Why does it matter? Those TLDs existed before the internet connected anything outside the US, so there was always an implicit ".us", if you will, following them. Yeah, it's sloppy now, but what do we do?
The people who are missing the point are the ones who blame ICANN for something that was decided twenty years before ICANN even existed.
What about universities in other countries? Governments? Militaries?
The existing tld system works just fine for this, we just don't use ".us" much in this country so it isn't as apparent. For instance, the city of Los Angeles website is "www.ci.la.ca.us" rather than "los-angeles.gov," much the same way Imperial College is ic.ac.uk or Stellenbosch University is sun.ac.za or the Australian Football league is afl.com.au.
Each country code tld is controlled by the country thus assigned and they can do what they want with it. This is a non-problem and one that makes the whole "ICANN controls the world" argument laughable. People are just needlessly obsessed with the handful of overused and often misused tlds like com, org and net. However, I agree,.asia is a lame idea, but the problem of admitting other alphabets is very non-trivial and of great value.
Granted, hard-coding those values is pretty absurd, but the single login does make sense, mostly financial, but in a very, very non-trivial way.
When you're sold an enterprise server for an enterprise app with a $1250 per-seat (much less named users) fee and you have 5,000 concurrent users, that's $6.25 million. You can buy the same server with five or ten user licenses for $40k. Provided the application is secure enough, the cost v. benefit of having per seat licenses just doesn't pan out. Cut another way, fine, you have named users passing through to the database and those logins come through the application. Does that _really_ make you much more secure if those logins can be compromised? Sure, you might sniff out the lowliest account, but if you can do that, you can sniff out the admin account as well. Where's the $6M advantage? I'm seeing a subtle variant of security-via-obscurity here. "Gosh, if they have to pick from thousands of accounts instead of dozens, we're secure!" Right.
Case in point: The state of California was sold a named user license by Oracle for $1.5 BILLION. That's right, name every goddamned user working on the State of California network. Not really much different than a per-seat license, but I suppose they could have saved, say, a billion, leaving them with a $500,000,000 database license. I believe the purchase orders -- and the careers of those who signed them -- were cancelled prior to payment.
So, where do you draw the line on this nonsense? 100 users? 1,000? 10,000? Does it really make a difference? If you can hack 1:100, what's the value of reducing it to 1:10,000?
Outside of anarchy or absolute sovereignty (i.e. ONE sovereign), you have to compromise with your community, sparky, be it your neighborhood, town, county, state, country, hemisphere or planet. It's not immoral. It's Amoral.
That money would produce a safer city with more jobs if it was left to the citizens.
Last I checked, in this country, the government is composed of -- gasp -- citizens, not space aliens from Uranus. At what point did Americans forget the "of, by, and for the people" routine? Why should a state or federal authority be telling the citizens of a town that they can't do whatever they blinking well please as far as public works projects? So the _citizens_ get together and say, golly, we can all chip in ten bucks and we'll have a wonderful benefit for our community that is worth far more than ten bucks to each citizen.
What's next? Gee, sorry Podunksville, you can't build a public park with a toilet. You need to sell the land off to a private developer so you can have the privilege of paying to sit on the grass or take a leak.
One could pull out any number of asinine bureacratic moves by everthing from the U.N. to your local PTA board -- and using the DEA to argue against, say, school lunch programs, is just plain stupid.
The point here is, nearly every penny of ALL federal funding is OPTIONAL and there is local control of it. Sure, there are conditions -- because, more often than not, IT'S NOT YOUR (STATE'S) MONEY. Don't want the conditions? Don't take the money. But, bottom line, the vast, vast majority of the bureaucratic abuse and absurdity that happens in government isn't happening on Capitol Hill -- it's happening in your hometown, which, frankly, is why we have national regulations on things like, say, owning slaves, money laundering and drug trafficking.
National governments do few things better than non-profit community organizations and local governments. National government policies are over arching and generic. ...which is why almost all national government policies merely dictate broad guidelines and leave the details to states, which in turn may delegate details to counties, which in turn may delegate details to cities, which in turn may delegate details to neighborhoods...
See: Education and healthcare policy.
I don't think foreign intelligence gathering -- and to the degree that there is local component -- is a good starting point from which to critically examine all national-level policy-making. For many things, it is a very good idea to set the basic parameters and spread the financial risk nationally, yet leave implementation to state and local authorities, yet retain national-level oversight. For example, can you imagine how difficult it would be to track Medicaid fraud if it was purely a local or even state system or how much more catastrophic the funding issue would be in, say, Louisiana, if all funding for indigent healthcare was local?
Sure, national governments are big, bulky and teeming with corruption just like any other organization of any considerable size, whether public or private. Unfortunately, when you start dealing with issues that are not only interstate in nature, but involve transnational players, only national governments have the resources to coordinate them. Even the big evil Homeland Security leaves almost everything to do with implementation to state and local authorities.
What kills the ENTIRE Star Wars franchise in terms of "greatest Sci Fi" is the HORRIBLE willful ignorance of basic f@%!ing physics. It's absolutely egregious to consider any of them "good" SciFi because they're heavy on the Fi and totally absent of the Sci (not to mention the usual assortment of fairly complex and abstract social/political/economic/psychological issues most _good_ SciFi is written to communicate, which Star Wars doesn't remotely begin to bother with. They'd be more appropriate in "Western," since, after all, that's what Lucas deliberately set out to make--and will openly admit to. Just because it's in space doesn't mean it's SciFi.
Barring that, Tarkovsky's Solyaris should be competing for #1 with 2001. Soderbergs, well, it's greatest success was making 1:39 feel like the orginal 2:45. Actually, I have a sneaking suspicion that the painful plodding was a deliberate attempt to achieve the same psychological state that Tarkovsky communicated to much greater effect... sort of like that damned incessant breathing in 2001. To not have that film in the top ten is just embarrasingly juvenile. That said, where the hell is Blade Runner? Cripes.
World: We want an independent international body to control the internet. ICANN: Uhm, we're already an international body with rotating membership comprised of public and private representatives with actual physical facilities scattered around the globe. World: But, you're controlled by the United States government. ICANN: Uh, we send them a spreadsheet and have a conference call once a year, that's all. Hell, we're more beholden to a pissy private university in California than the US Government. Who would you recommend? World: The UN, ITU maybe. ICANN: So you're saying, basically, give control to Switzerland? World: Yes, they're independent. ICANN: So are we. World:...
There's a consumer-ready hydrogen filling station a mile from my house. Seriously.
Granted, you won't be driving cross-country, but I wish people would get their facts straight. They DO exist. There may only be a handful around the country, but cheeky statements like "oh, which don't exist by the way" just make the author look like an ass when I've been able to pull up to a hydrogen pump for two years...
This article--being an obviously biased love letter to the Republican party--could also be considered a political contribution.
At a time when effectively everyone has their own press and, IMHO, should be treated no differently than "professional journalists"--the term, of late, really should be in quotes, not least because so many "real" journalists are shills of the shrillest variety--unless we're going to say that the entire budget of Fox should be considered a political contribution to the Republican Party or the NYT to the Dems, it almost seems absurd to be counting ANY of these beans any differently. So, 'screw it, let's just return to the time of Hearst and allow total yellow-journalism and vote-buying. At least it would be open, obvious and readily understood by all for what it is.
It's not a solution to the problem, it's just a different problem all together. That's the problem.
Both self-employment and employment--I've done ten years of each, in that order--can be as much the means to fulfillment and joy as they can be to misery and despair.
Regardless, whenever the topic of organizational complexities and politics comes up, a chorus of people start chiming in like speakers at an MLM opportunity meeting that being-your-own-boss is the only way to happiness and enlightenment. Well, that's all well and good and good luck with your endeavors, but, it just isn't an answer to the original question. Almost all businesses require employees, so it simply isn't helpful to say "screw that noise, just go into business for yourself!"
Well, uhm, that's not much advice to give your [future] managers/partners/employees, is it?
It is merely another way of having a professional life. It is not always a better/easier/more flexible/more remunerating/enjoyable/enriching in anway experience. It can make or break you just like every other mode of living. The feeling of being in command of your destiny is almost entirely an illusion as much as it is an illusion that you are not in fact in command of your destiny working for any entity.
Many things people want to do simply cannot be done as an entrepreneur, so the litany is pointless. I mean, honestly, if the thing you really love doing is genetic engineering or brain surgery, you're probably not going to have a good go of it starting in your garage.
All my employees are partial owners...then they are not "your" employees. They are your "partners."
If the shares of the company are distributed such that "partner" is no-longer an appropriate title, you are offering "stock options" as an incentive to your "employees" for whom "salary" or "wages" are their primary source of income.
See how that works?
Most "small business owners" take home about $65k per year. YMMV, but generally speaking, a road to riches it is not.
Is that what you tell your prospective employees during their interviews? Methinks your success in business will be severely limited if that is the case. So, who are you lying to, us or your employees? Hmm?
Timecards reflect essential truth, if not literal truth of when work is done.
Timecards, if machine stamped, reflect when someone (not necessarily the name on the card) inserted it into said machine. If written, they reflect whatever the person writing it (again, not necessarily the same person) wished to write.
They reflect nothing else. Period.
Sometimes people work 16 hours and are feverishly producing the entire time. Sometimes they slack off for a few hours and make it up off-hours and may or may not charge it. Sometimes people are present for precisely 28,800 seconds per day... and may or may not do a damned thing the entire time.
Evaluate people on their work product. If someone works three hours a week and then goes home, but produces the same as someone who is present for 97, who do you think is the better resource that should be paid more?
..and frankly, this is why people should be concerned with the current ascendants to the Supreme Court. The oft-referenced notion of Stare Decisis is really problematic here--it quite literally means that if something with as much precedent as, say, copyright, has been decided well in the past, we just refuse to argue about it any more. Things like this _need_ to be revisted and argued, but this deceivingly simplistic legal concept has such a nice ring to it that people don't want to think about how it applies to scenarios like this.
I fear that we're going to start seeing more judges sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming like three year-olds "I can't hear you, nya nya nya nya nya, already decided this, can't talk about it, nya nya nya nya nya."
Slashdot Mirror
I simply don't think there is a point to be made.
Why does it matter? Those TLDs existed before the internet connected anything outside the US, so there was always an implicit ".us", if you will, following them. Yeah, it's sloppy now, but what do we do?
The people who are missing the point are the ones who blame ICANN for something that was decided twenty years before ICANN even existed.
What about universities in other countries? Governments? Militaries?
.asia is a lame idea, but the problem of admitting other alphabets is very non-trivial and of great value.
The existing tld system works just fine for this, we just don't use ".us" much in this country so it isn't as apparent. For instance, the city of Los Angeles website is "www.ci.la.ca.us" rather than "los-angeles.gov," much the same way Imperial College is ic.ac.uk or Stellenbosch University is sun.ac.za or the Australian Football league is afl.com.au.
Each country code tld is controlled by the country thus assigned and they can do what they want with it. This is a non-problem and one that makes the whole "ICANN controls the world" argument laughable. People are just needlessly obsessed with the handful of overused and often misused tlds like com, org and net. However, I agree,
Granted, hard-coding those values is pretty absurd, but the single login does make sense, mostly financial, but in a very, very non-trivial way.
When you're sold an enterprise server for an enterprise app with a $1250 per-seat (much less named users) fee and you have 5,000 concurrent users, that's $6.25 million. You can buy the same server with five or ten user licenses for $40k. Provided the application is secure enough, the cost v. benefit of having per seat licenses just doesn't pan out. Cut another way, fine, you have named users passing through to the database and those logins come through the application. Does that _really_ make you much more secure if those logins can be compromised? Sure, you might sniff out the lowliest account, but if you can do that, you can sniff out the admin account as well. Where's the $6M advantage? I'm seeing a subtle variant of security-via-obscurity here. "Gosh, if they have to pick from thousands of accounts instead of dozens, we're secure!" Right.
Case in point: The state of California was sold a named user license by Oracle for $1.5 BILLION. That's right, name every goddamned user working on the State of California network. Not really much different than a per-seat license, but I suppose they could have saved, say, a billion, leaving them with a $500,000,000 database license. I believe the purchase orders -- and the careers of those who signed them -- were cancelled prior to payment.
So, where do you draw the line on this nonsense? 100 users? 1,000? 10,000? Does it really make a difference? If you can hack 1:100, what's the value of reducing it to 1:10,000?
Outside of anarchy or absolute sovereignty (i.e. ONE sovereign), you have to compromise with your community, sparky, be it your neighborhood, town, county, state, country, hemisphere or planet. It's not immoral. It's Amoral.
Welcome to life.
That money would produce a safer city with more jobs if it was left to the citizens.
Last I checked, in this country, the government is composed of -- gasp -- citizens, not space aliens from Uranus. At what point did Americans forget the "of, by, and for the people" routine? Why should a state or federal authority be telling the citizens of a town that they can't do whatever they blinking well please as far as public works projects? So the _citizens_ get together and say, golly, we can all chip in ten bucks and we'll have a wonderful benefit for our community that is worth far more than ten bucks to each citizen.
What's next? Gee, sorry Podunksville, you can't build a public park with a toilet. You need to sell the land off to a private developer so you can have the privilege of paying to sit on the grass or take a leak.
I don't see how this is any different.
One could pull out any number of asinine bureacratic moves by everthing from the U.N. to your local PTA board -- and using the DEA to argue against, say, school lunch programs, is just plain stupid.
The point here is, nearly every penny of ALL federal funding is OPTIONAL and there is local control of it. Sure, there are conditions -- because, more often than not, IT'S NOT YOUR (STATE'S) MONEY. Don't want the conditions? Don't take the money. But, bottom line, the vast, vast majority of the bureaucratic abuse and absurdity that happens in government isn't happening on Capitol Hill -- it's happening in your hometown, which, frankly, is why we have national regulations on things like, say, owning slaves, money laundering and drug trafficking.
National governments do few things better than non-profit community organizations and local governments. National government policies are over arching and generic. ...which is why almost all national government policies merely dictate broad guidelines and leave the details to states, which in turn may delegate details to counties, which in turn may delegate details to cities, which in turn may delegate details to neighborhoods...
See: Education and healthcare policy.
I don't think foreign intelligence gathering -- and to the degree that there is local component -- is a good starting point from which to critically examine all national-level policy-making. For many things, it is a very good idea to set the basic parameters and spread the financial risk nationally, yet leave implementation to state and local authorities, yet retain national-level oversight. For example, can you imagine how difficult it would be to track Medicaid fraud if it was purely a local or even state system or how much more catastrophic the funding issue would be in, say, Louisiana, if all funding for indigent healthcare was local?
Sure, national governments are big, bulky and teeming with corruption just like any other organization of any considerable size, whether public or private. Unfortunately, when you start dealing with issues that are not only interstate in nature, but involve transnational players, only national governments have the resources to coordinate them. Even the big evil Homeland Security leaves almost everything to do with implementation to state and local authorities.
"Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk" in "last name, first name" format would be "Hwang, Woo-Suk."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name
...and when Alien first hit the video shelves in the 80's, it was rightly placed under "Horror."
What kills the ENTIRE Star Wars franchise in terms of "greatest Sci Fi" is the HORRIBLE willful ignorance of basic f@%!ing physics. It's absolutely egregious to consider any of them "good" SciFi because they're heavy on the Fi and totally absent of the Sci (not to mention the usual assortment of fairly complex and abstract social/political/economic/psychological issues most _good_ SciFi is written to communicate, which Star Wars doesn't remotely begin to bother with. They'd be more appropriate in "Western," since, after all, that's what Lucas deliberately set out to make--and will openly admit to. Just because it's in space doesn't mean it's SciFi.
Except of course for Aelita Queen of Mars.
Barring that, Tarkovsky's Solyaris should be competing for #1 with 2001. Soderbergs, well, it's greatest success was making 1:39 feel like the orginal 2:45. Actually, I have a sneaking suspicion that the painful plodding was a deliberate attempt to achieve the same psychological state that Tarkovsky communicated to much greater effect... sort of like that damned incessant breathing in 2001. To not have that film in the top ten is just embarrasingly juvenile. That said, where the hell is Blade Runner? Cripes.
Like the one: "Yes, we're all VERY interested in what you're having for dinner."
Note he said no -centralised- authority, not no authority at all.
See: Democracy, ant. Dictatorship
World: We want an independent international body to control the internet. ...
ICANN: Uhm, we're already an international body with rotating membership comprised of public and private representatives with actual physical facilities scattered around the globe.
World: But, you're controlled by the United States government.
ICANN: Uh, we send them a spreadsheet and have a conference call once a year, that's all. Hell, we're more beholden to a pissy private university in California than the US Government. Who would you recommend?
World: The UN, ITU maybe.
ICANN: So you're saying, basically, give control to Switzerland?
World: Yes, they're independent.
ICANN: So are we.
World:
...I was thinking the same thing on about the third sentence of that review.
There's a consumer-ready hydrogen filling station a mile from my house. Seriously.
Granted, you won't be driving cross-country, but I wish people would get their facts straight. They DO exist. There may only be a handful around the country, but cheeky statements like "oh, which don't exist by the way" just make the author look like an ass when I've been able to pull up to a hydrogen pump for two years...
This article--being an obviously biased love letter to the Republican party--could also be considered a political contribution.
At a time when effectively everyone has their own press and, IMHO, should be treated no differently than "professional journalists"--the term, of late, really should be in quotes, not least because so many "real" journalists are shills of the shrillest variety--unless we're going to say that the entire budget of Fox should be considered a political contribution to the Republican Party or the NYT to the Dems, it almost seems absurd to be counting ANY of these beans any differently. So, 'screw it, let's just return to the time of Hearst and allow total yellow-journalism and vote-buying. At least it would be open, obvious and readily understood by all for what it is.
It's not a solution to the problem, it's just a different problem all together. That's the problem.
Both self-employment and employment--I've done ten years of each, in that order--can be as much the means to fulfillment and joy as they can be to misery and despair.
Regardless, whenever the topic of organizational complexities and politics comes up, a chorus of people start chiming in like speakers at an MLM opportunity meeting that being-your-own-boss is the only way to happiness and enlightenment. Well, that's all well and good and good luck with your endeavors, but, it just isn't an answer to the original question. Almost all businesses require employees, so it simply isn't helpful to say "screw that noise, just go into business for yourself!"
Well, uhm, that's not much advice to give your [future] managers/partners/employees, is it?
It is merely another way of having a professional life. It is not always a better/easier/more flexible/more remunerating/enjoyable/enriching in anway experience. It can make or break you just like every other mode of living. The feeling of being in command of your destiny is almost entirely an illusion as much as it is an illusion that you are not in fact in command of your destiny working for any entity. Many things people want to do simply cannot be done as an entrepreneur, so the litany is pointless. I mean, honestly, if the thing you really love doing is genetic engineering or brain surgery, you're probably not going to have a good go of it starting in your garage.
All my employees are partial owners ...then they are not "your" employees. They are your "partners."
If the shares of the company are distributed such that "partner" is no-longer an appropriate title, you are offering "stock options" as an incentive to your "employees" for whom "salary" or "wages" are their primary source of income.
See how that works?
Most "small business owners" take home about $65k per year. YMMV, but generally speaking, a road to riches it is not.
Is that what you tell your prospective employees during their interviews? Methinks your success in business will be severely limited if that is the case. So, who are you lying to, us or your employees? Hmm?
I always get confused, is it the fountains or the pines? So difficult... ;) /All in jest...
I suppose that there probably aren't a lot of pine trees in Italy
Respighi would like a word with you.
Timecards reflect essential truth, if not literal truth of when work is done.
Timecards, if machine stamped, reflect when someone (not necessarily the name on the card) inserted it into said machine. If written, they reflect whatever the person writing it (again, not necessarily the same person) wished to write.
They reflect nothing else. Period.
Sometimes people work 16 hours and are feverishly producing the entire time. Sometimes they slack off for a few hours and make it up off-hours and may or may not charge it.
Sometimes people are present for precisely 28,800 seconds per day... and may or may not do a damned thing the entire time.
Evaluate people on their work product. If someone works three hours a week and then goes home, but produces the same as someone who is present for 97, who do you think is the better resource that should be paid more?
..and frankly, this is why people should be concerned with the current ascendants to the Supreme Court. The oft-referenced notion of Stare Decisis is really problematic here--it quite literally means that if something with as much precedent as, say, copyright, has been decided well in the past, we just refuse to argue about it any more. Things like this _need_ to be revisted and argued, but this deceivingly simplistic legal concept has such a nice ring to it that people don't want to think about how it applies to scenarios like this.
I fear that we're going to start seeing more judges sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming like three year-olds "I can't hear you, nya nya nya nya nya, already decided this, can't talk about it, nya nya nya nya nya."