So...what exactly is wrong with the current law, FISA?
Is the capability to instantly begin tapping with 72 hours to get a retroactive judicially-reviewed warrant--from a rubberstamp court no less--an insuffient solution for addressing terrorist threats?
If so, then wouldn't it be better for the executive branch to request some changes to that law than to disregard it?
I mean, shouldn't the folks who are chartered to *enforce* laws also *obey* laws? Or do the ends always justify the means?
I wanted to highlight this bit of verbal acrobatics on your part, because it's central to your spin here (and highly amusing to boot).
Well sure. You're a neocon, you love a good spin. I'd think you'd be better able to separate it from what the rest of us like to call "the truth" though.
As for rhetorical acrobatics, let me applaud your truly Olympic-class gyrations here:
It is, of course, true, as you suggest, that no Democrat has been indicted in this case -- in the narrow sense that no one of either party who received money from Mr. Abramoff has yet been indicted.
Would've been a 10.0 if you could've nailed the landing. Unfortuately, it was way too much of a stretch and you're out of the medal race.
I know you want to make folks think there's no difference between Abramoff illegally exchanging money for specific favors for his clients and those same clients making legal campaign contributions...but there just is. And, it's a very, very big difference.
even if we pretend (for the sake of argument) that this is the only political scandal which Washington has ever seen,
This strawman is stupid. No one argued that this is the only scandalous thing in DC. There are plenty of scandalous things to go around, but *this* scandal is purely a Republican--or rather, neocon--problem, and you're basically reacting as expected--clouding the issue and flinging mud to put everyone on the same dirty ground. No one believes you. Sorry.
I'd recommend against staking your credibility
Yep. I'm all about taking a neocon's advice on credibility. That's like taking an iceberg's advice on sailing the Titanic.
It would be far more realistic to admit that with the large amounts of money the congress bandies about every day, such scandals are hardly a new thing
Point being? We should just ignore it? Or we should prosecute all criminal activity in the capitol? Which is it?
(I suspect you are too young to remember the early nineties, but you might find it informative to google the names `Jim Wright' or `Dan Rostenkowski'),
First, this has to be one of the silliest rhetorical tactics in the book, "Son, you're probably to young to know this, but..." Arguing ad hominem is, if I may guess, probably the first chapter in the neocon playbook so don't color me surprised.
Second, it's also a red herring with no bearing on the Abramoff scandal.
Finally, if any Dem is guilty of an Abramoff-related crime, I personally hope they get a cell in the same tennis club. Evidence is not favoring that scenario though. Too bad for you.
The voter gets the paper, looks at the human readable output to verify that his vote was correctly recorded, and drops the paper into a ballot box on his way out...
The election officials keep the paper ballots, machine printed recepts that is, so that in the event of a dispute they can be hand counted...the paper ballots get the final say in the event of a dispute.
Sorry to be argumentative, because I'd like there to be an elegant solution to this problem, but doesn't this essentially turn the electronic vote into an "[un]official" exit poll reading?
I mean, how is this an improvement over machine counted paper ballots we use today? Other than a faster preliminary count?
Also, if the papers are dropped in a ballot box, but not counted unless there is a "dispute", how do you recognize a dispute in the first place? Don't both have to be tallied and compared to discover some discrepency?
Like I said, I'd love electronic voting to work well, and I'd love an elegant and transparent auditing methodology. The devil is in these details...
As nifty as a paper trail sounds, there are problems with that too. For example, how do you verify that the votes people input are logged correctly on the printout? Bits are easy to flip, whether done on purpose, or by executing buggy code.
And do you really think that vote anonymity--an essential feature of our process--would last if people walked out of their polling place with some sort of receipt? If you can connect an identity to a vote, you can directly coerce or otherwise influence that voter with all manner of nasty tactics. No thanks.
Ok, you really don't understand what you are saying, or are intentionally trying to mislead people.
I'm sure lying is not on my otherwise long list of character flaws, and I'm confident that I can hold my own with you regarding OS X, based on this thread. So, in short, I think you're wrong again.
OSX is NOT BSD. It is using a BSD Interface to the kernel. PERIOD.
OSX is Darwin - there really is a BIG difference, and Darwin DOES NOT inherent the security and reliability of other BSD kernel interfacing variants. This is also true that FreeBSD and OpenBSD don't inherent each other's reliability or strengths. I wish people would quit confusing this.
Darwin evolved from FreeBSD, which is, in fact, BSD. The industry almost ubiquitously respects BSD, in all its variants, with regard to stability and security. I don't know why you brought up OpenBSD specifically, other than you assumed incorrectly that I'm unaware of that project's highlighted focus on security beyond that of other BSD strains.
Yes, Darwin is the interface to the MACH kernel. And?
I'm no file system expert and I have no interest in becoming one. I'm a network operator, not a server or workstation guru. I've developed for OS X, and I have taken an effort, with this discussion, to study a bit of NTFS. I still haven't found anything that moves it beyond the current default OS X file system with journalling. Honestly, you probably know better, and good for you.
I have a network to tend to, so you have a good weekend and keep those servers humming. PERIOD.:)
Freedom to use your software they way you want, the ability to fix things if you need to, the ability to make sure there's nothing hidden in the code that you may not want... These are things that should be topping that list
You're so right. Those would be very excellent benefits...if every user was also an ambitious coder with time to tweak, recompile, and test multiple complex software packages written in various compiled and interpreted languages.
Unfortunately, most users just like to, well, _use_ things that _work_for_them_ without a lot of f'ing around. So, they find a little less benefit to themselves in having the source code and a compiler at their disposal.
Instead they like the thing that simply costs them less--in money, time, headaches, whatever. Isn't that just a tragedy?
To me, Microsoft's behavior is extremely offensive and abusive.
Because they take your money at gunpoint?
If you don't like their product or how they maintain it, buy a platform that satisfies your needs better. In any case, take responsibility for the consequences of your own choices.
"But I'm not the decision-maker..." You decided to work where you work, though right?
You completely missed the point. I provided an arithmetic case example to make a simple point regarding the insufficient logical basis for your conclusion. I was showing how your "evidence" could be factual--Apple patched more than MS--but that no conclusion regarding the relative security of each operating system may be drawn without additional factual basis. In other words, no one, including you, can draw a logical conclusion from the datapoints you used to draw a conclusion. Period.
Both are fully patched, but wouldn't you question the design and safety of the boat that had 200 holes in the first place?
Maybe. But, wouldn't you agree that the nature and severity of the holes is likely to be at least as meaningul as the quantity of patches? If one boat had 200 minor to moderate leaks but its structure was consistently seaworthy, and the other boat had 50 moderate to major leaks at chronically weak spots in its hull, I'd choose to go to sea in the first boat. No question.
If you want to judge relative security based on comparing lists of patches, you *must* include severity data, including both the potential and realized impact, and the attack vectors.
I wasn't saying neither were unsafe or unpatched, but one HAD to be patched more than the other.
Wrong. The statements "One was patched more than the other," and, "One had to be patched more than the other," are not equivalent. The number of virii, worms, and other attack vectors in the wild for Windows indicates that it was patched less than it "had to be" to be secure.
TRUE - the Root abstraction for Users is a better method than what Windows Uses.
Great! I guess we're done and you've answered your own original question then...
Or not, apparently...
FALSE - Having a *nix heritage means little to NOTHING. In fact MS's NT team specifically designed NT NOT like *nix to avoid the shortcoming and security holes of the *nix model from the early 90s.
"[OS X's] UNIX heritage," and, "all *NIX implementations," are not equivalent either. BSD is pretty universally regarded as a very secure *NIX variant, as well as a extremely secure OS compared to Windows. Hence, OS X benefits from its FreeBSD underpinnings. Period. [See how annoying that is?]
This is true, this was also true of WIndows NT
You know NT. You love NT. You live NT. Fine. I get it.
This is not so much a fact...go read up...
Windows XP and OS X are the current defacto standard for PC and Mac computing, no? XP uses NTFS, which allows permission setting to the file level and encryption. OS X uses a BSD-based filesystem and CDSA to do the same things. XP Home, BTW, doesn't support encryption with NTFS, so...
And what's with XP Home and Simple File Sharing? Can't turn it off? That sucks, eh?
Refocusing now, how do you explain the 10s of thousands of exploit variants affecting Windows to the 10s of exploits affecting OS X if OS X is less secure? Answer, please.
Now, allow me a final anecdote: I just bought a ultra-cheap Dell for home use (XP Home) and set it up with an account for each family member. By default, none of the accounts even had a password. WTF? Firewalling wasn't enabled by default. W.T.F!?
Good thing I have a commercial-class firewall sitting in front of my home net.
You know what also pisses me off though? All the network-aware apps (including ipconfig.exe, ping.exe and tracert.exe) are hanging every time I run them--*except* IE, which will hum around the web just fine. But, if I boot to Safe Mode + Networking, all is well. Gyahhh!
In comparison, my Macs just f'ing worked perfectly out of the box and have never stopped. No viruses. No worms. No root-kits. No spyware beyond normal cookie crap. No wonky network problems. Nothing.
Safer? I guess, except in the past year Apple released more security and exploit fixes for OSX than Microsoft did for WindowsXP...
So again how is it a safer OS if these exploits existed in the first place?
As others have also noted, there is a disconnect in your logic here. If Apple uncovers 25 potential exploits and patches 23, while MS uncovers 50 and patches 20...well, surely you get the picture.
Apple is a _safer_ (not 100% safe) operating system than WindowsWhatever for a variety of reasons.
* It's harder to exploit because its default behaviors are more secure. * Its overall design harvests security strengths from its UNIX heritage. * Yes, its low installed base makes it a less attractive target. * BUT, so does its superior security model. ^(1)
(1) If you and a friend are running away from a charging bear, you don't have to run faster than the bear--you have to run faster than your friend. Likewise, OS X doesn't have to be 100% secure, it just has to be more secure than Windows.
In this and other posts on this article, you've stretched the bounds of logic and exagerated claims of OS X exploits. Why?
Hm. You may be right. I may actually have come to the wrong conclusion after a hasty read on the first blogger's bio. I can't tell positively, but I'll take your word for it. Thanks.
I remain skeptical regarding the topic at hand, however. It will be interesting to follow the story as it plays out in the coming months and years.
With waves of controversy (Brown, Plame, Delay, Abrhamoff, flagrant crony appointments, I could continue...) flowing out of our Republican controlled government, my trust in it is paper thin and weakening moment by moment.
I read the blogs, and checked the authors' bios. They (all four) have a transparent bias which limits their credibility with me. At least it's transparent, though, which is better than some other sources--like talk radio and cable news.
Two legal blogs by blatantly partisan shills do not comprise compelling enough evidence to change my mind on this, sorry. If I wished to pursue the matter, I could find equally partisan shills for the counter-argument--which would probably have a similarly impotent affect on your opinion too, I suspect.
The notable but unsettling irony is that one of your bloggers is a customer of my company. We provide internet, so he's likely using the network I built to post his neocon BS. Oh well, such is life.
That's an interesting take on this, but it's very flawed.
Distilled, your point seems to be that laws don't prevent people from breaking laws, they just create consequences for acting illegally.
Well, okay. Here's the thing though--there is supposed to be a diametric difference in how criminals and law enforcement behave. The former are tasked with breaking laws, and the latter tasked with enforcing them. If the latter also break the laws willingly because the negative consequences are acceptible to them, then the phrase "rule of law" is meaningless.
There is FISA to handle that, but it wasn't used in these cases for whatever reason (the reason doesn't matter).
FISA is a LAW specifically addressing the need to conduct foreign intelligence in domestic jurisdictions. Are you arguing that it doesn't matter if this law is followed? This is the nonsense that confuses me.
If someone is caught plotting terror attacks by one of these intercepts, that falls under the Executive branch's foreign intellegence/war powers, and it is fair game.
US citizens in domestic jurisdictions have habius corpus rights to criminal prosecution for that type of crime too. There are precedents for this, and that pretty much nullifies your points regarding criminal prosecution.
The Fourth Ammendment applies to police search and seizures for criminal prosecution. It does not apply to military and/or national security intelligence. Constitutionally, intelligence gathering does not require a warrant.
That's an either an intentional lie or a warm blanket of rationalization. There is no such distinction. The 10 Amendments comprising the BoR were attached to the Constitution specifically to quell concern over federal government powers, not state and local police forces.
Intelligence gathering is not illegal, despite the full-on media assault to the contrary.
Intelligence gathering is not illegal, but unwarranted searches by government agents are, per the Constitiution.
See, it's not God or FOSS advocates that forbid warrantless wire-taps in this country, it's OUR CONSTITUTION. You know, the quiet little document that clearly defines the boundries of the President's authority?
Is there a reason why you think that the President is not bound by his oath to uphold that document?
Could you help me understand why the administration chose not to seek warrants from the rubber-stamp FISA court? They've approved over 19,000 warrants and denied less than a dozen. The tapping can even begin immediately, with 72 hours to acquire the warrant retroactively, so there's no timing risk associated.
And tell me, why is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment not such a problem for you? Do you not think the Constitution is the highest legal authority in the country? That's what they taught us in school, right?
Or is it just okay for the President to break the law now? Because it was a big deal for the last guy...
No one has any problem with them tapping suspect communications, but many people think that should be done legally. What do you think?
They could have gotten warrants for those taps, but chose not to. Why?
No, it was just a random high level language I used as an example. Although it is interesting to see you completely missed the point due to the chip on your shoulder about Java - not that I should be surprised about that from someone who uses "M$".
You read a lot of stuff into what I've written that's just not there. I very much *like* Java. It's a great tool for developing applications if a highly protected environment and/or almost trivial application portability is more valuable than quickness & resource utilization. And yes, there are many such circumstances.
I have no strong feelings one way or the other on Microsoft. I actually like Office 2003 for Mac, and have earlier gushed over Flight Sim and Word 5.1. I do prefer OS X to XP, but I use both platforms daily for different tasks. I simply use "M$" in/. posts and email as quick, recognizable keystroke savings.
Considering we're comparing "todays software" to "yesterday's software", the features of "todays software" are fairly intrinsic to the discussion.
I don't understand what you think we're arguing about here. I said, "most features," and you said, "not all features." Those aren't even contradictory statements. Most is some number less than all, so we agree. Agreement is good, no?
Or do you disagree that "most" is accurate?
with your implication that software hasn't improved, or that the improvements are nothing but bloat.
Again, I've never made either of these points. Rather, I've argued that the ratio of improvement to bloat is less than 1:1. In clear terms, I assert the value of software improvements has not kept pace with the value of resources used. This does not mean that I think all improvements are bloat, nor would I argue that many new features lack worth.
Any remotely modern PC can run even the latest versions of Word. For those which can't, go back a version or two - if the functionality you want was there in those older versions, it's not going to matter, is it ?
If every computer was only running one or two apps for one user, then software bloat wouldn't matter. But most users are running Word, Excel, Outlook, a web browser, and ITunes simultaneously. I often am cutting/pasting/linking between 3 to 5 large Excel workbooks, with Outlook, Firefox or IE & ITunes running. In addition ocassionally I also run several Java-based apps (the HP Openview client Service Desk & another network management app) and MS Visio. BTW, any one of those last three apps will *kill* my 2.4GHz/512M laptop's performance. I have to quit as many other apps as possible before firing up any of those. Bye/., bye tunes.
This point by point debate is getting very fragmented and is killing my productivity so I will summarize my points and you may feel free to reply or not.
Here goes:
I, again, argue that the number and value of improvements has been outpaced by resource demands. However, I don't think this is a function of HLL vs. Assembler programming, though some HLL development environments deprioritize resource optimization in favor of other goals--and that's fine. I think the responsibility for this ratio of improvements to resources falls mostly on vendor priorities and coder skill.
I argue that the magnitudinal growth of the labor pool in programming has also diluted the quality of coder, and thus the code. I further argue that while yesterday's code jockey could excel in a resource-plentiful environment, much of today's tech school hacks would exit the profession in dismay given the resources available to programmers in the eighties and nineties. Coders used to be mostly degreed electrical engineers, mathmaticians & computer scientists. Now, not so much.
I also assert that HLL, while incredibly useful and vital tools, are not the source of new features or old problems. And yes, some languages are more suited to some tasks than others. I would use Terrapin Logo to teach my
The simple technical solution is to embed meta-data in tags.
Some of that can be automatically populated, such as creation date, length and file type. Some has to be manually added, such as title, rating, or genre.
Ah. Now I see. There's Java kool-aid in the punch bool.
Well, no, as you go on to note.
Actually, I said, "most features," and I meant most. Much like the vendors who need to sell version X + 1 of their best-seller, you are the one whose scope creeped to include "all the same features" as today's software. M$ Word 5.1 for Macintosh had most of the features most folks use in a word processor, including much of what you listed. Percentage-wise, I'd wager around 80-85% of the most-used features were in that nice, clean package. For speed, stability, and security--proportional to functionality-- it's arguably the best version of Word ever released.
Once again, just because modern software might have features *you* aren't interested in, doesn't mean no-one else wants them.
And I never said otherwise. It's *nice* that Word 200X can do everything it does, and it's nice that new features are available for folks that need or want them. It's not as nice that many of those features come with hidden costs--ever-creeping system requirements, performance hits, security holes, etc.
Remember when Word 6.0 for Win/Mac came out? It was a watershed moment of interplatform consistency and interoperability! Ooh, you can share docs between platforms *without* translation. Of course, the Mac version was unwieldly large compared to 5.1, it was slower than 5.1, the interface was all "Windows"-up and non-standard, it crashed all the time, and it opened Mac users up to a world of destructive, productivity-sucking macro-virii that they were previously unable to acquire. But check out all those new features! Surely they were worth it, eh?
Oh, and kudos to M$ for making those default macro behaviors so, uh, secure.
Similarly, just because your OS suddenly has the ability to share files, doesn't mean you've got good collaboration capabilities. Yelling out across the room to see if anyone else has a file open doesn't cut it, particularly when that room might be in another country.
Discussion scope creep example #3...no one made any point contradicting what you're saying here. Networking, version-tracking, on-line collaboration and other geographically disparate workforce tools are great examples of highly useful improvements. That has *nothing* to do with the quality of the coding done to actually implement those improvements.
There are infinite methods to write software features, and they may all accomplish the goal, but some are faster, some are more stable, and some are safer--hell, some might be all three. Then again, others may be unnecessarily slow, unstable or dangerous. The latter examples are often packaged as "V1.0" to get the product to market on time, BTW.
And "yester-coders" would probably have trouble writing good code by todays standards. Giving code the smallest memory footprint possible is no longer a primary criteria.
Bull. And bull, respectively. Back then, the environment forced coders to hone their skills at creating solid datastructures and efficient algorithms. Those are the keys to great coding, regardless of the language, environment or application. They'd thrive today as they did then.
Likewise, any competent coder, past or present, tries his or her best to be as efficient, optimized and structured as they can be, given the tools they have available. Despite plentiful memory, storage and CPU horsepower, no sane user chooses a slower, larger application if a smaller, faster one does the same task just as well or better. Unless the larger app comes in a shiny package. It's hard to go wrong with a shiny package.;^)
And here's where we get to your Java-colored kool-aid tongue:..
Yes, they do. Better languages mean developers have to spend less time fixing (or even worrying about) bugs and language-related security holes (like unchecked buffers) and writing bare-metal optimised code, and have more time to spend on features, improving reliability and UI
? The graphics improvements *alone* are mind boggling. Just the amount of raw data being thrown out to the screen would be orders of magnitude greater (let alone the processing involved to generate it).
Yep. Doesn't mean that the game is coded well though. Any moron can program nifty looking graphics and a pasable GUI using OpenGL or Mesa & GLUT libraries--or whatever graphics engine is your favorite. Processing a fair number of 4-bit colored polygons in 64K of RAM, while applying a sophisticated flight--and yes, weather--physics engine in the same memory space impresses me much more than today's spaghetti-coder asking, "let's see if the latest hardware can handle 30 fps @ 1600 x 1200 with all bajillion 32-bit textures loaded."
Textures are *megabytes* in size (that's why you need 128M+ video cards).
Thank's for the news flash. I had no idea it was *megabytes*! Oooh. Aaah. Clap. clap. clap. You know, I thought that sea-bottom texture that I applied to an OpenGL-based ocean scene (with several fully animated fish swimming around and animated plantlife), when I was hacking away at a college class project was pretty big, but I guess I had no idea pictures were so large these days./sarcasm
See, this is how I know any dumb monkey can make pretty moving pictures and interactive hoo-ha with a computer. I've done it and I'm totally a crap coder.
I've also done an 3D "museum" user-controlled walkthrough (for another OpenGL-based class project) that had full collision detection and complex interactive light rendering (you could shine a "flashlight" or hold a "lantern" on the Mona Lisa, which was one of the imported textures). It ran great, and had several "floors" of objects & pictures to explore. But, trust me, I'm by no means a skilled OpenGL coder.
Almost everything ? Realtime spelling and grammar checking ? Realtime repagination & layout ? Help systems with complex human-language interpreters ? OLE ? Inline display (or other manipulation) of embedded or externally-linked objects, documents and data ? Trivially created and manipulated tables ? Multiuser collaboration ? Revision tracking ? Complex macro capabilities ? Good UI ?
Well, yes. M$ Word 5.1 had a great dictionary (not realtime tho') and had more than enough features for a *word processor* and had a GREAT interface (because it used the standard Mac UI library--I've forgotten what that was called). If I wanted to do real page-design and layout, any of the three I mentioned (RSG!, PM, QXpress) would do just fine--also using the standard Mac UI, TYVM. I don't recall collaboration and revision tracking features, but then again, that was before LANs--along with fileservers, email, etc.--were ubiquitous in small/medium businesses, now wasn't it? Sneaker-net was still the popular standard for document transfer & sharing so usually the copy on Bobby's 1.44M disk was the one everyone shared. A lack of those type of features is more a function of the environment than the software itself.
And quite frankly, given how cheap hardware is today, I think it's much preferable developers spend their time concentrating on the best way their software can solve the problem(s) at hand, rather than whether or not they can afford the extra memory to store the date with a 4-digit year or a 2-digit year.
I whole-heartedly agree. If I can buy 256M of RAM for $30 at a bigbox store, and have harddisk & removable media to burn, then by all means, focus on quality! My point was that given a limitation 64K of RAM, today's programmers would weep openly whereas yester-coders thrived.
It also means software with more features, more reliability, more security, better UI, better portability, quicker patching and lower costs.
Maintainability, and to a degree, portability, I'll give you. But languages have nothing do with increasing features, reliability, or security, and improving UI. HHLs are more human readable, but each line is implement
...software today is doing a *lot* more than software was twenty years ago. Heck, just the improvements in maintainability and robustness from better coding practices and higher level languages probably "cost" an order of magnitude in performance.
In my purely anecdotal (therefore largely meaningless) experience, that is not the case at all.
I had an Apple II+ back in the day (upgraded to 64K RAM) that ran M$ Flight Sim 2--in "hi-res" color and with polygonally-rendered scenery. Today's mininum hardware and software requirements for sims & games is obscene. Yes, the latest include heavy texture objects and magnitudes more polygons, but c'mon...64K total RAM to 512M video mem + multiple Gig of system RAM? I call "bloated coding".
Productivity software? I had a Mac SE/30 with 1M of RAM and a 20M hdd--still do, somewhere. It ran M$ Word 5.1 and a layout/design program called "Ready, Set, Go!", which at the time rivaled Pagemaker & Quark. The executables for those pieces of software fit on one floppy each, and they did almost everything today's wordprocessing and layout programs do. I call "very, very bloated coding".
Better coding practices? Please, old-school coders programmed much tighter code, because there was no other option. Memory cost a freakin' fortune. I wager there aren't many coders today that could do what they did given the same resources.
Maintainability? I'd rather maintain less than more, even if the "less" is not organized as well as the "more".
Robustness? Remember the old days, when executables stood alone and didn't rely on oft-buggy third-party libraries (for ex. "libtool") to run? Those were the days, man.
...Country Code domains are considered to represent the country it is assigned to, and it is considered the "property" of the country and the government of said country.
In the past and for various reasons, some countries allowed their domains to be run by others, including individuals and organizations.
The article takes issue with countries taking back the control of the domain.
This is simply and factually untrue.
Jon Postel started delegating ccTLDs to qualified managers in 1985, and formalized his process with RFC 1591 in 1994. ICANN/IANA took over completely after his death, and added their own policies beyond RFC 1591 in their document PC-1.
Managers are historically and predominantly *not* governments; they are instead private sector entities of significant internet presence in their given country, such as a large national or regional service provider.
Redelegating a ccTLD from its manager for any reason other than incompetent management, represents a major departure from normal process. Redelegating that ccTLD to a government body is an even more staggering departure from current practice.
Near as I can tell, the writer of the article believes that the currently holder of a ccTLD is the "rightful owner".
Rightful "manager" is more accurate, and this is true.
The U.S. and ICANN believe the current government of the country is the "rightful owner".
If true, this represents a change from the status quo.
When it comes to ccTLDs I believe that the government of the country is the rightful owner. The current holders, or perhaps controllers is a better word, do so at the pleasure of the country.
So, my question to you is "Who should control the country code top level domain for a country?"
Barring incompetent duty performance, the ccTLD manager who originally qualified for the delegation under Postel, IETF RFC 1591, and IANA PC-1.
In cases of incompetence, the redelegation should direct control to a stable, competent custodial entity, unladen by periodically shifting political agendas.
Since governments--local, regional & national--are highly likely to act in their self-interest with regard to politics and power, and since those interests often change drastically in time, they are--definitionally--very poor choices, IMHO.
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So...what exactly is wrong with the current law, FISA?
Is the capability to instantly begin tapping with 72 hours to get a retroactive judicially-reviewed warrant--from a rubberstamp court no less--an insuffient solution for addressing terrorist threats?
If so, then wouldn't it be better for the executive branch to request some changes to that law than to disregard it?
I mean, shouldn't the folks who are chartered to *enforce* laws also *obey* laws? Or do the ends always justify the means?
Is that, like, a decoder ring or a shoe-phone?
The awkward wording hides the actual meaning. The problem is that a non-priviledged user could *acquire* admin rights and *then* misbehave.
I wanted to highlight this bit of verbal acrobatics on your part, because it's central to your spin here (and highly amusing to boot).
Well sure. You're a neocon, you love a good spin. I'd think you'd be better able to separate it from what the rest of us like to call "the truth" though.
As for rhetorical acrobatics, let me applaud your truly Olympic-class gyrations here:
It is, of course, true, as you suggest, that no Democrat has been indicted in this case -- in the narrow sense that no one of either party who received money from Mr. Abramoff has yet been indicted.
Would've been a 10.0 if you could've nailed the landing. Unfortuately, it was way too much of a stretch and you're out of the medal race.
I know you want to make folks think there's no difference between Abramoff illegally exchanging money for specific favors for his clients and those same clients making legal campaign contributions...but there just is. And, it's a very, very big difference.
even if we pretend (for the sake of argument) that this is the only political scandal which Washington has ever seen,
This strawman is stupid. No one argued that this is the only scandalous thing in DC. There are plenty of scandalous things to go around, but *this* scandal is purely a Republican--or rather, neocon--problem, and you're basically reacting as expected--clouding the issue and flinging mud to put everyone on the same dirty ground. No one believes you. Sorry.
I'd recommend against staking your credibility
Yep. I'm all about taking a neocon's advice on credibility. That's like taking an iceberg's advice on sailing the Titanic.
It would be far more realistic to admit that with the large amounts of money the congress bandies about every day, such scandals are hardly a new thing
Point being? We should just ignore it? Or we should prosecute all criminal activity in the capitol? Which is it?
(I suspect you are too young to remember the early nineties, but you might find it informative to google the names `Jim Wright' or `Dan Rostenkowski'),
First, this has to be one of the silliest rhetorical tactics in the book, "Son, you're probably to young to know this, but..." Arguing ad hominem is, if I may guess, probably the first chapter in the neocon playbook so don't color me surprised.
Second, it's also a red herring with no bearing on the Abramoff scandal.
Finally, if any Dem is guilty of an Abramoff-related crime, I personally hope they get a cell in the same tennis club. Evidence is not favoring that scenario though. Too bad for you.
The voter gets the paper, looks at the human readable output to verify that his vote was correctly recorded, and drops the paper into a ballot box on his way out...
The election officials keep the paper ballots, machine printed recepts that is, so that in the event of a dispute they can be hand counted...the paper ballots get the final say in the event of a dispute.
Sorry to be argumentative, because I'd like there to be an elegant solution to this problem, but doesn't this essentially turn the electronic vote into an "[un]official" exit poll reading?
I mean, how is this an improvement over machine counted paper ballots we use today? Other than a faster preliminary count?
Also, if the papers are dropped in a ballot box, but not counted unless there is a "dispute", how do you recognize a dispute in the first place? Don't both have to be tallied and compared to discover some discrepency?
Like I said, I'd love electronic voting to work well, and I'd love an elegant and transparent auditing methodology. The devil is in these details...
As nifty as a paper trail sounds, there are problems with that too. For example, how do you verify that the votes people input are logged correctly on the printout? Bits are easy to flip, whether done on purpose, or by executing buggy code.
And do you really think that vote anonymity--an essential feature of our process--would last if people walked out of their polling place with some sort of receipt? If you can connect an identity to a vote, you can directly coerce or otherwise influence that voter with all manner of nasty tactics. No thanks.
Ok, you really don't understand what you are saying, or are intentionally trying to mislead people.
I'm sure lying is not on my otherwise long list of character flaws, and I'm confident that I can hold my own with you regarding OS X, based on this thread. So, in short, I think you're wrong again.
OSX is NOT BSD. It is using a BSD Interface to the kernel. PERIOD.
OSX is Darwin - there really is a BIG difference, and Darwin DOES NOT inherent the security and reliability of other BSD kernel interfacing variants. This is also true that FreeBSD and OpenBSD don't inherent each other's reliability or strengths. I wish people would quit confusing this.
Darwin evolved from FreeBSD, which is, in fact, BSD. The industry almost ubiquitously respects BSD, in all its variants, with regard to stability and security. I don't know why you brought up OpenBSD specifically, other than you assumed incorrectly that I'm unaware of that project's highlighted focus on security beyond that of other BSD strains.
Yes, Darwin is the interface to the MACH kernel. And?
I'm no file system expert and I have no interest in becoming one. I'm a network operator, not a server or workstation guru. I've developed for OS X, and I have taken an effort, with this discussion, to study a bit of NTFS. I still haven't found anything that moves it beyond the current default OS X file system with journalling. Honestly, you probably know better, and good for you.
I have a network to tend to, so you have a good weekend and keep those servers humming. PERIOD.
Freedom to use your software they way you want, the ability to fix things if you need to, the ability to make sure there's nothing hidden in the code that you may not want... These are things that should be topping that list
You're so right. Those would be very excellent benefits...if every user was also an ambitious coder with time to tweak, recompile, and test multiple complex software packages written in various compiled and interpreted languages.
Unfortunately, most users just like to, well, _use_ things that _work_for_them_ without a lot of f'ing around. So, they find a little less benefit to themselves in having the source code and a compiler at their disposal.
Instead they like the thing that simply costs them less--in money, time, headaches, whatever. Isn't that just a tragedy?
To me, Microsoft's behavior is extremely offensive and abusive.
Because they take your money at gunpoint?
If you don't like their product or how they maintain it, buy a platform that satisfies your needs better. In any case, take responsibility for the consequences of your own choices.
"But I'm not the decision-maker..." You decided to work where you work, though right?
Where do you base this argument...
You completely missed the point. I provided an arithmetic case example to make a simple point regarding the insufficient logical basis for your conclusion. I was showing how your "evidence" could be factual--Apple patched more than MS--but that no conclusion regarding the relative security of each operating system may be drawn without additional factual basis. In other words, no one, including you, can draw a logical conclusion from the datapoints you used to draw a conclusion. Period.
Both are fully patched, but wouldn't you question the design and safety of the boat that had 200 holes in the first place?
Maybe. But, wouldn't you agree that the nature and severity of the holes is likely to be at least as meaningul as the quantity of patches? If one boat had 200 minor to moderate leaks but its structure was consistently seaworthy, and the other boat had 50 moderate to major leaks at chronically weak spots in its hull, I'd choose to go to sea in the first boat. No question.
If you want to judge relative security based on comparing lists of patches, you *must* include severity data, including both the potential and realized impact, and the attack vectors.
I wasn't saying neither were unsafe or unpatched, but one HAD to be patched more than the other.
Wrong. The statements "One was patched more than the other," and, "One had to be patched more than the other," are not equivalent. The number of virii, worms, and other attack vectors in the wild for Windows indicates that it was patched less than it "had to be" to be secure.
TRUE - the Root abstraction for Users is a better method than what Windows Uses.
Great! I guess we're done and you've answered your own original question then...
Or not, apparently...
FALSE - Having a *nix heritage means little to NOTHING. In fact MS's NT team specifically designed NT NOT like *nix to avoid the shortcoming and security holes of the *nix model from the early 90s.
"[OS X's] UNIX heritage," and, "all *NIX implementations," are not equivalent either. BSD is pretty universally regarded as a very secure *NIX variant, as well as a extremely secure OS compared to Windows. Hence, OS X benefits from its FreeBSD underpinnings. Period. [See how annoying that is?]
This is true, this was also true of WIndows NT
You know NT. You love NT. You live NT. Fine. I get it.
This is not so much a fact...go read up...
Windows XP and OS X are the current defacto standard for PC and Mac computing, no? XP uses NTFS, which allows permission setting to the file level and encryption. OS X uses a BSD-based filesystem and CDSA to do the same things. XP Home, BTW, doesn't support encryption with NTFS, so...
And what's with XP Home and Simple File Sharing? Can't turn it off? That sucks, eh?
Refocusing now, how do you explain the 10s of thousands of exploit variants affecting Windows to the 10s of exploits affecting OS X if OS X is less secure? Answer, please.
Now, allow me a final anecdote: I just bought a ultra-cheap Dell for home use (XP Home) and set it up with an account for each family member. By default, none of the accounts even had a password. WTF? Firewalling wasn't enabled by default. W.T.F!?
Good thing I have a commercial-class firewall sitting in front of my home net.
You know what also pisses me off though? All the network-aware apps (including ipconfig.exe, ping.exe and tracert.exe) are hanging every time I run them--*except* IE, which will hum around the web just fine. But, if I boot to Safe Mode + Networking, all is well. Gyahhh!
In comparison, my Macs just f'ing worked perfectly out of the box and have never stopped. No viruses. No worms. No root-kits. No spyware beyond normal cookie crap. No wonky network problems. Nothing.
Oh well.
Happy Computing...
Mostly very good points.
and how are they sure that this system cant be duped either.
Well, digital signatures may be one solution for authenticating the message source.
[sigh] I may as well join on the pig pile.
Safer? I guess, except in the past year Apple released more security and exploit fixes for OSX than Microsoft did for WindowsXP...
So again how is it a safer OS if these exploits existed in the first place?
As others have also noted, there is a disconnect in your logic here. If Apple uncovers 25 potential exploits and patches 23, while MS uncovers 50 and patches 20...well, surely you get the picture.
Apple is a _safer_ (not 100% safe) operating system than WindowsWhatever for a variety of reasons.
* It's harder to exploit because its default behaviors are more secure.
* Its overall design harvests security strengths from its UNIX heritage.
* Yes, its low installed base makes it a less attractive target.
* BUT, so does its superior security model. ^(1)
(1) If you and a friend are running away from a charging bear, you don't have to run faster than the bear--you have to run faster than your friend. Likewise, OS X doesn't have to be 100% secure, it just has to be more secure than Windows.
In this and other posts on this article, you've stretched the bounds of logic and exagerated claims of OS X exploits. Why?
Hm. You may be right. I may actually have come to the wrong conclusion after a hasty read on the first blogger's bio. I can't tell positively, but I'll take your word for it. Thanks.
I remain skeptical regarding the topic at hand, however. It will be interesting to follow the story as it plays out in the coming months and years.
With waves of controversy (Brown, Plame, Delay, Abrhamoff, flagrant crony appointments, I could continue...) flowing out of our Republican controlled government, my trust in it is paper thin and weakening moment by moment.
Finally, someone uncowardly. Thank you.
I read the blogs, and checked the authors' bios. They (all four) have a transparent bias which limits their credibility with me. At least it's transparent, though, which is better than some other sources--like talk radio and cable news.
Two legal blogs by blatantly partisan shills do not comprise compelling enough evidence to change my mind on this, sorry. If I wished to pursue the matter, I could find equally partisan shills for the counter-argument--which would probably have a similarly impotent affect on your opinion too, I suspect.
The notable but unsettling irony is that one of your bloggers is a customer of my company. We provide internet, so he's likely using the network I built to post his neocon BS. Oh well, such is life.
That's an interesting take on this, but it's very flawed.
Distilled, your point seems to be that laws don't prevent people from breaking laws, they just create consequences for acting illegally.
Well, okay. Here's the thing though--there is supposed to be a diametric difference in how criminals and law enforcement behave. The former are tasked with breaking laws, and the latter tasked with enforcing them. If the latter also break the laws willingly because the negative consequences are acceptible to them, then the phrase "rule of law" is meaningless.
There is FISA to handle that, but it wasn't used in these cases for whatever reason (the reason doesn't matter).
FISA is a LAW specifically addressing the need to conduct foreign intelligence in domestic jurisdictions. Are you arguing that it doesn't matter if this law is followed? This is the nonsense that confuses me.
If someone is caught plotting terror attacks by one of these intercepts, that falls under the Executive branch's foreign intellegence/war powers, and it is fair game.
US citizens in domestic jurisdictions have habius corpus rights to criminal prosecution for that type of crime too. There are precedents for this, and that pretty much nullifies your points regarding criminal prosecution.
Your rights are just fine.
I wish that was reassuring. It's not.
The Fourth Ammendment applies to police search and seizures for criminal prosecution. It does not apply to military and/or national security intelligence. Constitutionally, intelligence gathering does not require a warrant.
That's an either an intentional lie or a warm blanket of rationalization. There is no such distinction. The 10 Amendments comprising the BoR were attached to the Constitution specifically to quell concern over federal government powers, not state and local police forces.
Intelligence gathering is not illegal, despite the full-on media assault to the contrary.
Intelligence gathering is not illegal, but unwarranted searches by government agents are, per the Constitiution.
See, it's not God or FOSS advocates that forbid warrantless wire-taps in this country, it's OUR CONSTITUTION. You know, the quiet little document that clearly defines the boundries of the President's authority?
Is there a reason why you think that the President is not bound by his oath to uphold that document?
Could you help me understand why the administration chose not to seek warrants from the rubber-stamp FISA court? They've approved over 19,000 warrants and denied less than a dozen. The tapping can even begin immediately, with 72 hours to acquire the warrant retroactively, so there's no timing risk associated.
And tell me, why is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment not such a problem for you? Do you not think the Constitution is the highest legal authority in the country? That's what they taught us in school, right?
Or is it just okay for the President to break the law now? Because it was a big deal for the last guy...
No one has any problem with them tapping suspect communications, but many people think that should be done legally. What do you think?
They could have gotten warrants for those taps, but chose not to. Why?
No, it was just a random high level language I used as an example. Although it is interesting to see you completely missed the point due to the chip on your shoulder about Java - not that I should be surprised about that from someone who uses "M$".
/. posts and email as quick, recognizable keystroke savings.
/., bye tunes.
You read a lot of stuff into what I've written that's just not there. I very much *like* Java. It's a great tool for developing applications if a highly protected environment and/or almost trivial application portability is more valuable than quickness & resource utilization. And yes, there are many such circumstances.
I have no strong feelings one way or the other on Microsoft. I actually like Office 2003 for Mac, and have earlier gushed over Flight Sim and Word 5.1. I do prefer OS X to XP, but I use both platforms daily for different tasks. I simply use "M$" in
Considering we're comparing "todays software" to "yesterday's software", the features of "todays software" are fairly intrinsic to the discussion.
I don't understand what you think we're arguing about here. I said, "most features," and you said, "not all features." Those aren't even contradictory statements. Most is some number less than all, so we agree. Agreement is good, no?
Or do you disagree that "most" is accurate?
with your implication that software hasn't improved, or that the improvements are nothing but bloat.
Again, I've never made either of these points. Rather, I've argued that the ratio of improvement to bloat is less than 1:1. In clear terms, I assert the value of software improvements has not kept pace with the value of resources used. This does not mean that I think all improvements are bloat, nor would I argue that many new features lack worth.
Any remotely modern PC can run even the latest versions of Word. For those which can't, go back a version or two - if the functionality you want was there in those older versions, it's not going to matter, is it ?
If every computer was only running one or two apps for one user, then software bloat wouldn't matter. But most users are running Word, Excel, Outlook, a web browser, and ITunes simultaneously. I often am cutting/pasting/linking between 3 to 5 large Excel workbooks, with Outlook, Firefox or IE & ITunes running. In addition ocassionally I also run several Java-based apps (the HP Openview client Service Desk & another network management app) and MS Visio. BTW, any one of those last three apps will *kill* my 2.4GHz/512M laptop's performance. I have to quit as many other apps as possible before firing up any of those. Bye
This point by point debate is getting very fragmented and is killing my productivity so I will summarize my points and you may feel free to reply or not.
Here goes:
I, again, argue that the number and value of improvements has been outpaced by resource demands. However, I don't think this is a function of HLL vs. Assembler programming, though some HLL development environments deprioritize resource optimization in favor of other goals--and that's fine. I think the responsibility for this ratio of improvements to resources falls mostly on vendor priorities and coder skill.
I argue that the magnitudinal growth of the labor pool in programming has also diluted the quality of coder, and thus the code. I further argue that while yesterday's code jockey could excel in a resource-plentiful environment, much of today's tech school hacks would exit the profession in dismay given the resources available to programmers in the eighties and nineties. Coders used to be mostly degreed electrical engineers, mathmaticians & computer scientists. Now, not so much.
I also assert that HLL, while incredibly useful and vital tools, are not the source of new features or old problems. And yes, some languages are more suited to some tasks than others. I would use Terrapin Logo to teach my
The simple technical solution is to embed meta-data in tags.
Some of that can be automatically populated, such as creation date, length and file type. Some has to be manually added, such as title, rating, or genre.
Ah. Now I see. There's Java kool-aid in the punch bool.
;^)
Well, no, as you go on to note.
Actually, I said, "most features," and I meant most. Much like the vendors who need to sell version X + 1 of their best-seller, you are the one whose scope creeped to include "all the same features" as today's software. M$ Word 5.1 for Macintosh had most of the features most folks use in a word processor, including much of what you listed. Percentage-wise, I'd wager around 80-85% of the most-used features were in that nice, clean package. For speed, stability, and security--proportional to functionality-- it's arguably the best version of Word ever released.
Once again, just because modern software might have features *you* aren't interested in, doesn't mean no-one else wants them.
And I never said otherwise. It's *nice* that Word 200X can do everything it does, and it's nice that new features are available for folks that need or want them. It's not as nice that many of those features come with hidden costs--ever-creeping system requirements, performance hits, security holes, etc.
Remember when Word 6.0 for Win/Mac came out? It was a watershed moment of interplatform consistency and interoperability! Ooh, you can share docs between platforms *without* translation. Of course, the Mac version was unwieldly large compared to 5.1, it was slower than 5.1, the interface was all "Windows"-up and non-standard, it crashed all the time, and it opened Mac users up to a world of destructive, productivity-sucking macro-virii that they were previously unable to acquire. But check out all those new features! Surely they were worth it, eh?
Oh, and kudos to M$ for making those default macro behaviors so, uh, secure.
Similarly, just because your OS suddenly has the ability to share files, doesn't mean you've got good collaboration capabilities. Yelling out across the room to see if anyone else has a file open doesn't cut it, particularly when that room might be in another country.
Discussion scope creep example #3...no one made any point contradicting what you're saying here. Networking, version-tracking, on-line collaboration and other geographically disparate workforce tools are great examples of highly useful improvements. That has *nothing* to do with the quality of the coding done to actually implement those improvements.
There are infinite methods to write software features, and they may all accomplish the goal, but some are faster, some are more stable, and some are safer--hell, some might be all three. Then again, others may be unnecessarily slow, unstable or dangerous. The latter examples are often packaged as "V1.0" to get the product to market on time, BTW.
And "yester-coders" would probably have trouble writing good code by todays standards. Giving code the smallest memory footprint possible is no longer a primary criteria.
Bull. And bull, respectively. Back then, the environment forced coders to hone their skills at creating solid datastructures and efficient algorithms. Those are the keys to great coding, regardless of the language, environment or application. They'd thrive today as they did then.
Likewise, any competent coder, past or present, tries his or her best to be as efficient, optimized and structured as they can be, given the tools they have available. Despite plentiful memory, storage and CPU horsepower, no sane user chooses a slower, larger application if a smaller, faster one does the same task just as well or better. Unless the larger app comes in a shiny package. It's hard to go wrong with a shiny package.
And here's where we get to your Java-colored kool-aid tongue:..
Yes, they do. Better languages mean developers have to spend less time fixing (or even worrying about) bugs and language-related security holes (like unchecked buffers) and writing bare-metal optimised code, and have more time to spend on features, improving reliability and UI
? The graphics improvements *alone* are mind boggling. Just the amount of raw data being thrown out to the screen would be orders of magnitude greater (let alone the processing involved to generate it).
/sarcasm
Yep. Doesn't mean that the game is coded well though. Any moron can program nifty looking graphics and a pasable GUI using OpenGL or Mesa & GLUT libraries--or whatever graphics engine is your favorite. Processing a fair number of 4-bit colored polygons in 64K of RAM, while applying a sophisticated flight--and yes, weather--physics engine in the same memory space impresses me much more than today's spaghetti-coder asking, "let's see if the latest hardware can handle 30 fps @ 1600 x 1200 with all bajillion 32-bit textures loaded."
Textures are *megabytes* in size (that's why you need 128M+ video cards).
Thank's for the news flash. I had no idea it was *megabytes*! Oooh. Aaah. Clap. clap. clap. You know, I thought that sea-bottom texture that I applied to an OpenGL-based ocean scene (with several fully animated fish swimming around and animated plantlife), when I was hacking away at a college class project was pretty big, but I guess I had no idea pictures were so large these days.
See, this is how I know any dumb monkey can make pretty moving pictures and interactive hoo-ha with a computer. I've done it and I'm totally a crap coder.
I've also done an 3D "museum" user-controlled walkthrough (for another OpenGL-based class project) that had full collision detection and complex interactive light rendering (you could shine a "flashlight" or hold a "lantern" on the Mona Lisa, which was one of the imported textures). It ran great, and had several "floors" of objects & pictures to explore. But, trust me, I'm by no means a skilled OpenGL coder.
Almost everything ? Realtime spelling and grammar checking ? Realtime repagination & layout ? Help systems with complex human-language interpreters ? OLE ? Inline display (or other manipulation) of embedded or externally-linked objects, documents and data ? Trivially created and manipulated tables ? Multiuser collaboration ? Revision tracking ? Complex macro capabilities ? Good UI ?
Well, yes. M$ Word 5.1 had a great dictionary (not realtime tho') and had more than enough features for a *word processor* and had a GREAT interface (because it used the standard Mac UI library--I've forgotten what that was called). If I wanted to do real page-design and layout, any of the three I mentioned (RSG!, PM, QXpress) would do just fine--also using the standard Mac UI, TYVM. I don't recall collaboration and revision tracking features, but then again, that was before LANs--along with fileservers, email, etc.--were ubiquitous in small/medium businesses, now wasn't it? Sneaker-net was still the popular standard for document transfer & sharing so usually the copy on Bobby's 1.44M disk was the one everyone shared. A lack of those type of features is more a function of the environment than the software itself.
And quite frankly, given how cheap hardware is today, I think it's much preferable developers spend their time concentrating on the best way their software can solve the problem(s) at hand, rather than whether or not they can afford the extra memory to store the date with a 4-digit year or a 2-digit year.
I whole-heartedly agree. If I can buy 256M of RAM for $30 at a bigbox store, and have harddisk & removable media to burn, then by all means, focus on quality! My point was that given a limitation 64K of RAM, today's programmers would weep openly whereas yester-coders thrived.
It also means software with more features, more reliability, more security, better UI, better portability, quicker patching and lower costs.
Maintainability, and to a degree, portability, I'll give you. But languages have nothing do with increasing features, reliability, or security, and improving UI. HHLs are more human readable, but each line is implement
...software today is doing a *lot* more than software was twenty years ago. Heck, just the improvements in maintainability and robustness from better coding practices and higher level languages probably "cost" an order of magnitude in performance.
In my purely anecdotal (therefore largely meaningless) experience, that is not the case at all.
I had an Apple II+ back in the day (upgraded to 64K RAM) that ran M$ Flight Sim 2--in "hi-res" color and with polygonally-rendered scenery. Today's mininum hardware and software requirements for sims & games is obscene. Yes, the latest include heavy texture objects and magnitudes more polygons, but c'mon...64K total RAM to 512M video mem + multiple Gig of system RAM? I call "bloated coding".
Productivity software? I had a Mac SE/30 with 1M of RAM and a 20M hdd--still do, somewhere. It ran M$ Word 5.1 and a layout/design program called "Ready, Set, Go!", which at the time rivaled Pagemaker & Quark. The executables for those pieces of software fit on one floppy each, and they did almost everything today's wordprocessing and layout programs do. I call "very, very bloated coding".
Better coding practices? Please, old-school coders programmed much tighter code, because there was no other option. Memory cost a freakin' fortune. I wager there aren't many coders today that could do what they did given the same resources.
Maintainability? I'd rather maintain less than more, even if the "less" is not organized as well as the "more".
Robustness? Remember the old days, when executables stood alone and didn't rely on oft-buggy third-party libraries (for ex. "libtool") to run? Those were the days, man.
"Higher Level Language" == "BLOATED BLOATING BLOAT BLOAT"
...Country Code domains are considered to represent the country it is assigned to, and it is considered the "property" of the country and the government of said country.
In the past and for various reasons, some countries allowed their domains to be run by others, including individuals and organizations.
The article takes issue with countries taking back the control of the domain.
This is simply and factually untrue.
Jon Postel started delegating ccTLDs to qualified managers in 1985, and formalized his process with RFC 1591 in 1994. ICANN/IANA took over completely after his death, and added their own policies beyond RFC 1591 in their document PC-1.
Managers are historically and predominantly *not* governments; they are instead private sector entities of significant internet presence in their given country, such as a large national or regional service provider.
Redelegating a ccTLD from its manager for any reason other than incompetent management, represents a major departure from normal process. Redelegating that ccTLD to a government body is an even more staggering departure from current practice.
Near as I can tell, the writer of the article believes that the currently holder of a ccTLD is the "rightful owner".
Rightful "manager" is more accurate, and this is true.
The U.S. and ICANN believe the current government of the country is the "rightful owner".
If true, this represents a change from the status quo.
When it comes to ccTLDs I believe that the government of the country is the rightful owner. The current holders, or perhaps controllers is a better word, do so at the pleasure of the country.
Believe what you want. It's still not true.
So, my question to you is "Who should control the country code top level domain for a country?"
Barring incompetent duty performance, the ccTLD manager who originally qualified for the delegation under Postel, IETF RFC 1591, and IANA PC-1.
In cases of incompetence, the redelegation should direct control to a stable, competent custodial entity, unladen by periodically shifting political agendas.
Since governments--local, regional & national--are highly likely to act in their self-interest with regard to politics and power, and since those interests often change drastically in time, they are--definitionally--very poor choices, IMHO.
Except - why would they leave Hawaii?
Exactly. While my wife and I honeymooned on Kuaui we asked a north shore local where she vacationed and she said...on the south shore.