> If you don't sign up with these social networks, you will be flagged > as a "loner" type , and put on the no fly list. Customs already does > this to people who don't have a credit card. I speak from experience.
Huh. I've never had a credit card, and last I checked I didn't have any trouble at the airport. Granted, it's been five years since the last time I flew. But I didn't have any problem at that time.
If I were paranoid, I'd probably think you were a credit-card industry shill spreading FUD to scare people into getting credit cards. But in reality I don't think they're bothering much about it at this point. They have pretty much the entire adult population in their crushing grip already and have, I think, become complacent about the rest of us. There must be at least a few hundred of us left in this country who have never given in and got a card, but at this point I think they're just ignoring us. Heck, they don't even bother to harass me with endless credit card offers in the mail any more. I used to get that junk every day, but at this point several *months* can pass between their "offers".
First they wheedle and cajole, then they laugh at you, then they ignore you, then you win?
> I didn't see anyone paying for namespace in p2p networks or on > I2P/FreeNet/etc., maybe we don't need to have parent domains
Show me a peer-to-peer network that can provide each user (including users who don't have their own computer) with a globally-unique address to which anyone on the network can send a message, and it will be delivered to the right person. (In other words, email.) Show me a peer-to-peer network that's suitable for web-style publishing, wherein you make your content available and anyone on the network can look at it at any time just by knowing your address.
P2P doesn't work for everything. Some things need to be client/server.
Do you mean $0? But you *can* get a domain for $0. I have two of them at the moment, and have had others in the past.
You can't get a *top-level* domain for that, but you can't get a top-level domain at all, unless you meet the requirements, which are pretty steep. (The easiest way is to get yourself recognized as a sovereign nation and get a two-letter TLD. Longer ones are even harder to get.) This is a *good* thing, because DNS wouldn't really scale to everyone in the world having a top-level domain anyway. The root servers would never survive that.
So most of us take a subdomain. DNS was, after all, DESIGNED to be hierarchical, because it scales better that way. Subdomains *are* available free of charge, especially if you're not very particular about exactly which parent domain you're under.
That's the beauty of delegation: anyone who gets charge of a domain gets to set their own policy for handing out subdomains, and then you get to decide if you're willing to deal with them or not. Okay, so the people running.com want to charge you money for yourveryownsecondlevelname.com. You don't want to pay it? Hey, you can get yourthirdlevelname.provider.com for free. (The exact terms depend on which provider you get it from.)
xkcd explained this a while ago. Basically, if the internet ever *stops* working, even for a few seconds, alarms go off and people panic and do anything necessary to get it working again immediately.
It turns out this is actually a fairly reliable system.
> Since switching to Ubuntu, over three years ago, I haven't used AV.
I've never used AV on my personal computer, and the last time I had a virus incident, the transmission vector was a 360K floppy disk. (That's a double-sided double-density disk for you young whippersnappers who don't remember 5.25" drives. I was running DOS 3.3 at the time.)
I do use other forms of protection, such as a sane firewall configuration (everything not explicitly permitted is implicitly verboten) and safe computing practices (get my software from reliable sources, try to keep up to date on security updates, don't run unnecessary services, use mail client software that doesn't do anything with non-plaintext MIME parts except extract them to a file and that only when I say so, and so on and so forth; basically, don't deliberately do anything that's obviously foolish), and I try to avoid software with a bad security track record (Outlook, Sendmail, that sort of thing).
Basically, I just try not to be a complete idiot. Seems to work pretty well.
Antivirus software does, of course, have a place. It's useful, for instance, when you have users who don't really know what the word "executable" means, don't understand that the From field can be forged, don't know the difference between a banner advertisement and dialog boxes, and could not off the top of their head tell you whether the computer has AV software installed or what it's called. You know, end users. People who just want to use the Menu Document to open the Word Program they typed yesterday in Windows XP 7 so they can print their email. In such situations, AV software is helpful We have it at work, and I keep it up to date.
Actually, I heard Microsoft and HP were looking to merge with McDonald's, and that Apple was going to merge with Pepsico (which owns, among other things, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut), and then Google will acquire the parent company of Nabisco and Kraft Foods. They're going to set things up so that which electronics you own, and which data plan you subscribe to, also determines what food you can buy. So for example if you want to be able to buy both Big Macs and Lunchables, you'll need to own an iPhone and an Android phone, and carry them both around with you everywhere.
Also, I heard Obama was going to run for office in the EU when his terms are up in the US.
> IPv4/IPv6 coexistence is now expected to last for 5 years.
I'm pretty sure that's a lowball estimate. I do not see IPv6 overtaking IPv4 as the primary protocol of the internet for several times that long at the very least, and quite frankly my money is on never. I see IPv6 being the next MicroChannel Architecture or Itanium: how's it going to ever get businesses (other than the core IT shops who are already behind it) on board, given that it's not even slightly backward compatible? It's a classic prisoner's dilemma, with dozens of participants: if *everybody* does the "right thing", everybody's better off, but if even *one* of the major players doesn't bother, the whole thing is pointless and the practical thing to do is ignore it.
> this is all leading to a black market in traditional IPv4 addresses
I'm not sure I would call it a black market, since there is (to my knowledge) nothing illegal or unethical about reselling such resources. It's not the way things have traditionally been done, but it will be. But yeah, IPv4 addresses are going to be resold (as in, ISPs will probably buy back unused subnet blocks from their customers and then sell them to other customers). Duh.
> that will catch many people off-guard,
Everything that ever happens catches some people off guard, no matter how obvious it is ahead of time that it's going to happen.
> and boost Internet access prices sky-high."
Non sequitur. There are more than 2^31 total public IPv4 addresses, which is in practice (with NAT for systems that don't need to provide public services) more than enough to meet the actual need. Consequently, they don't need to be very expensive, and they won't be. Anybody who tries to charge completely outlandish prices will be underbid.
IPv4 addresses *will* have to cost money, though, going forward, because when they're basically free, as now, organizations snap up entire Class-A blocks, because they can, even if they're only planning three servers and a couple of NAT gateways for workstations. That's why we're running low: it's human nature to take more than you need as long as it's free or nearly free. So the price of IPv4 addresses will go up enough to convince some people to sell off some of the extra ones they're holding that they don't need. An equilibrium will be reached, and that will be that.
My guess is home users who want a public IPv4 address (e.g., so they can remote-desktop into their home PC from work or whatever) will end up paying an extra dollar or two a month for a public IPv4 address (either as a line-item on their bill, or by using a slightly more expensive ISP that bundles it). This is a very rough estimate, but I think the price point that's needed is somewhere around that level. Much more, and they'll be a glut on the market; much less, and nobody will be willing to give them up for sale.
> I'm not so sure about that. I have to wonder if the explosion of iPhone > and Android based phones has not contributed significantly to this.
I won't say they haven't contributed, but I don't think it's really the major factor. The 2010Q1 stats from our website at work (which, admittedly, is small and of mostly local import) show all known mobile platforms combined at less than 1% (and just barely ahead of Iceweasel), compared to Firefox (branded as such) at 19%, Safari at 16%, and Chrome at 4% (up *substantially* from just one quarter earlier).
What interests me is that there appears to be a lot of motion, people switching to one browser and then another, and it does not appear that everyone is moving in the same direction. It doesn't look to me as if everyone is moving en masse from one particular browser to another one, because the loss and gain numbers don't match up in a way that makes sense for that. Firefox numbers, for instance, have scarcely changed at all in the last year, although I know there are people moving to Firefox (especially from IE) and others moving from it (e.g. toward Chrome). I think the browser market has become competitive again, and people in general (not everyone, of course but more than just a handful) are starting to experiment with different browsers and make a choice based on personal taste. I view this as a good thing.
Incidentally my stats also show IE8 up to 22% now (up from around 1% a year previous), which makes it the single most widely deployed version of IE at this point. I'm showing IE7 at 14% and IE6 at 12%, down from 40% and 18% (respectively) a year earlier. Note the huge drop in IE7 (40 to 14, a loss of 65% of the market share it had a year earlier), compared to the slower drop in IE6 (18 to 12, losing 33% of what it had). Of course, that's partly because a lot more of the IE7 users had automatic updates turned on, which by default puts them on IE8 now, even if they took no special action. In the next year, I look for IE8 to continue to rise and IE7 to continue to drop significantly, possibly falling below IE6. Whether overall IE numbers will continue to drop, I don't know. It might depend on what kind of showing IE9 presents. I also don't know whether Firefox will be able to hold near 20% in the long term; I suspect it may have peaked. Chrome, obviously, is still on the increase. Opera appears to be holding its own in the less-than-1% range where it has always lived. Konqueror is below IE5 and apparently tied with IE4, which tells me that all the KDE users (not that there are that many of them in the first place, though it's difficult to measure this since the UA string does not generally disclose window manager or desktop environment) are using other browsers (probably mostly Firefox, but that's a guess).
The thing is, Linux is configurable. You *can* change its behavior, easily. Windows, not so much.
How bad do you need the time to be right in Windows? If that's really a requirement, then you should probably set the hardware clock to local time, because that's how Windows does it.
On the other hand, my experience suggests that the longer you've been running Linux, the less often you'll be inclined to boot into Windows. *shrug*. Give it a couple more years, and you'll probably forget all about caring whether the time is right in Windows. Heck, eventually you'll forget why you even have Windows installed.
Well, I saw all the system restore points disappear on the one Win7 workstation we have so far where I work, but that system was at the time experiencing serious problems due to what turned out to be a stick of bad RAM, so I'm not sure whether any software bug was necessarily involved in that instance.
Actually, I find the claim of 95% water interesting, because I would have figured that most plastics were substantially more than 5% backbone elements (carbon, silicon, nitrogen, sulfur, and other nonmetals that can sustain more than two covalent bonds per atom, so that you can chain them end-to-end with one another in long molecules and still attach other stuff at the sides). Water contains only oxygen and hydrogen, neither of which, so far as I am aware, is known to form chains more than three atoms long (well, hydrogen does when it's solid, but it's more metal than plastic, and furthermore it reverts to a diatomic gas if you look at it funny or let the temperature rise much above zero kelvins).
> since just about everyone agrees that today's state of the art solar is, > well, not good enough, why are we doing more than experimenting with solar
Unless you count research (which aims to improve the state of the art in the future), I was not aware that we *were* doing much more with solar than (what basically amounts to) experimenting. Well, and running ultra-low-power devices, like cheap pocket calculators, but the current state of the art *is* good enough for that.
> (yes and off-grid applications,
Don't know much about that. I live in the Midwestern US, so it's pretty hard to get very far from the grid around here. (Of course, my uncle, who is in charge of the finances for a major regional power company, is of the opinion that the grid will eventually fail simply because it's old and poorly maintained. But until this actually happens, it hasn't inspired very many people to do much more than maybe install an emergency generator in the garage.)
> but of course that's not what politicians are sinking our tax money into).
I try to avoid knowing or thinking too much about where the politicians are throwing our tax money. Given the option, I virtually always favor spending cuts (and vote accordingly), but beyond that I don't like to upset myself unnecessarily. In the abstract, I am fully aware of the fact that more than 80% of the money goes toward things the government has no business spending money on, and I can accept that because I tell myself our form of government is still better than a lot of the alternatives that have been tried in other times and places. But I'd still rather not dwell much on the details. It would just be depressing, and nothing useful would be accomplished.
> Why are people bringing their own equipment in the first place?
Yeah, this was my question. You're really bringing in your personal equipment and using it to do job-related work?
If you were a consultant or contractor or somesuch, billing them exorbitant rates by the hour, I could see this, because a contracted firm's fee is expected to cover the whole service, not just the labor. Employees in this kind of situation don't receive the whole amount that the client pays, because it also has to cover equipment, insurance, administrative overhead, and various other expenses. So if you're in that kind of situation (say, you're a private consultant), then you might provide equipment, but you charge a fee large enough to cover that. You also have to pay the employer half of social security, cover your office rent if applicable, advertising, and various other things. Basically, you *are* the employer in this scenario, and the person paying the bill is the client.
A normal employee, however, should NOT be expected to provide his own equipment for work. That is the employer's responsibility.
> any viable energy source we have except theoretical fusion > processes will run out in less than 100 years time
I'm pretty sure breeder-reactor fission (using uranium 238, either natural or depleted, or even thorium) is viable at this point. It's not quite as economic as fossil fuels while the reserves thereof hold out, but that comparison only matters until the fossil fuels start running out.
So running out of "enriched" uranium (the 235 isotope) isn't a big problem.
By the time we start running low on U235, to say nothing of thorium, we can expect solar-panel technology to have advanced *considerably* from the present state of the art.
> Crop plants typically convert 1-2% of the sunlight striking > them to biomass. Under optimal conditions, some varieties of > sugarcane can convert up to 8%.
And yet, growing grain in this manner, inefficiently fermenting and distilling it to get alcohols, and burning the alcohols as fuel is still more practical than current solar-panel technology. Mostly because of manufacturing costs for the solar panels, but still.
You know, everybody thinks being a comedian sounds "easy".
Until they try it. It's actually quite hard. To be any good at it, you need to be intelligent, creative, and witty *and* have strong people skills (e.g., to be able to read the audience), and all of that in one person is not a particularly common combination.
I'm not saying I'm going to vote for Dave Barry for President or anything. But when you're looking at somebody's qualifications for office, comedian as a former job title is not in itself worrisome. I'd be rather more worried about somebody who used to be a lawyer.
> a devastating new cruise missile system that can be > hidden inside a shipping container, giving any merchant > vessel the capability to wipe out an aircraft carrier.
Any merchant vessel, or just any merchant vessel whose operators can afford to keep cruise missiles around? How much do they project it will cost them per unit to mass produce these babies?
(Also, an aircraft carrier is a fairly unlikely target for a typical merchant, all else being equal. There's no money in taking out an aircraft carrier, and plenty of risk. Not to say there couldn't be privateers, but it seems unlikely to be the dominant use to which such a weapon would be put.)
> Your only option is to let the traffic route to the original > destination and then tunnel it to where you actually want it.
I suppose that theoretically would work, but it's impractical.
More reasonable is to shift the larger (containing) netblock assignment up a level or two and route smaller blocks of it down to the asignees. This only works if you're getting your "new" addresses from somebody connected to the net via the same ISP as the new customer, but this is in practice not a problem: every significant ISP has numerous customers with surplus sections in their blocks. All the ISPs have to do is offer an incentive program and/or buy up portions of the blocks that are already routed through them anyway, and they'll have IP addresses to sell to new customers.
I'm telling you, it won't be a big problem. Public IPv4 addresses will no longer be *free*, but they will still cost a lot less than bandwidth, and they'll be available for the forseeable future. There are, after all, somewhere between 2^31 and 2^32 of them altogether. Going forward, that's not going to be enough for every single internet-connected system including cell phones and wrist watches to have one, but it *is* enough for every server and router to have one, plus the workstations of anyone who's willing to pay an extra dollar or two a month for the privilege. (Some ISPs will probably even continue to bundle it; they just won't be quite the cheapest IPSs.)
In other words, the public IPv4 address is the new static IP address. Life goes on.
> You _cannot_ port individual IPs and small subnets from one organisation to another
If you'd included a qualification such as "simply" or "easily" in your statement, I might have let it pass. But you actually _can_ shuffle small subnets around (well, up to a point -- a point we have certainly not yet reached); it just takes a little more doing. Okay, a lot more doing. But still less trouble than switching the whole internet over to IPv6.
A little, yes. But not very much, because they're not scarce. There are just metric barge-loads of public IPv4 addresses that are assigned (allocated) but aren't being used, and trainloads more being used by systems that don't need them (office workstations and such that are firewalled off from receiving any inbound connections anyway so they might as well be on NAT). Anybody who tries to charge very much is just going to get underbid.
I mean, yeah, when the initial shock first hits (the first time ARIN or IANA or whoever has to tell somebody sorry, we haven't got any free ones left to give you) there'll be a small number of idiots who panic and pay the first price somebody quotes them. There's a sucker born every minute. But sane people will not have to pay ridiculous prices, because like I said there's no real scarcity.
Public IP addresses *seem* scarce because they've been handed out like candy in gargantuan enormous blocks pretty much for free. Medium-sized organizations typically get an entire Class A even though they only have half a dozen servers and a few hundred workstations.
But the scarcity isn't real. Most of the addresses that have been handed out are actually available, or will be if the price goes up even a little.
So the cost of a public IP address will go up, but it'll still be completely dwarfed by the cost of the bandwidth an internet-connected system uses.
> Their people who suddenly own fortunes in un-sold ipv4 > addresses will start to sabotage ipv6, hiring marketing > teams to spew bad news about it all over.
Unnecessary. The internet runs on IPv4. Everyone knows this. It sells itself.
> > but they'll definitely consider just NATting new customers. > Trouble is, 99% of users won't even notice.
Why is this trouble?
If a user notices and complains about being behind NAT, set a flag on their account so the DHCP server gives them a publicly-routable address. No big deal. IP addresses aren't, in the forseeable future, going to be scarce enough for that to be a problem. Most users will never ask for it, so you only need public IP addresses for the customers who actually care about having them. Some ISPs would take the opportunity to levy an extra charge for a public address, but if they make the charge too high a competitor will arise. Market forces will sort it out.
Relax. The internet will not stop working when ICANN runs out of unassigned IP blocks. There'll be a few months of administrative headaches for ISPs, but in the long run systems that need a public address will be able to get one, and ones that don't need it will go behind NAT, and there'll be enough public addresses to last until the mid twenty-second century, at least.
Whatever the reason, it's still true: most internet-connected computers don't have any need for a public address. Put them behind NAT and they still do everything people want.
I'll go you one better: it would not be difficult to design an application-layer protocol that would allow systems behind a NAT gateway to accept inbound connections, with the gateway's cooperation. (Client systems would need to present an additional piece of information besides the IP address and port when making a connection, but this is not difficult if you build it into the protocol. Servers behind NAT would need to inform the gateway of the values of this field that they can respond to; servers that are not behind NAT could skip this step.) Any application built on top of such a protocol would work on systems that have a public IP address, and also on systems behind a NAT gateway that supports the protocol.
Obviously that only works for new protocols (not, say, SMTP), but with a handful of exceptions (e.g., RDP, BitTorrent) most of the commonly-used existing protocols are designed on the assumption of many clients and few servers, so systems behind NAT don't need to be servers. That's certainly true for the big three (DNS, HTTP, SMTP), which between them account for something like 98% of internet use. The ratio of clients to servers on these protocols is thousands to one.
Of course, that raises the question of whether the ISP would allow the NAT gateways to pass through the incoming connections. But from a policy perspective that's not really very different from whether they allow the routers to pass through incoming connections now. Some ISPs block ports they don't think people need, but there are plenty of ISPs that don't. If it's important to customers, somebody will offer it.
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> If you don't sign up with these social networks, you will be flagged
> as a "loner" type , and put on the no fly list. Customs already does
> this to people who don't have a credit card. I speak from experience.
Huh. I've never had a credit card, and last I checked I didn't have any trouble at the airport. Granted, it's been five years since the last time I flew. But I didn't have any problem at that time.
If I were paranoid, I'd probably think you were a credit-card industry shill spreading FUD to scare people into getting credit cards. But in reality I don't think they're bothering much about it at this point. They have pretty much the entire adult population in their crushing grip already and have, I think, become complacent about the rest of us. There must be at least a few hundred of us left in this country who have never given in and got a card, but at this point I think they're just ignoring us. Heck, they don't even bother to harass me with endless credit card offers in the mail any more. I used to get that junk every day, but at this point several *months* can pass between their "offers".
First they wheedle and cajole, then they laugh at you, then they ignore you, then you win?
> I didn't see anyone paying for namespace in p2p networks or on
> I2P/FreeNet/etc., maybe we don't need to have parent domains
Show me a peer-to-peer network that can provide each user (including users who don't have their own computer) with a globally-unique address to which anyone on the network can send a message, and it will be delivered to the right person. (In other words, email.) Show me a peer-to-peer network that's suitable for web-style publishing, wherein you make your content available and anyone on the network can look at it at any time just by knowing your address.
P2P doesn't work for everything. Some things need to be client/server.
> The fact that you can't get a domain for 0$
.com want to charge you money for yourveryownsecondlevelname.com. You don't want to pay it? Hey, you can get yourthirdlevelname.provider.com for free. (The exact terms depend on which provider you get it from.)
Do you mean $0? But you *can* get a domain for $0. I have two of them at the moment, and have had others in the past.
You can't get a *top-level* domain for that, but you can't get a top-level domain at all, unless you meet the requirements, which are pretty steep. (The easiest way is to get yourself recognized as a sovereign nation and get a two-letter TLD. Longer ones are even harder to get.) This is a *good* thing, because DNS wouldn't really scale to everyone in the world having a top-level domain anyway. The root servers would never survive that.
So most of us take a subdomain. DNS was, after all, DESIGNED to be hierarchical, because it scales better that way. Subdomains *are* available free of charge, especially if you're not very particular about exactly which parent domain you're under.
That's the beauty of delegation: anyone who gets charge of a domain gets to set their own policy for handing out subdomains, and then you get to decide if you're willing to deal with them or not. Okay, so the people running
xkcd explained this a while ago. Basically, if the internet ever *stops* working, even for a few seconds, alarms go off and people panic and do anything necessary to get it working again immediately. It turns out this is actually a fairly reliable system.
> Since switching to Ubuntu, over three years ago, I haven't used AV.
I've never used AV on my personal computer, and the last time I had a virus incident, the transmission vector was a 360K floppy disk. (That's a double-sided double-density disk for you young whippersnappers who don't remember 5.25" drives. I was running DOS 3.3 at the time.)
I do use other forms of protection, such as a sane firewall configuration (everything not explicitly permitted is implicitly verboten) and safe computing practices (get my software from reliable sources, try to keep up to date on security updates, don't run unnecessary services, use mail client software that doesn't do anything with non-plaintext MIME parts except extract them to a file and that only when I say so, and so on and so forth; basically, don't deliberately do anything that's obviously foolish), and I try to avoid software with a bad security track record (Outlook, Sendmail, that sort of thing).
Basically, I just try not to be a complete idiot. Seems to work pretty well.
Antivirus software does, of course, have a place. It's useful, for instance, when you have users who don't really know what the word "executable" means, don't understand that the From field can be forged, don't know the difference between a banner advertisement and dialog boxes, and could not off the top of their head tell you whether the computer has AV software installed or what it's called. You know, end users. People who just want to use the Menu Document to open the Word Program they typed yesterday in Windows XP 7 so they can print their email. In such situations, AV software is helpful We have it at work, and I keep it up to date.
> What are you talking about? Opera's global market share
My post made it clear that I was talking about one particular website. Go read it again.
Actually, I heard Microsoft and HP were looking to merge with McDonald's, and that Apple was going to merge with Pepsico (which owns, among other things, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut), and then Google will acquire the parent company of Nabisco and Kraft Foods. They're going to set things up so that which electronics you own, and which data plan you subscribe to, also determines what food you can buy. So for example if you want to be able to buy both Big Macs and Lunchables, you'll need to own an iPhone and an Android phone, and carry them both around with you everywhere.
Also, I heard Obama was going to run for office in the EU when his terms are up in the US.
Among computer geeks, RPG usually stands for Richard P. Gabriel. Not sure what he has to do with PGP, though.
> IPv4/IPv6 coexistence is now expected to last for 5 years.
I'm pretty sure that's a lowball estimate. I do not see IPv6 overtaking IPv4 as the primary protocol of the internet for several times that long at the very least, and quite frankly my money is on never. I see IPv6 being the next MicroChannel Architecture or Itanium: how's it going to ever get businesses (other than the core IT shops who are already behind it) on board, given that it's not even slightly backward compatible? It's a classic prisoner's dilemma, with dozens of participants: if *everybody* does the "right thing", everybody's better off, but if even *one* of the major players doesn't bother, the whole thing is pointless and the practical thing to do is ignore it.
> this is all leading to a black market in traditional IPv4 addresses
I'm not sure I would call it a black market, since there is (to my knowledge) nothing illegal or unethical about reselling such resources. It's not the way things have traditionally been done, but it will be. But yeah, IPv4 addresses are going to be resold (as in, ISPs will probably buy back unused subnet blocks from their customers and then sell them to other customers). Duh.
> that will catch many people off-guard,
Everything that ever happens catches some people off guard, no matter how obvious it is ahead of time that it's going to happen.
> and boost Internet access prices sky-high."
Non sequitur. There are more than 2^31 total public IPv4 addresses, which is in practice (with NAT for systems that don't need to provide public services) more than enough to meet the actual need. Consequently, they don't need to be very expensive, and they won't be. Anybody who tries to charge completely outlandish prices will be underbid.
IPv4 addresses *will* have to cost money, though, going forward, because when they're basically free, as now, organizations snap up entire Class-A blocks, because they can, even if they're only planning three servers and a couple of NAT gateways for workstations. That's why we're running low: it's human nature to take more than you need as long as it's free or nearly free. So the price of IPv4 addresses will go up enough to convince some people to sell off some of the extra ones they're holding that they don't need. An equilibrium will be reached, and that will be that.
My guess is home users who want a public IPv4 address (e.g., so they can remote-desktop into their home PC from work or whatever) will end up paying an extra dollar or two a month for a public IPv4 address (either as a line-item on their bill, or by using a slightly more expensive ISP that bundles it). This is a very rough estimate, but I think the price point that's needed is somewhere around that level. Much more, and they'll be a glut on the market; much less, and nobody will be willing to give them up for sale.
> I'm not so sure about that. I have to wonder if the explosion of iPhone
> and Android based phones has not contributed significantly to this.
I won't say they haven't contributed, but I don't think it's really the major factor. The 2010Q1 stats from our website at work (which, admittedly, is small and of mostly local import) show all known mobile platforms combined at less than 1% (and just barely ahead of Iceweasel), compared to Firefox (branded as such) at 19%, Safari at 16%, and Chrome at 4% (up *substantially* from just one quarter earlier).
What interests me is that there appears to be a lot of motion, people switching to one browser and then another, and it does not appear that everyone is moving in the same direction. It doesn't look to me as if everyone is moving en masse from one particular browser to another one, because the loss and gain numbers don't match up in a way that makes sense for that. Firefox numbers, for instance, have scarcely changed at all in the last year, although I know there are people moving to Firefox (especially from IE) and others moving from it (e.g. toward Chrome). I think the browser market has become competitive again, and people in general (not everyone, of course but more than just a handful) are starting to experiment with different browsers and make a choice based on personal taste. I view this as a good thing.
Incidentally my stats also show IE8 up to 22% now (up from around 1% a year previous), which makes it the single most widely deployed version of IE at this point. I'm showing IE7 at 14% and IE6 at 12%, down from 40% and 18% (respectively) a year earlier. Note the huge drop in IE7 (40 to 14, a loss of 65% of the market share it had a year earlier), compared to the slower drop in IE6 (18 to 12, losing 33% of what it had). Of course, that's partly because a lot more of the IE7 users had automatic updates turned on, which by default puts them on IE8 now, even if they took no special action. In the next year, I look for IE8 to continue to rise and IE7 to continue to drop significantly, possibly falling below IE6. Whether overall IE numbers will continue to drop, I don't know. It might depend on what kind of showing IE9 presents. I also don't know whether Firefox will be able to hold near 20% in the long term; I suspect it may have peaked. Chrome, obviously, is still on the increase. Opera appears to be holding its own in the less-than-1% range where it has always lived. Konqueror is below IE5 and apparently tied with IE4, which tells me that all the KDE users (not that there are that many of them in the first place, though it's difficult to measure this since the UA string does not generally disclose window manager or desktop environment) are using other browsers (probably mostly Firefox, but that's a guess).
> I'd prefer Windows change its ways, not Linux.
The thing is, Linux is configurable. You *can* change its behavior, easily. Windows, not so much.
How bad do you need the time to be right in Windows? If that's really a requirement, then you should probably set the hardware clock to local time, because that's how Windows does it.
On the other hand, my experience suggests that the longer you've been running Linux, the less often you'll be inclined to boot into Windows. *shrug*. Give it a couple more years, and you'll probably forget all about caring whether the time is right in Windows. Heck, eventually you'll forget why you even have Windows installed.
Well, I saw all the system restore points disappear on the one Win7 workstation we have so far where I work, but that system was at the time experiencing serious problems due to what turned out to be a stick of bad RAM, so I'm not sure whether any software bug was necessarily involved in that instance.
Actually, I find the claim of 95% water interesting, because I would have figured that most plastics were substantially more than 5% backbone elements (carbon, silicon, nitrogen, sulfur, and other nonmetals that can sustain more than two covalent bonds per atom, so that you can chain them end-to-end with one another in long molecules and still attach other stuff at the sides). Water contains only oxygen and hydrogen, neither of which, so far as I am aware, is known to form chains more than three atoms long (well, hydrogen does when it's solid, but it's more metal than plastic, and furthermore it reverts to a diatomic gas if you look at it funny or let the temperature rise much above zero kelvins).
> since just about everyone agrees that today's state of the art solar is,
> well, not good enough, why are we doing more than experimenting with solar
Unless you count research (which aims to improve the state of the art in the future), I was not aware that we *were* doing much more with solar than (what basically amounts to) experimenting. Well, and running ultra-low-power devices, like cheap pocket calculators, but the current state of the art *is* good enough for that.
> (yes and off-grid applications,
Don't know much about that. I live in the Midwestern US, so it's pretty hard to get very far from the grid around here. (Of course, my uncle, who is in charge of the finances for a major regional power company, is of the opinion that the grid will eventually fail simply because it's old and poorly maintained. But until this actually happens, it hasn't inspired very many people to do much more than maybe install an emergency generator in the garage.)
> but of course that's not what politicians are sinking our tax money into).
I try to avoid knowing or thinking too much about where the politicians are throwing our tax money. Given the option, I virtually always favor spending cuts (and vote accordingly), but beyond that I don't like to upset myself unnecessarily. In the abstract, I am fully aware of the fact that more than 80% of the money goes toward things the government has no business spending money on, and I can accept that because I tell myself our form of government is still better than a lot of the alternatives that have been tried in other times and places. But I'd still rather not dwell much on the details. It would just be depressing, and nothing useful would be accomplished.
> Why are people bringing their own equipment in the first place?
Yeah, this was my question. You're really bringing in your personal equipment and using it to do job-related work?
If you were a consultant or contractor or somesuch, billing them exorbitant rates by the hour, I could see this, because a contracted firm's fee is expected to cover the whole service, not just the labor. Employees in this kind of situation don't receive the whole amount that the client pays, because it also has to cover equipment, insurance, administrative overhead, and various other expenses. So if you're in that kind of situation (say, you're a private consultant), then you might provide equipment, but you charge a fee large enough to cover that. You also have to pay the employer half of social security, cover your office rent if applicable, advertising, and various other things. Basically, you *are* the employer in this scenario, and the person paying the bill is the client.
A normal employee, however, should NOT be expected to provide his own equipment for work. That is the employer's responsibility.
> any viable energy source we have except theoretical fusion
> processes will run out in less than 100 years time
I'm pretty sure breeder-reactor fission (using uranium 238, either natural or depleted, or even thorium) is viable at this point. It's not quite as economic as fossil fuels while the reserves thereof hold out, but that comparison only matters until the fossil fuels start running out.
So running out of "enriched" uranium (the 235 isotope) isn't a big problem.
By the time we start running low on U235, to say nothing of thorium, we can expect solar-panel technology to have advanced *considerably* from the present state of the art.
> Crop plants typically convert 1-2% of the sunlight striking
> them to biomass. Under optimal conditions, some varieties of
> sugarcane can convert up to 8%.
And yet, growing grain in this manner, inefficiently fermenting and distilling it to get alcohols, and burning the alcohols as fuel is still more practical than current solar-panel technology. Mostly because of manufacturing costs for the solar panels, but still.
You know, everybody thinks being a comedian sounds "easy".
Until they try it. It's actually quite hard. To be any good at it, you need to be intelligent, creative, and witty *and* have strong people skills (e.g., to be able to read the audience), and all of that in one person is not a particularly common combination.
I'm not saying I'm going to vote for Dave Barry for President or anything. But when you're looking at somebody's qualifications for office, comedian as a former job title is not in itself worrisome. I'd be rather more worried about somebody who used to be a lawyer.
> a devastating new cruise missile system that can be
> hidden inside a shipping container, giving any merchant
> vessel the capability to wipe out an aircraft carrier.
Any merchant vessel, or just any merchant vessel whose operators can afford to keep cruise missiles around? How much do they project it will cost them per unit to mass produce these babies?
(Also, an aircraft carrier is a fairly unlikely target for a typical merchant, all else being equal. There's no money in taking out an aircraft carrier, and plenty of risk. Not to say there couldn't be privateers, but it seems unlikely to be the dominant use to which such a weapon would be put.)
> Your only option is to let the traffic route to the original
> destination and then tunnel it to where you actually want it.
I suppose that theoretically would work, but it's impractical.
More reasonable is to shift the larger (containing) netblock assignment up a level or two and route smaller blocks of it down to the asignees. This only works if you're getting your "new" addresses from somebody connected to the net via the same ISP as the new customer, but this is in practice not a problem: every significant ISP has numerous customers with surplus sections in their blocks. All the ISPs have to do is offer an incentive program and/or buy up portions of the blocks that are already routed through them anyway, and they'll have IP addresses to sell to new customers.
I'm telling you, it won't be a big problem. Public IPv4 addresses will no longer be *free*, but they will still cost a lot less than bandwidth, and they'll be available for the forseeable future. There are, after all, somewhere between 2^31 and 2^32 of them altogether. Going forward, that's not going to be enough for every single internet-connected system including cell phones and wrist watches to have one, but it *is* enough for every server and router to have one, plus the workstations of anyone who's willing to pay an extra dollar or two a month for the privilege. (Some ISPs will probably even continue to bundle it; they just won't be quite the cheapest IPSs.)
In other words, the public IPv4 address is the new static IP address. Life goes on.
> You _cannot_ port individual IPs and small subnets from one organisation to another
If you'd included a qualification such as "simply" or "easily" in your statement, I might have let it pass. But you actually _can_ shuffle small subnets around (well, up to a point -- a point we have certainly not yet reached); it just takes a little more doing. Okay, a lot more doing. But still less trouble than switching the whole internet over to IPv6.
> decide whether free speech rights are more important
> than helping parents keep violent material away from children.
It's not a question of importance, but of relevance.
> The price for ipv4 addys will go up.
A little, yes. But not very much, because they're not scarce. There are just metric barge-loads of public IPv4 addresses that are assigned (allocated) but aren't being used, and trainloads more being used by systems that don't need them (office workstations and such that are firewalled off from receiving any inbound connections anyway so they might as well be on NAT). Anybody who tries to charge very much is just going to get underbid.
I mean, yeah, when the initial shock first hits (the first time ARIN or IANA or whoever has to tell somebody sorry, we haven't got any free ones left to give you) there'll be a small number of idiots who panic and pay the first price somebody quotes them. There's a sucker born every minute. But sane people will not have to pay ridiculous prices, because like I said there's no real scarcity.
Public IP addresses *seem* scarce because they've been handed out like candy in gargantuan enormous blocks pretty much for free. Medium-sized organizations typically get an entire Class A even though they only have half a dozen servers and a few hundred workstations.
But the scarcity isn't real. Most of the addresses that have been handed out are actually available, or will be if the price goes up even a little.
So the cost of a public IP address will go up, but it'll still be completely dwarfed by the cost of the bandwidth an internet-connected system uses.
> Their people who suddenly own fortunes in un-sold ipv4
> addresses will start to sabotage ipv6, hiring marketing
> teams to spew bad news about it all over.
Unnecessary. The internet runs on IPv4. Everyone knows this. It sells itself.
> > but they'll definitely consider just NATting new customers.
> Trouble is, 99% of users won't even notice.
Why is this trouble?
If a user notices and complains about being behind NAT, set a flag on their account so the DHCP server gives them a publicly-routable address. No big deal. IP addresses aren't, in the forseeable future, going to be scarce enough for that to be a problem. Most users will never ask for it, so you only need public IP addresses for the customers who actually care about having them. Some ISPs would take the opportunity to levy an extra charge for a public address, but if they make the charge too high a competitor will arise. Market forces will sort it out.
Relax. The internet will not stop working when ICANN runs out of unassigned IP blocks. There'll be a few months of administrative headaches for ISPs, but in the long run systems that need a public address will be able to get one, and ones that don't need it will go behind NAT, and there'll be enough public addresses to last until the mid twenty-second century, at least.
Whatever the reason, it's still true: most internet-connected computers don't have any need for a public address. Put them behind NAT and they still do everything people want.
I'll go you one better: it would not be difficult to design an application-layer protocol that would allow systems behind a NAT gateway to accept inbound connections, with the gateway's cooperation. (Client systems would need to present an additional piece of information besides the IP address and port when making a connection, but this is not difficult if you build it into the protocol. Servers behind NAT would need to inform the gateway of the values of this field that they can respond to; servers that are not behind NAT could skip this step.) Any application built on top of such a protocol would work on systems that have a public IP address, and also on systems behind a NAT gateway that supports the protocol.
Obviously that only works for new protocols (not, say, SMTP), but with a handful of exceptions (e.g., RDP, BitTorrent) most of the commonly-used existing protocols are designed on the assumption of many clients and few servers, so systems behind NAT don't need to be servers. That's certainly true for the big three (DNS, HTTP, SMTP), which between them account for something like 98% of internet use. The ratio of clients to servers on these protocols is thousands to one.
Of course, that raises the question of whether the ISP would allow the NAT gateways to pass through the incoming connections. But from a policy perspective that's not really very different from whether they allow the routers to pass through incoming connections now. Some ISPs block ports they don't think people need, but there are plenty of ISPs that don't. If it's important to customers, somebody will offer it.