What sort of engineering can be done to further prise the Internet from control of any government, anywhere?
There are only a few things that are currently centrally controlled; AS numbers, IP addresses, and DNS.
AS numbers could be replaced with cryptographic identities. They'd be bigger and more cumbersome, but since no human is required to deal with them, that's not really an issue. As an added bonus, they could be used to verify BGP announcements. It would require an update to all the core routers, but not in any time critical paths, so while obnoxious, it's not really any worse than any other software upgrade. This could be done gradually, with both the old and new system co-existing.
IP addresses could be replaced with cryptographic identities, but that would require a change to everything that currently uses them. Roughly as difficult as changing to IPv6, but since these are in time critical paths, there would be lots of routers that didn't do verification. (Not that they do any verification now.) It would also expand the routing table (the new numbers would be a lot bigger even than IPv6 numbers) which means fewer total routes could be supported. Essentially this means the core routers would need more memory and therefore cost more. Moore's law will probably outstrip this, so the net effect would still be cheaper and cheaper bandwidth, but not quite as it would be with IPv4/IPv6.
DNS as it stands requires a final authority. I can't think of anything that has both short, easy for humans to remember names, guaranteed uniqueness and doesn't involve an authority. Either you give that up, or you live with a final authority and work hard to make that authority as powerless as possible in any other area. It would help a lot if the entity that assigns TLDs was in no way affiliated with the entity that decides what the TLDs are.
there seem to be a lot of people who assume that if global warming isn't humanity's fault (and I'm not exactly convinced), it is a non-issue...
Not a non-issue, but if it's not caused by anything we're doing, then it's also not a reason to stop doing what we've been doing.
I think human activity has an effect, but I'm very suspicious of claims that it's the major effect. Humans have a disproportionate effect, but they are still a small fraction of the planet's biomass.
(most) TLDs pay ICANN. There's also a lot of money changing hands (and probably more that we can't see) for each new TLD proposal. There's money in IP allocations too.
ICANN has already proven that they will charge more and more each year, and while they're "only" up to a few millions per year now, there's no indication they will stop the increases.
If I hit you with my hat, you wouldn't say my hat hit you, you'd blame me.
Even supposing that the human part of the human plus computer extended phenotype isn't as smart as the human part would be without the computer, you still need to consider how much "you" includes your computer.
Just digging a hole and dumping my body in without toxins and letting it decompose in the normal amount of time doesn't seem to be an option here legally.
Not sure were "here" is, but in the US, and the UK, embalming before burial is optional.
Do your relatives a favor and ask for a cheap casket and no-embalming in your will.
The best part is that *no* advance in captcha technology can really fix this.
In theory, something like "What is the fifth letter of this website's URL?" could fix it. Even the "army of low paid workers" can be blocked in theory.
In practice, virtually any specific defense can be beaten by some attack, and any specific attack can be beaten some defense. Since captchas have to go "first", they will always be vulnerable.
If you look at areas that have high piracy rates, you can see that non-pirate goods have lower prices than they do in areas with low piracy rates. Uh... that could be it. Or it could be that you're in a village in China, Bangladesh, or some other place where income levels, and the cost of living, is 1/50th that of the US.
There's no causality in your assertion. Put simply, they don't have the money to buy western goods, and as such resort to piracy.
Actually, the assertion does have causality in it. It asserts that piracy causes lower prices. But yes, evidence of correlation isn't proof of causation.
If there was no piracy, would prices be higher, lower, or is there no causal connection between piracy and pricing?
Since we have evidence that they are higher in places with less piracy, it can not be that prices would be lower. It might be that prices have no connection with the amount of piracy.
Is there an example of someplace with low prices and low piracy, or high prices and high piracy?
The thing that always frosts me, is whenever The Industry talks about piracy they always bandy about numbers like (from TFA), three billion dollars per year in lost revenue. I would really love to see their methodology.
I remember an interesting article that looked at piracy in a more realistic way.
Piracy increases the supply of the goods. The market reaction to increase in supply is decrease in price.
If you look at areas that have high piracy rates, you can see that non-pirate goods have lower prices than they do in areas with low piracy rates. So the main cost of piracy isn't lost sales, but sales made at a lower price than they could be in the absence of piracy.
But the **AA can't really complain (publicly) about not being able to charge high prices because of piracy.
"Our company just had its bi-annual email crisis/outage, so my boss wants to try something new -- to give me the 'opportunity' to figure out and implement a better way to host our small domain's email.
So you're unhappy with 99.5% uptime. (assuming that those two outages per year are for a full 24 hours...)
We've changed hosts a few times, but whether we spend a little money or a lot none have been as reliable as we've liked -- companies fold, get blacklisted by AOL, and so forth. Is there a way to be smart about this, without hiring a dedicated email server pro?
So you're not going to be happy with a solution that involves having someone else do it...
Do reliable email hosts actually exist?
There is no such thing as 100% uptime.
While better than 99.9% uptime hosting does exist, you're not likely to find one without doing a lot of work, and even then there will still be outages.
There isn't an ISP in existance that will both let a random company do email, and not be on some blacklist somewhere.
Should we run 'email appliance' software (such as ClarkConnect or E-Smith) on our own server? I'd appreciate any tips here - hell hath no fury like people without email, and I am very afraid..."
Best advice I can offer is to tell your boss that despite the problems you've had with [best service provider to date], there aren't any better solutions available, and you recommend living with the problems, rather than dealing with a whole new set of problems. Anything else would set you up as the fall guy when email breaks in the future.
But I don't see how they could credibly remove the PVP flag from normal servers, since there's that whole, you know, horde vs alliance thing that's kind of hard to fix.
I can think of an easy way to do it. Split the servers into horde and alliance servers. On an alliance server, people are only allowed to play alliance.
Great Rovian (as in Karl Rove) strategy. Propose something so out of whack with common sense that by claiming to be willing to go for the common ground, you end up getting what you really wanted anyway because the ground has shifted so much towards your position that the middle point really only reflects your interests.
No sir,software patents stifle innovation and serve no useful social purpose and thus must be defeated.
Raymond Smullyan tells a story something like this; Two children are walking down the street when they see a cake. The first says he saw the cake first, so it's his. The second says they saw the cake at the same time, so they should share it half and half. A stranger happens by and tells the boys they should compromise - give the first 3/4 of the cake, and the second 1/4.
To me, the important thing is for software not to be subject to patents. I'm hoping for a law that states clearly that anything that exists solely as bits isn't subject to patent law, and anything that runs on computers built before a patent was applied for isn't subject to that patent.
To get that, we probably should take a more extreme position.
The problem is that there are a lot of spam fighters that believe it's perfectly acceptable to block email that originates from a DSL connection.
Now you can reduce the number of sites that are able to tell you are connecting via DSL, (Many for example only check your rDNS so if you can get that set to your domain then they'll accept your email) but there will always be some that use block lists that include your IP.
To get around this, you really need to send email through a relay. I don't know of any free relays that aren't also considered untrustworth (that doesn't mean there aren't any), but there are plenty of pay services that will forward your email for under $5 a month. Most ISPs provide the service as part of the general connection package, though presumably you've already considered and rejected the idea of using your ISPs mail relay for some reason.
Every time a BOE item is equipped money vanishes from the economy permanently.
Actually, no. If you sold the BoE item to a vendor, it would be worth gold. If you equip it first, and then sell it to the vendor, you get exactly the same amount of gold for it.
Gold vanishes from the economy when you buy things from vendors, when you auction something, when you disenchant something, and when you repair items. (There's also a tiny change when crafting certain items, but it's pretty insignificant.) Gold is created when you loot something. Overall, Gold flows in a lot faster than it flows out. The only thing that prevents complete meltdown is that epic mounts cost a lot, and that gold isn't particularly useful.
Gold has been dropping relative to US dollars steadily. This dup bug will just accelrate that a little.
Does anyone really have reasonable prediction that doesn't include at least 80% of all power being nuclear in 50 years?
Several people.
The bulk of energy is going to be produced by whatever means is the cheapest at the moment. Right now, that means oil and coal.
There are no reasonable predictions that nuclear power will be cheaper in the future. It might pass oil, but only because oil is getting more expensive. But photovoltaics have a reasonable chance of being significantly cheaper in the future. If the current price per watt downward trend continues, in 20 years they'll be the cheapest way to produce energy, even factoring in the cost of batteries to store the energy when the suns not shining.
It doesn't really matter that a battery can hold more energy -- it still takes hours and hours to charge the damn thing.
Even if the we were talking about a slow charge battery (unlike the one in the fine article) you could still "fill up" in the time it takes to swap the batteries. The filling station might have to wait hours, but you wouldn't.
The idea that the US is currently in control of the internet is already silly.
The other root servers could stop mirroring A, ISPs could stop pointing to the current root servers, or the end users could stop using their ISPs domain servers.
If the UN wants to set up and control their own root server, they should just do it, there's nothing stopping them.
How would you use a motor to reposition an object in space?
It's usually called a tether not a motor, and it pushes againsts the earth's magnetic field to generate lift. Not a huge amount of lift, but more than enough to maintain or even increase a low earth orbit.
... every kilowatt hour of energy your system produces in it's entire lifetime will not be more than the kilowatt hours that were used up to purify and crystallize the silicon, and make the PV system.
That is false.
It clearly doesn't take more than $12,000 worth of energy to make a solar panel that sells for $12,000.
If a solar panel makes more electricity than it costs to buy the panel, it's a net energy gain.
Let me ask you this then: Do you feel that protecting processes or hardware is a good idea?
I'm not sure. The pitifully few studies I've seen support the idea that the average man does better in a community that doesn't restrict processes to the inventor, but I remain unconvinced either way.
How do inventors recoup their research and development investment if the process is trivial to perform once all the work in figuring out how to do it profitably is done?
If processes aren't protected then it's much harder. So what? The goal shouldn't be to have more processes produced, but to have more available. This is a tradeoff between the incentive to develop and the ease of distribution.
"Protection" of processes theoretically makes development more likely, but distribution less likely. Note though, that this protection can result in less development if it turns out that development can result in liability. For example, if Blackberry infringes on patents, then the money spent re-developing the ideas in those patents was wasted.
If you do feel that this is a good idea, why is software different?
Software is different because invention is so much simpler. It's often easier in software to re-invent the wheel then to find an already invented one. (Distribution of the idea is also cheaper, but in both hardware and software the cost is already so close to zero that the difference is neglible)
If you prevent the use of an idea independantly created, then you force software authors to use the much more difficult path of finding existing solutions for their problems. Worse, not only do you have the cost of finding them, you must also compensate the original "inventor" for their work. You do not even have the option of not accepting their fee and developing it on your own.
With hardware, patents frequently cover difficult to research ideas. Discovering that a tungstun filliment works better than any of a 100 alternatives requires testing all 100 alternatives.
With software, rarely do you research alternative methods for doing things. The first thing that works is as good as anything else.
I am still unconvinced that copyright is enough to protect software.
I am still unconvinced that "protecting" software is a good idea. If I can't use an idea or piece of software, it's no different (to me) than if it doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
There are only a few things that are currently centrally controlled;
AS numbers, IP addresses, and DNS.
AS numbers could be replaced with cryptographic identities.
They'd be bigger and more cumbersome, but since no human is required to deal with them,
that's not really an issue.
As an added bonus, they could be used to verify BGP announcements.
It would require an update to all the core routers, but not in any time critical paths,
so while obnoxious, it's not really any worse than any other software upgrade.
This could be done gradually, with both the old and new system co-existing.
IP addresses could be replaced with cryptographic identities, but that would require a change to everything that currently uses them.
Roughly as difficult as changing to IPv6, but since these are in time critical paths, there would be lots of routers that didn't do verification.
(Not that they do any verification now.)
It would also expand the routing table (the new numbers would be a lot bigger even than IPv6 numbers) which means fewer total routes could be supported.
Essentially this means the core routers would need more memory and therefore cost more.
Moore's law will probably outstrip this, so the net effect would still be cheaper and cheaper bandwidth, but not quite as it would be with IPv4/IPv6.
DNS as it stands requires a final authority.
I can't think of anything that has both short, easy for humans to remember names, guaranteed uniqueness and doesn't involve an authority.
Either you give that up, or you live with a final authority and work hard to make that authority as powerless as possible in any other area.
It would help a lot if the entity that assigns TLDs was in no way affiliated with the entity that decides what the TLDs are.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Not a non-issue, but if it's not caused by anything we're doing, then it's also not a reason to stop doing what we've been doing.
I think human activity has an effect, but I'm very suspicious of claims that it's the major effect.
Humans have a disproportionate effect, but they are still a small fraction of the planet's biomass.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
(most) TLDs pay ICANN.
There's also a lot of money changing hands (and probably more that we can't see) for each new TLD proposal.
There's money in IP allocations too.
ICANN has already proven that they will charge more and more each year, and while they're "only" up to a few millions per year now, there's no indication they will stop the increases.
If I hit you with my hat, you wouldn't say my hat hit you, you'd blame me.
Even supposing that the human part of the human plus computer extended phenotype isn't as smart as the human part would be without the computer, you still need to consider how much "you" includes your computer.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Not sure were "here" is, but in the US, and the UK, embalming before burial is optional.
Do your relatives a favor and ask for a cheap casket and no-embalming in your will.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Why bother dealing with AOL?
Just report your credit card as stolen.
In theory, something like "What is the fifth letter of this website's URL?" could fix it.
Even the "army of low paid workers" can be blocked in theory.
In practice, virtually any specific defense can be beaten by some attack, and any specific attack can be beaten some defense.
Since captchas have to go "first", they will always be vulnerable.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Actually, the assertion does have causality in it.
It asserts that piracy causes lower prices.
But yes, evidence of correlation isn't proof of causation.
If there was no piracy, would prices be higher, lower, or is there no causal connection between piracy and pricing?
Since we have evidence that they are higher in places with less piracy, it can not be that prices would be lower.
It might be that prices have no connection with the amount of piracy.
Is there an example of someplace with low prices and low piracy, or high prices and high piracy?
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I remember an interesting article that looked at piracy in a more realistic way.
Piracy increases the supply of the goods.
The market reaction to increase in supply is decrease in price.
If you look at areas that have high piracy rates, you can see that non-pirate goods have lower prices than they do in areas with low piracy rates.
So the main cost of piracy isn't lost sales, but sales made at a lower price than they could be in the absence of piracy.
But the **AA can't really complain (publicly) about not being able to charge high prices because of piracy.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
So you're unhappy with 99.5% uptime.
(assuming that those two outages per year are for a full 24 hours...)
So you're not going to be happy with a solution that involves having someone else do it...
There is no such thing as 100% uptime.
While better than 99.9% uptime hosting does exist,
you're not likely to find one without doing a lot of work, and even then there will still be outages.
There isn't an ISP in existance that will both let a random company do email, and not be on some blacklist somewhere.
Best advice I can offer is to tell your boss that despite the problems you've had with [best service provider to date], there aren't any better solutions available, and you recommend living with the problems, rather than dealing with a whole new set of problems.
Anything else would set you up as the fall guy when email breaks in the future.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I can think of an easy way to do it.
Split the servers into horde and alliance servers.
On an alliance server, people are only allowed to play alliance.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Raymond Smullyan tells a story something like this;
Two children are walking down the street when they see a cake.
The first says he saw the cake first, so it's his.
The second says they saw the cake at the same time, so they should share it half and half.
A stranger happens by and tells the boys they should compromise - give the first 3/4 of the cake, and the second 1/4.
To me, the important thing is for software not to be subject to patents.
I'm hoping for a law that states clearly that anything that exists solely as bits isn't subject to patent law, and anything that runs on computers built before a patent was applied for isn't subject to that patent.
To get that, we probably should take a more extreme position.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Sure - free room and board, you get to work outside, and the women all have 6 breasts.
The problem is that there are a lot of spam fighters that believe it's perfectly acceptable to block email that originates from a DSL connection.
Now you can reduce the number of sites that are able to tell you are connecting via DSL,
(Many for example only check your rDNS so if you can get that set to your domain then they'll accept your email) but there will always be some that use block lists that include your IP.
To get around this, you really need to send email through a relay.
I don't know of any free relays that aren't also considered untrustworth (that doesn't mean there aren't any), but there are plenty of pay services that will forward your email for under $5 a month.
Most ISPs provide the service as part of the general connection package, though presumably you've already considered and rejected the idea of using your ISPs mail relay for some reason.
-- should you trust authority without question?
Actually, no.
If you sold the BoE item to a vendor, it would be worth gold.
If you equip it first, and then sell it to the vendor, you get exactly the same amount of gold for it.
Gold vanishes from the economy when you buy things from vendors, when you auction something, when you disenchant something, and when you repair items.
(There's also a tiny change when crafting certain items, but it's pretty insignificant.)
Gold is created when you loot something.
Overall, Gold flows in a lot faster than it flows out.
The only thing that prevents complete meltdown is that epic mounts cost a lot, and that gold isn't particularly useful.
Gold has been dropping relative to US dollars steadily.
This dup bug will just accelrate that a little.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Several people.
The bulk of energy is going to be produced by whatever means is the cheapest at the moment.
Right now, that means oil and coal.
There are no reasonable predictions that nuclear power will be cheaper in the future.
It might pass oil, but only because oil is getting more expensive.
But photovoltaics have a reasonable chance of being significantly cheaper in the future.
If the current price per watt downward trend continues, in 20 years they'll be the cheapest way to produce energy, even factoring in the cost of batteries to store the energy when the suns not shining.
-- Should you trust authority without question?
When it was first announced on slashdot, I ran some tests and decided greylisting had a 15% false negative and less than 0.01% false positive rate.
It seemed like it would be defeated in a few months, but I figured an 85% reduction in spam for a few months was a good thing.
It's been more than a year, and greylisting still stops more than 80% of the spam.
Even if the we were talking about a slow charge battery (unlike the one in the fine article) you could still "fill up" in the time it takes to swap the batteries.
The filling station might have to wait hours, but you wouldn't.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
The idea that the US is currently in control of the internet is already silly.
The other root servers could stop mirroring A, ISPs could stop pointing to the current root servers, or the end users could stop using their ISPs domain servers.
If the UN wants to set up and control their own root server, they should just do it, there's nothing stopping them.
-- Should you trust authority without question?
It's usually called a tether not a motor, and it pushes againsts the earth's magnetic field to generate lift.
Not a huge amount of lift, but more than enough to maintain or even increase a low earth orbit.
Here's a link - http://www.tethers.com/EDTethers.html
-- Should you believe authority without question?
That is false.
It clearly doesn't take more than $12,000 worth of energy to make a solar panel that sells for $12,000.
If a solar panel makes more electricity than it costs to buy the panel, it's a net energy gain.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
"Spam is in the eye of the beholder" is trying to point out that there isn't a "clear agreed-upon definition" for spam.
"excessive unwanted emails" is just as valid a definition for spam as "unsolicited bulk email".
The real danger IMO is people who try and create the definition instead of trying to discover it.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I'm not sure.
The pitifully few studies I've seen support the idea that the average man does better in a community that doesn't restrict processes to the inventor, but I remain unconvinced either way.
If processes aren't protected then it's much harder. So what?
The goal shouldn't be to have more processes produced, but to have more available.
This is a tradeoff between the incentive to develop and the ease of distribution.
"Protection" of processes theoretically makes development more likely, but distribution less likely.
Note though, that this protection can result in less development if it turns out that development can result in liability.
For example, if Blackberry infringes on patents, then the money spent re-developing the ideas in those patents was wasted.
Software is different because invention is so much simpler.
It's often easier in software to re-invent the wheel then to find an already invented one.
(Distribution of the idea is also cheaper, but in both hardware and software the cost is already so close to zero that the difference is neglible)
If you prevent the use of an idea independantly created, then you force software authors to use the much more difficult path of finding existing solutions for their problems.
Worse, not only do you have the cost of finding them, you must also compensate the original "inventor" for their work.
You do not even have the option of not accepting their fee and developing it on your own.
With hardware, patents frequently cover difficult to research ideas.
Discovering that a tungstun filliment works better than any of a 100 alternatives requires testing all 100 alternatives.
With software, rarely do you research alternative methods for doing things.
The first thing that works is as good as anything else.
I am still unconvinced that "protecting" software is a good idea.
If I can't use an idea or piece of software, it's no different (to me) than if it doesn't exist.
Indeed.