This is a lotto-type game where they draw M of N numbered balls out of a bin (or M bins, I forget which.) That has a distribution that you can calculate, and it's more granular than a Normal distribution. Normal is a useful approximation for many kinds of continuous distributions, and many kinds of distributions will approach normal if you add up enough trials, but it's not the same.
Another way to look at the problem is that the state's trying to make money, and the statistical properties are simple enough that if they're at least vaguely competent they'll keep the odds correct, and they'll also hire enough auditors to make it hard to get away with deliberately rigging the game. It's much easier to scam the system by getting a sweetheart deal running the lottery terminal network, selling "lucky winning number" books at convenience stores, or telling the winners that you're a corrupt Nigerian official's widowed mother who needs help.
I've only participated in one government lottery. I didn't win the green suit, M-16 rifle, and two-year all-expenses-paid vacation to exciting tropical Vietnam, or the grand prize magic bullet with my name on it, and since my number was high enough to get classified as 1-H, I didn't even win the third-prize government-health-care physical exam. Haven't bought another ticket from those bastards since then.
New Jersey's lottery was sold to the public as "funding for education and old people". But the lottery sales places have to put up posters saying what the state spends it on, and it doesn't match the initial hype. (This is based on my memories of looking at the posters a decade ago, when I lived there, so YMMV.) Only 50% goes to the winners. (They couldn't pay out more, because the Mafia Daily Number pays 60%, and the state wasn't allowed to compete with that.) Some reasonable fraction goes to the ticket sellers, administrative costs, etc. But the next biggest chunk of money went to funding the state prison system, and kids and old people were way far down the list.
And of course that doesn't tell you what portion of the administrative cost are boondoggle - a few years back I looked into bidding on upgrading Oregon's state lottery network from X.25 to something modern, and it was a total scam - reducing the costs would mean that the agency handling the network would get less money, so they didn't want that kind of upgrade.
There are two reasons you'd want the owner's name - you're trying to contact them because of content on their website / email, or you're trying to sue them because you think you should own their domain name due to trademark law. If you want to contact them, use the contact info on their website; if it's not valid, then the whois owner information probably isn't either.
The trademark ownership issue has been a major driver since before ICANN - the IETF Ad-Hoc Committee that was trying to expand the number of global TLDs before ICANN took over were under a lot of pressure from the Trademark Gods to make sure that anybody who registered a name provided their True Name and True ICBM Address (er, process-server address) so that trademark lawsuits could be resolved without needing to drag the DNS registrars into the process. I think that's unnecessary - it's reasonable to have a Uniform Dispute Resolution Process that says that if you don't provide usable contact information then you're presumed to lose a trademark dispute for non-generic names, as opposed to preemptively violating your privacy.
In practice, the main reasons I use the whois owner name are to try to make sure I've got a correct email address for somebody if I'm not sure, or sometimes to see if it'll help me contact somebody whose website doesn't provide useful information (e.g. spam complaints to abuse@ get ignored), but I've found that if somebody's a sleaze, they're usually providing non-useful information in their whois records.
There was one spammer I could have probably sued successfully, but their whois address was a box number in Greenville DE, at the same address as The Company Corporation, which has been the canonical place to set up cheap Delaware corporations for the last 100+ years - so the most I'd get if I successfully sued them for everything they were worth would have been the contents of their file folder, and they'd have had to go pay another $100 to get another shell company. I guess I might have also acquired their intellectual property, like the trademark on ScammersRUs.com or whatever they were called.
I've been following the additional-TLDs issue since before ICANN existed, when the IETF Ad-Hoc Committee was trying to do that. Even back then, they were under sufficient pressure from the Trademark Gods to make sure that anybody who registered a TLD provided a True Name and True ICBM (er,process-server) Address, because the Trademark Gods wanted to be sure anybody who owned a potentially infringing domain name could easily be sued. The IAHC had some concerns about privacy issues with that; ICANN, of course, has no such scruples, since the only "IP" they care about is "Intellectual Property", not the "Internet Protocol".
Having some kind of contact methods for the administrative, technical, and billing users is valuable, but there's no need for it to be a personal email address - especially for a domain that belongs to a business, where that information is likely to change or be handled by a group of people. You might as well have generic addresses like domreg_admin@yourdomain.com. Spammers are still going to try to abuse it, but if nothing else you can put an auto-responder that tells the sender to use a web form.
The technical contact is a special case, because it probably shouldn't be based in the domain it's supporting, since a common reason for using it is that something's wrong with the DNS server or the web/email server supporting that domain; and therefore it's most likely to not work when you most need it - so it needs to be handled somewhere else (like a commercial email service, or perhaps even a forwarder at the DNS provider), and it probably should have good spam filtering. At a medium-large company, the phone number should go to a help desk, which isn't a privacy problem either, but for an individual it's annoying but useful to publish the number.
The billing contact is another special case, because the only entity that needs to access it is the DNS registrar that's handling name registration - it should probably be hosted somewhere other than the domain (again because it has a good chance of failing when it's needed), and spam filtering can be a very short whitelist. I don't see a legitimate need for it to be public.
As others have pointed out, no, it doesn't mean anybody's proven that it's not universal, it just means that this alleged proof of universality was incorrect.
The price the highest bidder is willing to pay for it is an ephemeral value that only exists if there's currently an auction going on for the domain name. If the name isn't currently being sold, or it's being sold through a mechanism other than an auction, there's no way to do the measurement. With real estate, the price a specific piece of land sells for depends on the auction process when it's being sold, but there's a broad enough market for comparable real estate that it's possible to estimate the value even if there isn't a current auction - you can compare land area, building size, etc. for similar pieces of land that have been sold nearby and adjust for overall market trends such as interest rate sensitivity.
Domain names don't work like that (though there are exceptions.) There are some names like sex.com that are sufficiently generic that people are going to buy them speculatively (or steal them speculatively:-), but most names have a value only because they're associated with an existing known brand name (and therefore aren't something that anyone other than the brand owner can legitimately bid on), or aren't associated with any current brand name and therefore only acquire interestingness if somebody needs to name a domain (and company), finds that name to be available, and tries to register it, and the only condition under which they'd be valuable to a namesquatter is if the squatter has information that somebody else has checked whether the name is available - if it were an inherently valuable keyword the squatter would have _already_ paid the $6 to register it instead of entering into a competitive bidding process.
Sex.com is part of a neighborhood where comparables exist and a legitimate auction process is possible. Google.com isn't - it's only valuable because Google named themselves that. obscure-Web2dot0-marketdroidia.com isn't either - it's only valuable because some obscure web2.0 marketdroids named their company that, even though it's obviously worth less than google.com because the company's going to vanish before they get their 15 minutes of fame. DeadDotComillenium.com might have a value, because it might be possible to have a legitimate auction depending on what happened to the trademark when the dotcom who used to own it died (did the trademark get sold off along with the fancy chairs, or did it just die?)
You're still not getting the issue of registries vs. registrars. For the ICANN-controlled general-use global TLDs, each TLD has one registry but an open market for registrars. There's one registry that controls the database for.com, but lots of registrars that sell into it, and they don't have access to each other's transactions - they're competing with each other, and all they can tell is what's in the registry (including the names, authoritative nameservers, and limited transaction data.)
If you go to Registrar A and check the availability of Yet-Another-Example.com, Registrar A and the Registry can see that you looked for it, but Registrar B can't. The Registry is a monopoly that you can't avoid - but if you think Registrar A are domain-name-stealing scum who are going to register the name out from under you if you don't pay for it right then, you don't need to use them - you can use a registrar that's more ethical, such as Registrar B (ok, probably B, C, D... W are scum, but X, Y, and Z aren't...) There are registrars with a reputation for ethics and privacy protection, just as there are registrars with reputations for low cost or good wholesaler support or efficient name stealing. It's nothing close to monopolistic - you really can pick the ones you want to deal with. Any of them _could_ act like scum, but many of them don't, and other people can become registrars by paying ICANN their fee, and it only takes *one* ethical registrar to give you a way to avoid dealing with scum (unlike the registries, which are monopolies for their TLDs, so the only way to avoid them is to get a name in a different TLD.)
The other way to check name availability is DNS - the root and some TLDs have distributed name service managed by multiple entities, while others have one centralized entity that runs all the authoritative servers for that TLD's zone. If somebody does a lookup for an existing name, they may get the answer from the authoritative server, but usually their ISP's DNS servers are keeping a cache of queries, so they'll get the answer from the cache. But if they do a looking for a nonexistent name, like Example-I-Just-Made-Up-Now.com, it won't be in their ISP's cache, so their ISP will query the TLD's authoritative server, which will say it doesn't exist. That does mean that Verisign, who control the authoritative DNS for.com, can see the unregistered names that people are looking for, which is valuable information they can sell to name squatters and other speculators. And that's what's going on here.
Supercomputers really are called supercomputers because they're a lot faster than other machines, and the details of vectorized number-crunching are just there to put precision around it.
Depending on whether you define "supercomputer" statically (as a Cray-1 speed) or dynamically (as a machine on or near the TOP500 list), you'll find that handheld supercomputers are either already here or else will never get there. In the "Already here" camp, a Cray-1 is about as fast as a Pentium 133; I've got a GPS wristwatch that's about 5 years old, and while my old Palm handhelds only have Mac Classic levels of horsepower, many of the media-focused handhelds have ARM chips running several hundred MHz so they're in range; even the newer iPods are pretty close.
On the other hand, if you define a Supercomputer dynamically, then pretty much by definition you're not going to get a handheld into the Top500 list because somebody who doesn't have that design constraint can make a faster machine for less money, and therefore it wouldn't make sense to do that. (Perhaps that'll change after the Great Nanotech Singularity transforms us into uploaded post-humans, but at that point we probably won't care about fitting computation into hands made out of meat and the Top 500 supercomputers will be recycled planets, so it'd be a short-lived niche market in between if it happens at all....) A less silly scenario that could possibly happen is that some nanotechish breakthrough makes it possible to grow large areas of molecular-sized computation elements efficiently but doesn't make interfacing to them easy, so it could be more efficient to make the whole computer out of nanoscale stuff with only a network connection and power feed, in which case it might make sense to have palm-sized supercomputers (or palm-sized CPU/storage units with big air conditioners supporting them.) Palm-sized doesn't necessarily mean hand-held - if it needs to run in liquid nitrogen, you're not going to carry it around even though it's small enough to do so.
If you want to define "Supercomputer" statically, it's defined as "As fast as a Cray-1", using whatever your favorite definition of the speed of a Cray-1 is (MIPS, MFLOPS, vectorized memory throughput, etc.) It was a pretty definition in 1980 - a VAX minicomputer was 1 MIPS, an IBM 370 Mainframe was about 10 MIPS, and a Cray-1 was a bit over 100 MIPS. But crank Moore's Law for a couple of decades, and a Pentium 133 was about as fast as a Cray-1 - these days you can get graphics cards as fast as a Cray XMP.
Yes, the PS3 cluster is a supercomputer - by today's marketing definition of a supercomputer. I've been watching technology export law since the Kremvax days, back when the US government was actually more worried about Commies getting high technology rather than using leftover cold war ideology as a way to keep the US from going non-wiretappable during the 90s, and export law had to adapt their definitions of supercomputers largely because of how heavily the exportocrats got taunted when it became obvious that the Playstation 2 would be an illegal-to-export supercomputer. There's a good article from CNET about the status in 1999 - the permitted speeds varied by customer country and military/civilian application, but they went from roughly 2000 MTOPS in 1996 to 7000 in 1997 to 20000 in 1999 (that's million theoretical operations per second, so roughly bogoMIPS) to some number of "weighted teraFLOPS" in 2006.
In ICANN's design for the domain name sales system, there are two levels - the single registry which controls the database for a TLD (e.g. all of.com) and the multiple registrars that sell names (and other services) to customers. No registrar is a monopoly, at least for the big TLDs - there are lots of them, all competing with each other. You don't have to buy names from GoDaddy if you don't want to - there are lots of others that can't afford Superbowl commercials. Some specialize in good dependable service, some compete on price, some specialize in web hosting and include names with it, some specialize in bulk sales to spammers, whatever. There's only one database per TLD, which the registry controls, and the fees are set by ICANN.
I don't know if this applies to all of the specialized TLDs -.aero,.museum, etc. may work differently. And of course country-code TLDs set their own policies, though some have let ICANN eat their brains.
There are different markets for this kind of data. Sure, there are name squatters and typosquatters going after the names of existing legitimate businesses, such as microsfot.com and microsoft.biz; this will help them, but fixing it is a job for trademark law, though large businesses often avoid much of the problem by buying up the nearby namespace (typos, other TLDs, other variants on their company name, etc.) which gets them the traffic as well as keeping it from going elsewhere. And there are annoying parasites who find out what names people search for on domain-registrar sites and steal them out from under them.
But there's a big demand for names made of perfectly legal collections of keywords that people happen to type into their browsers, which can generate banner-ad revenues, as well as increasing the probability that somebody typing those things into search engines will find your content-free page full of plausible astroturf. The current domain-tasting rules say that you can register a domain name and return it within five days in case you made a "mistake" in your registration, and the obvious "mistake" is that not enough people are hitting your page at random to generate enough banner ad revenue to make it worth buying the page. So there's a huge business in people kiting domain names, registering them for 3-4 days to see if they get enough hits to keep the name and then dumping them, and either putting a generic under-construction banner ad page or a slightly more customized page like "Want to get more info about the Squeamish Ossifrage market? Here are the hottest new sites!"
The domain-tasting name-kiting business means there's a huge transaction load on the registrars and the registry - the registrars could avoid it if they want by not refunding their markups on the basic registrar fee (some do, some don't, so there's obviously some profit for them) but the centralized registrar that runs.com is stuck with it because of ICANN policy, and that's Verisign. The transactions don't cost them anything close to the $6 they charge to register a name for a year, but they're still expensive. For the rest of us, the name-tasters litter the namespace making it harder to find real sites among the trash, and making it harder to find meaningful names when you've got actual content that you want to create a website for.
ICANN's evaluating whether to change the policies on free domain tasting - either eliminating the refund or at least charging a "restocking" transaction fee would cut down on a lot of the kiting. If VRSN sells a list of popular misses, it'll appeal to the same people who are doing the kiting, but it'll at least let them just buy the names that might make money and not litter the rest of the space.
Most of the registrations aren't fraudulent - they're just speculators abusing the 5-day-grace-period thing, seeing whether plausible random names will earn at least $6/year in banner ads and keeping the ones that work. The reason it works is that somebody at ICANN decided a few years ago that the registry shouldn't charge any fees on domains that get returned during the grace period. If GoDaddy or some other registrar is annoyed by it, *they* can perfectly well charge a fee or give only a partial refund on whatever they charge for name registration and only return the registry's fee - but apparently they're making some money on the kiters so they're not doing that. ICANN's currently re-evaluating that policy (public comment period is over), and maybe they'll get rid of free tasting or at least charge _something_ for it, which would cut down on the abuse.
It won't all go away, but it'll at least make it easier to find the fraudulent thieving abusers who are currently masked by all the noise.
Not all of the domainer scum are playing the same market. Some are targeting existing names (or potential names of real customers), and they're often malicious - but trademark law provides some tools for dealing with them.
But another kind are the speculative domain tasters, who register large numbers of potentially useful names and return them before the 5-day grace period unless they're going to make more than $6/year in banner ads. ICANN's Soviet-central-planners have decided that the Registry won't charge transaction costs on that, so it doesn't cost anything to search except opportunity cost and credit card balance. It's certainly simple to fix that without compulsory licensing or complex "taxes" based on some perceived "value" of a domain name or some bogus plan for requiring name buyers to provide "actual content" - either don't return the customer's money if they don't like the name, or at least charge some fixed price for the transaction even if you're returning all or half of their fee. There'll still be some market for this kind of fishing, but it's much smaller.
Individual registrars can already avoid having to deal with domain tasters - they can set their fees at a price that makes it unattractive to use them even though ICANN's making the registry return their part of the fee. That doesn't eliminate the practice unless all the registrars stop doing it, and there are apparently enough registrars that make money off of speculative parasites that they're tolerating the extra transaction load - but Verisign's $6 fee was never particularly cost-based anyway, so the registrars can keep their costs low by automating the process heavily.
Comments on "value" of a name, and on providing "real content". Until strong AI shows up, there'll be no easily automated way to distinguish between real human-provided content and bogus astroturf, and certainly not without burning huge quantities of CPU and database storage, and if strong AI ever does show up, it'll be no more interested in reading those web pages than real humans are. The speculative domain tasters are often going to generate lots of astroturf for their pages to try to attract traffic from search engines as well. Also, what's the "value" of a name? Certainly nothing objectively quantifiable. For domainers, it's the amount of money they think they can make from owning the name, but for real companies in real business, it's tied into the whole advertising and branding space. DotCom Boom companies were often somewhere in between real companies and bogus ones (was DogFoodOnline.Com a good idea or a silly way to extract money from overexcited VCs? Only your sock puppet knows for sure...)
There a different reasons that domainers keep buying domain names even though they have no useful content to offer. Some of them typosquat on names that are similar to popular domain names, or steal names that actual content providers (or other domainers) are checking, but others just go fishing for whatever combinations of keywords and misspelled keywords they think might have a chance of attracting people to their pages and serving them ad banners.
Because domain tasting is free, it's easy to do brute-force searches for useful keywords; all it takes is opportunity cost on your credit card and remembering to return the unsuccessful names before your 5 days expires. It doesn't take a lot of time to see if you're getting enough random hits to make more than $6 a year at your current ad banner rates, and why should you care if you're littering the domain name space and thrashing your domain name registrar and the central registry with transactions? And until domain tasting stops being free, this abusive behaviour will continue, and apparently enough of the registrars are making money on the successful hits or they'd have started charging for transactions.
This new approach that Verisign's allegedly thinking about may reduce that - it'll help deliberate typosquatters, but the shotgun players can look at the hit rates directly and decide what to buy instead of constantly thrashing the transaction systems. It sounds like they've put some thought into their market, handing out chunks of data so multiple customers can play, as opposed to putting out a master list that lets everybody race to register the same domain names. It'll save VS money on transaction costs that they're not currently getting reimbursed for, and it'll mean that multiple domain tasters aren't thrashing the same namespace constantly.
This also means that if you're trying to get a domain name because you have actual content to provide, or think it sounds cool, or whatever, you're not going to miss it because some speculative domain taster has it in their 5-day grip. If it makes much more than $6/year in advertising revenue you'll probably lose it either way, but at least you won't lose it because of inefficiencies in the process.
First of all, I wasn't talking about a Denial of Service level of attack on the phisher (though those can be entertaining as well) or even a Rack Up Bandwidth Bills attack (there have been groups like "Artists Against 419" that do that to Nigerian 419 websites.) I was talking about handing the phisher enough bogus account data that it's hard to find any accounts from real suckers between the bogus accounts, and reducing the phisher's reputation with the people he sells stolen numbers to.
Any half-decently configured web server isn't going to die if it gets a million hits over a couple of days, though it may reject some of the connection attempts if you overdo it. (For one day, that's about 11 hits/second, around 100kbps - 1 Mbps depending on how dense the input format is.) And while some hosting services blow out their bandwidth quota if they get more than 1-10GB per month, which is about how much you'd be sending, and either charge too much or (for free hosting) shut down for the month because of overuse, the perp is attempting to be in a profit-making business just like anybody else whose site becomes popular, and he's also spending a lot more bandwidth sending out email to people who don't reply. Many phishing servers are on zombies on residential broadband services, and some of them throttle down to 64kbps but don't also block home web servers, which could inconvenience the real owner or lead to a bandwidth-abuse contact from the owner's ISP; in either case that may be the only warning the owner has that he's become a zombie and needs to clean up. And in practice, zombie-based servers are usually run from a fast-flux DNS server so the load gets spread around a lot of different zombies.
Sure, there are lots of attacks on spammers and phishers that are immoral - breaking their legs, etc. But there are many things you can do that are Just Fine.
For instance, if a phisher is impersonating ExampleBank.com's website, it's perfectly fine for ExampleBank to impersonate suckers and go feed the phisher's site a million bogus bank account numbers and passwords that drop the phisher into their honeypot server as well as flooding the phisher's supply of account info from real suckers so it's harder to sell. And it's also mostly ok for ExampleCreditCard.com to feed the phisher a bunch of bogus credit or debit card numbers, though that's not as safe, because there's some risk that they'll use them at merchants who don't verify the card online if they've got the expiration date and security code.
Is it ok for ExampleCreditCard to sell the phishers a bunch of bogus card info? That's a tougher call - aside from avoiding illegal entrapment, the card company probably needs to take some losses by accepting those card numbers for small transactions because the card number buyer will do some testing, and otherwise they're likely to burn some legitimate merchants.
Some kinds of "bulletproof hosting" are easy to catch - ISPs in Russia or China or whereever that have stable IP address ranges and no redeeming social value in their web sites, so none of your customers miss them, but if you're using routers you probably can't handle more than a couple thousand such routes; if you're trying to block a mail server or squid cache it's a lot easier. (Even more fun than null-routing them is using BGP to advertise a better route to their address, so the rest of the world also can't reach them, but of course any reputable ISP isn't going to let you do that.)
But spammers and phishers have known that for years - so spammer-friendly ISPs or hosting providers such as AGIS or OptInRealBig were easy to block, and it was easy to trace the people selling illegal goods, though you couldn't always prosecute them. So now they're using tricks like hosting their material on botnet armies (because you're not going to null-route a home broadband carrier whose customers might be hitting your customers' websites or who might be running P2P applications like gaming), and using DNS servers that are constantly changing the IP addresses they hand out so that any given zombie server's IP address is only exposed for a short time to a few people, so even if it gets blacklisted it'll only prevent a few hits.
So yeah, the spammers and phishers *are* dodging this.
I'd expect that an obvious mechanism for attacking phishers would be to collect samples of the phishing spam, connect to their web sites, hand them bad account numbers, and see who's trying to use them. It's an arms race, of course, so it's probably more effective to do low-volume in-depth investigation, but high-volume attacks are an alternative. Some things that could happen are
Banks/etc. start overloading phisher websites with bogus info. - lets them catch some users, but also increases the number of bad cards that the phishers are selling to their customers so their customers aren't willing to pay as much for them.
Phishers start discarding lots of records from the same IP address and maybe trading suspicious IP addresses.
Banks start using _lots_ of IP addresses (e.g. get employees or volunteers to run phish-hunter from their home broadband, or get DSL carriers to lend you lots of addresses.
Phishers start using CAPTCHAs on their sites, but this annoys the suckers.
marines.com is actually a Marine Corps recruiting site. But since it's in.com, not.mil.us where it belongs or at least.mil or.gov, it's obviously a commercial organization.
Unfortunately, the RAM on the FIT-PC is non-expandable - you're stuck with the 256MB, so there will be applications you can't run effectively even if you're happy with the 500 MHz. I don't know if they soldered it on or what, but they don't even _sell_ a larger-RAM option. The disk is probably replaceable with a larger one if you need to, and the slow CPU is IMHO just fine for a lot of applications, but the RAM limit is annoying.
There are a few states, including Texas and I think Georgia or Alabama, where it's illegal to sell "obscene devices" such as vibrators and other sex toys. It'll be a while before they're ready to deal with Robot Sex...
The Unfair National Sales Tax proposal does screw the poor, but it also double-taxes retired people. For currently working people, if the government takes the same amount of money as income tax or consumption tax, it's pretty much a wash. But if you're retired, any money you've saved has already been taxed once, so a consumption tax means you're going to pay twice. I'm a late Baby Boomer, and I do hope to retire some day, and Social Security is going to be pretty bankrupt by then so I'll be living off savings and pension (and any savings that aren't tax-protected will also have their interest get taxed as well...) If this thing gets anywhere, you're going to have a lot of pissed-off old hippies and any of their aging parents who are still around.
On the other hand, while Democrats mostly don't like non-progressive taxes, most of the support for it I've seen hasn't been from the ultra-rich - it's middle-class and small-business types, who realize that they're paying the bulk of the taxes in this country and imagine that this will somehow help it. Democrats do like taxing businesses instead of people, ignoring the fact that the money really comes from people's incomes, either directly by reducing dividends to stockholders (so you could get the same money from them by taxing their income instead of the corporations) or indirectly by raising the prices of the products the corporation sells (which might be progressive or regressive depending on what kinds of products they sell, or just extra-well-hidden if their products are mainly sold to other businesses.)
The real problem is that if the government spends as much money as it wants to (and given Democratic social-welfare spending, Bush's rabid military spending, Social Security that nobody wants to admit to touching and which will grow rapidly as boomers retire and people live longer, and everybody's pork and bureaucracy), then there's no way to get all that money except through proportional or progressive income taxes, because otherwise the tax would be higher than poor people's incomes. Current Federal spending is about $2trillion/year, which is about $10,000 per adult, plus there's state spending (California's about $5000/adult) and catching up on the debt which _will_ eventually have to happen. Obviously before you get close to 100% of their incomes, you'd have massive numbers of people homeless on the streets, starving children, and a revolution, so that's not going to happen - so we're not going to fund the entire budget from a consumption tax, or even get close to it.
The "Fair Tax" advocates generally say that they don't like any kinds of taxes but that they'd be happier trading the income tax for a "fair" sales tax - but even if the Federal budget were radically reduced, the tax would get introduced as a phased-in "transitional" measure and you'd find that the income tax wouldn't ever go away. In practice, we'd probably end up with a 15-20% consumption tax like Europe's VAT or Canada's GST, plus an income tax that's almost as high as today's. The only real alternative would be a much higher consumption tax plus corporate taxes that amount to an income tax on stockholders and a sales tax on customers, which would be even worse for the economy. And your privacy would get the double-whammy as well, because you'd have data collected on your purchases as well as your income, and a lot more invasive auditing than current sales-tax auditing.
Slashdot Mirror
Another way to look at the problem is that the state's trying to make money, and the statistical properties are simple enough that if they're at least vaguely competent they'll keep the odds correct, and they'll also hire enough auditors to make it hard to get away with deliberately rigging the game. It's much easier to scam the system by getting a sweetheart deal running the lottery terminal network, selling "lucky winning number" books at convenience stores, or telling the winners that you're a corrupt Nigerian official's widowed mother who needs help.
I didn't win the green suit, M-16 rifle, and two-year all-expenses-paid vacation to exciting tropical Vietnam, or the grand prize magic bullet with my name on it, and since my number was high enough to get classified as 1-H, I didn't even win the third-prize government-health-care physical exam. Haven't bought another ticket from those bastards since then.
And of course that doesn't tell you what portion of the administrative cost are boondoggle - a few years back I looked into bidding on upgrading Oregon's state lottery network from X.25 to something modern, and it was a total scam - reducing the costs would mean that the agency handling the network would get less money, so they didn't want that kind of upgrade.
The trademark ownership issue has been a major driver since before ICANN - the IETF Ad-Hoc Committee that was trying to expand the number of global TLDs before ICANN took over were under a lot of pressure from the Trademark Gods to make sure that anybody who registered a name provided their True Name and True ICBM Address (er, process-server address) so that trademark lawsuits could be resolved without needing to drag the DNS registrars into the process. I think that's unnecessary - it's reasonable to have a Uniform Dispute Resolution Process that says that if you don't provide usable contact information then you're presumed to lose a trademark dispute for non-generic names, as opposed to preemptively violating your privacy.
In practice, the main reasons I use the whois owner name are to try to make sure I've got a correct email address for somebody if I'm not sure, or sometimes to see if it'll help me contact somebody whose website doesn't provide useful information (e.g. spam complaints to abuse@ get ignored), but I've found that if somebody's a sleaze, they're usually providing non-useful information in their whois records.
There was one spammer I could have probably sued successfully, but their whois address was a box number in Greenville DE, at the same address as The Company Corporation, which has been the canonical place to set up cheap Delaware corporations for the last 100+ years - so the most I'd get if I successfully sued them for everything they were worth would have been the contents of their file folder, and they'd have had to go pay another $100 to get another shell company. I guess I might have also acquired their intellectual property, like the trademark on ScammersRUs.com or whatever they were called.
I've been following the additional-TLDs issue since before ICANN existed, when the IETF Ad-Hoc Committee was trying to do that. Even back then, they were under sufficient pressure from the Trademark Gods to make sure that anybody who registered a TLD provided a True Name and True ICBM (er,process-server) Address, because the Trademark Gods wanted to be sure anybody who owned a potentially infringing domain name could easily be sued. The IAHC had some concerns about privacy issues with that; ICANN, of course, has no such scruples, since the only "IP" they care about is "Intellectual Property", not the "Internet Protocol".
The technical contact is a special case, because it probably shouldn't be based in the domain it's supporting, since a common reason for using it is that something's wrong with the DNS server or the web/email server supporting that domain; and therefore it's most likely to not work when you most need it - so it needs to be handled somewhere else (like a commercial email service, or perhaps even a forwarder at the DNS provider), and it probably should have good spam filtering. At a medium-large company, the phone number should go to a help desk, which isn't a privacy problem either, but for an individual it's annoying but useful to publish the number.
The billing contact is another special case, because the only entity that needs to access it is the DNS registrar that's handling name registration - it should probably be hosted somewhere other than the domain (again because it has a good chance of failing when it's needed), and spam filtering can be a very short whitelist. I don't see a legitimate need for it to be public.
As others have pointed out, no, it doesn't mean anybody's proven that it's not universal, it just means that this alleged proof of universality was incorrect.
Domain names don't work like that (though there are exceptions.) There are some names like sex.com that are sufficiently generic that people are going to buy them speculatively (or steal them speculatively
Sex.com is part of a neighborhood where comparables exist and a legitimate auction process is possible. Google.com isn't - it's only valuable because Google named themselves that. obscure-Web2dot0-marketdroidia.com isn't either - it's only valuable because some obscure web2.0 marketdroids named their company that, even though it's obviously worth less than google.com because the company's going to vanish before they get their 15 minutes of fame. DeadDotComillenium.com might have a value, because it might be possible to have a legitimate auction depending on what happened to the trademark when the dotcom who used to own it died (did the trademark get sold off along with the fancy chairs, or did it just die?)
If you go to Registrar A and check the availability of Yet-Another-Example.com, Registrar A and the Registry can see that you looked for it, but Registrar B can't. The Registry is a monopoly that you can't avoid - but if you think Registrar A are domain-name-stealing scum who are going to register the name out from under you if you don't pay for it right then, you don't need to use them - you can use a registrar that's more ethical, such as Registrar B (ok, probably B, C, D... W are scum, but X, Y, and Z aren't...) There are registrars with a reputation for ethics and privacy protection, just as there are registrars with reputations for low cost or good wholesaler support or efficient name stealing. It's nothing close to monopolistic - you really can pick the ones you want to deal with. Any of them _could_ act like scum, but many of them don't, and other people can become registrars by paying ICANN their fee, and it only takes *one* ethical registrar to give you a way to avoid dealing with scum (unlike the registries, which are monopolies for their TLDs, so the only way to avoid them is to get a name in a different TLD.)
The other way to check name availability is DNS - the root and some TLDs have distributed name service managed by multiple entities, while others have one centralized entity that runs all the authoritative servers for that TLD's zone. If somebody does a lookup for an existing name, they may get the answer from the authoritative server, but usually their ISP's DNS servers are keeping a cache of queries, so they'll get the answer from the cache. But if they do a looking for a nonexistent name, like Example-I-Just-Made-Up-Now.com, it won't be in their ISP's cache, so their ISP will query the TLD's authoritative server, which will say it doesn't exist. That does mean that Verisign, who control the authoritative DNS for
Depending on whether you define "supercomputer" statically (as a Cray-1 speed) or dynamically (as a machine on or near the TOP500 list), you'll find that handheld supercomputers are either already here or else will never get there. In the "Already here" camp, a Cray-1 is about as fast as a Pentium 133; I've got a GPS wristwatch that's about 5 years old, and while my old Palm handhelds only have Mac Classic levels of horsepower, many of the media-focused handhelds have ARM chips running several hundred MHz so they're in range; even the newer iPods are pretty close.
On the other hand, if you define a Supercomputer dynamically, then pretty much by definition you're not going to get a handheld into the Top500 list because somebody who doesn't have that design constraint can make a faster machine for less money, and therefore it wouldn't make sense to do that. (Perhaps that'll change after the Great Nanotech Singularity transforms us into uploaded post-humans, but at that point we probably won't care about fitting computation into hands made out of meat and the Top 500 supercomputers will be recycled planets, so it'd be a short-lived niche market in between if it happens at all....) A less silly scenario that could possibly happen is that some nanotechish breakthrough makes it possible to grow large areas of molecular-sized computation elements efficiently but doesn't make interfacing to them easy, so it could be more efficient to make the whole computer out of nanoscale stuff with only a network connection and power feed, in which case it might make sense to have palm-sized supercomputers (or palm-sized CPU/storage units with big air conditioners supporting them.) Palm-sized doesn't necessarily mean hand-held - if it needs to run in liquid nitrogen, you're not going to carry it around even though it's small enough to do so.
Yes, the PS3 cluster is a supercomputer - by today's marketing definition of a supercomputer. I've been watching technology export law since the Kremvax days, back when the US government was actually more worried about Commies getting high technology rather than using leftover cold war ideology as a way to keep the US from going non-wiretappable during the 90s, and export law had to adapt their definitions of supercomputers largely because of how heavily the exportocrats got taunted when it became obvious that the Playstation 2 would be an illegal-to-export supercomputer. There's a good article from CNET about the status in 1999 - the permitted speeds varied by customer country and military/civilian application, but they went from roughly 2000 MTOPS in 1996 to 7000 in 1997 to 20000 in 1999 (that's million theoretical operations per second, so roughly bogoMIPS) to some number of "weighted teraFLOPS" in 2006.
I don't know if this applies to all of the specialized TLDs -
But why don't use use larger dimensions so you'd only need 10?
Ours goes up to 11 !
But there's a big demand for names made of perfectly legal collections of keywords that people happen to type into their browsers, which can generate banner-ad revenues, as well as increasing the probability that somebody typing those things into search engines will find your content-free page full of plausible astroturf. The current domain-tasting rules say that you can register a domain name and return it within five days in case you made a "mistake" in your registration, and the obvious "mistake" is that not enough people are hitting your page at random to generate enough banner ad revenue to make it worth buying the page. So there's a huge business in people kiting domain names, registering them for 3-4 days to see if they get enough hits to keep the name and then dumping them, and either putting a generic under-construction banner ad page or a slightly more customized page like "Want to get more info about the Squeamish Ossifrage market? Here are the hottest new sites!"
The domain-tasting name-kiting business means there's a huge transaction load on the registrars and the registry - the registrars could avoid it if they want by not refunding their markups on the basic registrar fee (some do, some don't, so there's obviously some profit for them) but the centralized registrar that runs .com is stuck with it because of ICANN policy, and that's Verisign. The transactions don't cost them anything close to the $6 they charge to register a name for a year, but they're still expensive. For the rest of us, the name-tasters litter the namespace making it harder to find real sites among the trash, and making it harder to find meaningful names when you've got actual content that you want to create a website for.
ICANN's evaluating whether to change the policies on free domain tasting - either eliminating the refund or at least charging a "restocking" transaction fee would cut down on a lot of the kiting. If VRSN sells a list of popular misses, it'll appeal to the same people who are doing the kiting, but it'll at least let them just buy the names that might make money and not litter the rest of the space.
It won't all go away, but it'll at least make it easier to find the fraudulent thieving abusers who are currently masked by all the noise.
But another kind are the speculative domain tasters, who register large numbers of potentially useful names and return them before the 5-day grace period unless they're going to make more than $6/year in banner ads. ICANN's Soviet-central-planners have decided that the Registry won't charge transaction costs on that, so it doesn't cost anything to search except opportunity cost and credit card balance. It's certainly simple to fix that without compulsory licensing or complex "taxes" based on some perceived "value" of a domain name or some bogus plan for requiring name buyers to provide "actual content" - either don't return the customer's money if they don't like the name, or at least charge some fixed price for the transaction even if you're returning all or half of their fee. There'll still be some market for this kind of fishing, but it's much smaller.
ICANN is currently evaluating the issue, though their is over. (Poll Results!) The article commented that Verisign may be proposing to do this as a way to make money off the speculators if ICANN does get rid of domain tasting.
Individual registrars can already avoid having to deal with domain tasters - they can set their fees at a price that makes it unattractive to use them even though ICANN's making the registry return their part of the fee. That doesn't eliminate the practice unless all the registrars stop doing it, and there are apparently enough registrars that make money off of speculative parasites that they're tolerating the extra transaction load - but Verisign's $6 fee was never particularly cost-based anyway, so the registrars can keep their costs low by automating the process heavily.
Comments on "value" of a name, and on providing "real content". Until strong AI shows up, there'll be no easily automated way to distinguish between real human-provided content and bogus astroturf, and certainly not without burning huge quantities of CPU and database storage, and if strong AI ever does show up, it'll be no more interested in reading those web pages than real humans are. The speculative domain tasters are often going to generate lots of astroturf for their pages to try to attract traffic from search engines as well. Also, what's the "value" of a name? Certainly nothing objectively quantifiable. For domainers, it's the amount of money they think they can make from owning the name, but for real companies in real business, it's tied into the whole advertising and branding space. DotCom Boom companies were often somewhere in between real companies and bogus ones (was DogFoodOnline.Com a good idea or a silly way to extract money from overexcited VCs? Only your sock puppet knows for sure...)
Because domain tasting is free, it's easy to do brute-force searches for useful keywords; all it takes is opportunity cost on your credit card and remembering to return the unsuccessful names before your 5 days expires. It doesn't take a lot of time to see if you're getting enough random hits to make more than $6 a year at your current ad banner rates, and why should you care if you're littering the domain name space and thrashing your domain name registrar and the central registry with transactions? And until domain tasting stops being free, this abusive behaviour will continue, and apparently enough of the registrars are making money on the successful hits or they'd have started charging for transactions.
This new approach that Verisign's allegedly thinking about may reduce that - it'll help deliberate typosquatters, but the shotgun players can look at the hit rates directly and decide what to buy instead of constantly thrashing the transaction systems. It sounds like they've put some thought into their market, handing out chunks of data so multiple customers can play, as opposed to putting out a master list that lets everybody race to register the same domain names. It'll save VS money on transaction costs that they're not currently getting reimbursed for, and it'll mean that multiple domain tasters aren't thrashing the same namespace constantly.
This also means that if you're trying to get a domain name because you have actual content to provide, or think it sounds cool, or whatever, you're not going to miss it because some speculative domain taster has it in their 5-day grip. If it makes much more than $6/year in advertising revenue you'll probably lose it either way, but at least you won't lose it because of inefficiencies in the process.
Any half-decently configured web server isn't going to die if it gets a million hits over a couple of days, though it may reject some of the connection attempts if you overdo it. (For one day, that's about 11 hits/second, around 100kbps - 1 Mbps depending on how dense the input format is.) And while some hosting services blow out their bandwidth quota if they get more than 1-10GB per month, which is about how much you'd be sending, and either charge too much or (for free hosting) shut down for the month because of overuse, the perp is attempting to be in a profit-making business just like anybody else whose site becomes popular, and he's also spending a lot more bandwidth sending out email to people who don't reply. Many phishing servers are on zombies on residential broadband services, and some of them throttle down to 64kbps but don't also block home web servers, which could inconvenience the real owner or lead to a bandwidth-abuse contact from the owner's ISP; in either case that may be the only warning the owner has that he's become a zombie and needs to clean up. And in practice, zombie-based servers are usually run from a fast-flux DNS server so the load gets spread around a lot of different zombies.
For instance, if a phisher is impersonating ExampleBank.com's website, it's perfectly fine for ExampleBank to impersonate suckers and go feed the phisher's site a million bogus bank account numbers and passwords that drop the phisher into their honeypot server as well as flooding the phisher's supply of account info from real suckers so it's harder to sell. And it's also mostly ok for ExampleCreditCard.com to feed the phisher a bunch of bogus credit or debit card numbers, though that's not as safe, because there's some risk that they'll use them at merchants who don't verify the card online if they've got the expiration date and security code.
Is it ok for ExampleCreditCard to sell the phishers a bunch of bogus card info? That's a tougher call - aside from avoiding illegal entrapment, the card company probably needs to take some losses by accepting those card numbers for small transactions because the card number buyer will do some testing, and otherwise they're likely to burn some legitimate merchants.
(Even more fun than null-routing them is using BGP to advertise a better route to their address, so the rest of the world also can't reach them, but of course any reputable ISP isn't going to let you do that.)
But spammers and phishers have known that for years - so spammer-friendly ISPs or hosting providers such as AGIS or OptInRealBig were easy to block, and it was easy to trace the people selling illegal goods, though you couldn't always prosecute them. So now they're using tricks like hosting their material on botnet armies (because you're not going to null-route a home broadband carrier whose customers might be hitting your customers' websites or who might be running P2P applications like gaming), and using DNS servers that are constantly changing the IP addresses they hand out so that any given zombie server's IP address is only exposed for a short time to a few people, so even if it gets blacklisted it'll only prevent a few hits.
So yeah, the spammers and phishers *are* dodging this.
marines.com is actually a Marine Corps recruiting site. But since it's in .com, not .mil.us where it belongs or at least .mil or .gov, it's obviously a commercial organization.
Unfortunately, the RAM on the FIT-PC is non-expandable - you're stuck with the 256MB, so there will be applications you can't run effectively even if you're happy with the 500 MHz. I don't know if they soldered it on or what, but they don't even _sell_ a larger-RAM option. The disk is probably replaceable with a larger one if you need to, and the slow CPU is IMHO just fine for a lot of applications, but the RAM limit is annoying.
There are a few states, including Texas and I think Georgia or Alabama, where it's illegal to sell "obscene devices" such as vibrators and other sex toys. It'll be a while before they're ready to deal with Robot Sex...
On the other hand, while Democrats mostly don't like non-progressive taxes, most of the support for it I've seen hasn't been from the ultra-rich - it's middle-class and small-business types, who realize that they're paying the bulk of the taxes in this country and imagine that this will somehow help it. Democrats do like taxing businesses instead of people, ignoring the fact that the money really comes from people's incomes, either directly by reducing dividends to stockholders (so you could get the same money from them by taxing their income instead of the corporations) or indirectly by raising the prices of the products the corporation sells (which might be progressive or regressive depending on what kinds of products they sell, or just extra-well-hidden if their products are mainly sold to other businesses.)
The real problem is that if the government spends as much money as it wants to (and given Democratic social-welfare spending, Bush's rabid military spending, Social Security that nobody wants to admit to touching and which will grow rapidly as boomers retire and people live longer, and everybody's pork and bureaucracy), then there's no way to get all that money except through proportional or progressive income taxes, because otherwise the tax would be higher than poor people's incomes. Current Federal spending is about $2trillion/year, which is about $10,000 per adult, plus there's state spending (California's about $5000/adult) and catching up on the debt which _will_ eventually have to happen. Obviously before you get close to 100% of their incomes, you'd have massive numbers of people homeless on the streets, starving children, and a revolution, so that's not going to happen - so we're not going to fund the entire budget from a consumption tax, or even get close to it.
The "Fair Tax" advocates generally say that they don't like any kinds of taxes but that they'd be happier trading the income tax for a "fair" sales tax - but even if the Federal budget were radically reduced, the tax would get introduced as a phased-in "transitional" measure and you'd find that the income tax wouldn't ever go away. In practice, we'd probably end up with a 15-20% consumption tax like Europe's VAT or Canada's GST, plus an income tax that's almost as high as today's. The only real alternative would be a much higher consumption tax plus corporate taxes that amount to an income tax on stockholders and a sales tax on customers, which would be even worse for the economy. And your privacy would get the double-whammy as well, because you'd have data collected on your purchases as well as your income, and a lot more invasive auditing than current sales-tax auditing.