That actually makes a certain amount of sense. There were some worms floating around that would replicate themselves by sending an infected URL out as a message to all of your AIM contacts.
There was a period of time a few years ago when I was getting 10-15 of these URL-messages a day. Didn't affect me any, because I used a Mac, but it might explain Yahoo's paranoia.
However, I would find such a limitation incredibly annoying, since I often use IM applications to send people links. For example, let's say you're looking at a web site and want to send it to somebody in the next cube over -- rather than reading them the URL, you just cut-and-paste into an IM message. I can't tell you how many times I've done that.
I knew there was a reason I never started using Yahoo Messenger.
I just did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be anyone else talking about it, at least that I could find -- if Yahoo really was engaging in this, you'd think it would have created more of a hue and cry.
I'm starting to suspect hoax, unless someone besides the article submitter can come up with evidence that it happened.
I can't imagine that Yahoo would want to demonstrate that it has the capability of selectively filtering messages based on content. That just opens the door to lots of problematic demands -- e.g., why don't they block links to warez sites, or porn, or gambling, or (in other countries) various political websites. If you have that sort of capability, even if you don't want to use it for evil purposes, people are going to try and make you use it. So it's better just to never develop the capability in the first place, and if it is technically possible, never reveal that it can be done on demand, so that you can maintain your plausible deniability.
You're correct; in that example I should have said "trends" and not "rates." E.g., 'if current trends in production and consumption continue, oil will peak...' or 'if current trends in consumption and exploration continue...'
In other words, one would be extrapolating the change in production forwards rather than the actual amount of production (first derviative, basically).
Nonetheless, the point of all my comments boil down to "don't make more assumptions than absolutely necessary," and "state all of the assumptions and their justifications whenever possible."
I'd rather not see Canada turn into a toxic wasteland and increase CO2 emissions so that Americans can keep driving their SUVs.
Uh huh... it'll be becase of those bad old Americans who just came up and stole that oil in the middle of the night from the poor ignorant Canadians, and not because they willingly sold it on the open market for the going price.
Just keep in mind that a transaction requires a buyer and a seller. That oil isn't going anywhere unless the Canadians decide to sell it. If they want to sell it despite the environmental damage that it will do, that's their decision. You can't really blame the buyers for that.
You are advocating blatant propaganda, and the manipulation of poblic opinion through the biased use of what should be a neutral source of information and analysis.
Not at all. Not even slightly.
On the contrary, I'm saying that predictions should be made with the minimum of error-inducing assumptions.
Simply assuming that we'll develop (and implement!) some technology that will reduce our oil consumption seems very dangerous. Particularly since, in making the prediction yourself, you're altering the chances of that assumption being right.
Rather than packing all sorts of potentially unwarranted assumptions into the prediction, I think it's more scientifically valid to take what is known right now, and extrapolate it into the future, so that the reader can be presented with a clear if-then statement, along with an estimate of the certainty of the extrapolation. I.e., 'If some trend continues, this will probably be the effect.'
Unless the paper or report also has an in-depth discussion of the likelihood of various technological developments, I don't think that it is generally appropriate to include them in a prediction, since the reader will probably not have the information necessary to judge whether it's valid or not.
In short, building in predictions about future technological developments to the prediction seems far more prone to propagandization than simply drawing out a straight trendline based on currently accepted consumption and production/exploration data. The latter may not be valid for very long, but is at least easier for a reader to understand, interpret, and choose whether to believe.
Predictions need to be made in a clear "if, then (uncertainty)" format.
That is, every time someone makes a prediction, they should be clear about the assumptions which are being used to create it. E.g., rather than just saying "Oil production will peak in 2007," it should be said, "If current rates of consumption and production continue, then oil production will peak in 2007, plus or minus two years." It states the assumptions, the prediction itself, and the uncertainty with which the prediction is being given.
That said, I maintain that the most useful predictions for people to understand, are the ones which extrapolate a current trend into the future, adding the minimum number of additional 'ifs.' Saying "if we continue to do x, then there is a y chance that z will happen," is not a scare tactic, it's honesty. Including a lot of trends, such as future technological developments which are difficult to predict, into the 'if' part of the statement, just make the prediction more difficult to use and increase its ultimate uncertainty.
Well, you really don't want to factor future technological developments into the predictions, because that encourages people to just keep doing what they're doing, and might cause the technological developments that you were counting on, to never be introduced.
The point of these predictions, IMO, is to show us what will happen if we just keep bumbling along, doing what we're currently doing.
If you assume that we'll start using more efficient cars in the future, and take that into consideration when making your graph/paper/prediction/whatever, then it might make the looming crisis look less severe, meaning that people won't actually start using more efficient cars... and the crisis ends up being worse.
It's a self-defeating prophesy: if you make it look like we're going to do better than we're currently on target to do, taking no corrective action, then you encourage us to not take any.
I still don't quite understand it, though. (And maybe the judge doesn't, either, hence the problem...) How could ICANN "kill" a domain?
ICANN controls the root nameservers, so they could conceivably "kill" any TLD of their choice (not that this wouldn't be insanity, but it's technically possible), but they don't manage any of the domains within the TLDs themselves, at least to my understanding..com and.net are managed by Verisign,.org is run by the Public Interest Registry,.edu is EduCause, etc. So if you wanted to order someone to shut down spamhaus.org, it would be PIR or their "technical partner," Afilias Ltd.
The best response ICANN could make to the request to put a hold on the name is "we can't do it." At the very least, it would deflect the request to the actual maintainance organization for the TLD (in this case PIR), who would be in a better position to accede to or refuse the request. The updating, maintanance, suspension, or takedown of individual domains just isn't within ICANN's jurisdiction; one would hope a Federal judge would understand that, conceptually.
The ITU, ISO, and IEC do okay because there's very little politicization of their decision-making processes. When's the last time that the ITU did anything that average people cared about? The ITU for the most part just acts as a mediator between various national regulatory bodies, and does very little actual rulemaking itself (and where it has veered into that, it has been the subject of criticism for overstepping). The ISO isn't exactly a great example either -- they had a go at the whole internet business, with the OSI project, and it sucked and was made irrelevant by TCP/IP and the IETF, principally due to ISO's mismanagement of the whole thing. You really want to give the Internet back to them for another round? No, thanks.
An Internet governance committee would not be able to avoid the spotlight; there are too many unresolved, very contentious issues. Things like.xxx and spam are just the tip of the iceberg, and cannot be passed down to various national or local jurisdictions, as similar problems in the radio or telephone world might. The current generation of Internet protocols is not going to last forever, and when their replacements are designed, there are lots of opportunities for monitoring, censorship, or regulation to be inserted. Whatever body has control of the Internet (whether in reality or just in name) will wield a tremendous amount of power, far exceeding that held by any of the regulatory bodies currently in existence, and this will only increase in the future.
Just because a UN body has done an acceptable job of delegating radio spectrum for further regulation by national authorities (which is the bulk of the ITU's job) doesn't mean that they wouldn't make a giant cockup of something as potentially contentious as Internet governance.
Maybe you should turn off Air America for a moment and realize that the U.N. -- an organization designed to find consensus between countries -- isn't necessarily the best way to achieve consensus among people, and might be nothing but an unnecessary middleman where a more direct, open, apolitical, democratic process would do fine.
In another few years, the movie studios could do just that.
But right now, B&M DVD sales are too much a part of their revenue stream to allow them to just walk away from it. Just think, if some movie studio said "no problem, we'll just sell exclusively through iTunes," how many consumers would see their movies? Not too many -- it's still only a small percentage of consumers who buy music online, and even fewer who buy movies online.
The B&M stores are going to use their clout in the market to try and keep out online distribution -- which they know because of its low costs will eventually be their demise -- as long as possible. Right now they can still do that. In a few years, probably not.
Well, it's hard to imagine Aqua running on a Geode processor, but the underlying parts of OS X that were derived from NeXT ran just fine on 30MHz machines; I doubt you'd have that much of a problem building something for an embedded system if the desire was there. It basically becomes a question of how much modern userland stuff from OS X you want to throw in on top of the kernel; that's where the bloat is.
At any rate, I think the OLPC people made the right decision in going with Linux; it's certainly easier to customize than OS X would have been, if only because there are many more people familiar with the Linux kernel than the xnu one.
I think you should be very careful describing the project that way.
Saying that it makes people in other countries "able to compete" probably isn't going to win you a lot of friends amount the recently-unemployed here in Western countries. In fact, I could imagine that to someone who's recently seen their job disappear due to globalization, if you say "without computers or some other advantage, these third world countries will find themselves unable to compete," a more likely reaction would be "good, let's keep it that way."
Rather than competition, I think that we need to look at the global market as a one of participation. Obviously, there is competition, but by increasing the educational level of other countries, you produce markets for goods and capital in addition to just creating more skilled labor. So as I've said elsewhere, it can make good business sense, from a purely self-interested foreign policy perspective, to help other nations bootstrap themselves.
'Let's help them compete with us' may play well with the cocktail-party set, but it's going to go over like a fart in church at your local UAW meeting, I think.
Actually, it makes a certain amount of business sense to try and bring some level of education and "civilization" to the Third World. You don't hear about these motivations as much, because people like to concentrate on those moral impulses that make them feel good about themselves, but there are sound economic reasons for investing in development there.
You can make a lot more money off of a country as a trading partner than just as a weapons market. In the former case there's actually wealth created there, which benfits the entire global market; in the latter case it's just a sink for high-value goods (arms) to get destroyed, in return for some raw materials in payment. It's the ultimate broken window.
Not to mention that by making a country safer and more educated, you create opportunities for capital investment, which is a major source of profit in the First World.
I'm not necessarily advocating cash-based foreign aid, but just pointing out that the economic benefits of wartorn countries are often overstated; it would be better and more profitable in the long run to create in them markets for manufactured goods besides weapons, irregardless of the moral or ethical reasons for doing so.
That said, it's a common misconception that the OLPC machines are designed for "starving kids in Africa." I think the intended users are countries that are truly "developing," like Thailand and Mexico, and not where there isn't even basic infrastructure nor enough money for food. Sending thousands of dollars worth of anything to a country controlled by warlords would of course be almost criminally stupid.
Although, if I ever walk outside my house and see a tool palette hanging in the air above my garage, I think I'd go back inside and lock the door, too.
I think giving the ICANN to the U.N. would be a uniquely terrible idea. It's hardly democratic -- any body where every country would have the same say in how the internet was run, without regard to the number of internet users or infrastructure there, would be a total farse. (Can you imagine giving North Korea the same voting power as China, Germany, the U.K., or the U.S.? It would be ridiculous. You'd have tons of small nations who aren't connected and don't care about internet governance selling their vote to the highest bidder. You might as well just auction the process off and be done with it.)
However, that doesn't mean that the status quo is a good system, either. A democratic system run by internet users, or where internet users at least had some influence over the decisions made by the governing body (similar to OpenNIC) would be a good compromise.
If the vast majority of internet users think that you're a spammer or detrimental to the network in general, there's probably a good chance that you are. I admit, there's always the chance of having a "tyranny of the majority," but I'll take the tyranny of the majority over the tyranny of an actual tyrant any day.
Maybe the solution is just for European ISPs and backbone providers to just stop syncing to the ICANN DNS roots.
You can't "take" ICANN away from the US government, no matter how much people in Europe don't like it (how exactly would you "take" it? Invade? Haul the servers away in a truck in the middle of the night?).
The U.S. only controls the DNS system because everyone else in the world implicitly agrees to use it. If you think that the U.S. Government is ever going to give up control of ICANN, you're insane -- they never will. However, if enough people switched to some other DNS root, then the USG's "legacy" system would just become irrelevant.
What's stopping them from getting a domain name in a non-US-controlled TLD?
I don't see how a US court ruling could shut down a domain name in another country's TLD; so why don't they just go and get a name in the UK, or Switzerland, or Sealand.
Somehow I think enough people find Spamhaus useful, that if they asked they could probably take up collection and get enough money to afford a new domain, and right now they have enough press coverage to ensure that it would be publicized. Sure, it would be a PITA for a lot of mailserver admins who would need to change the address, but that's still a lot less work than filtering their spam by hand.
It sounds like Spamhaus is getting ready to 'cut off their nose to spite their face,' or in this case, destroy themselves in order to try and prove some point to a Federal Court in the US that couldn't give a damn one way or the other. If they're trying to make a point, this isn't the way to do it.
If there was a huge requirement for Linux that was "grandma friendly," Linux distributions that were even easier to use than they are today would be created. Nonwithstanding that I have serious doubts that you've ever used Ubuntu or any of the other current 'easy' distros (where you never need to use the CLI to install software), the approach that they take towards ease-of-use is a reflection of the people who are interested in them: computer enthuasiasts and ex-Windows refugees who are willing to experiment with stuff. Given that this is their market, they're dead simple.
While Windows is basically a take-it-or-leave-it proposition -- if you don't like the way Windows does something, unless you have an in with somebody at Microsoft, you are shit outta luck -- any significant user demand for something in Linux usually produces a version or fork of the software that caters to it. Hence there are far more distributions of Linux than there are versions of Windows.
If God decreed next Monday that Windows was no more, you can bet that by Tuesday, people would be working on making a version of Linux that catered to people who needed something with about five icons on the entire desktop. (And somebody else would probably make one that simulated a Windows XP desktop as closely as possible, etc.) That such things either don't exist today, or (more likely) exist but aren't popular, is less a reflection of Linux per se, than of the people who currently choose to use Linux.
If Linux isn't "grandma friendly" (and I'm not saying that it's necessarily not, as I'm sure other people will attest to, but if it's not), then it's probably because there's perceived to be insufficent demand for a truly dead-easy-to-use (and hence probably somewhat inflexible) distribution. Software gets written for the userbase that the programmers believe exist, both on the commercial and OSS side.
Not dissimilarly, 3DSMax and Photoshop don't exist for Linux, because their respective owners think that the demand for the application on the platform is insufficient to warrant the effort to port it. If everyone was using Linux, doubtless both would exist.
What drives Windows is inertia; it has 90+% marketshare, therefore people use it, developers develop for it, and there's very little public demand for an alternative. It has no technical or usability superiority that couldn't be replicated elsewhere, if there was a reason to. But Microsoft bundles it in with new hardware and sells it at a price-point that's sufficiently below the "point of pain" so that most people just don't mind using it that much.
If you find the differences between Mac Word and Windows Word to be that "scary," God help you when you switch to Vista and the new version of Office...
I'm with you. I've tried to figure out the same thing, and as far as I can tell, the "masochistic endorphin high" is the reason runners seem do do it. Most people aren't sightseeing when they go running (more often than not you run a route, so you've seen it before, and how much do you really see when you're zoned out and have the "thousand yard stare" going?), so that's not really it, like it could be for hiking or walking. There's really very little to enjoy about it, except for the feeling of exertion itself. If you don't take pleasure in the exertion, you're probably not going to enjoy running.
I have a suspicion that there is a difference in brain chemistry that makes some people enjoy the endorphin high more than others, because many runners honestly seem to really enjoy it, and not in an "I really like pain" way, but that they are actually deriving a form of physical pleasure from the exertion which outweighs the pain. Conversely, many (IMO, most) other people find the "high" to be more than outweighed by the physical discomfort necessary to obtain it.
I do a mild run a few times a week (and I used to do a lot more when I was in the military) but I've never once enjoyed it. I go running because it's good exercise and because I don't want to turn into Jabba the Hutt in my new desk job; if it weren't for the health and vanity/appearance benefits, no way would I put myself through that. (It's also cheap and requires very little equipment compared to other exercise modes.) Aside from the exercise, I could simulate the experience of running as I perceive it fairly well by having someone beat me repeatedly with a stick, and save a lot of time and wear on my joints.
If you could invent a pill that would allow normal people to enjoy the experience of running in the same way that some distance runners I've spoken to seem to enjoy it, I suspect that you're be a very rich person.
While in the US it's "kekeke pedos" here in the UK it has a positive image and is doing "good things"
Explaining why this "fund raiser" is being conducted almost exclusively in the U.S. (It would be exclusive, except for a show in Toronto.)
From TFA:
The concerts will take place October 21. Artists include TV on the Radio in Philadelphia, Alice in Chains in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Ziggy Marley in Medford, Oregon, Citizen Cope in Seattle, Gov't Mule in Spokane, Washington, and Insane Clown Posse in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Other concerts will take place in Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco, California; Melbourne, Florida; Atlanta; Louisville, Kentucky; St. Paul, Minnesota; Reno, Nevada; Baltimore; Asheville, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; Milwaukee; and Washington, D.C.
Well yeah -- I mean, if they really wanted to send money to Sudan, you'd think that one of the brain surgeons there at News Corp would realize that it's a little ridiculous for a giant multinational corporation with $25 billion in revenue to sponsor a fucking fund raiser, in order to get regular folks to send in a couple of bucks here and there, as if they were the Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas Rotary Club... if the goal of the whole process was "let's send money to Sudan," Rupert Murdoch could probably just cut a check out of his petty cash fund and be done with it.
As they are not doing that and are conducting a fund raiser, however ironic, I think it's safe to assume that the ultimate goal of the process is not, in fact, sending money to Sudan.
As to what the real motive might be, I'll leave that up to you to consider.
Sure, but that assumes that the point is to actually do something in Sudan, and not improve the tarnished image of the online service that they forked out a bunch of dough for, and are currently burdened with. It's a little bit of a Hail Mary, but hey, when you've got a web site that most people only know of because they've seen it on the news in the same sentence with "pedophile," you can't really go wrong.
Why would News Corp give a damn about people in Sudan? Here's a hint: they don't.
The only reason they're raising money for people in Sudan is that it's the least-offensive cause some focus group could come up with. Right now, MySpace needs the most heart-warming, family-friendly but not totally-unhip image resuscitation that money can buy.
Slashdot Mirror
That actually makes a certain amount of sense. There were some worms floating around that would replicate themselves by sending an infected URL out as a message to all of your AIM contacts.
There was a period of time a few years ago when I was getting 10-15 of these URL-messages a day. Didn't affect me any, because I used a Mac, but it might explain Yahoo's paranoia.
However, I would find such a limitation incredibly annoying, since I often use IM applications to send people links. For example, let's say you're looking at a web site and want to send it to somebody in the next cube over -- rather than reading them the URL, you just cut-and-paste into an IM message. I can't tell you how many times I've done that.
I knew there was a reason I never started using Yahoo Messenger.
Maybe due to malware, rather than Yahoo?
Wait -- there's a difference?
Very strange.
I just did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be anyone else talking about it, at least that I could find -- if Yahoo really was engaging in this, you'd think it would have created more of a hue and cry.
I'm starting to suspect hoax, unless someone besides the article submitter can come up with evidence that it happened.
I can't imagine that Yahoo would want to demonstrate that it has the capability of selectively filtering messages based on content. That just opens the door to lots of problematic demands -- e.g., why don't they block links to warez sites, or porn, or gambling, or (in other countries) various political websites. If you have that sort of capability, even if you don't want to use it for evil purposes, people are going to try and make you use it. So it's better just to never develop the capability in the first place, and if it is technically possible, never reveal that it can be done on demand, so that you can maintain your plausible deniability.
You're correct; in that example I should have said "trends" and not "rates." E.g., 'if current trends in production and consumption continue, oil will peak...' or 'if current trends in consumption and exploration continue...'
In other words, one would be extrapolating the change in production forwards rather than the actual amount of production (first derviative, basically).
Nonetheless, the point of all my comments boil down to "don't make more assumptions than absolutely necessary," and "state all of the assumptions and their justifications whenever possible."
Alaska just called, they want their Ted Stevens back.
No, they don't.
In fact, can we get him on the No Fly List?
I'd rather not see Canada turn into a toxic wasteland and increase CO2 emissions so that Americans can keep driving their SUVs.
... it'll be becase of those bad old Americans who just came up and stole that oil in the middle of the night from the poor ignorant Canadians, and not because they willingly sold it on the open market for the going price.
Uh huh
Just keep in mind that a transaction requires a buyer and a seller. That oil isn't going anywhere unless the Canadians decide to sell it. If they want to sell it despite the environmental damage that it will do, that's their decision. You can't really blame the buyers for that.
You are advocating blatant propaganda, and the manipulation of poblic opinion through the biased use of what should be a neutral source of information and analysis.
Not at all. Not even slightly.
On the contrary, I'm saying that predictions should be made with the minimum of error-inducing assumptions.
Simply assuming that we'll develop (and implement!) some technology that will reduce our oil consumption seems very dangerous. Particularly since, in making the prediction yourself, you're altering the chances of that assumption being right.
Rather than packing all sorts of potentially unwarranted assumptions into the prediction, I think it's more scientifically valid to take what is known right now, and extrapolate it into the future, so that the reader can be presented with a clear if-then statement, along with an estimate of the certainty of the extrapolation. I.e., 'If some trend continues, this will probably be the effect.'
Unless the paper or report also has an in-depth discussion of the likelihood of various technological developments, I don't think that it is generally appropriate to include them in a prediction, since the reader will probably not have the information necessary to judge whether it's valid or not.
In short, building in predictions about future technological developments to the prediction seems far more prone to propagandization than simply drawing out a straight trendline based on currently accepted consumption and production/exploration data. The latter may not be valid for very long, but is at least easier for a reader to understand, interpret, and choose whether to believe.
No, not at all.
Predictions need to be made in a clear "if, then (uncertainty)" format.
That is, every time someone makes a prediction, they should be clear about the assumptions which are being used to create it. E.g., rather than just saying "Oil production will peak in 2007," it should be said, "If current rates of consumption and production continue, then oil production will peak in 2007, plus or minus two years." It states the assumptions, the prediction itself, and the uncertainty with which the prediction is being given.
That said, I maintain that the most useful predictions for people to understand, are the ones which extrapolate a current trend into the future, adding the minimum number of additional 'ifs.' Saying "if we continue to do x, then there is a y chance that z will happen," is not a scare tactic, it's honesty. Including a lot of trends, such as future technological developments which are difficult to predict, into the 'if' part of the statement, just make the prediction more difficult to use and increase its ultimate uncertainty.
Well, you really don't want to factor future technological developments into the predictions, because that encourages people to just keep doing what they're doing, and might cause the technological developments that you were counting on, to never be introduced.
... and the crisis ends up being worse.
The point of these predictions, IMO, is to show us what will happen if we just keep bumbling along, doing what we're currently doing.
If you assume that we'll start using more efficient cars in the future, and take that into consideration when making your graph/paper/prediction/whatever, then it might make the looming crisis look less severe, meaning that people won't actually start using more efficient cars
It's a self-defeating prophesy: if you make it look like we're going to do better than we're currently on target to do, taking no corrective action, then you encourage us to not take any.
I still don't quite understand it, though. (And maybe the judge doesn't, either, hence the problem...) How could ICANN "kill" a domain?
.com and .net are managed by Verisign, .org is run by the Public Interest Registry, .edu is EduCause, etc. So if you wanted to order someone to shut down spamhaus.org, it would be PIR or their "technical partner," Afilias Ltd.
ICANN controls the root nameservers, so they could conceivably "kill" any TLD of their choice (not that this wouldn't be insanity, but it's technically possible), but they don't manage any of the domains within the TLDs themselves, at least to my understanding.
The best response ICANN could make to the request to put a hold on the name is "we can't do it." At the very least, it would deflect the request to the actual maintainance organization for the TLD (in this case PIR), who would be in a better position to accede to or refuse the request. The updating, maintanance, suspension, or takedown of individual domains just isn't within ICANN's jurisdiction; one would hope a Federal judge would understand that, conceptually.
The ITU, ISO, and IEC do okay because there's very little politicization of their decision-making processes. When's the last time that the ITU did anything that average people cared about? The ITU for the most part just acts as a mediator between various national regulatory bodies, and does very little actual rulemaking itself (and where it has veered into that, it has been the subject of criticism for overstepping). The ISO isn't exactly a great example either -- they had a go at the whole internet business, with the OSI project, and it sucked and was made irrelevant by TCP/IP and the IETF, principally due to ISO's mismanagement of the whole thing. You really want to give the Internet back to them for another round? No, thanks.
.xxx and spam are just the tip of the iceberg, and cannot be passed down to various national or local jurisdictions, as similar problems in the radio or telephone world might. The current generation of Internet protocols is not going to last forever, and when their replacements are designed, there are lots of opportunities for monitoring, censorship, or regulation to be inserted. Whatever body has control of the Internet (whether in reality or just in name) will wield a tremendous amount of power, far exceeding that held by any of the regulatory bodies currently in existence, and this will only increase in the future.
An Internet governance committee would not be able to avoid the spotlight; there are too many unresolved, very contentious issues. Things like
Just because a UN body has done an acceptable job of delegating radio spectrum for further regulation by national authorities (which is the bulk of the ITU's job) doesn't mean that they wouldn't make a giant cockup of something as potentially contentious as Internet governance.
Maybe you should turn off Air America for a moment and realize that the U.N. -- an organization designed to find consensus between countries -- isn't necessarily the best way to achieve consensus among people, and might be nothing but an unnecessary middleman where a more direct, open, apolitical, democratic process would do fine.
If I were the movie studio, I'd call this bluff.
In another few years, the movie studios could do just that.
But right now, B&M DVD sales are too much a part of their revenue stream to allow them to just walk away from it. Just think, if some movie studio said "no problem, we'll just sell exclusively through iTunes," how many consumers would see their movies? Not too many -- it's still only a small percentage of consumers who buy music online, and even fewer who buy movies online.
The B&M stores are going to use their clout in the market to try and keep out online distribution -- which they know because of its low costs will eventually be their demise -- as long as possible. Right now they can still do that. In a few years, probably not.
Well, it's hard to imagine Aqua running on a Geode processor, but the underlying parts of OS X that were derived from NeXT ran just fine on 30MHz machines; I doubt you'd have that much of a problem building something for an embedded system if the desire was there. It basically becomes a question of how much modern userland stuff from OS X you want to throw in on top of the kernel; that's where the bloat is.
At any rate, I think the OLPC people made the right decision in going with Linux; it's certainly easier to customize than OS X would have been, if only because there are many more people familiar with the Linux kernel than the xnu one.
I think you should be very careful describing the project that way.
Saying that it makes people in other countries "able to compete" probably isn't going to win you a lot of friends amount the recently-unemployed here in Western countries. In fact, I could imagine that to someone who's recently seen their job disappear due to globalization, if you say "without computers or some other advantage, these third world countries will find themselves unable to compete," a more likely reaction would be "good, let's keep it that way."
Rather than competition, I think that we need to look at the global market as a one of participation. Obviously, there is competition, but by increasing the educational level of other countries, you produce markets for goods and capital in addition to just creating more skilled labor. So as I've said elsewhere, it can make good business sense, from a purely self-interested foreign policy perspective, to help other nations bootstrap themselves.
'Let's help them compete with us' may play well with the cocktail-party set, but it's going to go over like a fart in church at your local UAW meeting, I think.
Actually, it makes a certain amount of business sense to try and bring some level of education and "civilization" to the Third World. You don't hear about these motivations as much, because people like to concentrate on those moral impulses that make them feel good about themselves, but there are sound economic reasons for investing in development there.
You can make a lot more money off of a country as a trading partner than just as a weapons market. In the former case there's actually wealth created there, which benfits the entire global market; in the latter case it's just a sink for high-value goods (arms) to get destroyed, in return for some raw materials in payment. It's the ultimate broken window.
Not to mention that by making a country safer and more educated, you create opportunities for capital investment, which is a major source of profit in the First World.
I'm not necessarily advocating cash-based foreign aid, but just pointing out that the economic benefits of wartorn countries are often overstated; it would be better and more profitable in the long run to create in them markets for manufactured goods besides weapons, irregardless of the moral or ethical reasons for doing so.
That said, it's a common misconception that the OLPC machines are designed for "starving kids in Africa." I think the intended users are countries that are truly "developing," like Thailand and Mexico, and not where there isn't even basic infrastructure nor enough money for food. Sending thousands of dollars worth of anything to a country controlled by warlords would of course be almost criminally stupid.
Good point.
Although, if I ever walk outside my house and see a tool palette hanging in the air above my garage, I think I'd go back inside and lock the door, too.
I think giving the ICANN to the U.N. would be a uniquely terrible idea. It's hardly democratic -- any body where every country would have the same say in how the internet was run, without regard to the number of internet users or infrastructure there, would be a total farse. (Can you imagine giving North Korea the same voting power as China, Germany, the U.K., or the U.S.? It would be ridiculous. You'd have tons of small nations who aren't connected and don't care about internet governance selling their vote to the highest bidder. You might as well just auction the process off and be done with it.)
However, that doesn't mean that the status quo is a good system, either. A democratic system run by internet users, or where internet users at least had some influence over the decisions made by the governing body (similar to OpenNIC) would be a good compromise.
If the vast majority of internet users think that you're a spammer or detrimental to the network in general, there's probably a good chance that you are. I admit, there's always the chance of having a "tyranny of the majority," but I'll take the tyranny of the majority over the tyranny of an actual tyrant any day.
Maybe the solution is just for European ISPs and backbone providers to just stop syncing to the ICANN DNS roots.
You can't "take" ICANN away from the US government, no matter how much people in Europe don't like it (how exactly would you "take" it? Invade? Haul the servers away in a truck in the middle of the night?).
The U.S. only controls the DNS system because everyone else in the world implicitly agrees to use it. If you think that the U.S. Government is ever going to give up control of ICANN, you're insane -- they never will. However, if enough people switched to some other DNS root, then the USG's "legacy" system would just become irrelevant.
What's stopping them from getting a domain name in a non-US-controlled TLD?
I don't see how a US court ruling could shut down a domain name in another country's TLD; so why don't they just go and get a name in the UK, or Switzerland, or Sealand.
Somehow I think enough people find Spamhaus useful, that if they asked they could probably take up collection and get enough money to afford a new domain, and right now they have enough press coverage to ensure that it would be publicized. Sure, it would be a PITA for a lot of mailserver admins who would need to change the address, but that's still a lot less work than filtering their spam by hand.
It sounds like Spamhaus is getting ready to 'cut off their nose to spite their face,' or in this case, destroy themselves in order to try and prove some point to a Federal Court in the US that couldn't give a damn one way or the other. If they're trying to make a point, this isn't the way to do it.
This is, quite frankly, a pretty trivial comment.
If there was a huge requirement for Linux that was "grandma friendly," Linux distributions that were even easier to use than they are today would be created. Nonwithstanding that I have serious doubts that you've ever used Ubuntu or any of the other current 'easy' distros (where you never need to use the CLI to install software), the approach that they take towards ease-of-use is a reflection of the people who are interested in them: computer enthuasiasts and ex-Windows refugees who are willing to experiment with stuff. Given that this is their market, they're dead simple.
While Windows is basically a take-it-or-leave-it proposition -- if you don't like the way Windows does something, unless you have an in with somebody at Microsoft, you are shit outta luck -- any significant user demand for something in Linux usually produces a version or fork of the software that caters to it. Hence there are far more distributions of Linux than there are versions of Windows.
If God decreed next Monday that Windows was no more, you can bet that by Tuesday, people would be working on making a version of Linux that catered to people who needed something with about five icons on the entire desktop. (And somebody else would probably make one that simulated a Windows XP desktop as closely as possible, etc.) That such things either don't exist today, or (more likely) exist but aren't popular, is less a reflection of Linux per se, than of the people who currently choose to use Linux.
If Linux isn't "grandma friendly" (and I'm not saying that it's necessarily not, as I'm sure other people will attest to, but if it's not), then it's probably because there's perceived to be insufficent demand for a truly dead-easy-to-use (and hence probably somewhat inflexible) distribution. Software gets written for the userbase that the programmers believe exist, both on the commercial and OSS side.
Not dissimilarly, 3DSMax and Photoshop don't exist for Linux, because their respective owners think that the demand for the application on the platform is insufficient to warrant the effort to port it. If everyone was using Linux, doubtless both would exist.
What drives Windows is inertia; it has 90+% marketshare, therefore people use it, developers develop for it, and there's very little public demand for an alternative. It has no technical or usability superiority that couldn't be replicated elsewhere, if there was a reason to. But Microsoft bundles it in with new hardware and sells it at a price-point that's sufficiently below the "point of pain" so that most people just don't mind using it that much.
If you find the differences between Mac Word and Windows Word to be that "scary," God help you when you switch to Vista and the new version of Office...
I'm with you. I've tried to figure out the same thing, and as far as I can tell, the "masochistic endorphin high" is the reason runners seem do do it. Most people aren't sightseeing when they go running (more often than not you run a route, so you've seen it before, and how much do you really see when you're zoned out and have the "thousand yard stare" going?), so that's not really it, like it could be for hiking or walking. There's really very little to enjoy about it, except for the feeling of exertion itself. If you don't take pleasure in the exertion, you're probably not going to enjoy running.
I have a suspicion that there is a difference in brain chemistry that makes some people enjoy the endorphin high more than others, because many runners honestly seem to really enjoy it, and not in an "I really like pain" way, but that they are actually deriving a form of physical pleasure from the exertion which outweighs the pain. Conversely, many (IMO, most) other people find the "high" to be more than outweighed by the physical discomfort necessary to obtain it.
I do a mild run a few times a week (and I used to do a lot more when I was in the military) but I've never once enjoyed it. I go running because it's good exercise and because I don't want to turn into Jabba the Hutt in my new desk job; if it weren't for the health and vanity/appearance benefits, no way would I put myself through that. (It's also cheap and requires very little equipment compared to other exercise modes.) Aside from the exercise, I could simulate the experience of running as I perceive it fairly well by having someone beat me repeatedly with a stick, and save a lot of time and wear on my joints.
If you could invent a pill that would allow normal people to enjoy the experience of running in the same way that some distance runners I've spoken to seem to enjoy it, I suspect that you're be a very rich person.
Explaining why this "fund raiser" is being conducted almost exclusively in the U.S. (It would be exclusive, except for a show in Toronto.)
From TFA:
Well yeah -- I mean, if they really wanted to send money to Sudan, you'd think that one of the brain surgeons there at News Corp would realize that it's a little ridiculous for a giant multinational corporation with $25 billion in revenue to sponsor a fucking fund raiser, in order to get regular folks to send in a couple of bucks here and there, as if they were the Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas Rotary Club ... if the goal of the whole process was "let's send money to Sudan," Rupert Murdoch could probably just cut a check out of his petty cash fund and be done with it.
As they are not doing that and are conducting a fund raiser, however ironic, I think it's safe to assume that the ultimate goal of the process is not, in fact, sending money to Sudan.
As to what the real motive might be, I'll leave that up to you to consider.
Sure, but that assumes that the point is to actually do something in Sudan, and not improve the tarnished image of the online service that they forked out a bunch of dough for, and are currently burdened with. It's a little bit of a Hail Mary, but hey, when you've got a web site that most people only know of because they've seen it on the news in the same sentence with "pedophile," you can't really go wrong.
Why would News Corp give a damn about people in Sudan? Here's a hint: they don't.
The only reason they're raising money for people in Sudan is that it's the least-offensive cause some focus group could come up with. Right now, MySpace needs the most heart-warming, family-friendly but not totally-unhip image resuscitation that money can buy.