That's what I mean by no governance: the internet is not controlled by a government,
That's bullshit for two reasons. 1. A trademark holder can seize a legally purchased domain baesd on US trademark law. That's the only reason I need to buy the domain from Amazon.com and not just from a domain registrar. Even if I outbid some big corporation, they would take the domain if it coincided with their trade marks. 2. "Governance" does not need to be provided by a national government. According to that use of the term, there is no such thing as "corporate governance." Look: the Internet is governed. There are processes for handing out names and IP numbers. The process is controlled by a company under the oversight of the US Commerce Department. Therefore the Internet is indirectly governed by the US government.
but by an essentially laissez faire free market. If there really had been any sort of demand (beyond the silly political posturing) for a.xxx domain, it would have happened. But the actual users and content providers didn't want one and ICANN was smart enough to know it.
It was mostly people on the Christian right who opposed the.xxx domain. Think it through for a second. If you offered pornmongers a new domain with no strings attached, obviously they would say yes. If you respond that the ".xxx" domain sucked because it had strings attached then you are just reinforcing my point that the Internet is governed. And worst, it is starting to be governed according to Christian principles!
Since there currently is no government oversight for the internet, there's no way to remove it!
Really? Where do I sign up for my ".xxx" domain? And by the way, I've been thinking it might be nice to have the domain "amazon.com" for my collection of pictures from the Amazon. How do I take over the amazon.com domain from its current inhabitants? Given that there is no governance on the Internet, I guess that just by asking for it I should be able to do it.
I think that the poster just hyped it. Further, I notice that the letter was co-signed by Condi. I'd bet anything that she was just asked if it would be okay for her name to go along with Guiterrez's, but that the letter actually originated in his office. The poster focused on the Rice angle because that seems more exciting than a letter from the Secretary of Commerce. Hype, hype, hype.
You're totally misunderstanding the proposal. It isn't that the ActiveX will cease automatically running. It is that after they are running, the user will need to "activate them" with a mouse click before working with them. If you want to stop a movie playing, you'd have to click once to activate it and again to stop it.
Sure, it's a neat idea: for the programming language runtime that is running behind Apache. And it has been implemented by programs running behind Apache. So Apache already "supports" this. You still haven't said what more you want Apache itself to do.
It would be very interesting if someone actually managed to track the "Cyber Monday" meme to its source. It might be possible, since it originated recently and probably spread mostly via the Internet.
The article you are replying to spends about half of its text describing in detail where the meme came from and what the motivations were of the creators!
Wow: that is really insightful. Google is media company where the media is "web-based applications." Google has pampered "creatives" just like every other media company. The creatives just happen to be engineers, because they outsource the task of creating actual data content to their end-users.
I can't believe how paranoid you guys are. The standard defines a file format. The standard doesn't care whether the application you are making reads, writes, deletes or inserts data. It just describes the file format. Now Microsoft could decide to standardize just a subset of their internal format. But then their own documents would violate the XML schema and they would be in violation of the specification. They have no interest in this. What you tin foil heads can't get your head around is that Microsoft is a complex company in a complex business. They have to change strategies when the industry changes. They are in danger of losing control of the industry if standards definition passes from being a defacto process under their control to a de jure process under the control of OASIS and the Open Source community. Therefore, they must convince the industry to build applications that depend upon the Office file format and not the OpenOffice file formats. This requires quality documentation and a standards body's blessing.
Does this mean that Microsoft is now a warm and fuzzy, consumer-friendly company? No. It means that sometimes Microsoft's goals align with those of their consumers, and they must do some things that will force them to give up a bit of control (over who knows how to work with their file format) in order to maintain other control (over the overall office document paradigm).
But really, they aren't giving up anything that they didn't already. WordProcessorML is the default save format of Word 12. And WordProcessorML is trivial to reverse engineer. Several books have already been written about it. So there is no secret to keep and almost no cost to standardizing the file formats.
Mark my words: within a couple of years it will be absolutely standard for all kinds of tools to read and write the Microsoft format and that will suit Microsoft just fine.
Microsoft is really interested in opening up their office formats. The office formats are like the win32 API. They want everybody to code to them. That way they have control over the industry's direction. If leadership passes to OpenOffice instead, then Microsoft loses leadership.
But of course, MS is not charging US prices in Vietnam...
Furthermore, the relevant question is whether Windows XP is out of range for people who have computers. Vietnamese rice farmers are not going to run Windows XP.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Did you RTFA? It says: "Scientists cannot predict which influenza strain will cause a pandemic or when the next one will break out. They can warn only that another is bound to come and that the conditions now seem ripe."
Maybe the bird flu is "the big one". Maybe it isn't. Even if it isn't, we should use the opportunity of its media ubiquity to figure out what we will done when the next big flu does hit. When, not if (unless there is a surprising development in medicine!).
* OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field. As stated previously OpenDocument is a subset of MsOffice format, any attempt my MS to Extend the format, or any perceived crippling of output (conversion from ms->opendocument --- downgrade) will leave Microsoft wide open to billion dollar anti-trust, anti-competitive, lawsuits from all the other members of the OpenDocument committee - please remember Ms had to pay Sun Micrososystems 2Billion US (Sun is also OpenDocument committee Member).
That's just silly. Microsoft has hundreds of import/export filters with varying levels of quality. Nobody would ever implement import/export if it were possible to be sued by standards bodies or their member companies. Why hasn't anyone sued them over Word's horrible HTML? Ths Java situation was totally different. Java was not (and is not!) a standard. Microsoft was only allowed to redistribute Java because they entered into a conract with Sun. They violated that contract. Therefore they were sued. Half-assed OpenDocument support is not even remotely comparable. Half-assed OpenDocument support would be simply Microsoft doing business as always.
But part of the genious of Google is that it infers the structure of the Web through links. If you allow authors to push structure at you then it becomes that much easier for spammers and other profit-driven interests to game the system.
Deciding not to "navel gaze" is just a lazy way of saying that the Slashdot maintainers are not interested in hearing about necessary improvements to the site. It isn't boring: it is disturbing because it implies extra thought and work.
People are afraid of an avowedly totalitarian communist government that is rapidly gaining power. This does not make them "xenophobic." Perhaps sino-communist-o-phoboic. The Chinese government wants everyone to confuse its interests and wishes with those of the Chinese people. Do not fall into that trap. The Chinese government is a malignant force that oppresses them and endagers us. Chinese and Western people should be united in their opposition to it.
That particular episode of Lost is irrelevant in the big picture. The issue is whether the network is going to undercut its affiliates by building an alternate distribution model.
We had "rootless" (fully decentralized) naming systems in the past. We used "bang paths" to route messages from one machine to another using names that were only unique to each machine. What a damn nightmare. Let's never, ever, ever try that again. I mean obviously the Internet had reliability problems back then that were unrelated to bang paths but I don't ever want to have to specify a location using a name that is only meaningful to some machines on the Internet and not others. I don't know why you want that either.
Or are you talking about simply having a totally flat DNS namespace with no TLDs. I don't see how that would fix the war between the EU and the US. Someone still controls the assignment of those names.
Paul Prescod
I read this website and I realise that beyond the limited realm of computers the folk who hang out here are, with a few exceptions, generally as ignorant as the average man in the street.
I have two responses. The first is to deny: the average man on the street does not even know what a space elevator is, or whether NASA has sent rovers to multiple planets or just one. You responded to a single misinformed (low-rated) post and ignored the others that were better informed.
I have to wonder what the worldview is of someone who doesn't understand where his civilization stands technologically--what is possible and what is not yet possible.
The second is to agree: nobody knows on any given day precisely what is technologically possible and what is not. I didn't know that a carbon nanotube factory is being built. You probably have gaps in your knowledge, whether they relate to the current state of biology, astrophysics, art or international law. If you think that a person should be too embarassed about their gaps in knowledge to ask a question then you have a very harsh "worldview" -- to use your pet term.
The idea that someone with a computer and access to the internet would not understand that carbon nanotubes are cutting edge technology and not something available off the shelf at your local Ace Hardware is mind boggling.
I happen to read a lot of science media so I know that carbon nanotubes are in the future. 95% of people in the world have other interests and I personally have no problem with that. I would much rather that they pay attention to politics or world affairs rather than the question of whether a particular technology is available THIS YEAR, or NEXT YEAR or FIVE YEARS FROM NOW. It's very short-sighted to think that those kinds of timelines are important in the big picture. If we were talking about the millions of people around the world who think that Iraq or Israel blew up the WTC then I'd share your concern. But we're talking about the current state of manufcuture of a currently obscure material. Millions of people have an inquisitive and informed "worldview" without knowing anything about carbon nanotubes.
To conclude, I would rather be an ignorant science-o-phobe than a pompous, elitist dickhead.
China could use this as an excuse to set up their own root server system. They could force ISPs and Internet Cafes to use their system exclusively. Then they could charge American companies for the right to register their names in the Chinese servers. Basically this would be a form of protectionism under the pretense of "Communications Infrastructure Independence and Security." Chinese users could follow links from search engines and find that they only work if the referenced company has paid an appropriate "National Domain Registration tariff". This would not be at all unprecedented. I believe both trademarks and patents are similar examples of nationally controlled "namespaces".
Actually I think it would have minimal affect on Americans. I doubt there is much e-commerce going on between your average American on the web and Chinese or Brazillian web sites, at least not intentionally.:)
The average American is not the only concern. Do you really think eBay wants "eBay.com" to resolve to "ChineseEBayClone.com" in China and something else in the EU?
What is more likely to happen is web users in China and Brazil no longer get correct resolution of names to sites everywhere else in the world, including each other, and their own DNS solution will fall flat on its face.
Do you really think that the average Chinese person is more interested in using American sites than in local Chinese-language sites? Or that they control their own infrastructure and even have a choice?
What will happen is that companies like Google and eBay will have to register multiple times under each nationalized root. This will complicate their lives and give local companies a small advantage (especially if they can use local copyright laws to their benefit and steal valuable domains before the foreigners do). This would help upstart Chinese companies but it wouldn't help Chinese consumers or American businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I mean by no governance: the internet is not controlled by a government,
That's bullshit for two reasons. 1. A trademark holder can seize a legally purchased domain baesd on US trademark law. That's the only reason I need to buy the domain from Amazon.com and not just from a domain registrar. Even if I outbid some big corporation, they would take the domain if it coincided with their trade marks. 2. "Governance" does not need to be provided by a national government. According to that use of the term, there is no such thing as "corporate governance." Look: the Internet is governed. There are processes for handing out names and IP numbers. The process is controlled by a company under the oversight of the US Commerce Department. Therefore the Internet is indirectly governed by the US government.
but by an essentially laissez faire free market. If there really had been any sort of demand (beyond the silly political posturing) for a .xxx domain, it would have happened. But the actual users and content providers didn't want one and ICANN was smart enough to know it.
It was mostly people on the Christian right who opposed the .xxx domain. Think it through for a second. If you offered pornmongers a new domain with no strings attached, obviously they would say yes. If you respond that the ".xxx" domain sucked because it had strings attached then you are just reinforcing my point that the Internet is governed. And worst, it is starting to be governed according to Christian principles!
Since there currently is no government oversight for the internet, there's no way to remove it!
Really? Where do I sign up for my ".xxx" domain? And by the way, I've been thinking it might be nice to have the domain "amazon.com" for my collection of pictures from the Amazon. How do I take over the amazon.com domain from its current inhabitants? Given that there is no governance on the Internet, I guess that just by asking for it I should be able to do it.
I think that the poster just hyped it. Further, I notice that the letter was co-signed by Condi. I'd bet anything that she was just asked if it would be okay for her name to go along with Guiterrez's, but that the letter actually originated in his office. The poster focused on the Rice angle because that seems more exciting than a letter from the Secretary of Commerce. Hype, hype, hype.
You're totally misunderstanding the proposal. It isn't that the ActiveX will cease automatically running. It is that after they are running, the user will need to "activate them" with a mouse click before working with them. If you want to stop a movie playing, you'd have to click once to activate it and again to stop it.
I can't see a notable security benefit in this...
Who said that this move had anything to do with security?
The parent post is factually incorrect but it isn't flamebait. It should not be modded down so far.
Sure, it's a neat idea: for the programming language runtime that is running behind Apache. And it has been implemented by programs running behind Apache. So Apache already "supports" this. You still haven't said what more you want Apache itself to do.
Please mod parent up. It makes a lot of sense!
It would be very interesting if someone actually managed to track the "Cyber Monday" meme to its source. It might be possible, since it originated recently and probably spread mostly via the Internet.
The article you are replying to spends about half of its text describing in detail where the meme came from and what the motivations were of the creators!
Wow: that is really insightful. Google is media company where the media is "web-based applications." Google has pampered "creatives" just like every other media company. The creatives just happen to be engineers, because they outsource the task of creating actual data content to their end-users.
Ummmm. Can you remind me what the vt100 equivalents of eBay, Google and Skype were?
Given you might need to serve a few thousand people an hour (or more?), I'd say it's still got awhile to go.
"Several per second" is equivalent to "a few thousand an hour."
I can't believe how paranoid you guys are. The standard defines a file format. The standard doesn't care whether the application you are making reads, writes, deletes or inserts data. It just describes the file format. Now Microsoft could decide to standardize just a subset of their internal format. But then their own documents would violate the XML schema and they would be in violation of the specification. They have no interest in this. What you tin foil heads can't get your head around is that Microsoft is a complex company in a complex business. They have to change strategies when the industry changes. They are in danger of losing control of the industry if standards definition passes from being a defacto process under their control to a de jure process under the control of OASIS and the Open Source community. Therefore, they must convince the industry to build applications that depend upon the Office file format and not the OpenOffice file formats. This requires quality documentation and a standards body's blessing.
Does this mean that Microsoft is now a warm and fuzzy, consumer-friendly company? No. It means that sometimes Microsoft's goals align with those of their consumers, and they must do some things that will force them to give up a bit of control (over who knows how to work with their file format) in order to maintain other control (over the overall office document paradigm).
But really, they aren't giving up anything that they didn't already. WordProcessorML is the default save format of Word 12. And WordProcessorML is trivial to reverse engineer. Several books have already been written about it. So there is no secret to keep and almost no cost to standardizing the file formats.
Mark my words: within a couple of years it will be absolutely standard for all kinds of tools to read and write the Microsoft format and that will suit Microsoft just fine.
Microsoft is really interested in opening up their office formats. The office formats are like the win32 API. They want everybody to code to them. That way they have control over the industry's direction. If leadership passes to OpenOffice instead, then Microsoft loses leadership.
But of course, MS is not charging US prices in Vietnam...
Furthermore, the relevant question is whether Windows XP is out of range for people who have computers. Vietnamese rice farmers are not going to run Windows XP.
Did you RTFA? It says: "Scientists cannot predict which influenza strain will cause a pandemic or when the next one will break out. They can warn only that another is bound to come and that the conditions now seem ripe."
Maybe the bird flu is "the big one". Maybe it isn't. Even if it isn't, we should use the opportunity of its media ubiquity to figure out what we will done when the next big flu does hit. When, not if (unless there is a surprising development in medicine!).
* OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field. As stated previously OpenDocument is a subset of MsOffice format, any attempt my MS to Extend the format, or any perceived crippling of output (conversion from ms->opendocument --- downgrade) will leave Microsoft wide open to billion dollar anti-trust, anti-competitive, lawsuits from all the other members of the OpenDocument committee - please remember Ms had to pay Sun Micrososystems 2Billion US (Sun is also OpenDocument committee Member).
That's just silly. Microsoft has hundreds of import/export filters with varying levels of quality. Nobody would ever implement import/export if it were possible to be sued by standards bodies or their member companies. Why hasn't anyone sued them over Word's horrible HTML? Ths Java situation was totally different. Java was not (and is not!) a standard. Microsoft was only allowed to redistribute Java because they entered into a conract with Sun. They violated that contract. Therefore they were sued. Half-assed OpenDocument support is not even remotely comparable. Half-assed OpenDocument support would be simply Microsoft doing business as always.
But part of the genious of Google is that it infers the structure of the Web through links. If you allow authors to push structure at you then it becomes that much easier for spammers and other profit-driven interests to game the system.
Deciding not to "navel gaze" is just a lazy way of saying that the Slashdot maintainers are not interested in hearing about necessary improvements to the site. It isn't boring: it is disturbing because it implies extra thought and work.
People are afraid of an avowedly totalitarian communist government that is rapidly gaining power. This does not make them "xenophobic." Perhaps sino-communist-o-phoboic. The Chinese government wants everyone to confuse its interests and wishes with those of the Chinese people. Do not fall into that trap. The Chinese government is a malignant force that oppresses them and endagers us. Chinese and Western people should be united in their opposition to it.
That particular episode of Lost is irrelevant in the big picture. The issue is whether the network is going to undercut its affiliates by building an alternate distribution model.
We had "rootless" (fully decentralized) naming systems in the past. We used "bang paths" to route messages from one machine to another using names that were only unique to each machine. What a damn nightmare. Let's never, ever, ever try that again. I mean obviously the Internet had reliability problems back then that were unrelated to bang paths but I don't ever want to have to specify a location using a name that is only meaningful to some machines on the Internet and not others. I don't know why you want that either. Or are you talking about simply having a totally flat DNS namespace with no TLDs. I don't see how that would fix the war between the EU and the US. Someone still controls the assignment of those names. Paul Prescod
I read this website and I realise that beyond the limited realm of computers the folk who hang out here are, with a few exceptions, generally as ignorant as the average man in the street.
I have two responses. The first is to deny: the average man on the street does not even know what a space elevator is, or whether NASA has sent rovers to multiple planets or just one. You responded to a single misinformed (low-rated) post and ignored the others that were better informed.
I have to wonder what the worldview is of someone who doesn't understand where his civilization stands technologically--what is possible and what is not yet possible.
The second is to agree: nobody knows on any given day precisely what is technologically possible and what is not. I didn't know that a carbon nanotube factory is being built. You probably have gaps in your knowledge, whether they relate to the current state of biology, astrophysics, art or international law. If you think that a person should be too embarassed about their gaps in knowledge to ask a question then you have a very harsh "worldview" -- to use your pet term.
The idea that someone with a computer and access to the internet would not understand that carbon nanotubes are cutting edge technology and not something available off the shelf at your local Ace Hardware is mind boggling.
I happen to read a lot of science media so I know that carbon nanotubes are in the future. 95% of people in the world have other interests and I personally have no problem with that. I would much rather that they pay attention to politics or world affairs rather than the question of whether a particular technology is available THIS YEAR, or NEXT YEAR or FIVE YEARS FROM NOW. It's very short-sighted to think that those kinds of timelines are important in the big picture. If we were talking about the millions of people around the world who think that Iraq or Israel blew up the WTC then I'd share your concern. But we're talking about the current state of manufcuture of a currently obscure material. Millions of people have an inquisitive and informed "worldview" without knowing anything about carbon nanotubes.
To conclude, I would rather be an ignorant science-o-phobe than a pompous, elitist dickhead.
China could use this as an excuse to set up their own root server system. They could force ISPs and Internet Cafes to use their system exclusively. Then they could charge American companies for the right to register their names in the Chinese servers. Basically this would be a form of protectionism under the pretense of "Communications Infrastructure Independence and Security." Chinese users could follow links from search engines and find that they only work if the referenced company has paid an appropriate "National Domain Registration tariff". This would not be at all unprecedented. I believe both trademarks and patents are similar examples of nationally controlled "namespaces".
Actually I think it would have minimal affect on Americans. I doubt there is much e-commerce going on between your average American on the web and Chinese or Brazillian web sites, at least not intentionally. :)
The average American is not the only concern. Do you really think eBay wants "eBay.com" to resolve to "ChineseEBayClone.com" in China and something else in the EU?
What is more likely to happen is web users in China and Brazil no longer get correct resolution of names to sites everywhere else in the world, including each other, and their own DNS solution will fall flat on its face.
Do you really think that the average Chinese person is more interested in using American sites than in local Chinese-language sites? Or that they control their own infrastructure and even have a choice?
What will happen is that companies like Google and eBay will have to register multiple times under each nationalized root. This will complicate their lives and give local companies a small advantage (especially if they can use local copyright laws to their benefit and steal valuable domains before the foreigners do). This would help upstart Chinese companies but it wouldn't help Chinese consumers or American businesses.