Because the big content creation companies bought the laws. It really is that simple. Through the system of soft money and campaign contributions, bribery -- for I shall forthwith commit myself to the practice of calling a spade a spade -- is an established part of "the system", a filthy and disgusting act that all acknowledge and few resist. If you dislike the DMCA, if you _really_ want to see it gone, there is exactly one thing you can do: raise more money than the IP industry and buy its repeal.
I hope you don't think you're going to see a decrease in your tuition due to this; surely a college student has enough experience with how the world works than that.
(And, not intended to be flamebait or anything, but if you _are_ a college student, let me suggest that you invest some of your anticipated financial windfall in a dictionary and spend some time learning to spell words like "benefit".)
The DMCA did not necessarily pass unanimously. It passed on a voice vote, meaning the "Ayes" were louder than the "Nays" and no record exists of who voted for or against. Of all the things I'd change about the way the houses of Congress do business, the single most important thing is the elimination of the voice vote -- on every matter, no matter how trivial, there should be a full and complete accounting by name and district/state of the fors, the againsts, the abstentions, and the absents.
Sure, it'd slow things down a lot, but what's more important: that Congress do a lot of stuff, or that the public be able to determine how any given representative voted?
Of course, you could argue that his company's product didn't coexist with Windows so much as it provided a functionality that only a few people needed...until the Web came, and then everyone needed it, Microsoft folded it into Windows, and Trumpet was thrown out like a sorority girl the morning after a good party.
"[T]he Internet is as public as Grand Central Station, or Central Park. People should have no reasonable expectation of privacy on the internet."
That depends on what you mean by "reasonable expectation of privacy." I am well aware that when I go to a public area such as Grand Central Station that I might been observed by people who know me or people who don't, and that I might or might not be aware of it.
However, I do not consider it likely that someone who knows nearly everything about me will track where I go in Grand Central Station, what I do there, how long I take to do it, whether I do it alone, and so forth -- and I damn sure don't consider it likely that this mysterious individual about whom I will know almost nothing will have the ability and the desire to sell what he has learned about me to a third party so that that third party may increase what _it_ knows about me. Some people think that way, but in general we mock and deride them for being paranoid. Yet on the Web, we mutely accept such a state of affairs and often mistakenly tell people that such is no different from our daily life.
The legal phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy" is like "shadows and penumbras" -- it gives the lawyers and the IANALs something to quote and sound very wise but it doesn't _mean_ anything other than what the judge of the moment thinks it means. That's not a solid legal footing for anything. And with technology far outpacing our legal system, perhaps even this shifting-sand legal foundation should be revisited.
If I may address your initial point, that you are satisfied with moderate advertising in exchange for some surrender of your personal privacy, I don't think that many would disagree. However, the Web and indeed any purchase that involves either plastic or corporations or both will not permit that bargain. They _demand_ that you surrender everything about yourself (and they will fill in the gaps by "sharing information" with their "partners" to "serve you better") and they then bombard you with promotional materials that have only the most tenuous connection to your purchasing interests. And yet people continue to happily accept that, in exchange for a nickel off here or a rebate coupon there -- and these people are fouling it up for the rest of us who _don't_ share your opinion that a little marketing is worth a little privacy. When I buy groceries, I have to fight off the "Frequent shopper card?" chirping from the clerk. When I want a thirty-cent resistor at Radio Shack I have to deal with "Home address?" from the clerk. It's time to return to the day when a business transaction consisted of a person giving money for a product, no more, no less. Keep your advertising and your targeted marketing and your insiders-only discounts. Just gimme my damn resistor, sir.
You don't have to give a ripe shit about science to have a basic level of scientific literacy. I'm not talking about being able to solve the infinite square well problem, but knowing things like why the sky is blue or why lizards spend so much time in the sun or what makes volcanoes or why perpetual motion machines don't work no matter what tweaks you make.
Consider the fact that nearly every newspaper in the country prints a daily horoscope. Imagine what could be taught if they had a little "Science Fact of the Day", a paragraph or three explaining, say, why the sky is blue. Most of the science that I would consider basic literacy level is really simple stuff. You don't have to be Michael Faraday to understand how a motor works and you don't have to be Albert Einstein to understand that Isaac Newton didn't "invent" gravity.
Imagine a country where people knew enough science that Slashdot didn't keep reporting on cold fusion developments to the enthusiastic approbation of half the respondents, or where people knew why it is disingenuous to talk about Chernobyl when discussing nuclear power safety in the United States. Imagine...yew-hooo-oooohh-uh-oooh.
That's a well-written and clear brief in the Bunner case -- but the EFF's repeated references to "Proctor & Gamble _v_ Bankers Trust" would be a lot more compelling if they'd bothered to make themselves aware that the company is "Procter & Gamble". One hopes that the appellate panel is less critical than I or Mr. Bunner will certainly lose -- not loose! -- his appeal.
Re:Wheee!!! Money rules again!
on
Linux Win In Schools
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think you're missing the point. There are many purposes for computers in a school system.
Unrelated to the actual teaching mission, computers provide database capabilities for tracking the students' progress and special needs, if any. Grades, attendance, counselor or faculty notes, all can and should be retained electronically. Computers provide communication via messaging or email between administrators and faculty who are likely in widely-separated buildings and often widely-separated towns. They permit rapid production of mind-numbing statistics and colored charts that are so in vogue with top-level edubosses.
Within the educational mission, though, there are a lot of things computers can be used for. For the schools fortunate/large enough to offer computer-focused classes, does the operating system matter? Well, if you're learning C or C++ or Java or Python or whatever, then not really. If you're in a class teaching computer basics (what's a CPU, what's RAM, etc.) then again no. If you're in a lab and using a computer to interface with a data-taking gadget, once more we find the OS to be irrelevant. Foreign language tutorial? Electronic arithmetic flash cards?
There _is_ a role to be played by Windows, though, and you've hit on it. Students who intend to pursue clerical jobs should be exposed through their vocational classes to Windows and Office. Those, as you point out, are the standard tools and it's reasonable to expect that the students will need to know them. However, even these students should be exposed to alternative office suites on alternative operating systems to prepare them for the fact that they might end up in (for example) a Macs-only office. Exposing them to concepts that span a single product makes the difference between teaching and training.
So eliminate the whim. If you can require the company to disclose its APIs (and protocols and file formats -- mustn't forget those) then you can restrict them from releasing any product using changed APIs for some period of time following the public disclosure of the new APIs.
The comet was Hale-Bopp. I live in Los Alamos, elev. 7200 feet. If you are willing to drive for about 20 minutes, you can be 800 feet higher, in the middle of the Jemez Mountains, and quite separated from manmade lights. The night sky -- the real night sky, not the four stars and an airplane that the city-dwellers get -- is staggering. The astronomers are fighting a losing (lost?) battle, but I am glad I have seen just where we fit.
Remember if you will that "element" as it applies to chemistry came into being at a time when its chemical definition was NOT in conflict with your second definition of an "irreducible constituent of a composite entity." Elements and the periodic table were scientifically established quite some time before we found out that our irreducible constituents were in fact quite reducible, to smaller bits-n-pieces that are themselves reducible. Democritus' "atom" has the same story.
Sadly, this kind of archaeology and anthropology in the United States is effectively dead -- whatever Native First Indigenous People American Indian tribe lived closest to the site of the discovery would lay claim to his remains and a wonderful find would be lost to science thanks to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act . Fire up your Google buttons and look for the sad tale of Kennewick Man...
You do understand that Emacs is no more a part of Darwin than Internet Explorer, right? You are capable of distinguishing between the operating system and applications that can run on it, right?
Running Apple software doesn't automatically grant you wisdom, knowledge, and insight any more than not running it denies you such things.
"I have, on the other hand, dealt with many companies who refuse to use GPL's software due to the restrictions it introduces, as well as the general lack of accountbility which is an integral part of most open-source licenses."
The lack of accountability? {boggle} Do the people at the many companies you've dealt with actually READ the licensing agreements on the commercial software they are paying for? Without naming names, pick any J. Random Licensing Agreement and you'll see words to the effect of "We promise nothing. We accept no responsibility. Don't be surprised if this software is utterly unfit for anything, including the task for which you are paying the license fee. Anything that happens is on your head. Now pay up, bitch."
At least when open/free software rejects accountability, it does so with a sense of "You get what you pay for." If I were paying a thousand bucks a head for {important software package critical to my business success} I'd be a little less forgiving of the "Don't call me" attitude.
It depends on what you mean by "simulating nuclear explosions". Sandia is using ASCI Red to model the effects of a nuclear blast (like how far away from a blast of X kilotons do the buildings get knocked down), but they are legally prohibited from modeling the actual reactions that occur within a nuclear device, the part we call the "physics package." Los Alamos and Livermore are using their ASCI machines to do these calculations and we need all the horsepower we can get to model the phenomena accurately enough to certify our aging stockpile without nuclear testing.
I assume you're speaking of the US government. Among the things that government is tasked with is to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty. That means that they have a legitimate role to play in the creation of public goods. Public roads, public health, and now, public computing infrastructure. There's nothing wrong with private companies making money doing things _for_ the government, but when the work is done, the results belong to everyone. If that means that the opportunity for a person or a corporation to make money providing something which serves a public interest is lost, then so be it.
The legal fiction that corporations are "people" who pay taxes and merit governmental protection is nice and it's one which has served the economy well in the past (discussions about its present state are deferred to other/. stories) but when there is a compelling public interest to be served by government spending, the loss of a corporation's ability or even a private individual's ability to make a profit in that arena is just too bad. Ideally, a compromise is reached wherein the public interest is served AND a sufficient profit can be made privately that the interest is served inexpensively by the most economically efficient body which competes to provide the interest.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the kind of software that I'd expect the government to fund is critical infrastructure: BIND, TCP/IP, and so forth. And that kind of software should be made available at no cost, either under a free license or by release directly into the public domain. I wouldn't expect the government to gut Intuit by releasing a free Quicken knockoff.
I disagree. If 2600 loses, it will not be because of their "hacker reputation". First Amendment cases that make it to high courts tend to be aware that it is easy to support speech we agree with. The Supreme Court and to a lesser extent, the Appellate courts have dealt firmly with laws purporting to be for our own good and they have permitted the publication of books containing bomb-making instructions. They have permitted the leafletting in municipal plazas by those who encourage the annihilation of Africans/Jews/handicapped/people who don't eat Oreos. Compared to evaluating whether the American Nazi Party can hold a parade in predominantly-Jewish Skokie, IL, the question of whether some longhaired hippie computer freak can link to computer code is...not so imposing.
It was brought up before the initial trial that Judge Kaplan had ties to the entertainment industry that by all rights should have led him to recuse himself. I do not know of any such ties within the Appellate Court.
Re:I may be an old fart but...
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 2
Who gets to decide? No individual or organization with a financial stake in the decision itself.
Re:I may be an old fart but...
on
IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 3
Read the memos. Their entire point is that when it comes to domain names, (say it with me now, all you "Highlander" fans) there can be only one.
The point is that at the end of the day, a domain name has to resolve to an IP address. If the same name resolves to two addresses depending on where you are, that's a Bad Thing. Unfortunately, that's exactly what is going to happen now that ICANN has decided to issue a.biz TLD. Existing DNS servers that don't look to ICANN for guidance already issued a.biz TLD and it is reasonably well-populated. There's every reason to believe that problems will ensue and that the lawyers will get to make a lot of money quarreling over the rights to assmasters.biz and others.
The suggestion in the memo is a good one: abstract the existing DNS away one more layer. All the roots have to play nicely together. ICANN doesn't get to introduce.biz because someone else already has. The thus-far successful first-come, first-served policy would dictate who gets a new.TLD just as it has dictated who gets SLD.com.
It's a simple solution. The memos (which are far from being official IETF positions) are needed because name issuance has become a business. A very, very big business. Tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars can be made -- if the artificial scarcity of domain names is maintained. ICANN has/had a public trust: to administer the root domain fairly. They have perverted that into a profit-making venture. They have, not to put too fine a point on it, forfeited their privilege as the ultimate arbiters of domain naming. The Virtual Inclusive Root proposal of these memos sidesteps ICANN.
Mr. Higgs has written a very clear pair of documents that deserve to be taken seriously, and to have their content codified into one or more RFCs requiring root solvers to treat other root solvers as peers. This is a problem that will have to be engineered away, presenting the US government with a _fait accompli_. The moneyed interests that have hijacked ICANN will never permit foreigners and weirdos to horn in on their cash train through legislative action and the US government will never permit other nations to have an equal say in such legislative action. The IETF way has always been "rough consensus and running code". Now more than ever, we need that.
I remember when the Linux kernel introduced modules and in the race to out-module one another, a lot of newbies rebuilt their kernels with every single filesystem as a module. Ahh, those were the days...
Actually, a number of technologies relevant to nuclear weapons were patented prior to and during the Manhattan Project. For some reason, Mr. Stalin failed to adhere to such Intellectual Property law as might have existed at that time. Now that I think about it, I can't imagine a notion more antithetical to the Communist Manifesto than intellectual "property".
Slashdot Mirror
Because the big content creation companies bought the laws. It really is that simple. Through the system of soft money and campaign contributions, bribery -- for I shall forthwith commit myself to the practice of calling a spade a spade -- is an established part of "the system", a filthy and disgusting act that all acknowledge and few resist. If you dislike the DMCA, if you _really_ want to see it gone, there is exactly one thing you can do: raise more money than the IP industry and buy its repeal.
Yes, I _have_ lost all faith. Why do you ask?
I hope you don't think you're going to see a decrease in your tuition due to this; surely a college student has enough experience with how the world works than that.
(And, not intended to be flamebait or anything, but if you _are_ a college student, let me suggest that you invest some of your anticipated financial windfall in a dictionary and spend some time learning to spell words like "benefit".)
The DMCA did not necessarily pass unanimously. It passed on a voice vote, meaning the "Ayes" were louder than the "Nays" and no record exists of who voted for or against. Of all the things I'd change about the way the houses of Congress do business, the single most important thing is the elimination of the voice vote -- on every matter, no matter how trivial, there should be a full and complete accounting by name and district/state of the fors, the againsts, the abstentions, and the absents.
Sure, it'd slow things down a lot, but what's more important: that Congress do a lot of stuff, or that the public be able to determine how any given representative voted?
Of course, you could argue that his company's product didn't coexist with Windows so much as it provided a functionality that only a few people needed...until the Web came, and then everyone needed it, Microsoft folded it into Windows, and Trumpet was thrown out like a sorority girl the morning after a good party.
"[T]he Internet is as public as Grand Central Station, or Central Park. People should have no reasonable expectation of privacy on the internet."
That depends on what you mean by "reasonable expectation of privacy." I am well aware that when I go to a public area such as Grand Central Station that I might been observed by people who know me or people who don't, and that I might or might not be aware of it.
However, I do not consider it likely that someone who knows nearly everything about me will track where I go in Grand Central Station, what I do there, how long I take to do it, whether I do it alone, and so forth -- and I damn sure don't consider it likely that this mysterious individual about whom I will know almost nothing will have the ability and the desire to sell what he has learned about me to a third party so that that third party may increase what _it_ knows about me. Some people think that way, but in general we mock and deride them for being paranoid. Yet on the Web, we mutely accept such a state of affairs and often mistakenly tell people that such is no different from our daily life.
The legal phrase "reasonable expectation of privacy" is like "shadows and penumbras" -- it gives the lawyers and the IANALs something to quote and sound very wise but it doesn't _mean_ anything other than what the judge of the moment thinks it means. That's not a solid legal footing for anything. And with technology far outpacing our legal system, perhaps even this shifting-sand legal foundation should be revisited.
If I may address your initial point, that you are satisfied with moderate advertising in exchange for some surrender of your personal privacy, I don't think that many would disagree. However, the Web and indeed any purchase that involves either plastic or corporations or both will not permit that bargain. They _demand_ that you surrender everything about yourself (and they will fill in the gaps by "sharing information" with their "partners" to "serve you better") and they then bombard you with promotional materials that have only the most tenuous connection to your purchasing interests. And yet people continue to happily accept that, in exchange for a nickel off here or a rebate coupon there -- and these people are fouling it up for the rest of us who _don't_ share your opinion that a little marketing is worth a little privacy. When I buy groceries, I have to fight off the "Frequent shopper card?" chirping from the clerk. When I want a thirty-cent resistor at Radio Shack I have to deal with "Home address?" from the clerk. It's time to return to the day when a business transaction consisted of a person giving money for a product, no more, no less. Keep your advertising and your targeted marketing and your insiders-only discounts. Just gimme my damn resistor, sir.
The article said that as a Kuiper Belt object, this rock must be given "a mythological name associated with creation."
May I suggest..."God"?
You don't have to give a ripe shit about science to have a basic level of scientific literacy. I'm not talking about being able to solve the infinite square well problem, but knowing things like why the sky is blue or why lizards spend so much time in the sun or what makes volcanoes or why perpetual motion machines don't work no matter what tweaks you make.
Consider the fact that nearly every newspaper in the country prints a daily horoscope. Imagine what could be taught if they had a little "Science Fact of the Day", a paragraph or three explaining, say, why the sky is blue. Most of the science that I would consider basic literacy level is really simple stuff. You don't have to be Michael Faraday to understand how a motor works and you don't have to be Albert Einstein to understand that Isaac Newton didn't "invent" gravity.
Imagine a country where people knew enough science that Slashdot didn't keep reporting on cold fusion developments to the enthusiastic approbation of half the respondents, or where people knew why it is disingenuous to talk about Chernobyl when discussing nuclear power safety in the United States. Imagine...yew-hooo-oooohh-uh-oooh.
That's a well-written and clear brief in the Bunner case -- but the EFF's repeated references to "Proctor & Gamble _v_ Bankers Trust" would be a lot more compelling if they'd bothered to make themselves aware that the company is "Procter & Gamble". One hopes that the appellate panel is less critical than I or Mr. Bunner will certainly lose -- not loose! -- his appeal.
I think you're missing the point. There are many purposes for computers in a school system.
Unrelated to the actual teaching mission, computers provide database capabilities for tracking the students' progress and special needs, if any. Grades, attendance, counselor or faculty notes, all can and should be retained electronically. Computers provide communication via messaging or email between administrators and faculty who are likely in widely-separated buildings and often widely-separated towns. They permit rapid production of mind-numbing statistics and colored charts that are so in vogue with top-level edubosses.
Within the educational mission, though, there are a lot of things computers can be used for. For the schools fortunate/large enough to offer computer-focused classes, does the operating system matter? Well, if you're learning C or C++ or Java or Python or whatever, then not really. If you're in a class teaching computer basics (what's a CPU, what's RAM, etc.) then again no. If you're in a lab and using a computer to interface with a data-taking gadget, once more we find the OS to be irrelevant. Foreign language tutorial? Electronic arithmetic flash cards?
There _is_ a role to be played by Windows, though, and you've hit on it. Students who intend to pursue clerical jobs should be exposed through their vocational classes to Windows and Office. Those, as you point out, are the standard tools and it's reasonable to expect that the students will need to know them. However, even these students should be exposed to alternative office suites on alternative operating systems to prepare them for the fact that they might end up in (for example) a Macs-only office. Exposing them to concepts that span a single product makes the difference between teaching and training.
So eliminate the whim. If you can require the company to disclose its APIs (and protocols and file formats -- mustn't forget those) then you can restrict them from releasing any product using changed APIs for some period of time following the public disclosure of the new APIs.
The comet was Hale-Bopp. I live in Los Alamos, elev. 7200 feet. If you are willing to drive for about 20 minutes, you can be 800 feet higher, in the middle of the Jemez Mountains, and quite separated from manmade lights. The night sky -- the real night sky, not the four stars and an airplane that the city-dwellers get -- is staggering. The astronomers are fighting a losing (lost?) battle, but I am glad I have seen just where we fit.
Can't believe I haven't seen this guy's name yet in this thread...
W. Richard Stevens, "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment".
Remember if you will that "element" as it applies to chemistry came into being at a time when its chemical definition was NOT in conflict with your second definition of an "irreducible constituent of a composite entity." Elements and the periodic table were scientifically established quite some time before we found out that our irreducible constituents were in fact quite reducible, to smaller bits-n-pieces that are themselves reducible. Democritus' "atom" has the same story.
Please...half a millisecond is an eternity in modern measurement technology.
Sadly, this kind of archaeology and anthropology in the United States is effectively dead -- whatever Native First Indigenous People American Indian tribe lived closest to the site of the discovery would lay claim to his remains and a wonderful find would be lost to science thanks to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act . Fire up your Google buttons and look for the sad tale of Kennewick Man...
You do understand that Emacs is no more a part of Darwin than Internet Explorer, right? You are capable of distinguishing between the operating system and applications that can run on it, right?
Running Apple software doesn't automatically grant you wisdom, knowledge, and insight any more than not running it denies you such things.
"I have, on the other hand, dealt with many companies who refuse to use GPL's software due to the restrictions it introduces, as well as the general lack of accountbility which is an integral part of most open-source licenses."
The lack of accountability? {boggle} Do the people at the many companies you've dealt with actually READ the licensing agreements on the commercial software they are paying for? Without naming names, pick any J. Random Licensing Agreement and you'll see words to the effect of "We promise nothing. We accept no responsibility. Don't be surprised if this software is utterly unfit for anything, including the task for which you are paying the license fee. Anything that happens is on your head. Now pay up, bitch."
At least when open/free software rejects accountability, it does so with a sense of "You get what you pay for." If I were paying a thousand bucks a head for {important software package critical to my business success} I'd be a little less forgiving of the "Don't call me" attitude.
It depends on what you mean by "simulating nuclear explosions". Sandia is using ASCI Red to model the effects of a nuclear blast (like how far away from a blast of X kilotons do the buildings get knocked down), but they are legally prohibited from modeling the actual reactions that occur within a nuclear device, the part we call the "physics package." Los Alamos and Livermore are using their ASCI machines to do these calculations and we need all the horsepower we can get to model the phenomena accurately enough to certify our aging stockpile without nuclear testing.
Hold on a second.
/. stories) but when there is a compelling public interest to be served by government spending, the loss of a corporation's ability or even a private individual's ability to make a profit in that arena is just too bad. Ideally, a compromise is reached wherein the public interest is served AND a sufficient profit can be made privately that the interest is served inexpensively by the most economically efficient body which competes to provide the interest.
I assume you're speaking of the US government. Among the things that government is tasked with is to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty. That means that they have a legitimate role to play in the creation of public goods. Public roads, public health, and now, public computing infrastructure. There's nothing wrong with private companies making money doing things _for_ the government, but when the work is done, the results belong to everyone. If that means that the opportunity for a person or a corporation to make money providing something which serves a public interest is lost, then so be it.
The legal fiction that corporations are "people" who pay taxes and merit governmental protection is nice and it's one which has served the economy well in the past (discussions about its present state are deferred to other
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the kind of software that I'd expect the government to fund is critical infrastructure: BIND, TCP/IP, and so forth. And that kind of software should be made available at no cost, either under a free license or by release directly into the public domain. I wouldn't expect the government to gut Intuit by releasing a free Quicken knockoff.
I disagree. If 2600 loses, it will not be because of their "hacker reputation". First Amendment cases that make it to high courts tend to be aware that it is easy to support speech we agree with. The Supreme Court and to a lesser extent, the Appellate courts have dealt firmly with laws purporting to be for our own good and they have permitted the publication of books containing bomb-making instructions. They have permitted the leafletting in municipal plazas by those who encourage the annihilation of Africans/Jews/handicapped/people who don't eat Oreos. Compared to evaluating whether the American Nazi Party can hold a parade in predominantly-Jewish Skokie, IL, the question of whether some longhaired hippie computer freak can link to computer code is...not so imposing.
It was brought up before the initial trial that Judge Kaplan had ties to the entertainment industry that by all rights should have led him to recuse himself. I do not know of any such ties within the Appellate Court.
Who gets to decide? No individual or organization with a financial stake in the decision itself.
Read the memos. Their entire point is that when it comes to domain names, (say it with me now, all you "Highlander" fans) there can be only one.
.biz TLD. Existing DNS servers that don't look to ICANN for guidance already issued a .biz TLD and it is reasonably well-populated. There's every reason to believe that problems will ensue and that the lawyers will get to make a lot of money quarreling over the rights to assmasters.biz and others.
.biz because someone else already has. The thus-far successful first-come, first-served policy would dictate who gets a new .TLD just as it has dictated who gets SLD.com.
The point is that at the end of the day, a domain name has to resolve to an IP address. If the same name resolves to two addresses depending on where you are, that's a Bad Thing. Unfortunately, that's exactly what is going to happen now that ICANN has decided to issue a
The suggestion in the memo is a good one: abstract the existing DNS away one more layer. All the roots have to play nicely together. ICANN doesn't get to introduce
It's a simple solution. The memos (which are far from being official IETF positions) are needed because name issuance has become a business. A very, very big business. Tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars can be made -- if the artificial scarcity of domain names is maintained. ICANN has/had a public trust: to administer the root domain fairly. They have perverted that into a profit-making venture. They have, not to put too fine a point on it, forfeited their privilege as the ultimate arbiters of domain naming. The Virtual Inclusive Root proposal of these memos sidesteps ICANN.
Mr. Higgs has written a very clear pair of documents that deserve to be taken seriously, and to have their content codified into one or more RFCs requiring root solvers to treat other root solvers as peers. This is a problem that will have to be engineered away, presenting the US government with a _fait accompli_. The moneyed interests that have hijacked ICANN will never permit foreigners and weirdos to horn in on their cash train through legislative action and the US government will never permit other nations to have an equal say in such legislative action. The IETF way has always been "rough consensus and running code". Now more than ever, we need that.
(Wavy flashback lines)
I remember when the Linux kernel introduced modules and in the race to out-module one another, a lot of newbies rebuilt their kernels with every single filesystem as a module. Ahh, those were the days...
Ah, but he puts more effort once into avoiding the work, so then he can avoid the work again and again and again and again and...
Actually, a number of technologies relevant to nuclear weapons were patented prior to and during the Manhattan Project. For some reason, Mr. Stalin failed to adhere to such Intellectual Property law as might have existed at that time. Now that I think about it, I can't imagine a notion more antithetical to the Communist Manifesto than intellectual "property".