc.
The production scheme would go on airships at 12 miles out. The reason for that is that they require less power to stay in place, most of the weather takes place at much lower altitudes. Thunderstorms tend to take place at under 6Km at those latitudes.
My meterologoist is not sure what the wind factor is up there, you are probably above the jet stream (good) but hey since you don't get much weather at those levels there is not a great deal of interest in tracking it. Possibly the wind factor is small because you are so high up and the atmosphere is much thinner.
You would need some sort of solar array to power the networking gear. One cool aspect though is that you could have directional antanae focused on a particular area. So you would not need to share the same frequency band with everyone in the 40Km service area.
Erm do you mean here that Ipv8 is intended as a joke or that that is the result? The creator certainly thinks his scheme is not a joke, unfortunately the rest of the world does. Basically the idea is to compress an 8 byte address into 4 bytes. This part is of course quite possible provided you don't need to ever go the other way...
The big problem for the Internet at large is that the IPv6 scheme thunk up by the woolly headed academics of the IETF is about as practical. IPv4 can talk to IPv6 but not the other way arround. The plan is completely clueless when it comes to the business of how to deploy IPv6 in the real world.
Unfortunately the days are long gone when folk in the IETF could wield a cluebat and fix these guys. Most of the people with a real clue have drifted away. OK so Dave Clark may be nominally still a member of the IETF, but he has zero time to spend wielding cluebats these days.
What needs to happen is for folk to realize that NAT boxes are the way to deploy IPv6, not the enemy.
Basically a NAT box should be capable of talking IPv6 on either side of the bridge. It should be capable of talking IPv6 on the internal net and IPv4 externally, vice versa, or the same protocol (IPv4 or IPv6) on both sides. And in doing so it should be 100% transparent to the end user.
The first step is to write a protocol that allows an existing machine on the inside of a NAT box to make a request (which may be refused) to open up an external port to accept connections. Yes this needs support at the O/S level and possibly make the applications aware. This is no biggie because the main server applications that make sense are video-conferencing and home web servers. Both easily fixed.
Armed with that capability you can make an IPv4 network behind a NAT box work as if each machine had its own IPv4 address. Of course the loosers at the IETF are blocking this because they want to push IPv6 by withholding features from IPv4.
A NAT box of this type would be able to tell its provider that it is IPv6 transitional capable when it requests an IP address from its ISP. The ISP can then do similar IPv6 gating to IPv4 at the Internet level. This way you could run 10,000 residential Internet users off a pool of 256 IP addresses.
The key here is to decouple the deployment of IPv6 on internal and external networks so that both can operate independently. The router boys think they understand the Internet because they understand routing. Fact is that they simply have no clue about the business relations involved. Their solution at every turn is 'oh well it will take time for the business people to come round'. They just don't get the fact that the business people may never come arround to their way of thinking.
One thing is certain Harald Alvestrand is not going to convince ISPs to change over with his current tactics.
Do you want me to spell it out for you?
Thought so, that being my main point. Incidentally great move putting that dyslexic guy Webster in charge of the dictionary.
Talking about books not available in the US, Murdoch seems to have stopped publication of 'The Murdoch Archipelago' in the US. Having read it I can see why, the extreme right wing owner of Fox News would not want his viewers to know that he is quite happy spewing left wing propaganda if it suits him, or cozying up to the Chinese communists.
The problem with that type of scheme is that it is really difficult to make it work when there are people trying to game the system. Try to apply the slashdot moderation system direct to political discussion and you will have teams of partisans desperately moderating down the other side. Moveon.org has been blacklisted by lists after a group of republicans organized a campaign where they subscribed to the list then reported it as spam. Same probably happens to republican lists (although grass roots does not really figure the same in their model)
On the IRTF ASRG list Vernon Schryer used to make a point of reporting posts he simply did not like as 'spam' to his distributed mod list scheme. If the designer of a scheme can commit that type of abuse in that type of forum there is little hope for the scheme being scalable.
SPEWS is such a cartoon cutout operation that I seriously wonder if it is being run by a spammer, certainly we will find at least one blacklist where this is the case. Think about it, other spammers are your competition, both for eyeballs and for the merchandise. So run a service that blocks their mail but not your mails when you choose.
Quite a lot of the anti-spam technologists have played both sides of the fence. Folk who are unsucessful at selling their anti-spam scheme frequently turn to spam to sell it.
Early on the ASRG list appeared to have been the target of a campaign to destroy the list by Vernon et al. It might just be that they are complete jerks or the gratuitous insults aimed at every practical suggestion may have been made with a purpose. It felt like there was a purpose, be as unpleasant as possible and hope you can drive people away.
What we have to start doing is to turn the issue arround, instead of trying to spot bad mail, look for the good stuff. Mail that is genuinely from Hotmail is pretty unlikely to be bulk sent because of their rate limiters. So it is pretty likely to be genuine. Schemes like SPF and Yahoo! Domain Keys are the way to go. Couple these with an accreditation scheme that can report the reputation of the sender as well and you have a scheme that can identify good mail with very high accuracy. If 50% of mail is authenticated then the spam filters can be twice as strict on the remaining 50%.
That is no biggie, if SCO says to the judge that there is a dispute as to who owns the code IBM simply replies show us the code that you assert you have an ownership claim in.
The next logical conclusion for them would be to ask the judge to postpone the discovery (effectively freezing the case) until the Novell case is settled. Now, I'm not saying that this will fly, but it does strike me as the primary reason that SCO filed suit against Novell.
Agreed, but the tactic has a neligible chance of success. IBM could probably have the case put on hold because SCO has asserted that there is a dispute, but SCO has created this dispute.
Paul Revere's idea I believe, down in Boston harbor a couple of centuries ago.
I agree that they are likely to try. But that is unlikely to help here because it is SCO that is contesting the second case and in any case it has absolutely no bearing on the IBM matter. The Novell sale took place after IBM acquired its license to UNIX from AT&T labs. Neither SCO nor Novell has any power to modify that agreement after the fact.
Regardless of who owns the copyrights to the material that SCO claims is being infringed, SCO still has to demonstrate infringement. The fact that SCO may not actually own the copyright is a secondary issue that is much more complex and does not have to be decided if the infringement issue is not proven.
I can't see a judge agreeing to put the IBM case aside while SCO start another bogus case with the clear intention of protracting the whole proceedings. A more likely outcome would be the consolidation of the two cases. The contract issue is a matter of law that does not require a jury to decide. I can't see a federal judge postponing a case while a plaintif tries to get a different judge to hear one particular issue.
The common factor being that they are British publications. One could ask why anyone reads any US publication given that they are mostly devoted to reporting 'character' and 'personality' stories completely ignoring any political issues of any substance.
If CNN were reporting in Iran today they would have reduced the power struggle there to a series of stories on who had the best looking turban.
The FTs comments on Boeing are right on point. Boeing was once a great company, then they stopped being in the business of making planes and started to be about squeezing contracts out of the US federal government. What is most astonishing about this change in direction is the time it took place - right at the end of the cold war when it was pretty obvious to anyone but the Boeing CEO that military spending would be winding down.
Sic transit gloria. If you read the decline and fall of the great powers what is astonishing is the fact that while eventual decline is inevitable there is no reason why the Roman empire could not with better management have survived a couple more centuries, the fall of the great powers was usually the result of hubris, of stopping the work of empire building and started waving flags, declaring empire days and generally lording it over everyone else.
I believe that the greatest threat to the pre-eminent position of the US today is the folk who have adopted the Condit strategy, forget how the US became great - by leading the alliance of the free world and instead start lording it over folk. Forbes is merely one of the organ grinders who are playing the tune here.
Try reading "Eats, shoots and leaves", currently a top ten seller in the UK and due in the US sometime the colonials learn not to make tea with salt water.
Forbes magazine is a pale shadow of what it was under the senior Forbes. Steve Forbes the son was the clueless google eyed loonie who ran against GW Bush for the GOP presidential nomination claiming GW would not do enough for the ultra-rich (like himself).
It is somewhat rich to be given lectures in entepreneurship from a person who inherited every penny he owns. Come to that it was a bit much hearing the loonie prate on about 'familly values' and doing the standard GOP pander to the anti-gay bigots when Steve inherited his fortune from his gay father.