Yeah, I was there. This is where brian reid got pissed off at gene spafford so brian and jon gilmore created alt.*
Speaking of alt, this also applied to dns...
Ironically it was Eugene Kashpureff that came up with the.brandnam idea in 1997 and was universally reviled by the very poeple who are doing it now. Turns out it wasn't that it was a bad idea, it was just they they wern't making any money off it. Now they can.
Good Lord, one assertion, unsupported with no citations or references and you're taking that as fact? Why?
There's thirty citations that take the opposing view in the executive summary before the index alone in Foster's box.
Why don't you read it and see it it makes any more sense than what you supplied as a counter argument. Here's the first chapter of the executive summary which is a few pages long.
"There is currently a global Alzheimer’s pandemic involving tens of millions of victims. In the USA alone, the number of those affected is expected to each 14 million by 2050. 1 This suffering and the financial costs associated with it are unnecessary. Alzheimer’s disease is caused by aluminum and is particularly common in those carrying the APO E4 allele(s), who are more susceptible to this toxic metal because they are less capable than the general population of removing brain beta-amyloid and tau proteins. As a consequence, such individuals are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, as these abnormal proteins build up in the brain and form neuritic plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Naturally, this process occurs more often and most apidly in regions that promote the deposition of beta-amyloid and tau. Such “harmful” environments are those in which drinking water is acidic, high in monomeric aluminum, and lack magnesium, calcium, and silicic acid. Under these circumstances, aluminum enters the brain and impairs various enzymes, including choline acetyltransferase, calcium/ calmodulin kinase II, alkaline phosphatase, and phospholipase A2. The result of this process is the abnormal brain pathology seen in Alzheimer’s disease patients and the disrupted biochemistry associated with it. In an earlier publication, 2
I called this explanation of the downward spiral, known as Alzheimer’s disease, Foster’s Multiple Antagonist Hypothesis."
Foster was a medical geostatistician, who looked for basal cause of somatic illnesses by looking at what minerals were high or low and did that correlate with high or low incicence of disease there.
He noticed, for example, that senegal high very high selenium in the soil, and despite having the same sexual practices as the rest of sub saharan Africa, they had an HIV/AIDS rate about the same as the US, that is substantially lower. This led to a treatment for aids that reversed the disease. The various papers describing the biochem are online as are the progress reports at a clinic in Uganda where they've been successfuly using the treatment.
"The Successful Orthomolecular Treatment of AIDS: Accummulating Evidence from Africa"
"Working Hypothesis As shown by Dr. Will Taylor and his colleagues 1
at the University of Georgia, HIV encodes for one of the human glutathione peroxidases. As a result, as it is replicated it deprives HIV-seropositive individuals of the selenoenzyme glutathione peroxidase and its four key components, namely selenium, cysteine, glutamine and tryptophan.2,3
Slowly but surely, this depletion process causes severe deficiencies of all these nutrients. Their lack, in turn, is behind the major symptoms of AIDS, including the collapse of the immune system, increased susceptibility to cancer, myocardial infarction and depression, muscle wasting, diarrhea, psyc
Now, why don't you study the genetics and biochemistry of it, and what he's saying, and comment on that. At the end of each chapter he explains what the just said in grade 12 terms so anybody should be able to understand it.
Because what I'm hearing is the fallacy of the argument from ignorance, where you don't know about something but are certain it has some property or other.
I wrote one in Unix/C 17 years ago. I've been adding to it and tweaking it on a daily basis since then. I used it images.killi.net mbz.org killi.net and other hobby crap, but it'll work on anything. I've never actually shown it to anyone cause I'm lazy, but it's pretty slick.
The treatment seems to be "take moderate doses of zinc". Zinc and aluminum are antagonists, whichever one you have more of chases other one out. Zinc is an essential element that is a component of many (most?) of the enzymes in our body that facilitate the tend if not hundreds of thousands of different biochemical reactions that take place every second. The body does not need and cannot use aluminum. Guess which one shows up in our diets in great abundance and which one is nearly always at below normal levels?
This is supposed to abate, but not reverse the ailment. Fosters record is above average, he was one of the leading explorers in the biochemical origin of disease.
The other thing is this report from a doctor whose husband had Alzheimer's, she heard about a coconut oil therapy, put him on it and he got better by the standard tests. http://coconutoil.com/AlzheimersDiseaseDrMaryNewport.pdf another report that speculates that the current (and possibly misguided, see Lustig's video on sugar ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM ) that was recently highlighted here) trend to low fat is causing all sorts of problems due to the shift in fatty acid profiles this entails: http://www.coconutdiet.com/alzheimers.htm
Both coconut oil and zinc are cheap, natural, essential with no side effects. Seems to me one has little to lose by trying it, and everything to gain. By Pascal's wager, it's worth a shot, no?
Can somebody pass this on to him? (Pratchett, not Pascal. He's dead, Jim.)
But I noticed if I asked for this file via a web browser then root.bin got translated to root.bin.en.gz and you can ask for this by name with wget and it works. unzip it and call it root.bin and then it all works.
vi works in this thing. manpages don't. Probably should be there though, easily added.
"wait 10 seconds while I boot linix in a browser window to look up the manpage". Hysterical. Course, I should have seen this coming, 10 years ago IBM RAID controllers made you boot linux on your pc *just* to configure the device.
I'm not sure where thing is in the range from "slick" to "game changer". But it's inbetween those two somewhere.
Somebody really should get the network stack going. This thing isn't even that slow, and being able to drop into unix anywhere any time is really really handy.
In the world of domain disputes, currently it's a $1500 UDRP action that takes weeks and has some serious deliberation and analysis. This is appropriate to figure out the messy cases like peta.org and wwf.org.
That's not what this is for.
This is for egregious violations. Say you're frobozz.com and you make keyboards. A year later somebody comes along ad grabs fr0bozz.com and sells keyboards labeled "frobozz". And they're not selling real frobozz keyboards, they're made up cheap crap. Or say you're a civil liberties group and some schmuck comes along and has a domain one letter off pointing to a Nazi site.
In both cases these are obvious and egregious cases, that is any reasonable person can tell in a few seconds which way this is gonna go if it comes down to a UDRP. This is meant to take care of the problem quickly and cheaply, and the only people at risk here and people trading on the good will of others.
But, take the devils advocate position here, say a bad judgment is rendered for $200. Is there any recourse? Sure, it's called the court system.
Disclaimer: I sort of thought this up, as did John Berryhill and a number of other people, independently. John is a one of the few domain name owners rights lawyers and would be the kind of person making these decisions. I've yet to see anyone bullshit him successfully.
As usual the/. impression of the issue at hand is totally out to lunch with no basis in law, fact, logic or reason. But what else is new?
I worked at Telautograph in 1988 to 1990. The telewriters with the articulated arms gave way to the fax machines of the 60s and they were replace by the Omninote which was a small desktop terminal with a 2 line vacuum flourescent display, keyboard and small printer, used to send messages *over the power line*, so, for use inside one building. I did try to get them to send via uucp but they were not interested in that in 88. They had pretty interesting network software, if a node couldn't communicate with another node, it relayed through another node that could, power lines aren't the cleanest things to send signals on, especially when they're 90V with huge motors going on and off at random.
Lusting has been extensively debunked by Alan Aragon http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-the-fructose-alarmism-debate/ and James Krieger, amongst others; and Gary Taubes' carb hypothesis requires that obese individuals are capable of violating the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of conservation of mass so he's just reaching for something, anything that can vaguely support his bullshit claims.
No such think. I read it, it's a post facto set of arguents. What Lustig has on his side is he explains what the molecules do and what the metabolic pathways are. You can argue stats but you can't argue chemical reactions, they are what they are and so what they do no matter what you think. And it appears the bad cholesterols is made from fluctose (Lustig explains how in the video). We already know sugars role in cancer, cancer feeds directly off sugar, the more you have the more likely cancer will be a problem for you.
Type II diabetes is cause by a corruption of the cellular membranes with too many animal and trans fat molecules replacing the phospholipids that are supposed to be there. The latter are flexible and have all those wonderful carbon links and are J shaped. The former are I shaped, inflexible and crowd the neurotransmitter receptors so they can't operate properly. So you have enough insulin (or serotonin, or estrogen, what have you) but the cell can't absorb it, Or "the body can't use it" as they say. Remediate with flax oil and stop eating crap. In about 3 mos it should have gone away.
"white sugar", as you call it, is a problem equal to HFCS, not less than "half the problem" as you suggest. Another "expert" that hasn't watched the presentation.
Correct.
As others as already pointed out, aspertame is not proven to be a problem at all. Of all sweeteners, only sugar/HFCS is proven to be harmful.
There are conflicting studies. The studies that show it was safe were paid for by the drug companies. They're used to sponsoring ghost written research and have been caught at it many times. In fact things are so bad now about half the literature is junk. [1]
It became well known in the medical community by 1987 that aspartame shouldn't be used by people with epilepsy or migraines.
Re:Dramatic effect and scientific precision
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
Sucrose, table sugar, is one molecule of fructose and one molecule of glucose held together by the weakest of bonds. That is, by the time it hits your stomach you have one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose in it, broken down from table sugar.
Now, HFCS OTOH, is one part glucose one part fructose. Just a mix of the two sugars.
Now that you understand the biochemistry, explain to me how HFCS is any different, let alone any worse.
When you see those reports saying HFCS is worse than sugar, you might for a moment reflect who would pay that much money to get you to not buy HFCS but buy sugar instead and understand the sugar lobby is a $2B a year organization.
The porn industry could give a shit. Seven people own nearly half of.com names and a bunch of wanna ba.com kings have hands full of.com names. Enough of these guys felt threatened that they paid some no-account porn people to protest. They even paid a homeless guy in San Fransisco to protest. http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoessays/2011/dot-xxx/
There's no real opposition in pornland. They don't give a shit. It's the guys with ".com portfolios" that were doing this to try to keep.com names valuable.
The whole point of tld expansion was to create new resources and to prevent regulation of extant resources; that is, life doesn't end at.com. Opposition with vested interests not withstanding.
No, ICANN finally approved it because all their criteria for a new tld had been met. There were some back door manuoverings to block the domain during the Bush Administration, specifically Karl Rove told the head of the Department of Communications (who oversee ICANN) not to add it the last time they were going to (the decision had been a "go" at ICANN, and they asked DoC to include it) as a favour to the Southern Baptist Conference who has specifically asked for it in exchange for delivering the south.
This of course isn't legal in that there were processes set up and this sort of thing was never accounted for.
Now,.xxx couldn't sue icann, their contractual obligations mandated they go through arbitration first. Cerf behaved very cagily and it went against him and the arbitration panel decided icann had to do what it said it would do.
And yes it goes back to 1996/97. Up until this year I made sure.xxx worked in every alternative root cluster; I was sorta there at the birth of.xxx
Note that about 10 years prior I also had alt.sex created.
This took all the porn off the rest of Usenet and put it in one place. Those that wanted to filter it did, those that want to find it, know where it is, and you never heard any more about dirty pictures elsewhere in Usenet. For the most part.
My favorite line I ever used during the DNS wars was when I got to tell the newly appointed director of DoC, who'd just been handed the the domain stuff to deal with: "Don't worry Becky, half of.com ISN'T porn". My guess is, in 10 years a porn site in.com is gonna seem really out of place.
It's nice to see this finally go through but they have a way to go to be profitable. 10 years at about a million a year adds up. But I'm sure they'll do fine.
Disclaimer: I have no interest or stake, financial or otherwise in.xxx (or any tld).
"That's why IANA, the ultimate top level controller of Internet numbers, is based in the US. It was created there to manage things on ARPANET."
You don't know what you're talking about. IANA wasn't "created", it's just a name Jon used for that particular task. A task done on contract for DARPA, later NSF. But Jon/IANA never had the authority you assert. Jon got frapped pretty hard by Ira Magaziner when Jon split the root (he put it back, real quick) and when IANA tried to declare what would happen with new tlds they were bitch slapped by the US government and put in their place as a subsidiary underneath ICANN but all accountable to the DoC and finally the US congress. Jon took over the task because it was natural for him to do so, there was no plan, no design and no "creation". That's pure fantasy.
IANA was an accounting function. But no real control once the USG woke up, around 96 or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was there. This is where brian reid got pissed off at gene spafford so brian and jon gilmore created alt.*
Speaking of alt, this also applied to dns...
Ironically it was Eugene Kashpureff that came up with the .brandnam idea in 1997 and was universally reviled by the very poeple who are doing it now. Turns out it wasn't that it was a bad idea, it was just they they wern't making any money off it. Now they can.
The US controls every domain name on the planet. Don't kid yourselves.
For a "siezed" website, it seems to be pretty up: http://tvshack.bz/movies/M (beware of popups)
I had no idea this site existed. Hello Streisand effect!
Good Lord, one assertion, unsupported with no citations or references and you're taking that as fact? Why?
There's thirty citations that take the opposing view in the executive summary before the index alone in Foster's box.
Why don't you read it and see it it makes any more sense than what you supplied as a counter argument. Here's the first chapter of the executive summary which is a few pages long.
"There is currently a global Alzheimer’s pandemic involving tens of millions of victims. In the USA alone, the number of those affected is expected to each 14 million by 2050. 1 This suffering and the financial costs associated with it are unnecessary. Alzheimer’s disease is caused by aluminum and is particularly common in those carrying the APO E4 allele(s), who are more susceptible to this toxic metal because they are less capable than the general population of removing brain beta-amyloid and tau proteins. As a consequence, such individuals are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, as these abnormal proteins build up in the brain and form neuritic plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Naturally, this process occurs more often and most apidly in regions that promote the deposition of beta-amyloid and tau. Such “harmful” environments are those in which drinking water is acidic, high in monomeric aluminum, and lack magnesium, calcium, and silicic acid. Under these circumstances, aluminum enters the brain and impairs various enzymes, including choline acetyltransferase, calcium/ calmodulin kinase II, alkaline phosphatase, and phospholipase A2. The result of this process is the abnormal brain pathology seen in Alzheimer’s disease patients and the disrupted biochemistry associated with it. In an earlier publication, 2
I called this explanation of the downward spiral, known as Alzheimer’s disease, Foster’s Multiple Antagonist Hypothesis."
Foster was a medical geostatistician, who looked for basal cause of somatic illnesses by looking at what minerals were high or low and did that correlate with high or low incicence of disease there.
He noticed, for example, that senegal high very high selenium in the soil, and despite having the same sexual practices as the rest of sub saharan Africa, they had an HIV/AIDS rate about the same as the US, that is substantially lower. This led to a treatment for aids that reversed the disease. The various papers describing the biochem are online as are the progress reports at a clinic in Uganda where they've been successfuly using the treatment.
http://hdfoster.com/sites/hdfoster.com/files/users/user6/What%20Really%20Causes%20AIDS.pdf
http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v02n03.shtml
"AIDS: A TREATABLE COMBINATION OF NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCIES
AIDS MAY BE A COMBINATION OF NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCIES HIV Depletes Body of Selenium and Three Amino Acids"
http://www.orthomolecular.org/library/jom/2006/pdf/2006-v21n04-p193.pdf
"The Successful Orthomolecular Treatment of
AIDS: Accummulating Evidence from Africa"
"Working Hypothesis
As shown by Dr. Will Taylor and his
colleagues
1
at the University of Georgia, HIV encodes for one of the human glutathione peroxidases. As a result, as it is replicated it deprives HIV-seropositive individuals of the selenoenzyme glutathione peroxidase and its four key components, namely selenium, cysteine, glutamine and tryptophan.2,3
Slowly but surely, this depletion process causes severe deficiencies of all these nutrients. Their lack, in turn, is behind the major symptoms of AIDS, including the collapse of the immune system, increased susceptibility to cancer, myocardial infarction and depression, muscle wasting, diarrhea, psyc
Great rhetoric.
Now, why don't you study the genetics and biochemistry of it, and what he's saying, and comment on that. At the end of each chapter he explains what the just said in grade 12 terms so anybody should be able to understand it.
Because what I'm hearing is the fallacy of the argument from ignorance, where you don't know about something but are certain it has some property or other.
I wrote one in Unix/C 17 years ago. I've been adding to it and tweaking it on a daily basis since then. I used it images.killi.net mbz.org killi.net and other hobby crap, but it'll work on anything. I've never actually shown it to anyone cause I'm lazy, but it's pretty slick.
Foster has a hypothesis that's it's a certain gene, and in the presence of aluminum, Alzheimer's happens. He explains his theory in great detail with all the genetics and biochemistry here: http://hdfoster.com/sites/hdfoster.com/files/users/user6/Foster_Alzheimers.pdf
The treatment seems to be "take moderate doses of zinc". Zinc and aluminum are antagonists, whichever one you have more of chases other one out. Zinc is an essential element that is a component of many (most?) of the enzymes in our body that facilitate the tend if not hundreds of thousands of different biochemical reactions that take place every second. The body does not need and cannot use aluminum. Guess which one shows up in our diets in great abundance and which one is nearly always at below normal levels?
This is supposed to abate, but not reverse the ailment. Fosters record is above average, he was one of the leading explorers in the biochemical origin of disease.
The other thing is this report from a doctor whose husband had Alzheimer's, she heard about a coconut oil therapy, put him on it and he got better by the standard tests. http://coconutoil.com/AlzheimersDiseaseDrMaryNewport.pdf another report that speculates that the current (and possibly misguided, see Lustig's video on sugar ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM ) that was recently highlighted here) trend to low fat is causing all sorts of problems due to the shift in fatty acid profiles this entails: http://www.coconutdiet.com/alzheimers.htm
Both coconut oil and zinc are cheap, natural, essential with no side effects. Seems to me one has little to lose by trying it, and everything to gain. By Pascal's wager, it's worth a shot, no?
Can somebody pass this on to him?
(Pratchett, not Pascal. He's dead, Jim.)
They were all easily obtained as files via http using wget. Except for root.bin which was 403 forbidden.
76002325 86 -rw-r--r-- 1 sexton www 88024 May 17 10:42 cpux86.js
76002326 2 -rw-r--r-- 1 www www 549 May 18 00:15 home.html
76002327 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 sexton www 14858 May 16 14:14 linuxstart.bin
76002328 6 -rw-r--r-- 1 sexton www 5379 May 16 14:14 tech.html
76002323 8 -rw-r--r-- 1 sexton www 6534 May 17 05:26 term.js
76002324 1664 -rw-r--r-- 1 sexton www 1679494 May 16 14:13 vmlinux26.bin
% wget http://bellard.org/jslinux/root.bin
--2011-05-18 00:39:07-- http://bellard.org/jslinux/root.bin
Resolving bellard.org (bellard.org)... 88.191.75.179
Connecting to bellard.org (bellard.org)|88.191.75.179|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2011-05-18 00:39:07 ERROR 403: Forbidden.
But I noticed if I asked for this file via a web browser then root.bin got translated to root.bin.en.gz and you can ask for this by name with wget and it works.
unzip it and call it root.bin and then it all works.
vi works in this thing. manpages don't. Probably should be there though, easily added.
"wait 10 seconds while I boot linix in a browser window to look up the manpage". Hysterical. Course, I should have seen this coming, 10 years ago IBM RAID controllers made you boot linux on your pc *just* to configure the device.
I'm not sure where thing is in the range from "slick" to "game changer". But it's inbetween those two somewhere.
Somebody really should get the network stack going. This thing isn't even that slow, and being able to drop into unix anywhere any time is really really handy.
Change it to msrk Firefox and it works just fine. Boots in 20 seconds on my laptop under Opera.
You have to be his "friend" first, then you get a like button.
I was thinking pdp11-73 or 84.
You forgot "on a mac".
That's right. We should bring up the UUCP network under this and disintermediate icann.
Sure it is. What if somebody got Apache to run under it?
Sometimes the most common isn't the best. A lot of times, actually.
Nope. You don't understand the domain ecosystem.
In the world of domain disputes, currently it's a $1500 UDRP action that takes weeks and has some serious deliberation and analysis. This is appropriate to figure out the messy cases like peta.org and wwf.org.
That's not what this is for.
This is for egregious violations. Say you're frobozz.com and you make keyboards. A year later somebody comes along ad grabs fr0bozz.com and sells keyboards labeled "frobozz". And they're not selling real frobozz keyboards, they're made up cheap crap. Or say you're a civil liberties group and some schmuck comes along and has a domain one letter off pointing to a Nazi site.
In both cases these are obvious and egregious cases, that is any reasonable person can tell in a few seconds which way this is gonna go if it comes down to a UDRP. This is meant to take care of the problem quickly and cheaply, and the only people at risk here and people trading on the good will of others.
But, take the devils advocate position here, say a bad judgment is rendered for $200. Is there any recourse? Sure, it's called the court system.
Disclaimer: I sort of thought this up, as did John Berryhill and a number of other people, independently. John is a one of the few domain name owners rights lawyers and would be the kind of person making these decisions. I've yet to see anyone bullshit him successfully.
As usual the /. impression of the issue at hand is totally out to lunch with no basis in law, fact, logic or reason. But what else is new?
"I loaded the demo and nothing happened when pressing "Run" for Chrome or Firefox. What am I missing?"
Doesn't work in Opera either. How many friggin browsers do I have to try to find one that works?
ICANN vote? You must be kidding. Never mind that's what the USG told them to do in 1999.
I worked at Telautograph in 1988 to 1990. The telewriters with the articulated arms gave way to the fax machines of the 60s and they were replace by the Omninote which was a small desktop terminal with a 2 line vacuum flourescent display, keyboard and small printer, used to send messages *over the power line*, so, for use inside one building. I did try to get them to send via uucp but they were not interested in that in 88. They had pretty interesting network software, if a node couldn't communicate with another node, it relayed through another node that could, power lines aren't the cleanest things to send signals on, especially when they're 90V with huge motors going on and off at random.
Lusting has been extensively debunked by Alan Aragon http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-the-fructose-alarmism-debate/ and James Krieger, amongst others; and Gary Taubes' carb hypothesis requires that obese individuals are capable of violating the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of conservation of mass so he's just reaching for something, anything that can vaguely support his bullshit claims.
No such think. I read it, it's a post facto set of arguents. What Lustig has on his side is he explains what the molecules do and what the metabolic pathways are. You can argue stats but you can't argue chemical reactions, they are what they are and so what they do no matter what you think. And it appears the bad cholesterols is made from fluctose (Lustig explains how in the video). We already know sugars role in cancer, cancer feeds directly off sugar, the more you have the more likely cancer will be a problem for you.
Type II diabetes is cause by a corruption of the cellular membranes with too many animal and trans fat molecules replacing the phospholipids that are supposed to be there. The latter are flexible and have all those wonderful carbon links and are J shaped. The former are I shaped, inflexible and crowd the neurotransmitter receptors so they can't operate properly. So you have enough insulin (or serotonin, or estrogen, what have you) but the cell can't absorb it, Or "the body can't use it" as they say. Remediate with flax oil and stop eating crap. In about 3 mos it should have gone away.
"white sugar", as you call it, is a problem equal to HFCS, not less than "half the problem" as you suggest. Another "expert" that hasn't watched the presentation.
Correct.
As others as already pointed out, aspertame is not proven to be a problem at all. Of all sweeteners, only sugar/HFCS is proven to be harmful.
There are conflicting studies. The studies that show it was safe were paid for by the drug companies. They're used to sponsoring ghost written research and have been caught at it many times. In fact things are so bad now about half the literature is junk. [1]
It became well known in the medical community by 1987 that aspartame shouldn't be used by people with epilepsy or migraines.
[1] http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/observations/ghosts/
Sucrose, table sugar, is one molecule of fructose and one molecule of glucose held together by the weakest of bonds. That is, by the time it hits your stomach you have one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose in it, broken down from table sugar.
Now, HFCS OTOH, is one part glucose one part fructose. Just a mix of the two sugars.
Now that you understand the biochemistry, explain to me how HFCS is any different, let alone any worse.
When you see those reports saying HFCS is worse than sugar, you might for a moment reflect who would pay that much money to get you to not buy HFCS but buy sugar instead and understand the sugar lobby is a $2B a year organization.
The porn industry could give a shit. Seven people own nearly half of .com names and a bunch of wanna ba .com kings have hands full of .com names. Enough of these guys felt threatened that they paid some no-account porn people to protest. They even paid a homeless guy in San Fransisco to protest. http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoessays/2011/dot-xxx/
There's no real opposition in pornland. They don't give a shit. It's the guys with ".com portfolios" that were doing this to try to keep .com names valuable.
The whole point of tld expansion was to create new resources and to prevent regulation of extant resources; that is, life doesn't end at .com. Opposition with vested interests not withstanding.
No, ICANN finally approved it because all their criteria for a new tld had been met. There were some back door manuoverings to block the domain during the Bush Administration, specifically Karl Rove told the head of the Department of Communications (who oversee ICANN) not to add it the last time they were going to (the decision had been a "go" at ICANN, and they asked DoC to include it) as a favour to the Southern Baptist Conference who has specifically asked for it in exchange for delivering the south.
This of course isn't legal in that there were processes set up and this sort of thing was never accounted for.
Now, .xxx couldn't sue icann, their contractual obligations mandated they go through arbitration first. Cerf behaved very cagily and it went against him and the arbitration panel decided icann had to do what it said it would do.
And yes it goes back to 1996/97. Up until this year I made sure .xxx worked in every alternative root cluster; I was sorta there at the birth of .xxx
Note that about 10 years prior I also had alt.sex created.
This took all the porn off the rest of Usenet and put it in one place. Those that wanted to filter it did, those that want to find it, know where it is, and you never heard any more about dirty pictures elsewhere in Usenet. For the most part.
My favorite line I ever used during the DNS wars was when I got to tell the newly appointed director of DoC, who'd just been handed the the domain stuff to deal with: "Don't worry Becky, half of .com ISN'T porn". My guess is, in 10 years a porn site in .com is gonna seem really out of place.
It's nice to see this finally go through but they have a way to go to be profitable. 10 years at about a million a year adds up. But I'm sure they'll do fine.
Disclaimer: I have no interest or stake, financial or otherwise in .xxx (or any tld).
"That's why IANA, the ultimate top level controller of Internet numbers, is based in the US. It was created there to manage things on ARPANET."
You don't know what you're talking about. IANA wasn't "created", it's just a name Jon used for that particular task. A task done on contract for DARPA, later NSF. But Jon/IANA never had the authority you assert. Jon got frapped pretty hard by Ira Magaziner when Jon split the root (he put it back, real quick) and when IANA tried to declare what would happen with new tlds they were bitch slapped by the US government and put in their place as a subsidiary underneath ICANN but all accountable to the DoC and finally the US congress. Jon took over the task because it was natural for him to do so, there was no plan, no design and no "creation". That's pure fantasy.
IANA was an accounting function. But no real control once the USG woke up, around 96 or so.