Those ideas would stay secret for who knows how long without the patent system. Are you sure you, as an academic, really want that?
You've never read a patent, have you? In most (almost all?) cases, they are worded in an obscure and roundabout way so that they no longer describe anything usable directly.
Patents are worded vaguely to try to include as many different things as possible (so as to be able to attack the competition) and to prevent anyone from being able to build anything out of them once they do run out.
Patents no longer disclose anything. Doing away with them would cause zero loss of knowledge.
For that matter, look at &@#^# copyrights. The point of copyright is to grant a limited monopoly on certain activities in exchange for insuring the work enters the public domain later. Nowadays, copyright keeps being extended over and over so that/nothing/ enters public domain anymore.
Businesses will twist and abuse ANY system that grants limited monopolies into weapons to crush competition, regardless of the original goal. Remember, they can hire packs of lawyers.
Only workable solution? Do away with laws that grant monopolies entierly, however limited.
If you had, in fact, RTFA you would have seen that there is some evidence of helium generation during the reaction.
While apparently hard (but not impossible) to reproduce, and not well understood, there is now credible evidence that something happens that generates heat and helium out of hydrogen.
If the phenomenon is real, and we manage to reproduce it reliably, it probably is fusion, albeit only a couple of atoms at a time (which has the side effects of (1) no harder-to-control chain reaction over vast amounts of fissible material and (2) trivial to contain generation).
Might not be too easy to use, though. I could see how the heat could be made to give energy to a conventional steam turbine though.
At any rate, your quip about dead from radiation poisoning is a strawman. Even if all is as the researchers hope, we are observing the fission of minuscule amounts of atoms at a time (hence the manageable heat) and what little radiation escapes from the reaction medium unabsorbed and unconverted into heat is most likely unmeasurably small and completely drowned out by the background radiation we live in.
You have a competitor in UK? Eating through your market share?
We can take care of that! We, at SPAM, inc, will simply do a wave of aggressive spamming "touting" the virtues of your competitor, and arrange for a few hundred copies of that mailing to reach the sysadmin of the hosting ISP. Say "Goodbye!" to your competitor's web site!
And, for a small extra, we'll even include some advance fee fraud or otherwise illegal contents to the spam. Watch in glee as your competitors are harrased by the authorities to boot!
Hmmm. Sounds like a really, really good idea now doesn't it?
In the picture with the flag why isn't the flag just hang down? I mean it kinda looks like it's in the wind (yeah, yeah, insert your favorite Capricorn One joke here). Wouldn't the gravitation force being exerted on the moon cause it "straighten out" in some way?
Simple. The flags all had a rod, perpendicular to the pole, so that the flag wouldn't just hang down (which would have looked -- err -- silly at best).
And the apparent motion simply is motion. Being to atmosphere to dampen it, just setting the flag up caused it to ripple and wave and it'd take a very long time to settle down.
I'd expect if you went up there now it'd look rather limp (if still holding straight because of the aforementioned rod). Although I'd expect the slightest vibration on the surface to show rather visibly (including meteorite impacts and your putative landing).
Well, that's fairly amusing. Presuming you are correct in your initial assumption (the rightmost button is the "natural" default) then your conclusion is wrong.
You want the "most natural" option to be the do-nothing one. If your UI asks a question to which the response is almost unfailingly to proceed, then the dialog is a needless hinderance that will annoy the adept and confuse/scare the neophyte.
What you need is a good undo; interrupting the work with a modal dialog should only be done for irrecoverable operations that are infrequent.
I think you make a very good point, but given a large enough[1] training corpus, and being very conservative on the weight to assign to error backpropagation, wouldn't it be interresting to see if the decision hyperplane would be able to reshape itself quickly enough to include freshly "evolved" forms of spam as they appear? (Provided, of course, that those consist of variants on previous forms).
I agree, however, that your concern about constructed attacks against detection of specific features is a killer, as it stands. But given a large enough set of features to look for in both form and contents the task becomes increasingly more difficult (hence SpamAssassin's success), would that problem tend to eleminate itself?
I'm using SpamAssassin now, and I think its primary weakness is lack of combinatorial weighing. Feature X is worth n point independently of the presence of other features in the message (or not? I might just have never found how).
-- MG
[1] Where "large enough" is the usual hard problem.
What you just stated, basically, is a conjecture. Something that seems right, intuitively, but isn't proven.
Another example that seems just as "obvious" might be Goldbach's which seems right and has been tested up to very, very large numbers. But it's still not proven.
To most people, the difference is tenuous, but it's there; and sometimes the difference between having a proof or not has critical applications outside pure math.
If anyone were, for instance, able to find a way to easily factor large primes them a great deal of today's best encryption would become moot. So, any additional knowledge about the properties of prime numbers is potentially important.
While that step is obviously extreme by today's standards, perhaps the military, eager to manage public perceptions, might begin confiscating cameras of soldiers and contractors, Jenkins said.
"I wouldn't be surprised if that happened," Jenkins said. "The images that are forcing the government to do things are coming out of very unlikely places."
Auuugh! Cameras are good! It allows the people to check on what their army is really doing. Don't want embarrasing pictures? How about not acting in a way you'd be embarrased to have the world know instead of confiscating cameras?
Why does it seem that NASA is so obsessed with finding life on other planets? Not just complex lifeforms, but really simple cellular life. What ever happened to the focus of exploration and manned missions? Finding life should not be NASA's #1 mission, there are other interesting scientific aspects about space exploration that don't involve finding life.
Hmm, probably because there is no single discovery that would have more important scientific and philosophical repercussion?
Is the emergence of life on Terra a unique occurance or a statistical certainty? Finding life on, say, Mars that has independently evolved transforms life here from a fluke to something nearly garanteed to be universal (the chance of something amazingly unlikely happening twice in the same solar system is epsilon).
For that matter, gaining insight on how life emerged elsewhere is bound to give insight on how it emerged here as well. Maybe not a one-to-one mapping, but certainly good avenues of investigation.
I guess there are some, however, with a vested interrest in maintaining the "certainty" of the uniqueness of (especially intelligent) life here on Terra.
A basic denial of service attack is simply nothing more than somebody using all of their available bandwidth to send meaningless information to the victim host. If such an attack is greater than the available incoming bandwidth the victim has, then their legitimate incoming traffic gets delayed or dropped after being timed out.
Yes and no. That's one form, certainly, but not the most "useful" or dangerous. The more effective DOS attacks send meaningful data meant to tie up the victim into processing them rather than legitimate requests.
For instance, if you want to DOS a web server, you're much better off simulating requests for a page than just meaningless data; not only will you consume bandwidth but you will also take connections up, cause disk access and consume CPU time on the victim.
I enumerated a number of putative limits on what I can do with software because of the intermediate needed copies, and you (skillfuly) debunked each and everyone of them.
You miseed my point, however, that all of those limits are usually specifically enumerated in EULAs.
As for the definition of copy used by software ("one machine at a time"), you'll find even that one doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If I buy a book, I could make a photocopy of it and reat that. Perhaps to enlarge, say, or copy many pages to on sheet for portability, or just because I'd rather read the book on neon pink paper.
I'd love to have a publisher try to sue over that. Copyright isn't about copies, it's about distributing copies.
There is no rationale behind preventing me from installing package-software-foo on fifty computers I own in copyright law. There is a business rationale in trying to prevent me from doing it, however.
Except, if he had the OS installed on a removable hard drive and moved it from one PC to another. Lets assume we are talking about win 98 here to avoid product activation issues.
That's a different (and legal, AFAIK) situation. The only exception would be OEM licenses which, I believe, are only valid for the machine they were sold with.
Ooo! Ooo! You opened the Can of Worms!
What exactly are "the machine they were sold with"? If I change my mouse, does it invalidate the licence? What about the harddrive or the video card? The motherboard (or maybe just the CPU)?
EULAs are nothing but attempts to indimidate and control. They have managed to twist the meaning of "copy" so that the use of the software is a "copy" (from medium to ram) claiming then that their right to limit copy is in force.
Let's hope someone does bring an EULA to court someday in front of a judge that can understand that a "copy" necessary in order to use something is not the kind of copy meant to be limited by copyright law.
After all, when I read a book, I make several intangible copies. Light reflected off the pages create a copy on my retina. My brain processing that image certainly makes many symbolic copies. I might even retain a long term copy for future reference (it's called, you know, memory).
Obviously, the copyright holders shouldn't be able to sue me. Those copies were necessary and unavoidable to even use the book to begin with. Why should software be any different?
If I buy a book, I'm allowed to read it as often as I want, where I want, and I'm perfectly allowed to let someone else read along too! I can lend it, or give it. And a bookmaker certainly could write any sort of conditions on the cover "if you read this book, you agree to foo-bar-baz" and they would be laughed out of a court.
Some time in the past, some evil business-type paid some lawer-type to go and confuse a non-tech savvy judge that being able to use what you buy is making a copy because of some technical detail. That judge got swindeled and we are paying the price.
Let's hope nobody goes to a judge explaining the evil copy that we make optically every time we read (or indeed look) at something.
I'm probably going to show my geeky age... but one of the things I most appreciate from Google is that it works right with textmode browsers (e.g. lynx, links).
Their designers/programmers, happily possess a full set of clues. They understand that the Web is not TV, and that HTML is a carrier for contents, not eye candy.
If they can do this right with free webmail too, they win even more brownie points!
Don't get me started about sites that give you error messages (or worse yet, fail dismally without explanation) simply because you don't have *script or foo-browser-extension from M$.
Or, the even more annoying ones that complain and refuse to let you in when they think you aren't using MSIE but in fact work perfectly if you instruct your browser to lie about what it is.
Ethics are hardly involved. This is a question of raw stupidity.
That he has even tought of posting his customer's true dataset is inforgivably moronic. Whether it was data on children's whereabouts, credit card information, or even "just" accounting information on some business.
While it is true that not revealing your customer's data is the ethical thing to do, it's also just plain ol' common sense.
Though I should perhaps say vintage common sense. Seems that product has been discontinued for some years now.
When a bad decision is made by the US government, I look to the rest of the world to show them the light... but what happens? They say "great job! we'll do the same stupid thing". Why can't some countries do something different than the US and prove that there is a better system out there
Because your country pressures the others into complying with their world view. Usually economically. Sometimes militarily.
Case in point: up here in Canada, we almost decriminalized marijuana; something which was generally regarded as a Good Move [despite some peoples' misgivings about the weed itself it was generally agreed that criminal charges were completely unwarranted].
Why "almost"? Because the US, with its obsessive-compulsive War on Drugs, didn't want any of it. And the hell with sovereignty, threats would do.
Faced with the prospect of commerce being crippled by barely disguised sanctions [tightening of borders leading to long delays in shipping, god forbid the Evil Weed should cross] the government here backpedaled.
And we are the biggest trading partner of the US, and quoting GWB, "brothers".
At least, they haven't invaded us militarily to "liberate" us from our evil pot-friendly government.
Just say to him "Well Grandpa, my motto is anyone who can't describe, with exacting detail, all the functions of every organ in the human body doesn't deserve to live."
How about "Well Grandpa, my motto is anyone who can't describe, with exacting detail, all the functions of every organ in the human body doesn't deserve to practice medecine?"... just as witty and accu...
Only such pair I know of are the 68008 vs the 68000; both are functionally identical (except for some very very minor differences) but the '08 has an 8-bit data bus (vs 16 for the '00).
The '08 was, unsurprisingly, slower whenever memory access was needed (its main use was its very simple E/Q clocking [compatible with 6809] and simple interfacing).
But that was before the days of superscalar architecture and on-die caches, both of which change the bottleneck point.
no longer could someone tell a white-lie to protect a friends feeling, or let someone down gently, or tell their kids half-truths to protect them until they are older. Bluffing in poker would be obsolete. Millions of people would lose their jobs as their skills in marketing and sales would be rendered null. Lastly, the institution of marriage will be destroyed as millions of wives ask their husbands if "they look fat."
I'm sure the glasses are just snake oil, but you managed to make me hope they aren't.
Those "horror" scenarios you just described are all Good Things!
The hardware was already doing the things you bought it for - or did you buy it in anticipation of being able to use it as a shitty media router?
So, in other words, if I buy a car to commute I should not be allowed/able to use it for other purposes it can fulfill simply because I didn't anticipate the use?
Not sure I follow your reasoning there.
And y'know, I can think of a million things I could do with MS-DOS 2.11 on a Gamecube, but that doesn't mean implementing it wouldn't be a practical waste of time and effort.
If it runs linux, then it can also run bochs, so I get that too if I want.
Now that I think of it, there's probably a few old dos games I have collecting dust that could be amusing to get on the GC.:-)
Or mame.
That also fits "what I bought it for", doesn't it? Playing games?
Perhaps, simply, because then you can use the hardware you bought to do the things you want?
The GC is small, runs quietly, and has decent audio and video outputs. It's already sitting in my living room, where my large TV and sound system are. If, in addition to games, it can be used to play media that lives on my network then so much the better!
I can think of othere uses. RSS feed displayer, anyone?:-)
Will they be infrastructure related companies such as Cisco and even FedEx, or will they be true dot.com's such as eBay or Amazon?
Why need they be mutually exclusive? Last time I checked, there was no magical business model-- adaptability, listening to your customer base, and investing in human resources were your best bets.
It depends on the management, not the field of endeavor or the original business model, methinks.
This is, again, the fault of the marketing droids!
First they destroy the very concept of a clean, simple and reasonably useful markup language because they couldn't care less about organisation and contents as long as they can show shiny bits to mesmerize the consumer.
Took years to begin to fix that one.
Having DNS support other character sets is a consequence of the second of their mostrous brain farts: confusing addressing and indexing.
A domain name is NOT an index keyword. It has no meaning beyond setting up a delegation structure. 'foo.com' need have nothing to do with foos; it's just a frigging address.
My postal address is "40 Some Street, Laval, Qc, CA" Canada -> Quebec -> Laval -> exact location.
Repeat after me. De-le-ga-tion.
Let's do a little brain experiment. Let's say all the postal services of the world decided to go the DNS way:
My address could be marc-andre-pelletier.programmer.
It would be a nightmare for any postal service, because rather than delegate the information to find where the house is to increasingly regional authorities, they'd have to look me up in a huge database to figure out where to send my mail.
It would also be confusing because of mark-andre-pelletier.programmer and marc-andre-peletier.programmer ad nauseam.
Of course, then there is the conflict that will ensue because there is inevitably another programmer with my name who may or may not be better known than I and will want my 'address'.
Sounds familiar?
This is what is inexorably happening with DNS. It's too late to change any of this; the marketroids already imposed that fuck-up and domain names are already worthless technically.
So what do we do? Let's ask the marketroids. "Let's increase the breadth of the flat namespace even further!"
Sigh.
Allowing more (conceptual) codepoints in domain names isn't being nice to non-english speakers. It's just increasing to the confusion with no useful value.
Maybe we should petition the phone companies to get unicode phone numbers. It'll make your phone ring much less often-- not only will many people not be able to remember your number right (or even successfuly write it down (how many people know how to write an uppercase epsilon?)) but many people won't even have a phone with the right symbols.
Who knows; maybe telemarketers will stop calling when they can't figure out your number.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never read a patent, have you? In most (almost all?) cases, they are worded in an obscure and roundabout way so that they no longer describe anything usable directly.
Patents are worded vaguely to try to include as many different things as possible (so as to be able to attack the competition) and to prevent anyone from being able to build anything out of them once they do run out.
Patents no longer disclose anything. Doing away with them would cause zero loss of knowledge.
For that matter, look at &@#^# copyrights. The point of copyright is to grant a limited monopoly on certain activities in exchange for insuring the work enters the public domain later. Nowadays, copyright keeps being extended over and over so that /nothing/ enters public domain anymore.
Businesses will twist and abuse ANY system that grants limited monopolies into weapons to crush competition, regardless of the original goal. Remember, they can hire packs of lawyers.
Only workable solution? Do away with laws that grant monopolies entierly, however limited.
-- MG
Who knows, he might have multiple personality disorder*!
-- MG
* for purposes of this joke, we presume the existence of this pathology.
While apparently hard (but not impossible) to reproduce, and not well understood, there is now credible evidence that something happens that generates heat and helium out of hydrogen.
If the phenomenon is real, and we manage to reproduce it reliably, it probably is fusion, albeit only a couple of atoms at a time (which has the side effects of (1) no harder-to-control chain reaction over vast amounts of fissible material and (2) trivial to contain generation).
Might not be too easy to use, though. I could see how the heat could be made to give energy to a conventional steam turbine though.
At any rate, your quip about dead from radiation poisoning is a strawman. Even if all is as the researchers hope, we are observing the fission of minuscule amounts of atoms at a time (hence the manageable heat) and what little radiation escapes from the reaction medium unabsorbed and unconverted into heat is most likely unmeasurably small and completely drowned out by the background radiation we live in.
-- MG
Hmmm. Sounds like a really, really good idea now doesn't it?
-- MG
Simple. The flags all had a rod, perpendicular to the pole, so that the flag wouldn't just hang down (which would have looked -- err -- silly at best).
And the apparent motion simply is motion. Being to atmosphere to dampen it, just setting the flag up caused it to ripple and wave and it'd take a very long time to settle down.
I'd expect if you went up there now it'd look rather limp (if still holding straight because of the aforementioned rod). Although I'd expect the slightest vibration on the surface to show rather visibly (including meteorite impacts and your putative landing).
-- MG
You want the "most natural" option to be the do-nothing one. If your UI asks a question to which the response is almost unfailingly to proceed, then the dialog is a needless hinderance that will annoy the adept and confuse/scare the neophyte.
What you need is a good undo; interrupting the work with a modal dialog should only be done for irrecoverable operations that are infrequent.
-- MG
I agree, however, that your concern about constructed attacks against detection of specific features is a killer, as it stands. But given a large enough set of features to look for in both form and contents the task becomes increasingly more difficult (hence SpamAssassin's success), would that problem tend to eleminate itself?
I'm using SpamAssassin now, and I think its primary weakness is lack of combinatorial weighing. Feature X is worth n point independently of the presence of other features in the message (or not? I might just have never found how).
-- MG
[1] Where "large enough" is the usual hard problem.
What you just stated, basically, is a conjecture. Something that seems right, intuitively, but isn't proven.
Another example that seems just as "obvious" might be Goldbach's which seems right and has been tested up to very, very large numbers. But it's still not proven.
To most people, the difference is tenuous, but it's there; and sometimes the difference between having a proof or not has critical applications outside pure math.
If anyone were, for instance, able to find a way to easily factor large primes them a great deal of today's best encryption would become moot. So, any additional knowledge about the properties of prime numbers is potentially important.
-- MG
Please email me. (Your /. account has no visible contact info).
-- MG
Auuugh! Cameras are good! It allows the people to check on what their army is really doing. Don't want embarrasing pictures? How about not acting in a way you'd be embarrased to have the world know instead of confiscating cameras?
-- MG
Hmm, probably because there is no single discovery that would have more important scientific and philosophical repercussion?
Is the emergence of life on Terra a unique occurance or a statistical certainty? Finding life on, say, Mars that has independently evolved transforms life here from a fluke to something nearly garanteed to be universal (the chance of something amazingly unlikely happening twice in the same solar system is epsilon).
For that matter, gaining insight on how life emerged elsewhere is bound to give insight on how it emerged here as well. Maybe not a one-to-one mapping, but certainly good avenues of investigation.
I guess there are some, however, with a vested interrest in maintaining the "certainty" of the uniqueness of (especially intelligent) life here on Terra.
-- MG
Yes and no. That's one form, certainly, but not the most "useful" or dangerous. The more effective DOS attacks send meaningful data meant to tie up the victim into processing them rather than legitimate requests.
For instance, if you want to DOS a web server, you're much better off simulating requests for a page than just meaningless data; not only will you consume bandwidth but you will also take connections up, cause disk access and consume CPU time on the victim.
-- MG
I enumerated a number of putative limits on what I can do with software because of the intermediate needed copies, and you (skillfuly) debunked each and everyone of them.
You miseed my point, however, that all of those limits are usually specifically enumerated in EULAs.
As for the definition of copy used by software ("one machine at a time"), you'll find even that one doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If I buy a book, I could make a photocopy of it and reat that. Perhaps to enlarge, say, or copy many pages to on sheet for portability, or just because I'd rather read the book on neon pink paper.
I'd love to have a publisher try to sue over that. Copyright isn't about copies, it's about distributing copies.
There is no rationale behind preventing me from installing package-software-foo on fifty computers I own in copyright law. There is a business rationale in trying to prevent me from doing it, however.
-- MG
Ooo! Ooo! You opened the Can of Worms!
What exactly are "the machine they were sold with"? If I change my mouse, does it invalidate the licence? What about the harddrive or the video card? The motherboard (or maybe just the CPU)?
EULAs are nothing but attempts to indimidate and control. They have managed to twist the meaning of "copy" so that the use of the software is a "copy" (from medium to ram) claiming then that their right to limit copy is in force.
Let's hope someone does bring an EULA to court someday in front of a judge that can understand that a "copy" necessary in order to use something is not the kind of copy meant to be limited by copyright law.
After all, when I read a book, I make several intangible copies. Light reflected off the pages create a copy on my retina. My brain processing that image certainly makes many symbolic copies. I might even retain a long term copy for future reference (it's called, you know, memory).
Obviously, the copyright holders shouldn't be able to sue me. Those copies were necessary and unavoidable to even use the book to begin with. Why should software be any different?
If I buy a book, I'm allowed to read it as often as I want, where I want, and I'm perfectly allowed to let someone else read along too! I can lend it, or give it. And a bookmaker certainly could write any sort of conditions on the cover "if you read this book, you agree to foo-bar-baz" and they would be laughed out of a court.
Some time in the past, some evil business-type paid some lawer-type to go and confuse a non-tech savvy judge that being able to use what you buy is making a copy because of some technical detail. That judge got swindeled and we are paying the price.
Let's hope nobody goes to a judge explaining the evil copy that we make optically every time we read (or indeed look) at something.
-- MG
Their designers/programmers, happily possess a full set of clues. They understand that the Web is not TV, and that HTML is a carrier for contents, not eye candy.
If they can do this right with free webmail too, they win even more brownie points!
Don't get me started about sites that give you error messages (or worse yet, fail dismally without explanation) simply because you don't have *script or foo-browser-extension from M$.
Or, the even more annoying ones that complain and refuse to let you in when they think you aren't using MSIE but in fact work perfectly if you instruct your browser to lie about what it is.
K*I*S*S!
-- MG
That he has even tought of posting his customer's true dataset is inforgivably moronic. Whether it was data on children's whereabouts, credit card information, or even "just" accounting information on some business.
While it is true that not revealing your customer's data is the ethical thing to do, it's also just plain ol' common sense.
Though I should perhaps say vintage common sense. Seems that product has been discontinued for some years now.
-- MG
Because your country pressures the others into complying with their world view. Usually economically. Sometimes militarily.
Case in point: up here in Canada, we almost decriminalized marijuana; something which was generally regarded as a Good Move [despite some peoples' misgivings about the weed itself it was generally agreed that criminal charges were completely unwarranted].
Why "almost"? Because the US, with its obsessive-compulsive War on Drugs, didn't want any of it. And the hell with sovereignty, threats would do.
Faced with the prospect of commerce being crippled by barely disguised sanctions [tightening of borders leading to long delays in shipping, god forbid the Evil Weed should cross] the government here backpedaled.
And we are the biggest trading partner of the US, and quoting GWB, "brothers".
At least, they haven't invaded us militarily to "liberate" us from our evil pot-friendly government.
Yet.
-- MG
Spyware, adware, "helpful" browser adjuncts.
Oh, wait, you mean another malicious attacker!
-- MG
How about "Well Grandpa, my motto is anyone who can't describe, with exacting detail, all the functions of every organ in the human body doesn't deserve to practice medecine?"... just as witty and accu...
Oh, wait a minute...
-- MG
The '08 was, unsurprisingly, slower whenever memory access was needed (its main use was its very simple E/Q clocking [compatible with 6809] and simple interfacing).
But that was before the days of superscalar architecture and on-die caches, both of which change the bottleneck point.
-- MG
I'm sure the glasses are just snake oil, but you managed to make me hope they aren't.
Those "horror" scenarios you just described are all Good Things!
-- MG
Not sure I follow your reasoning there.
If it runs linux, then it can also run bochs, so I get that too if I want.
Now that I think of it, there's probably a few old dos games I have collecting dust that could be amusing to get on the GC. :-)
Or mame.
That also fits "what I bought it for", doesn't it? Playing games?
-- MG
The GC is small, runs quietly, and has decent audio and video outputs. It's already sitting in my living room, where my large TV and sound system are. If, in addition to games, it can be used to play media that lives on my network then so much the better!
I can think of othere uses. RSS feed displayer, anyone? :-)
-- MG
Why need they be mutually exclusive? Last time I checked, there was no magical business model-- adaptability, listening to your customer base, and investing in human resources were your best bets.
It depends on the management, not the field of endeavor or the original business model, methinks.
-- MG
First they destroy the very concept of a clean, simple and reasonably useful markup language because they couldn't care less about organisation and contents as long as they can show shiny bits to mesmerize the consumer.
Took years to begin to fix that one.
Having DNS support other character sets is a consequence of the second of their mostrous brain farts: confusing addressing and indexing.
A domain name is NOT an index keyword. It has no meaning beyond setting up a delegation structure. 'foo.com' need have nothing to do with foos; it's just a frigging address .
My postal address is "40 Some Street, Laval, Qc, CA" Canada -> Quebec -> Laval -> exact location. Repeat after me. De-le-ga-tion.
Let's do a little brain experiment. Let's say all the postal services of the world decided to go the DNS way:
My address could be marc-andre-pelletier.programmer.
It would be a nightmare for any postal service, because rather than delegate the information to find where the house is to increasingly regional authorities, they'd have to look me up in a huge database to figure out where to send my mail.
It would also be confusing because of mark-andre-pelletier.programmer and marc-andre-peletier.programmer ad nauseam.
Of course, then there is the conflict that will ensue because there is inevitably another programmer with my name who may or may not be better known than I and will want my 'address'.
Sounds familiar?
This is what is inexorably happening with DNS. It's too late to change any of this; the marketroids already imposed that fuck-up and domain names are already worthless technically.
So what do we do? Let's ask the marketroids. "Let's increase the breadth of the flat namespace even further!"
Sigh.
Allowing more (conceptual) codepoints in domain names isn't being nice to non-english speakers. It's just increasing to the confusion with no useful value.
Maybe we should petition the phone companies to get unicode phone numbers. It'll make your phone ring much less often-- not only will many people not be able to remember your number right (or even successfuly write it down (how many people know how to write an uppercase epsilon?)) but many people won't even have a phone with the right symbols.
Who knows; maybe telemarketers will stop calling when they can't figure out your number.
-- MG