I think you are mistaken. An Internet is formed by connections between many computers. But if none of THEIR computers are connected to any of OUR computers, they have their own Internet.
Every connection has to go over some kind of wire or radio link. Those are mostly controlled by the state, apart from a few satellite uplinks. Then, they can make sure that the Iranian Internet addressing system conflicts with the "real" one, for example by reusing popular IP addresses for essential services in Iran. Same for the DNS servers. They would only resolve addresses within Iran.
Heck, they could build their entire Iranian Internet on IPv6! Wouldn't that be fun! And if they change the protocols just slightly, it would make it very hard to interwork/tunnel with the rest of the world.
There is nothing new in any of this. But it's hard to do, because you would have to develop a whole lot of stuff from soup through to nuts to make it work, and nobody else will have any incentive to help you with it.
Firstly, graphics hardware makers prefer to keep parts of the driver proprietary, so they are not tied to published interfaces. This reduces the amount of documentation they have to develop, and allows them to make minor changes in the HW/SW interface when they need to without impacting anyone else.
Also, this is an area where Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Apple) have huge experience. Both companies put a lot of resources into making their platforms easy to develop for, and that includes a lot of help for people writing drivers. Microsoft's WHQL (or whatever they call it these days) runs training sessions and labs with Microsoft experts attending, so the hardware folks can get their questions answered by people who really know the code, and have helped many other people do the same thing in the past. This is nitty-gritty stuff, and costs a lot of money to staff, prepare, and keep going.
Of course the motivation behind this is to make it easier to code for Windows (or MacOS) than for other O/Ses, thus keeping the quality higher and improving the consumer experience. The hardware folks are only too happy to take advantage of this, so vendors write drivers for Windows first (both for the size of market and because all this assistance is available). And so the cycle continues.
I think it's unfair to say
Until graphics card manufacturers take Linux seriously
It would be more fair to say "Until the Linux community provide equivalent tools and assistance". And for that, someone has to see money in it. Don't expect the hardware guys to pay extra for the priviledge of adding Linux support; they get paid the same for their hardware no matter what the O/S chosen is.
Er, I can't find any link that indicates this is a genuine story. Nothing shows up on Microsoft.com, that I can see. Is this just a rumour that some journalist heard, or is there some factual basis to it?
"Sales taxes in theory should support the government infrastructure a business uses to conduct itself such as the court system, utility infrastructure if it's public, etc."
What a naive statement:-). "In theory" car taxes should pay for the road infrastructure, American federal income tax pays for WWII, and British Income Tax supports the war against Napoleon.
Taxation is all about governments taking money to do what governments do, good or bad. They will always try to take as much as they can without damaging the economy or causing public outcry. Justification of any given tax is purely PR; in reality everything goes into the common pot. So called "tax cutting" administrations are more often "tax moving", either onto another type of "stealth" tax, or off into the tax burden of future generations.
This is not CA or even USA thinking. Every tax systems in history across the planet has been the same.
You think so? Why are the burgers cold these days? Answer, the five-thousand miles of pneumatic tubing isn't all well insulated. And when CERN get their (McDonalds funded) matter transportation system fixed they'll be golden. Problem is, at present the burger sometimes finishes up wrapped around the bread, and a few excess vitamins are still getting through the filters.
The Master was the biggest loser in the American movie episode. They had the evil about right, but missed an essential element of his character. He may have been a real rotter, but at every point and in both incarnations he always behaved like a gentleman. He was polite to the girls even while he was lining up the laser beams, and he made a point of never actually breaking his word. His personal honour was important to him, despite his ambitions. The American version was totally wrong, being little more than a smart thug.
Great. Under your scheme, JK Rowling would be in fear of her life from Hollywood hitmen.
And don't forget the estate has to pay off the creditors. Some of the great artists died in penury and their work only took off after they died.
But copyright isn't forever anyway. It eventually times out (according to most law, inlcuding the US Constitution), though the US Congress always seem to extend the deadline so that Mickey Mouse stays inside.
Terry Nation created the Daleks in the early sixties. Not really that long ago.
If the estate has the asset, they have both a right and duty to make sure it isn't watered down by bad implementations. Hence the arguments about control. For example, Ann McCaffrey has refused many offers to make movies of her Pern Dragons, as she doesn't want some stupid movie mogul to say "we need a really good dragon/dragon fight at the end", and the studios always want carte blanche.
These things should be resolved by negotiation. The Nation estate can always change their minds, or the BBC can agree some boundaries of control.
Huh? As far as I know, all the players out there support Multicast, certainly the Windows one does. The trouble is, not so many of the ISPs and even less of the in-home routers and NATs will carry it, so clients tend to roll back to Unicast when they can't connect. If you're lucky enough to have a good ISP with good Mbone connect, that's great. The real world often doesn't have the option.
And as others have said, multicast doesn't help with on-demand use.
I work in the TV broadcast space, and we now have concepts like NVoD where the same show is transmitted on multiple channels at slight time offsets, so people can join at multiple times, perhaps every fifteen minutes. Then we have the PVRs in the home. Now, combine multicast as an NVoD delivery system (IPTV), add a PVR function to handle pause and storage, and multicast starts to be useful for a lot of other things as well as Live.
Sorry, but even the government doesn't call the USA a democracy. I think officially it is a democratic Republic. However, a truer definition is probably a self-perpetuating oligarchy. The two big parties have set things up so noone else gets to play, and the system of huge campaign contributions from vested interests is part of this.
America does have local democracy, with citizens initiatives and things like that, but the federal level is locked up solid to keep the established ruling classes in power. You have to join the elite club or you don't get elected.
Somehow I don't think this was what the writers of the constitution really had in mind...
Would have been fun if they first released Lord of the Rings Part 3 in Regions other than 1, and made the US wait for it. Then we'd have heard some screaming and shouting.:-)
Region coding has nothing to do with piracy (which I strongly oppose), it's simple marketing so they can launch in one country and use the profits to pay for the next launch in another. The introduction of globally launched movies, especially using digital cinema, will also undercut the usefulness of region coding.
My local rental outlet in Switzerland has a whole shelf of DVD R1 import for the benefit of English-speaking ex-pats and others.
And note that the DVD player manufacturers are very quick to leak the codes needed to de-region their players, simply because they won't sell without this "feature".
I lived in the US for several years, and still travel there frequently. If I bought it honestly, they have no moral right to stop me playing wherever I like, and I shouldn't have to hassle with bringing a wrong-voltage, lousy-TV-format player from the US just to view my own content.
Access to information and communications is one of the major enablers of development, for a number of reasons: 1) You get a chance to sell your produce to a much wider market, not just the local merchant who pays a pittance. You can also find out how much profit he is making on the deal. 2) You get access to education, not least on health and your own rights. 3) You get a chance to observe and participate in democracy, and see what the wider world is saying about the government who put all the posters up in your village demanding your votes 4) You get a chance to report local corruption, crime and abuses to those who can make a difference, whether in your own national government, the wider world, or the free press. 5) Perhaps the most important point, you can begin to feel connected to the world around you, read news and books, establish personal relationships, build spiritual connections, and many other things, and start to feel as if you have some control over your own destiny.
These are all things taken for granted in the western world, but in the poorest places this is like water in a desert. And its got to be cheaper to put an Internet terminal in each village than a UN or Red Cross aid worker (though they are needed as well).
In my opinion, some level of access to telecommunications (of which the Internet is only one part) should be recognised as a basic human right. The work of the ITU in developing this access may be unsung, but will reap benefits for many years to come.
I'm not sure about this. You are not really putting the burden on the user, but on the software developer. If I want to sell a new app that uses a special port (e.g. a multiplayer game), do I really have to educate the masses on how to get the right ports open on their system?
If you really want the firewall on by default, at least let it respond to UPnP port mapping requests from applications in the home.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are mistaken. An Internet is formed by connections between many computers. But if none of THEIR computers are connected to any of OUR computers, they have their own Internet. Every connection has to go over some kind of wire or radio link. Those are mostly controlled by the state, apart from a few satellite uplinks. Then, they can make sure that the Iranian Internet addressing system conflicts with the "real" one, for example by reusing popular IP addresses for essential services in Iran. Same for the DNS servers. They would only resolve addresses within Iran. Heck, they could build their entire Iranian Internet on IPv6! Wouldn't that be fun! And if they change the protocols just slightly, it would make it very hard to interwork/tunnel with the rest of the world. There is nothing new in any of this. But it's hard to do, because you would have to develop a whole lot of stuff from soup through to nuts to make it work, and nobody else will have any incentive to help you with it.
Firstly, graphics hardware makers prefer to keep parts of the driver proprietary, so they are not tied to published interfaces. This reduces the amount of documentation they have to develop, and allows them to make minor changes in the HW/SW interface when they need to without impacting anyone else.
Also, this is an area where Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Apple) have huge experience. Both companies put a lot of resources into making their platforms easy to develop for, and that includes a lot of help for people writing drivers. Microsoft's WHQL (or whatever they call it these days) runs training sessions and labs with Microsoft experts attending, so the hardware folks can get their questions answered by people who really know the code, and have helped many other people do the same thing in the past. This is nitty-gritty stuff, and costs a lot of money to staff, prepare, and keep going.
Of course the motivation behind this is to make it easier to code for Windows (or MacOS) than for other O/Ses, thus keeping the quality higher and improving the consumer experience. The hardware folks are only too happy to take advantage of this, so vendors write drivers for Windows first (both for the size of market and because all this assistance is available). And so the cycle continues.
I think it's unfair to say
Until graphics card manufacturers take Linux seriously
It would be more fair to say "Until the Linux community provide equivalent tools and assistance". And for that, someone has to see money in it. Don't expect the hardware guys to pay extra for the priviledge of adding Linux support; they get paid the same for their hardware no matter what the O/S chosen is.
...where they mean when they say stick this where the sun don't shine! :-)
Er, I can't find any link that indicates this is a genuine story. Nothing shows up on Microsoft.com, that I can see. Is this just a rumour that some journalist heard, or is there some factual basis to it?
"Sales taxes in theory should support the government infrastructure a business uses to conduct itself such as the court system, utility infrastructure if it's public, etc."
:-). "In theory" car taxes should pay for the road infrastructure, American federal income tax pays for WWII, and British Income Tax supports the war against Napoleon.
What a naive statement
Taxation is all about governments taking money to do what governments do, good or bad. They will always try to take as much as they can without damaging the economy or causing public outcry. Justification of any given tax is purely PR; in reality everything goes into the common pot. So called "tax cutting" administrations are more often "tax moving", either onto another type of "stealth" tax, or off into the tax burden of future generations.
This is not CA or even USA thinking. Every tax systems in history across the planet has been the same.
You think so? Why are the burgers cold these days? Answer, the five-thousand miles of pneumatic tubing isn't all well insulated. And when CERN get their (McDonalds funded) matter transportation system fixed they'll be golden. Problem is, at present the burger sometimes finishes up wrapped around the bread, and a few excess vitamins are still getting through the filters.
The Master was the biggest loser in the American movie episode. They had the evil about right, but missed an essential element of his character. He may have been a real rotter, but at every point and in both incarnations he always behaved like a gentleman. He was polite to the girls even while he was lining up the laser beams, and he made a point of never actually breaking his word. His personal honour was important to him, despite his ambitions. The American version was totally wrong, being little more than a smart thug.
Great. Under your scheme, JK Rowling would be in fear of her life from Hollywood hitmen.
And don't forget the estate has to pay off the creditors. Some of the great artists died in penury and their work only took off after they died.
But copyright isn't forever anyway. It eventually times out (according to most law, inlcuding the US Constitution), though the US Congress always seem to extend the deadline so that Mickey Mouse stays inside.
Terry Nation created the Daleks in the early sixties. Not really that long ago.
If the estate has the asset, they have both a right and duty to make sure it isn't watered down by bad implementations. Hence the arguments about control. For example, Ann McCaffrey has refused many offers to make movies of her Pern Dragons, as she doesn't want some stupid movie mogul to say "we need a really good dragon/dragon fight at the end", and the studios always want carte blanche.
These things should be resolved by negotiation. The Nation estate can always change their minds, or the BBC can agree some boundaries of control.
Huh? As far as I know, all the players out there support Multicast, certainly the Windows one does. The trouble is, not so many of the ISPs and even less of the in-home routers and NATs will carry it, so clients tend to roll back to Unicast when they can't connect. If you're lucky enough to have a good ISP with good Mbone connect, that's great. The real world often doesn't have the option.
And as others have said, multicast doesn't help with on-demand use.
I work in the TV broadcast space, and we now have concepts like NVoD where the same show is transmitted on multiple channels at slight time offsets, so people can join at multiple times, perhaps every fifteen minutes. Then we have the PVRs in the home. Now, combine multicast as an NVoD delivery system (IPTV), add a PVR function to handle pause and storage, and multicast starts to be useful for a lot of other things as well as Live.
America does have local democracy, with citizens initiatives and things like that, but the federal level is locked up solid to keep the established ruling classes in power. You have to join the elite club or you don't get elected. Somehow I don't think this was what the writers of the constitution really had in mind...
Would have been fun if they first released Lord of the Rings Part 3 in Regions other than 1, and made the US wait for it. Then we'd have heard some screaming and shouting. :-)
Region coding has nothing to do with piracy (which I strongly oppose), it's simple marketing so they can launch in one country and use the profits to pay for the next launch in another. The introduction of globally launched movies, especially using digital cinema, will also undercut the usefulness of region coding.
My local rental outlet in Switzerland has a whole shelf of DVD R1 import for the benefit of English-speaking ex-pats and others.
And note that the DVD player manufacturers are very quick to leak the codes needed to de-region their players, simply because they won't sell without this "feature".
I lived in the US for several years, and still travel there frequently. If I bought it honestly, they have no moral right to stop me playing wherever I like, and I shouldn't have to hassle with bringing a wrong-voltage, lousy-TV-format player from the US just to view my own content.
Access to information and communications is one of the major enablers of development, for a number of reasons:
1) You get a chance to sell your produce to a much wider market, not just the local merchant who pays a pittance. You can also find out how much profit he is making on the deal.
2) You get access to education, not least on health and your own rights.
3) You get a chance to observe and participate in democracy, and see what the wider world is saying about the government who put all the posters up in your village demanding your votes
4) You get a chance to report local corruption, crime and abuses to those who can make a difference, whether in your own national government, the wider world, or the free press.
5) Perhaps the most important point, you can begin to feel connected to the world around you, read news and books, establish personal relationships, build spiritual connections, and many other things, and start to feel as if you have some control over your own destiny.
These are all things taken for granted in the western world, but in the poorest places this is like water in a desert. And its got to be cheaper to put an Internet terminal in each village than a UN or Red Cross aid worker (though they are needed as well).
In my opinion, some level of access to telecommunications (of which the Internet is only one part) should be recognised as a basic human right. The work of the ITU in developing this access may be unsung, but will reap benefits for many years to come.
I'm not sure about this. You are not really putting the burden on the user, but on the software developer. If I want to sell a new app that uses a special port (e.g. a multiplayer game), do I really have to educate the masses on how to get the right ports open on their system? If you really want the firewall on by default, at least let it respond to UPnP port mapping requests from applications in the home.