If greed wasn't a more powerful motivator than ethics for far too many corporations then there wouldn't be a need for any regulations whatsoever.
The regulations don't punish anything that isn't already punishable, and impose great gobs of costs in their compliance.
It's like making detailed laws against murder. Death by bludgeoning is a separate crime from death by stabbing, separate from death by shooting, etc etc etc. Motorvehicular homicide? Still homicide. All are murder, all prosecutable, but it takes volumes of law books to track and years of practice to understand.
Did the accountants lie? Yes. Prosecute it. One sentence, rather than 17,000 pages of regulations.
You're not really advocating that are you?
Technically speaking, yes. What I am not doing is advocating anyone get away with lying to their stockholders about the condition of the company.
Which means that you and I are in complete agreement with the approval in your last sentence, while being in complete disagreement about how to get there.
Actually, I do have a big problem with one thing you're saying, even though I am not certain you mean what it seems you mean. To wit:
a free country also relies on people being able to get rich *fairly*
There's nothing fair about life. Trying to impose "fairness" is a justification used by tyrants to lull individuals into a false sense of security while they're being stabbed in the back. But what I think you meant was not fair but ethical.
One of the unseen effects of all these regulations, especially limited liability incorporation, is that officers and stock holders are insulated from the repercussions of their choices.
Remove all the legal impediments, and what will happen? Ethical accounting practices will be demanded by stockholders. Accountability (please pardon the pun, English is a limited language) of officers for the results of their decisions will be imposed not because the governments say so but because stock holders are attentive and fickle. It is, after all, their money, not the company officer's, and people tend to be careful with their own money.
I do implore you to click on over to http://www.mises.org/ and check out not just the daily articles but also their "blog" where they post several times as many comments and links on business, regulation, ethics, anything that relates to economics. Sarbanes-Oxley has been discussed in detail, to an extent anything I say pales in comparison.
No, I'm not trying to treat a registry like an index.
Yes, you are. You want to use the registry so that it has something you can look things up in. You want to be able to type www.BobRobertson.com and get a page that has meaning for someone YOU call Bob Robertson. But there are lots of Bob Robertsons, and you have no way of knowing who has the.com or.firm or.name or.net or any of the other top level domains that you might think are important.
In fact they are not important at all.
I'm trying to treat a URL like an address.
Then use the servers IP address. It's unique. It's already there. Any DNS information is redundant. It is, as you say, directly human-usable, without having to be stored or transferred electronically so it meets all your criteria.
Do you use your phone book? Do you write down the numeric numbers of your friends? Funny thing, I use bookmarks and an address book too, for physical addresses, telephone numbers, and URLs. You might try it, it's very useful. It's called "Favorites" in IE, "Bookmarks" in most other web browsers.
And browsers store a nice text description so it doesn't matter what the address is, numeric or alpha. Computers are good at remembering things like that, not all people are.
The hierarchical structure helps distribute the load of keeping a registry...
Good sir, we are in total agreement. You might note that I said exactly the same thing in the post you are replying to. That was the original purpose of top level domains. You also allude to the non-functional official differentiation between TLDs, which merely demonstrates why they are redundant. Adding more merely increases the redundancy.
Nothing about reducing the number of top level domains contradicts the utility of hierarchical name space, the distributive nature of DNS, or functional, human-usable names. It simplifies.
I've already said we have country codes, which.TV is utilizing to good effect, how many thousands more would satisfy you?
Search is not necessarily a good alternative to an address system...
Did you read the post you are replying to? I said, the effort put into all this top level domain redundancy would be better spent improving the indexes. And here you talk about the indexes needing improvement in order to be more usable.
I get the impression that if you were able to step back and look at the problem dispassionately, you too would come to the same conclusion that the 40+- people at the IETF engineering BOF on "More TLDs" did: Simplify.
Hi, Profane. I see we're on opposite sides of an issue again.
Compliance has costs, right now. It's time and money spent NOT satisfying customers, NOT building business relationships, NOT producing product, NOT hiring more workers or NOT improving the conditions/pay/training of the employees.
There is something you don't seem to grasp, called the "Time Preference Of Money". It is why we earn interest on money we don't spend today, or pay interest on money we borrow to spend today. My $1,000 invested today turns into $1,100, or more or less, depending on how smart I am in investing.
My $1,000 paid on the principle of my mortgage today means I am not going to be paying many times that in interest over the life of the loan.
Businesses are no different.
The spending of $1,000 on redundant paperwork and red-tape accounting services today means that I do not have that money to invest where it will earn a return on my investment. You can argue till you're blue in the face that I'll get that money back "someday", but even if I get my $1,000 dollars back I have LOST money because of the lost investment opportunity.
This is the essence of the "broken window fallacy" in economics, as well as Adam Smith's "invisible hand". Freidric Hayak called it "That which is unseen."
This law doesn't fix anything. Enron failed because they had a business model based on buying and selling of GOVERNMENT pollution credits and other fabrications of government which failed to be legislated into existence. When the empty bubble that was Enron failed, it didn't matter that it had been making stuff up in its books, it would have failed anyway. It Had No Product.
The market worked. Their accounting firm was demonstrated to be corrupt and it failed too. This is what happens in a free market, bad companies fail. To call that a "bad thing" it to try to argue that corrupt, inefficient, or just plain badly run businesses should not fail. Such an effort in argument is beyond stupid.
Making the law more strict will simply mean less money left over for training, pay and facilities. Higher prices, too. After all, there is no source of money in a company than their customers. Every tax, every fee, every fine or payment comes from sales.
So you're arguing for less competition, higher prices and lower wages. No thank you.
You're just coming up with all the same old reasons for trying to treat a registry like an index. They are fundamentally different functions.
"When the 'Net was small", DNS was indeed invented in order to make easily remembered names for machines. But the 'Net is not small, and continuing to try to use the registry like an index does not solve the problem. One TLD has exactly the same name-space as one hundred TLDs, they are simply harder to know which one is the right one.
The number of actually typed URLs is decreasing. To increase complexity in a system that is already decreasing in usability is not a rational act. Making indexes better is.
John Postel was wrong. I was at the IETF BOF that discussed the issue. So was Postel. It was nice meeting him.
The guy from Dunn and Bradstreet was correct when he said that "we" were trying to use the registry like an index.
As other people have pointed out, CokaCola just has to buy coke.com, coke.net, coke.us, coke.biz, coke.firm, coke.soda, coke.etc.etc.etc. More top level domains does not increase the "name space", nor does it increase usability. In fact, it obfuscates.
Indexes and portals are in increasing use all the time. A new verb has entered the language, "to google". There is in fact no reason to use a domain name at all, because someone will find your page in Google regardless of what it's called. Even at the time of the BOF, I gave the examples of Yahoo and AltaVista making domain names obsolete.
I really thought that the success of Geocities (.com) was going to make it obvious to everyone. Instead of extra names, they had subdirectories. Numbered subdirectories and a search engine. The URL didn't relate to anything at all.
So what was the result of that BOF, where the brightest minds came together to discuss the issue? Even Postel agreed, it would be best to reduce the number of TLDs. They have outlived their usefulness, that was based on insufficient hardware size/speed at the time. "We" already have country codes,.US,.UK &etc. to differentiate the physical top servers.
At some point, the.earth TLD will be appended to them, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.
And I'm going to shout it this time... *EVIDENCE*?
No need to shout. You're still clinging to the false assertion that replacing a monarchy with a democracy is de-facto progress. As I pointed out, most modern democracies are far more restrictive of individual liberty than many monarchies have been.
Continuing to demand evidence is silly, I've already told you that reading _Democracy, the God That Failed_ would be a good start.
I can also suggest the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murrey Rothbard concerning "Public Choice Theory", which details how bureaucracies always accrue power to themselves by the simple function of each bureaucrat weighting their choices by what is in their interest. A search with Google should suffice, or you can visit http://www.mises.org/
If you're going to demand evidence, don't ignore it when it is presented to you. That just makes you look silly.
Any history book. I would suggest first, _Democracy_-_The_God_That_Failed_ by Hanse Hermann Hoppe. That will cure you of your error that a change from monarchy to democracy is self-evident "progress".
The UK? An absolute monarchy becomes a constitutional democracy.
You must have missed the part about multiple civil wars, the whole Cromwell thing, War of the Roses, something about an invasion almost 1,000 years ago, etc. Governments come and go, styles come and go. Once established, every government tends to increase its power over the lives of its subjects until it too is overthrown.
If you asked British subjects of, say, 1750 to: Relinquish their personal arms; Meekly prostrate themselves to a criminal because it's not their job to take the law into their own hands; Pay for other people to live on the dole; Pay more than 1/2 of their income in taxes; Produce government paperwork in order to travel, you would have a revolution on your hands.
Historical evidence as far as I can see shows that the people revolt against subjugation when the government becomes onerous. Just a matter of time.
This directly contradicts your earlier demand for proof that governments become onerous. Governments ALWAYS become onerous over time, prompting civil wars and revolutions, even if their violence is only focused on the heads of said government and doesn't effect YOU.
I don't think actually owning a gun will make that much of a difference
Then you are not a student of history. Government thugs are cowards, that's why they attack in groups. Wide distribution of arms in the hands of common citizens makes the price of such police action higher. So high, in fact, that it becomes much more difficult to rule peoples lives directly. That's why Jews were disarmed in Germany and the occupied countries before and during WW2. That's why Russian subjects have traditionally been disarmed. That's why the Japanese restricted the ownership of arms only to the Samurai class historically, and have continued to disarm their citizens in modern times.
Governments that allow their citizens to carry arms are very rare. Britain used to be the archetype of that kind of individual freedom, even under a monarchy, and were also the most powerful and influential country on earth.
British freedoms are what the American Bill of Rights was written to ensure, because people had become complacent and let those freedoms be infringed upon. Looking at that piece of paper, it's easy to see how far Britain, and America too, have since fallen.
Luminaries in the field of economics, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, many other current and past professors and writers.
Even if you disagree with their conclusions, their arguments will challenge and inform rather than being merely the spouting platitudes and fallacies.
http://www.mises.org/Media/
I cannot recommend them highly enough. You'll get a better education in economics after a few lectures than you will in any public school and most colleges.
Someone takes my money at gun point to pay for something THEY want, they're a thief....or a politician. Same thing.
If the Senator wants Hubble serviced, he can join or start a voluntary organization to do exactly that. And, funny thing, I'd likely contribute to it too.
So, how can you say that anarchy doesn't mean chaos?
Good sir, you said it yourself. 1. Absence of any form of political authority.
But what is "political authority"? It is the lawful power to unilaterally change contracts, among other things. For instance, the IRS code is changed every year. I have no ability to "opt out", unlike every voluntary contract I enter into that the other party chooses to change.
Every voluntary interaction you enter into is therefore anarchic, because you can indeed opt out. They hold no "political" authority over you. As you point out, those voluntary interactions happen under rules agreed upon by all the people involved. Churches are a great example. Some of them have a great many rules and regulations, yet (save for some abusive and generally condemned few) are entirely voluntary.
Anarchy means that if I am murdered there are no common standards whereby the murder would be judged.
Interesting that you would mention that after I said that the initiation of force, such as murder, remains prosecutable.
I do take exception to your putting forth that a lack of common standards is a bad thing. Many different standards have existed through history, some of which would value your life merely by some lump of gold. Variations of standards is why there are juries, because killing someone is not always murder.
Apparently we have read/talked to different groups of people calling themselves libertarians.
There are several people who call themselves "libertarians" who are nothing of the sort. I expect that you have indeed heard from some of them.
Many of "us" who espouse the benefits of definition 1 you provided tend to use the term "anarcho-capitalist" rather than simply "anarchist", for all the reasons you suggest.
non-initiation of force is one of the easiest things to rationalize into use of force. (generational feuds, etc.)
Only if you posit a society without societal norms. Luckily, when people are left to their own devices instead of "ruled", they form communities under agreed upon rules and standards of conduct. All the laws in the world do not prevent, as you say, "generational feuds". What has happened is the societal norm that such bloodshed is wrong has been written into law.
This also brings up the not-insignificant question of where influence ends and force begins.
"We" set those standards every day. I recall a news report about a woman who constantly sued the people around her. She would sue the family several houses away for playing basketball in their driveway, for instance, because she was able to word the suit in such a way as to make it seem that they were creating a nuisance, like that.
By the strict letter of the law, she was right. She knew how to twist the words to suit her own ends. The community, the reporter, the people watching the report, however, all (I assume) condemned her actions as the most absurd abuse of what had been written into statute law to prosecute real troublemakers.
Societal norms asserted themselves. No one ruler decided she was wrong, the answer was not political. Anarchy(1) at its best.
Please don't get me wrong, I agree with you that standards for conduct are important. I consider them of the utmost importance for peaceful human interaction. This is one of the biggest reasons I have for opposing government, opposing "political rule": Government gets to change the rules at their pleasure. Government creates chaos in a way that a mere individual cannot, because government can enforce those changes.
I do recommend you look at a few of the articles on Mises.org, they also have a blog where you can ask for clarification.
In other words: In the long run, we evolve something similar to the system of truth-in-advertising laws...
Nope. In the short run. Consumer Reports, Underwriters Labs, Failure Analysis, even Erin Brockovitch. All of these "watchdogs" exist right now, and a truly free market will only see them flourish.
exactly like the familiar whine of would-be Marxists: "No state on this planet has even approached true...
Good sir, you were the one who said that Libertarian countries have existed. All we want to know is, where are they?
In the meantime, people get ripped off, and since we agree (I think we agree, right?) that what we'll end up with is basically a system of "blanket regulation" under a different name, why suffer needlessly?
Prosecution of the initiation of force and fraud is all a "Libertarian" government would be empowered to do. Your statement is false because it implies that no such prosecution would happen in a free market. However, since there is no other function for all the people who would be bureaucrats and regulators and otherwise love to stick their noses into other peoples business, I expect that watchdog groups (like the ones that exist now, in fact) would flourish.
Imagine Underwriters Labs, or Failure Analysis. Or even something named "Consumer Reports". Oh, that's right, you don't have to imagine. And, they are entirely Free Market.
Prosecution for initiation of force and fraud is exactly what all the statists say their regulations are supposed to do. The fact that those regulations crush innovation, foster abuse, protect nasty people who hurt others deliberately while careful to remain "within the law", are all problems that having those regulations create. "why suffer needlessly" indeed.
Eliminate the regulations, go after the poluters, the false-advertisers, the makers of hazardous products, directly. There will be lots of resources left over without the regulations punishing those who harm no one, and lots of busybodies available to pester the few bad apples out of business.
unsustainable and would rapidly change into either anarchy or stronger government.
Like when the authoritarian Constitution was implemented over the relatively free Articles of Confederation?
The problem with arguing about anarchy is that people do not talk about the same thing. Chaos is not the result of not having "rulers", yet many peoples use of the word anarchy would lead one to think that it means only chaos.
You live your life in anarchy most of the time. No one tells you where to shop, what to buy, what channel to watch, when to post on Slashdot, what to say or how to say it. There is no law defining when you go to bed or who you work for. Indeed, you can quit your job any time you want if their rules are not to your liking. Utter anarchy.
Anarchy does not mean that voluntary association goes away, it simply means that associations are all voluntary.
The bomb-throwing, window breaking, paint spraying "anarchists" on the news are hardly anarchists at all. They are funded and directed, taking orders from their leaders whomever they may be. They have leaders, and are therefore not anarchists.
Libertarians espouse only one principle: Non initiation of force. Everything else is a tributary of that one principle. That there are repercussions of this ideal that make some people uncomfortable is obvious.
To state that you don't agree with it means that you believe it is ok for you to initiate force against people, the essence of "the ends justify the means". You may narrowly define what ends you see as being so important that they justify forcing compliance, but your narrow definition does not change the fact.
I expect that almost all of your ends are the result of not thinking through what "initiation" means, such as the prosecution of murder which almost always involves using force against the murderer. Such prosecution is a response, not an initiation. Same with defensive war.
Anyway, please think about it. It's not like I can tell you to think about it, since I will not use force to compel you. Get it?
Perfect information is indeed impossible. You don't know how to produce a pencil any more than the person who collects rubber-tree sap for the eraser or the person who digs graphite for the lead does, yet they are integral to the production of that pencil.
That is why the division of labor exists. Each individual knows his own effort best. Communication of this knowledge is by price. If I can produce something cheaper than someone else, I will sell more of it than they will. My price communicates the efficiency of my process.
By buying, the information that I am producing something people want is communicated. I don't have to know, for instance, that there has been a fall in the demand for pencils. The fact that my latex rubber isn't selling as well as it used to is enough for me to look to more efficient uses of my time.
It is only in a "free" market that such communication can exist. Price controls, tariffs, legal obstructions such as licensure and grants of limited liability, prevent the flow of this information. Inefficient processes are maintained, innovations are squashed, vested interests profit at the expense of the consumer.
There is no valid criticism of the "free" market. Every criticism I have ever read has been about the results of various interferences by governments. Urban sprawl? The result of zoning. Raw sewage in the government owned rivers? The result of government owned "sewage treatment" plants.
Enron is an excellent example, a business created out of nothing for the purpose of profiting on the trade in government pollution credits, government contracts, and government regulations. Enron corrupt? Don't act surprised. To blame the "free" market on such failures is irrational.
I recommend pretty much anything written by Ludwig von Mises, Murry Rothbard, or just read the daily articles on http://www.mises.org/ for a little while.
They even have a blog where you can educate them about the "valid" criticisms. You may even be right, and I assure you your posts will not be deleted just because you challenge their preconceptions.
Do plumbers make money? Do electricians? How about building contractors of any kind?
Sure they do. Yet, their materials, specifications and "code" are completely open source.
It's not glamorous, it's not chic, but supplying the service of building what works to meet the customers needs works fine as a business model regardless of the product we're talking about.
Mike, you're absolutely right. I marvel every time I go into the grocery store to see the variety and prices. Strawberries, grapes, good citrus, in February, at affordable, if still higher than when-in-season-locally, prices.
And that's the fresh food that is time sensitive in transportation. Someone is making a profit moving fruit from Chile to Kentucky quickly at a price even I can afford.
The comment that "Greed is good" was addressing exactly what you're talking about. In order to make a profit, someone will step into ANY available business, even if it's as seemingly mundane as transporting food to where no one else is doing it right now.
And there will always be some shmuck in the wings watching for where the profits are high, ready to undercut the price and still make a profit without having to do all the leg-work of discovering the market in the first place.
If that shmuck is, as you say, some really nasty person like Sam Walton, he'll undercut everybody he can to make his buck, so that the products are delivered not only where they have never been delivered before, but at as low a price as possible to keep out competition. The lowly consumer makes out like a bandit!
That is, unfortunately, until Government steps in and "levels the playing field", thereby punishing only the people at the bottom of the economic scale who cannot afford to pay the tariffs.
There is plenty of food produced on earth to feed everyone. The 81 billion is just the price that it would take to move it.
But would it get there? Food supplies rotted on the docks in Ethiopia because the petty warlords wouldn't let it move to the interior where people were starving.
Stalin and Mao used transportation (or I should say BLOCKED transportation) of food in order to starve many millions of their own citizens.
The problem is not food, it's government. In an environment of actual freedom, entrepreneurs would gladly step in and find innovative and inexpensive ways to move food to where it is needed. And it wouldn't cost you a dime, much less 81 billion dollars.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember the company name that made the bi-directional single fiber boxes. But the speed was multi-megabit, not gigabit. It was also 5 years ago, I'm certain that capabilities have improved since. Especially if a two-fiber ring structure is used. As you said, you only buy the physical fiber once, so it's worth doing well.
The wireless service I've seen used directional antenna to direct your home signal back to the hub. It was in San Jose California, I have not seen it in service elsewhere even though I've heard of it.
But that was just an extention of 802.11b, again not gigabit speeds.
I'm firmly of the opinion that dropping taxes on such services will do much more to promote their use than anything else, because it's the only method of "promotion" that does not discriminate on the basis of politics, technology, or anything else. It simply lowers the barrier to entry for anyone who thinks they can do it better.
what happens if one of the homes goes to their backyard and cuts the fiber?
Then the systems "upstream" of that cut are not reachable. That same question could be asked of the lime-green box at the south-west corner of my property right now, labeled "TV Cable". If I cut it, I am liable for the damage I do.
Fiber is really the way to go but wireless could get things started.
I agree, and that sort of thing is happening.
I'm quite pleased with the IP service I get from my cable TV provider. Except for the genesis, it pretty much matches what is possible for "community" cooperation. Since the local telephone operator offers DSL as well, there is a check on the kinds of prices they can charge.
Oh, and the cable provider is now pushing VoIP service through their cable as well, which means I'm going to have to be careful. They may start filtering VoIP packets. If so, they lose a customer. A lack of such game playing with service might be one good byproduct of cooperative community ISPs.
I don't disagree with you as far as you go, but. Big But: No force.
It's really that simple. Cooperation is great, people will build such systems easily and even quickly. I've often considered the "development" as a perfect incubator. Or the multi-story building in a city, same functional thing. Fiber really isn't all that expensive to lay in the ground as places are being built, and there are already central cable and electrical infrastructure access points.
There are some neat DWDM fiber data access units that I particularly like for this use. One fiber is daisy-chained from house to house, "upstream" is on one frequency, "downstream" is on another one. Bidirectional at multi-megabit speeds with the reliability of fiber.
However, I will not condone robbing people to pay for it. If anyone mentions taxes or "eminent domain" or any of the other ways that people are relieved of their property against their will, the project is not worth doing. It by definition doesn't have "popular" support.
Why don't we have city-wide gigabit networks plugged into every home and business?
Because it's expensive as heck to build. People are already building wireless peer-to-peer community networks, but they're not fast.
Were you using the word "community" to denote "municipal"? As in city government provided? Goodness, if you don't like the restrictions placed on your service now, I cannot imagine how you think it will be better when it's run by unaccountable bureaucrats and special-interest politicians. Imagine your ISP being run by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
That's a very scary thought. I'd rather a slower "free as in freedom" network than the fastest "filtered for my own good" one.
Slashdot Mirror
If greed wasn't a more powerful motivator than ethics for far too many corporations then there wouldn't be a need for any regulations whatsoever.
The regulations don't punish anything that isn't already punishable, and impose great gobs of costs in their compliance.
It's like making detailed laws against murder. Death by bludgeoning is a separate crime from death by stabbing, separate from death by shooting, etc etc etc. Motorvehicular homicide? Still homicide. All are murder, all prosecutable, but it takes volumes of law books to track and years of practice to understand.
Did the accountants lie? Yes. Prosecute it. One sentence, rather than 17,000 pages of regulations.
You're not really advocating that are you?
Technically speaking, yes. What I am not doing is advocating anyone get away with lying to their stockholders about the condition of the company.
Which means that you and I are in complete agreement with the approval in your last sentence, while being in complete disagreement about how to get there.
Bob-
I thank you for your kind words.
Actually, I do have a big problem with one thing you're saying, even though I am not certain you mean what it seems you mean. To wit:
a free country also relies on people being able to get rich *fairly*
There's nothing fair about life. Trying to impose "fairness" is a justification used by tyrants to lull individuals into a false sense of security while they're being stabbed in the back. But what I think you meant was not fair but ethical.
One of the unseen effects of all these regulations, especially limited liability incorporation, is that officers and stock holders are insulated from the repercussions of their choices.
Remove all the legal impediments, and what will happen? Ethical accounting practices will be demanded by stockholders. Accountability (please pardon the pun, English is a limited language) of officers for the results of their decisions will be imposed not because the governments say so but because stock holders are attentive and fickle. It is, after all, their money, not the company officer's, and people tend to be careful with their own money.
I do implore you to click on over to http://www.mises.org/ and check out not just the daily articles but also their "blog" where they post several times as many comments and links on business, regulation, ethics, anything that relates to economics. Sarbanes-Oxley has been discussed in detail, to an extent anything I say pales in comparison.
Bob-
No, I'm not trying to treat a registry like an index.
.com or .firm or .name or .net or any of the other top level domains that you might think are important.
.TV is utilizing to good effect, how many thousands more would satisfy you?
Yes, you are. You want to use the registry so that it has something you can look things up in. You want to be able to type www.BobRobertson.com and get a page that has meaning for someone YOU call Bob Robertson. But there are lots of Bob Robertsons, and you have no way of knowing who has the
In fact they are not important at all.
I'm trying to treat a URL like an address.
Then use the servers IP address. It's unique. It's already there. Any DNS information is redundant. It is, as you say, directly human-usable, without having to be stored or transferred electronically so it meets all your criteria.
Do you use your phone book? Do you write down the numeric numbers of your friends? Funny thing, I use bookmarks and an address book too, for physical addresses, telephone numbers, and URLs. You might try it, it's very useful. It's called "Favorites" in IE, "Bookmarks" in most other web browsers.
And browsers store a nice text description so it doesn't matter what the address is, numeric or alpha. Computers are good at remembering things like that, not all people are.
The hierarchical structure helps distribute the load of keeping a registry...
Good sir, we are in total agreement. You might note that I said exactly the same thing in the post you are replying to. That was the original purpose of top level domains. You also allude to the non-functional official differentiation between TLDs, which merely demonstrates why they are redundant. Adding more merely increases the redundancy.
Nothing about reducing the number of top level domains contradicts the utility of hierarchical name space, the distributive nature of DNS, or functional, human-usable names. It simplifies.
I've already said we have country codes, which
Search is not necessarily a good alternative to an address system...
Did you read the post you are replying to? I said, the effort put into all this top level domain redundancy would be better spent improving the indexes. And here you talk about the indexes needing improvement in order to be more usable.
I get the impression that if you were able to step back and look at the problem dispassionately, you too would come to the same conclusion that the 40+- people at the IETF engineering BOF on "More TLDs" did: Simplify.
Bob-
Compliance will ultimately cost nothing.
Hi, Profane. I see we're on opposite sides of an issue again.
Compliance has costs, right now. It's time and money spent NOT satisfying customers, NOT building business relationships, NOT producing product, NOT hiring more workers or NOT improving the conditions/pay/training of the employees.
There is something you don't seem to grasp, called the "Time Preference Of Money". It is why we earn interest on money we don't spend today, or pay interest on money we borrow to spend today. My $1,000 invested today turns into $1,100, or more or less, depending on how smart I am in investing.
My $1,000 paid on the principle of my mortgage today means I am not going to be paying many times that in interest over the life of the loan.
Businesses are no different.
The spending of $1,000 on redundant paperwork and red-tape accounting services today means that I do not have that money to invest where it will earn a return on my investment. You can argue till you're blue in the face that I'll get that money back "someday", but even if I get my $1,000 dollars back I have LOST money because of the lost investment opportunity.
This is the essence of the "broken window fallacy" in economics, as well as Adam Smith's "invisible hand". Freidric Hayak called it "That which is unseen."
This law doesn't fix anything. Enron failed because they had a business model based on buying and selling of GOVERNMENT pollution credits and other fabrications of government which failed to be legislated into existence. When the empty bubble that was Enron failed, it didn't matter that it had been making stuff up in its books, it would have failed anyway. It Had No Product.
The market worked. Their accounting firm was demonstrated to be corrupt and it failed too. This is what happens in a free market, bad companies fail. To call that a "bad thing" it to try to argue that corrupt, inefficient, or just plain badly run businesses should not fail. Such an effort in argument is beyond stupid.
Making the law more strict will simply mean less money left over for training, pay and facilities. Higher prices, too. After all, there is no source of money in a company than their customers. Every tax, every fee, every fine or payment comes from sales.
So you're arguing for less competition, higher prices and lower wages. No thank you.
Bob-
What is so difficult about "Google or AOL Keyword: Frankincense And Murr" as opposed to "Be sure to visit our website at http://promotions.frankincenseandmurr1234.sj.ca.us "?
You're just coming up with all the same old reasons for trying to treat a registry like an index. They are fundamentally different functions.
"When the 'Net was small", DNS was indeed invented in order to make easily remembered names for machines. But the 'Net is not small, and continuing to try to use the registry like an index does not solve the problem. One TLD has exactly the same name-space as one hundred TLDs, they are simply harder to know which one is the right one.
The number of actually typed URLs is decreasing. To increase complexity in a system that is already decreasing in usability is not a rational act. Making indexes better is.
Bob-
John Postel was wrong. I was at the IETF BOF that discussed the issue. So was Postel. It was nice meeting him.
.US, .UK &etc. to differentiate the physical top servers.
.earth TLD will be appended to them, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.
The guy from Dunn and Bradstreet was correct when he said that "we" were trying to use the registry like an index.
As other people have pointed out, CokaCola just has to buy coke.com, coke.net, coke.us, coke.biz, coke.firm, coke.soda, coke.etc.etc.etc. More top level domains does not increase the "name space", nor does it increase usability. In fact, it obfuscates.
Indexes and portals are in increasing use all the time. A new verb has entered the language, "to google". There is in fact no reason to use a domain name at all, because someone will find your page in Google regardless of what it's called. Even at the time of the BOF, I gave the examples of Yahoo and AltaVista making domain names obsolete.
I really thought that the success of Geocities (.com) was going to make it obvious to everyone. Instead of extra names, they had subdirectories. Numbered subdirectories and a search engine. The URL didn't relate to anything at all.
So what was the result of that BOF, where the brightest minds came together to discuss the issue? Even Postel agreed, it would be best to reduce the number of TLDs. They have outlived their usefulness, that was based on insufficient hardware size/speed at the time. "We" already have country codes,
At some point, the
Bob-
And I'm going to shout it this time... *EVIDENCE*?
No need to shout. You're still clinging to the false assertion that replacing a monarchy with a democracy is de-facto progress. As I pointed out, most modern democracies are far more restrictive of individual liberty than many monarchies have been.
Continuing to demand evidence is silly, I've already told you that reading _Democracy, the God That Failed_ would be a good start.
I can also suggest the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murrey Rothbard concerning "Public Choice Theory", which details how bureaucracies always accrue power to themselves by the simple function of each bureaucrat weighting their choices by what is in their interest. A search with Google should suffice, or you can visit http://www.mises.org/
If you're going to demand evidence, don't ignore it when it is presented to you. That just makes you look silly.
Bob-
Your evidence?
Any history book. I would suggest first, _Democracy_-_The_God_That_Failed_ by Hanse Hermann Hoppe. That will cure you of your error that a change from monarchy to democracy is self-evident "progress".
The UK? An absolute monarchy becomes a constitutional democracy.
You must have missed the part about multiple civil wars, the whole Cromwell thing, War of the Roses, something about an invasion almost 1,000 years ago, etc. Governments come and go, styles come and go. Once established, every government tends to increase its power over the lives of its subjects until it too is overthrown.
If you asked British subjects of, say, 1750 to: Relinquish their personal arms; Meekly prostrate themselves to a criminal because it's not their job to take the law into their own hands; Pay for other people to live on the dole; Pay more than 1/2 of their income in taxes; Produce government paperwork in order to travel, you would have a revolution on your hands.
Historical evidence as far as I can see shows that the people revolt against subjugation when the government becomes onerous. Just a matter of time.
This directly contradicts your earlier demand for proof that governments become onerous. Governments ALWAYS become onerous over time, prompting civil wars and revolutions, even if their violence is only focused on the heads of said government and doesn't effect YOU.
I don't think actually owning a gun will make that much of a difference
Then you are not a student of history. Government thugs are cowards, that's why they attack in groups. Wide distribution of arms in the hands of common citizens makes the price of such police action higher. So high, in fact, that it becomes much more difficult to rule peoples lives directly. That's why Jews were disarmed in Germany and the occupied countries before and during WW2. That's why Russian subjects have traditionally been disarmed. That's why the Japanese restricted the ownership of arms only to the Samurai class historically, and have continued to disarm their citizens in modern times.
Governments that allow their citizens to carry arms are very rare. Britain used to be the archetype of that kind of individual freedom, even under a monarchy, and were also the most powerful and influential country on earth.
British freedoms are what the American Bill of Rights was written to ensure, because people had become complacent and let those freedoms be infringed upon. Looking at that piece of paper, it's easy to see how far Britain, and America too, have since fallen.
Bob-
Luminaries in the field of economics, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, many other current and past professors and writers.
Even if you disagree with their conclusions, their arguments will challenge and inform rather than being merely the spouting platitudes and fallacies.
http://www.mises.org/Media/
I cannot recommend them highly enough. You'll get a better education in economics after a few lectures than you will in any public school and most colleges.
Bob-
Someone takes my money at gun point to pay for something THEY want, they're a thief. ...or a politician. Same thing.
If the Senator wants Hubble serviced, he can join or start a voluntary organization to do exactly that. And, funny thing, I'd likely contribute to it too.
Bob-
No.
Always glad to have a reasonable discourse.
So, how can you say that anarchy doesn't mean chaos?
Good sir, you said it yourself. 1. Absence of any form of political authority.
But what is "political authority"? It is the lawful power to unilaterally change contracts, among other things. For instance, the IRS code is changed every year. I have no ability to "opt out", unlike every voluntary contract I enter into that the other party chooses to change.
Every voluntary interaction you enter into is therefore anarchic, because you can indeed opt out. They hold no "political" authority over you. As you point out, those voluntary interactions happen under rules agreed upon by all the people involved. Churches are a great example. Some of them have a great many rules and regulations, yet (save for some abusive and generally condemned few) are entirely voluntary.
Anarchy means that if I am murdered there are no common standards whereby the murder would be judged.
Interesting that you would mention that after I said that the initiation of force, such as murder, remains prosecutable.
I do take exception to your putting forth that a lack of common standards is a bad thing. Many different standards have existed through history, some of which would value your life merely by some lump of gold. Variations of standards is why there are juries, because killing someone is not always murder.
Apparently we have read/talked to different groups of people calling themselves libertarians.
There are several people who call themselves "libertarians" who are nothing of the sort. I expect that you have indeed heard from some of them.
May I suggest the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Lew Rockwell as good places to correct your misinformation?
Many of "us" who espouse the benefits of definition 1 you provided tend to use the term "anarcho-capitalist" rather than simply "anarchist", for all the reasons you suggest.
non-initiation of force is one of the easiest things to rationalize into use of force. (generational feuds, etc.)
Only if you posit a society without societal norms. Luckily, when people are left to their own devices instead of "ruled", they form communities under agreed upon rules and standards of conduct. All the laws in the world do not prevent, as you say, "generational feuds". What has happened is the societal norm that such bloodshed is wrong has been written into law.
This also brings up the not-insignificant question of where influence ends and force begins.
"We" set those standards every day. I recall a news report about a woman who constantly sued the people around her. She would sue the family several houses away for playing basketball in their driveway, for instance, because she was able to word the suit in such a way as to make it seem that they were creating a nuisance, like that.
By the strict letter of the law, she was right. She knew how to twist the words to suit her own ends. The community, the reporter, the people watching the report, however, all (I assume) condemned her actions as the most absurd abuse of what had been written into statute law to prosecute real troublemakers.
Societal norms asserted themselves. No one ruler decided she was wrong, the answer was not political. Anarchy(1) at its best.
Please don't get me wrong, I agree with you that standards for conduct are important. I consider them of the utmost importance for peaceful human interaction. This is one of the biggest reasons I have for opposing government, opposing "political rule": Government gets to change the rules at their pleasure. Government creates chaos in a way that a mere individual cannot, because government can enforce those changes.
I do recommend you look at a few of the articles on Mises.org, they also have a blog where you can ask for clarification.
I look forward to further discussion.
Bob-
Once survival is taken care of, culture can happen. By lowering the cost of such things as food and clothing, more money is left over for "culture".
I love Japanese culture. The art, architecture, style. But did the poor shmuck who only owned one pair of shoes in his life care about that?
Bob-
In other words: In the long run, we evolve something similar to the system of truth-in-advertising laws...
Nope. In the short run. Consumer Reports, Underwriters Labs, Failure Analysis, even Erin Brockovitch. All of these "watchdogs" exist right now, and a truly free market will only see them flourish.
Bob-
exactly like the familiar whine of would-be Marxists: "No state on this planet has even approached true...
Good sir, you were the one who said that Libertarian countries have existed. All we want to know is, where are they?
In the meantime, people get ripped off, and since we agree (I think we agree, right?) that what we'll end up with is basically a system of "blanket regulation" under a different name, why suffer needlessly?
Prosecution of the initiation of force and fraud is all a "Libertarian" government would be empowered to do. Your statement is false because it implies that no such prosecution would happen in a free market. However, since there is no other function for all the people who would be bureaucrats and regulators and otherwise love to stick their noses into other peoples business, I expect that watchdog groups (like the ones that exist now, in fact) would flourish.
Imagine Underwriters Labs, or Failure Analysis. Or even something named "Consumer Reports". Oh, that's right, you don't have to imagine. And, they are entirely Free Market.
Prosecution for initiation of force and fraud is exactly what all the statists say their regulations are supposed to do. The fact that those regulations crush innovation, foster abuse, protect nasty people who hurt others deliberately while careful to remain "within the law", are all problems that having those regulations create. "why suffer needlessly" indeed.
Eliminate the regulations, go after the poluters, the false-advertisers, the makers of hazardous products, directly. There will be lots of resources left over without the regulations punishing those who harm no one, and lots of busybodies available to pester the few bad apples out of business.
Bob-
unsustainable and would rapidly change into either anarchy or stronger government.
Like when the authoritarian Constitution was implemented over the relatively free Articles of Confederation?
The problem with arguing about anarchy is that people do not talk about the same thing. Chaos is not the result of not having "rulers", yet many peoples use of the word anarchy would lead one to think that it means only chaos.
You live your life in anarchy most of the time. No one tells you where to shop, what to buy, what channel to watch, when to post on Slashdot, what to say or how to say it. There is no law defining when you go to bed or who you work for. Indeed, you can quit your job any time you want if their rules are not to your liking. Utter anarchy.
Anarchy does not mean that voluntary association goes away, it simply means that associations are all voluntary.
The bomb-throwing, window breaking, paint spraying "anarchists" on the news are hardly anarchists at all. They are funded and directed, taking orders from their leaders whomever they may be. They have leaders, and are therefore not anarchists.
Libertarians espouse only one principle: Non initiation of force. Everything else is a tributary of that one principle. That there are repercussions of this ideal that make some people uncomfortable is obvious.
To state that you don't agree with it means that you believe it is ok for you to initiate force against people, the essence of "the ends justify the means". You may narrowly define what ends you see as being so important that they justify forcing compliance, but your narrow definition does not change the fact.
I expect that almost all of your ends are the result of not thinking through what "initiation" means, such as the prosecution of murder which almost always involves using force against the murderer. Such prosecution is a response, not an initiation. Same with defensive war.
Anyway, please think about it. It's not like I can tell you to think about it, since I will not use force to compel you. Get it?
Bob-
Libertarian paradises, where they have existed
Good sir, please, where have you seen such places? I'd love to hear about them.
Bob-
Perfect information is indeed impossible. You don't know how to produce a pencil any more than the person who collects rubber-tree sap for the eraser or the person who digs graphite for the lead does, yet they are integral to the production of that pencil.
That is why the division of labor exists. Each individual knows his own effort best. Communication of this knowledge is by price. If I can produce something cheaper than someone else, I will sell more of it than they will. My price communicates the efficiency of my process.
By buying, the information that I am producing something people want is communicated. I don't have to know, for instance, that there has been a fall in the demand for pencils. The fact that my latex rubber isn't selling as well as it used to is enough for me to look to more efficient uses of my time.
It is only in a "free" market that such communication can exist. Price controls, tariffs, legal obstructions such as licensure and grants of limited liability, prevent the flow of this information. Inefficient processes are maintained, innovations are squashed, vested interests profit at the expense of the consumer.
There is no valid criticism of the "free" market. Every criticism I have ever read has been about the results of various interferences by governments. Urban sprawl? The result of zoning. Raw sewage in the government owned rivers? The result of government owned "sewage treatment" plants.
Enron is an excellent example, a business created out of nothing for the purpose of profiting on the trade in government pollution credits, government contracts, and government regulations. Enron corrupt? Don't act surprised. To blame the "free" market on such failures is irrational.
I recommend pretty much anything written by Ludwig von Mises, Murry Rothbard, or just read the daily articles on http://www.mises.org/ for a little while.
They even have a blog where you can educate them about the "valid" criticisms. You may even be right, and I assure you your posts will not be deleted just because you challenge their preconceptions.
Bob-
Do plumbers make money? Do electricians? How about building contractors of any kind?
Sure they do. Yet, their materials, specifications and "code" are completely open source.
It's not glamorous, it's not chic, but supplying the service of building what works to meet the customers needs works fine as a business model regardless of the product we're talking about.
Bob-
Mike, you're absolutely right. I marvel every time I go into the grocery store to see the variety and prices. Strawberries, grapes, good citrus, in February, at affordable, if still higher than when-in-season-locally, prices.
And that's the fresh food that is time sensitive in transportation. Someone is making a profit moving fruit from Chile to Kentucky quickly at a price even I can afford.
The comment that "Greed is good" was addressing exactly what you're talking about. In order to make a profit, someone will step into ANY available business, even if it's as seemingly mundane as transporting food to where no one else is doing it right now.
And there will always be some shmuck in the wings watching for where the profits are high, ready to undercut the price and still make a profit without having to do all the leg-work of discovering the market in the first place.
If that shmuck is, as you say, some really nasty person like Sam Walton, he'll undercut everybody he can to make his buck, so that the products are delivered not only where they have never been delivered before, but at as low a price as possible to keep out competition. The lowly consumer makes out like a bandit!
That is, unfortunately, until Government steps in and "levels the playing field", thereby punishing only the people at the bottom of the economic scale who cannot afford to pay the tariffs.
Bob-
There is plenty of food produced on earth to feed everyone. The 81 billion is just the price that it would take to move it.
But would it get there? Food supplies rotted on the docks in Ethiopia because the petty warlords wouldn't let it move to the interior where people were starving.
Stalin and Mao used transportation (or I should say BLOCKED transportation) of food in order to starve many millions of their own citizens.
The problem is not food, it's government. In an environment of actual freedom, entrepreneurs would gladly step in and find innovative and inexpensive ways to move food to where it is needed. And it wouldn't cost you a dime, much less 81 billion dollars.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember the company name that made the bi-directional single fiber boxes. But the speed was multi-megabit, not gigabit. It was also 5 years ago, I'm certain that capabilities have improved since. Especially if a two-fiber ring structure is used. As you said, you only buy the physical fiber once, so it's worth doing well.
The wireless service I've seen used directional antenna to direct your home signal back to the hub. It was in San Jose California, I have not seen it in service elsewhere even though I've heard of it.
But that was just an extention of 802.11b, again not gigabit speeds.
I'm firmly of the opinion that dropping taxes on such services will do much more to promote their use than anything else, because it's the only method of "promotion" that does not discriminate on the basis of politics, technology, or anything else. It simply lowers the barrier to entry for anyone who thinks they can do it better.
what happens if one of the homes goes to their backyard and cuts the fiber?
Then the systems "upstream" of that cut are not reachable. That same question could be asked of the lime-green box at the south-west corner of my property right now, labeled "TV Cable". If I cut it, I am liable for the damage I do.
Fiber is really the way to go but wireless could get things started.
I agree, and that sort of thing is happening.
I'm quite pleased with the IP service I get from my cable TV provider. Except for the genesis, it pretty much matches what is possible for "community" cooperation. Since the local telephone operator offers DSL as well, there is a check on the kinds of prices they can charge.
Oh, and the cable provider is now pushing VoIP service through their cable as well, which means I'm going to have to be careful. They may start filtering VoIP packets. If so, they lose a customer. A lack of such game playing with service might be one good byproduct of cooperative community ISPs.
Bob-
I don't disagree with you as far as you go, but. Big But: No force.
It's really that simple. Cooperation is great, people will build such systems easily and even quickly. I've often considered the "development" as a perfect incubator. Or the multi-story building in a city, same functional thing. Fiber really isn't all that expensive to lay in the ground as places are being built, and there are already central cable and electrical infrastructure access points.
There are some neat DWDM fiber data access units that I particularly like for this use. One fiber is daisy-chained from house to house, "upstream" is on one frequency, "downstream" is on another one. Bidirectional at multi-megabit speeds with the reliability of fiber.
However, I will not condone robbing people to pay for it. If anyone mentions taxes or "eminent domain" or any of the other ways that people are relieved of their property against their will, the project is not worth doing. It by definition doesn't have "popular" support.
Bob-
Why don't we have city-wide gigabit networks plugged into every home and business?
Because it's expensive as heck to build. People are already building wireless peer-to-peer community networks, but they're not fast.
Were you using the word "community" to denote "municipal"? As in city government provided? Goodness, if you don't like the restrictions placed on your service now, I cannot imagine how you think it will be better when it's run by unaccountable bureaucrats and special-interest politicians. Imagine your ISP being run by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
That's a very scary thought. I'd rather a slower "free as in freedom" network than the fastest "filtered for my own good" one.
Bob-