The real problem being the local legal monopoly on phone service.
"Deregulating" DSL is pointless if the phone companies continue to have regional legal monopolies. The only competition is Cable because Cable is the only competition by law.
The wireless systems are overlaying the physical wire systems, but again they are limited by law to a single provider in any given area.
Competition is being selected not by customers, not by technology, but by the bureaucrats and politicians who decide who may occupy the last mile.
No wonder it's a nightmare of lousy service, this is just an example of trying to get IP services from the DMV.
Deregulate without actually removing the regulations is a contradiction in terms, and leads to things like California power shortages.
A Little Dose Of Reality indeed. Very little.
on
Ice Lake on Mars
·
· Score: 1
we cant even send a shuttle into space to the ISS without foam coming off and jeopardzing the crew...
What's this "we" stuff, kemosabe? Last private space launch I saw didn't have any of this "foam" stuff you're talking about.
Oh, you mean government space launches! Built by the lowest bidder, but only if they build it in a dozen different "marginal constituencies" as the Brits say, paying off campaign donors and other vote-generating schemes, making sure that various politicians get "in the pocket" for future votes, and other games of pork barrel politics which have absolutely nothing to do with actual space flight.
Oh, that's right, the private space flight efforts have been blocked for decades by bureaucratic red tape. You might not have heard about them. Indeed, it does seem as if these absurd bricks called "shuttles" are the only spacecraft you believe exist.
You might find two books quite interesting. _Kings of the High Frontier_ and _Net Assets_. The latter is available online I'm sure, but I don't think Pulpless.com where _Kings_ was available is functional any more. Bummer.
As for medical research, well, get out of the way and let those who are interested go give it a try! Volunteers? $10K for anyone who will live a year in space, free tuition to online University of Phoenix while in orbit? What a great idea and CHEAP compared to a NASA astronaught.
It's not the card that is the problem. The problem is the *requirement*. By requiring such an ID, a very large door is opened to abuse.
Don't believe it will be abused? Then you ignore all of history. All governmental powers abused at some time. That's why democracy sucks so badly, it's just institutionalized mob rule.
Why have a constitution at all, if governmental powers are not abused? Because they are abused. They are always abused.
What government giveth government can taketh away. Piss off some petty bureaucrat, or just catch one who's having a bad day, and they can put a flag on your ID that will do all the bad things other people have suggested and you will have to prove your innocence in order to get your life back. Ever try to prove you DIDN'T do something?
ID's are a great idea. If governments didn't issue them, private firms would. In fact, it happens right now. You've seen the requirements like "no rental without a major credit card"? Same thing.
I notice you're worried about RFID. That means you do understand the potential for abuse. Now imagine simply that those against it are merely taking the reservations you already have and going further with them.
Unfortunately, so long as government is doing the issuing/requiring, there is no room for disagreement of any kind. Everyone is forced into the same one-size-fits-all package, and if anything goes wrong everyone is harmed.
If you'd asked if Microsoft would release their application and development suite as binaries for Linux, for a price, I'd say "Sure! As soon as they realize that the OS is now a commodity they cannot count on for their profit margins any more."
However, Microsoft will not release Windows as Open Source. They cannot, because there is too much stolen code in it. **cough**BSD**cough**
IF Microsoft had released Office for every OS out there, rather than trying to own the entire PC from device drivers to applications to keyboards and mice, they would indeed own the office, likely for the rest of time. But they didn't. They got greedy, they wanted it all, and focused so much effort and time trying to LOCK IN users and LOCK OUT any alternatives that they lost sight of the one thing that they used to do well: Write applications.
They tried. 64-bit Win95 for the Alpha did indeed get sold, but then they abandoned it. This left customers hanging and looking for an alternative, and they were pissed enough at MS to not go back. This is not smart, and it demonstrates the lack of forethought that has created the environment for disaster that Windows Vista forshadows.
Who will upgrade their hardware to relative supercomputers just to pay for an upgrade to software they already have and that already works? The vision of those hardy souls who have never upgraded from Win98 because, face it, Win98 and Office97 are still perfectly good for 99.99% of what everyone does.
So when Office97 documents start failing because Microsoft changed their formats again, don't expect companies to spend $2000/seat to just do what they could do yesterday. OpenOffice is already here.
And when IE7 won't install on anything older than WinXP, don't expect that same $2000/seat upgrade to be spent to, again, just do today what worked fine yesterday. Firefox, Opera, Mozilla &etc are already here.
The F/OSS community already has a head start in making functional apps to do what needs doing regardless of OS, on existing hardware, using commodity protocols. Microsoft can never catch up trying to do that, because they have never been successful at doing that. They CHOSE not to be compatible, not to be frugal, not to play nice with others.
Microsoft as a company believes this is some kind of "race" that they have to "win", but while Microsoft spends bails of money "mobilizing their sales and marketing departments", F/OSS developers will continue to write good code.
Private efforts have already demonstrated that they can "prevent debris from falling off the tank" because they don't use the pork-barrel cluster-frell that is this "space shuttle" thing.
The space shuttle is a perfect example of design by committee, and budget by politicians. THAT is why it keeps failing. It's an expensive, unreliable method of getting into LOW earth orbit, a place that is practically useless which is why all the real payloads have to be brought up with their own boosters attached to them.
The most effective thing "we" could do for space travel is abolish NASA. Quit throwing good money after bad, auction off all their assets to the highest bidders and let it go already! Before more people die pointlessly.
The premise of the "price" or "cost" part of the question is the fallacy called the "Labor Theory Of Value". The fallacy is demonstrated by the simple fact that no two people produce exactly the same "value" in the same time, or the same job. Price is a calculation separate from cost.
"Value" is utterly subjective. What is worth nothing to me is of tremendous value to someone else. One loaf of bread to a starving man is valuable beyond measure. One loaf of bread on a fully stocked store shelf is practically worthless.
Giving away the software and selling support is no different from giving away the razors and selling the blades, a business model with which Gillette made a fortune long before anyone had computer software to worry about selling.
Once again we see the absurdity of the FCC. Anyone who wants to can get a radio, it's the "law abiding" who are stuck with all the hurdles and bureaucratic handstands required to get "licenses", just like "criminals" attaching amplifiers to their CB radios.
Both cable and telephone systems have enjoyed a merchantilist "mandated monopoly" status in most of the country. The same reasonings were made in both cases, that market competition would make profit margins so low that service would not be rolled out for marginal customers. Same for "rural electrification" and lots of other services. Profits were, and are, legally mandated to occur regardless of the desirability of the services offered.
The ruling is a contradiction, because the cable companies continue to enjoy legal monopoly status. Their only competition in the wired IP field is in fact the phone companies, with VoIP and DSL bringing the two systems closer together in functionality every day.
Don't get me wrong, I utterly oppose anyone mandating that I provide my infrastructure to other people whether I like it or not. What I loath is the hypocrisy involved.
Now we have another judicial fiat defining differences in how they are allowed and/or required to do their business. Instead of competition driving prices down and service quality up, the companies are being limited to someone else's ideas of what they should be.
You're right that the two systems have never been regulated exactly the same. The problem is that they are regulated. As with every merchantilist scheme, we the customers are the losers.
Opiates they may be, but good speculative fiction is what expands the mind to think of the world in new ways.
Not just a novel, where the mundane world is muddled through over and over. SF lets the mind play "What if?", which allows wondering if the mundane things around us can become more.
Two of my favorite writers, L. Neil Smith and Robert A. Heinline aren't (weren't) afraid of putting very real human motivations into extraordinary situations. I think those make the best stories.
Wells, Verne, Tolkien, their characters tend to be rather more than human, in the latter case litterally. Black and white without truly reacting to the situations around them.
Bad writing happens in any genre, it's too bad that the "fantastic" attributes of SF allow for bad writing to make money. (and I'm not going to mention that any Star Trek paperback goes best-seller merely because of being a Star Trek paperback. interesting phenomenon that.)
As has been said before, yours is the only one working.
This Magnet URI seems like a great idea too, looks like I'll have to install Asurlace (or whatever it's called) in addition to everything else. I'm using bittornado, quite happy with it, maybe it does Magnet URIs too.
Aww, just trying to lighten the mood. Microsoft can write anything they want for their OS and for their customers. I applaud their recognition that a command line is worth having.
In doing so, I think Microsoft is admitting that wizards cannot do everything, that a command line is worth having. It's the only way under windows I've ever known to get the information from "C:\route print"
Well said, TripMaster. I'd mod this up as "insightful" if I had any mod points.
I know people on the "No Fly List" merely because they speak out on the net against government intrusion. Heck, I could easily be on the list myself, but since I haven't tried flying since the list was invented I don't know....since there is no way to find out if you're on the list until you TRY to board a plane. Idiots.
Nothing is gained by having many TLD (top level domains). The purpose of a TLD was to denote what registry to look in as a last resort when looking up a domain name that was otherwise not cached in any of the DNS servers querried.
Way Back When, When The Net Was Small, TLDs were used to distribute the load among the registries. With the advance of technology, there really isn't any functional reason to do so now.
In the mean time, the registry has been used like an index. Rather than look something up first, a person (machines don't care about DNS, just IP addresses) will type in a likely domain name and hope for the best. It is only after failure that they will go to the indexes like Yahoo and Google and look there for the address just like they would look in the phone book.
With the political forces already having created the country TLDs, there is no point at all to having, as you put it, "90's style suffixes appended to internet names".
What is surprising is the number of otherwise smart people who cannot grasp this. Since the DNS system is already difficult for humans to use by itself (eg. coke.com or coke.net or coke.int or coke.org or coke.ny.ny.us) because they are trying to use it like an index rather than a registry, they then advocate adding yet more TLDs. Yet it is the very use of TLDs that has confused the difference between an index and a registry in their minds in the first place, as well as caused the shell-game problem of which TLD to look under first.
Nothing I'm saying in any way reflects on the usefulness of the hierarchical system that is DNS. It is VERY useful to be able to separate www.whatever.the.heck from mx.whatever.the.heck from www.go.to.heck, etc.etc.etc.heck
The issue is TLDs, and TLDs have outlived their usefulness. At some point in the future, there will be a.earth appended after the country codes, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.
The end customer always pays all the fees, fines, taxes, whatever.
That's because there is no other source for a company to acquire the money than from sales. Sales are it, folks. All costs are passed on, they're costs. By definition.
What's silly is the assertion that it is possible to "punish" a company. All it does is raise the costs, and therefore the price of the end products.
No. Remember that the Microsoft way is to "Embrace And Extend".
1) First, Microsoft goes their own way.
2) Commodity standards and protocols end up being much better.
3) Microsoft makes a big to-do about how they are "embracing standards" by dumping their proprietary thing for the commodity standard thing.
4) Microsoft quietly introduces non-standard extentions into their implementation of what used to be a standard, then declares that everyone else is being incompatible.
With the patents (regardless of prior art, it seems. morons in government, but I repeat myself) Microsoft will be able to both declare how the competition is incompatible and prevent actual compatibility from being reverse-engineered. Unlike copyright, reverse engineering a patented thing is prosecutable.
Microsoft is not changing their tune. Everything they do is to boost image and/or profitability. Period. They have no other motivation.
As a publicly traded company, in fact they should have no other motivation than maximizing shareholder value. If the principles and officers do anything else they themselves are legally liable to those shareholders. For a good dissertation on this idea, read
Neil Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_.
That is one of the concrete reasons that FOSS beats commercial software again and again. The goal of FOSS is to write good software.
In recent history, Europe had to deal with another interventionist government. In the particular situation I'm thinking of, 10 million of the governments own citizens were killed.
When are people going to realize that interventionist governments are destructive to their own citizens well being? The "EU" is no different.
Ah! Many thanks for the clarification. I agree, that is a problem. I agree, they don't get into compliance costs on honest companies directly, but it has been addressed many times before.
It is exactly the same problem with all government regulation. That the costs of compliance with the regulation and its consequential requirement for yet more regulations to try to fix the problems the first regulation caused, on and on ad nauseum, constitute far greater damage to everyone, especially the innocent, than would have been represented by the "problem" that the first regulation was touted as solving.
Alcohol prohibition, gun control, and the War On Some Drugs are extreme examples with commensurate extreme costs overwhelmingly out of proportion with the "problem" supposedly addressed.
Nothing is gained by having many TLD (top level domains). The purpose of a TLD was to denote what registry to look in as a last resort when looking up a domain name that was otherwise not cached in any of the DNS servers querried.
Way Back When, When The Net Was Small, TLDs were used to distribute the load among the registries. With the advance of technology, there really isn't any functional reason to do so now.
In the mean time, the registry has been used like an index. Rather than look something up first, a person (machines don't care about DNS, just IP addresses) will type in a likely domain name and hope for the best. It is only after failure that they will go to the indexes like Yahoo and Google and look there for the address just like they would look in the phone book.
With the political forces already having created the country TLDs, there is no point at all to having, as you put it, "90's style suffixes appended to internet names".
What is surprising is the number of otherwise smart people who cannot grasp this. Since the DNS system is already difficult for humans to use by itself (eg. coke.com or coke.net or coke.int or coke.org or coke.ny.ny.us) because they are trying to use it like an index rather than a registry, they then advocate adding yet more TLDs. Yet it is the very use of TLDs that has confused the difference between an index and a registry in their minds in the first place, as well as caused the shell-game problem of which TLD to look under first.
Nothing I'm saying in any way reflects on the usefulness of the hierarchical system that is DNS. It is VERY useful to be able to separate www.whatever.the.heck from mx.whatever.the.heck from www.go.to.heck, etc.etc.etc.heck
The issue is TLDs, and TLDs have outlived their usefulness. At some point in the future, there will be a.earth appended after the country codes, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.
You are ethical when you obey the rules, and unethical when you don't obey the rules.
Which is why I would only invest in a company (if this were a completely voluntary system) which ascribed to a set of accounting practices. I'm not saying that the level of detail that SOX requires is in-of-itself bad, I'm saying that I would prefer it be something done because it inspires investor and customer confidence.
The reason that a free market doesn't succumb to the same dead-end corruption as a command economy does is because there isn't anyone in "command" to be corrupt. Abusive companies lose their reputations, badly run organizations fail, consumers are free to buy from whomever they wish while new sellers can enter any venture where they can offer value.
I see great value in good accounting practices. I don't expect it will prevent abuse any more than laws against murder prevent murder. What quality accounting practices do is raise confidence of both customers and investors. In a truly free market, such confidence is exceptionally important.
The importance of quality in accounting practices is evident in the fact that a "representative" style government believes it has the mandate required for it to take action in the matter. Government involvement is not a first step, it is a reaction to what investors, customers and other individuals already want to see.
Being "unfair" in the eyes of the consumer is also a great way to go out of business. Thus is the "social standard" imposed upon business practices without any government needed.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem being the local legal monopoly on phone service.
"Deregulating" DSL is pointless if the phone companies continue to have regional legal monopolies. The only competition is Cable because Cable is the only competition by law.
The wireless systems are overlaying the physical wire systems, but again they are limited by law to a single provider in any given area.
Competition is being selected not by customers, not by technology, but by the bureaucrats and politicians who decide who may occupy the last mile.
No wonder it's a nightmare of lousy service, this is just an example of trying to get IP services from the DMV.
Deregulate without actually removing the regulations is a contradiction in terms, and leads to things like California power shortages.
Bob-
Thank you. :^)
we cant even send a shuttle into space to the ISS without foam coming off and jeopardzing the crew...
What's this "we" stuff, kemosabe? Last private space launch I saw didn't have any of this "foam" stuff you're talking about.
Oh, you mean government space launches! Built by the lowest bidder, but only if they build it in a dozen different "marginal constituencies" as the Brits say, paying off campaign donors and other vote-generating schemes, making sure that various politicians get "in the pocket" for future votes, and other games of pork barrel politics which have absolutely nothing to do with actual space flight.
Oh, that's right, the private space flight efforts have been blocked for decades by bureaucratic red tape. You might not have heard about them. Indeed, it does seem as if these absurd bricks called "shuttles" are the only spacecraft you believe exist.
You might find two books quite interesting. _Kings of the High Frontier_ and _Net Assets_. The latter is available online I'm sure, but I don't think Pulpless.com where _Kings_ was available is functional any more. Bummer.
As for medical research, well, get out of the way and let those who are interested go give it a try! Volunteers? $10K for anyone who will live a year in space, free tuition to online University of Phoenix while in orbit? What a great idea and CHEAP compared to a NASA astronaught.
Bob-
It's not the card that is the problem. The problem is the *requirement*. By requiring such an ID, a very large door is opened to abuse.
Don't believe it will be abused? Then you ignore all of history. All governmental powers abused at some time. That's why democracy sucks so badly, it's just institutionalized mob rule.
Why have a constitution at all, if governmental powers are not abused? Because they are abused. They are always abused.
What government giveth government can taketh away. Piss off some petty bureaucrat, or just catch one who's having a bad day, and they can put a flag on your ID that will do all the bad things other people have suggested and you will have to prove your innocence in order to get your life back. Ever try to prove you DIDN'T do something?
ID's are a great idea. If governments didn't issue them, private firms would. In fact, it happens right now. You've seen the requirements like "no rental without a major credit card"? Same thing.
I notice you're worried about RFID. That means you do understand the potential for abuse. Now imagine simply that those against it are merely taking the reservations you already have and going further with them.
Unfortunately, so long as government is doing the issuing/requiring, there is no room for disagreement of any kind. Everyone is forced into the same one-size-fits-all package, and if anything goes wrong everyone is harmed.
Bob-
May thanks. The first trailer was easy to find, this one was invisible.
Bob-
If you'd asked if Microsoft would release their application and development suite as binaries for Linux, for a price, I'd say "Sure! As soon as they realize that the OS is now a commodity they cannot count on for their profit margins any more."
However, Microsoft will not release Windows as Open Source. They cannot, because there is too much stolen code in it. **cough**BSD**cough**
IF Microsoft had released Office for every OS out there, rather than trying to own the entire PC from device drivers to applications to keyboards and mice, they would indeed own the office, likely for the rest of time. But they didn't. They got greedy, they wanted it all, and focused so much effort and time trying to LOCK IN users and LOCK OUT any alternatives that they lost sight of the one thing that they used to do well: Write applications.
They tried. 64-bit Win95 for the Alpha did indeed get sold, but then they abandoned it. This left customers hanging and looking for an alternative, and they were pissed enough at MS to not go back. This is not smart, and it demonstrates the lack of forethought that has created the environment for disaster that Windows Vista forshadows.
Who will upgrade their hardware to relative supercomputers just to pay for an upgrade to software they already have and that already works? The vision of those hardy souls who have never upgraded from Win98 because, face it, Win98 and Office97 are still perfectly good for 99.99% of what everyone does.
So when Office97 documents start failing because Microsoft changed their formats again, don't expect companies to spend $2000/seat to just do what they could do yesterday. OpenOffice is already here.
And when IE7 won't install on anything older than WinXP, don't expect that same $2000/seat upgrade to be spent to, again, just do today what worked fine yesterday. Firefox, Opera, Mozilla &etc are already here.
The F/OSS community already has a head start in making functional apps to do what needs doing regardless of OS, on existing hardware, using commodity protocols. Microsoft can never catch up trying to do that, because they have never been successful at doing that. They CHOSE not to be compatible, not to be frugal, not to play nice with others.
Microsoft as a company believes this is some kind of "race" that they have to "win", but while Microsoft spends bails of money "mobilizing their sales and marketing departments", F/OSS developers will continue to write good code.
Bob-
Private efforts have already demonstrated that they can "prevent debris from falling off the tank" because they don't use the pork-barrel cluster-frell that is this "space shuttle" thing.
The space shuttle is a perfect example of design by committee, and budget by politicians. THAT is why it keeps failing. It's an expensive, unreliable method of getting into LOW earth orbit, a place that is practically useless which is why all the real payloads have to be brought up with their own boosters attached to them.
The most effective thing "we" could do for space travel is abolish NASA. Quit throwing good money after bad, auction off all their assets to the highest bidders and let it go already! Before more people die pointlessly.
Bob-
People also get caught speeding. It doesn't mean that they harmed anyone in the process, only that they violated some bureaucratic "regulation".
The premise of the "price" or "cost" part of the question is the fallacy called the "Labor Theory Of Value". The fallacy is demonstrated by the simple fact that no two people produce exactly the same "value" in the same time, or the same job. Price is a calculation separate from cost.
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap12sec3.asp
"The Sphere of Economic Calculation"
"Value" is utterly subjective. What is worth nothing to me is of tremendous value to someone else. One loaf of bread to a starving man is valuable beyond measure. One loaf of bread on a fully stocked store shelf is practically worthless.
Giving away the software and selling support is no different from giving away the razors and selling the blades, a business model with which Gillette made a fortune long before anyone had computer software to worry about selling.
Bob-
Once again we see the absurdity of the FCC. Anyone who wants to can get a radio, it's the "law abiding" who are stuck with all the hurdles and bureaucratic handstands required to get "licenses", just like "criminals" attaching amplifiers to their CB radios.
Here's a great article on the subject:
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1662
"The Spectrum Should Be Private Property."
Bob-
Both cable and telephone systems have enjoyed a merchantilist "mandated monopoly" status in most of the country. The same reasonings were made in both cases, that market competition would make profit margins so low that service would not be rolled out for marginal customers. Same for "rural electrification" and lots of other services. Profits were, and are, legally mandated to occur regardless of the desirability of the services offered.
The ruling is a contradiction, because the cable companies continue to enjoy legal monopoly status. Their only competition in the wired IP field is in fact the phone companies, with VoIP and DSL bringing the two systems closer together in functionality every day.
Don't get me wrong, I utterly oppose anyone mandating that I provide my infrastructure to other people whether I like it or not. What I loath is the hypocrisy involved.
Now we have another judicial fiat defining differences in how they are allowed and/or required to do their business. Instead of competition driving prices down and service quality up, the companies are being limited to someone else's ideas of what they should be.
You're right that the two systems have never been regulated exactly the same. The problem is that they are regulated. As with every merchantilist scheme, we the customers are the losers.
Bob-
Opiates they may be, but good speculative fiction is what expands the mind to think of the world in new ways.
Not just a novel, where the mundane world is muddled through over and over. SF lets the mind play "What if?", which allows wondering if the mundane things around us can become more.
Two of my favorite writers, L. Neil Smith and Robert A. Heinline aren't (weren't) afraid of putting very real human motivations into extraordinary situations. I think those make the best stories.
Wells, Verne, Tolkien, their characters tend to be rather more than human, in the latter case litterally. Black and white without truly reacting to the situations around them.
Bad writing happens in any genre, it's too bad that the "fantastic" attributes of SF allow for bad writing to make money. (and I'm not going to mention that any Star Trek paperback goes best-seller merely because of being a Star Trek paperback. interesting phenomenon that.)
As has been said before, yours is the only one working.
:^)))
This Magnet URI seems like a great idea too, looks like I'll have to install Asurlace (or whatever it's called) in addition to everything else. I'm using bittornado, quite happy with it, maybe it does Magnet URIs too.
(but for that I'd have to read the manual!
I wonder why no one posted the Torrent UUencoded?
Bob-
Gonad
Aww, just trying to lighten the mood. Microsoft can write anything they want for their OS and for their customers. I applaud their recognition that a command line is worth having.
In doing so, I think Microsoft is admitting that wizards cannot do everything, that a command line is worth having. It's the only way under windows I've ever known to get the information from "C:\route print"
Bob-
Well said, TripMaster. I'd mod this up as "insightful" if I had any mod points.
...since there is no way to find out if you're on the list until you TRY to board a plane. Idiots.
I know people on the "No Fly List" merely because they speak out on the net against government intrusion. Heck, I could easily be on the list myself, but since I haven't tried flying since the list was invented I don't know.
I don't remember who said it first:
The first 90% takes 10% of the time.
The last 10% takes 90% of the time.
I expect one could substitute "money", "labor", "effort" for "time" in the above.
Bob-
Nothing is gained by having many TLD (top level domains). The purpose of a TLD was to denote what registry to look in as a last resort when looking up a domain name that was otherwise not cached in any of the DNS servers querried.
.earth appended after the country codes, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.
Way Back When, When The Net Was Small, TLDs were used to distribute the load among the registries. With the advance of technology, there really isn't any functional reason to do so now.
In the mean time, the registry has been used like an index. Rather than look something up first, a person (machines don't care about DNS, just IP addresses) will type in a likely domain name and hope for the best. It is only after failure that they will go to the indexes like Yahoo and Google and look there for the address just like they would look in the phone book.
With the political forces already having created the country TLDs, there is no point at all to having, as you put it, "90's style suffixes appended to internet names".
What is surprising is the number of otherwise smart people who cannot grasp this. Since the DNS system is already difficult for humans to use by itself (eg. coke.com or coke.net or coke.int or coke.org or coke.ny.ny.us) because they are trying to use it like an index rather than a registry, they then advocate adding yet more TLDs. Yet it is the very use of TLDs that has confused the difference between an index and a registry in their minds in the first place, as well as caused the shell-game problem of which TLD to look under first.
Nothing I'm saying in any way reflects on the usefulness of the hierarchical system that is DNS. It is VERY useful to be able to separate www.whatever.the.heck from mx.whatever.the.heck from www.go.to.heck, etc.etc.etc.heck
The issue is TLDs, and TLDs have outlived their usefulness. At some point in the future, there will be a
Bob-
The end customer always pays all the fees, fines, taxes, whatever.
That's because there is no other source for a company to acquire the money than from sales. Sales are it, folks. All costs are passed on, they're costs. By definition.
What's silly is the assertion that it is possible to "punish" a company. All it does is raise the costs, and therefore the price of the end products.
Bob-
1) First, Microsoft goes their own way.
2) Commodity standards and protocols end up being much better.
3) Microsoft makes a big to-do about how they are "embracing standards" by dumping their proprietary thing for the commodity standard thing.
4) Microsoft quietly introduces non-standard extentions into their implementation of what used to be a standard, then declares that everyone else is being incompatible.
With the patents (regardless of prior art, it seems. morons in government, but I repeat myself) Microsoft will be able to both declare how the competition is incompatible and prevent actual compatibility from being reverse-engineered. Unlike copyright, reverse engineering a patented thing is prosecutable.
Microsoft is not changing their tune. Everything they do is to boost image and/or profitability. Period. They have no other motivation.
As a publicly traded company, in fact they should have no other motivation than maximizing shareholder value. If the principles and officers do anything else they themselves are legally liable to those shareholders. For a good dissertation on this idea, read Neil Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_.
That is one of the concrete reasons that FOSS beats commercial software again and again. The goal of FOSS is to write good software.
Bob-
So, what's the problem? Just don't open any .doc files as root for a few days.
In recent history, Europe had to deal with another interventionist government. In the particular situation I'm thinking of, 10 million of the governments own citizens were killed.
When are people going to realize that interventionist governments are destructive to their own citizens well being? The "EU" is no different.
Ah! Many thanks for the clarification. I agree, that is a problem. I agree, they don't get into compliance costs on honest companies directly, but it has been addressed many times before.
It is exactly the same problem with all government regulation. That the costs of compliance with the regulation and its consequential requirement for yet more regulations to try to fix the problems the first regulation caused, on and on ad nauseum, constitute far greater damage to everyone, especially the innocent, than would have been represented by the "problem" that the first regulation was touted as solving.
Alcohol prohibition, gun control, and the War On Some Drugs are extreme examples with commensurate extreme costs overwhelmingly out of proportion with the "problem" supposedly addressed.
Here's a great short article on that subject:
http://www.mises.org/story/1773
The article highlights material from Ludwig von Mises' book "A Critique Of Interventionism", which is online in its entirety if you're interested.
Bob-
Nothing is gained by having many TLD (top level domains). The purpose of a TLD was to denote what registry to look in as a last resort when looking up a domain name that was otherwise not cached in any of the DNS servers querried.
.earth appended after the country codes, but I doubt I'll have to worry about that.
Way Back When, When The Net Was Small, TLDs were used to distribute the load among the registries. With the advance of technology, there really isn't any functional reason to do so now.
In the mean time, the registry has been used like an index. Rather than look something up first, a person (machines don't care about DNS, just IP addresses) will type in a likely domain name and hope for the best. It is only after failure that they will go to the indexes like Yahoo and Google and look there for the address just like they would look in the phone book.
With the political forces already having created the country TLDs, there is no point at all to having, as you put it, "90's style suffixes appended to internet names".
What is surprising is the number of otherwise smart people who cannot grasp this. Since the DNS system is already difficult for humans to use by itself (eg. coke.com or coke.net or coke.int or coke.org or coke.ny.ny.us) because they are trying to use it like an index rather than a registry, they then advocate adding yet more TLDs. Yet it is the very use of TLDs that has confused the difference between an index and a registry in their minds in the first place, as well as caused the shell-game problem of which TLD to look under first.
Nothing I'm saying in any way reflects on the usefulness of the hierarchical system that is DNS. It is VERY useful to be able to separate www.whatever.the.heck from mx.whatever.the.heck from www.go.to.heck, etc.etc.etc.heck
The issue is TLDs, and TLDs have outlived their usefulness. At some point in the future, there will be a
Bob-
Profane,
Here's a quick article over on mises.org that addresses the continuing problems with this latest massive interference with "the market":
http://blog.mises.org/blog/archives/003418.asp
I would appreciate any comments you have on it.
Bob-
You are ethical when you obey the rules, and unethical when you don't obey the rules.
Which is why I would only invest in a company (if this were a completely voluntary system) which ascribed to a set of accounting practices. I'm not saying that the level of detail that SOX requires is in-of-itself bad, I'm saying that I would prefer it be something done because it inspires investor and customer confidence.
The reason that a free market doesn't succumb to the same dead-end corruption as a command economy does is because there isn't anyone in "command" to be corrupt. Abusive companies lose their reputations, badly run organizations fail, consumers are free to buy from whomever they wish while new sellers can enter any venture where they can offer value.
I see great value in good accounting practices. I don't expect it will prevent abuse any more than laws against murder prevent murder. What quality accounting practices do is raise confidence of both customers and investors. In a truly free market, such confidence is exceptionally important.
The importance of quality in accounting practices is evident in the fact that a "representative" style government believes it has the mandate required for it to take action in the matter. Government involvement is not a first step, it is a reaction to what investors, customers and other individuals already want to see.
Being "unfair" in the eyes of the consumer is also a great way to go out of business. Thus is the "social standard" imposed upon business practices without any government needed.
Bob-