Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
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Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
Dude, nobody makes that much LSD any more, at least outside of San Francisco, and even there you're only buying blotter paper which somebody has waved a picture of LSD by.
And the drug I was taking while reading the excellent Ender's Game was caffeine; I gave up on Card after Speaker or maybe Xenocide, so I never got to the Shadow series.
In D&D terminology, Bush/Cheney were clearly Chaotic Evil. Some of their advisers and henchpersons like John Yoo may have been Lawful Evil or Neutral Evil, and their main enemies were probably Lawful Evil, as well as the Neutral and Good folks who were collateral damage. Seems to be a good environment for Zombies.
Vampire movies sometimes have vamps who are protagonists, certainly since The Vampire Lestat novels. And then you get the occasional Vampires vs. Werewolves sort of movie, which was obviously a literary reference to the Cold War...
Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat were written during the Reagan years, though she's been cranking out sequels through Bush and Clinton years and for all I know more recently. The movies got made a few years after the book, but it was Reagan-era vampirism.
That's kind of like skydivers' responses to the "why jump out of a perfectly good airplane?" jokes - "have you seen the airplanes we're jumping out of?".
A few years back I was in Mazatlan with friends, and checked out tequilas in the local liquor store. The range of selections explained why one of the local restaurants was pouring the stuff like water - the cheap stuff was about $5/gallon. If you wanted Cazadores or drinks at a fancy bar, you still had to pay real money, but if you wanted ethanol that had been aged in plastic for no more than 15 minutes, and didn't have to pay US-level or Europe-level alcohol taxes, it doesn't actually cost that much to make.
Back when I was at Bell Labs, the convention for names to put on technical papers was to use initials and last name. I don't know how long that had been going on, but it was viewed as allowing work to be seen without the filter of gender (plus it was unambiguous about whether to use your nickname vs. formal name, for those of us like me who are only addressed with our formal first name by bureaucrats who are pretending to be familiar but don't actually know us...)
On the other hand, there were fewer applications using avatars in those days, and the default avatar was usually a Peter Weinberger logo-face.
We had no problems picking gender-neutral names to use for text examples that should be politically correct - we'd add Pat if we needed to. In this case, Terry was male and Lee was female.
I had a friend in college whose name was Rene (female, but IIRC she spelled it like that, not like Renee.) She got married, and at one point they received some paperwork for Mr. Rene Lastname. She tried to deal with it, and they told her that no, they needed to speak to MR Rene Lastname, not Mrs. Rene Lastname. ("Dammit, there *is* no Mr. Rene Lastname, he's Mr. Bruce Lastname"....)
If you've got a shared database between sender and recipient, then rather than having the recipient's software guess the avatar, or having the sender indicate the gender to use, you could have the sender pick the avatar. So yeah, I agree with your "dumbidea" tag.
And the conventions for avatar choice are very scenario-dependent. You might choose a rather different avatar for work than for gaming, for instance...
Of course, here in San Francisco, not only did which gender the law thinks you are just become more important, but gender is a rather more flexible construct. I don't know if my friend who's XXY is allowed to marry *anybody* now.
If you're speaking Chinese, you probably do that. But what I've seen of Chinese name usage in English in American business contexts is that the names often get reversed to more American-style name orders, especially if they're using European individual-names (sorry for the awkward construction - I'm not aware of a useful English term for "first name" other than "first name", though the term "Christian name" is occasionally used) or if they're more-than-first-generation immigrants. That's especially true if you're taking those names and putting them into a database like Microsoft Exchange email system's user database, or also if you're abbreviating names. So my friend K.C. Liu is obviously Liu K-something C-something in Chinese, and in spoken English he's either KC or Dr. Liu. And Fu-Li Betty Wang is Wang Fu-Li in Chinese.
Well I'm lichen your idea... Technically a lichen has a fungus and something that photosynthesizes, usually algae or cyanobacterium (or sometimes both). And the nutrients that get passed back and forth usually aren't cellulose, but maybe it'd be possible to get that kind of fungus together with a plant.
Alternatively, you could combine the fungus's cellulose-to-diesel features with growing cellulose-stalked grains, so instead of using corn to produce ethanol competing with using corn for food, you'd grow the corn, keep the seeds for food, and feed the stalks and cobs to the fungus for fuel.
I use laptops for work, and I'm still stuck with 1024x768 - lame PC worldview. The only time in the last decade and a half that my organization decided to get better-than-lowest-common-denominator screens was when they decided that 640x480 with 24-bit color was *much* cooler than 800x600 with 8-bit color. My wife just bought herself a new laptop, and it's something like 1024x768 or 1024x800, but that's because she wanted the under 3 pound model with the ~10-inch screen.
Desktops? My Sun-3 back in the 1980s had 1152x900, just marginally over a megapixel. My home desktop uses 1024x768 on the motherboard graphics, so I'll probably need to buy a graphics card when I get around to buying a flat-panel monitor. (And the Sun-2 in my attic was also only 1024x768:-)
When it was good, it was very very good, but when it was bad, well, it was a windowing system written in Postscript that let you pass pieces of Postscript code back and forth between client and server to get things done, which could be appallingly insecure and buggy. (The fix for this was that Gosling later wrote Java with things he'd learned from NeWS.) (Postscript is essentially FORTH souped up with font knowledge, but it's good enough to handle objects in.)
Postscript means that WYSIWYG, really, rendered however you'd like. The terminal emulator, for instance, used Postscript, rendered at screen resolutions, and if you needed to print it, it rendered them at printer resolutions, or if you iconized a terminal window, that just set to font size to 1 point / 1 pixel, and you could still see any interactions happening in the icon. My boss was around 60, and constantly switching pairs of glasses if he needed to talk to somebody and also read his computer screen. We set his psterm default to 24-point font, and everything was Just Bigger, and he could just read it without messing around. Mouse tracking worked well, because you could make the tracking happen down in the server without the extra round-trip to the client, so if you had a slow network connection it was ok - you were passing data across the link, not pictures of the mouse, etc.
I've been a Libertarian for a couple of decades, but haven't been doing active politics the last few years. I'm probably voting for Barr, but I might flip a coin and vote for Nader instead. (Lots of things wrong with Nader, especially economics, a few really good things about him, and it's very clear that a vote for Nader is also a vote for None of the Above and against the war in Iraq.)
The LP's been taken over by quasi-Republicans in the last few years. Bob Barr, while he's seriously excellent about privacy issues, still thinks drugs should be illegal (though he's at least realized that the way the War on Some Drugs is being fought has serious problems) - which says he fundamentally doesn't get what Libertarianism is about. And he was one of the crew of divorced Republicans responsible for the Defense of Some Marriages Act. On the other hand, just about nobody else _is_ talking about undoing the civil liberties damage and concentration of power that Bush has done, and hardly any national-level politicians are even trying to get rid of the Patriot Act.
If your ISP is only getting its connectivity from Cogent, and isn't homed to multiple upstream ISPs, then they're at risk from any technical problems their Cogent link has as well as from any business problems Cogent has. If they need any regulatory help from the FCC, it's a requirement for Sprint to give them free Clues, not for Sprint to give Cogent free connectivity.
The Internet's a lot more stable than when I got involved with it 25ish years ago, or when small ISPs were a dime a dozen a decade and a bit ago, but it's still not 100% perfect. Back in the mid-90s, small ISPs provided dialup and email service, and they usually bought their first upstream T1 line from the cheapest provider available, but if they stayed up and running for a few months and started to fill it up, they almost universally bought their next upstream T1 from a different provider, because Internet routing flapped all the time, and if you had two providers you were not only less susceptible to your connection failing, you were much less likely to lose connection to half the world whenever a butterfly flapped its wings near MAE-WEST. In fact most ISPs these days can give you a reasonable service level agreement and also a reasonable level of service, but your ISP needs some sort of redundant connection.
Of course, if you think this is a mess, just look at the shape the IPv6 world is in - randomly-connected archipelagos of random little islands, tunnelled together by a maze of twisty little passages.
(Disclaimer: I work for an ISP that's not part of this dispute, but this is entirely my own opinion, not theirs.)
Unlike Cogent, who were big enough to get a trial arrangement for free peering with Sprint by asking for it, my web site / hosting service is somewhat smaller (specifically, it's the spare P266 laptop sitting under the desk behind some junk.) But really, I'm just as important to Sprint, because even though I'm not carrying 17% of the US Internet traffic, I also will have a much better traffic ratio - they'll be able to send 3:1 traffic to me, as opposed to Cogent sending them 3:1 or whatever, so clearly it's a good deal for them to offload traffic onto my server for free!
So I hope your regulations will support me in my Qwest to have Sprint give me lots of free bandwidth! And you'll have the support of all of Sprint's customers, who'll want to get the right to cancel at any time if Sprint doesn't give my web hosting service free bandwidth!
Ok, having said all that, if there were regulation like you're proposing for disconnecting free peering, we'd suddenly see big ISPs being unwilling to take on new free peering arrangements because they wouldn't want to get locked into unsuccessful ones by your regulations. On the other hand, the ISPs for whom free peering does make economic sense might start selling each other service for $1 or 1 Euro per month, cancellable at any time.
The AC who posted Article #25607411 misses the point that Sprint customers can't reach Cogent customers and vice versa unless somebody connects some routes. Users of other ISPs are fine, and small ISPs that have Sprint as an upstream are likely to multihome to multiple upstream carriers for reliability, so they're ok. The two main parties that are affected are Sprint wireless customers and hosting companies that only use Cogent (a fairly large market, because Cogent's per-megabit charges are cheap), and Sprint thinks the latter are more likely to pressure Cogent into fixing it.
From Sprint's perspective, Cogent can buy transit from almost any ISP they want and that'll fix the problem. Sprint could also buy transit from somebody connected to Cogent, but Tier 1 carriers have ego problems about this, and of course if Sprint were willing to do that they'd have been willing to continue free peering with Cogent as well.
Sprint wireless users can also tunnel through various tunnel servers to get to non-Sprint parts of the net. Possibly "Google Secure Access" will work (it's free, intended for users of Google's Wifi services, but may be more generally usable), and there's the Tor Anonymity Network.
Well, you start out with a fedora and a leather jacket as armor and a bullwhip as a weapon... If I play an archaeologist, I normally name my dog "Indy". (It's useful to name your dog, in case you end up encountering other dogs in general. Also, if a player dies, a later player on the same machine may encounter the earlier player's ghost (remember, Unix used to be a time-sharing multiple-user operating system:-), and naming the dog can be a hint to the later player that meets a dog that there may be a ghost around also.)
And if you don't know why the Tourist's goddess is The Lady, you should read more early Terry Pratchett.
You could pick your client first and then use its protocol, but it's much better to pick your protocol first and then pick one or more clients that support it. The two interesting open protocols out there are Jabber's XMPP, and SIMPLE, which is part of the SIP protocol family (mainly used for Voice over IP and also video.) Do you want to integrate your IM system with your voice system (since that's already maintaining a presence server)? SIMPLE may be a better choice. Not using an open VOIP platform? XMPP may give you more choice of clients.
One real benefit of the last Jabber system I used was that our corporate firewalls were set up in a way that could support IM sessions from either inside or outside the firewall, so I could stay connected to IM from home even if I wasn't using the corporate VPN. (Unfortunately, our current internal IM client is something the IT department homebrewed a few years before our merger, runs some homebrew protocol, and can't pass through the firewall - but it does give you lots of choices of automatically-converted-from-text-to-graphics emoticons!:-);-|:=( At least the stuff we sell to customers is something standard, I think Jabber.)
If your corporate legal department tells you that the Sarbanes-Oxley rules require you to keep records of all your instant messages, then the Off-The-Record instant messaging system is not what you're looking for. But most people probably aren't subject to that kind of regulation.
He _was_ talking in a more general sense, but it's important to keep track of the real details behind that, because generalities aren't always correct in specific cases, and blhack's posting is really on target. The IPv4 parts of the Internet are mostly connected to each other, though not always; IPv6, on the other hand, is a bunch of little islands that might almost be coordinated enough to call itself an archipelago.
My home router is on the Internet. You can send packets to its IP addresses (though not all of them actually have machines answering them) because I'm paying my ISP to deliver packets addressed to my router, and my ISP is connected somehow to your ISP. If I stop paying my ISP, they'll stop sending me packets, and stop accepting packets I send them. That wouldn't mean that my ISP had stopped providing "full internet service" to its other customers, or that yours had stopped doing so, it would just mean that you and I couldn't connect to each other unless I started paying my bill. And similarly, if you're hosting "Fulan-gong.com", your packets aren't going to get to China no matter how much you pay your ISP, but that doesn't mean they're ripping you off.
ISPs can either connect to each other for free ("peering"), or the smaller one can pay the bigger one $X/Mbps to access its services ("transit"). There are lots of pairs of companies who find it worthwhile to peer for free - typically eyeball services and content services - and in the US, there are about two dozen "Tier 1" ISPs who are big enough to tell everybody "Either you pay me, or we peer with each other for free is you're big enough for me to care about you, but I'm not going to pay you."
Cogent is the bottom end of the Tier 1 market. They carry a huge amount of traffic, because they're cheap and sell to lots of content providers, but their ability to convince other Tier 1 ISPs that it's worth peering with them for free has always been marginal. (For instance, they've only been peering with Sprint for two years.) And occasionally somebody drops them.
It's going to take a lot to get IPv6 into a usably interconnected network. Sure, it's nice to get an IPv6 address and some limited functionality, but most ISPs aren't connecting to each other on native IPv6, and even with tunneling over IPv4 it's pretty sparse.
Renesys is a fairly neutral source for information about peering (as opposed to Cogent's press release, which is obviously their side of the story.) The Forbes article is good perspective, but it's from before Sprint dropped Cogent. BTW, Sprint and Cogent have only been peering for two years; before that Cogent had to pay to connect to them.
One part of Cogent's business model is selling to multiple-tenant business buildings, where they can stick a router in the basement and run Fast Ethernet connections to multiple customers, and most of the 1300 buildings where they're on-net are either that kind of arrangement or else businesses they've built connections to directly (including some hosting centers.) For the MTU market, what this means is that all it costs them is some inside wiring and a bit of extra traffic on their free peering links.
Back around 2000 they were selling Fast Ethernet to this market for about the price most other carriers charged for 2-3 T1s (i.e. 3-4 Mbps for $2-4K.) I don't think most of their customers expected sustained dependable throughput of 100 Mbps for that price - but just about everybody expected to get more than 3 Mbps almost all the time, so it was a win, especially as a second carrier connection.
Because in fact you're right - naming is one of the things the Internet has difficulty with, and twitter's not doing significantly better than anybody else (except that it's much easier for them to take away my twitter name "SomebodyElsesTrademark" and give it to a more legitimate user of that name, though there are still obvious name collisions (like "acme" and "aaa" and "joesdiner" which have multiple users in different physical or logical spaces), so it's not like the problem is solved there either.)
That's one problem ICQ didn't have - a few user-id-numbers might be slightly cool, like 31337 or 12345678 or something that was a phonespell of something cool, but basically the namespace was lame enough that nobody fought over it.
Actually that gets to my dimly-remembered critique of the Labor Theory of Value that underlies Marx's belief that capitalists are evilly exploiting workers. Marx gives an example of shoes made by hand by workers and shoes made using capitalist-provided machines, and argues that the hand-made shoes are more valuable because more labor went into them, because all the value comes from the labor. (I think he argues that the value of the raw material doesn't count, because its value also depends on the labor from raising the cows, tanning the leather, etc.)
But the value of a pair of shoes to the wearer doesn't depend on the amount of work that went into making it, and while there may be quality differences between hand-made shoes and shoes that were made using machines, that can be positive or negative. And while it takes just as much labor to make two left shoes as it does to make a right shoe and a left shoe, the value to the wearer is substantially different.
Now, in America, the value of that shoe is derived from the brand name, with Sketchers being intermediate between Nikes and Keds, as opposed to the issue of whether your size is really 11 or 10.6 or 11.2 and medium-width as opposed to wide or narrow with the laces tightened enough to adjust for the wrong fit. After all, they all come from the same sweatshops...
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Dude, nobody makes that much LSD any more, at least outside of San Francisco, and even there you're only buying blotter paper which somebody has waved a picture of LSD by.
And the drug I was taking while reading the excellent Ender's Game was caffeine; I gave up on Card after Speaker or maybe Xenocide, so I never got to the Shadow series.
In D&D terminology, Bush/Cheney were clearly Chaotic Evil. Some of their advisers and henchpersons like John Yoo may have been Lawful Evil or Neutral Evil, and their main enemies were probably Lawful Evil, as well as the Neutral and Good folks who were collateral damage. Seems to be a good environment for Zombies.
Vampire movies sometimes have vamps who are protagonists, certainly since The Vampire Lestat novels. And then you get the occasional Vampires vs. Werewolves sort of movie, which was obviously a literary reference to the Cold War...
Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat were written during the Reagan years, though she's been cranking out sequels through Bush and Clinton years and for all I know more recently. The movies got made a few years after the book, but it was Reagan-era vampirism.
That's kind of like skydivers' responses to the "why jump out of a perfectly good airplane?" jokes - "have you seen the airplanes we're jumping out of?".
A few years back I was in Mazatlan with friends, and checked out tequilas in the local liquor store. The range of selections explained why one of the local restaurants was pouring the stuff like water - the cheap stuff was about $5/gallon. If you wanted Cazadores or drinks at a fancy bar, you still had to pay real money, but if you wanted ethanol that had been aged in plastic for no more than 15 minutes, and didn't have to pay US-level or Europe-level alcohol taxes, it doesn't actually cost that much to make.
Back when I was at Bell Labs, the convention for names to put on technical papers was to use initials and last name. I don't know how long that had been going on, but it was viewed as allowing work to be seen without the filter of gender (plus it was unambiguous about whether to use your nickname vs. formal name, for those of us like me who are only addressed with our formal first name by bureaucrats who are pretending to be familiar but don't actually know us...)
On the other hand, there were fewer applications using avatars in those days, and the default avatar was usually a Peter Weinberger logo-face.
We had no problems picking gender-neutral names to use for text examples that should be politically correct - we'd add Pat if we needed to. In this case, Terry was male and Lee was female.
I had a friend in college whose name was Rene (female, but IIRC she spelled it like that, not like Renee.) She got married, and at one point they received some paperwork for Mr. Rene Lastname. She tried to deal with it, and they told her that no, they needed to speak to MR Rene Lastname, not Mrs. Rene Lastname. ("Dammit, there *is* no Mr. Rene Lastname, he's Mr. Bruce Lastname"....)
If you've got a shared database between sender and recipient, then rather than having the recipient's software guess the avatar, or having the sender indicate the gender to use, you could have the sender pick the avatar. So yeah, I agree with your "dumbidea" tag.
And the conventions for avatar choice are very scenario-dependent. You might choose a rather different avatar for work than for gaming, for instance...
Of course, here in San Francisco, not only did which gender the law thinks you are just become more important, but gender is a rather more flexible construct. I don't know if my friend who's XXY is allowed to marry *anybody* now.
There's more than one Western naming convention. Spanish naming conventions aren't the same as English - for instance, José LÃpez Portillo y Pacheco was usually referred to in English as "President Lopez Portillo", or sometimes "President Lopez", and Vicente Fox Quesada was "President Fox". And then there's the concept of "middle name" being something you only have one of...
If you're speaking Chinese, you probably do that. But what I've seen of Chinese name usage in English in American business contexts is that the names often get reversed to more American-style name orders, especially if they're using European individual-names (sorry for the awkward construction - I'm not aware of a useful English term for "first name" other than "first name", though the term "Christian name" is occasionally used) or if they're more-than-first-generation immigrants. That's especially true if you're taking those names and putting them into a database like Microsoft Exchange email system's user database, or also if you're abbreviating names. So my friend K.C. Liu is obviously Liu K-something C-something in Chinese, and in spoken English he's either KC or Dr. Liu. And Fu-Li Betty Wang is Wang Fu-Li in Chinese.
Well I'm lichen your idea... Technically a lichen has a fungus and something that photosynthesizes, usually algae or cyanobacterium (or sometimes both). And the nutrients that get passed back and forth usually aren't cellulose, but maybe it'd be possible to get that kind of fungus together with a plant.
Alternatively, you could combine the fungus's cellulose-to-diesel features with growing cellulose-stalked grains, so instead of using corn to produce ethanol competing with using corn for food, you'd grow the corn, keep the seeds for food, and feed the stalks and cobs to the fungus for fuel.
I use laptops for work, and I'm still stuck with 1024x768 - lame PC worldview. The only time in the last decade and a half that my organization decided to get better-than-lowest-common-denominator screens was when they decided that 640x480 with 24-bit color was *much* cooler than 800x600 with 8-bit color. My wife just bought herself a new laptop, and it's something like 1024x768 or 1024x800, but that's because she wanted the under 3 pound model with the ~10-inch screen.
Desktops? My Sun-3 back in the 1980s had 1152x900, just marginally over a megapixel. My home desktop uses 1024x768 on the motherboard graphics, so I'll probably need to buy a graphics card when I get around to buying a flat-panel monitor. (And the Sun-2 in my attic was also only 1024x768 :-)
When it was good, it was very very good, but when it was bad, well, it was a windowing system written in Postscript that let you pass pieces of Postscript code back and forth between client and server to get things done, which could be appallingly insecure and buggy. (The fix for this was that Gosling later wrote Java with things he'd learned from NeWS.) (Postscript is essentially FORTH souped up with font knowledge, but it's good enough to handle objects in.)
Postscript means that WYSIWYG, really, rendered however you'd like. The terminal emulator, for instance, used Postscript, rendered at screen resolutions, and if you needed to print it, it rendered them at printer resolutions, or if you iconized a terminal window, that just set to font size to 1 point / 1 pixel, and you could still see any interactions happening in the icon. My boss was around 60, and constantly switching pairs of glasses if he needed to talk to somebody and also read his computer screen. We set his psterm default to 24-point font, and everything was Just Bigger, and he could just read it without messing around. Mouse tracking worked well, because you could make the tracking happen down in the server without the extra round-trip to the client, so if you had a slow network connection it was ok - you were passing data across the link, not pictures of the mouse, etc.
I've been a Libertarian for a couple of decades, but haven't been doing active politics the last few years. I'm probably voting for Barr, but I might flip a coin and vote for Nader instead. (Lots of things wrong with Nader, especially economics, a few really good things about him, and it's very clear that a vote for Nader is also a vote for None of the Above and against the war in Iraq.)
The LP's been taken over by quasi-Republicans in the last few years. Bob Barr, while he's seriously excellent about privacy issues, still thinks drugs should be illegal (though he's at least realized that the way the War on Some Drugs is being fought has serious problems) - which says he fundamentally doesn't get what Libertarianism is about. And he was one of the crew of divorced Republicans responsible for the Defense of Some Marriages Act. On the other hand, just about nobody else _is_ talking about undoing the civil liberties damage and concentration of power that Bush has done, and hardly any national-level politicians are even trying to get rid of the Patriot Act.
If your ISP is only getting its connectivity from Cogent, and isn't homed to multiple upstream ISPs, then they're at risk from any technical problems their Cogent link has as well as from any business problems Cogent has. If they need any regulatory help from the FCC, it's a requirement for Sprint to give them free Clues, not for Sprint to give Cogent free connectivity.
The Internet's a lot more stable than when I got involved with it 25ish years ago, or when small ISPs were a dime a dozen a decade and a bit ago, but it's still not 100% perfect. Back in the mid-90s, small ISPs provided dialup and email service, and they usually bought their first upstream T1 line from the cheapest provider available, but if they stayed up and running for a few months and started to fill it up, they almost universally bought their next upstream T1 from a different provider, because Internet routing flapped all the time, and if you had two providers you were not only less susceptible to your connection failing, you were much less likely to lose connection to half the world whenever a butterfly flapped its wings near MAE-WEST. In fact most ISPs these days can give you a reasonable service level agreement and also a reasonable level of service, but your ISP needs some sort of redundant connection.
Of course, if you think this is a mess, just look at the shape the IPv6 world is in - randomly-connected archipelagos of random little islands, tunnelled together by a maze of twisty little passages.
(Disclaimer: I work for an ISP that's not part of this dispute, but this is entirely my own opinion, not theirs.)
Unlike Cogent, who were big enough to get a trial arrangement for free peering with Sprint by asking for it, my web site / hosting service is somewhat smaller (specifically, it's the spare P266 laptop sitting under the desk behind some junk.) But really, I'm just as important to Sprint, because even though I'm not carrying 17% of the US Internet traffic, I also will have a much better traffic ratio - they'll be able to send 3:1 traffic to me, as opposed to Cogent sending them 3:1 or whatever, so clearly it's a good deal for them to offload traffic onto my server for free!
So I hope your regulations will support me in my Qwest to have Sprint give me lots of free bandwidth! And you'll have the support of all of Sprint's customers, who'll want to get the right to cancel at any time if Sprint doesn't give my web hosting service free bandwidth!
Ok, having said all that, if there were regulation like you're proposing for disconnecting free peering, we'd suddenly see big ISPs being unwilling to take on new free peering arrangements because they wouldn't want to get locked into unsuccessful ones by your regulations. On the other hand, the ISPs for whom free peering does make economic sense might start selling each other service for $1 or 1 Euro per month, cancellable at any time.
The AC who posted Article #25607411 misses the point that Sprint customers can't reach Cogent customers and vice versa unless somebody connects some routes. Users of other ISPs are fine, and small ISPs that have Sprint as an upstream are likely to multihome to multiple upstream carriers for reliability, so they're ok. The two main parties that are affected are Sprint wireless customers and hosting companies that only use Cogent (a fairly large market, because Cogent's per-megabit charges are cheap), and Sprint thinks the latter are more likely to pressure Cogent into fixing it.
From Sprint's perspective, Cogent can buy transit from almost any ISP they want and that'll fix the problem. Sprint could also buy transit from somebody connected to Cogent, but Tier 1 carriers have ego problems about this, and of course if Sprint were willing to do that they'd have been willing to continue free peering with Cogent as well.
Sprint wireless users can also tunnel through various tunnel servers to get to non-Sprint parts of the net. Possibly "Google Secure Access" will work (it's free, intended for users of Google's Wifi services, but may be more generally usable), and there's the Tor Anonymity Network.
Well, you start out with a fedora and a leather jacket as armor and a bullwhip as a weapon... If I play an archaeologist, I normally name my dog "Indy". (It's useful to name your dog, in case you end up encountering other dogs in general. Also, if a player dies, a later player on the same machine may encounter the earlier player's ghost (remember, Unix used to be a time-sharing multiple-user operating system :-), and naming the dog can be a hint to the later player that meets a dog that there may be a ghost around also.)
And if you don't know why the Tourist's goddess is The Lady, you should read more early Terry Pratchett.
You could pick your client first and then use its protocol, but it's much better to pick your protocol first and then pick one or more clients that support it. The two interesting open protocols out there are Jabber's XMPP, and SIMPLE, which is part of the SIP protocol family (mainly used for Voice over IP and also video.) Do you want to integrate your IM system with your voice system (since that's already maintaining a presence server)? SIMPLE may be a better choice. Not using an open VOIP platform? XMPP may give you more choice of clients.
One real benefit of the last Jabber system I used was that our corporate firewalls were set up in a way that could support IM sessions from either inside or outside the firewall, so I could stay connected to IM from home even if I wasn't using the corporate VPN. (Unfortunately, our current internal IM client is something the IT department homebrewed a few years before our merger, runs some homebrew protocol, and can't pass through the firewall - but it does give you lots of choices of automatically-converted-from-text-to-graphics emoticons! :-) ;-| :=( At least the stuff we sell to customers is something standard, I think Jabber.)
If your corporate legal department tells you that the Sarbanes-Oxley rules require you to keep records of all your instant messages, then the Off-The-Record instant messaging system is not what you're looking for. But most people probably aren't subject to that kind of regulation.
He _was_ talking in a more general sense, but it's important to keep track of the real details behind that, because generalities aren't always correct in specific cases, and blhack's posting is really on target. The IPv4 parts of the Internet are mostly connected to each other, though not always; IPv6, on the other hand, is a bunch of little islands that might almost be coordinated enough to call itself an archipelago.
My home router is on the Internet. You can send packets to its IP addresses (though not all of them actually have machines answering them) because I'm paying my ISP to deliver packets addressed to my router, and my ISP is connected somehow to your ISP. If I stop paying my ISP, they'll stop sending me packets, and stop accepting packets I send them. That wouldn't mean that my ISP had stopped providing "full internet service" to its other customers, or that yours had stopped doing so, it would just mean that you and I couldn't connect to each other unless I started paying my bill. And similarly, if you're hosting "Fulan-gong.com", your packets aren't going to get to China no matter how much you pay your ISP, but that doesn't mean they're ripping you off.
ISPs can either connect to each other for free ("peering"), or the smaller one can pay the bigger one $X/Mbps to access its services ("transit"). There are lots of pairs of companies who find it worthwhile to peer for free - typically eyeball services and content services - and in the US, there are about two dozen "Tier 1" ISPs who are big enough to tell everybody "Either you pay me, or we peer with each other for free is you're big enough for me to care about you, but I'm not going to pay you."
Cogent is the bottom end of the Tier 1 market. They carry a huge amount of traffic, because they're cheap and sell to lots of content providers, but their ability to convince other Tier 1 ISPs that it's worth peering with them for free has always been marginal. (For instance, they've only been peering with Sprint for two years.) And occasionally somebody drops them.
It's going to take a lot to get IPv6 into a usably interconnected network. Sure, it's nice to get an IPv6 address and some limited functionality, but most ISPs aren't connecting to each other on native IPv6, and even with tunneling over IPv4 it's pretty sparse.
Renesys is a fairly neutral source for information about peering (as opposed to Cogent's press release, which is obviously their side of the story.) The Forbes article is good perspective, but it's from before Sprint dropped Cogent. BTW, Sprint and Cogent have only been peering for two years; before that Cogent had to pay to connect to them.
One part of Cogent's business model is selling to multiple-tenant business buildings, where they can stick a router in the basement and run Fast Ethernet connections to multiple customers, and most of the 1300 buildings where they're on-net are either that kind of arrangement or else businesses they've built connections to directly (including some hosting centers.) For the MTU market, what this means is that all it costs them is some inside wiring and a bit of extra traffic on their free peering links.
Back around 2000 they were selling Fast Ethernet to this market for about the price most other carriers charged for 2-3 T1s (i.e. 3-4 Mbps for $2-4K.) I don't think most of their customers expected sustained dependable throughput of 100 Mbps for that price - but just about everybody expected to get more than 3 Mbps almost all the time, so it was a win, especially as a second carrier connection.
Because in fact you're right - naming is one of the things the Internet has difficulty with, and twitter's not doing significantly better than anybody else (except that it's much easier for them to take away my twitter name "SomebodyElsesTrademark" and give it to a more legitimate user of that name, though there are still obvious name collisions (like "acme" and "aaa" and "joesdiner" which have multiple users in different physical or logical spaces), so it's not like the problem is solved there either.)
That's one problem ICQ didn't have - a few user-id-numbers might be slightly cool, like 31337 or 12345678 or something that was a phonespell of something cool, but basically the namespace was lame enough that nobody fought over it.
Actually that gets to my dimly-remembered critique of the Labor Theory of Value that underlies Marx's belief that capitalists are evilly exploiting workers. Marx gives an example of shoes made by hand by workers and shoes made using capitalist-provided machines, and argues that the hand-made shoes are more valuable because more labor went into them, because all the value comes from the labor. (I think he argues that the value of the raw material doesn't count, because its value also depends on the labor from raising the cows, tanning the leather, etc.)
But the value of a pair of shoes to the wearer doesn't depend on the amount of work that went into making it, and while there may be quality differences between hand-made shoes and shoes that were made using machines, that can be positive or negative. And while it takes just as much labor to make two left shoes as it does to make a right shoe and a left shoe, the value to the wearer is substantially different.
Now, in America, the value of that shoe is derived from the brand name, with Sketchers being intermediate between Nikes and Keds, as opposed to the issue of whether your size is really 11 or 10.6 or 11.2 and medium-width as opposed to wide or narrow with the laces tightened enough to adjust for the wrong fit. After all, they all come from the same sweatshops...