What they agree is irrelevant. They are not the nation harboring the suspect. And regardless of what you or I think about the Taliban, or whether you recognize them as the lawful government of Afghanistan or not, they are still the defacto government of Afghanistan, and the only power with legislative powers in Afghanistan.
And my point is that noone knows whether diplomatic talks or legal hearings would be fruitless, since the US has blatantly refused to talk to the Taliban despite multiple offers from the Taliban to diplomatic talks, and to place Osama bin Laden at the fate of hearings conducted by the Organization of Islamic Countries and the UN.
By refusing to try those options, the US government has placed itself in the same category as the terrorists: Defying international laws, common juridic practice, and
resorting to warmongering before they've exhausted all other options.
The first civilians have already been confirmed dead by non-Taliban sources (to top it off it was 4 people working in a UN sponsored organization devoted to clearing away landmines). Why is it any better for the US to kill civilians than it is for bin Laden?
Noone is saying there's any guarantees that the
Taliban would have complied with any promises to
extradite bin Laden. But the US government didn't even try.
Why should people be hunted down for killing civilians with no support in law when the US government is condoning it by doing it themselves?
Whether he admits to anything or not is irrelevant. In the legal systems used in the US, Europe, and most of the rest of the world, admission does not make you guilty of a crime until a court of law has determined you to be so.
As for the US killing bin Laden - it seems that is what the US is trying now, after repeatedly refusing to hand over evidence implicating him in the attack.
As for where you're on trial - whether or not the country you're in is your homelass is completely irrelevant from a legal standpoint. What is relevant is whether the nation that want you extradited can fulfill the legal conditions set by the nation you're currently in. Why do you think a British court spent ages deciding on whether whether to extradite Pinochet to Spain, or let him go back to his home land (Chile)?
And you're wrong in the case of a suspect found in a foreign country:
First you request the foreign country to arrest your suspect, or at the very least serve him. Then you hold an extradition hearing in the country he is located, where you present at least enough evidence to prove that you have a reasonable basis for charging the person, and that your are fulfilling the legal criteria set by the foreign nation to grant extradition.
In cases where the suspect fears for his/hers life, many foreign nations will also require you
to prove that the suspect will not face the death penalty or risk bodily harm if extradited, as many countries do not allow extradition in such cases. This includes several European countries.
Then, if the foreign court accepts your arguments, you are handed the suspect and can put him/her on trial in your own country.
Talibans request for evidence before extradition is normal practice in any civilized country, and apparently also in some backwards fundamentalist nations as Afghanistan. But apparently the internationally accepted way of dealing with a suspect is too civilized for the US.
Maybe all the countries that has been the subject of US atrocities should start acting the same way in order to get hold of the US politicans and military personell that have allowed, supported and carried out attacks on their nations...
Because we all now the US government isn't hypocritical enough to refuse their victims the same kind of barbaric revenge they are carrying out on Afghanistan, right?
If the US don't deal with the Taliban as another government, no matter how much the US dislike them, then the US government is being just as bad as the terrorists.
As for harboring terrorists, and aiding groups who use terrorism, have you forgotten who financed the Taliban in the first place? Oh, yes, that was US... Hmm. And for a long time the IRA wasn't classified as a terrorist group in the US, allowing IRA to do massive fund raising in the US relatively safely. Harboring terrorists, you say? Maybe someone should have bombed the US - of course only the homes of suspected IRA members.
Also, even Slobodan Milosevic, a man likely responsible for the deaths of far more than 6000 innocent people, was allowed hearings in his home country before being given up - the government of Serbia was given the choice. Why doesn't this apply to Afghanistan?
I'm not saying bombing would be wrong under any and all circumstances, but that to avoid sinking to the terrorists level, and demonstrating to the world that they don't give a shit about justice, the US government should have tried legal procedures and negotiations first, and if that failed a military strike could have been considered.
As it is now, the US has presented no evidence that bin Laden was involved in the WTC bombing - they are just asking the world to trust them.
There is a reason that the US, and all other more or less civilized nations, have this thing called separation of power: The judiciary, the government and law enforcement is separate.
It's there exactly to prevent what the US is doing right now: The government taking out people they don't like without proving that they're guilty of a crime.
e.toys.name would be safe provided you don't use the name in a ways infringing on Etoys trademark, and you can document that you did not change your name in bad faith (with intent to abuse the trademark).
In addition there's less reason for trademark holders to object to a name that collides, as they can't themselves register the name anyway, and as such their only reason to go after you is if they believe you're infringing on their trademark - not to get control over the domain themselves.
Of course, if you get the domain e.toys.name and start selling toys on the website, then Etoys will likely come after you no matter what your name is, and they'd likely win, as there'd be a real chance of confusing people into believing they were actually shopping from Etoys.
Have you seen any proof of this, and of bin Ladens involvement in the WTC attack, or are you just accepting what media and your government says as truth?
Taliban have repeatedly offered to extradite bin Laden if the US presents them proof, or to let the
OIC (Organization of Islamic Countries) and UN review the proof and advice on the extradition issue.
This may be just posturing - the Taliban may be prepared to ignore any evidence.
But the US has, by ignoring requests for a civilized legal process to be carried up prior to starting war, sunk to the level of the terrorists.
Would the US have gone to war if it was a Western country that refused to hand over bin Laden without an extradition hearing where evidence is presented?
Would you have bombed the UK, Germany or France, if bin Laden had been in their country, and they'd insisted on complying with their countries laws and not hand over a suspect without a hearing conducted by a court of law?
Not likely.
So what do you think militant Muslims are seeing this as? A justified police action, or a war on Islam that they are obliged to assist in?
If you're going to use that argument, then US should turn its weapons on itself. The US have financed so many terrorist groups, assasins and armies that have killed civilians that 6000 dead is merely a drop in the ocean of blood caused by the US in the last hundred years.
And when did the US follow established international procedures to request an extradition hearing, present evidence, and have a court decide on the merits of their case?
No "civilized" nation could have extradited bin Laden without being in violation of their own laws. Some countries in Europe and elsewhere couldn't even legally extradite him under any circumstances if there is any chance that he'd risc the death penalty if extradited to the US.
I can understand the rage, and I can understand that the US public wants Afghanistan and the Taliban "punished", but don't pretend that it's about justice - this is purely about revenge.
Unfortunately it plays straight into the hands of the terrorists. How many more extremists are now watching the news and getting all their ideas about the US as the enemy of Islam confirmed, and start thinking about holy war?
The US is breeding its own enemies, as so often before.
Sigh. Unicode is the character set. The specific encodings of Unicode, including the 16 bit encodings (and the 32 bit encodings) have other names. And the 8 bit encoding is UTF-8.
If you're going to be pedantic, Microsoft don't
store Unicode any more than Star Office does.
If the only reason for adding.com.info and.biz was to do load balancing, then surely it would be idiotic. But the premise for that would be that most people registering in.info and.biz would register it to protect their.com names. While some may do that, I don't think the majority of.com owners will.
That also doesn't take into accounts new TLDs like ".name", which has a very different market from the three above, and which gets significant interest. It also doesn't take into account that the seven new TLDs introduced now is only a "proof-of-consept" phase for ICANN, and that if things work out reasonably well, we can expect further new TLDs to be approved in the future.
.com will be the biggest for a long time, but a lot can happen in the 5-10 year timeframe.
(ObDisclaimer: I co-founded the company that operates.name)
No, the total load wouldn't be the same, as you'd
get the total load for all TLDs instead of "just" the load of.com. While.com is the significant TLD now, that will not necessarily stay that way, and flattening the namespace when load is just increasing steadily every year is just asking for problems.
Below is a simplified description of how the caching works:
Most internet users use their ISPs DNS server
as their nameserver.
That nameserver will cache the result of any query
up to a specified amount of time (the maximum value you're supposed to cache an entry is provided to you in the response when you query a DNS server).
Now, if you request www.foo.bar, your machine will query your ISPs DNS server, and if www.foo.bar isn't cached, the DNS server will strip off the leftmost part, and check if information about which nameservers serve foo.bar is cached.
If it isn't, then it will strip off the next part, and so on. If it can't find the TLD in its cache, it will ask the root servers.
If foo.bar is found in the cache, however, your ISPs nameserver will request info on www.foo.bar from one of the nameservers responsible for foo.bar, and cache that data for future reference.
So if someone else using your ISP has accessed any domain on the top-level domain "bar" recently, the nameserver info for the TLD "bar" will likely be in the cache, and valid.
And if someone else using your ISP has accessed foo.bar, or any host under foo.bar, information about foo.bar is likely in your ISPs DNS cache.
And if they've looked up www.foo.bar in particular, even that may be in the cache.
So only a small percentage of all lookups of a domain will actually cause a hit on the root servers, quite few will avoid hitting the nameservers for the specific TLDs, and for quite a few domains much of the data will be cached at your ISP most of the time.
Allowing people to register directly under the root would mean that the number of lookups in the root servers would go through the roof, as there
is one less level of caching, and the network of root servers would have to be able to cope with a load similar to all the current TLDs combined, as opposed to "only" when nameserver info for a TLD has expired from the cache somewhere - the traffic volume is high enough as it is.
Your only partially correct about the cowboy.neal.name:) There's provisions both for using names of fictional characters provided you own the rights to that character, and for using nicknames, provided that name is commonly known to refer to you.
So presumably Rob would get away with commander.taco.name, for instance.
As for registrations on the third level, technically that is trivially easy. The reason that has been done is so that the second level can be shared for mail purposes. So while under.com only one of Bob Smith and John Smith would be able to get smith.com, and use bob@smith.com or john@smith.com, unless they could agree to share it (or Bob could decide to register bobsmith.com, and get a crappy mail address like bob@bobsmith.com, or similar), under.name they can get bob.smith.name/bob@smith.name and john.smith.name/john@smith.name respectively.
Some data I took out on that this weekend shows that in the US, for the 65000 most common lastnames, 22 million people would be able to get
their firstname.lastname.name without doing anything special. If you take into account nicknames, use of initials, use of hyphens etc., that number increases to more than 100 million that can get a nice name-based e-mail address on the form firstname@lastname.name, as opposed to only 65000 if noone share the second level.
If you add in the people with less common lastnames, the number increase to about 170 million in the US alone, before you need to start doing stuff like adding numbers.
Of course, for more common last names, like Smith, using numbers will be necessary quite a lot earlier than for less common lastnames.
(Ob Disclaimer: I co-founded the company that operates.name, but I'm talking only for myself)
One more details: Yes, cultures without given name/surname has been given some thought.
The general rule is that you'd have to use a hyphen, or write the separate parts as one.
So to use your example, it would be osama@bin-laden.name, or osama@binladen.name.
Of course some cultures doesn't even use surnames,
or use the surname first and the given name afterwards.
So you'd be allowed to register smith.john.name if
you'd like to. Or foo.sonof-bar.name
It's not ideal, but it's the first try on a namespace purely for personal use, and after all
if your name is too common or too difficult to fit into this scheme, you still have the option of a lot of other TLD's. Noone is being forced to use.name for personal names..name is just another alternative that may give people more choice,
and for most people hopefully a logical naming
system.
I'd suggest looking at www.gnr.name, which is the official registry site.
Essentially the registry offers e-mail forwarding on firstname@lastname.name adresses, and that is why you must register third level names for domains, so that everyone can share the second
level for e-mail adresses.
There's no monitoring of abuse of second level names, but there is a dispute resolution policy that require you to prove that you have the name (or something reasonably close to it) if someone claims that you are infringing on their trademark.
For nicknames, it is intended that you must still
use two levels. So you could register bill.clinton.name even if your name is william.clinton.name, but you wouldn't be able to
register just bill.name
Other combinations are allowed as well, as long as it's something you are "commonly known as". So it could be argued that commander.taco.name would be
a valid registration.
Anyway, the registration guidelines are only enforced if someone formally challenge your registration. But registering ronald.macdonald.name or mickey.mouse.name would most likely be a bad idea unless that's really
your name:)
You're both right and wrong. You can't register
a second level domain name. But you can register
second level e-mail forwarding. It's exactly to be able to enforce sharing of the second level addresses that this was done.
If it was possible to register gates.name, you'd have to deal with that registrant to get bill@gates.name, and you'd be screwed if that registrant didn't want to share.
Instead you can register bill.gates.name and bill@gates.name separately, and have bill@gates.name forwarded to whatever account you want.
Look for the e-mail forwarding service in the ICANN documents.
Of course some people will. But even though there are some very common names that a lot of people have, most people have relatively rare names. In the US for instance, more than 80.000 lastnames are included in the US census. The remaining lastnames doesn't get in because they are too rare. Combine that with thousands of firstnames, and most people will get either their name, or something reasonably simple.
Obviously john47.smith.name isn't as attractive as john.smith.name, but it's still a lot better than a lot of the options out there.
And in some countries, such as France, the number of lastnames in use are close to a million.
Re:Convienently ignores the cost of training.
on
Linux on the Desktop
·
· Score: 2
Recently my girlfriend moved in with me. When she
needed to use a computer, I set up an account on
my Linux box, showed her how to log in, showed her
where Abiword where in the menus, and didn't worry
any more.
A couple of days later she was about as familiar
with Linux as she is with Windows, had found all
my games, had found gphoto and downloaded some pictures from my digital camera and set one of them as her new background.
So far I've hardly done anything to help her, except giving her names of some of the apps.
And she don't even like computers...
Yes, there are things on Linux that have a steep
learning curve. But once a reasonably recent Linux distribution is set up on your machine, most beginners don't run into many more difficulties than they do under Windows - in fact I'd dare say that many beginners won't really realize that there are things that are more difficult under
Linux, since most such things are sufficiently difficult under Windows too that they'd ask someone for help in either case.
For intermediate users, though, the switch might
be a little more painful.
Most of their accounting loss is a result of writing down intagibles and goodwill. One of the reasons of this is that previously Redhat has aquired several companies. Whenever they aquire a company they have to account for the difference between the companies assets (cash, property, shareholdings, etc. etc.) and the price they buy the company for. Typically that is accounted as "goodwill" (on the assumption that part of the reason that you are buying the company is that it's customers will buy something from you again).
Goodwill props up the assets side in a companys financials, and that is good. But it has to be
written down over time. Sometimes a company will
write it down as slowly as possible, in order for
it not to affect their earnings. In this case Redhat has chosen (or been forced to - I don't know what rules are used in the US to determine when they have to write down goodwill) to write
down a significant amount in one quarter.
Yes, this is a loss. But it is not a loss of cash, but of abstract, intangible values.
In fact, according to their financials, at the
end of this quarter, Redhat had 299,9 million
USD in cash. On February 28 they had 302.7 million
USD cash. So in the last 6 months, their cash
position has only been reduced by 2.8 million.
And if you look at total assets, you will find that their current assets are estimated at 428.2
million USD (of which 82.4 million are goodwill
and intagibles), vs. 505.3 million USD (with 147.4
million USD in goodwill and intangibles) on February 28.
This means that in the last 6 months, they have
written down 65 million. Excluding the write down
of intangibles, their assets have only dropped 12.1 million USD
The difference between that number and the reduction in cash comes from reduced outstanding
invoices and prepaid expenses.
In addition, their liabilities now are slightly
lower than 6 months ago, meaning that the
picture is more positive that it looks (about
2.2 million USD difference).
In other words, Redhat is doing very well considering the economic climate... And also that
they have cash to run for many years at their
current cash burn before they actually have to start making money.
Also note that they have accrued a significant
loss in the past which can be used to reduce their
taxes once they earn money.
(Disclaimer: I own a few Redhat shares. And the
above should not be taken as investment advice. Go do your own research. Yada, yada, yada)
Most of that is writing down goodwill and intangibles. It is not cash expenses. Which
is important. If they'd lost 53 million
cash in a quarter, they'd run out of money quickly. But as it is, they hardly dipped into their cash reserves this quarter.
Within the last year, Nasdaq was trading at extremely inflated levels. That people choose to
sell at those levels isn't exactly very surprising. When the economic climate starts improving again I bet you'll see more than enough insiders buying back shares they sold the last year, but for a fraction of the price.
Contrary to.com/.net/.org, where ALL of the 5000 (and probably many more) most common surnames in US has been taken, and where your
chance of getting a firstname@lastname address
or firstname.lastname address is completely dependent on the whim of the owner, under ".name" noone can buy just the lastname and deny people access to it.
".name" is exclusively for registering personal
names, on the form "firstname.lastname.name" or
nicknames, and e-mail adresses on the form
"firstname@lastname.name". So far the interest
has been huge.
(ObDisclaimer: I work for the company administrating.name)
If you take a look at the rules for ".name", you
will see that the dispute rules has been
adapted to the intent of the TLD (it favors persons that actually have the name they register)
There's even provisions for allowing your registration even when it specifically collides
with a valid trademark claim, as long as you are
registering your name, nickname or something
close to it.
(ObDisclaimer: I work for GNR, the company that
operates.name)
As Isaac Asimov spent his career demonstrating
in his books, there would be plenty of ways to
end up with problems in spite of, or because of,
those rules...
Besides, the laws where suggested for robots
that were semi-autonomous thanks to artificial
intelligence. We're not anywhere near that yet.
Slashdot Mirror
And my point is that noone knows whether diplomatic talks or legal hearings would be fruitless, since the US has blatantly refused to talk to the Taliban despite multiple offers from the Taliban to diplomatic talks, and to place Osama bin Laden at the fate of hearings conducted by the Organization of Islamic Countries and the UN.
By refusing to try those options, the US government has placed itself in the same category as the terrorists: Defying international laws, common juridic practice, and resorting to warmongering before they've exhausted all other options.
The first civilians have already been confirmed dead by non-Taliban sources (to top it off it was 4 people working in a UN sponsored organization devoted to clearing away landmines). Why is it any better for the US to kill civilians than it is for bin Laden?
Noone is saying there's any guarantees that the Taliban would have complied with any promises to extradite bin Laden. But the US government didn't even try.
Why should people be hunted down for killing civilians with no support in law when the US government is condoning it by doing it themselves?
At best it is hypocrisy. At worst it is murder.
As for the US killing bin Laden - it seems that is what the US is trying now, after repeatedly refusing to hand over evidence implicating him in the attack.
As for where you're on trial - whether or not the country you're in is your homelass is completely irrelevant from a legal standpoint. What is relevant is whether the nation that want you extradited can fulfill the legal conditions set by the nation you're currently in. Why do you think a British court spent ages deciding on whether whether to extradite Pinochet to Spain, or let him go back to his home land (Chile)?
And you're wrong in the case of a suspect found in a foreign country:
First you request the foreign country to arrest your suspect, or at the very least serve him. Then you hold an extradition hearing in the country he is located, where you present at least enough evidence to prove that you have a reasonable basis for charging the person, and that your are fulfilling the legal criteria set by the foreign nation to grant extradition.
In cases where the suspect fears for his/hers life, many foreign nations will also require you to prove that the suspect will not face the death penalty or risk bodily harm if extradited, as many countries do not allow extradition in such cases. This includes several European countries.
Then, if the foreign court accepts your arguments, you are handed the suspect and can put him/her on trial in your own country.
Talibans request for evidence before extradition is normal practice in any civilized country, and apparently also in some backwards fundamentalist nations as Afghanistan. But apparently the internationally accepted way of dealing with a suspect is too civilized for the US.
Maybe all the countries that has been the subject of US atrocities should start acting the same way in order to get hold of the US politicans and military personell that have allowed, supported and carried out attacks on their nations...
Because we all now the US government isn't hypocritical enough to refuse their victims the same kind of barbaric revenge they are carrying out on Afghanistan, right?
As for harboring terrorists, and aiding groups who use terrorism, have you forgotten who financed the Taliban in the first place? Oh, yes, that was US... Hmm. And for a long time the IRA wasn't classified as a terrorist group in the US, allowing IRA to do massive fund raising in the US relatively safely. Harboring terrorists, you say? Maybe someone should have bombed the US - of course only the homes of suspected IRA members.
Also, even Slobodan Milosevic, a man likely responsible for the deaths of far more than 6000 innocent people, was allowed hearings in his home country before being given up - the government of Serbia was given the choice. Why doesn't this apply to Afghanistan?
I'm not saying bombing would be wrong under any and all circumstances, but that to avoid sinking to the terrorists level, and demonstrating to the world that they don't give a shit about justice, the US government should have tried legal procedures and negotiations first, and if that failed a military strike could have been considered.
As it is now, the US has presented no evidence that bin Laden was involved in the WTC bombing - they are just asking the world to trust them.
There is a reason that the US, and all other more or less civilized nations, have this thing called separation of power: The judiciary, the government and law enforcement is separate.
It's there exactly to prevent what the US is doing right now: The government taking out people they don't like without proving that they're guilty of a crime.
In addition there's less reason for trademark holders to object to a name that collides, as they can't themselves register the name anyway, and as such their only reason to go after you is if they believe you're infringing on their trademark - not to get control over the domain themselves.
Of course, if you get the domain e.toys.name and start selling toys on the website, then Etoys will likely come after you no matter what your name is, and they'd likely win, as there'd be a real chance of confusing people into believing they were actually shopping from Etoys.
Taliban have repeatedly offered to extradite bin Laden if the US presents them proof, or to let the OIC (Organization of Islamic Countries) and UN review the proof and advice on the extradition issue.
This may be just posturing - the Taliban may be prepared to ignore any evidence.
But the US has, by ignoring requests for a civilized legal process to be carried up prior to starting war, sunk to the level of the terrorists.
Would the US have gone to war if it was a Western country that refused to hand over bin Laden without an extradition hearing where evidence is presented?
Would you have bombed the UK, Germany or France, if bin Laden had been in their country, and they'd insisted on complying with their countries laws and not hand over a suspect without a hearing conducted by a court of law?
Not likely.
So what do you think militant Muslims are seeing this as? A justified police action, or a war on Islam that they are obliged to assist in?
And when did the US follow established international procedures to request an extradition hearing, present evidence, and have a court decide on the merits of their case?
No "civilized" nation could have extradited bin Laden without being in violation of their own laws. Some countries in Europe and elsewhere couldn't even legally extradite him under any circumstances if there is any chance that he'd risc the death penalty if extradited to the US.
I can understand the rage, and I can understand that the US public wants Afghanistan and the Taliban "punished", but don't pretend that it's about justice - this is purely about revenge.
Unfortunately it plays straight into the hands of the terrorists. How many more extremists are now watching the news and getting all their ideas about the US as the enemy of Islam confirmed, and start thinking about holy war?
The US is breeding its own enemies, as so often before.
If you're going to be pedantic, Microsoft don't store Unicode any more than Star Office does.
That also doesn't take into accounts new TLDs like ".name", which has a very different market from the three above, and which gets significant interest. It also doesn't take into account that the seven new TLDs introduced now is only a "proof-of-consept" phase for ICANN, and that if things work out reasonably well, we can expect further new TLDs to be approved in the future.
(ObDisclaimer: I co-founded the company that operates .name)
No, the total load wouldn't be the same, as you'd get the total load for all TLDs instead of "just" the load of .com. While .com is the significant TLD now, that will not necessarily stay that way, and flattening the namespace when load is just increasing steadily every year is just asking for problems.
Below is a simplified description of how the caching works:
Most internet users use their ISPs DNS server as their nameserver.
That nameserver will cache the result of any query up to a specified amount of time (the maximum value you're supposed to cache an entry is provided to you in the response when you query a DNS server).
Now, if you request www.foo.bar, your machine will query your ISPs DNS server, and if www.foo.bar isn't cached, the DNS server will strip off the leftmost part, and check if information about which nameservers serve foo.bar is cached.
If it isn't, then it will strip off the next part, and so on. If it can't find the TLD in its cache, it will ask the root servers.
If foo.bar is found in the cache, however, your ISPs nameserver will request info on www.foo.bar from one of the nameservers responsible for foo.bar, and cache that data for future reference.
So if someone else using your ISP has accessed any domain on the top-level domain "bar" recently, the nameserver info for the TLD "bar" will likely be in the cache, and valid.
And if someone else using your ISP has accessed foo.bar, or any host under foo.bar, information about foo.bar is likely in your ISPs DNS cache.
And if they've looked up www.foo.bar in particular, even that may be in the cache.
So only a small percentage of all lookups of a domain will actually cause a hit on the root servers, quite few will avoid hitting the nameservers for the specific TLDs, and for quite a few domains much of the data will be cached at your ISP most of the time.
Allowing people to register directly under the root would mean that the number of lookups in the root servers would go through the roof, as there is one less level of caching, and the network of root servers would have to be able to cope with a load similar to all the current TLDs combined, as opposed to "only" when nameserver info for a TLD has expired from the cache somewhere - the traffic volume is high enough as it is.
Except that you'd effectively defeat the caching which is done in the current system. So the load would increase, and increase a lot.
So presumably Rob would get away with commander.taco.name, for instance.
As for registrations on the third level, technically that is trivially easy. The reason that has been done is so that the second level can be shared for mail purposes. So while under .com only one of Bob Smith and John Smith would be able to get smith.com, and use bob@smith.com or john@smith.com, unless they could agree to share it (or Bob could decide to register bobsmith.com, and get a crappy mail address like bob@bobsmith.com, or similar), under .name they can get bob.smith.name/bob@smith.name and john.smith.name/john@smith.name respectively.
Some data I took out on that this weekend shows that in the US, for the 65000 most common lastnames, 22 million people would be able to get their firstname.lastname.name without doing anything special. If you take into account nicknames, use of initials, use of hyphens etc., that number increases to more than 100 million that can get a nice name-based e-mail address on the form firstname@lastname.name, as opposed to only 65000 if noone share the second level.
If you add in the people with less common lastnames, the number increase to about 170 million in the US alone, before you need to start doing stuff like adding numbers.
Of course, for more common last names, like Smith, using numbers will be necessary quite a lot earlier than for less common lastnames.
(Ob Disclaimer: I co-founded the company that operates .name, but I'm talking only for myself)
The general rule is that you'd have to use a hyphen, or write the separate parts as one.
So to use your example, it would be osama@bin-laden.name, or osama@binladen.name.
Of course some cultures doesn't even use surnames, or use the surname first and the given name afterwards.
So you'd be allowed to register smith.john.name if you'd like to. Or foo.sonof-bar.name
It's not ideal, but it's the first try on a namespace purely for personal use, and after all if your name is too common or too difficult to fit into this scheme, you still have the option of a lot of other TLD's. Noone is being forced to use .name for personal names. .name is just another alternative that may give people more choice,
and for most people hopefully a logical naming
system.
Essentially the registry offers e-mail forwarding on firstname@lastname.name adresses, and that is why you must register third level names for domains, so that everyone can share the second level for e-mail adresses.
There's no monitoring of abuse of second level names, but there is a dispute resolution policy that require you to prove that you have the name (or something reasonably close to it) if someone claims that you are infringing on their trademark.
For nicknames, it is intended that you must still use two levels. So you could register bill.clinton.name even if your name is william.clinton.name, but you wouldn't be able to register just bill.name
Other combinations are allowed as well, as long as it's something you are "commonly known as". So it could be argued that commander.taco.name would be a valid registration.
Anyway, the registration guidelines are only enforced if someone formally challenge your registration. But registering ronald.macdonald.name or mickey.mouse.name would most likely be a bad idea unless that's really your name :)
If it was possible to register gates.name, you'd have to deal with that registrant to get bill@gates.name, and you'd be screwed if that registrant didn't want to share.
Instead you can register bill.gates.name and bill@gates.name separately, and have bill@gates.name forwarded to whatever account you want.
Look for the e-mail forwarding service in the ICANN documents.
Obviously john47.smith.name isn't as attractive as john.smith.name, but it's still a lot better than a lot of the options out there.
And in some countries, such as France, the number of lastnames in use are close to a million.
A couple of days later she was about as familiar with Linux as she is with Windows, had found all my games, had found gphoto and downloaded some pictures from my digital camera and set one of them as her new background.
So far I've hardly done anything to help her, except giving her names of some of the apps.
And she don't even like computers...
Yes, there are things on Linux that have a steep learning curve. But once a reasonably recent Linux distribution is set up on your machine, most beginners don't run into many more difficulties than they do under Windows - in fact I'd dare say that many beginners won't really realize that there are things that are more difficult under Linux, since most such things are sufficiently difficult under Windows too that they'd ask someone for help in either case.
For intermediate users, though, the switch might be a little more painful.
Goodwill props up the assets side in a companys financials, and that is good. But it has to be written down over time. Sometimes a company will write it down as slowly as possible, in order for it not to affect their earnings. In this case Redhat has chosen (or been forced to - I don't know what rules are used in the US to determine when they have to write down goodwill) to write down a significant amount in one quarter.
Yes, this is a loss. But it is not a loss of cash, but of abstract, intangible values.
In fact, according to their financials, at the end of this quarter, Redhat had 299,9 million USD in cash. On February 28 they had 302.7 million USD cash. So in the last 6 months, their cash position has only been reduced by 2.8 million.
And if you look at total assets, you will find that their current assets are estimated at 428.2 million USD (of which 82.4 million are goodwill and intagibles), vs. 505.3 million USD (with 147.4 million USD in goodwill and intangibles) on February 28.
This means that in the last 6 months, they have written down 65 million. Excluding the write down of intangibles, their assets have only dropped 12.1 million USD
The difference between that number and the reduction in cash comes from reduced outstanding invoices and prepaid expenses.
In addition, their liabilities now are slightly lower than 6 months ago, meaning that the picture is more positive that it looks (about 2.2 million USD difference).
In other words, Redhat is doing very well considering the economic climate... And also that they have cash to run for many years at their current cash burn before they actually have to start making money.
Also note that they have accrued a significant loss in the past which can be used to reduce their taxes once they earn money.
(Disclaimer: I own a few Redhat shares. And the above should not be taken as investment advice. Go do your own research. Yada, yada, yada)
Most of that is writing down goodwill and intangibles. It is not cash expenses. Which is important. If they'd lost 53 million cash in a quarter, they'd run out of money quickly. But as it is, they hardly dipped into their cash reserves this quarter.
Within the last year, Nasdaq was trading at extremely inflated levels. That people choose to sell at those levels isn't exactly very surprising. When the economic climate starts improving again I bet you'll see more than enough insiders buying back shares they sold the last year, but for a fraction of the price.
Redhat have enough cash to sustain them for well beyond 10 years with their current cash burn, so I wouldn't worry to much.
Contrary to .com/.net/.org, where ALL of the 5000 (and probably many more) most common surnames in US has been taken, and where your
chance of getting a firstname@lastname address
or firstname.lastname address is completely dependent on the whim of the owner, under ".name" noone can buy just the lastname and deny people access to it.
(ObDisclaimer: I work for the company administrating .name)
There's even provisions for allowing your registration even when it specifically collides with a valid trademark claim, as long as you are registering your name, nickname or something close to it.
(ObDisclaimer: I work for GNR, the company that operates .name)
Besides, the laws where suggested for robots that were semi-autonomous thanks to artificial intelligence. We're not anywhere near that yet.