IDSL is an ISDN-flavored DSL version. It uses the ISDN modulation to send bits over the wire, but with a full-time DSLAM connection as opposed to ISDN switched calling. It gets 144kbps - ISDN has two 64kbps B channels and a 16kbps D channel, and is typically used for a 128kbps bonded circuit.
The big advantage of IDSL is distance - it typically gets about 30,000 feet, compared to about 18000 for most DSL flavors.
A typical patent has a bunch of claims, usually starting with very general and progressing to some very detailed claims which are the core of the new idea in the patent, and then some more claims that are variations on the earlier ones. They're not written in English, but in Patentese, which is a dialect that has a subset of English grammar chosen to avoid conveying actual new information to the reader while still allowing the reader to confirm that information already known is covered.
So they'll start out with claims about a "round transportation device" and move on to claims about a "left-hand-threaded chrome-nickel-molybdenum wingnut", and some of the later claims may involve "titanium-oxide-pigmented circular signifiers". The patent examiner will grant the patent because the wingnut did something new and useful, even though there was some prior art concerning the "wheel". This does not mean that the patent owners aren't going to then go try to extort money from people for their use of the wheel, or for business models that charge more for whitewall tires, or that columnists or Slashdot submitters won't misconstrue what the patent's about. But the patent itself may still be legitimate.
Last year I was working on a project that required joining a couple of different tables, and it was very annoying to find out that Excel doesn't have even a basic join. I guess they want you to buy the version of Office that includes Access if you want that.
There were also other problems which perhaps it could have solved if I knew it better, such as chopping some of the fields from 11 characters to 8 (which of course made the entries non-unique), but it was easier to install vim and do an ed-style edit than try to find how, since there was enough other manipulation I wanted to do that was easier that way. If I'd been working in Linux instead of Windows I would have checked out recent versions of the old v7 join, but I wasn't going to install Cygwin just to do that; perhaps I should have.
There are two different memes you're mixing up here. The "I, for one, welcome our [Fill-in-the-blank] overlords" was from a Simpsons episode, and gets used relentlessly on Slashdot.
The "French surrender a lot" meme is different - whatever its origin, and the Onion article that helped propagate it in the ~2000 timeframe, the US right wing started pushing it heavily during the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, because the French weren't jumping onto Bush's bandwagon, and it was a convenient way to get the rubes to attack anyone who wasn't cooperating, further drawing them in to the neo-con's frame of reference.
But it was especially important for Bush, because the obvious name to call the Iraqis who fought back against the US-led invasion would have been The "Iraqi Resistance", in parallel to the French Resistance of WWII, who everybody remembers at least vaguely as having been brave fighters against an overwhelming attacker, which was really really not the meme that Rove et al wanted to have around.
Having one or two antique machines around to act as specialized servers can be useful - a DNS/DHCP box, a print server, whatever. And it's useful to have a couple of screens scattered around the house for casual browsing, music playing, etc. But after that you're really much better off managing your server applications on a current machine, either as applications on the primary machine or as virtual machines if you need extra security or isolation. Modern CPUs may use more power than old ones, but if you're already running one, you're just adding a few cycles to it and using a bit more RAM, compared to each older machine needing to fire up RAM, video cards, network interfaces, disks, etc.
I tend to agree with Jeffrey Hummel's arguments that the Southern states seceded primarily because of slavery, but Lincoln had the Union reconquer them for reasons of nationalism.
Economics was obviously a major driver (and slavery's as much a part of that as free trade), but a lot of it was emotional/political issues - slavery has a large impact on social organization, and people had strong emotional reactions both for and against it, and all that emphasis on the Union as personal identity and the "manifest destiny" crap; you don't get brother-killing-brother kinds of wars over trade policy. And you may remember that states were being admitted to the union in ways that balanced the numbers of new slave and free states - even though the new slave states weren't all in the Deep South which had the economics issues.
So much of the Union's desire to reconquer the Confederate States reminds me of China's insistence on reconquering and controlling their old empire, including Taiwan and Tibet (the, uh, Han shot first...)
And Lincoln wanted to increase central government power. While he wasn't a Prohibitionist, they were one of the groups that had joined to form the Republican party, and fighting slavery and Demon Rum required more central power.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space" -Douglas Adams
Space is really big and empty, and vaguely potentially habitable places to live are really rare and far apart - and starships that you can build in your backyard, or possibly even in your planet's backyard, are from the fiction side of science fiction, not the science side.
Even if there _are_ other intelligent beings out there, it's pretty unlikely that they'd be able to afford to burn the kind of resources it would take to do much starfaring. Even communications is really hard - if a species spends a million years broadcasting into space using frequencies and patterns we'd recognize as communications, that doesn't get you much coverage, and maybe they last probed our direction a century ago so we've missed our chance for the millenium, or maybe we just didn't recognize the signal they sent us last Tuesday because SETI wasn't pointed in the right direction.
Or, well, they figured that we're made out of meat, and didn't want to keep talking to us.
The reason that there are separate black and white churches, at least in the US, started out as racism, pure and simple, though by now there's also a century or two of evolved traditions and style. The theological explanation for this is a process called "sin"... And even when racism didn't keep people from going to other churches, they usually wanted to go to churches in or near their neighborhoods, which in much of the US were mostly racially divided, and *that* was leftovers of racism.
On the other hand, the reasons for separate Hispanic, Chinese, and Korean Protestant churches in the US are primarily language. Catholic churches didn't traditionally have this problem as much, because if everything's in Latin then only the people who've learned their Latin really understand the show (though the Italians and Spanish can catch some of it anyway.) But for the rest of us, and for Catholic churches after Vatican II, it's really nice to understand what the preacher is saying, especially on complex philosophical or emotional issues, and to be able to talk to each other the rest of the time, and the alternatives are to either hang out in separate groups or to share the world's most common language, which is Bad English.
Haitians in the Northeast US are an edge case - they've usually had separate churches because they're speaking Creole French, but of course the reasons they're black are because of slavery.
I used to go to a Southern Baptist church in New Jersey, and it was really annoying to hear some people refer to it as a "white" church - we were about 1/3 Chinese, a few black families, a few Colombians, a few Puerto Ricans, an Arab family, some southerners, some Yankees, some Vietnamese (well, technically they were Chinese from Saigon, but they spoke Hakka). Not bad for under 100 people. Eventually a Chinese-language church opened up nearby and most of the Chinese families started going to it.
It's stupid, but that doesn't mean nobody's ever done it - my ranting is as grumpy as it is because Verisign did it and several other sets of people have done it since then. Verisign's attempt was really egregious, since they're the main registrar for.com and.net, and ICANN yelled at them until they stopped (one of the few times I think ICANN has really done the Right Thing.) Most of the other people who've done it are ISPs (who shouldn't do that, but you can always set your system to point to some other DNS resolver, and they're at least not the Registrar.)
OpenDNS is more interesting - they're also doing things like offering to block known phishing sites, and while they're still Technically Wrong, you're not going to use them without either deliberately choosing to do so (or having your ISP use them.)
You're seeing the congealed top layer, and those "craters" are mostly bubbles, though some of them are the mold spots, which is a bit less obvious because it's only lit in black&white (except during eclipses, but even then the reddish lighting isn't the right color for seeing green cheese-mold.)
But space travel is perfectly possible - you're doing it every time you go into a subway. The Apollo missions were carefully planned to land on the colder harder spots, which is why they didn't sink in.
Remember, I'm not a *real* doctor - but I've got a Master's Degree - in Science!
BitTorrent was designed to be a scalable high-performance system. Ratios are part of making that work, and Bram went through several iterations of tuning to get the pyramid scheme to work well.
Early connectors are likely to have high ratios unless they abandon right after getting their full file, and late arrivers are going to be mostly leaching, and to some extent that's ok - but most people will get their files earlier if people are more generous, and also they'll get them earlier if they download from faster-uploading peers, and obviously it's helpful to keep at least one seeder around so that there's always a source of all the parts. Generosity's a Good Thing in this kind of network.
Also, don't confuse ratios for a given torrent with ratios over a series of files - this isn't Napster. If you've been seeding for a week, that's nice to everybody, but you're only getting rewarded or penalized on This One File, and hopefully you've received it by now and aren't waiting for some tracker to hand out the last block which it's keeping in reserve to force the early participants to reach higher upload ratios before they can leave...
There are so many things wrong with this. The first one is that it doesn't actually work as indicated in Claim 1, because it's operating at the wrong levels of the protocol stacks. DNS maps between names and IP addresses, and is used for many different kinds of Layer 4, 5, and 7 applications, but URLs are a Layer 7 function typically supported by browsers, and the identification of what kind of service the client is interested in is not known at name resolution time, or even what Layer 4 transport protocol or Layer 7 application protocol, and in fact the methods used in the patent have the DNS operator's web server decide what kind of response web page to provide in response to a URL included in a HTTP request, even though the client's DNS request might not have been intended to be used for HTTP. When Verisign implemented their annoying breakage of DNS functionality, they supported HTTP on port 80, and had a stub email server that did a sloppy approach to rejecting connections, and AFAICT didn't provide other services, such as correct rejections on SSL's TCP Port 443 or SSH's TCP port 22. It's not clear that they even did the right thing at Layer 3 - if you were trying to "ping misspellllled-example.com", they not only should have answered the DNS request with a "No Such Domain" error message, but if you sent it a ping, it shouldn't respond (I forget if they responded to pings or not; many systems don't do that for self-defense.)
Another reason this patent shouldn't have been accepted is that wildcard domains were a standard capability, and having a web server try to provide useful information in a 404 page was probably a known capability, or at least obvious to someone skilled in the trade. Responding to a DNS request with the IP address of a web server that isn't the one the customer was looking for might not count as "obvious to someone skilled in the trade" because it's obviously wrong.
Agreed, and that makes a real difference. Avoiding having a single target which could be used to shut down the whole system was one of Bram's objectives when he was writing Bittorrent. Individual trackers can be shut down, so a person distributing a given file or bunch of files can be told to shut down, but the Bittorrent system as a whole keeps working just fine, because there isn't one big "Kick Me" target on it like Napster had. That also reduced some of the need for secrecy that some of Bittorrent's shutdown-avoiding predecessors had, notably Mojo Nation, and pushed the responsibility to the people distributing any specific file, as opposed to the platform.
That does lose some efficiency - a vanilla Bittorrent client is less likely to be willing to upload a given file after it's done downloading that one. On other other hand, it also blocks the RIAA's favorite tactic of "You made Every File You Have Available to Six Billion People, so you owe us 6Billion*Nfiles*$1000/file".
ISPs don't actually care about copyright infringement, except possibly the cable modem companies which are also selling television and might have their advertising revenues impacted. Back when Napster and @Home were still around, @Home had two positions on Napster - officially, they'd say "Evil Copyright Infringers are Bad! And people generating upstream bandwidth from home are Bad!". Unofficially, the people who worked there mostly said "Well, duh! The reason people are buying broadband at home is to download music - Napster's really great for us!"
ISPs care about money - buying more upstream costs money, and upgrading peering links or internal distribution networks costs money. They also care about customer perceived performance, and if P2P uses their networks inefficiently, and swamps a neighborhood's upstream in ways that interfere with TCP performance, that's bad. For the most part, this technology will reduce their costs by reducing exterior bandwidth, and that's good, as long as it doesn't do it in ways that the improved P2P performance finds other bottlenecks in their system to step on. The better the P2P paths can match the structure of the ISP, the lower the impact on their network will be.
This approach doesn't actually require the ISP to install anything, or to do anything, or expose them to participating-in-P2P-themselves infringement conflicts; there are other approaches that do, such as putting P2P caching servers in their network. So it's pretty much all gravy for them, especially since they know that some large fraction of the bits they're carrying are P2P. (The Akamai caching servers here aren't being used to cache the P2P - they're web caches used by traditional content providers, and what this tool is doing is using their location to identify some of the structure of the ISP network to do better P2P peer matching.)
There are two groups of people who don't like P2P - the RIAA who want to spin it as content thievery (which, ok, it often is), and the ISPs, who don't like getting their networks swamped and having to pay more for transit with upstream ISPs or increasing the size of their peering with peers and their internal distribution links. Right now, both of those forces are pointed in the same direction.
Making P2P more efficient by aligning peer selection with ISP structure makes the ISP side less grouchy about it. This is good. The more precisely you can do that, the more you reduce the impact on the ISP's performance and costs, as well as getting better performance for the P2P system. So they're generally going to like it, though it's obviously a balancing act, because better alignment means you can also find the bottlenecks in your ISP and fill them.
So no, as long as you're not bothering Akamai too much, and as long as this works reasonably well with your ISPs, it's not going to get pushback.
Back when Napster was still around, it did some work with some universities to set up peering student-student rather than student-outsider, because that way most of the bandwidth stayed on the fat cheap university LANs rather than the thinner and rapidly-overloaded links to the Internet. Some of this happened naturally (students would show up as having fast connections, so students would generally upload from other students, but outsiders would also try to upload from students.) Napster could do this fairly easily, because they had a centralized database. Bittorrent and most other P2P systems today are designed to avoid having a centralized database, because it was a target.
Akamai's content distribution system works by putting large numbers of small caching servers around the internet, on ISP networks, and using algorithms to connect clients to the closest server while doing some level of load-balancing. (There are other CDNs that work by putting small numbers of large servers at peering points.) So if two clients get connected to the same Akamai server when they're retrieving some Akamai customer's content, they're probably nearby in a network sense. That doesn't require getting lots of detail from Akamai's network - though it might be more accurate if it did.
It's an interesting approach - you can also do things like identifying IP addresses by BGP Autonomous System Number, which will tell you what sites are in the same ISP, but you might get better P2P performance by connecting to a peer on another ISP in your same city than a peer who's on your ISP but across the country. (Most ISPs seem to assign ASNs on roughly a continent or country level.) So sometimes you'll get better P2P performance by picking close ping times, but as the article says, pinging lots of potential peers can take a long time.
The sale actually takes place *between* the two entities. If that's interstate, then states can't tax it.
However, if the seller is located in multiple places, and one of those places is the state where the buyer is, then AFAICT it's fairly settled that that state has enough jurisdiction to tax the sale. So if you buy something by mail from Walmart, but there's a Walmart store in your state, your state can tax you even though the goods are getting shipped from Bentonville Arkansas.
NY's cheating here by arguing that anybody who's got an Amazon-referring web site (and makes money from sales that happen because they're linking to Amazon) is part of Amazon, therefore Amazon has physical presence within NY, therefore it's taxable.
Fine, if you want to be precise about it, you're asking for ICANN to require that their registrars enforce anti-privacy policies so that they and other people can police people who want to buy domain names, rather than asking that ICANN do the police work themselves. (But if you've followed ICANN for very long, you know that they want to control all the TLDs, not just the.us and old and new global TLDs. And the global TLDs are supposed to be global, though some of them were US-centric at the beginning.)
And I've accused you twice of wanting to police them because you're complaining that the lack of whois contact information makes it difficult to police them, and given specific examples of content (selling drugs and pirated software) for which you think ICANN should do something different.
Furthermore, your accusation that ICANN's failing to fulfill its duty in monitoring who sells domains on the Internet implies that you think that it has a duty, and that enforcing the whois rules that ICANN itself made are part of that duty. If you want to argue that ICANN shouldn't make rules if it doesn't plan to enforce them, I'll be happy to agree with you, but those particular rules are rules it shouldn't have made.
If ICANN has any appropriate duties, it's to become the representative body that it said it was going to be when it got the US Department of Commerce to give it the job; lots of people have written about how it's evaded that kind of structure, and reading Karl Auerbach's years of comments about it should be a fairly good start. As much as I respect and admire Esther, she didn't do a very successful job of getting the organization she founded to behave itself, and the people who've followed her have taken it even farther away from any pretense of representativeness.
I don't think ICANN's been 100% bad - it's done a few things quite well, though I think that overall it's stifled innovation in many potentially interesting areas. DNS is flexible enough that you can work around many things by adding a layer of indirection, e.g. the people who have the domain example.com can do anything they want with their subdomains even if.com or the root won't support them. But some things have been serious mistakes, like inventing domain tasting and requiring the registrars to support it, and the directions they've gone with multilingual domain names have been a total mess (not that it's an easy problem), and I'm inclined to guess that they've delayed IPv6 deployment by a year or so with their address space policies (though that's a mixed blessing, since that's also delayed the creation of an IPv6 equivalent of IPv4 swamp space.) And they've been blatant rent-seekers; I think the whole problem should have been left in the hands of the IETF.
According to the article, 4.1's still in the crashes-a-lot type of alpha stage. Some kinds of quirks I can put up with, but it's obviously not for me yet...
Definitely:-) As long as you were sober when you ran down those innocent pedestrians and set fire to those little old ladies, there's no problem with it. Now, if you'd responded to the "Let's kill the Haitians!" by giving them zombie drugs, rather than shooting them or running them over, that could have led to preventable traffic deaths, which would be a Bad Thing.
And as to your side note, the last time I wanted to kill a dwarf in real life, I didn't have a good enough answer to "What! With your bare hands?", so game playing has definitely made me a better person than I would otherwise have been....
Back in the mid-90s, I was visiting my parents who had one of those "television" things occupying space in their living room, and I noticed that the display from my laptop computer showed up on the screen. It wasn't really in sync, had about three copies of the text slowly scrolling by, but you could tell it was readable text. I don't remember what year it was, so the laptop may have been a 486 or a Pentium 75, or something around that range, and the screen might have been 800x600 but was probably 640x480 (because our IT bureaucracy was much more impressed with screens that had more colors than more pixels; even today I'm still stuck with 1024x768:-).
Since I'd done work with TEMPEST in the 1980s and was hanging out with a bunch of crypto people, and since the open-source discussions were mostly people saying "Laptops should protect you just fine since they're LCD", I obviously had to speculate about how this could be happening. My guess is that it wasn't the LCD itself that was radiating, but instead was the VGA jack on the back for plugging into a desktop monitor. Most laptops still have those today, and while many people use LCDs rather than CRTs as desktop monitors, they're still connecting by VGA signals using not-particularly-shielded cables, so there should still be plenty of signal around to listen for.
Obviously today's video signals are a lot higher frequency, so you'd need to use some actual computer equipment rather than squinting at a television. I don't know if the digital signal formats are easier or harder to intercept successfully than the VGA analog ones; maybe that'll help.
Actually Google announced a couple of months ago that they'd stop accepting AdSense advertising for kited domains. The first article or two that I just looked at said it didn't know the specifics of how they were going to identify those domains - you could speculate that they'd use whois data, but you could also speculate that some registrars would start offering to backdate their whois records just to thwart that... (:-)
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It gets 144kbps - ISDN has two 64kbps B channels and a 16kbps D channel, and is typically used for a 128kbps bonded circuit.
The big advantage of IDSL is distance - it typically gets about 30,000 feet, compared to about 18000 for most DSL flavors.
So they'll start out with claims about a "round transportation device" and move on to claims about a "left-hand-threaded chrome-nickel-molybdenum wingnut", and some of the later claims may involve "titanium-oxide-pigmented circular signifiers". The patent examiner will grant the patent because the wingnut did something new and useful, even though there was some prior art concerning the "wheel". This does not mean that the patent owners aren't going to then go try to extort money from people for their use of the wheel, or for business models that charge more for whitewall tires, or that columnists or Slashdot submitters won't misconstrue what the patent's about. But the patent itself may still be legitimate.
There were also other problems which perhaps it could have solved if I knew it better, such as chopping some of the fields from 11 characters to 8 (which of course made the entries non-unique), but it was easier to install vim and do an ed-style edit than try to find how, since there was enough other manipulation I wanted to do that was easier that way. If I'd been working in Linux instead of Windows I would have checked out recent versions of the old v7 join, but I wasn't going to install Cygwin just to do that; perhaps I should have.
The "French surrender a lot" meme is different - whatever its origin, and the Onion article that helped propagate it in the ~2000 timeframe, the US right wing started pushing it heavily during the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq, because the French weren't jumping onto Bush's bandwagon, and it was a convenient way to get the rubes to attack anyone who wasn't cooperating, further drawing them in to the neo-con's frame of reference.
But it was especially important for Bush, because the obvious name to call the Iraqis who fought back against the US-led invasion would have been The "Iraqi Resistance", in parallel to the French Resistance of WWII, who everybody remembers at least vaguely as having been brave fighters against an overwhelming attacker, which was really really not the meme that Rove et al wanted to have around.
Having one or two antique machines around to act as specialized servers can be useful - a DNS/DHCP box, a print server, whatever. And it's useful to have a couple of screens scattered around the house for casual browsing, music playing, etc. But after that you're really much better off managing your server applications on a current machine, either as applications on the primary machine or as virtual machines if you need extra security or isolation. Modern CPUs may use more power than old ones, but if you're already running one, you're just adding a few cycles to it and using a bit more RAM, compared to each older machine needing to fire up RAM, video cards, network interfaces, disks, etc.
Economics was obviously a major driver (and slavery's as much a part of that as free trade), but a lot of it was emotional/political issues - slavery has a large impact on social organization, and people had strong emotional reactions both for and against it, and all that emphasis on the Union as personal identity and the "manifest destiny" crap; you don't get brother-killing-brother kinds of wars over trade policy. And you may remember that states were being admitted to the union in ways that balanced the numbers of new slave and free states - even though the new slave states weren't all in the Deep South which had the economics issues.
So much of the Union's desire to reconquer the Confederate States reminds me of China's insistence on reconquering and controlling their old empire, including Taiwan and Tibet (the, uh, Han shot first...)
And Lincoln wanted to increase central government power. While he wasn't a Prohibitionist, they were one of the groups that had joined to form the Republican party, and fighting slavery and Demon Rum required more central power.
... oh, never mind, everybody pretty much figured that one was coming anyway.
Space is really big and empty, and vaguely potentially habitable places to live are really rare and far apart - and starships that you can build in your backyard, or possibly even in your planet's backyard, are from the fiction side of science fiction, not the science side.
Even if there _are_ other intelligent beings out there, it's pretty unlikely that they'd be able to afford to burn the kind of resources it would take to do much starfaring. Even communications is really hard - if a species spends a million years broadcasting into space using frequencies and patterns we'd recognize as communications, that doesn't get you much coverage, and maybe they last probed our direction a century ago so we've missed our chance for the millenium, or maybe we just didn't recognize the signal they sent us last Tuesday because SETI wasn't pointed in the right direction.
Or, well, they figured that we're made out of meat, and didn't want to keep talking to us.
On the other hand, the reasons for separate Hispanic, Chinese, and Korean Protestant churches in the US are primarily language. Catholic churches didn't traditionally have this problem as much, because if everything's in Latin then only the people who've learned their Latin really understand the show (though the Italians and Spanish can catch some of it anyway.) But for the rest of us, and for Catholic churches after Vatican II, it's really nice to understand what the preacher is saying, especially on complex philosophical or emotional issues, and to be able to talk to each other the rest of the time, and the alternatives are to either hang out in separate groups or to share the world's most common language, which is Bad English.
Haitians in the Northeast US are an edge case - they've usually had separate churches because they're speaking Creole French, but of course the reasons they're black are because of slavery.
I used to go to a Southern Baptist church in New Jersey, and it was really annoying to hear some people refer to it as a "white" church - we were about 1/3 Chinese, a few black families, a few Colombians, a few Puerto Ricans, an Arab family, some southerners, some Yankees, some Vietnamese (well, technically they were Chinese from Saigon, but they spoke Hakka). Not bad for under 100 people. Eventually a Chinese-language church opened up nearby and most of the Chinese families started going to it.
It's been done for years :-) The catch is finding a pin-feeder for your laser printer...
That was the William Morris I thought of first as well:-)
OpenDNS is more interesting - they're also doing things like offering to block known phishing sites, and while they're still Technically Wrong, you're not going to use them without either deliberately choosing to do so (or having your ISP use them.)
But space travel is perfectly possible - you're doing it every time you go into a subway. The Apollo missions were carefully planned to land on the colder harder spots, which is why they didn't sink in.
Remember, I'm not a *real* doctor - but I've got a Master's Degree - in Science!
Early connectors are likely to have high ratios unless they abandon right after getting their full file, and late arrivers are going to be mostly leaching, and to some extent that's ok - but most people will get their files earlier if people are more generous, and also they'll get them earlier if they download from faster-uploading peers, and obviously it's helpful to keep at least one seeder around so that there's always a source of all the parts. Generosity's a Good Thing in this kind of network.
Also, don't confuse ratios for a given torrent with ratios over a series of files - this isn't Napster. If you've been seeding for a week, that's nice to everybody, but you're only getting rewarded or penalized on This One File, and hopefully you've received it by now and aren't waiting for some tracker to hand out the last block which it's keeping in reserve to force the early participants to reach higher upload ratios before they can leave...
Another reason this patent shouldn't have been accepted is that wildcard domains were a standard capability, and having a web server try to provide useful information in a 404 page was probably a known capability, or at least obvious to someone skilled in the trade. Responding to a DNS request with the IP address of a web server that isn't the one the customer was looking for might not count as "obvious to someone skilled in the trade" because it's obviously wrong.
That does lose some efficiency - a vanilla Bittorrent client is less likely to be willing to upload a given file after it's done downloading that one. On other other hand, it also blocks the RIAA's favorite tactic of "You made Every File You Have Available to Six Billion People, so you owe us 6Billion*Nfiles*$1000/file".
ISPs care about money - buying more upstream costs money, and upgrading peering links or internal distribution networks costs money. They also care about customer perceived performance, and if P2P uses their networks inefficiently, and swamps a neighborhood's upstream in ways that interfere with TCP performance, that's bad. For the most part, this technology will reduce their costs by reducing exterior bandwidth, and that's good, as long as it doesn't do it in ways that the improved P2P performance finds other bottlenecks in their system to step on. The better the P2P paths can match the structure of the ISP, the lower the impact on their network will be.
This approach doesn't actually require the ISP to install anything, or to do anything, or expose them to participating-in-P2P-themselves infringement conflicts; there are other approaches that do, such as putting P2P caching servers in their network. So it's pretty much all gravy for them, especially since they know that some large fraction of the bits they're carrying are P2P. (The Akamai caching servers here aren't being used to cache the P2P - they're web caches used by traditional content providers, and what this tool is doing is using their location to identify some of the structure of the ISP network to do better P2P peer matching.)
Making P2P more efficient by aligning peer selection with ISP structure makes the ISP side less grouchy about it. This is good. The more precisely you can do that, the more you reduce the impact on the ISP's performance and costs, as well as getting better performance for the P2P system. So they're generally going to like it, though it's obviously a balancing act, because better alignment means you can also find the bottlenecks in your ISP and fill them.
So no, as long as you're not bothering Akamai too much, and as long as this works reasonably well with your ISPs, it's not going to get pushback.
Back when Napster was still around, it did some work with some universities to set up peering student-student rather than student-outsider, because that way most of the bandwidth stayed on the fat cheap university LANs rather than the thinner and rapidly-overloaded links to the Internet. Some of this happened naturally (students would show up as having fast connections, so students would generally upload from other students, but outsiders would also try to upload from students.) Napster could do this fairly easily, because they had a centralized database. Bittorrent and most other P2P systems today are designed to avoid having a centralized database, because it was a target.
It's an interesting approach - you can also do things like identifying IP addresses by BGP Autonomous System Number, which will tell you what sites are in the same ISP, but you might get better P2P performance by connecting to a peer on another ISP in your same city than a peer who's on your ISP but across the country. (Most ISPs seem to assign ASNs on roughly a continent or country level.) So sometimes you'll get better P2P performance by picking close ping times, but as the article says, pinging lots of potential peers can take a long time.
However, if the seller is located in multiple places, and one of those places is the state where the buyer is, then AFAICT it's fairly settled that that state has enough jurisdiction to tax the sale. So if you buy something by mail from Walmart, but there's a Walmart store in your state, your state can tax you even though the goods are getting shipped from Bentonville Arkansas.
NY's cheating here by arguing that anybody who's got an Amazon-referring web site (and makes money from sales that happen because they're linking to Amazon) is part of Amazon, therefore Amazon has physical presence within NY, therefore it's taxable.
And I've accused you twice of wanting to police them because you're complaining that the lack of whois contact information makes it difficult to police them, and given specific examples of content (selling drugs and pirated software) for which you think ICANN should do something different.
Furthermore, your accusation that ICANN's failing to fulfill its duty in monitoring who sells domains on the Internet implies that you think that it has a duty, and that enforcing the whois rules that ICANN itself made are part of that duty. If you want to argue that ICANN shouldn't make rules if it doesn't plan to enforce them, I'll be happy to agree with you, but those particular rules are rules it shouldn't have made.
If ICANN has any appropriate duties, it's to become the representative body that it said it was going to be when it got the US Department of Commerce to give it the job; lots of people have written about how it's evaded that kind of structure, and reading Karl Auerbach's years of comments about it should be a fairly good start. As much as I respect and admire Esther, she didn't do a very successful job of getting the organization she founded to behave itself, and the people who've followed her have taken it even farther away from any pretense of representativeness.
I don't think ICANN's been 100% bad - it's done a few things quite well, though I think that overall it's stifled innovation in many potentially interesting areas. DNS is flexible enough that you can work around many things by adding a layer of indirection, e.g. the people who have the domain example.com can do anything they want with their subdomains even if
According to the article, 4.1's still in the crashes-a-lot type of alpha stage. Some kinds of quirks I can put up with, but it's obviously not for me yet...
And as to your side note, the last time I wanted to kill a dwarf in real life, I didn't have a good enough answer to "What! With your bare hands?", so game playing has definitely made me a better person than I would otherwise have been....
Since I'd done work with TEMPEST in the 1980s and was hanging out with a bunch of crypto people, and since the open-source discussions were mostly people saying "Laptops should protect you just fine since they're LCD", I obviously had to speculate about how this could be happening. My guess is that it wasn't the LCD itself that was radiating, but instead was the VGA jack on the back for plugging into a desktop monitor. Most laptops still have those today, and while many people use LCDs rather than CRTs as desktop monitors, they're still connecting by VGA signals using not-particularly-shielded cables, so there should still be plenty of signal around to listen for.
Obviously today's video signals are a lot higher frequency, so you'd need to use some actual computer equipment rather than squinting at a television. I don't know if the digital signal formats are easier or harder to intercept successfully than the VGA analog ones; maybe that'll help.
Actually Google announced a couple of months ago that they'd stop accepting AdSense advertising for kited domains. The first article or two that I just looked at said it didn't know the specifics of how they were going to identify those domains - you could speculate that they'd use whois data, but you could also speculate that some registrars would start offering to backdate their whois records just to thwart that... (:-)