It may not die, but there's no reason to believe it will be anywhere near as nice as it is now, especially as far as connecting to it.
Sooner or later some suit is going to figure out that it would be cheaper to build Son of Internet (MechaInternet, whatever) than to try to "fix" the existing one. It will have everything the suits want, none of what they don't want, and will be built explicitly to make money. As this comes about, more and more people will want access to this gleaming new monstrousity than to the Internet that we all know and love. Why go to the old one when the store/bank/tv channel you want to go to is only on Internet 2?
And what happens when more people want access to this new network than the old one? It will be more profitable to sell access to the new one than the old one. The ISPs we've come to expect as a commodity will all but vanish during this mass migration, because here isn't where the money is.
So maybe the internet will still be around and it will be wild and free and feeling the grass between its toes blah blah blah, just like it was ten years ago. But we'll also have to connect just like we did ten years ago: by dialling into some small BBS that just can't afford all the bells and whistles we've come to take for granted with current ISPs. Luxuries like bandwidth and phone lines and connection time.
Sure, you'll still have the Internet, but you'll only be allowed to connect for about ten minutes a day at 33.6 kbps.
If you're talking about adding the price of the OEM install of Windows, do you include the price of JUST the Windows install (say, $40-$50), or do you include the price of all the assorted crap that OEMs tend to install (MS Works, MS Money, MusicMatch Jukebox, MSN access, DVD player, CD burner, fax software, yadda yadda yadda)? This could easily drive the cost up to over $200 per OEM install, while you get the same functionality with your average Linux distro for $30 a pop.
It will take at least 6 such Linux distros to catch up to the cost of an OEM install if you look at it this way, so by the example given Windows is still winning.
As a footnote, it's crap like that (as well as the even-more-restrictive OEM liscencing) that has caused me to never buy an OEM machine for personal use again.
I've had a similar discussion with a roommate of mine. He loved the movie Clear & Present Danger, and I hated it mostly because I read the book. After getting fed up with my "What the fuck were they smoking when they mauled this story?" complaints, he started to claim that I just wasn't rating the movie on it's own merits. (But hell, it stank even as a "sequel" to The Hunt for Red October, Baldwin was a much better Ryan than Ford, etc. etc....)
At that point I countered with the way the movie was more of a Steven Segal flick than Harrison Ford, the way it was more action gun flick than anything that had anything to do with the intrigue it pretended it had, so on and so forth...
In short, it is possible for those of us who saw the original anything to hate a derivative on its own merits.
- That only by having a provider-independent boundary can we guarantee that a change of ISP will not require a costly internal restructuring or consolidation of subnets."
It is not in the larger ISP's (AOL, Baby Bells, etc.) to allow customers to easily change providers.
"- To allow easy growth of the subscribers' networks without need to go back to ISPs for more space (except for that relatively small number of subscribers for which a/48 is not enough)."
The more devices you have in your network, the more bandwidth the ISP will be exptected to provide. Bandwidth costs ISPs money, and many home broadband providers to home users don't like you using all your alloted bandwitdth for any period of time.
"- To remove the burden from the ISPs and registries of judging sites' needs for address space, unless the site requests more space than a/48."
If they maintain control over those decisions, they can keep a cap on the bandwidth they need to provide. Besides, everybody likes hanging on to power.
"- To allow the site to maintain a single reverse-DNS zone covering all prefixes."
Then how will the ISPs charge you for using their DNS servers?
From where I sit, the big ISPs/telecoms stand to make more money in maintaining the current IPv4 structure of the internet than moving to this implementation of IPv6. I mean, come on: Charge $40/month for a/48 or for a/128? You do the math.
"and/128 when it is absolutely known that one and only one device is connecting."
Unless they want to dish out huge amounts of money upgrading their hardware and increasing their bandwidth, your ISP is going to give you one and only one IP. For us home users, pricing and distribution won't be much different from IPv4.
"This document is a draft position of the IAB and IESG. Comments should be directed to iab@isi.edu and iesg@ietf.org. This note will be removed upon publication as an RFC."
So they're requesting for comments before it gets publicized as a Request For Comments? No wonder the internet is so fucked up!
"Congress is planning to double the number of FBI agents and Federal attorneys devoted to pursuing copyright cases."
Is this the same FBI that lost all those books full of evidence in the McVeigh case? The same FBI that has managed to lose God knows how many government-issued and government-bought pistols and computers (with who knows what on the hard disks)?
The FBI's reputation is going down the tubes right now, and any Congresscritter that actually goes along with this idea is shooting themself in their political foot.
"Any deficiencies or faults in the quality of the defendant's goods are likely to reflect negatively upon, tarnish and seriously injure the reputation which Lucasfilm has established for goods and services marketed under its Light Saber mark. This confusion is likely to result in loss of revenues to Lucasfilm and damage to its reputation."
That seems to describe Phantom Menace perfectly.
Gnutella lets people freely access porn on the internet, even kids. This is "bad."
Porn is an IP business, and freely distributing their material will (in theory) put them out of business. This is "good."
So... what do they do now? Eliminate Gnutella and save the porn industry, or leave it be and let kids download German scheissen videoes?
Actually, now that I mention it, there's an awful lot of free porn on the internet, and yet they're still making money to some extent. Perhaps this can be used to show that arguments by the MPAA and RIAA are full of holes?
... is that the other side of this issue has yet to be defended on its merrits. Anti-DMCA folks have been railing on the way it infringes on First Amendment rights and the "fair use" clause in copyright law, but all the law's defenders have been answering with is "the ends justify the means" and even personal attacks against the detractors themselves. Things like:
"As far as I know there have been very few complaints from intellectual property holders."
--Rep. Howard Coble
"But I wonder if those same advocates would be as protective of a piece of technology that helps people obtain their personal information online."
--Allan Adler
You'd think that if they thought it was such a great and wonderful law they'd be able to defend it on its merrits alone, but I have yet to see that.
Pop in a tape/dvd/whatever of Cowboy Bebop, and when the opening credits are going by, listen to the music and think "dah dweeee dah dah dah dweee dow." It fits!
Boycott the RIAA, firebomb Adobe, blah blah blah...
How come nobody's mentioned writing their politicians about this? Try telling THEM how much you don't like sections 1201 and 1202 of Chapter 12 of Title 17 of the U. S. Code. It might be helpful to quote passages from it that you find particularly damning.
Tell them about Sklyarov and Felten v. RIAA and Universal v. Reimerdes and any other of the big cases I missed. Talk about how the law is being abused and violates the First Amendment. Mention that it could harm business. Keep in mind that neither they nor anybody they know actually read Slashdot (as hard as that may be to grasp).
Here's the President's address:
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500-0001
Here's the address for the Supreme Court:
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist
Supreme Court of the United States
1 1st St. NE
Washington, DC 20543-0002
Your representative? The House maintains a site here where it will tell you who your rep is after you tell them what your state and ZIP code are. Don't know your ZIP+4 code is? Go to the USPS site and put your address in here to find out. After you find out who it is, their address is on their website.
Senators? The Senate's web site maintains a list of the addresses (and phone numbers) of all current Senators organized by state here
Too cheap to pay the $1.70 in postage to write all these people? E-mail them. I was amazed last week when Tauzin acknowledged an e-mail I sent him with a snail-mail response. Sure, it was a blanket form letter on the topic, but it's a sign that it got read. (I still reccomend paper mail, though, since it's harder to ignore).
At the absolute least, you should realize that bitching and moaning to Slashdot about all this is about as effective as bitching and moaning to a brick wall.
Oh, and one last note: If you DO write them, don't flame them (unless you want another note added to your FBI file and possible surveilance/wiretaps/etc.).
Secondly, people don't pay $250 a plate for such dinners because the food or the service is just that good, but because they want most of the money to go to the EFF. On the other hand, I can't think of anybody who buys a CD because they want Sony or AOL-Time/Warner to have most of the money.
Third, if you want to get food from somebody else, or get the recipe from the chef and make it yourself, you can. You'll have a hard time legally getting CDs or even guitar tabs from someone other than the RIAA, though.
And last (that I can think of at this second) but not least, the EFF hasn't tried to make the act of jumping a fence a felony offense in and of itself.
Seriously though, I hope this convinces the attourney general and the new district judge that Microsoft's monopoly has serious detriments on the internet as well as the industry.
So VeriSign may get control of the.us TLD. They may be assholes about fees and services in.us, but they probably won't be able to touch existing lower-level domains. So while registering a mywebsite.us may require bending over, registering mywebsite.fl.us or mywebsite.ca.us or any other of the 50-some-odd state, district, and territory domains still controlled by the state/district/territory/whatever governments will still be the same.
"Furthermore, all the detection equipment is looking IN...gee, asteriods from earth. (cough)."
Actually, current NMD plans call for ground-based radar stations. No space-based.
"Not to mention that the destruction equipment (lasers, explosives, etc.) aren't required for asteriods. All that is require is a simple delta-v."
No lasers or explosives involved, either (unless you count the rocket fuel). It's a kinetic-kill vehicle. At any rate, though, the nearer the detection, the more acceleration you need, and in order to get monstrous acceleration/jerk/etc., you'd need to use (wait for it) explosives.
And if our detection equipment is as poor as you've mentioned, then perhaps improving the other half of asteroid defense isn't such a bad idea.
In order to have fusion, you need plasma (a state of matter beyond gas... instead of getting whole atoms/molecules, they get broken down into components) to fuse. In order to get plasma, you need to raise the gas in question to a very high temperature (in the case of fusion bombs, a fission bomb is detonnated to get the temperature high enough to cause fusion... it's this fission bomb that's the source of most of the radiation in a hydrogen bomb, as the force of the fusion explosion just spreads it around).
The problem with containing this plasma is keeping it hot enough to continue to be plasma so you can continue the fusion process. If you use a normal solid container, not only does the material need to be strong enough to hold the hot, pressurized plasma, the metal (ceramic, whatever) of the container will conduct heat away from the plasma as it touches, potentially cooling it back down to a gas and stopping all fusion. At the very least it'd be an energy drain.
In order to solve this, a tokamak uses magnetic fields to suspend the plasma in the middle of the doughnut (no, not the hole, the doughnut is made from a tube) so that the plasma never touches the outer walls.
If magnetic containment fails, the plasma will expand to fill the doughnut (losing heat in the same process that causes those canned air sprayers to get cold if you hold the trigger too long), and then come into contact with the walls of the container (which will then conduct heat away from the plasma). It won't be too much longer before the plamsa condenses back into a gas, possibly well before coming into contact with the walls of the container if it's designed right.
The container is strong enough to hold this, so if you lose magnetic containment within the container, you get...
... nothing. No boom, no jets of super-hot plasma, no escape of neutrons or radioactive particles, no nothing. It just don't work no more. Like a car that runs out of gas.
However, I'll still bet $10 that anti-nuke tree-huggers and the like will still protest heavily against it because there's a "nuclear" in "thermonuclear."
Slashdot Mirror
Is this before or after music trading is discussed before the House Un-American Activities Committee?
It may not die, but there's no reason to believe it will be anywhere near as nice as it is now, especially as far as connecting to it.
Sooner or later some suit is going to figure out that it would be cheaper to build Son of Internet (MechaInternet, whatever) than to try to "fix" the existing one. It will have everything the suits want, none of what they don't want, and will be built explicitly to make money. As this comes about, more and more people will want access to this gleaming new monstrousity than to the Internet that we all know and love. Why go to the old one when the store/bank/tv channel you want to go to is only on Internet 2?
And what happens when more people want access to this new network than the old one? It will be more profitable to sell access to the new one than the old one. The ISPs we've come to expect as a commodity will all but vanish during this mass migration, because here isn't where the money is.
So maybe the internet will still be around and it will be wild and free and feeling the grass between its toes blah blah blah, just like it was ten years ago. But we'll also have to connect just like we did ten years ago: by dialling into some small BBS that just can't afford all the bells and whistles we've come to take for granted with current ISPs. Luxuries like bandwidth and phone lines and connection time.
Sure, you'll still have the Internet, but you'll only be allowed to connect for about ten minutes a day at 33.6 kbps.
Damn, somebody beat me to the punch...
It will take at least 6 such Linux distros to catch up to the cost of an OEM install if you look at it this way, so by the example given Windows is still winning.
As a footnote, it's crap like that (as well as the even-more-restrictive OEM liscencing) that has caused me to never buy an OEM machine for personal use again.
Your forgetting the registration racket for XP: The Home Game and Microsoft's stated reasons for doing so.
At that point I countered with the way the movie was more of a Steven Segal flick than Harrison Ford, the way it was more action gun flick than anything that had anything to do with the intrigue it pretended it had, so on and so forth...
In short, it is possible for those of us who saw the original anything to hate a derivative on its own merits.
... in a major player in the MPAA making a new Tron movie?
- That only by having a provider-independent boundary can we guarantee that a change of ISP will not require a costly internal restructuring or consolidation of subnets."
It is not in the larger ISP's (AOL, Baby Bells, etc.) to allow customers to easily change providers.
"- To allow easy growth of the subscribers' networks without need to go back to ISPs for more space (except for that relatively small number of subscribers for which a /48 is not enough)."
The more devices you have in your network, the more bandwidth the ISP will be exptected to provide. Bandwidth costs ISPs money, and many home broadband providers to home users don't like you using all your alloted bandwitdth for any period of time.
"- To remove the burden from the ISPs and registries of judging sites' needs for address space, unless the site requests more space than a /48."
If they maintain control over those decisions, they can keep a cap on the bandwidth they need to provide. Besides, everybody likes hanging on to power.
"- To allow the site to maintain a single reverse-DNS zone covering all prefixes."
Then how will the ISPs charge you for using their DNS servers?
From where I sit, the big ISPs/telecoms stand to make more money in maintaining the current IPv4 structure of the internet than moving to this implementation of IPv6. I mean, come on: Charge $40/month for a /48 or for a /128? You do the math.
"and /128 when it is absolutely known that one and only one device is connecting."
Unless they want to dish out huge amounts of money upgrading their hardware and increasing their bandwidth, your ISP is going to give you one and only one IP. For us home users, pricing and distribution won't be much different from IPv4.
So they're requesting for comments before it gets publicized as a Request For Comments? No wonder the internet is so fucked up!
Is this the same FBI that lost all those books full of evidence in the McVeigh case? The same FBI that has managed to lose God knows how many government-issued and government-bought pistols and computers (with who knows what on the hard disks)?
The FBI's reputation is going down the tubes right now, and any Congresscritter that actually goes along with this idea is shooting themself in their political foot.
"Any deficiencies or faults in the quality of the defendant's goods are likely to reflect negatively upon, tarnish and seriously injure the reputation which Lucasfilm has established for goods and services marketed under its Light Saber mark. This confusion is likely to result in loss of revenues to Lucasfilm and damage to its reputation." That seems to describe Phantom Menace perfectly.
Porn is an IP business, and freely distributing their material will (in theory) put them out of business. This is "good."
So... what do they do now? Eliminate Gnutella and save the porn industry, or leave it be and let kids download German scheissen videoes?
Actually, now that I mention it, there's an awful lot of free porn on the internet, and yet they're still making money to some extent. Perhaps this can be used to show that arguments by the MPAA and RIAA are full of holes?
"As far as I know there have been very few complaints from intellectual property holders."
--Rep. Howard Coble
"But I wonder if those same advocates would be as protective of a piece of technology that helps people obtain their personal information online."
--Allan Adler
You'd think that if they thought it was such a great and wonderful law they'd be able to defend it on its merrits alone, but I have yet to see that.
Pop in a tape/dvd/whatever of Cowboy Bebop, and when the opening credits are going by, listen to the music and think "dah dweeee dah dah dah dweee dow." It fits!
How come nobody's mentioned writing their politicians about this? Try telling THEM how much you don't like sections 1201 and 1202 of Chapter 12 of Title 17 of the U. S. Code. It might be helpful to quote passages from it that you find particularly damning.
Tell them about Sklyarov and Felten v. RIAA and Universal v. Reimerdes and any other of the big cases I missed. Talk about how the law is being abused and violates the First Amendment. Mention that it could harm business. Keep in mind that neither they nor anybody they know actually read Slashdot (as hard as that may be to grasp).
Here's the President's address:
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500-0001
Here's the address for the Supreme Court:
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist
Supreme Court of the United States
1 1st St. NE
Washington, DC 20543-0002
Your representative? The House maintains a site here where it will tell you who your rep is after you tell them what your state and ZIP code are. Don't know your ZIP+4 code is? Go to the USPS site and put your address in here to find out. After you find out who it is, their address is on their website.
Senators? The Senate's web site maintains a list of the addresses (and phone numbers) of all current Senators organized by state here
Too cheap to pay the $1.70 in postage to write all these people? E-mail them. I was amazed last week when Tauzin acknowledged an e-mail I sent him with a snail-mail response. Sure, it was a blanket form letter on the topic, but it's a sign that it got read. (I still reccomend paper mail, though, since it's harder to ignore).
At the absolute least, you should realize that bitching and moaning to Slashdot about all this is about as effective as bitching and moaning to a brick wall.
Oh, and one last note: If you DO write them, don't flame them (unless you want another note added to your FBI file and possible surveilance/wiretaps/etc.).
Secondly, people don't pay $250 a plate for such dinners because the food or the service is just that good, but because they want most of the money to go to the EFF. On the other hand, I can't think of anybody who buys a CD because they want Sony or AOL-Time/Warner to have most of the money.
Third, if you want to get food from somebody else, or get the recipe from the chef and make it yourself, you can. You'll have a hard time legally getting CDs or even guitar tabs from someone other than the RIAA, though.
And last (that I can think of at this second) but not least, the EFF hasn't tried to make the act of jumping a fence a felony offense in and of itself.
What, donating to the EFF isn't tax-deductable?
Seriously though, I hope this convinces the attourney general and the new district judge that Microsoft's monopoly has serious detriments on the internet as well as the industry.
So VeriSign may get control of the .us TLD. They may be assholes about fees and services in .us, but they probably won't be able to touch existing lower-level domains. So while registering a mywebsite.us may require bending over, registering mywebsite.fl.us or mywebsite.ca.us or any other of the 50-some-odd state, district, and territory domains still controlled by the state/district/territory/whatever governments will still be the same.
No it's not. By not touching Java with their browser, they have the security of not getting sued by Sun again. :)
Sounds like a great application for IP over avian carriers to me!
Actually, current NMD plans call for ground-based radar stations. No space-based.
"Not to mention that the destruction equipment (lasers, explosives, etc.) aren't required for asteriods. All that is require is a simple delta-v."
No lasers or explosives involved, either (unless you count the rocket fuel). It's a kinetic-kill vehicle. At any rate, though, the nearer the detection, the more acceleration you need, and in order to get monstrous acceleration/jerk/etc., you'd need to use (wait for it) explosives.
And if our detection equipment is as poor as you've mentioned, then perhaps improving the other half of asteroid defense isn't such a bad idea.
The problem with containing this plasma is keeping it hot enough to continue to be plasma so you can continue the fusion process. If you use a normal solid container, not only does the material need to be strong enough to hold the hot, pressurized plasma, the metal (ceramic, whatever) of the container will conduct heat away from the plasma as it touches, potentially cooling it back down to a gas and stopping all fusion. At the very least it'd be an energy drain.
In order to solve this, a tokamak uses magnetic fields to suspend the plasma in the middle of the doughnut (no, not the hole, the doughnut is made from a tube) so that the plasma never touches the outer walls.
If magnetic containment fails, the plasma will expand to fill the doughnut (losing heat in the same process that causes those canned air sprayers to get cold if you hold the trigger too long), and then come into contact with the walls of the container (which will then conduct heat away from the plasma). It won't be too much longer before the plamsa condenses back into a gas, possibly well before coming into contact with the walls of the container if it's designed right.
The container is strong enough to hold this, so if you lose magnetic containment within the container, you get...
However, I'll still bet $10 that anti-nuke tree-huggers and the like will still protest heavily against it because there's a "nuclear" in "thermonuclear."
He's complaining about something or other freezing over.