Every nation should be represented in a fair and democratic Internet administration, not just the people we like.
That's silly. The best government is a wise, benevolent despot, everyone sensible agrees about that. (The problem is how to ensure that the despot stays benevolent and wise, which they never are over the long term...) As long as ICANN is behaving wisely and benevolently in their despot role, what exactly is the problem? They're administering the phone book, and they're doing a fine job. Let 'em, even if folks in other countries have pulled the issue of internet administration into the "USA is evil" fad.
If other nations do set up their own root servers, the Internet will be fractured and cease to be the useful network it is today.
So it's inconceivable to you that there could be multiple sets of root servers, disambiguated by smart client software? If the political environment changes, so will the software. Have a little faith, man.
You can't deny other nations a voice and still expect them to participate on your terms,
Sure, if "denying other nations a voice" consists of telling them they can't screw up the phone book, it sounds like a swell plan. And they'll keep playing ICANN's game because this is about giving the USA a black eye in the press, it's not about actually running the internet.
The fastest way to create client DNS software that handles multiple root servers is to give control of . to the UN. The people who care about the smooth functioning of the net would go mildly bananas, and multiroot dns would be fully implemented and deployed in 2 years. (Pro: http://public-root.com/, con: http://www.circleid.com/posts/putting_multiple_roo t_nameserver_issue_to_rest/; and naturally I think Vixie's more likely to be right about the naiive implementation, but I also suspect that the UN jerking around with DNS entries would be enough to motivate the right people (including the inestimable Mr. Vixie, I would hope) to get the work done.)
it's an international resource that only has the value it has because it is singular.
It's not "national", intra- or inter-. It's a resource that connects individuals and businesses, created and maintained by individuals and businesses, and it interacts with the various governments only as much as they require it with threat of force. The vast majority of the businesses and individuals that make up the internet are nearly as hostile to US government interference as they are to interference from China or Myanmar. That many local and national governments subsidise or create ISPs is of no consequence to backbone routing policies, or administration of the root domain.
And again, its singularity is the result of a simplifying assumption in the design, as a result of being sheltered under the hands-off protection of that nasty US government. But simplifying assumptions can be discarded, the software can become more complex, if the political situation demands it.
Colmes' job is to be the token liberal, he never calls Hannity on his crap. He's the straight man, so Hannity can get his conservative digs in. Nothing balanced about that show, to me. That's the show on Fox I know best, I imagine the rest of your analysis is of similar quality.
If the Fox coverage isn't biased, then why the poll results showing Fox viewers have hugely more conservative understanding of the "facts" than viewers of any other network?
I'm also an Independent, favoring many of the same stances on issues you do, wondering how long these two parties will do their death-spiral dance -- will they remember they're there to govern before we have another revolution, or not? Tune in absolutely nowhere for good reporting on this question.
For anyone thinking "revolution, what a crock!", ponder that the two parties aren't fighting over issues or how best to govern the country, they're fighting for power, and the alleged "issues" being discussed (when they are) are mere props, given none of the respect or consideration they are due, treated as trinkets to distract and manipulate the voters.
The real business of governance is being largely ignored, and the two parties have done everything they can to prevent any other political force from gaining a toehold, or any possibility of governing. So much so, in fact, that no other political party can have enough influence to even keep the Rs and Ds honest.
You get the government you deserve. We need to learn how to deserve better. (Instant Runoff Voting, or the slightly better variation Condorcet Voting, is one step in that direction.)
Grown from a toy language with one neat trick -- a big switch that you throw between "write this to stdout" and "interpret this as code" -- PHP is yet another language whose only reason for existing is to indulge the coders' desires to play with the new shiny toy. (TCL, Python, etc.)
All scripting languages move toward feature-parity with perl. Why bother with that process? Let the toy remain a toy.
Rather than reiterate language design from 10 years ago, why not just use an existing tool to do something new and useful?
Yeah, perl's syntax is arcane, but it's powerful. Yeah, the language is huge, but is it better to implement a smaller language that is then expanded over and over?
And soon your buddy lists will cooperate with your more-general contact management data via FOAF. Having to keep several buddy lists synced up, plus one or more of Orkut, Friendster, etc., is just a huge pain that could be solved, if the companies involved saw the potential for an improved user experience.
GPS antennas must be pretty big, because the signals from orbit are pretty weak.
Small projectiles are less stable. A projectile the size of a grain of sand could barely cross a room.
The kinetic energy required to overcome air friction would make the impact pretty serious, if you could magically overcome the instability problem, and magically make the tiny projectile carry that much kinetic energy without vaporising it.
As for tracking the thing, where's the transmit antenna? RFID tags have a short range, and they're a lot bigger than a mosquito-sized impact. No antenna means no signal range.
And as other posters have noted, there's no room for a power source, the GPS signals don't penetrate well, etc. etc.
Some of us were around before everyone started using SMTP...
AOL, Prodigy, MSN, and many others were email islands, and it was many years after the advent of these "widespread standards" you speak of before they connected.
The existing social networking sites are important proving grounds for user interfaces, features, and underlying technology. But don't worry, social networking will look more like email before too long. Several of the bigger sites are working on exporting FOAF, and once that happens the end-user software will emerge to make much better use of the data.
I'm guessing it'll be less than 2 years (and perhaps much less) before the Mozilla project's client du jour will incorporate FOAF data throughout your email, IM, etc. user experience. It'll become a required part of every communication client, because it'll be so useful.
At the risk of my machine getting crushed just as I leave town for a week, I'll point y'all at my notes on the topic.
Been there, done that. Don't put any money, time, or relationships into this project that you aren't fully prepared to lose, despite your best efforts.
Hire people. That's why God invented capitalism. Your friends and family are not cheaper, they are vastly more expensive, in ways you don't yet see.
And more importantly, why would you want them to? Do you hate money, or think that the Google founders should?
The stock price fluctuations that are inevitable will only matter to the current stock owners if they choose to let them. If they're getting a $12B market cap, they'll have "fuck you" money; they'll be able to make whatever decisions they think best.
Good articles. Thought-provoking. As you say, this ground has seen a few tracks before. Please let me offer a few suggestions that I believe would be helpful to you.
--
You are paying too much attention to money. Poor people don't care about money, they care about quality of life. Stuff, amusement, and opportunity. If everyone has enough of those things, what does it matter that it only cost $1000 per year per person? That's what higher productivity means -- everything gets cheaper.
Money is used to ration two things: Wealth and work. Wealth is land, natural resources, company ownership. intellectual property, and the future taxes of the federal government (aka cash). Work is everything people and their machines do to increase the value of their wealth.
The problem is how to ration the wealth and work when some large portion of the population has no wealth, and doesn't work. How do you take from the rich, and give to the poor? Especially when that will encourage the rich to take their toys somewhere you can't tax them? Or the borderline rich will decide that life as a poor person isn't so bad? When the rich people are all gone, who do you take from then? Try reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and see where this path leads.
Since you seem fond of taxing the rich, you may find it useful to look at the limiting case: If we took all the wealth of the US and redistributed it evenly to everyone, how much investment income would everyone get? You may be surprised how little that is. A good measure would be to take the total value of all companies in the US (the Wilshire 5000 index would be a good way to get this, again about $10T), then double it to take privately held companies into account. (As I recall this is very roughly correct.) Then multiply by 4% to get the typical long-term inflation-adjusted investment return. 4% of $20T is $800B, or roughly $2000 per person. So ALL profits from business in the US are $2000 per person per year. That includes the profits that are reinvested to make the economy grow. If it were redistributed and everyone spent it, that would halt all economic growth.
US GDP is about $13T, or $37k dollars per person per year in the US. That's the total US paycheck, divided by number of people, including children. Taxing the income of the rich also won't get you very far, because as you see, while they do get a boatload of money, there aren't enough of them to really matter. 100 people who get $100M per year is still only $10B, or 0.1% of the total US paycheck.
Local, state, and federal taxes currently consume roughly half (I think 56% = $7T) of every dollar earned. So there isn't a lot of fat left in the system. Productivity would have to triple if half of our country were unemployed, and we still wanted to be good to pensioners and those on social security. On the other hand, maybe with sufficient automation we will see productivity triple.
--
(This is a less important point.) Your articles seem to come across as treating robots as a problem similar to illegal aliens "stealing our jobs". I realize you didn't say that, and after looking at your bio I think it likely that you don't mean that (exactly), but it comes across that way. You appear to (inadvertantly) be using the language of a demagogue to argue that "robots taking our jobs" are a malign yet unstoppable force. The central economic tenet that you put forth is essentially correct, but your language leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
--
Your solutions are fairly socialist, or at least welfare-statist. You might want to read some Hayek and Friedman (Hidden Order is a good place to start, Amazon has it) to see how the free-marketers think. It's not so hostile to the poor as you might imagine. After all, since I depend on everyone else's work for my well being (and they on mine), it's better for me to live in a world of rich, educated people who have high-quality goods and services to trade. Or, the pithy saying: rich people make better trading partners.
roystgnr sez:...but even for centimeter radii leading edges we've only recently discovered ceramics that we think can survive the resulting reentry temperatures. What would let bacterial micrometer radii survive?
Just for one example, the definition of "dumping" is fought over pretty heavily. This is ruled on by the WTO, not worked out in the market. While not exactly arbitrary, one can only expect that anti-dumping rulings are subject to political influences.
I'm not up on the minutiae of WTO policy discussions, so I'm not qualified to have much of an opinion as to whether the state of the world with regard to dumping activities is better or worse (or more fair, or more pro-US, or more pro-EU, etc.) under the WTO policies. (Of course, pre-WTO this was handled under the relatively toothless GATT, rather than in the unfettered market. Whatever.)
The WTO isn't about free trade, it's about trade on the terms of those who set the policies. Even in the ideal situation of truly tariff-free "free" trade, the trade isn't really "free". It's according to a single, mandated set of policies. Those policies are created largely to benefit the US and EU, and screw the third world.
If you believe in the market, you have to believe in a market for trade policies. That means allowing countries to screw themselves by erecting trade barriers. Or allowing countries to prevent themselves by being screwed by other countries' trade or export policies, or their exploitation of unbalanced WTO rules, etc.
And who knows, perhaps there are situations where the simplistic "any trade is good trade" model isn't the ideal solution. Without a market for trade policies, a better solution (perhaps only relevant to a few situations in which countries might find themselves) will never be found.
Slashdot Mirror
The fastest way to create client DNS software that handles multiple root servers is to give control of . to the UN. The people who care about the smooth functioning of the net would go mildly bananas, and multiroot dns would be fully implemented and deployed in 2 years. (Pro: http://public-root.com/, con: http://www.circleid.com/posts/putting_multiple_roo t_nameserver_issue_to_rest/; and naturally I think Vixie's more likely to be right about the naiive implementation, but I also suspect that the UN jerking around with DNS entries would be enough to motivate the right people (including the inestimable Mr. Vixie, I would hope) to get the work done.)
It's not "national", intra- or inter-. It's a resource that connects individuals and businesses, created and maintained by individuals and businesses, and it interacts with the various governments only as much as they require it with threat of force. The vast majority of the businesses and individuals that make up the internet are nearly as hostile to US government interference as they are to interference from China or Myanmar. That many local and national governments subsidise or create ISPs is of no consequence to backbone routing policies, or administration of the root domain.And again, its singularity is the result of a simplifying assumption in the design, as a result of being sheltered under the hands-off protection of that nasty US government. But simplifying assumptions can be discarded, the software can become more complex, if the political situation demands it.
Cheers,
Flumph
Will NASA get a stipend for each planet? Is there an astronomy-textbook lobby that's pushing for more chapters?
Creating arbitrary categories so we can think we know about stuff is no substitute for knowing about stuff. The map is not the territory.
Deciding "what's a planet" is a game for people who don't care about astronomy, and just want to argue over beers at the pub.
Flumph
Colmes' job is to be the token liberal, he never calls Hannity on his crap. He's the straight man, so Hannity can get his conservative digs in. Nothing balanced about that show, to me. That's the show on Fox I know best, I imagine the rest of your analysis is of similar quality.
If the Fox coverage isn't biased, then why the poll results showing Fox viewers have hugely more conservative understanding of the "facts" than viewers of any other network?
I'm also an Independent, favoring many of the same stances on issues you do, wondering how long these two parties will do their death-spiral dance -- will they remember they're there to govern before we have another revolution, or not? Tune in absolutely nowhere for good reporting on this question.
For anyone thinking "revolution, what a crock!", ponder that the two parties aren't fighting over issues or how best to govern the country, they're fighting for power, and the alleged "issues" being discussed (when they are) are mere props, given none of the respect or consideration they are due, treated as trinkets to distract and manipulate the voters.
The real business of governance is being largely ignored, and the two parties have done everything they can to prevent any other political force from gaining a toehold, or any possibility of governing. So much so, in fact, that no other political party can have enough influence to even keep the Rs and Ds honest.
You get the government you deserve. We need to learn how to deserve better. (Instant Runoff Voting, or the slightly better variation Condorcet Voting, is one step in that direction.)
Flumph
> What about a few about peace?
Have you actually read Sun Tzu? The highest measure of skill he describes is to not fight at all.
Grown from a toy language with one neat trick -- a big switch that you throw between "write this to stdout" and "interpret this as code" -- PHP is yet another language whose only reason for existing is to indulge the coders' desires to play with the new shiny toy. (TCL, Python, etc.)
All scripting languages move toward feature-parity with perl. Why bother with that process? Let the toy remain a toy.
Rather than reiterate language design from 10 years ago, why not just use an existing tool to do something new and useful?
Yeah, perl's syntax is arcane, but it's powerful. Yeah, the language is huge, but is it better to implement a smaller language that is then expanded over and over?
Curmudgeonly yours,
Flumph
And soon your buddy lists will cooperate with your more-general contact management data via FOAF. Having to keep several buddy lists synced up, plus one or more of Orkut, Friendster, etc., is just a huge pain that could be solved, if the companies involved saw the potential for an improved user experience.
Scott
Would there be a metametamoderate option, so someone could label you as "easily amused"?
:)
Hey Pot, you're black!
Kettle
At those speeds, shouldn't it have wings rather than wheels?
BTW, FP.
Flumph
GPS antennas must be pretty big, because the signals from orbit are pretty weak.
Small projectiles are less stable. A projectile the size of a grain of sand could barely cross a room.
The kinetic energy required to overcome air friction would make the impact pretty serious, if you could magically overcome the instability problem, and magically make the tiny projectile carry that much kinetic energy without vaporising it.
As for tracking the thing, where's the transmit antenna? RFID tags have a short range, and they're a lot bigger than a mosquito-sized impact. No antenna means no signal range.
And as other posters have noted, there's no room for a power source, the GPS signals don't penetrate well, etc. etc.
Ardent Pedantry R Us,
Flumph
Some of us were around before everyone started using SMTP...
AOL, Prodigy, MSN, and many others were email islands, and it was many years after the advent of these "widespread standards" you speak of before they connected.
The existing social networking sites are important proving grounds for user interfaces, features, and underlying technology. But don't worry, social networking will look more like email before too long. Several of the bigger sites are working on exporting FOAF, and once that happens the end-user software will emerge to make much better use of the data.
I'm guessing it'll be less than 2 years (and perhaps much less) before the Mozilla project's client du jour will incorporate FOAF data throughout your email, IM, etc. user experience. It'll become a required part of every communication client, because it'll be so useful.
At the risk of my machine getting crushed just as I leave town for a week, I'll point y'all at my notes on the topic.
ObAprilFools: Your fly's open.
Hire people. That's why God invented capitalism. Your friends and family are not cheaper, they are vastly more expensive, in ways you don't yet see.
Good luck, either way.
And more importantly, why would you want them to? Do you hate money, or think that the Google founders should?
The stock price fluctuations that are inevitable will only matter to the current stock owners if they choose to let them. If they're getting a $12B market cap, they'll have "fuck you" money; they'll be able to make whatever decisions they think best.
Have some faith, man.
Flumph
http://www.fairvote.org/irv/
Instant Runoff Voting means you don't have to vote for the lesser evil, except as your second-to-last choice. It wins. Read about it.
Good articles. Thought-provoking. As you say, this ground has seen a few tracks before. Please let me offer a few suggestions that I believe would be helpful to you.
--
You are paying too much attention to money. Poor people don't care about money, they care about quality of life. Stuff, amusement, and opportunity. If everyone has enough of those things, what does it matter that it only cost $1000 per year per person? That's what higher productivity means -- everything gets cheaper.
Money is used to ration two things: Wealth and work. Wealth is land, natural resources, company ownership. intellectual property, and the future taxes of the federal government (aka cash). Work is everything people and their machines do to increase the value of their wealth.
The problem is how to ration the wealth and work when some large portion of the population has no wealth, and doesn't work. How do you take from the rich, and give to the poor? Especially when that will encourage the rich to take their toys somewhere you can't tax them? Or the borderline rich will decide that life as a poor person isn't so bad? When the rich people are all gone, who do you take from then? Try reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and see where this path leads.
Since you seem fond of taxing the rich, you may find it useful to look at the limiting case: If we took all the wealth of the US and redistributed it evenly to everyone, how much investment income would everyone get? You may be surprised how little that is. A good measure would be to take the total value of all companies in the US (the Wilshire 5000 index would be a good way to get this, again about $10T), then double it to take privately held companies into account. (As I recall this is very roughly correct.) Then multiply by 4% to get the typical long-term inflation-adjusted investment return. 4% of $20T is $800B, or roughly $2000 per person. So ALL profits from business in the US are $2000 per person per year. That includes the profits that are reinvested to make the economy grow. If it were redistributed and everyone spent it, that would halt all economic growth.
US GDP is about $13T, or $37k dollars per person per year in the US. That's the total US paycheck, divided by number of people, including children. Taxing the income of the rich also won't get you very far, because as you see, while they do get a boatload of money, there aren't enough of them to really matter. 100 people who get $100M per year is still only $10B, or 0.1% of the total US paycheck.
Local, state, and federal taxes currently consume roughly half (I think 56% = $7T) of every dollar earned. So there isn't a lot of fat left in the system. Productivity would have to triple if half of our country were unemployed, and we still wanted to be good to pensioners and those on social security. On the other hand, maybe with sufficient automation we will see productivity triple.
--
(This is a less important point.) Your articles seem to come across as treating robots as a problem similar to illegal aliens "stealing our jobs". I realize you didn't say that, and after looking at your bio I think it likely that you don't mean that (exactly), but it comes across that way. You appear to (inadvertantly) be using the language of a demagogue to argue that "robots taking our jobs" are a malign yet unstoppable force. The central economic tenet that you put forth is essentially correct, but your language leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
--
Your solutions are fairly socialist, or at least welfare-statist. You might want to read some Hayek and Friedman (Hidden Order is a good place to start, Amazon has it) to see how the free-marketers think. It's not so hostile to the poor as you might imagine. After all, since I depend on everyone else's work for my well being (and they on mine), it's better for me to live in a world of rich, educated people who have high-quality goods and services to trade. Or, the pithy saying: rich people make better trading partners.
Lower mass/cross section ratio.
=> Lower terminal velocity.
=> Lower heat from reentry.
Just for one example, the definition of "dumping" is fought over pretty heavily. This is ruled on by the WTO, not worked out in the market. While not exactly arbitrary, one can only expect that anti-dumping rulings are subject to political influences.
I'm not up on the minutiae of WTO policy discussions, so I'm not qualified to have much of an opinion as to whether the state of the world with regard to dumping activities is better or worse (or more fair, or more pro-US, or more pro-EU, etc.) under the WTO policies. (Of course, pre-WTO this was handled under the relatively toothless GATT, rather than in the unfettered market. Whatever.)
while (@issues) {s/dumping/$_/;}
Regards,
Flumph
If you believe in the market, you have to believe in a market for trade policies. That means allowing countries to screw themselves by erecting trade barriers. Or allowing countries to prevent themselves by being screwed by other countries' trade or export policies, or their exploitation of unbalanced WTO rules, etc.
And who knows, perhaps there are situations where the simplistic "any trade is good trade" model isn't the ideal solution. Without a market for trade policies, a better solution (perhaps only relevant to a few situations in which countries might find themselves) will never be found.
Flumph