Except you're wrong: Neither Network Solutions nor ICANN will be in charge of registering the domains - separate companies were awarded the new TLDs (including the company I work for, that will be responsible for.name), and while.info and.biz are almost free of restrictions,.museum,.aero,.pro,.coop and.name all have restrictions:
.museum is for museums only.aero is for the aerospace industry and airliners etc..pro is only for professionals of different kinds, such as MDs etc..coop is only for organizations organized as cooperatives.name is only for registering personal names, nicknames or names of fictional characters
Yes, I'm sure people will find ways of abusing it, but it should go a long way.
And have you ever tried finding a domain name under.com lately? Even one that doesn't crash with a trademark? Try any word from your dictionary - even the most obscure you can find. It's likely taken. And it's likely taken prefixed and postfixed with tons of common combinations of letters and digits.
For a country where using open source means that any costs associated with software will go to local consultants and programmers instead of a foreign software company, there will be serious net benefits even if the costs for some reason doesn't go down, since it will shift their export balance, and create jobs locally, improving their IT sector.
For many poor countries this may be as attractive, or even more attractive, than the initial hope of reducing the immediate costs.
As such, yes open source upset the current economical system, by shifting the balance from the typically US and Europe based large software companies, to service providers and developers locally (which benefits the country even if those people happen to be employed by multinationals like IBM etc.)
Uhm. If the expression is equivalent to saying "millions of dollars", then it is certainly not limited to 1-9 million. It means that he is referring to a large sum, without knowing the specifics at this point (which is also confirmed elsewhere in the article).
Even if they strike a deal with someone to provide the software and consulting services, the consulting is likely to be the largest part of the cost, and if they choose a local company to provide the consulting services, they are at least keeping the money in Mexico instead of feeding the company coffers of Microsoft.
You're at least partly wrong. You have to draw the pixel several times, but only to the on-die tile cache, before writing it out once over the external bus.
So you should still see a significant benefit - not as much as for opaque areas, though, as it can't just throw away the partially obscured pixels as it can with the totally hidden ones.
If you'd read the article you'd have seen that they are releasing a lower power version based on the same architecture as well, and suggested a price of around $79 for it. But if you're looking for cheap machines for office applications, you should be looking at something with integrated chipsets instead. It's not like you'd normally put a 3D accelerated graphics card in a machine that is only intended for word processing or similar.
Several of the GeForce 3 features require games to be rewritten to take full advantage of it - particularly the programmable parts, I'd assume.
And if you'd read the article, you'd see that this card does achives FSAA at a decent resolution with very good performance, and that the quality of the memory architecture is what really makes it compare well, by massively reducing the amount of memory accesses.
Revolutionary "movements" as a whole rarely have one goal. They may have warying groups more or less in control, depending on how successful specific groups are at different points throughout the revolution, but revolutions by nature happen when multiple groups all happen to support the same immediate goals of changing "something".
And while the internet "revolution" haven't had a clearly spelled out goal, there are lot of implicit goals: Making communication easier, building virtual communities, sharing information. Many of these goals are represented by movements and groups, whether loosely defined by coinciding goals and ideas, or with established organizations like the FSF.
And your comment about selling out so early underscores the points I made elsewhere: Revolutions are defined by the "leaders", or the early adopters if you will - the people that see the visions, and come up with the ideas, and that build the foundation. But revolutions are brought to their conclusion when the masses buy into enough of those ideas to start forming their own visions about what should happen.
Most often these ideas will close in on the original visions and intent, but more often than not they twist them, and masses of people are conservative in sum, buying into just small fractions of the potential of the initial ideas.
It is bound to produce the idea of people selling out, when what is happening is just that people that at one point thought that their ideas might be brought to completion start realizing that the masses are happy with just a small taste.
Just remember that without the masses that bring revolutions to a halt they never would have started in the first place. And at some point the masses will eventually start buying into the next step, and things will change again.
By that time people with vision will likely already have seen new goals, though, and get just as disappointed when they don't get there.
I've seen arguments like this frequently. However, the main problem with it is that revolutions aren't intended to keep going. It is right that revolutions come when enough people share some idealistic goal.
However, throughout history revolutions have come about not when the avantgarde and natural "leadership" of the revolution was ready for it, but when the masses start sharing some of their immediate goals.
And note that well: immediate goals.
That is also one of the inherent problems of revolutions: The avantgarde tends to get quickly disillutioned, and to fight hard for the revolution to live on, and radicalise after the
initial noise dies down, and the masses refuse to
support further changes.
It has happened time and time again, and the reason is simple: The masses don't normally share the most radical goals. The masses endear to the immediate, short term, moderate goals only because the more radical elements have highlighted a wide enough spectrum of "new" thought that they find something they can agree with.
What normally happens after a revolution is that the radical groups see that their ideas have been supported, but that their long term goals are abandoned in favor of the immediate gains. The typical response, as seen in France and Russia, and almost in every other revolutionary situation is a backlash of struggles between two groups:
Radicals who see in the revolution a justification for going further, and reactionaries who feels threatened by the gains made.
Depending on the strenght of the different side, the outcome is different to predict. In France and Russia the radical sides won, leading to the period of red terror in France, and to the October revolution in Russia (radicalizing the revolution that happened earlier in 1917, that had culminated in the fall of the Romanov family, and established the Kerensky led government). In Germany, however, after the uprisings in 1848, and periodically onwards to 1871, the reactionary forces reestablished their power, leading to Bismark and Emperor Vilhelms rule.
In any case a dictatorship tends to be the result. Either of the radicals, failing to gain support of the people, and resorting to power to maintain "their" revolution, or by reactionaries trying to stem the tide of history.
Yes, revolutions destroy many illusions, but mostly of those either too idealistic for the common man, or people clinging to the past.
Yes, many here would likely have preferred the "old" internet, or older forms of communications, or want to take the internet much further in the original direction of sharing knowledge.
But that isn't what the masses are ready for. And you don't get revolutions without support of the masses - you get coups...
Why should it make you skittish? Midori appears to be a fork as well - or so the FAQ indicates at least. There are tons of forks of Linux, including lots of ports to weird hardware, like uCLinux and Elks, and there are stuff like RTLinux, and many more.
Forks are good when it makes needed functionality that wouldn't be appropriate to put in the mainstream kernel available to those that need it.
Forks are bad when the people forking doesn't try to keep their fork as closely synced with the official kernel, and/or doesn't try to get as much as possible reintegrated back into the official kernel when/if it makes sense.
Unless a lot has changed since I saw their marketing material, they either are offering, or are planning to offer a "native" version with a RISC instruction set as well. However, that may be old scrapped marketing "truths"...:-)
Ah, now this is a masterpiece in deceptive misuse of "statistics", and in making creative connections.
I agree with you that child porn is bad. Not so much because of the images themselves as because most of what current law deems child porn depict actual abuse to children.
However, presenting statements like "It is not normal and I would not be supprised if statistics prove that constant pedie porn casues childhood rape", and then going on to use that as an argument for filtering, is an amazing attempt at
manipulation.
I don't claim that no such statistics don't exist - I don't know. What I react to is the use of statistics that don't even reference, and that possibly doesn't exist, to say argument for blocking child porn, and then continuing to make
a connection to the porn industry, as an argument for general filtering of porn.
Apart from the creative use of statements about statistics, your argument falls apart in two central places:
First, the connection between child porn, or other porn. Yes, porn is a multi-billion dollar industry. But it's also just that: An industry. All the major players are large corporations that
are visible, some are even publicly traded on Nasdaq and other exchanges. The companies standing
for the real wealth in the porn industry couldn't possibly take the chance of involving themselves with illegal or abusive porn even if they wanted, because they are so highly visible.
Many of those companies are as concerned as you are about child porn, because the existence of abusive porn is a threat to the very existence of
these companies, since the worse the problem of child porn is perceived, the easier it is for people morally opposed to all porn to pass laws that requires filtering or other measures that makes it harder for adults to view or buy their products.
But you are in your post equating the porn industry to the child porn peddlers.
The second place it breaks down is just there. Yes, I'm sure there are lots of people out there selling child porn. However, if you were abusing children and selling illegal child porn (or other abusive porn), would you really make that site public?
If it's public enough that the people updating the
block lists for the filters will find it, don't you think those people will report it to the police? Don't you think the site will be taken down, and that the police will try to track down the owner?
If you really want to prevent someone from seeing child porn, then donating time and/or money to organizations that actively seek it out to report it to the police would be more constructive than installing a filter that will inevitably also block valuable material (whether or not you include "normal" porn in that category), and that
defer value and moral judgement from the parent
to someone else, without disclosing those decisions to the parent.
Porn sites want to earn money. They earn money by having people pay with credit cards. People under the age of 18 are highly unlikely to have credit cards, and even less likely to pay a porn site even if the should happen to have a credit card.
Children visiting their sites is a problem for them, for two reasons: Many parents will blame them, rather than the child, if they find their kids surfing a porn site, and non-paying users wasting bandwidth on their advertising sites cost them money.
Regardless of what you may think about porn site operators, I'm sure you'll agree that they are primary in it for the money, and economically it makes sense for them to block kids.
And it's not so simple as you say when it comes to unblocking mistakes. What about an abused child that tries to look up support groups for childrens
suffering sexual abuse?
A site like that could easily end up being filtered due to words in the text, but clearly be protected, and important. Do you really think a child that has learned that
adults can't be trusted through abuse will go to the librarian and tell them they want to see that
site?
Especially in small communities where the child abuser may very well get to hear about it...
Or what about a kid suspecting he/she is gay, but don't dare tell anyone? Many kids in that situation get severe problems, and need support to
figure out what they want - and especially so in homes where the parents may have voiced anti-gay
opinions. Do you really think a kid like that would ask to have information or support pages unblocked? Or would you maybe rather that they end up comitting suicide, as many do?
If anything, if you want to protect kids, you should not censor, and instead you should spend time talking to your child, and let them know you'll be supportive, even if you may end up learning things about them you'd prefer not to know...
You're assuming that the "renegade porn site" would be illegal. Newsflash: There's a world outside the US, and there's plenty of coutries with much more liberal porn laws than the US.
Even within the US, the differences in state laws will make it hard enough.
The major difference is that few other "religions" are so clearly based on pure profit and power motives, and few other "religions" use the kind of
excessive indoctrination methods that the CoS use.
Personally I'm an atheist, but I have no problems
with people believing in most religions. But the CoS? No way.
Keep in mind that it isn't yet overturned. Unly the temporary injunction was overturned.
Also, this court decision could help to reduce
the problem, since it clarifies what patents should be considered valid.
Hopefully there's a chance that the USPTO will actually react to that. And in any case it will be powerful help for companies trying to overturn overbroad or just plain silly patents.
I certainly agree with you that the court decision
is a great step forward... But it's only a start.
It's good. It basically says that if you want to
patent a business method, or a process related
to the internet or software, which all have been very controversial, you will have to specifically
show through patent claims that your patent would
provide significant advantages, and not be obvious.
In a way they're just reiterating what
US patent law says in the first place. But AFAIK
this is the first time a court explicitly makes
it clear that just moving something onto the internet doesn't make it "new", and doesn't make
it patentable by default.
Compare this with the flurry of patents
lately that takes an existing business method or
process and say "on the internet", and assume that
because they're doing something on the net instead
of in their offline business or on a proprietary
data network, it is suddenly something new.
The point is they should be allowed to publish
bullshit, and Microsoft should criticize them on
the merits of their work, not threaten them with
lawsuits over it.
If Microsoft can really demonstrate that the testing labs methods are flawed, and that the
benchmarks they publish are useless, then fine.
The extent of British territorial waters isn't
that interesting. If Sealand is British, then
obviously the territorial waters doesn't matter, but if Sealand weren't British before Britain extended it's territorial waters, then the mere
act of extending its waters does not allow Britain
to take possession of land that is already in posession by someone else.
And further, if Sealand
is a sovereign nation, the right to 12 mile territorial waters apply to Sealand as well, together with rules regulating the division in cases where there isn't more than 24 miles between
the bodies of land (and thus both parties can't get a full 12 miles).
Whether anybody will recognize Sealand as a sovereign nation is of course a completely different issue, considering how hard it is even for entire well established groups of people with their own languages and culture to get their own
nations, even in "civilized Europe".
No, it would mean 3+ ISPs to threaten with lawsuits, and throw money at.
Attacking a government would be hard. Attacking
an ISP is comparatively quite easy. Most of them
doesn't have anything resembling a spine when it
comes to defending their customers rights.
Sure, but who says they'll have to have a legal
claim? Just threatening to sue may be enough in
many cases. And there's more than enough other
ways to "fix" the problem of ISPs that won't listen, if you just have the money.
That works for products Microsoft have equivalents
to. It does not work for company X that uses Windows for their computerized cash registers and
rely on an app from a bankrupt company that they
haven't been able to replace, and that Microsoft
don't have any alternative to.
That's the problem for Microsoft: Closed source apps where they original company has gone out of business that force them to choose between having backwards compatability longer than they want, or preventing
the users from upgrading, thus reducing their revenue source.
The large number of Windows 3.1 installations out there is a good demonstration of that principle.
Uhh... They have to connect to somewhere.. Otherwise it's kind of meaningless. And whoever
they connect to will likely be pressured by the RIAA. Especially considering that even if you
accept Seelands claim to being a sovereign state,
the ISPs they are connecting to aren't situated
there, and will be possible to reach via courts
in the countries they operate in.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I'm sure people will find ways of abusing it, but it should go a long way.
And have you ever tried finding a domain name under .com lately? Even one that doesn't crash with a trademark? Try any word from your dictionary - even the most obscure you can find. It's likely taken. And it's likely taken prefixed and postfixed with tons of common combinations of letters and digits.
(disclaimer: I work for the company that will operate .name - the TLD intended primarily for personal names)
The IETF doesn't enforce DNS standards, ICANN do (for the official gTLDs, that is).
For many poor countries this may be as attractive, or even more attractive, than the initial hope of reducing the immediate costs.
As such, yes open source upset the current economical system, by shifting the balance from the typically US and Europe based large software companies, to service providers and developers locally (which benefits the country even if those people happen to be employed by multinationals like IBM etc.)
Uhm. If the expression is equivalent to saying "millions of dollars", then it is certainly not limited to 1-9 million. It means that he is referring to a large sum, without knowing the specifics at this point (which is also confirmed elsewhere in the article).
Even if they strike a deal with someone to provide the software and consulting services, the consulting is likely to be the largest part of the cost, and if they choose a local company to provide the consulting services, they are at least keeping the money in Mexico instead of feeding the company coffers of Microsoft.
So you should still see a significant benefit - not as much as for opaque areas, though, as it can't just throw away the partially obscured pixels as it can with the totally hidden ones.
If you'd read the article you'd have seen that they are releasing a lower power version based on the same architecture as well, and suggested a price of around $79 for it. But if you're looking for cheap machines for office applications, you should be looking at something with integrated chipsets instead. It's not like you'd normally put a 3D accelerated graphics card in a machine that is only intended for word processing or similar.
And if you'd read the article, you'd see that this card does achives FSAA at a decent resolution with very good performance, and that the quality of the memory architecture is what really makes it compare well, by massively reducing the amount of memory accesses.
And while the internet "revolution" haven't had a clearly spelled out goal, there are lot of implicit goals: Making communication easier, building virtual communities, sharing information. Many of these goals are represented by movements and groups, whether loosely defined by coinciding goals and ideas, or with established organizations like the FSF.
And your comment about selling out so early underscores the points I made elsewhere: Revolutions are defined by the "leaders", or the early adopters if you will - the people that see the visions, and come up with the ideas, and that build the foundation. But revolutions are brought to their conclusion when the masses buy into enough of those ideas to start forming their own visions about what should happen.
Most often these ideas will close in on the original visions and intent, but more often than not they twist them, and masses of people are conservative in sum, buying into just small fractions of the potential of the initial ideas.
It is bound to produce the idea of people selling out, when what is happening is just that people that at one point thought that their ideas might be brought to completion start realizing that the masses are happy with just a small taste.
Just remember that without the masses that bring revolutions to a halt they never would have started in the first place. And at some point the masses will eventually start buying into the next step, and things will change again.
By that time people with vision will likely already have seen new goals, though, and get just as disappointed when they don't get there.
However, throughout history revolutions have come about not when the avantgarde and natural "leadership" of the revolution was ready for it, but when the masses start sharing some of their immediate goals.
And note that well: immediate goals.
That is also one of the inherent problems of revolutions: The avantgarde tends to get quickly disillutioned, and to fight hard for the revolution to live on, and radicalise after the initial noise dies down, and the masses refuse to support further changes.
It has happened time and time again, and the reason is simple: The masses don't normally share the most radical goals. The masses endear to the immediate, short term, moderate goals only because the more radical elements have highlighted a wide enough spectrum of "new" thought that they find something they can agree with.
What normally happens after a revolution is that the radical groups see that their ideas have been supported, but that their long term goals are abandoned in favor of the immediate gains. The typical response, as seen in France and Russia, and almost in every other revolutionary situation is a backlash of struggles between two groups:
Radicals who see in the revolution a justification for going further, and reactionaries who feels threatened by the gains made.
Depending on the strenght of the different side, the outcome is different to predict. In France and Russia the radical sides won, leading to the period of red terror in France, and to the October revolution in Russia (radicalizing the revolution that happened earlier in 1917, that had culminated in the fall of the Romanov family, and established the Kerensky led government). In Germany, however, after the uprisings in 1848, and periodically onwards to 1871, the reactionary forces reestablished their power, leading to Bismark and Emperor Vilhelms rule.
In any case a dictatorship tends to be the result. Either of the radicals, failing to gain support of the people, and resorting to power to maintain "their" revolution, or by reactionaries trying to stem the tide of history.
Yes, revolutions destroy many illusions, but mostly of those either too idealistic for the common man, or people clinging to the past.
Yes, many here would likely have preferred the "old" internet, or older forms of communications, or want to take the internet much further in the original direction of sharing knowledge.
But that isn't what the masses are ready for. And you don't get revolutions without support of the masses - you get coups...
Forks are good when it makes needed functionality that wouldn't be appropriate to put in the mainstream kernel available to those that need it.
Forks are bad when the people forking doesn't try to keep their fork as closely synced with the official kernel, and/or doesn't try to get as much as possible reintegrated back into the official kernel when/if it makes sense.
Unless a lot has changed since I saw their marketing material, they either are offering, or are planning to offer a "native" version with a RISC instruction set as well. However, that may be old scrapped marketing "truths"... :-)
I agree with you that child porn is bad. Not so much because of the images themselves as because most of what current law deems child porn depict actual abuse to children.
However, presenting statements like "It is not normal and I would not be supprised if statistics prove that constant pedie porn casues childhood rape", and then going on to use that as an argument for filtering, is an amazing attempt at manipulation.
I don't claim that no such statistics don't exist - I don't know. What I react to is the use of statistics that don't even reference, and that possibly doesn't exist, to say argument for blocking child porn, and then continuing to make a connection to the porn industry, as an argument for general filtering of porn.
Apart from the creative use of statements about statistics, your argument falls apart in two central places:
First, the connection between child porn, or other porn. Yes, porn is a multi-billion dollar industry. But it's also just that: An industry. All the major players are large corporations that are visible, some are even publicly traded on Nasdaq and other exchanges. The companies standing for the real wealth in the porn industry couldn't possibly take the chance of involving themselves with illegal or abusive porn even if they wanted, because they are so highly visible.
Many of those companies are as concerned as you are about child porn, because the existence of abusive porn is a threat to the very existence of these companies, since the worse the problem of child porn is perceived, the easier it is for people morally opposed to all porn to pass laws that requires filtering or other measures that makes it harder for adults to view or buy their products.
But you are in your post equating the porn industry to the child porn peddlers.
The second place it breaks down is just there. Yes, I'm sure there are lots of people out there selling child porn. However, if you were abusing children and selling illegal child porn (or other abusive porn), would you really make that site public?
If it's public enough that the people updating the block lists for the filters will find it, don't you think those people will report it to the police? Don't you think the site will be taken down, and that the police will try to track down the owner?
If you really want to prevent someone from seeing child porn, then donating time and/or money to organizations that actively seek it out to report it to the police would be more constructive than installing a filter that will inevitably also block valuable material (whether or not you include "normal" porn in that category), and that defer value and moral judgement from the parent to someone else, without disclosing those decisions to the parent.
Children visiting their sites is a problem for them, for two reasons: Many parents will blame them, rather than the child, if they find their kids surfing a porn site, and non-paying users wasting bandwidth on their advertising sites cost them money.
Regardless of what you may think about porn site operators, I'm sure you'll agree that they are primary in it for the money, and economically it makes sense for them to block kids.
And it's not so simple as you say when it comes to unblocking mistakes. What about an abused child that tries to look up support groups for childrens suffering sexual abuse?
A site like that could easily end up being filtered due to words in the text, but clearly be protected, and important. Do you really think a child that has learned that adults can't be trusted through abuse will go to the librarian and tell them they want to see that site?
Especially in small communities where the child abuser may very well get to hear about it...
Or what about a kid suspecting he/she is gay, but don't dare tell anyone? Many kids in that situation get severe problems, and need support to figure out what they want - and especially so in homes where the parents may have voiced anti-gay opinions. Do you really think a kid like that would ask to have information or support pages unblocked? Or would you maybe rather that they end up comitting suicide, as many do?
If anything, if you want to protect kids, you should not censor, and instead you should spend time talking to your child, and let them know you'll be supportive, even if you may end up learning things about them you'd prefer not to know...
Even within the US, the differences in state laws will make it hard enough.
Personally I'm an atheist, but I have no problems with people believing in most religions. But the CoS? No way.
Also, this court decision could help to reduce the problem, since it clarifies what patents should be considered valid.
Hopefully there's a chance that the USPTO will actually react to that. And in any case it will be powerful help for companies trying to overturn overbroad or just plain silly patents.
I certainly agree with you that the court decision is a great step forward... But it's only a start.
In a way they're just reiterating what US patent law says in the first place. But AFAIK this is the first time a court explicitly makes it clear that just moving something onto the internet doesn't make it "new", and doesn't make it patentable by default.
Compare this with the flurry of patents lately that takes an existing business method or process and say "on the internet", and assume that because they're doing something on the net instead of in their offline business or on a proprietary data network, it is suddenly something new.
If Microsoft can really demonstrate that the testing labs methods are flawed, and that the benchmarks they publish are useless, then fine.
And further, if Sealand is a sovereign nation, the right to 12 mile territorial waters apply to Sealand as well, together with rules regulating the division in cases where there isn't more than 24 miles between the bodies of land (and thus both parties can't get a full 12 miles).
Whether anybody will recognize Sealand as a sovereign nation is of course a completely different issue, considering how hard it is even for entire well established groups of people with their own languages and culture to get their own nations, even in "civilized Europe".
Attacking a government would be hard. Attacking an ISP is comparatively quite easy. Most of them doesn't have anything resembling a spine when it comes to defending their customers rights.
Sure, but who says they'll have to have a legal claim? Just threatening to sue may be enough in many cases. And there's more than enough other ways to "fix" the problem of ISPs that won't listen, if you just have the money.
That's the problem for Microsoft: Closed source apps where they original company has gone out of business that force them to choose between having backwards compatability longer than they want, or preventing the users from upgrading, thus reducing their revenue source.
The large number of Windows 3.1 installations out there is a good demonstration of that principle.
Uhh... They have to connect to somewhere.. Otherwise it's kind of meaningless. And whoever they connect to will likely be pressured by the RIAA. Especially considering that even if you accept Seelands claim to being a sovereign state, the ISPs they are connecting to aren't situated there, and will be possible to reach via courts in the countries they operate in.