The way currency became handled by the Federal Reserve was not a good thing. There are a lot of people that think that currency that isn't worth it's value on it's own is a bad thing. They maintain that we should only be coining money out of precious metals. I don't go that far. I feel that the currency is acceptable as long as it is absolutely backed by an equivalent amount of valuable substance.
The Gold Standard kept the currency limited and directly backed with something with real value. Taking our currency off the gold standard allowed for out of control printing and massive inflation. The government was able to print money so that it could spend it as needed. That meant that at any given time, the amount of currency in circulation could, for example, double.
Your right, US currency is fiat money. That makes it only worth as much as the US can convince people it is worth. It does not make for a stable currency, as evidenced by the heavy inflation that US currency sees. If we remained on the Gold Standard, we would at least have to acquire more precious metal to back the increased printing of currency.
One of the other things that was important about the Standard was that you were able to redeem paper money for its equivalent in precious metals. It allowed for more security in the currency.
I know I'm feeding a troll, but screw it, this is too blatently foolish to not respond. No, I'm not a Bush supporter. Just because I think the Democrats are outright crazy wrong does not immediately mean that I'm a Republican. I think they are the same thing, and that they're both wrong.
First off, the Federal in the US is supposed to be minute. It is anything but, given that it has nearly total control of the operation of the country and economy. That is the opposite of the way the Constitution was written for it to work. Social Security is a flop of a pyramid scheme. There aren't enough people paying in to make it work, and besides, if people were suckling on the teat of the Federal, they would have substantially more money to invest and prepare for their eventual retirement, well, if they wanted to retire. Social Security limits freedom and remove substantial money from people's pockets. Most people don't have the choice of opting out of the system.
For a little perspective, government employees don't pay into Social Security. Did you know that? Probably not, since you're obviously blasting my observation with no support and heavily biased (and easily disproven) opinion.
The US taxes well over 50% of citizens' income. That is horrendous. I don't care what other countries do, because I think they are wrong, too. I live in the US and I care about what *my* country does, and whether I think *my* country is doing it wrong. If Belgium is doing it differently, for example, fine, that is their decision and those citizens can sort it out.
Try calming down your anger and stop lashing out at people who disagree with you. It shows you to be infantile.
Oh hell no. Domino/Notes is one of the most powerful and flexible systems out there for collaboration. Counterpoint with Exchange/Outlook where you must do it MS' one true way, and you can't extend anything.
If you had problems with Notes, it is because the administrators didn't know what they were doing. It isn't easy to get Notes up and running decent, where as it is easy to do that with Exchange. However, with a little more knowledge you can make Notes run very well. To do something remotely similar with Exchange requires you to be practically an Exchange god. I'm defining "decent" as just good enough to work.
Domino/Notes is also less expensive, and runs on more platforms. It scales a *HUGE* amount more than Exchange, and does what it does on a lot less hardware than Exchange would. You can use it for more than Exchange can do, too.
Honestly, "but calendaring" has to be the stupidest excuse to use something like Exchange. There *are* a ton of products out there that will do the same thing. Many of them have been around longer than Exchange/Outlook. All of them cost less money. If you were to choose the best balance of features, expandability, and TCO, I guarantee you that the answer would not be Exchange.
Before you blast something like Domino/Notes, try using it in a properly set up environment. Really, if the choice is Exchange or Domino, the common frustrations of Notes are worth avoiding the nightmare of Exchange.
Just because he did one thing correctly does not make everything he did correct. The workplace and labor laws were coming anyway. However, for FDR's signature on that, we also ended up with a lot of terrible programs, such as welfare and Social Security. While we aren't working 7 days a week and 10 hours a day, we *are* working 5 days and 8 hours a day for 60 years, and the majority of people in the country barely keep their heads above water in the process. Add to that the high taxation that everyone endures, and it's pretty messy. We have an unstable currency (see Federal Reserve and the gold standard). We have tremendous numbers of people working for government instead of in private sector. And then there's the fact that even parts of the labor reform have been bad for the country...
No, FDR was not a good thing, and we shouldn't thank him for all the harm he caused.
Trillian would easily be the nicest client out there... if they would drop most of the skinning and make it keyboard accessible. Skinning seems to be the single largest problem with UIs today.
Yes, Miranda is so good that it doesn't support huge chunks of features in the IM systems. I've looked at it for years, and the reason I wouldn't use it today is the same as why I didn't use it then: they outright refuse to support the AIM OSCAR protocol, and so the functionality is very lacking.
That alone makes Trillian and gAIM much better than Miranda.
Exactly, the EU is a group of countries. It's an international organization and in the current system, it belongs in ".int", which is where it has a domain right now. All the independant member countries have their own ccTLDs for their businesses. You can't base a company out of the EU anyway, you base it out of one of the member countries. I can understand that the EU wants to do away with the distinction between countries, but that makes for another mess like what '.com' and similar are.
The US isn't really playing alone with it, but they do retain oversight with ICANN. That doesn't mean they are calling the shots, but they certainly could pull rank on ICANN. Best bet would be to just convince the US DoC to drop their oversight function, as was expected to happen next year (unfortunately they decided against it). It doesn't need to be an existing organization. It really shouldn't be a political body... you see the problems with the US gov. having a say over it can cause. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole dispute will lead to the US government taking tighter control. That's the way of the current administration, much to all of our dismay.
It seems like Poland makes it hard for people, then. I'm not saying Brazil is wrong to do online taxes, just that if they depend on it, they are being foolish. Too much can go wrong there, and not having other good options will probably burn them badly in the future. In the US, while they don't have free tax filing online, they at least let you retrieve whatever forms you need online. You can mail them in, or you can pay someone to electronic file them. Some things you can do over the telephone. Poland doesn't allow for the paper mail option?
Sorry, I wasn't assuming you were a script kiddie, but it really looked like you'd set up a home network and were claiming to be an expert on DNS as a result. We both know that's a favorite pasttime on slashdot!
I don't read polish, but there are a few bits of your site's english that could misrepresent your level of ability and experience. Unfortunately, I'm not doing much right now with Netstylus. We're a group of experienced people that also have day jobs, so we haven't been advertising for projects. Hopefully the day jobs will get a little less time-consuming so that we can get back to working towards getting our company large and much more profitable. It would be nice to just to part-time work, and spend most of my time working for myself again. Our businesses are very similar, though I suspect you've been a bit more successful at it.
The DNS thing is interesting, but I think more bad blood is just being generated by the political big wigs. The US wasn't going to coalesce over this idea via threats from the UN or the EU. It's good that people being unhappy over the current root zone setup is now well known, but most citizens of any country just don't care. That isn't going to change any time soon, unfortunately, but they might back their country just because the other guy isn't them. What everyone knows of the UN/EU side makes them look bad. It's like that had no plan, and they just wanted it right now, no discussion. By the time something got out that said otherwise, it was too late for many people; they'd already decided on one side or the other.
It is certainly a change you would make with a new OS release. There are ways of doing this without breaking everything out there, too. The one I like follows.
You leave the existing API intact, and change the data store method. To be logo certified on the new OS, you need to change the way the data store interaction happens to the new method. This lets you have new applications that work the right way, and they can code a fallback for older versions of Windows. Old applications use the old API, which redirects through the new data store.
New data store could be a number of things. The easiest way is to seperate out the types of data. Move around where you have data stored so that hardware is in one place, CLSIDs are somewhere else, etc. Definitely not in the same binary file of doom. That way you can have the system used objects in editable files in Windows, like how UNIX puts that stuff in/etc. Applications should store their settings in the user profile. If access speed was a concern, you could do something similar to hashed data, like how most MTAs do it.
The UNIX way is to have system-wide settings and app defaults in/etc, and any user settings and deviations in the home directory. Windows could definitely move to a similar method. It would just be quite a bit of work rewriting the API to make it transparent for existing apps.
It's just a different perspective, that's all. I look at it that various life evolved to take advantage of aspects of the system. There was a lot of CO2, so life evolved to consume it. That created a lot of oxygen, so life evolved to consume that. It created a cycle, but not out of respect for the system. If humans made the environment unbearable for some life, that life would die and new life would replace it. If we went too far, we would be the life that died and was replaced. I would say that if you were to define some system, that would be the system, at heart. In that respect, there isn't any responsibily of one life form to any other.
I consider humans to be "on top" because we were the first to evolve in a way that lets us shape the world on a large scale. If we don't like the world, we have the capacity to actively change it. Nothing else can do that right now. We're still a part of the system, just a part that I consider to have evolved a much stronger set of traits than any other form of life. However, since we're still bound to the system, we can't go around changing things irresponsibly, because we might end up killing ourselves out.
If we wish to maintain the status quo, then yes we certainly would need to do it exactly your way. I like the world the way it is, too, so I'd like to see humanity stop polluting it. I'm just looking at that system as having a different basic structure.
If the EU were a country, then nobody would be complaining about creating a ccTLD for it. There just isn't good reason to create a new TLD for the EU. I wouldn't have a problem with refusing new registrations in many of the TLDs, such as.com and.net.
UN is a voluntary organization with no ability to create law. They are mired in political squabbles and tend to accomplish nothing. There are serious problems with everything they run. It would be foolish to give control of something as important as DNS to an organization that cannot keep what it *does* have working right. You're right, I would complain about any organization that's like the UN. They are not a government, and I would never support the existence of a global government. They eliminate freedom.
Running taxes over the Internet *is* foolish. It is fundamentally a network that you do not control. There must always exist a way to do such things without using the Internet. That said, Brazil has nothing to worry about in this matter. As long as they can guarantee the stability of their links, they can provide access to their citizens, and their citizens can do their taxes.
As a net/sysadmin running my own networks, I wouldn't broadly enable a facility that allows any client to update records. It means your records cannot be trusted. Having a zone dedicated to dyndns updates is fine, but your servers, etc, should never be located within it. Redundant and syncronized just means you have slave servers and some form of zone transfers. Everyone running DNS should have those two things. It doesn't mean you know how it works, it means that you know how to configure a DNS server.
TLD access stats don't mean anything commercially. All it tells you is that you requested some.com, or some.uk, domain. Most DNS servers shouldn't ever even be hitting the root zones. Higher level domain queries are actually useful, since they tell you what site someone is accessing. That means the servers running.com are valuable for mining stats, but not the servers running the root zone.
I oppose the government control of most things. The governments job is limited, and it is not to manage the economy, or some network. It is to provide protection to the country's citizens, a framework for legal disputes, provide some basic services, and protect freedom. It is certainly not a governments job to run the Internet, or to run DNS. It *should* be commercial, since the network is commercially owned and used. There is commercial control of telephone networks, TV, radio, drugs, cars, trains, etc, and those are vital, so I suppose the government should take those over too?
First off, I'm opposed to a foreign government trying to supercede another government. The EU has absolutely no authority over the US. The UN is both not a government, and it has no authority over the US government. This is as it should be. I can't vote in the UN, and I'm not a citizen of the UN, so the UN can, quite honestly, shove it. If the UN thinks it can create law, then it has simply outlived its usefulness.
Absolutely nothing gives us the right to do any of that. However, humans exist now, and humans are in a fact a natural force. We evolved to be capable of manipulating our environment because it was an evolutionary advantage. To not do it because of some random insect or whatnot is to defy our evolution. In that right, as long as future generations exist, humans have served nature.
Now, modern humans *should* consider their actions more, because we can understand the benefit and the disadvantage of things. We shouldn't be screwing up our planet just because it's the cheap way or the lazy way. Even from the evolutionary standpoint, that does not help our chances of survival.
However, humans are at the top of things today. Why so many people are willing to sacrifice humans for some random animal is hard to understand. I like animals, too, but I like people a lot more. Like I said, we're at the top of things. I'll admit, it sounds very callous, but if killing a kitten cured cancer, there would be a whole lot of dead kittens out there, and that's better than a whole lot of dead humans.
Also, don't worry, GP assumes that humans won't exist in the future. That might be true, or it might not be true. We don't know, and that makes it conjecture.
I've seen this kind of horrid description of "love" before. It's generally held by people who have never experienced it, those that have been rejected considerably, or those trying to convince someone it's okay to just sleep with them for the hell of it. I argued then, and I would argue now, that the view is completely incorrect. The people that I have seen peddle it have tended to be heavily self-centered and wholly willing to exploit anyone for their own gain, and generally for their own amusement. It must be terrible to live in a world so empty and depressing, especially as compared to a world where love exists.
Remember, for most of the US public transit isn't an option. You should encourage them to fight for public transportation where appropriate and to carpool whenever possible.:) That will get us much more!
Honestly, China, Brazil, and Iran can do what they want to. The EU has no authority in the situation, and the UN is sounding like a child not getting its way. The EU happens to be the "European Union", and all the mentioned countries are *not in* the EU. They really should probably try to get out the story more that they are not trying to hijack the system.
I don't think that Brazil is that likely to run their own independant system. They might set up national cache servers, just in case, but they get no benefit and significant disadvantage by splitting off from the existing situation.
China will probably do it anyway, unless they are the ones running the system through the UN, and then *everyone* would suffer. The government in that country is more than just a little totalitarian, what with the lack of any real freedom and the state run censoring of everything. Unless something changes there, I certainly wouldn't want to use any Internet service that they set up.
Who knows about Iran... they have an awful lot going on. I don't think running their own DNS is at the top of the list.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what the EU thinks it is trying to do. The point is that the *result* would be the large-scale fracturing of DNS. It is of course good to encourage diplomacy and discussion, but this has started to go a little further than that. This article is helpful, in that it says they don't want to dismantle what is already there. However, after all that has been printed up to now, I think they should do a lot more to quell the paranoia.
Then I suppose the EU would start to look a lot more like a very powerful government forcing member states to do what it wants. I suspect that wouldn't work *that* well. Now the independant countries might decide to pass those laws, and their ISPs would probably be rather upset by it. I don't see that as likely to happen.
Well, that isn't what this is all about. This is about the UN and various government wanting to be in charge, and the UN being able to collect monies off the system. They don't have the stability of DNS at heart in this one.
That said, yes, it should be run by a global, and government independant, body. It *definitely* should not be run by the UN, or in any way influenced by the UN. That is making the situation worse than it is now.
Also, the ".eu" TLD is silly. Each EU member country has their own TLD. There is a zone called ".int" for international organizations, such as the currently existing "un.int" and "eu.int". That is not a reason for anything, but one of several excuses to try to back up their move to take control of DNS.
I would much rather the currently reliably functioning system stay the way it is and work to free it from political oversight than to give it to an even more inefficient and dangerous organization.
Also, just because Brazil did something stupid doesn't mean that everyone should help them fix it. Running their taxes over the Internet was their decision, and they knew what they were getting into when they did it. *Everyone* knew that DNS was run by various educational institutions, private companies, and the US military, with oversight by the US Dept of Commerce. It was not only public, but common knowledge and trivial to find out from "www.root-servers.org".
As far as the logging concerns, having the UN run something does not make it immune to that. It would probably make it worse, in all honesty, but that isn't important right now. What *is* important is that any DNS operator running any TLD *could* log all queries and gather statistics. For one thing, statistic gathering is essential to system operation. For another, logging those queries would be next to impossible, considering the sheer volume of requests. Even if it were possible, what difference does it make? Unless you're querying those servers directly (which you probably should not be doing) then they know that "ISP X" or "country y" or whatever queried that once today. I don't think you really understand how DNS works, considering a comment like that. Take a read on it and such concerns would be largely eliminated.
I'm not disputing that DNS has issues, because it does. I'm saying government should not be involved, and bigger government is even worse.
It isn't technologically difficult to place a new protocol on the Internet. The problem is one of motivation and money. To route IPv6 traffic, for example, one would have to replace or reconfigure every router, and most servers, on the Internet. There is a lot of routing hardware out there that doesn't know IPv6.
Spyware, spamming, and fraud are social issues, and should be dealt with that way. Maybe a new protocol will help clean up some of it for a while, but there will be new ways to start it up again discovered. Then you're back at square one, but with a new protocol.
IP address spoofing is a technical problem that you can already largely prevent. It's just that a lot of things are not properly configured.
It isn't so much that IPv4 has problems, but that it runs encapsulated in other protocols on many networks. A lot of fiber runs things like ATM, and you have to frame IPv4 inside of that. It makes the hardware more complicated is really all.
I wouldn't worry about it; you can't decentralize DNS as the protocol doesn't work that way. You would have to come up with something new. I'm not sure how a new protocol that can do the same thing, but decentralized, would work. Well, without going back to basically copying around huge hosts files to everything so that they know already know where things are.
Besides, it would take at least several years for whatever that new thing is to be as trustworthy and reliable as we expect DNS to be. It doesn't matter how good the tech would be, because people wouldn't trust it until it was proven to stand up to time.
The US isn't even in control of most of TLD work, and they aren't even talking about the IP addressing schemes or anything with this squabble. They're just talking about the root zone. That isn't even.com,.org, or.uk! It's the implied "." after each of those; the set of servers that tell systems where to ask for a TLD servers. The control that it gives is really to decide who is running the TLDs, and what TLDs are added to the root zone.
This is a very simple function that we really don't need to potentially screw up with politics. If the UN really cared about the whole thing, they wouldn't be fighting for control of a largely private run system, but to simply get rid of the political influence entirely. This is just a power grab, and an obvious one at that.
I can certainly understand the US being upset that the UN is attempting to tell them they aren't allowed to oversee that anymore. The US is a sovereign nation that has always been taking care of the root servers, and now some other countries are trying to force the US to do what they say. That is bound to really piss off those in power, just on general principle. These countries piss and moan about the US going around trying to tell other countries what to do, and now those countries are trying to do the same thing, with very similar results.
(FWIW, the US might not have built the modern Internet, but they did fund quite a bit of the original networking and research involved.)
In a true democracy you have many issues, and several failings. The issues are pretty much hashed out a millions times: population, voting complexity, time for responses, etc. The failings have also been fairly well discussed, too. The biggest is the inability to avoid the "tyranny of the majority".
Going your way, you end up without States rights, with a watered down local level, and a massive Federal government. This is exactly what happened after the 17th amendment passed, which called for the direct election of Senators to Congress. This means that you end up having a homogeneous legal stucture within your country. That also means that if the majority voted a law in that you disagree with, your only choice to avoid it is to leave the country. It ends up reducing freedom as a result of lack of choice. Doing it the way that the US *had* done it allows for the local governments to have the most power (where the people directly influence it), followed by the States, and then the Federal. The Federal was comprised half of representative chosed by the people, and half those appointed by the States. The States would be able to keep the municipalities in line, the Federal kept the States safe and ensured cooperation between them.
The important thing is that if you didn't like something in your town, you could move to the next one. If you didn't like your State, you could move to another way. The incentive to keep population, and that the reps making the laws were elected by the people, kept the laws much more sane. If we did it your way, the cities would carry everything and that's it. We'd have even larger and worse social programs (yes, that's possible), and even more enforced uniformity.
The Constitutional system of the US is almost, by not quite completely, the opposite of fascism.
(dictionary.com) "Fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism."
The original US system did not have central authority. It had tiers of government with the largest being strictly limited in power. It also included a system to remove bad laws if the lawmaking bodies refused to do so, either through courts, election, or higher levels of government. The US system also *clearly* did not have a dictator. Social controls were to be kept out of government, hence the Bill of Rights that specifically prevented the government for being involved in them; this also clearly stated that the government was not supposed to censor. Commerce was supposed to be encouraged between States, and evenly tariffed/excised where appropriate, and nothing more. Social programs were not allowed on the Federal level, as they were not enumerated.
I won't say that the US doesn't have racism or nationalism, because that isn't true. However, the US was *obviously* not designed as fascism. Just because the system has been corrupted does not mean it was always that way. And please, learn the words you use, it makes you sound stupid to use a word that is clearly inappropriate.
I would agree with you about how we don't have a democracy, being federalist republic and all, and that it is the better way of doing it. However, this government was formed under the idea of being for the people and by the people. It doesn't say "for the corporations" or "for the minority".
On slavery... the whole bit with slavery in the Civil War had nothing to do with wanting to have a free country. That wasn't what the move was about, and it wasn't what the war was over. It was done to cause problems for the South.
On civil rights law... civil rights is a great thing, however *I* would've voted against that legislation. It has done incredible harm to this country. Now a reasonably worded piece of law that didn't have tremendous issues and clauses that required discrimination would be a law that I would've voted for.
It's hard to say whether there would have been popular support for such legislation since it is so long after the fact and there were often so many other things going on, too. You're probably right about the two you mentioned, though. However, the US was the only country in the western world to use violence to get rid of slavery, and that should say something about whether there would've been support if it had been done in a different way.
I definitely wouldn't say that Congress is supposed to protect the minority, though. It's purpose is quite different from that, and that is a large part of the problem in the US today. Congress does far more than they should, and legislates tremendously outside the bounds of their Constitutional role.
In the case of this particular legislation, there is no reason that they should be passing a law about it. It is not regulating commerce, it is not a tariff or excise, and it is not in national defense. I'm reasonably certain that there is no mention of technological restrictions over broadcast content being one of the powers granted to the Federal in the Constitution. If the industry wants to do such a thing, then the industry can try, but it is wholly inappropriate for the Federal to be doing anything with it.
Every cellular phone that I've ever used gets toasty if you use it for any length of time. They're also putting off enough EM radiation to throw signal 7-10 miles. The microwave radiation they throw off isn't very penetrating, but luckily you have the transmitter right next to an opening that leads to your brain.
Cell phones put out between 0.5W and 3W of high frequency radiation (824MHz ~ 2.0GHz).
Heh, well the captcha for this post was "bastards", and that's rather appropriate...
Anyway, my point was that they Federal doesn't really have that power, but they're doing it anyway. If you look through the US Code, you will almost cretainly find some odd provision that would let them do this. It still doesn't make it Constitutional (and it certainly isn't that).
My point on the concept of a corporation is that they are supposed to exist to serve society. The idea was that for some things you needed a liability shield, so that you could continue to operation if someone screwed up, and also to protect the people working there from personal suits. They are allowed by State charter, and the State can revoke that charter if they please. They are supposed to be nothing more than that, and are not supposed to be considered a citizen in any respect. That they considered differently today was a 100 year old screw up, and is certainly not supported by the Constitution.
I meant that you should never be doing anything "national security" that relies on something private sector to keep working. People like to go on about defense contracts for this one, but that isn't opposed to what I'm saying. A defense contractor creates something on behalf of the government, and then turns that something over to the government. In that respect, the government is not relying on the civilian contractor for anything after the product/tech is created. They often choose to have them keep manufacturing the item in question, and sometimes that is stipulated in the contracts.
Slashdot Mirror
The way currency became handled by the Federal Reserve was not a good thing. There are a lot of people that think that currency that isn't worth it's value on it's own is a bad thing. They maintain that we should only be coining money out of precious metals. I don't go that far. I feel that the currency is acceptable as long as it is absolutely backed by an equivalent amount of valuable substance.
The Gold Standard kept the currency limited and directly backed with something with real value. Taking our currency off the gold standard allowed for out of control printing and massive inflation. The government was able to print money so that it could spend it as needed. That meant that at any given time, the amount of currency in circulation could, for example, double.
Your right, US currency is fiat money. That makes it only worth as much as the US can convince people it is worth. It does not make for a stable currency, as evidenced by the heavy inflation that US currency sees. If we remained on the Gold Standard, we would at least have to acquire more precious metal to back the increased printing of currency.
One of the other things that was important about the Standard was that you were able to redeem paper money for its equivalent in precious metals. It allowed for more security in the currency.
I know I'm feeding a troll, but screw it, this is too blatently foolish to not respond. No, I'm not a Bush supporter. Just because I think the Democrats are outright crazy wrong does not immediately mean that I'm a Republican. I think they are the same thing, and that they're both wrong.
First off, the Federal in the US is supposed to be minute. It is anything but, given that it has nearly total control of the operation of the country and economy. That is the opposite of the way the Constitution was written for it to work. Social Security is a flop of a pyramid scheme. There aren't enough people paying in to make it work, and besides, if people were suckling on the teat of the Federal, they would have substantially more money to invest and prepare for their eventual retirement, well, if they wanted to retire. Social Security limits freedom and remove substantial money from people's pockets. Most people don't have the choice of opting out of the system.
For a little perspective, government employees don't pay into Social Security. Did you know that? Probably not, since you're obviously blasting my observation with no support and heavily biased (and easily disproven) opinion.
The US taxes well over 50% of citizens' income. That is horrendous. I don't care what other countries do, because I think they are wrong, too. I live in the US and I care about what *my* country does, and whether I think *my* country is doing it wrong. If Belgium is doing it differently, for example, fine, that is their decision and those citizens can sort it out.
Try calming down your anger and stop lashing out at people who disagree with you. It shows you to be infantile.
Oh hell no. Domino/Notes is one of the most powerful and flexible systems out there for collaboration. Counterpoint with Exchange/Outlook where you must do it MS' one true way, and you can't extend anything.
If you had problems with Notes, it is because the administrators didn't know what they were doing. It isn't easy to get Notes up and running decent, where as it is easy to do that with Exchange. However, with a little more knowledge you can make Notes run very well. To do something remotely similar with Exchange requires you to be practically an Exchange god. I'm defining "decent" as just good enough to work.
Domino/Notes is also less expensive, and runs on more platforms. It scales a *HUGE* amount more than Exchange, and does what it does on a lot less hardware than Exchange would. You can use it for more than Exchange can do, too.
Honestly, "but calendaring" has to be the stupidest excuse to use something like Exchange. There *are* a ton of products out there that will do the same thing. Many of them have been around longer than Exchange/Outlook. All of them cost less money. If you were to choose the best balance of features, expandability, and TCO, I guarantee you that the answer would not be Exchange.
Before you blast something like Domino/Notes, try using it in a properly set up environment. Really, if the choice is Exchange or Domino, the common frustrations of Notes are worth avoiding the nightmare of Exchange.
Just because he did one thing correctly does not make everything he did correct. The workplace and labor laws were coming anyway. However, for FDR's signature on that, we also ended up with a lot of terrible programs, such as welfare and Social Security. While we aren't working 7 days a week and 10 hours a day, we *are* working 5 days and 8 hours a day for 60 years, and the majority of people in the country barely keep their heads above water in the process. Add to that the high taxation that everyone endures, and it's pretty messy. We have an unstable currency (see Federal Reserve and the gold standard). We have tremendous numbers of people working for government instead of in private sector. And then there's the fact that even parts of the labor reform have been bad for the country...
No, FDR was not a good thing, and we shouldn't thank him for all the harm he caused.
Trillian would easily be the nicest client out there... if they would drop most of the skinning and make it keyboard accessible. Skinning seems to be the single largest problem with UIs today.
Yes, Miranda is so good that it doesn't support huge chunks of features in the IM systems. I've looked at it for years, and the reason I wouldn't use it today is the same as why I didn't use it then: they outright refuse to support the AIM OSCAR protocol, and so the functionality is very lacking.
That alone makes Trillian and gAIM much better than Miranda.
Exactly, the EU is a group of countries. It's an international organization and in the current system, it belongs in ".int", which is where it has a domain right now. All the independant member countries have their own ccTLDs for their businesses. You can't base a company out of the EU anyway, you base it out of one of the member countries. I can understand that the EU wants to do away with the distinction between countries, but that makes for another mess like what '.com' and similar are.
The US isn't really playing alone with it, but they do retain oversight with ICANN. That doesn't mean they are calling the shots, but they certainly could pull rank on ICANN. Best bet would be to just convince the US DoC to drop their oversight function, as was expected to happen next year (unfortunately they decided against it). It doesn't need to be an existing organization. It really shouldn't be a political body... you see the problems with the US gov. having a say over it can cause. I wouldn't be surprised if this whole dispute will lead to the US government taking tighter control. That's the way of the current administration, much to all of our dismay.
It seems like Poland makes it hard for people, then. I'm not saying Brazil is wrong to do online taxes, just that if they depend on it, they are being foolish. Too much can go wrong there, and not having other good options will probably burn them badly in the future. In the US, while they don't have free tax filing online, they at least let you retrieve whatever forms you need online. You can mail them in, or you can pay someone to electronic file them. Some things you can do over the telephone. Poland doesn't allow for the paper mail option?
Sorry, I wasn't assuming you were a script kiddie, but it really looked like you'd set up a home network and were claiming to be an expert on DNS as a result. We both know that's a favorite pasttime on slashdot!
I don't read polish, but there are a few bits of your site's english that could misrepresent your level of ability and experience. Unfortunately, I'm not doing much right now with Netstylus. We're a group of experienced people that also have day jobs, so we haven't been advertising for projects. Hopefully the day jobs will get a little less time-consuming so that we can get back to working towards getting our company large and much more profitable. It would be nice to just to part-time work, and spend most of my time working for myself again. Our businesses are very similar, though I suspect you've been a bit more successful at it.
The DNS thing is interesting, but I think more bad blood is just being generated by the political big wigs. The US wasn't going to coalesce over this idea via threats from the UN or the EU. It's good that people being unhappy over the current root zone setup is now well known, but most citizens of any country just don't care. That isn't going to change any time soon, unfortunately, but they might back their country just because the other guy isn't them. What everyone knows of the UN/EU side makes them look bad. It's like that had no plan, and they just wanted it right now, no discussion. By the time something got out that said otherwise, it was too late for many people; they'd already decided on one side or the other.
It is certainly a change you would make with a new OS release. There are ways of doing this without breaking everything out there, too. The one I like follows.
/etc. Applications should store their settings in the user profile. If access speed was a concern, you could do something similar to hashed data, like how most MTAs do it.
/etc, and any user settings and deviations in the home directory. Windows could definitely move to a similar method. It would just be quite a bit of work rewriting the API to make it transparent for existing apps.
You leave the existing API intact, and change the data store method. To be logo certified on the new OS, you need to change the way the data store interaction happens to the new method. This lets you have new applications that work the right way, and they can code a fallback for older versions of Windows. Old applications use the old API, which redirects through the new data store.
New data store could be a number of things. The easiest way is to seperate out the types of data. Move around where you have data stored so that hardware is in one place, CLSIDs are somewhere else, etc. Definitely not in the same binary file of doom. That way you can have the system used objects in editable files in Windows, like how UNIX puts that stuff in
The UNIX way is to have system-wide settings and app defaults in
It's just a different perspective, that's all. I look at it that various life evolved to take advantage of aspects of the system. There was a lot of CO2, so life evolved to consume it. That created a lot of oxygen, so life evolved to consume that. It created a cycle, but not out of respect for the system. If humans made the environment unbearable for some life, that life would die and new life would replace it. If we went too far, we would be the life that died and was replaced. I would say that if you were to define some system, that would be the system, at heart. In that respect, there isn't any responsibily of one life form to any other.
I consider humans to be "on top" because we were the first to evolve in a way that lets us shape the world on a large scale. If we don't like the world, we have the capacity to actively change it. Nothing else can do that right now. We're still a part of the system, just a part that I consider to have evolved a much stronger set of traits than any other form of life. However, since we're still bound to the system, we can't go around changing things irresponsibly, because we might end up killing ourselves out.
If we wish to maintain the status quo, then yes we certainly would need to do it exactly your way. I like the world the way it is, too, so I'd like to see humanity stop polluting it. I'm just looking at that system as having a different basic structure.
Hopefully I explained that well enough.
If the EU were a country, then nobody would be complaining about creating a ccTLD for it. There just isn't good reason to create a new TLD for the EU. I wouldn't have a problem with refusing new registrations in many of the TLDs, such as .com and .net.
.com, or some .uk, domain. Most DNS servers shouldn't ever even be hitting the root zones. Higher level domain queries are actually useful, since they tell you what site someone is accessing. That means the servers running .com are valuable for mining stats, but not the servers running the root zone.
UN is a voluntary organization with no ability to create law. They are mired in political squabbles and tend to accomplish nothing. There are serious problems with everything they run. It would be foolish to give control of something as important as DNS to an organization that cannot keep what it *does* have working right. You're right, I would complain about any organization that's like the UN. They are not a government, and I would never support the existence of a global government. They eliminate freedom.
Running taxes over the Internet *is* foolish. It is fundamentally a network that you do not control. There must always exist a way to do such things without using the Internet. That said, Brazil has nothing to worry about in this matter. As long as they can guarantee the stability of their links, they can provide access to their citizens, and their citizens can do their taxes.
As a net/sysadmin running my own networks, I wouldn't broadly enable a facility that allows any client to update records. It means your records cannot be trusted. Having a zone dedicated to dyndns updates is fine, but your servers, etc, should never be located within it. Redundant and syncronized just means you have slave servers and some form of zone transfers. Everyone running DNS should have those two things. It doesn't mean you know how it works, it means that you know how to configure a DNS server.
TLD access stats don't mean anything commercially. All it tells you is that you requested some
I oppose the government control of most things. The governments job is limited, and it is not to manage the economy, or some network. It is to provide protection to the country's citizens, a framework for legal disputes, provide some basic services, and protect freedom. It is certainly not a governments job to run the Internet, or to run DNS. It *should* be commercial, since the network is commercially owned and used. There is commercial control of telephone networks, TV, radio, drugs, cars, trains, etc, and those are vital, so I suppose the government should take those over too?
First off, I'm opposed to a foreign government trying to supercede another government. The EU has absolutely no authority over the US. The UN is both not a government, and it has no authority over the US government. This is as it should be. I can't vote in the UN, and I'm not a citizen of the UN, so the UN can, quite honestly, shove it. If the UN thinks it can create law, then it has simply outlived its usefulness.
Absolutely nothing gives us the right to do any of that. However, humans exist now, and humans are in a fact a natural force. We evolved to be capable of manipulating our environment because it was an evolutionary advantage. To not do it because of some random insect or whatnot is to defy our evolution. In that right, as long as future generations exist, humans have served nature.
Now, modern humans *should* consider their actions more, because we can understand the benefit and the disadvantage of things. We shouldn't be screwing up our planet just because it's the cheap way or the lazy way. Even from the evolutionary standpoint, that does not help our chances of survival.
However, humans are at the top of things today. Why so many people are willing to sacrifice humans for some random animal is hard to understand. I like animals, too, but I like people a lot more. Like I said, we're at the top of things. I'll admit, it sounds very callous, but if killing a kitten cured cancer, there would be a whole lot of dead kittens out there, and that's better than a whole lot of dead humans.
Also, don't worry, GP assumes that humans won't exist in the future. That might be true, or it might not be true. We don't know, and that makes it conjecture.
I've seen this kind of horrid description of "love" before. It's generally held by people who have never experienced it, those that have been rejected considerably, or those trying to convince someone it's okay to just sleep with them for the hell of it. I argued then, and I would argue now, that the view is completely incorrect. The people that I have seen peddle it have tended to be heavily self-centered and wholly willing to exploit anyone for their own gain, and generally for their own amusement. It must be terrible to live in a world so empty and depressing, especially as compared to a world where love exists.
Yeah, we did at that... and then the 17th amendment was passed. I expect the EU to end up there in closer to the 5-10 year time frame.
Remember, for most of the US public transit isn't an option. You should encourage them to fight for public transportation where appropriate and to carpool whenever possible. :) That will get us much more!
Honestly, China, Brazil, and Iran can do what they want to. The EU has no authority in the situation, and the UN is sounding like a child not getting its way. The EU happens to be the "European Union", and all the mentioned countries are *not in* the EU. They really should probably try to get out the story more that they are not trying to hijack the system.
I don't think that Brazil is that likely to run their own independant system. They might set up national cache servers, just in case, but they get no benefit and significant disadvantage by splitting off from the existing situation.
China will probably do it anyway, unless they are the ones running the system through the UN, and then *everyone* would suffer. The government in that country is more than just a little totalitarian, what with the lack of any real freedom and the state run censoring of everything. Unless something changes there, I certainly wouldn't want to use any Internet service that they set up.
Who knows about Iran... they have an awful lot going on. I don't think running their own DNS is at the top of the list.
Anyway, it doesn't matter what the EU thinks it is trying to do. The point is that the *result* would be the large-scale fracturing of DNS. It is of course good to encourage diplomacy and discussion, but this has started to go a little further than that. This article is helpful, in that it says they don't want to dismantle what is already there. However, after all that has been printed up to now, I think they should do a lot more to quell the paranoia.
Then I suppose the EU would start to look a lot more like a very powerful government forcing member states to do what it wants. I suspect that wouldn't work *that* well. Now the independant countries might decide to pass those laws, and their ISPs would probably be rather upset by it. I don't see that as likely to happen.
Well, that isn't what this is all about. This is about the UN and various government wanting to be in charge, and the UN being able to collect monies off the system. They don't have the stability of DNS at heart in this one.
That said, yes, it should be run by a global, and government independant, body. It *definitely* should not be run by the UN, or in any way influenced by the UN. That is making the situation worse than it is now.
Also, the ".eu" TLD is silly. Each EU member country has their own TLD. There is a zone called ".int" for international organizations, such as the currently existing "un.int" and "eu.int". That is not a reason for anything, but one of several excuses to try to back up their move to take control of DNS.
I would much rather the currently reliably functioning system stay the way it is and work to free it from political oversight than to give it to an even more inefficient and dangerous organization.
Also, just because Brazil did something stupid doesn't mean that everyone should help them fix it. Running their taxes over the Internet was their decision, and they knew what they were getting into when they did it. *Everyone* knew that DNS was run by various educational institutions, private companies, and the US military, with oversight by the US Dept of Commerce. It was not only public, but common knowledge and trivial to find out from "www.root-servers.org".
As far as the logging concerns, having the UN run something does not make it immune to that. It would probably make it worse, in all honesty, but that isn't important right now. What *is* important is that any DNS operator running any TLD *could* log all queries and gather statistics. For one thing, statistic gathering is essential to system operation. For another, logging those queries would be next to impossible, considering the sheer volume of requests. Even if it were possible, what difference does it make? Unless you're querying those servers directly (which you probably should not be doing) then they know that "ISP X" or "country y" or whatever queried that once today. I don't think you really understand how DNS works, considering a comment like that. Take a read on it and such concerns would be largely eliminated.
I'm not disputing that DNS has issues, because it does. I'm saying government should not be involved, and bigger government is even worse.
It isn't technologically difficult to place a new protocol on the Internet. The problem is one of motivation and money. To route IPv6 traffic, for example, one would have to replace or reconfigure every router, and most servers, on the Internet. There is a lot of routing hardware out there that doesn't know IPv6.
Spyware, spamming, and fraud are social issues, and should be dealt with that way. Maybe a new protocol will help clean up some of it for a while, but there will be new ways to start it up again discovered. Then you're back at square one, but with a new protocol.
IP address spoofing is a technical problem that you can already largely prevent. It's just that a lot of things are not properly configured.
It isn't so much that IPv4 has problems, but that it runs encapsulated in other protocols on many networks. A lot of fiber runs things like ATM, and you have to frame IPv4 inside of that. It makes the hardware more complicated is really all.
I wouldn't worry about it; you can't decentralize DNS as the protocol doesn't work that way. You would have to come up with something new. I'm not sure how a new protocol that can do the same thing, but decentralized, would work. Well, without going back to basically copying around huge hosts files to everything so that they know already know where things are.
Besides, it would take at least several years for whatever that new thing is to be as trustworthy and reliable as we expect DNS to be. It doesn't matter how good the tech would be, because people wouldn't trust it until it was proven to stand up to time.
The US isn't even in control of most of TLD work, and they aren't even talking about the IP addressing schemes or anything with this squabble. They're just talking about the root zone. That isn't even .com, .org, or .uk! It's the implied "." after each of those; the set of servers that tell systems where to ask for a TLD servers. The control that it gives is really to decide who is running the TLDs, and what TLDs are added to the root zone.
This is a very simple function that we really don't need to potentially screw up with politics. If the UN really cared about the whole thing, they wouldn't be fighting for control of a largely private run system, but to simply get rid of the political influence entirely. This is just a power grab, and an obvious one at that.
I can certainly understand the US being upset that the UN is attempting to tell them they aren't allowed to oversee that anymore. The US is a sovereign nation that has always been taking care of the root servers, and now some other countries are trying to force the US to do what they say. That is bound to really piss off those in power, just on general principle. These countries piss and moan about the US going around trying to tell other countries what to do, and now those countries are trying to do the same thing, with very similar results.
(FWIW, the US might not have built the modern Internet, but they did fund quite a bit of the original networking and research involved.)
Investigate "Real Alternative". It installs the Real Media DirectShow codecs and then anything can play the files back.
In a true democracy you have many issues, and several failings. The issues are pretty much hashed out a millions times: population, voting complexity, time for responses, etc. The failings have also been fairly well discussed, too. The biggest is the inability to avoid the "tyranny of the majority".
Going your way, you end up without States rights, with a watered down local level, and a massive Federal government. This is exactly what happened after the 17th amendment passed, which called for the direct election of Senators to Congress. This means that you end up having a homogeneous legal stucture within your country. That also means that if the majority voted a law in that you disagree with, your only choice to avoid it is to leave the country. It ends up reducing freedom as a result of lack of choice. Doing it the way that the US *had* done it allows for the local governments to have the most power (where the people directly influence it), followed by the States, and then the Federal. The Federal was comprised half of representative chosed by the people, and half those appointed by the States. The States would be able to keep the municipalities in line, the Federal kept the States safe and ensured cooperation between them.
The important thing is that if you didn't like something in your town, you could move to the next one. If you didn't like your State, you could move to another way. The incentive to keep population, and that the reps making the laws were elected by the people, kept the laws much more sane. If we did it your way, the cities would carry everything and that's it. We'd have even larger and worse social programs (yes, that's possible), and even more enforced uniformity.
The Constitutional system of the US is almost, by not quite completely, the opposite of fascism.
(dictionary.com) "Fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism."
The original US system did not have central authority. It had tiers of government with the largest being strictly limited in power. It also included a system to remove bad laws if the lawmaking bodies refused to do so, either through courts, election, or higher levels of government. The US system also *clearly* did not have a dictator. Social controls were to be kept out of government, hence the Bill of Rights that specifically prevented the government for being involved in them; this also clearly stated that the government was not supposed to censor. Commerce was supposed to be encouraged between States, and evenly tariffed/excised where appropriate, and nothing more. Social programs were not allowed on the Federal level, as they were not enumerated.
I won't say that the US doesn't have racism or nationalism, because that isn't true. However, the US was *obviously* not designed as fascism. Just because the system has been corrupted does not mean it was always that way. And please, learn the words you use, it makes you sound stupid to use a word that is clearly inappropriate.
I would agree with you about how we don't have a democracy, being federalist republic and all, and that it is the better way of doing it. However, this government was formed under the idea of being for the people and by the people. It doesn't say "for the corporations" or "for the minority".
On slavery... the whole bit with slavery in the Civil War had nothing to do with wanting to have a free country. That wasn't what the move was about, and it wasn't what the war was over. It was done to cause problems for the South.
On civil rights law... civil rights is a great thing, however *I* would've voted against that legislation. It has done incredible harm to this country. Now a reasonably worded piece of law that didn't have tremendous issues and clauses that required discrimination would be a law that I would've voted for.
It's hard to say whether there would have been popular support for such legislation since it is so long after the fact and there were often so many other things going on, too. You're probably right about the two you mentioned, though. However, the US was the only country in the western world to use violence to get rid of slavery, and that should say something about whether there would've been support if it had been done in a different way.
I definitely wouldn't say that Congress is supposed to protect the minority, though. It's purpose is quite different from that, and that is a large part of the problem in the US today. Congress does far more than they should, and legislates tremendously outside the bounds of their Constitutional role.
In the case of this particular legislation, there is no reason that they should be passing a law about it. It is not regulating commerce, it is not a tariff or excise, and it is not in national defense. I'm reasonably certain that there is no mention of technological restrictions over broadcast content being one of the powers granted to the Federal in the Constitution. If the industry wants to do such a thing, then the industry can try, but it is wholly inappropriate for the Federal to be doing anything with it.
Every cellular phone that I've ever used gets toasty if you use it for any length of time. They're also putting off enough EM radiation to throw signal 7-10 miles. The microwave radiation they throw off isn't very penetrating, but luckily you have the transmitter right next to an opening that leads to your brain.
Cell phones put out between 0.5W and 3W of high frequency radiation (824MHz ~ 2.0GHz).
Heh, well the captcha for this post was "bastards", and that's rather appropriate...
Anyway, my point was that they Federal doesn't really have that power, but they're doing it anyway. If you look through the US Code, you will almost cretainly find some odd provision that would let them do this. It still doesn't make it Constitutional (and it certainly isn't that).
My point on the concept of a corporation is that they are supposed to exist to serve society. The idea was that for some things you needed a liability shield, so that you could continue to operation if someone screwed up, and also to protect the people working there from personal suits. They are allowed by State charter, and the State can revoke that charter if they please. They are supposed to be nothing more than that, and are not supposed to be considered a citizen in any respect. That they considered differently today was a 100 year old screw up, and is certainly not supported by the Constitution.
I meant that you should never be doing anything "national security" that relies on something private sector to keep working. People like to go on about defense contracts for this one, but that isn't opposed to what I'm saying. A defense contractor creates something on behalf of the government, and then turns that something over to the government. In that respect, the government is not relying on the civilian contractor for anything after the product/tech is created. They often choose to have them keep manufacturing the item in question, and sometimes that is stipulated in the contracts.