In this case, the negative is more applicable, "What's not good for the goose, is not good for the gander."
Turnabout is fair play
Fair play, yes. Wise play, not always.
The fact that we have "liberal" newspapers to appeal to ideological masses is not a good thing, either for democracy or journalism in general.
The fact that the middle class is choosing to become more trusting of idealogues, less informed, less critical, and less analytical is not a good thing, either for democracy or journalism in general.
Our growing tendency in the US to subscribe uncritically to a single ideology, spanning every issue and circumstance, is destructive beyond words.
Intellectual honesty must be applied to both sides, since each one has shown blatant tendencies towards self-serving lies.
Before I start, I need to point out that any given medium's bias is not inherently bad. If they post it prominently on their figurative barber pole, then readers can accommodate that bias in their news processing. However, if an organization cloaks their bias in a "fair and balanced" mantra, that's simply dishonest, deceitful and damaging to consumers. I pick on FauxNews, but the same criticism applies throughout the ideological spectrum. If you give us a biased view, we need transparency.
I'm not surprised that the circulation of most newspapers is going down.
No one is.
What is happening is that there are too many liberal reporters and editors chasing after too few liberal readers. It isn't that anyone is intentionally "punishing" these papers, rather this is simply supply and demand. The invisible hand strikes again. There is less demand for liberal news and more demand for conservative news.
I doubt you're even in the ballpark. The circulation shift is not rooted, or even closely related to political ideology. The drop in newspaper circulation follows an blatant trend in media consumption. In the late 20th century, a literate middle class would regularly consume complex stories spanning multiple columns, pages and even days. Now the same demographic prefers to nibble at vacuous soundbites or content-free crawls, often fully satisfied with lead paragraphs masquarading as full reports.
In addition, there is little a print newspaper can do to compete with the immediacy of modern news. TV and internet news is now a multi-channel 24-hour flood of new, often dramatic, but consistently incomplete coverage.
Returning to ideology, I would say that the conservative talking point media aptly capitalizes on this new media consumption model. As a niche, the conservative pundits usually program to it, and they usually do so quite well. That's not a compliment.
Case in point,
Case in counterpoint. They don't come more conservative than the WSJ. But, congruent to my point, the WSJ is densely packed with content.
the circulation boom currently being enjoyed by the Washington Times:
The Times appears to have misrepresented the Wash. Post numbers a bit.This third-party resource shows different numbers. Kudos, though, to the Times for their creativity. Gotta love them for the spin that rising to 1/10 the circulation of their rival paper is a "win". Cookin' with gas now, they are.
Another example is Fox news,
--who pioneered the content-free shout-down political hours, with more drama then depth. It does not surprise me that sheeple get dazzled by FauxNews more than the others. Stewart on (the CNN show) Crossfire was frighteningly on point regarding the damage this programming genre does to our democratic republic.
The premiere liberal radio network, Air America, is also doing badly. In Washington DC its listener share is actually so low that it can't even be detected according to the Arbitron rating service:
And by contrast, when Fox entered TV back in the late '80s, they hit the market nose to nose with the big three, right? No? It took a decade for them to build market share? The hell you say! Perhaps this is normal?! Get OUT!
The issue here is not one of technology, but ideology. This country is, day by day, moving further and further away from the left and closer to the right
As evidenced by the administration's raging popularity right now. I'm stuck between, "Prove it with numbers," and, "You wish," as responses. Hell, why choose? Seriously though, show me the data to support this.
A conservative person is not going to choose news presented with a liberal bent to it when the same information is available with a conservative bent.
I agree with you that there's a relatively large clue void in this whole discussion, but...
Being a tier 1 means, essentially, HAVING NO DEFAULT ROUTES....is wrong too. I work for a regional service provider, we have no default route, and we're not--by any stretch--a tier 1.
Tier "X" is just a marketing droid term and is technically meaningless. The networks popularly described as tier 1 DON'T BUY TRANSIT SERVICES from other networks. Transit services can be defined as a service where the "transit provider" agrees to:
1) Advertise routes learned from all peers and other transit customers to the transit customer.
2) Advertise routes learned from the transit customer to all peers and other transit customers.
3) Carry transit traffic based on those routing agreements.
Instead, "tier 1's" engage in "settlement free peering" with networks whom they're reasonably sure they will share an equitable traffic load. This also means they agree NOT to share non-transit (e.g. peer) routes and traffic with other peers.
You make deals with all the other tier 1 providers for direct connections at various places around the country and, if you can't colocate with a particular tier 1 in a particular geographic location, you pay another provider for transit from you to that tier 1.
Again, not as clue-rich as you probably intended. You're confusing paying for "transport" with paying for "transit". Colocation and geography is coincidental to peering or transit agreements.
We, for example, have a transit agreement with a provider one suite away from one of our POPs. In contrast, at one point we peered with more than 70 networks over a long haul OC3 to a midwestern NAP several hundreds of miles from us. We pay that transit provider nothing to transport an OC12 between rooms (because we pulled the fiber), but we paid a transport provider a significant amount for the OC3.
On the other hand, we do pay the transit provider for routing and bandwidth, but nothing to any of the peers we meet over the OC3. See?
Being at the top of the pyramid, there's no default route you can hand packets off to when one of your connections fails - because that would mean somebody else was providing you with a free lunch.
Step away from the default route stuff and you've pretty much got it. Peers don't give away transit is the moral to the story.
Of course, these guys are constantly squabbling ("we're bigger than you, so you should be paying us for the privilege")
Peering with a given sized network is a complex proposition. If you peer with someone who you could/should be selling transit, you've set a precedent for all other similar size networks to say "me too" and your transit revenue goes dry. For years we sold transit to a metro ISP who kept pushing peering as an option. We politely declined due to the above.
but, since disconnecting affects both peers' customers, it's really cutting off your nose to spite your face.
No. Cogent peers with many, many networks and buys partial transit from one, Verio.
The way peering works is:
1. Peers will propogate transit (paying) routes to everyone (other transit customers and all peers).
2. Peers will propogate routes learned from peers to transit customers. d
3. Peers DO NOT propogate routes learned from any direct peer to OTHER direct peers.
It was _rule number three_ that prevented networks single-homed to Cogent to be unreachable from networks single-homed to L(3) and vice versa.
There were many small and large networks, including other "tier 1's" that peered with both networks (or purchased transit from them) who could have provided transit to keep those single-homed Cogent/L(3) folks connected, but they didn't. Why?
Because neither Cogent or L(3) was paying them to do so--and carrying that much traffic is not cheap, even for the largest providers.
Disclaimer: I'm not a "freemarketsrulefreemarketsrulefreemarketsrule" neocon freak, and I'm not defending the GPs argument *at all*.
But your analogy sucks because the size comparisons are wrong. If L(3) == Sprint, Cogent == MacleodUSA, not Cogent == MCI.
Using Sprint & MacleodUSA as an example, they are not required by regulation to exchange minutes of use or maintain any business relationship unless some they have a negotiated a contract. And they may terminate any such agreement, to either one's advantage unless some special circumstances apply. And, in my experience, those circumstances apply more to accounting than actual traffic exchange.
Unless they are 100% fully compliant with the existing public "I"nternet namespace (i.e. no non-ICANN gTLDs and all ICANN namespace intact), alternative roots will corrupt their users' namespace and cause horrendous resolution problems, outright failures, and phishing/fraud nightmares.
In otherwords, ORSN is a reasonable alternative if you're bent on one, as they fully respect the existing namespace. But the others are utter lunacy if your purpose is to be present on, do business on, or even just surf the public "I"nternet.
We all must have one root naming authority and we all must have unique public-facing numbers, if we want to communicate with each other reliably and securely.
We can absolutely, vigorously, and freely debate ad nauseum who "the" authority will be to control "the" namespace and "the" numberspace. But, in the end, we all must agree on one authority, and there is no debating that.
The medium and its applications simply require it.
the U.N wants to impose a "user" tax, and God knows what else...
this is a money grab...
You're partially right.
But you've got the picture bass-ackwards. ICANN is charging a US$50K application fee for new gTLDs, and charging registries worldwide US$2 per name per year. But those registries have no say in ICANN policies...
This is a "non-profit" corporation overseen by the US government (Dept. of Commerce), too. So is it surpising that the fees smack of "taxation without representation" to many registrars outside the US? Not exactly.
Remember our country's history with unfair taxation? How can we be surprised by foreign registries pushing for multilateral control?
if it ain't broke, don't fix it...
Clearly, many feel that there's something to fix...
Anyone who argues pursuing "self-interest" is somehow bad is just plain crazy
There's many ways to pursue self-interest, and some of them are indeed wrong. Is ICANN an example? I don't care enough to think it through, frankly.
The internet came from research developed by the U.S. Department of Defence.
Not entirely. Yes, the DoD Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) headed the DARPA initiatives that lead to the creation of the TCP/IP protocol suite. The head of IPTO, J.C.R. Licklider, hired Robert Khan from Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) to lead the ARPANET project in 1972. When Khan found that architecture incompatibilities made it impossible to internetwork ARPANET with other packet network projects, he started exploring a solution.
Note that the Stanford researcher Khan recruited to lead the development of what became the TCP/IP suite, Vince Cerf, heavily credits the *French* CYCLADES network, created by Hubert Zimmerman and Louis Pouzin, as a technical foundation for TCP/IP. Ooh, that's gotta hurt your neocon pride a bit, eh?
The DARPA TCP/IP team (headed by Cerf) was only one of the three original concurrent TCP/IP development groups. The other two teams were headed by Ray Tomlinson of BBN, and Peter Kirstein of University College London (UK). At the IPTO, Khan played an important part in coordinating these efforts, and in 1977 Cerf unveiled the first TCP/IP demo. DARPA didn't adopt TCP/IP as its primary internetwork stack until 1983 or 1984, if I recall.
DARPA wanted a way to connect it's research facilities and created a blend of computers and phone lines to do it.
What utter nonsense! Cerf designed the upper-layer TCP/IP suite, which he implemented in software on otherwise standard computers of the day. The underlying physical LAN/WAN and datalink protocols that DARPA used were also established already by others.
If you want to talk about phone lines, Alexander Bell, the father of modern telephony was born a Scot educated in the UK, lived in Canada when he invented the modern telephone, and didn't move to the US until later.
Then the technology was released to the public for everyones use.
Hold up there, my friend. First, in 1983-84, MILNET split from ARPANET and DARPA passed the research torch to the National Science Foundation (NSF), because our beloved military elected to stop funding additional Internet projects. Oddly enough, the NSF, as you know, is a frequent target for neocon ire. Funny, eh?
And, yes, it was the then Sen. Al Gore (D) that worked very, very hard on key budget legislation to keep NSFNet growth and commercial fiber optic research going. That's how he "took initiative in creating the Internet." So now we can put that favorite neocon talking point to rest, what say?
Also in about 1983, USC researcher Jon Postel created the DNS protocol and then went on to operate the precursor to ICANN and IANA to maintain the root namespace and address space. He also has his name on several hundred more protocol and standard RFCs.
By the late 1980s, The NSFNet backbone connected universities and private researchers to regional networks with an increasing commercial presense. Additionally, commercial ISPs started emerging nationally and internationally. By 1994, larger commercial networks overtook the NSFNet backbone in size and connectivity. Eventually, commercial access eroded the NSFNet "research-only" mandate so badly that NSF opened private access to their backbone, in April of 1995.
It was also in 1989 that the *British* Tim Berners-Lee working at CERN (a *Europian* Lab) capitalized on DNS and TCP/IP to create the URL, HTML and HTTP protocols, which he then implemented in a "browser" called--drum roll--WorldWideWeb. There are many, many others who were born and educated outside the US whose names appear on many RFCs and drive many Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups.
Finally, note that in 1997, an engineer born and educated in India founded Juniper Networks, a company that rivals Cisco Systems as a backbone router vendor. In fact, I can say from extensive experience, Juniper is superior for most core routing applications.
Next time, please don't bring an AM-radio talking-point knife to an Internet history gunfight.
What part(s) of the Internet did the US invent, specifically? Just curious.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
Two things:
I meant ".., was a ubiquitous database..." in my last post. Careless typing.
And I thought of one more very good one: I believe Sabre, the air travel reservation system, predated the Interweb, but is now the backoffice engine for most travel booking sites.
Politicians don't give anybody who isn't a direct voter or campaign contributer the time of day
I think the truth is somewhat less binary than that. Politicians, to my observation, will generally give the time of day to the two entities you listed, plus anyone who can conceivably help advance some agenda dear to their hearts. This agenda need not be, and rarely is, limited to retaining votes or garnering compaign contributions. Unfortunately, it is more commonly a hidden agenda, and any congruence to the mainstream public's welfare is usually coincidental at best.
Back to point, I would argue that most politicians love/hate affair with the media is an excellent example of a nonvoting, noncontributing relationship.
Regardless, we seem to be in agreement that politicians generally suck, so we're really only debating about the amount of air we feel rushing past our heads.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
The Lexis/Nexis database, a ubiquitous research tool by the late '80s.
Setting aside the lamenting of corruption and bribery that you and other posters have articulated well, I'd like to point out that there is a more realistic, though somewhat less treacherous, interpretiation of:
"Similar wireless projects have been stymied in major metropolitan areas by telephone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at discouraging such competition."
Perhaps the telephone and cable companies "poured money" into hiring an army of lobbies, who kept much of that money for themselves, but spent the remainder on preparing copious reams of industry-serving reports and statements, that were then thrust under the noses of every politician that would give them the time of day.
Again, this is slightly more realistic and minutely less evil than rampant public bribery, albeit very minutely.
I didn't think that the plain algebra "=" notation embodied the notion of limits.
It doesn't need to. The flaw in your thinking is in the "as n approaches infinity". It's not "approaching" infinity, it IS infinity, so the series sum can't be limited to something less than one.
0.999 repeating is just an alternate notation for "1". Here's another way of understanding the notation:
Hm. I hope this post doesn't knock me off your "friends" list...:)
Yes but try explaining what DNS actualy is and does; how it is not the same as the Interweb; and how we all use a common set of root servers by convention and for convenience rather than necessity to your average moron off the street..
Actually, we use a common set of root servers so that any given DNS request for a "public" host address will result in the same response for every requestor, regardless of what host (and what network) originated the request. The public namespace needs to be authorative for public addresses, period. We can't have a namespace where you can request/. and I can request/. but you resolve to a useful news site, while I'm stuck with this one.:)
The e-commerce fraud and phishing opportunities abound in inconsistent namespaces.
If someone wants to populate their machine's "hosts" file or run named locally with gibberish TLDs, that's fine as long as it's not configured to answer public DNS requests authoritatively. Hell, have your machine reply with/.'s address when you surf to monkeybutts.arefunny for all it matters publicly. Just don't configure a publicly reachable root server with contradictory or inconsistencies with the ICANN root servers.
The beauty of the system is that the UN, the EU or any other set of nepotistic kleptomaniacs can declare themselves the lords of the Internet if they want to; I'll just keep using the root zone hints file supplied by ISC BIND, thank you very much.
As long as there is one set of relatively apolitical, geographically diverse, compitently administered, and fully authoritative roots, I don't much care who publishes the root zone--ICANN or whoever.
That no single organization runs it? That destroying pieces of it will not disrupt the rest?
No. The point of the internet deliver a popular and useful communicatoins service to consumers in various countries.
On a technical level, it was built by interconnecting otherwise autonomous networks together using standard protocols. Those standard protocols were designed to be flexible enough to accommodate the complete failure of one or more autonomous systems without fully disrupting other still reachable autonomous systems.
Why is it necessary that any one organization "control the Internet"? Isn't that exactly not the point of its design?
Well. DNS was created so there was some human-readable option to referring to each network node by a globally unique and reachable IP address. DNS needs to be globally authoritative so that when you type/. and I type/. each of us gets served the same content. Otherwise, you could end up somewhere else getting useful news, while I languish here.
One authority has to decide what the valid list of TLDs are, so that we all work off the same list. This debate is over who gets that authority, and I have little care who it is as long as we all agree on it eventually.
We assign IP addresses and domain names in Russia? That's funny. I was under the impression that responsibility was delegated to regional IP and domain name registries.
ARIN, RIPE, APNIC and the other regionals get their IP assignments from IANA, an organization controlled by ICANN. ICANN is a non-profit US corporation that also controls the DNS root network.
Couched in the Cold War climate, winning (being first to the moon), was the top priority, with mission budget and mission safety being somewhat lower down the list.
Now:
"We can spend $X over the next Y years to do this, unless we don't get funded. Of course, we'll pull the plug on the whole thing if the fifth redundant CPU on the autocrapper exceeds 25% utilization in computerized mission simulations. You don't want a constipated commander flying these things."
Here's a whopping problem with your analogy: it sucks.
Your "friend" was immersing himself in self-medication without medical training or valid medical purpose. Thus he compounded the inherent danger of the substances by using them with a junky's touch. On the other hand, doctors administer medication that is just as dangerously addictive and potentially lethal every single day in hospitals worldwide. And wise folks appreciate them for it.
Likewise, modern nuclear reactors are designed, built, operated and maintained by people of considerable skill. As opposed to some strung-out junky you shared a few bongs with back in school.
I know you're being rhetorical, but the US Constitution and other documents of the time do not lack clarity on this issue. Within the context of this discussion, those values can be summarized to, "A just government requires citizen input and *oversight*, and that requires individual liberty for citizens. Thus individual liberty is a core value."
Oh yeah, Life liberty and pursuit of happiness? All three are open to interpretation including life:)
Deconstructing your own interpretation of these values was a pointless excersize. Your interpretation and mine are apparently quite different, and I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince you that mine is more accurate. Likewise, you wasted much time and effort just to frame this simple question, "Since our implementation of our core values is not absolutely pure, how can we judge other folks' core values?"
And that's got an easy answer. We can judge the Chinese Government's values because regardless of any flawed present or past implementation, our founding values honor and support every human being's inalienable right to create their own destiny, and the Chinese government simply doesn't.
Finally, though others have already tried and apparently failed to educate you on one simple, fatal flaw in your argument, I must also try.
If citizen's are, by force, not allowed to voice their will, how can you be at all sure that a government is truly representing those citizens' will or their "culture values"? Explain please, and be specific about how you would know the government is not engaging purely in self-preservation at the cost of its citizens' welfare, culture, and humanity.
Specifically, explain to us how Tibetan culture is represented by the current Chinese government. I'm sure the Dalai Lama will be very interested to hear your explanation indeed.
The GP merely points out that your values are clearly out of whack with, actually diametricly opposing, the founding principles of the nation you were born to.
Oh, and it's free "speech", and for now it's still ahead on points. That will change if the profoundly ignorant and myopic keep letting it erode. Which one of those are you?
I didn't say we "should" do anything. I said we *shouldn't* set the speedlimit using an "upper-bound" technique, and offered a reasonable option to your comment that low speed limits are solely revenue motivated.
I'm all for applying sound engineering and analysis to any situation, and frankly, I believe speed limits are applied that way often.
Or perhaps its set low to accommodate the lowest common denominator of driver, car, road and weather conditions/quality.
It would be a bad idea to set speed limits according to what a sober, trained, and focused driver can safely obtain in a mechanically flawless exotic supercar in ideal road, weather and traffic conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
What's good for the goose is good for the gander
In this case, the negative is more applicable, "What's not good for the goose, is not good for the gander."
Turnabout is fair play
Fair play, yes. Wise play, not always.
The fact that we have "liberal" newspapers to appeal to ideological masses is not a good thing, either for democracy or journalism in general.
The fact that the middle class is choosing to become more trusting of idealogues, less informed, less critical, and less analytical is not a good thing, either for democracy or journalism in general.
Our growing tendency in the US to subscribe uncritically to a single ideology, spanning every issue and circumstance, is destructive beyond words.
Intellectual honesty must be applied to both sides, since each one has shown blatant tendencies towards self-serving lies.
Before I start, I need to point out that any given medium's bias is not inherently bad. If they post it prominently on their figurative barber pole, then readers can accommodate that bias in their news processing. However, if an organization cloaks their bias in a "fair and balanced" mantra, that's simply dishonest, deceitful and damaging to consumers. I pick on FauxNews, but the same criticism applies throughout the ideological spectrum. If you give us a biased view, we need transparency.
I'm not surprised that the circulation of most newspapers is going down.
No one is.
What is happening is that there are too many liberal reporters and editors chasing after too few liberal readers. It isn't that anyone is intentionally "punishing" these papers, rather this is simply supply and demand. The invisible hand strikes again. There is less demand for liberal news and more demand for conservative news.
I doubt you're even in the ballpark. The circulation shift is not rooted, or even closely related to political ideology. The drop in newspaper circulation follows an blatant trend in media consumption. In the late 20th century, a literate middle class would regularly consume complex stories spanning multiple columns, pages and even days. Now the same demographic prefers to nibble at vacuous soundbites or content-free crawls, often fully satisfied with lead paragraphs masquarading as full reports.
In addition, there is little a print newspaper can do to compete with the immediacy of modern news. TV and internet news is now a multi-channel 24-hour flood of new, often dramatic, but consistently incomplete coverage.
Returning to ideology, I would say that the conservative talking point media aptly capitalizes on this new media consumption model. As a niche, the conservative pundits usually program to it, and they usually do so quite well. That's not a compliment.
Case in point,
Case in counterpoint. They don't come more conservative than the WSJ. But, congruent to my point, the WSJ is densely packed with content.
the circulation boom currently being enjoyed by the Washington Times:
The Times appears to have misrepresented the Wash. Post numbers a bit.This third-party resource shows different numbers. Kudos, though, to the Times for their creativity. Gotta love them for the spin that rising to 1/10 the circulation of their rival paper is a "win". Cookin' with gas now, they are.
Another example is Fox news,
--who pioneered the content-free shout-down political hours, with more drama then depth. It does not surprise me that sheeple get dazzled by FauxNews more than the others. Stewart on (the CNN show) Crossfire was frighteningly on point regarding the damage this programming genre does to our democratic republic.
The premiere liberal radio network, Air America, is also doing badly. In Washington DC its listener share is actually so low that it can't even be detected according to the Arbitron rating service:
And by contrast, when Fox entered TV back in the late '80s, they hit the market nose to nose with the big three, right? No? It took a decade for them to build market share? The hell you say! Perhaps this is normal?! Get OUT!
The issue here is not one of technology, but ideology. This country is, day by day, moving further and further away from the left and closer to the right
As evidenced by the administration's raging popularity right now. I'm stuck between, "Prove it with numbers," and, "You wish," as responses. Hell, why choose? Seriously though, show me the data to support this.
A conservative person is not going to choose news presented with a liberal bent to it when the same information is available with a conservative bent.
This reminds me
I agree with you that there's a relatively large clue void in this whole discussion, but...
...is wrong too. I work for a regional service provider, we have no default route, and we're not--by any stretch--a tier 1.
Being a tier 1 means, essentially, HAVING NO DEFAULT ROUTES.
Tier "X" is just a marketing droid term and is technically meaningless. The networks popularly described as tier 1 DON'T BUY TRANSIT SERVICES from other networks. Transit services can be defined as a service where the "transit provider" agrees to:
1) Advertise routes learned from all peers and other transit customers to the transit customer.
2) Advertise routes learned from the transit customer to all peers and other transit customers.
3) Carry transit traffic based on those routing agreements.
Instead, "tier 1's" engage in "settlement free peering" with networks whom they're reasonably sure they will share an equitable traffic load. This also means they agree NOT to share non-transit (e.g. peer) routes and traffic with other peers.
You make deals with all the other tier 1 providers for direct connections at various places around the country and, if you can't colocate with a particular tier 1 in a particular geographic location, you pay another provider for transit from you to that tier 1.
Again, not as clue-rich as you probably intended. You're confusing paying for "transport" with paying for "transit". Colocation and geography is coincidental to peering or transit agreements.
We, for example, have a transit agreement with a provider one suite away from one of our POPs. In contrast, at one point we peered with more than 70 networks over a long haul OC3 to a midwestern NAP several hundreds of miles from us. We pay that transit provider nothing to transport an OC12 between rooms (because we pulled the fiber), but we paid a transport provider a significant amount for the OC3.
On the other hand, we do pay the transit provider for routing and bandwidth, but nothing to any of the peers we meet over the OC3. See?
Being at the top of the pyramid, there's no default route you can hand packets off to when one of your connections fails - because that would mean somebody else was providing you with a free lunch.
Step away from the default route stuff and you've pretty much got it. Peers don't give away transit is the moral to the story.
Of course, these guys are constantly squabbling ("we're bigger than you, so you should be paying us for the privilege")
Peering with a given sized network is a complex proposition. If you peer with someone who you could/should be selling transit, you've set a precedent for all other similar size networks to say "me too" and your transit revenue goes dry. For years we sold transit to a metro ISP who kept pushing peering as an option. We politely declined due to the above.
but, since disconnecting affects both peers' customers, it's really cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Not nearly in all cases.
FYI
http://www.fixedorbit.com/AS/0/AS174.htm
No. Cogent peers with many, many networks and buys partial transit from one, Verio.
The way peering works is:
1. Peers will propogate transit (paying) routes to everyone (other transit customers and all peers).
2. Peers will propogate routes learned from peers to transit customers.
d
3. Peers DO NOT propogate routes learned from any direct peer to OTHER direct peers.
It was _rule number three_ that prevented networks single-homed to Cogent to be unreachable from networks single-homed to L(3) and vice versa.
There were many small and large networks, including other "tier 1's" that peered with both networks (or purchased transit from them) who could have provided transit to keep those single-homed Cogent/L(3) folks connected, but they didn't. Why?
Because neither Cogent or L(3) was paying them to do so--and carrying that much traffic is not cheap, even for the largest providers.
Disclaimer: I'm not a "freemarketsrulefreemarketsrulefreemarketsrule" neocon freak, and I'm not defending the GPs argument *at all*.
But your analogy sucks because the size comparisons are wrong. If L(3) == Sprint, Cogent == MacleodUSA, not Cogent == MCI.
Using Sprint & MacleodUSA as an example, they are not required by regulation to exchange minutes of use or maintain any business relationship unless some they have a negotiated a contract. And they may terminate any such agreement, to either one's advantage unless some special circumstances apply. And, in my experience, those circumstances apply more to accounting than actual traffic exchange.
It seems the US lawmakers don't understand the "we all" in "we all must agree on one authority".
:^/
Seems so.
Unless they are 100% fully compliant with the existing public "I"nternet namespace (i.e. no non-ICANN gTLDs and all ICANN namespace intact), alternative roots will corrupt their users' namespace and cause horrendous resolution problems, outright failures, and phishing/fraud nightmares.
In otherwords, ORSN is a reasonable alternative if you're bent on one, as they fully respect the existing namespace. But the others are utter lunacy if your purpose is to be present on, do business on, or even just surf the public "I"nternet.
We all must have one root naming authority and we all must have unique public-facing numbers, if we want to communicate with each other reliably and securely.
We can absolutely, vigorously, and freely debate ad nauseum who "the" authority will be to control "the" namespace and "the" numberspace. But, in the end, we all must agree on one authority, and there is no debating that.
The medium and its applications simply require it.
follow the money...
the U.N wants to impose a "user" tax, and God knows what else...
this is a money grab...
You're partially right.
But you've got the picture bass-ackwards. ICANN is charging a US$50K application fee for new gTLDs, and charging registries worldwide US$2 per name per year. But those registries have no say in ICANN policies...
This is a "non-profit" corporation overseen by the US government (Dept. of Commerce), too. So is it surpising that the fees smack of "taxation without representation" to many registrars outside the US? Not exactly.
Remember our country's history with unfair taxation? How can we be surprised by foreign registries pushing for multilateral control?
if it ain't broke, don't fix it...
Clearly, many feel that there's something to fix...
Anyone who argues pursuing "self-interest" is somehow bad is just plain crazy
There's many ways to pursue self-interest, and some of them are indeed wrong. Is ICANN an example? I don't care enough to think it through, frankly.
The internet came from research developed by the U.S. Department of Defence.
Not entirely. Yes, the DoD Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) headed the DARPA initiatives that lead to the creation of the TCP/IP protocol suite. The head of IPTO, J.C.R. Licklider, hired Robert Khan from Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) to lead the ARPANET project in 1972. When Khan found that architecture incompatibilities made it impossible to internetwork ARPANET with other packet network projects, he started exploring a solution.
Note that the Stanford researcher Khan recruited to lead the development of what became the TCP/IP suite, Vince Cerf, heavily credits the *French* CYCLADES network, created by Hubert Zimmerman and Louis Pouzin, as a technical foundation for TCP/IP. Ooh, that's gotta hurt your neocon pride a bit, eh?
The DARPA TCP/IP team (headed by Cerf) was only one of the three original concurrent TCP/IP development groups. The other two teams were headed by Ray Tomlinson of BBN, and Peter Kirstein of University College London (UK). At the IPTO, Khan played an important part in coordinating these efforts, and in 1977 Cerf unveiled the first TCP/IP demo. DARPA didn't adopt TCP/IP as its primary internetwork stack until 1983 or 1984, if I recall.
DARPA wanted a way to connect it's research facilities and created a blend of computers and phone lines to do it.
What utter nonsense! Cerf designed the upper-layer TCP/IP suite, which he implemented in software on otherwise standard computers of the day. The underlying physical LAN/WAN and datalink protocols that DARPA used were also established already by others.
If you want to talk about phone lines, Alexander Bell, the father of modern telephony was born a Scot educated in the UK, lived in Canada when he invented the modern telephone, and didn't move to the US until later.
Then the technology was released to the public for everyones use.
Hold up there, my friend. First, in 1983-84, MILNET split from ARPANET and DARPA passed the research torch to the National Science Foundation (NSF), because our beloved military elected to stop funding additional Internet projects. Oddly enough, the NSF, as you know, is a frequent target for neocon ire. Funny, eh?
And, yes, it was the then Sen. Al Gore (D) that worked very, very hard on key budget legislation to keep NSFNet growth and commercial fiber optic research going. That's how he "took initiative in creating the Internet." So now we can put that favorite neocon talking point to rest, what say?
Also in about 1983, USC researcher Jon Postel created the DNS protocol and then went on to operate the precursor to ICANN and IANA to maintain the root namespace and address space. He also has his name on several hundred more protocol and standard RFCs.
By the late 1980s, The NSFNet backbone connected universities and private researchers to regional networks with an increasing commercial presense. Additionally, commercial ISPs started emerging nationally and internationally. By 1994, larger commercial networks overtook the NSFNet backbone in size and connectivity. Eventually, commercial access eroded the NSFNet "research-only" mandate so badly that NSF opened private access to their backbone, in April of 1995.
It was also in 1989 that the *British* Tim Berners-Lee working at CERN (a *Europian* Lab) capitalized on DNS and TCP/IP to create the URL, HTML and HTTP protocols, which he then implemented in a "browser" called--drum roll--WorldWideWeb. There are many, many others who were born and educated outside the US whose names appear on many RFCs and drive many Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups.
Finally, note that in 1997, an engineer born and educated in India founded Juniper Networks, a company that rivals Cisco Systems as a backbone router vendor. In fact, I can say from extensive experience, Juniper is superior for most core routing applications.
Next time, please don't bring an AM-radio talking-point knife to an Internet history gunfight.
What part(s) of the Internet did the US invent, specifically? Just curious.
Two things:
I meant ".., was a ubiquitous database..." in my last post. Careless typing.
And I thought of one more very good one: I believe Sabre, the air travel reservation system, predated the Interweb, but is now the backoffice engine for most travel booking sites.
Politicians don't give anybody who isn't a direct voter or campaign contributer the time of day
I think the truth is somewhat less binary than that. Politicians, to my observation, will generally give the time of day to the two entities you listed, plus anyone who can conceivably help advance some agenda dear to their hearts. This agenda need not be, and rarely is, limited to retaining votes or garnering compaign contributions. Unfortunately, it is more commonly a hidden agenda, and any congruence to the mainstream public's welfare is usually coincidental at best.
Back to point, I would argue that most politicians love/hate affair with the media is an excellent example of a nonvoting, noncontributing relationship.
Regardless, we seem to be in agreement that politicians generally suck, so we're really only debating about the amount of air we feel rushing past our heads.
The Lexis/Nexis database, a ubiquitous research tool by the late '80s.
Setting aside the lamenting of corruption and bribery that you and other posters have articulated well, I'd like to point out that there is a more realistic, though somewhat less treacherous, interpretiation of:
"Similar wireless projects have been stymied in major metropolitan areas by telephone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at discouraging such competition."
Perhaps the telephone and cable companies "poured money" into hiring an army of lobbies, who kept much of that money for themselves, but spent the remainder on preparing copious reams of industry-serving reports and statements, that were then thrust under the noses of every politician that would give them the time of day.
Again, this is slightly more realistic and minutely less evil than rampant public bribery, albeit very minutely.
I didn't think that the plain algebra "=" notation embodied the notion of limits.
It doesn't need to. The flaw in your thinking is in the "as n approaches infinity". It's not "approaching" infinity, it IS infinity, so the series sum can't be limited to something less than one.
0.999 repeating is just an alternate notation for "1". Here's another way of understanding the notation:
1/9 = 0.1111 repeating
2/9 = 0.2222 repeating
3/9 = 0.3333 repeating
4/9 = 0.4444 repeating
.
.
.
8/9 = 0.8888 repeating
9/9 = 0.9999 repeating = 1
QED
Hm. I hope this post doesn't knock me off your "friends" list... :)
/. and I can request /. but you resolve to a useful news site, while I'm stuck with this one. :)
/.'s address when you surf to monkeybutts.arefunny for all it matters publicly. Just don't configure a publicly reachable root server with contradictory or inconsistencies with the ICANN root servers.
Yes but try explaining what DNS actualy is and does; how it is not the same as the Interweb; and how we all use a common set of root servers by convention and for convenience rather than necessity to your average moron off the street..
Actually, we use a common set of root servers so that any given DNS request for a "public" host address will result in the same response for every requestor, regardless of what host (and what network) originated the request. The public namespace needs to be authorative for public addresses, period. We can't have a namespace where you can request
The e-commerce fraud and phishing opportunities abound in inconsistent namespaces.
If someone wants to populate their machine's "hosts" file or run named locally with gibberish TLDs, that's fine as long as it's not configured to answer public DNS requests authoritatively. Hell, have your machine reply with
The beauty of the system is that the UN, the EU or any other set of nepotistic kleptomaniacs can declare themselves the lords of the Internet if they want to; I'll just keep using the root zone hints file supplied by ISC BIND, thank you very much.
As long as there is one set of relatively apolitical, geographically diverse, compitently administered, and fully authoritative roots, I don't much care who publishes the root zone--ICANN or whoever.
That no single organization runs it? That destroying pieces of it will not disrupt the rest?
/. and I type /. each of us gets served the same content. Otherwise, you could end up somewhere else getting useful news, while I languish here.
No. The point of the internet deliver a popular and useful communicatoins service to consumers in various countries.
On a technical level, it was built by interconnecting otherwise autonomous networks together using standard protocols. Those standard protocols were designed to be flexible enough to accommodate the complete failure of one or more autonomous systems without fully disrupting other still reachable autonomous systems.
Why is it necessary that any one organization "control the Internet"? Isn't that exactly not the point of its design?
Well. DNS was created so there was some human-readable option to referring to each network node by a globally unique and reachable IP address. DNS needs to be globally authoritative so that when you type
One authority has to decide what the valid list of TLDs are, so that we all work off the same list. This debate is over who gets that authority, and I have little care who it is as long as we all agree on it eventually.
We assign IP addresses and domain names in Russia? That's funny. I was under the impression that responsibility was delegated to regional IP and domain name registries.
ARIN, RIPE, APNIC and the other regionals get their IP assignments from IANA, an organization controlled by ICANN. ICANN is a non-profit US corporation that also controls the DNS root network.
Then:
Couched in the Cold War climate, winning (being first to the moon), was the top priority, with mission budget and mission safety being somewhat lower down the list.
Now:
"We can spend $X over the next Y years to do this, unless we don't get funded. Of course, we'll pull the plug on the whole thing if the fifth redundant CPU on the autocrapper exceeds 25% utilization in computerized mission simulations. You don't want a constipated commander flying these things."
Here's a whopping problem with your analogy: it sucks.
Your "friend" was immersing himself in self-medication without medical training or valid medical purpose. Thus he compounded the inherent danger of the substances by using them with a junky's touch. On the other hand, doctors administer medication that is just as dangerously addictive and potentially lethal every single day in hospitals worldwide. And wise folks appreciate them for it.
Likewise, modern nuclear reactors are designed, built, operated and maintained by people of considerable skill. As opposed to some strung-out junky you shared a few bongs with back in school.
Hmm what are those values again?
:)
I know you're being rhetorical, but the US Constitution and other documents of the time do not lack clarity on this issue. Within the context of this discussion, those values can be summarized to, "A just government requires citizen input and *oversight*, and that requires individual liberty for citizens. Thus individual liberty is a core value."
Oh yeah, Life liberty and pursuit of happiness? All three are open to interpretation including life
Deconstructing your own interpretation of these values was a pointless excersize. Your interpretation and mine are apparently quite different, and I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince you that mine is more accurate. Likewise, you wasted much time and effort just to frame this simple question, "Since our implementation of our core values is not absolutely pure, how can we judge other folks' core values?"
And that's got an easy answer. We can judge the Chinese Government's values because regardless of any flawed present or past implementation, our founding values honor and support every human being's inalienable right to create their own destiny, and the Chinese government simply doesn't.
Finally, though others have already tried and apparently failed to educate you on one simple, fatal flaw in your argument, I must also try.
If citizen's are, by force, not allowed to voice their will, how can you be at all sure that a government is truly representing those citizens' will or their "culture values"? Explain please, and be specific about how you would know the government is not engaging purely in self-preservation at the cost of its citizens' welfare, culture, and humanity.
Specifically, explain to us how Tibetan culture is represented by the current Chinese government. I'm sure the Dalai Lama will be very interested to hear your explanation indeed.
Er, no one exiled you.
The GP merely points out that your values are clearly out of whack with, actually diametricly opposing, the founding principles of the nation you were born to.
Oh, and it's free "speech", and for now it's still ahead on points. That will change if the profoundly ignorant and myopic keep letting it erode. Which one of those are you?
I didn't say we "should" do anything. I said we *shouldn't* set the speedlimit using an "upper-bound" technique, and offered a reasonable option to your comment that low speed limits are solely revenue motivated.
I'm all for applying sound engineering and analysis to any situation, and frankly, I believe speed limits are applied that way often.
Or perhaps its set low to accommodate the lowest common denominator of driver, car, road and weather conditions/quality.
It would be a bad idea to set speed limits according to what a sober, trained, and focused driver can safely obtain in a mechanically flawless exotic supercar in ideal road, weather and traffic conditions.