If the coder writes a program in the wrong format for his own purposes with no one else using it,
then the coder is doing it wrong. This is the scenario suggesed by the original AC's post, where the author
writes his code to output in the wrong format, and then has to fix it with cut - apparently proving that bash is broken by doing so.
Of course Grampy AC may have meant the case where you can't change the source program, as is the case with ls. In that case, the cool thing about the pipefitting tools that come with bash is that you have a means to change that format without needing to hack ls.
Mind you, have you seen the nuber of options for ls? I think the only format it doesn't support is telepathic output. And that only until the expansion cards become commercially available.
In other words, you think it's unlikely that MSH can do things that the combination of bash and cut can do.
I think it's unlikely that MSH can do the things that bash and cut can do as well, and with as little effort, as MSH can do them. That's a distinction I didn't think needed making - maybe I should have made it anyway.
That's not exactly the same as "MSH is less powerful than cut", but it's near enough for our purposes.
Yours perhaps:P
And the point of MSH, as the article goes to incredible lengths to explain, is that it IS a filtering command-line environment.
I wouldn't say incredible lengths, or that the filtering was the point of MSH - the point seems to be to supply a.NET enabled, MS branded Perl variant. Even so, if EvilNTUser had hauled me up on that issue, I might have conceeded the point.
Then again, I might not. The streams in questions are object streams, and it's far from clear that Monad is going to ship with a set analagous pipe processing primitives as have evolved for use with *nix shells, we can reasonably expect some degree of overhead from the object format and there's a fair chance the text you want will be embedded in some gui display or interrupted with application specific markup and metadata.
So if the output isn't formatted the way you want it, I really do think it's going to be harder to fix that with MSH than with bash and cut. Of course, YMMV.
Hmmm... tell me - do you believe that if Language A is better at Task X than Language B
then it necessarily follows that A is better than B for all possible values of X?
You certainly seem to. Personally I'd expect that there'd be trade-offs in
the design of any language, but perhaps that's just me.
Tell you what, perhaps you can tell me if Monad comes with a
filter object that will take an object representing a body of text,
extract a portion of that text by either column number or character position,
and pass it on to another filter for further processing.
Because sometimes that's a sueful thing to be able to do and
frankly, I couldn't find that bit in TFA anywhere.
You see, if MSH doesn't have something like that and you then find
yourself in a situation where you can't modify the original script,
and you need to reformat the output, then you're pretty
much shit out of luck. In which case, gosh, it would turn out that
there was something you do with bash and cut far easier than with MSH.
Don't worry - I expect they'll fix it in Marketing.
Of course, maybe I skipped over the section in TFA on column based text
processing. Point it out to me and I'll cheerfully eat arbitrarily large
portions of humble pie. Otherwise, I stand by what I wrote.
When you have to do things like "command | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | cut -d ':' -f 1" to get some data, you know something is WRONG.
Agreed. In this case it's the coder, who should really have enough nous to print the data in the format in which he intends to use it. That's hardly rocket science, is it?
Of course, if you didn't write the python script and don't have the time and/or skill to hack it, you might nd up using cut and the like to get the data in the format you need. The cool think about that is that it's possible. I don't know if the same can be said under MSH, but it seems unlikely - the focus of Monad seems to be.NET integration, not a stream based filtering command line environment.
Then again, maybe you didn't even write the wrapper script and don't understand anything. If so you can always troll slashdot as an AC and get some astroturfing in.
I seem to have recolections of times when the UN peacekeepers went in police a cease fire that was negotiated independantly of the UN. If neither side trusts the other not to break the truce, you need a neutral party. For years, the UN have been the only body capable of fulfilling that role.
I can't see the Red Cross in that role because, well, they're apt to get shot at and sometimes need to shoot back. Of course, you could open the role up to armed NGOs (non governmental organisations, I assume?) but that rather runs the risk of legitimising a number of mercenary armies. Of course, there's no garuantee that these mercs won't have their own agendas, and their own covert backers. We could also expect that peacekeeping ops would favour the deepest pockets - I can see that going down well with the multinationals, but not with impoverished third world nations.
I can imagine accountability issues as well. At least currently everyone can yell at Kofi Annan.
Incidentally, I ran the UN corruption issue past my wife today. I'm something of your typical geek, and if it isn't tech, t sometimes goes right by me. My wife however has a wide scope to her interests and tends to pay attention to these things. She had pretty much the same impression of the UN as I have, and I don't think it's an unusual one in the UK. I don't suppose anyone assumes any degree of saintliness to the UN, but there's none of the demonisation that seems to be going on stateside. I suppose there could be some european agenda that includes an unconditional support for the UN, but that doesn't seem particularly credible to me.
Anyway, I think we're approaching the point where we have to agree to differ on this, so unless you've anything new that you'd like me to respond to, I'll probably leave this one here. Thank you for an intersting and courteous discussion.
Yes, I know about your role in antiwar.com. I'll grant that you know what you're talking about. I reserve the right to question some of your conclusions, however.
For example, Refugees INternation seems to be a Washington think tank with a strong anti-UN agenda. Of course, the agenda could be the effect rather than the cause. However, given the degree of political ill-will towards the UN in washington, I'm inclined to take them with a pinch of salt. Even the name seems designed to be evocative of Amnesty International.
Ass for the BBC article, it reports widespread allegations, which is to say that the beeb don't know if they're true or not.
But, you know what? It's assume the worst case, that all you say is true and the UN is institutionally corrupt. Even then, there is no other body that can perform the UNs role as peacekeepers. Nato is too strongly linked with the states, the EC are just as corrupt as your depiction of the UN and we can expect their troops to be viewed with equal suspicion, and any unilatteral national effort is likely to make matters worse, not better.
Given your antiwar.com involvement, I'd have thought that would be an important consideration.
So if the UN are as bad as you, and I'm by no means convinced, then it seems to be we should be clamouring for reform, or failing that that they should at least be some proposals for a replacement body on the desk. Best of luck convincing the third world that any new body will be an improvement though.
Unfortunately the current administration's idea of reform seems to be John Bolton who has gone on record saying that the UN only exists to support US self interest. Which, drifting back on topic for a second, is the sort of attitude that leads other nations to distrust sole US control of the root DNS servers.
The UN is run by, and consists almost solely of, politicians and their lapdogs, thus making it inherently untrustworthy.
What, you mean like national governments?
The UN are supposed to serve the needs of everyone. They rarely serve the needs of anyone except themselves.
I'm not sure I'd agree. I would have said that as a talking shop, the UN probably helped prevent the Cold War from turning Hot on more than one occasion. UN peacekeepers can police treaties and ceasefires where no other military force would be considered acceptable. Some of the UN branches (WHO springs to mind) may be in the pockets of some of the large multinationals, and that is a deplorable state of affairs. Even there, however, I'd stll maintain that rank and file of these groups are probably hard working and conciencous.
Undoubtedly, it's hard to ride the gravy train if you're looking out for anyone except yourself.
Heh. You sound like a European talking about the EC:D
I guess we'll have to chalk that first part up to hanging out with different crowds or something, but no one I know ever held the UN in particularly high regard. These problems didn't just spring up overnight, nor are they localized into one particular segment of their bureaucracy.
Well, if you say so. The only time the UN ever makes the news over this side of the Atlantic is when they send peacekeepers into some war zone. That was generally regarded as a good thing, at least to the extent that UN forces aren't generally seen as a provocation by any of the combatants. The last couple of years have seen the odd spot regading the corruption scandal around Kofi Annan and son, but even then that's only really started post the occupation of Iraq, and I've tended to dismiss the stories as payback for Annan's defiance of Bush and company.
So I guess the question becomes, if the UN is really that corrupt, why did I not hear about it before this? The BBC are generally pretty good about this sort of thing and, as you say these problems don't just spring up overnight.
I think the big thing though is that by and large the US hasn't been managing the internet, they've just left it be to grow on its own. The threat isn't so much the US govenrment losing control of the internet as someone else gaining that control who's actually going to use it.
Well, that's the thing. The perception overseas isn't so much that the US government left the Internet alone as that it didn't really know it existed, or at least, didn't think it was important. That has changed however, and bellicose as the current administration are, a lot of people are concerned that this "hands off" policy is not going to last.
Personally, I couldn't give a toss as long as the damn thing continues to work. I can see how these concerns arise however, and I don't think framing the debate as america-vs-the-world is terribly helpful.
Political issues aside, the UN is unwieldy and corrupt.
That may in fact turn out to be the case. It does seem to me, however, that certain media channels have been going out of their way to find dirt on the UN ever since our latest adventures in Iraq. Since the UN seemed well enough regarded prior to that point, and since I very much doubt that the UN has undergone some deep seated moral sea change since that time, I tend to take these stories with a pinch of salt. It wouldn't be the first time that doubts have been cast on the integrity and impartiality of cetain media corporations in this regard.
For what it's worth, I suspect that any such stories are founded in fact. It's the implication that the UN is institutionally corrupt that gives me difficulty. Still, tempting as it is to dismiss the anti-UN sentiment as propaganda from the Bush administration, I have no direct personal knowledge in this case. All I can say is that I can't say for sure. Your own involvement with AntiWar.com notwithstanding, I doubt that you can do much better.
the point remains, and I think it's a fair one
Not wishing to sound sarcastic, but which point was that? Mr Massey's points seem to be as follows:
The internet governance issue will be decided by clueless diplomats
The UN are tossers to a man
The US have done a decent job of managing the Internet
People don't like the US because they're busy grabbing everything in sight because they can
They are not going to stop
The "little countries" had better learn to like it
I don't dispute point 3). The rest of it seems pretty shameful.
Incidentally, I've said this before, but I really don't understand why all this fuss in the first place. It's not like the US aren't members of the UN, and as the "dominant superpower" you can expect to enjoy considerable influence over the management of the Internet. Yet to hear it discussed on slashdot, you'd think the French had threatened to come and take all your computers away and never let any of you play on the Internet again!
I can't see what you'd lose, expect possibly the ability to unilaterally victimise nations that displease you by manipulating DNS records. And maybe that is in fact the point.
Like I said earlier, I don't presume to know the answer. I will however stick my neck out and say that jingoism and sabre rattling isn't going to help anything.
What it really boils down to is we either trust the completely untrustworthy, unstable and unorganized UN
Umm... untrustworthy to whom and in what regard? Do I take it that the UN are supposed to serve the needs of USA first and the rest of the world second, if at all?
I can understand how some of those working at the UN might not see it quite that way.
Actually, you used the word ambiguously. In fact you seem to be trying to deliberately conflate two different usages of "standard"; one meaning "commonplace", the other refering to an agreed protocol to allow interoperability.
Microsoft integrated XML pretty deep into.NET, so naturally they are trumpeting the usefulness of the XML standard and SOA
Oooh... Microsoft! Funny thing about Microsoft, but they suffered a major setback recently. Seems that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts opted for an independantly defined open standard that everyone can use freely, rather than the Microsoft offering which was loaded up with licences and patents and which they could change at will and without consultation. I gather Microsoft were not happy about that. Chairs were thrown, I have no doubt.
Oddly enough, that was about SOAs (Service Oriented Architectures) as well. I know this is a crazy idea, but I expect Microsoft would be purely delighted if everyone ignored the Open Document standard and went on to express their
individuality
by buying whatever de-facto standard Microsoft might subsequently announce.
But then you used lots of dollar signs when talking about VB.NET so I guess you can't really be a Redmond shill. And to think, you nearly had me fooled.
Again, I could be entirely wrong. Your mileage may vary.
Yes, I think it probably will, and I think you probably are.
I think people understand perfectly well that open standards means increased competition, and that competition means better products and better value for money.
Certainly, there's only one way to find out. Personally, I'm rather looking forward to it.
The company's new privacy policy, though little changed in substance from one issued 15 months ago, is easier to read and reflects Google's expansion beyond its core search engine business.
It also describes in greater detail what Google is doing to protect against abuses.
But it remains remains silent on how long information is kept.
So just for the hell of it, I had a look at Yahoo's
privacy policy
to see what they said on data retention. Feel free to correct me, but I couldn't find it.
So in essence: google are still promising not to sell your details; they've clarified their policy against employees selling it on (they're anti-) and they've made the document easier to read. On the minus side, they've failed to provide information that Yahoo! don't provide either. Which seems to be about as evil as Google gets.
Of course, Yahoo does have a vested interest here. Maybe we should take this with a pinch of salt?
The Royal Society do have considerable prestige, but we're talking about the The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce - commonly known as the RSA.
Touche, sir.:)
That's what I get for reading slashdot in the wee small hours before bed.
All the same, the RSA isn't entirely without prestige.
They were founded in 1754 and can still claim royal patronage.
How long has a webpage that makes a browser crash been called a "Denial Of Service Exploit".
Oddly enough, about the same length of time as has passed since Microsoft realised
their stranglehold on web browsers was slipping.
One day Redmond reformed the IE development team to try and stem the tide. The next,
stories like this one started cropping up with penny-ante firefox exploits being
made into front page news. Just as though crushing your browser was comparable in
scale to rooting your network...
At the risk of being modded flamebait, may I say that for a nation
that fought tooth and nail for their independence, and that regularly
proclaims itself the home of Democracy, some of you fellows seem to take
a perverse pride in telling each other how your badly Democracy is broken
and how it will likely never work again
I'd have expected the US people to say "the foundation of our great nation
is being undermined! time to take action". Instead an outsider could
almost come to believe that US citizens don't mind ground into the dirt.
Just so long as the jackboots have "Made in the USA" printed on the sole.
I appreciate that not all Americans think this way. It's just that given
your history, I'm continually surprised that any of you do.
How many millions of smart (don't prove me wrong) people read this? We're
a force of Nature on the Internet, capable of manually DDoSing servers
into a meltdown.
But our power can be more usefully applied as a grassroots political force
than by
merely DDOSing all and sundry in an ineffective attempt to change
policy. That tactic just gives the opposition a ready ad hominem attack
with which to dismiss us, no matter how just our cause or how
rational our arguments. As with SCO, every web site outage
for the next six months suddenly becomes the work of lawless commie pirate
hackers who want to selfishly stop people making music and... well,
everyone looses interest, expect maybe to pass tough new laws further
restricting free speech online.
Not that I'm saying that was your suggestion, but I'd hate for someone
to misread it that way. I'm sure you understand.
Let's turn that power to doing good -- statistically, at least one person here is bound to have a good idea.
I think the good idea is the charter from TFA. This is a tremendously valuable
contribution to the debate. For one thing, the Royal Society have considerable
prestige. It's a lot harder to laugh them off than it is slashdot.
The diversity of the authors helps in this regard as well.
For another
the charter gives us a good talking point - something to campaign for. So you
can contact your local lawmaker type and ask what he'd doing to bring about
compliance with the Adelphi Charter. We can use it as a justification to ask
whether the public good has been considered in respect to a specific
IP ruling, and as further support for the abolition of software and business
methods and software patents.
This doesn't give us any new techniques for getting the attention of government - but then
we don't really need any - the old ones still work. What this gives us a lot of new,
high quality ammo. My bright idea would be to suggest that we use it.
It works on the principle that if he introduces himself as a MS guy, the Linux faithful will think "This man works for The Enemy" and disregard everything he says.
On the other hand, if he stands there and says "I was a UNIX hacker..." then folk start thinking "one of us! Let's hear what he has to say..." instead of keeping keeping firmly in mind that A) he's still employed by the Enemy B) would not have been sent except to evangelise and C) probably had his speech written by marketdroids at Redmond.
You can see the same approach at work in a couple of dozen Slashdot posts every time there is a Linux thread: "I used Linux for years until I finally realised..." "Much as I love Linux, I have to say..." "I use Linux on all my home machines, but in the real world..."
It's just another scummy marketing trick. That's all.
And if we decide to nuke Europe, there's no stopping us there, either.
I cannot express how deeply that reassures me.
Of course, no one's afraid we're going to do that
Well, I'm not afraid that you're going to do that. I will admit to the occasional qualm as to what God may tell George W. to do tomorrow however.
So, why are they afraid we're going to do something abusive with the internet?
See previous answer:)
Seriously, as the GP asked, without resorting to general complaints, is there a reason to believe that we would do something abusive with the internet
Well, in all honesty, the US burnt off a lot of international goodwill over Iraq. Now before anyone crisps me for attacking the US, I'm a brit, and my governemt is equally complicit in the matter. The only difference is that everything has been the fault of the British (or English if you're a brit) for the last fifty years or so - "perfidious albion" and all that. On the whole you colonial chappies have had the respect and admiration of vast chunks of the world - certainly the ones Ive been to. Sadly, you seem to have rather damaged that, and I often wonder if the US as a nation yet realises quite the value of what it lost in attacking Iraq.
Anyway, I think this is one of those arguments that, for no fault of your own, you just can't win.
The trouble is that the 'net is supposed to be decentralised. The harder the US fights to
keep control of this one aspect of it, the more some people are goign to wonder why this is
so important.
I mean it's not as if anyone's suggested putting Osama bin Laden in charge of all things internet.
It's going to be under internation control and the US will have a lot of influence
over how things happen, just as they do in other areas.
So, like I say, people are wondering "why is this so important to the current US administration?"
Yeah, that's a problem with living in a Democracy - sometimes you're not the majority.
Luckily. democracy does not require centralisation of power to work. The ideal is to decentralise as much as possible. If there isn't broad consensus about an issue across the nation, it probably shouldn't be decided at a national level.
Obviously there are going to be arguments about national budget, but then it's possible to decentralise that too.
If MS only want patents for defence, then logically they would lobby for the abolition of software patents.
Instead, we see them lobbying for the adoption of sofware patents in the EU.
From this we conclude that either A) Microsoft's corporate strategists are a bunch of blithering idiots
not fit to be allowed out unsupervised, or that B) the "only for defence" thesis is in fact incorrect.
Microsoft's dominance of the software industry would appear to rule out option A), so we are forced to the conclusion
that MS intend a role for their patent portfolio beyond the purely defensive.
Microsoft, like all corporations have to live with the things way are and not the way they'd like them to be.
We are talking about the same Microsoft here, aren't we? Major multination software house,
Billion dollar war chest, annual profits in excess of many nations' Gross National Product?
The one with the extensive political lobbying machine? The one which lobbied hard for the DMCA,
for instance. And for software patents in Europe too, (though they didn't win that one).
It seems to me that if the world isn't just as MS would like it to be, then they
damn well set about changing it. As far as I can tell, it seems to be corporate policy.
In our present environment, patents are a fact of life. MS and its competitors have evolved to take that situation into account.
That's very much the Redmond party line, isn't it? Poor little microsft, struggling to make its way in the cruel,
cruel world with only forty billion dollars, an operating systes mononpoly and a couple of dozen senators and judges
in their pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
The defence throws itself upon the mercy of the court, m'lud.
If the coder writes a program in the wrong format for his own purposes with no one else using it, then the coder is doing it wrong. This is the scenario suggesed by the original AC's post, where the author writes his code to output in the wrong format, and then has to fix it with cut - apparently proving that bash is broken by doing so.
Of course Grampy AC may have meant the case where you can't change the source program, as is the case with ls. In that case, the cool thing about the pipefitting tools that come with bash is that you have a means to change that format without needing to hack ls.
Mind you, have you seen the nuber of options for ls? I think the only format it doesn't support is telepathic output. And that only until the expansion cards become commercially available.
I think it's unlikely that MSH can do the things that bash and cut can do as well, and with as little effort, as MSH can do them. That's a distinction I didn't think needed making - maybe I should have made it anyway.
That's not exactly the same as "MSH is less powerful than cut", but it's near enough for our purposes.
Yours perhaps :P
And the point of MSH, as the article goes to incredible lengths to explain, is that it IS a filtering command-line environment.
I wouldn't say incredible lengths, or that the filtering was the point of MSH - the point seems to be to supply a .NET enabled, MS branded Perl variant. Even so, if EvilNTUser had hauled me up on that issue, I might have conceeded the point.
Then again, I might not. The streams in questions are object streams, and it's far from clear that Monad is going to ship with a set analagous pipe processing primitives as have evolved for use with *nix shells, we can reasonably expect some degree of overhead from the object format and there's a fair chance the text you want will be embedded in some gui display or interrupted with application specific markup and metadata.
So if the output isn't formatted the way you want it, I really do think it's going to be harder to fix that with MSH than with bash and cut. Of course, YMMV.
Tell you what, perhaps you can tell me if Monad comes with a filter object that will take an object representing a body of text, extract a portion of that text by either column number or character position, and pass it on to another filter for further processing. Because sometimes that's a sueful thing to be able to do and frankly, I couldn't find that bit in TFA anywhere.
You see, if MSH doesn't have something like that and you then find yourself in a situation where you can't modify the original script, and you need to reformat the output, then you're pretty much shit out of luck. In which case, gosh, it would turn out that there was something you do with bash and cut far easier than with MSH. Don't worry - I expect they'll fix it in Marketing.
Of course, maybe I skipped over the section in TFA on column based text processing. Point it out to me and I'll cheerfully eat arbitrarily large portions of humble pie. Otherwise, I stand by what I wrote.
Point me at the bit where you thought I said "MSH is less powerful than cut". Then we can talk.
Agreed. In this case it's the coder, who should really have enough nous to print the data in the format in which he intends to use it. That's hardly rocket science, is it?
Of course, if you didn't write the python script and don't have the time and/or skill to hack it, you might nd up using cut and the like to get the data in the format you need. The cool think about that is that it's possible. I don't know if the same can be said under MSH, but it seems unlikely - the focus of Monad seems to be .NET integration, not a stream based filtering command line environment.
Then again, maybe you didn't even write the wrapper script and don't understand anything. If so you can always troll slashdot as an AC and get some astroturfing in.
I can't see the Red Cross in that role because, well, they're apt to get shot at and sometimes need to shoot back. Of course, you could open the role up to armed NGOs (non governmental organisations, I assume?) but that rather runs the risk of legitimising a number of mercenary armies. Of course, there's no garuantee that these mercs won't have their own agendas, and their own covert backers. We could also expect that peacekeeping ops would favour the deepest pockets - I can see that going down well with the multinationals, but not with impoverished third world nations.
I can imagine accountability issues as well. At least currently everyone can yell at Kofi Annan.
Incidentally, I ran the UN corruption issue past my wife today. I'm something of your typical geek, and if it isn't tech, t sometimes goes right by me. My wife however has a wide scope to her interests and tends to pay attention to these things. She had pretty much the same impression of the UN as I have, and I don't think it's an unusual one in the UK. I don't suppose anyone assumes any degree of saintliness to the UN, but there's none of the demonisation that seems to be going on stateside. I suppose there could be some european agenda that includes an unconditional support for the UN, but that doesn't seem particularly credible to me.
Anyway, I think we're approaching the point where we have to agree to differ on this, so unless you've anything new that you'd like me to respond to, I'll probably leave this one here. Thank you for an intersting and courteous discussion.
For example, Refugees INternation seems to be a Washington think tank with a strong anti-UN agenda. Of course, the agenda could be the effect rather than the cause. However, given the degree of political ill-will towards the UN in washington, I'm inclined to take them with a pinch of salt. Even the name seems designed to be evocative of Amnesty International. Ass for the BBC article, it reports widespread allegations, which is to say that the beeb don't know if they're true or not.
But, you know what? It's assume the worst case, that all you say is true and the UN is institutionally corrupt. Even then, there is no other body that can perform the UNs role as peacekeepers. Nato is too strongly linked with the states, the EC are just as corrupt as your depiction of the UN and we can expect their troops to be viewed with equal suspicion, and any unilatteral national effort is likely to make matters worse, not better.
Given your antiwar.com involvement, I'd have thought that would be an important consideration.
So if the UN are as bad as you, and I'm by no means convinced, then it seems to be we should be clamouring for reform, or failing that that they should at least be some proposals for a replacement body on the desk. Best of luck convincing the third world that any new body will be an improvement though.
Unfortunately the current administration's idea of reform seems to be John Bolton who has gone on record saying that the UN only exists to support US self interest. Which, drifting back on topic for a second, is the sort of attitude that leads other nations to distrust sole US control of the root DNS servers.
What, you mean like national governments?
The UN are supposed to serve the needs of everyone. They rarely serve the needs of anyone except themselves.
I'm not sure I'd agree. I would have said that as a talking shop, the UN probably helped prevent the Cold War from turning Hot on more than one occasion. UN peacekeepers can police treaties and ceasefires where no other military force would be considered acceptable. Some of the UN branches (WHO springs to mind) may be in the pockets of some of the large multinationals, and that is a deplorable state of affairs. Even there, however, I'd stll maintain that rank and file of these groups are probably hard working and conciencous.
Undoubtedly, it's hard to ride the gravy train if you're looking out for anyone except yourself.
Heh. You sound like a European talking about the EC :D
Well, if you say so. The only time the UN ever makes the news over this side of the Atlantic is when they send peacekeepers into some war zone. That was generally regarded as a good thing, at least to the extent that UN forces aren't generally seen as a provocation by any of the combatants. The last couple of years have seen the odd spot regading the corruption scandal around Kofi Annan and son, but even then that's only really started post the occupation of Iraq, and I've tended to dismiss the stories as payback for Annan's defiance of Bush and company.
So I guess the question becomes, if the UN is really that corrupt, why did I not hear about it before this? The BBC are generally pretty good about this sort of thing and, as you say these problems don't just spring up overnight.
I think the big thing though is that by and large the US hasn't been managing the internet, they've just left it be to grow on its own. The threat isn't so much the US govenrment losing control of the internet as someone else gaining that control who's actually going to use it.
Well, that's the thing. The perception overseas isn't so much that the US government left the Internet alone as that it didn't really know it existed, or at least, didn't think it was important. That has changed however, and bellicose as the current administration are, a lot of people are concerned that this "hands off" policy is not going to last.
Personally, I couldn't give a toss as long as the damn thing continues to work. I can see how these concerns arise however, and I don't think framing the debate as america-vs-the-world is terribly helpful.
That may in fact turn out to be the case. It does seem to me, however, that certain media channels have been going out of their way to find dirt on the UN ever since our latest adventures in Iraq. Since the UN seemed well enough regarded prior to that point, and since I very much doubt that the UN has undergone some deep seated moral sea change since that time, I tend to take these stories with a pinch of salt. It wouldn't be the first time that doubts have been cast on the integrity and impartiality of cetain media corporations in this regard.
For what it's worth, I suspect that any such stories are founded in fact. It's the implication that the UN is institutionally corrupt that gives me difficulty. Still, tempting as it is to dismiss the anti-UN sentiment as propaganda from the Bush administration, I have no direct personal knowledge in this case. All I can say is that I can't say for sure. Your own involvement with AntiWar.com notwithstanding, I doubt that you can do much better.
the point remains, and I think it's a fair one
Not wishing to sound sarcastic, but which point was that? Mr Massey's points seem to be as follows:
I don't dispute point 3). The rest of it seems pretty shameful.
Incidentally, I've said this before, but I really don't understand why all this fuss in the first place. It's not like the US aren't members of the UN, and as the "dominant superpower" you can expect to enjoy considerable influence over the management of the Internet. Yet to hear it discussed on slashdot, you'd think the French had threatened to come and take all your computers away and never let any of you play on the Internet again!
I can't see what you'd lose, expect possibly the ability to unilaterally victimise nations that displease you by manipulating DNS records. And maybe that is in fact the point.
Like I said earlier, I don't presume to know the answer. I will however stick my neck out and say that jingoism and sabre rattling isn't going to help anything.
Umm... untrustworthy to whom and in what regard? Do I take it that the UN are supposed to serve the needs of USA first and the rest of the world second, if at all?
I can understand how some of those working at the UN might not see it quite that way.
Microsoft integrated XML pretty deep into .NET, so naturally they are trumpeting the usefulness of the XML standard and SOA
Oooh... Microsoft! Funny thing about Microsoft, but they suffered a major setback recently. Seems that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts opted for an independantly defined open standard that everyone can use freely, rather than the Microsoft offering which was loaded up with licences and patents and which they could change at will and without consultation. I gather Microsoft were not happy about that. Chairs were thrown, I have no doubt.
Oddly enough, that was about SOAs (Service Oriented Architectures) as well. I know this is a crazy idea, but I expect Microsoft would be purely delighted if everyone ignored the Open Document standard and went on to express their individuality by buying whatever de-facto standard Microsoft might subsequently announce. But then you used lots of dollar signs when talking about VB.NET so I guess you can't really be a Redmond shill. And to think, you nearly had me fooled.
Again, I could be entirely wrong. Your mileage may vary.
Yes, I think it probably will, and I think you probably are. I think people understand perfectly well that open standards means increased competition, and that competition means better products and better value for money.
Certainly, there's only one way to find out. Personally, I'm rather looking forward to it.
So in essence: google are still promising not to sell your details; they've clarified their policy against employees selling it on (they're anti-) and they've made the document easier to read. On the minus side, they've failed to provide information that Yahoo! don't provide either. Which seems to be about as evil as Google gets.
Of course, Yahoo does have a vested interest here. Maybe we should take this with a pinch of salt?
um... I think patents can still be rejected if the existence of prior art can be demonstrated,
Touche, sir. :)
That's what I get for reading slashdot in the wee small hours before bed.
All the same, the RSA isn't entirely without prestige. They were founded in 1754 and can still claim royal patronage.
I reckon they'll do.
Oddly enough, about the same length of time as has passed since Microsoft realised their stranglehold on web browsers was slipping.
One day Redmond reformed the IE development team to try and stem the tide. The next, stories like this one started cropping up with penny-ante firefox exploits being made into front page news. Just as though crushing your browser was comparable in scale to rooting your network...
Purely co-incidental, of course...
I'd have expected the US people to say "the foundation of our great nation is being undermined! time to take action". Instead an outsider could almost come to believe that US citizens don't mind ground into the dirt. Just so long as the jackboots have "Made in the USA" printed on the sole.
I appreciate that not all Americans think this way. It's just that given your history, I'm continually surprised that any of you do.
But our power can be more usefully applied as a grassroots political force than by merely DDOSing all and sundry in an ineffective attempt to change policy. That tactic just gives the opposition a ready ad hominem attack with which to dismiss us, no matter how just our cause or how rational our arguments. As with SCO, every web site outage for the next six months suddenly becomes the work of lawless commie pirate hackers who want to selfishly stop people making music and... well, everyone looses interest, expect maybe to pass tough new laws further restricting free speech online.
Not that I'm saying that was your suggestion, but I'd hate for someone to misread it that way. I'm sure you understand.
Let's turn that power to doing good -- statistically, at least one person here is bound to have a good idea.
I think the good idea is the charter from TFA. This is a tremendously valuable contribution to the debate. For one thing, the Royal Society have considerable prestige. It's a lot harder to laugh them off than it is slashdot. The diversity of the authors helps in this regard as well.
For another the charter gives us a good talking point - something to campaign for. So you can contact your local lawmaker type and ask what he'd doing to bring about compliance with the Adelphi Charter. We can use it as a justification to ask whether the public good has been considered in respect to a specific IP ruling, and as further support for the abolition of software and business methods and software patents.
This doesn't give us any new techniques for getting the attention of government - but then we don't really need any - the old ones still work. What this gives us a lot of new, high quality ammo. My bright idea would be to suggest that we use it.
It works on the principle that if he introduces himself as a MS guy, the Linux faithful will think "This man works for The Enemy" and disregard everything he says.
On the other hand, if he stands there and says "I was a UNIX hacker..." then folk start thinking "one of us! Let's hear what he has to say..." instead of keeping keeping firmly in mind that A) he's still employed by the Enemy B) would not have been sent except to evangelise and C) probably had his speech written by marketdroids at Redmond.
You can see the same approach at work in a couple of dozen Slashdot posts every time there is a Linux thread: "I used Linux for years until I finally realised..." "Much as I love Linux, I have to say..." "I use Linux on all my home machines, but in the real world..."
It's just another scummy marketing trick. That's all.
I cannot express how deeply that reassures me.
Of course, no one's afraid we're going to do that Well, I'm not afraid that you're going to do that. I will admit to the occasional qualm as to what God may tell George W. to do tomorrow however.
So, why are they afraid we're going to do something abusive with the internet?
See previous answer :)
Seriously, as the GP asked, without resorting to general complaints, is there a reason to believe that we would do something abusive with the internet
Well, in all honesty, the US burnt off a lot of international goodwill over Iraq. Now before anyone crisps me for attacking the US, I'm a brit, and my governemt is equally complicit in the matter. The only difference is that everything has been the fault of the British (or English if you're a brit) for the last fifty years or so - "perfidious albion" and all that. On the whole you colonial chappies have had the respect and admiration of vast chunks of the world - certainly the ones Ive been to. Sadly, you seem to have rather damaged that, and I often wonder if the US as a nation yet realises quite the value of what it lost in attacking Iraq.
Anyway, I think this is one of those arguments that, for no fault of your own, you just can't win. The trouble is that the 'net is supposed to be decentralised. The harder the US fights to keep control of this one aspect of it, the more some people are goign to wonder why this is so important.
I mean it's not as if anyone's suggested putting Osama bin Laden in charge of all things internet. It's going to be under internation control and the US will have a lot of influence over how things happen, just as they do in other areas.
So, like I say, people are wondering "why is this so important to the current US administration?"
Luckily. democracy does not require centralisation of power to work. The ideal is to decentralise as much as possible. If there isn't broad consensus about an issue across the nation, it probably shouldn't be decided at a national level.
Obviously there are going to be arguments about national budget, but then it's possible to decentralise that too.
If MS only want patents for defence, then logically they would lobby for the abolition of software patents.
Instead, we see them lobbying for the adoption of sofware patents in the EU.
From this we conclude that either A) Microsoft's corporate strategists are a bunch of blithering idiots not fit to be allowed out unsupervised, or that B) the "only for defence" thesis is in fact incorrect.
Microsoft's dominance of the software industry would appear to rule out option A), so we are forced to the conclusion that MS intend a role for their patent portfolio beyond the purely defensive.
QED.
Oh, by all means. :)
We are talking about the same Microsoft here, aren't we? Major multination software house, Billion dollar war chest, annual profits in excess of many nations' Gross National Product?
The one with the extensive political lobbying machine? The one which lobbied hard for the DMCA, for instance. And for software patents in Europe too, (though they didn't win that one).
It seems to me that if the world isn't just as MS would like it to be, then they damn well set about changing it. As far as I can tell, it seems to be corporate policy.
In our present environment, patents are a fact of life. MS and its competitors have evolved to take that situation into account.
That's very much the Redmond party line, isn't it? Poor little microsft, struggling to make its way in the cruel, cruel world with only forty billion dollars, an operating systes mononpoly and a couple of dozen senators and judges in their pocket.
How will they ever survive?