No, mainly I'm claiming that the primary purpose of the classification is to provide assertive information about the organisation (what country it's in, what subject matter they deal with, etc.).
I'd say.xxx provides some good information about what subject matter a site deals with. No one said anything about making this mandatory and doing so would almost certainly violate the constitution in the US and be pointless since foreign hosting is not governed by US law. This is information for end users and their agents.
No, I haven't heard that. Cite please.
Hmm, I don't know where I last read that. You can take a look at http://www.icra.org/. They are one of the open filtering sites and list the sites that provide actual labeling of metatags throughout their Websites. Most of the closed source filtering programs mention something , somewhere on their Website, but don't go into details. There is also an EU organization that takes voluntary ratings from sites everywhere and provides the information freely for filtering, but I don't know how large their membership is.
I doubt that. A huge amount of paid porn access (most?) happens in the workplace, where employers and their IT departments are constantly playing cat-and-mouse with porn sites. Shutting off all that revenue would be devastating.
This contradicts my experience with corporate networks, but that is only anecdotal. Can you cite a reference? Anyway, most filtered sites are schools, libraries, cafes, and private homes. Public places bring in very little porn revenue and private homes are obviously trying to avoid said sites. I've read that the cost/benefit analysis of kids viewing a porn site from home can be really really horrible. Angry parents, lawsuits, and bad press that drives away customers who want to be clandestine can be devastating. I do know people in the porn industry and I know they submit themselves to filtering services because they feel it saves them money.
Isn't feet.com just as memorable as feet.xxx? Isn't sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.com just as unmemorable as sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.xxx?
You missed my point entirely. The people who are running a foot fetish site at "sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.com" would love to have feet.com, but it is already taken by a podiatrist. If a.xxx domain is created they can register feet.xxx and then their site will be memorable. The current owners of feet.com are happy, they don't want a.xxx domain. No one is likely to confuse one for the other. Maybe, just maybe feet.com would get a few accidental hits at first, but that is to their benefit, it is free advertising. Everyone benefits.
These classifications are arguably useful for making it easier to find things.
I disagree with this assertion. To claim that providing metadata about a domain serves only to make it easier to find that data is misguided. The purpose is to inform the end user about what the data is, whether so the can find it, avoid it, or process it. Suppose I'm looking for the Cranberry Inserting Association. I do a search for "CIA" and see several links. One is to "CIA.gov." I don't follow that link because I know the organization I am looking for is not a government one. You're claiming that is somehow a "wrong" way to use the TLD information I saw? Hogwash.
Unless one accepts the ludicrous proposition that pornographers have been waiting all these years for a way to make it harder to access their web sites, and.xxx is their ship finally come in, then using a classification to make it harder to find things is quite a different problem.
I don't find that idea ludicrous at all. You do know most major porn sites sign themselves up with all the filtering companies out there right? Porn sites don't want unprofitable visits and almost anyone who is running a filter would be unprofitable in one way or another. If TLD info can be used to help people find identify the purpose of their sites, both so people that want to can visit and people that don't can avoid it, I'm sure they will be pleased as punch.
"Your logic is flawed. It is the classic "the world will never be perfect so why make any improvements" logical fallacy."
No it's not. It's a given fact.
You argue that if it is easier for people to see or not see porn, as they choose, then "Those types" will go crusade against something else, thus we should not make such a thing easy. That is a logically flawed argument because it assumes that the good done will be outweighed by some other evil, with no evidence to support that assertion.
I'm not a religious lobbyist. I oppose the.xxx TLD. It's not solely religious lobbyists who oppose the TLD.
I already agreed with this point, can you find any quote from me that says otherwise?
Blaming religious lobbyists for the dropping of.xxx is a straw man.
Do you even know what a "straw man" argument is? It would be a straw man if I argued that someone else said religious lobbyists were the only ones opposing it (knowing it was untrue) and then showed that fact to be false. Please be more careful with your terminology.
I never argued that only religious people were against it, I mentioned in passing that religious people were the ones that stopped it. You know they paid lobbyists a bunch of money to bribe, err persuade politicians to send letters to ICANN.
You think Microsoft would tolerate a porn site with flaccid, tiny penises on microsoft.xxx? Or do you think they'd buy the domain right away?
Well, if someone beat them to it, they would not have much choice, but I don't really care. Adding a TLD does nothing to trademarks. What is your point?
I am against any new TLD. We don't segregate TLDs now, we certainly won't with more TLDs.
Wow, you should really read a book on logic. This is called "non sequitur." Because the TLD system is not being appropriately used now for some TLDs you assert it will not be used appropriately if we have more of them. And you think this why? Actually.net,.edu,.gov, and.org are all used appropriately. So are most of the country specific TLDs. Further, there is a lot or reason to believe that a significantly larger number of TLDs would make their use more appropriate as the expense of registering all of the across the board would become greater and there would be more opportunities for variety. In fact, the main reason.biz and.info have been misused is because the registrars gave companies with.coms the right of first choice on them and they did not really have a significantly different purpose.
Why not a.geek.
There is not enough interest. Porn makes up a lot of the internet, geek news does not.
There are a ton of blogs. How about a.blog TLD?
I doubt many people would want this one either. It is a type of medium, not really a subject. The domain system is broken down by topic, traditionally, not medium. We have e-mail, web, and FTP all on the same domain. Blogging is more akin to a protocol than a topic, really. The thing is pretty much everything you mention differs from.xxx in the same way. None of them make up a significant chunk of the internet. Anyway, I'm all for more TLDs being created. Classifying information by domain gives me more info about what it is.
Porn companies are just like regular companies, just out to make a buck, and they won't just all fall lock-step into.xxx because it arrives. Especially not when they have well known.com addresses.
Then what's the harm of giving them the opportunity if they want it? Me, I'm 100% certain a lot of porn sites would jump at the chance to have a short, simple, easy to remember web address in.xxx and reduce the number of unprofitable hits they get from kids and typos. Porn companies don't want bad press from kids visiting their sites. They do want people to easily remember how to get to them. I think this could be very beneficial to them, to anyone who wants to find/remember porn sites, and to those who want to filter porn out.
It seems likely that the obvious sequence of events will be first and most obviously, providers of pornography will get.xxx sites to makes themselves easy to find. Next and just as obivously[sic], a lot of people and places will filter out.xxx sites. And finally, people providing content that some consider pornographic will be forced to put their web sites in the.xxx domain thus causing serious issues concerning free speech.
I'm not sure this last one will happen. It may in certain countries with restrictive policies, but at the same time those countries mostly already filter porn and users already get around it with proxies, P2P, or by accessing sites made just for them.
An alternative to the first extreme outcome that's just as bad is that if it isn't on.xxx then companies that provide filtering services may be forbidden from filtering it for fear of impeding someone's freedom of speech thus impeding someone else's freedom of choice.
Umm, I don't know anywhere that regards the freedom of speech that way. Users, their agents, and non-government organizations are free to filter any speech they want. Are you thinking of some particular jurisdiction?
Why would you want to do this?
Why would you want any TLD? Why have a.edu, they can just be part of.com and this removes the risk that someone may filter out all.edu material for some reason. The answer is more information is better than less information to me, the end user. Whether I am filtering out porn or specifically seeking porn the classifications of Website and mailing list operators as to whether or not their sites is "xxx" is useful to me.
Sellers of porn do not need a.xxx domain to identify their content anymore than providers of any other kind of information need a special domain for their data. There are far better ways to identify what they do outside of the domain name, and by doing so they have a much better chance of lessening government meddling in their business.
What are likely causes of government interference with the porn business? What justifications are likely to be provided. The most common I've seen actually sway people to a pro-censorship stance is the old emotive plea "won't someone think of the children?" Well, children do accidentally find porn despite their parent's attempt to prevent that. And, children are often prevented from finding useful information that is not porn, due to overly broad filters. These are real problems.
Would the creation of a.xxx domain cause many sites to move there? I think so. Would that make filtering easier and possibly lessen these problems? I think so. Is there a better solution available that is workable? If so, I haven't seen it. That is why I think it is an idea that should not be rejected out of hand.
As a Christian (aka "Religous[sic] wacko") I can see a _very_ good reason to have a.xxx domain.
First, christian != religious wacko. There are plenty of reasonable, intelligent christians. The particular individuals to which I am referring are mostly televangelists, members of neo-conservative movements, and people who call themselves christian, but don't have any idea what christ was advocating and instead subscribe to a myriad of "common-knowledge" beliefs that have little to do with christianity.
Porn is degrading to women, and it does destroys relationships
I can respect your right to hold that opinion. Personally, I think materials considered by many to be pornographic can be quite beautiful and artful. Appreciation for the human form seems to me to have no conflict with belief and respect for the creator of that form. As for images "destroying relationships" well that just sounds like an attempt to escape from personal responsibility. Images are images and if just the presence/availablity of those images is too much strain on your relationship, then you may have other, more serious problems.
No more - "sorry honey - I didn't know what I was doing" crap.
Anyone who believes such a protestation of ignorance should hold themselves responsible for the consequences.
By having a ".xxx" domain, I can set my firewall to instantly block all of the porn in the world. Thus stoping[sic] temptation and at the same time protecting my children from seeing things that they are too young to understand.
And that ability is what it should provide. It should allow you and anyone else to easily understand whether the provider of content has classified it as "XXX' or not thus allowing you to be more informed.
Admittly[sic] - having a.xxx domain would make a lot of software filtering package redundant... I wonder if those businesses voted "no to.xxx"
I doubt it. Many people will still want to filter out information on drugs, violence, and any number of other topics. Further, many people will disagree with the classifications of the content providers. This won't stop a.com in Europe from having topless images on their site, which a person in Kuwait may want to filter. It may decrease the market for such filters in some locations, though, which for public institutions would be a good thing. Too many of the filtering systems no are over-broad and filter content about everything from breast cancer to the communist party. It is my understanding that certain religious organizations spent a lot of money to lobby the government and that is what stopped the.xxx domain from being created.
Of course, this is just if the switch from.com to.xxx is mandatory.
I don't think it would likely be constitutional to make the switch mandatory in the US. Making it mandatory is useless unless it is a global law anyway, which is not going to happen.
If it's not, and it's only encouraged, that leads to another problem... A few angry calls later, and I might be pressured to move my domain.
Art has been pressured to labeled as porn and removed from view since there was a US. And yet, you still see nudes in museums and galleries. I'm pretty sure the court system and artists are ready to deal with said pressure. The choice of what TLD to register in is a matter of opinion, but I think many big porn companies would like to have the option of.xxx for their own and everyone else's benefit.
You missed the point. That is a very US-centric naming. In some places governments are organizations. In some places businesses are called "the foo organization." Why would an individual be an organization? My point was that TLDs can have different meanings in different cultures, but are still useful. Just because XXX means different things in different places is no reason not to provide that classification. Most of the world spoke out in favor of it.
The problem here is that cumsluts.com isn't in demand by anyone other than porn sites. Likewise, I can't see ibm.xxx being used for anything, so you aren't freeing up any sort of naming capacity.
But there is overlap too. Foot.com hosts a podiatrist site. Are you telling me no foot fetish site wants foot.xxx?
Yeah, and everything that isn't safe for the kids will be stuck there for the very same reason.
Except, that isn't that way the rest of the world has worked. Children can still see nudes at the art museum. There would be pressure to move things there, but at least in the US it will be very, very hard to force anyone to use it. Porn sites will want to because it will be profitable. I don't see how the availability of this domain hurts anyone.
At that point there's no benefit to having a meaningful content label in the URL when you can simply look at the page's content to see what type of site it is.
The benefit for finding a site is small. Some people will go to feet.xxx, just to see what is there, but that is not the main benefit. The reason for people to move to.xxx is not findability, but rememberability. Think, "Damn, this new computer is fast and all, but I don't have all my bookmarks from my last one. It's too bad my old one died. I can only remember the names of a few sites." What sites will they remember? Will "feet.xxx" be one of them? Will "sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.com?" Now think of all the people running Windows with only one user account who don't want their wife/kids to see porn bookmarks.
I think you will discover that most sites will opt out of schemes that make it easier for their content to be filtered. Porn sites receive revenue from people browsing them while at work, or while in a public library. I would argue that the revenue they would lose by making themselves easily blocked would be dwarfed by the amount they lose handling complaints.
Actually, the majority of major porn sites opt in to filtering schemes. The bandwidth, complains, and negative publicity cost more than not being filtered.
I'm not sure why you think of extra bandwidth usage as a con here.
A curious ten year old consumes bandwidth, is unlikely to subscribe to a site, and can generate huge amounts of negative publicity (which causes customers to leave pronto since they want to be discreet). This is random traffic sites don't want. For the most part, people who run filters are not a porn site's audience. Anyone who browses porn from the library is too poor to subscribe. Kids/schools are already mentioned. Universities don't filter in general. What market are filters losing them? Go ahead and write to a porn site and ask them.
Why do you think porn sites have the reputation of being banner ad swamps?
Because of cross-advertising agreements and large, consolidated porn companies that run hundreds of different sites. The ads direct you to other sites they own, so you'll spend more and don't have to search (and maybe find the competitor). How many porn site ads do you find on mainstream sites? The answer is very few, for the above reasons.
Your run-of-the-mill porn site, however, could care less if their content were properly labeled and would likely advocate against forced labeling, because they do, in fact, get some (probably small) percentage of their memberships by way of accidental visits.
Small operations don't label because it costs money up front and they aren't that technically savvy. They do register a domain, because it is necessary. They don't want to be forced to do expensive labeling, but they would certainly see opportunity in a.xxx domain. I don't know of any porn sites that opposed this and some requested it. It was stopped by lobbyists for religious groups.
Or you can just presume that that's going to happen, skip the middle step, and avoid using a domain that can be so easily stomped on.
Except that is not going to happen. People won't pass up the opportunity to have a short, rememberable way for customers to find their site again. and they won't ignore a domain very similar to their current one, but even more easily identifiable. In any case, that is just an argument as to why people would not move to a.xxx. If you truly believe that, let them make one and if no one goes there, it is no loss.
Oh, I have no doubt that there would be lots of people registering names there, especially category/content label-style names, such as feet.xxx. But I strongly suspect that most of these domain registrations will end up pointing to servers that simply issue HTTP redirects to other, existing porn sites, most likely on more established DNS domains (.com).
So they'll have an xxx in addition to the.com, it's a money-making opportunity for registrars and nothing else.
They are only more filterable if they move to.xxx, not just grab both locations. In many cases good, rememberable.coms are taken, but.xxx are available and the sites on the.com don't want them. I expect at first many popular sites would grab both a.com and.xxx, and some new sites would appear only on.xxx. That right there is of some benefit. Slowly, over time, sites operators may drop the.com altogether, since it brings in more cost-causing instead of money-making hits, the.com registration fee keeps going up, and trademarks are established that are defensible across all domains.
Yes, some conservative Christian groups oppose it, for the reason that they feel that it will "legitimize porn". I also oppose a.xxx TLD, for completely different reasons...
Of course people oppose it for differing reasons, I did not mean to imply otherwise. What I stated, however, is that the.xxx domain was stopped by religious lobbyists, which I think is pretty well documented at this point.
.xxx sucks from a technical standpoint. Using DNS to categorize sites allows anyone else to set up a non-.xxx address that points at the same address..xxx is useless for blocking, for this reason..xxx allows only a single bit of information to be encoded about a an entire domain (is it "adult", whatever that means, or not?) There are better, existing systems to embed metatags in web pages. These approaches are far more powerful ("contains REALISTIC_VIOLENCE and NUDITY" and lets the user or ISP choose how to filter based on these content flags), provide better granularity (you don't have to stick an entire domain in.xxx if it contains one adult page), and can't be bypassed as blocking systems just because someone uses a proxy or something similar.
There is a difference between blocking and filtering. Current attempts to scan content and use it to categorize sites as "porn" or "not porn" have thus far failed miserably. People don't include the metadata you advocate and I don't see them being universally applied at any point in the near future. You argue that the granularity is an issue, but realistically, lots of sites provide just porn and would like others to be able to easily determine that both for purposes of filtering and reasons of advertising. Those sites provide a whole lot of low-hanging fruit. This is the reason we have a domain system in the first place, to easily categorize large swaths of the internet for various purposes. Sure if content providers try to sneak by filters this will not stop them, but most don't want to and if they do, they can also avoid including the metadata you advocate and take other steps. If people are trying to mislead others, it is a whole different problem, but usually that is not the case.
Remember that this is not xxx.us -- this is a.xxx *TLD*. It applies to *everyone*.
Yep, different cultures have different opinions on classification. The same goes for other proposed and existing domains like.med (is homeopathy medicine in your culture?),.org (is a government an organization, what about businesses?). To account for this some sites will register with multiple TLDs. This is the proper behavior. In some countries the whole.xxx domain would be filtered and the system would route around the damage as porn purveyors register in the wrong TLD to reach their customers. All of these are real issues.
That said, it would be nice if I could go to foo.xxx knowing that I can find some type of XXX content there. It would be nice if I could filter.xxx for a school, knowing that I am not unintentionally blocking content the kids should see (unless it was improperly registered). The TLD system is global, and I don't expect each and every boob on the internet to only show up in that site, but I do expect most of the hardcore grannies on amputees anal action sites to be filtered, and I expect they would be. Those sites want to to know where they are and don't want people not interested. Each site would have to decide for itself, but I imagine a lot of sites would move there, which is good because it is just providing the end user with more granularity of classification. Having.xxx and.com lets me know something about the sites that are in one or the other (which is a subset of sites, admittedly). That really is why the TLD system exists, even if it is drastically underused today. Further, we have
This all presumes that there's universal agreement (across cultures and legal regimes) and a completely clear definition/dividing line for what is and is not porn.
Not at all. I'm in no way advocating laws mandating this. Every Website can decide for themselves if they are "XXX" based upon what they think their audience is looking for. The dominance of the search engine allows people to find "safe sex" discussions or "porn" with ease. The real issue is allowing people to easily filter for the majority of dedicated porn sites and giving porn purveyors more space and easier advertising. Short, easy to remember names are limited. feet.xxx is easy for foot fetishists to remember and would be prime new real estate. Given that their main purpose is selling porn, I don't think it s unreasonable for said site to expect to be filtered already (most porn sites already submit themselves to all the filter programs they can). If they also want to host a discussion on "safe sex" that they want minors to access they are better of hosting it elsewhere, with or without a.xxx TLD.
As for the please think of the children pleas, that will never stop. After porn is segmented and moved away and there's nary a tit on.com,.net or.org, then they'll move on to something else. Violent flash animations maybe.
Your logic is flawed. It is the classic "the world will never be perfect so why make any improvements" logical fallacy.
I love how you blame it on religious people in the government. Some of us have other objections to.xxx. Like that it's stupid.
It was religious lobbyists that were behind stopping.xxx via a strongly worded letter from government officials to ICANN. Are you arguing that this is not the case? I did not know anyone was still questioning the chain of events.
All that will happen is current porn sites will also buy a.xxx and ICANN will make a fortune as companies have to buy yet another domain name to make sure they own their domain name with every TLD.
This is possible, but I don't think it is probable. First, that behavior is a symptom of the ".com is all there is" mentality of the Web today. It will become less severe as more young, internet savvy people grow up. Second, the more domains exist and are in common use, the less important it will be to squat on inappropriate domain names in the wrong TLD. Third, unlike general purpose commerce sites and organizations who want as many hits as possible no matter what, porn sites have a vested interest in reducing hits from the wrong places. Bad publicity, lawsuits, and wasted bandwidth hit their bottom dollar. The existence of a.xxx domain makes it that much easier for a porn site with a name like "shoes.com" to be sued for misrepresenting themselves and under various morality acts. Fourth, a.xxx domain opens up room for new sites. feet.com is probably taken by podiatrists, but they would never register feet.xxx. This makes room for both podiatrists and foot fetishists. Finally, given that.com has been handed off and will be facing ever increasing registration fees, many sites might like the option to drop it altogether and move to a cheaper domain. Trademark laws should be adequate to stop new porn vendors from trading on their name by grabbing the domain later on.
So you think a.xxx TLD is stupid, huh? And the arguments you provide apply equally against the creation of any new domain, or any domain other than.com. Is it your opinion that we should just scrap the TLD system altogether and move everything into.com. I'm sure Verisign would love that. I think your opinion is shortsighted and wrong, but it is duly noted.
Unless it's mandatory, porn sites will still prefer to be dot-coms.
I disagree. If a.xxx domain existed, porn sites would move to it because it would make them easier to find and recognize. Also, it would make them easier to filter, which is something that right now most prefer, since it reduces their wasted bandwidth and complaints. Major porn sites, generally, register with filtering programs now to make them easier to filter. The only reason this would fail is if governments did make it mandatory and filters were put in place in an attempt to censor. I'm sure in some countries attempts would be made to "wipe-out" porn, by filtering.xxx banning porn entirely. Sites would then appear in other domains to cater to the market.
If you don't believe me, just think of the sites that would be available. Do you truly believe feet.xxx would not be registered within hours of the xxx domain going live? Having a.xxx domain is just extra advertising and continuing the already popular trend of making themselves easily filterable. I think people would slowly shift to it.
I've not yet seen a reason to have the.xxx domain. I'm not opposed, per se, but I have a hard time understanding the point to it.
Why do we have any TLDs? We can just shove everything into.com right? The point is to organize the internet into usable chunks both for content providers and consumers. Now I don't know about you, but I'd say porn makes up a significant chunk of the internet. Porn providers want consumers to easily be able to find them. They don't want young children to find them since kids generally don't have credit cards and if they do their parents look at the bills and likely will complain. They don't want people who don't like porn visiting them since it costs them bandwidth and is more likely to result in outrage/persecution of them.
Having an XXX domain gives porn purveyors a place to go where no one can complain they "accidentally" stumbled upon them. It will stop all of the "please think of the children" emotive pleas, since anyone concerned can just filter the XXX domain. This is the whole reason the domain system exists.
As to the reason some people oppose it. Certain religious wackos and the con-men who prey upon religious wackos like having an enemy. Most of them say that "porn is evil" and needs to be stopped. They aren't interested in letting everyone make up their own minds, or easily have a choice. Their concern is in telling each and every one of us what we can and can't do based upon their weird religious interpretations. As a result, they want to increase, not decrease outrage. This means they want children and other people who might accidentally access porn to do so as much as possible. They hope that by making it more difficult for people to find what they want, more difficult to avoid what they don't want, and more difficult to filter based upon easy categorization that they can outright ban porn in the entire world, rather than just let those who to see it do so and avoid it themselves.
Since a lot of these religious wackos and con-men are involved in the US government, which in holds ICANN's leash, they are using ICANN to push this agenda upon the world. That, understandably, makes much of the rest of the world less confident that the US will not use ICANN to push other agendas that conflict with global interests.
Re:Apple has no place in any responsible business
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Apple's Fruitful Future
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Apple has no business in the workplace until it opens up it's[sic] hardware to competition.
That is just not going to happen. You see, Apple is complete vertical chain for a reason. That reason is Microsoft. Jobs realized a long time ago that having a closed ecosystem was a problem and he did something about it. He founded NextStep. Then they were killed by MS's monopoly. Sure they had better hardware and better software, but unless you can get your software pre-installed and get developers to work on it you won't reach more than a tiny minority of the market. No hardware company will pre-install OS X, because MS will just raise the price of Windows for them and suddenly they can't compete in the mainstream market. That leaves them stuck completely reliant upon Apple, and competing with them at the same time, which is a terrible place to be. So you might think, "well Apple could fix that if they ditched the hardware business." Yeah, now you go to the board of director's of the second most profitable computer retailer and tell them you want to stop selling computers and focus on the part of your business that makes only 10% of your money.
The truth is, unless the government does its job and breaks MS up into two or more OS companies and/or enforces open standards there is no way Apple can safely move into that market.
Linux, on the other hand, may be able to walk in and save the day for big business. Linux is not a company. It is a OS supported by many companies and is ideally customizable for large corporate environments. Every large organization should be looking at it. If Linux grabs just 20% of the desktop through business and Apple grabs 20% of the home market, things will really start to change. Cross-platform will be an important characteristic and real standards might be followed.
Basically, I agree with you, but it will not happen because Apple would go out of business.
It wasn't all that long before the PC had Microsoft Windows to match Apple's GUI, and unlike Apple there were a whole host of alternatives waiting in the wings should Windows falter-- alternatives such as BeOS, OS/2, Linux and XWindows.
How amusing, of that list, only OS/2 did not run on macs.
Good service? If Dell doesn't satisfy, there's hundreds of other suppliers.
True, but they are all in the commodity PC market and if you take a look at consumer reports and other independent reviews you'll see the best of them rank about the same as Apple for hardware quality and customer support. Most of those that do rank the same are at least as expensive as Apple machines.
In recent years, Apple has looked a little more interesting with the move to OS X and a bit more variety in hardware such as the option to run on an Intel CPU.
The OS is certainly their strongest differentiator.
But the whole iPod thing seems to me to be more of the same toy like approach. Shiny, pretty, cute exterior that is easy and friendly, but what's under the hood is not quite as nice.
You sound like one of those guys who always buys the car with the biggest engine and ignores everything else about it. It is the whole package and the experience it gives you that is important.
You may not have noticed but Windows has not been updated in a while. In fact, it is about 5-10 years behind OS X technologically. Now I use Windows and OS X and Linux and NetBSD pretty much on a daily basis. On the workstation though, OS X is king. There are just so many things it can do easily that Windows can't do at all. You talk about how PCs have more software. You're right, they do. Especially weird niche applications. For most people, however, there is easy access to more software while running OS X than there is on Windows. This is because pretty much all of the command line and X-Windows applications built for Linux and the BSDs also run on OS X... without shutting down your computer and rebooting into another OS and wasting tons of time. Yes I know about cygwin; no it is not sufficient.
The truth of the matter is, switching to my Windows box feels like taking a step back in time to an earlier, more primitive age. What do you mean I can't set my laptop to work as a external disk for another machine? What do you mean I can't autodiscover all the printers, shared directories, streaming media, and IM clients on the network? What do you mean my spellchecker, grammar checker, text manipulation scripts, language translation services, dictionary, thesaurus, and online lookups don't work universally in all text in all applications? What do you mean I can't easily make a PDF of any file I can see? What do you mean I can't run dozens of memory and processor hungry applications all the time without it affecting the performance? You mean I have to shut down my graphics suite if I want World of Warcraft to perform acceptably? What do you mean there is no usable shell environment? What do you mean there is no compiler and no support for all the common scripting languages? What do you mean there is no GUI based scripting of actions?
Are you starting to get the point? A lot of people are "switching" these days. Almost inevitably there is a several month period where they are constantly gushing about how wonderful their new computer is. Unless you regularly use both systems, you don't understand why. If you do, you know that Windows is just way, way, way behind almost across the entire board. OS X is not right for everyone, but for a general purpose computer for those who don't have some special needs, it truly is way out in the lead.
If the only way to legally run OS X is to buy it from Apple with a Mac, well I can live with that. Macs are some of the nicest hardware on the market and contrary to common perception, cost about the same as other vendors with the same quality, reliability, and support. They don't have as much selection for price points, but they hit the
"What if they said "screw you, I'm going home" and stopped officially selling product in the EU?" ...No, stop, wait, that's not what would happen. In the beginning nothing would happen, all those computers running MS would continue to work just fine. But new computers will not be running Windows.
Actually, none of the above would happen. What would happen would be the MS shareholders would hold an emergency meeting and fire whoever made that decision. Then they would put a new person in charge who would apologize for his predecessor's insanity and go back to business as usual. No one passes up billions in profit to avoid less than a quarter of that in fines. No one strategically gives one of the largest markets in the world to their competitors.
Even if they did, they would still be violating EU law and refusing to comply with a court order, they'd just be breaking more laws as well. If ever there was a more blatant antitrust violation than refusing to do business with all of Europe, I've never heard of it. MS has people and a huge number of assets in Europe. The people can be thrown in jail if they don't comply. The assets can be seized. MS can't move their property out of the EU. They can't convince all their employees to illegally emigrate somewhere. They certainly can't somehow move their "intellectual property" out of the EU, since it is controlled and enforced by the EU governments.
Most likely in that event, MS europe would be ordered to divorce themselves from their parent corporation and would operate as a separate company (or companies). They would be forced to abide by EU law or they'd be tossed in jail. The intellectual property rights owned by MS would be granted to them within the EU.
know it sounds sexist... They have a track record of being less-susceptible to corruption and more prone to sensible thinking.
You're right, that does sound sexist. How do you statistically measure that women are more prone to "sensible thinking"...or is this just your personal, anecdotal opinion? What evidence do you have to support your belief?
2) Not recognizing MSFT's intellectual property would be a very, very stupid move. It would put in doubt all the other company's IP security. And what legal basis is there anyway?
Let me give you an analogy. Fining Microsoft would be a very, very stupid move. It would put in doubt all other company's money having security.
They broke the law and are being punished. If they refuse to comply with the court's punishment, the EU courts are well within their rights to toss the executives in jail and confiscate funds or property, including intellectual property. If someone in the US is convicted of breaking the law and then refuses to comply with the court orders we do the same thing. They are challenging the authority of the courts on their home turf. Not giving them the bloodiest nose ever would make everyone think the courts have no power.
Windows wouldn't be open source because... who would have the source? It would be free.
Several European countries have access to the source for Windows as well as a number of companies and presumably the source is stored somewhere in at least one MS facility. I doubt the EU would open source it anyway though. They would probably order MS Europe to split off from MS USA and form several new companies who hold the copyright on all the same intellectual property. These new companies, made up of former MS USA execs would compete fairly against one another and other companies in Europe because none would have a monopoly to abuse.
Punishing microsoft by fine is stupid when the problem is perceived to be so large
A fine is an almost mandatory part of the punishment. It gives MS execs hard data on how much breaking the law costs them. It also gives the EU millions of dollars of incentives to not take bribes from MS. Mind you it only makes sense as one of several punishments.
...a goverment-enforced prohibition on selling the product is more appropriate.
That would be too disruptive to normal business in Europe. The world is operating under a monopoly with huge barriers to entry. The whole point of MS's lock-in is that they have made it very hard to do business without their software. The courts need to address this in some way. One way is by ordering MS to document their secret interactions with other products, so that they can't leverage their monopoly and those secrets to gain yet another monopoly.
A web browser is far more afield for them than OS stability/security tools, and they ended up having no legal issues due to IE - it's still in the OS.
First, they were convicted in three jurisdictions for bundling IE. Second, the product does not matter, just the market. MS had a much better case with IE because the market was very indirect. Everyone was giving the product away and using indirect advertising to make money. With spyware there is a direct, healthy, competitive market. People buy anti-spyware from a dozen companies. That is all the courts care about because that is how monopolies are defined, by markets.
You're simply retarded, there will be and can be no legal challenge to this, and if anyone brings one they will lose, badly.
You are ignorant. You obviously have not bothered to read the Sherman Act.
And you seem to forget monopoly laws (which are ridiculous when applied to intellectual property, but thats beside the point) are intended to protect consumers, not businesses. You're going to have an uphill battle convincing anyone that this hurts consumers now, or in the future.
Monopoly laws don't care about intellectual property, they care only about markets. They are intended to protect free markets, under the belief that free markets benefit the consumer. When customers can choose the best of several products, for a given price; companies strive to make better products at lower prices in order to compete with one another and make money. This benefits consumers. When one company who has a monopoly in one market enters a second market by bundling two products (as defined by markets into which they are sold) and combining the prices of those products (you don't think the MS coders who wrote this are working for free do you?) they subvert the free market. Why would someone buy a second anti-virus suite when they were forced to pay for one included "free" with Windows? Some will, but only people who need a better product so much that they are willing to pay twice; once when they buy Windows and again when they buy the competitor. In this way, most people settle for whatever is bundled and consumers don't get the best product and certainly not at the best price. All of this should have been covered in Econ 101. Please educate yourself before spouting off ignorant rants in the future.
MS could argue that with Windows Defender they are creating a proactive way to deal with undiscovered holes.
Sure they can. Of course it has nothing to do with the way the law regards monopolies. They could start selling "OS covers" that are hard cases to protect your media upon which your OS is stored from breaking and they would be guilty if they bundled it with Windows. The reason for this is that monopolies are defined by markets, not by products. There is a market for anti-spyware. If MS enters that market by bundling anti-spyware with windows then they are breaking the law. If a single car manufacturer were left standing and had a monopoly they could claim an imitation of "the club" was a proactive way to augment their cheap locks. The courts don't care. All they see is that there is a market for "the club" and a monopoly is moving in by using the illegal tactic of bundling.
First M$ creates an entire industry focused around fixing holes in their OS. Now they are threatening to fix their own holes and that industry is mad at them? It seems to me this is like horses being mad at cars for making them obsolete.
No, they created a market for mitigating the effects of the holes in their OS. Now they are not fixing the holes, but entering the market for mitigating the effects of those holes by illegally leveraging their existing monopoly. Let me be clear on this. Bundled or not there is no legal way for MS to enter the "Windows hole mitigation" market. They can fix their OS so it does not have holes, but they can't illegally enter a market by bundling with their monopoly and they can't enter the market separately, because then they are leveraging the holes they have left in the monopoly to double-dip on customers. Both are illegal.
My current email solution is to host my own mail server from my home, however, I would like to start using a freemail service since I can't access my home mail server from work due to an overly restrictive firewall/proxy policy.
Depending upon what the firewall/proxy policy is, you might want to consider just setting up your e-mail server to serve webmail as well. There are free webmail solutions for quite a few mail servers. For some of the easiest, it is as simple as checking a box and making sure port 80 is open. I mention this because it is nice not to have to be at the mercy of a third party for you spam filtering needs.
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No, mainly I'm claiming that the primary purpose of the classification is to provide assertive information about the organisation (what country it's in, what subject matter they deal with, etc.).
I'd say .xxx provides some good information about what subject matter a site deals with. No one said anything about making this mandatory and doing so would almost certainly violate the constitution in the US and be pointless since foreign hosting is not governed by US law. This is information for end users and their agents.
No, I haven't heard that. Cite please.
Hmm, I don't know where I last read that. You can take a look at http://www.icra.org/. They are one of the open filtering sites and list the sites that provide actual labeling of metatags throughout their Websites. Most of the closed source filtering programs mention something , somewhere on their Website, but don't go into details. There is also an EU organization that takes voluntary ratings from sites everywhere and provides the information freely for filtering, but I don't know how large their membership is.
I doubt that. A huge amount of paid porn access (most?) happens in the workplace, where employers and their IT departments are constantly playing cat-and-mouse with porn sites. Shutting off all that revenue would be devastating.
This contradicts my experience with corporate networks, but that is only anecdotal. Can you cite a reference? Anyway, most filtered sites are schools, libraries, cafes, and private homes. Public places bring in very little porn revenue and private homes are obviously trying to avoid said sites. I've read that the cost/benefit analysis of kids viewing a porn site from home can be really really horrible. Angry parents, lawsuits, and bad press that drives away customers who want to be clandestine can be devastating. I do know people in the porn industry and I know they submit themselves to filtering services because they feel it saves them money.
Isn't feet.com just as memorable as feet.xxx? Isn't sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.com just as unmemorable as sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.xxx?
You missed my point entirely. The people who are running a foot fetish site at "sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.com" would love to have feet.com, but it is already taken by a podiatrist. If a .xxx domain is created they can register feet.xxx and then their site will be memorable. The current owners of feet.com are happy, they don't want a .xxx domain. No one is likely to confuse one for the other. Maybe, just maybe feet.com would get a few accidental hits at first, but that is to their benefit, it is free advertising. Everyone benefits.
These classifications are arguably useful for making it easier to find things.
I disagree with this assertion. To claim that providing metadata about a domain serves only to make it easier to find that data is misguided. The purpose is to inform the end user about what the data is, whether so the can find it, avoid it, or process it. Suppose I'm looking for the Cranberry Inserting Association. I do a search for "CIA" and see several links. One is to "CIA.gov." I don't follow that link because I know the organization I am looking for is not a government one. You're claiming that is somehow a "wrong" way to use the TLD information I saw? Hogwash.
Unless one accepts the ludicrous proposition that pornographers have been waiting all these years for a way to make it harder to access their web sites, and .xxx is their ship finally come in, then using a classification to make it harder to find things is quite a different problem.
I don't find that idea ludicrous at all. You do know most major porn sites sign themselves up with all the filtering companies out there right? Porn sites don't want unprofitable visits and almost anyone who is running a filter would be unprofitable in one way or another. If TLD info can be used to help people find identify the purpose of their sites, both so people that want to can visit and people that don't can avoid it, I'm sure they will be pleased as punch.
"Your logic is flawed. It is the classic "the world will never be perfect so why make any improvements" logical fallacy."
No it's not. It's a given fact.
You argue that if it is easier for people to see or not see porn, as they choose, then "Those types" will go crusade against something else, thus we should not make such a thing easy. That is a logically flawed argument because it assumes that the good done will be outweighed by some other evil, with no evidence to support that assertion.
I'm not a religious lobbyist. I oppose the .xxx TLD. It's not solely religious lobbyists who oppose the TLD.
I already agreed with this point, can you find any quote from me that says otherwise?
Blaming religious lobbyists for the dropping of .xxx is a straw man.
Do you even know what a "straw man" argument is? It would be a straw man if I argued that someone else said religious lobbyists were the only ones opposing it (knowing it was untrue) and then showed that fact to be false. Please be more careful with your terminology.
I never argued that only religious people were against it, I mentioned in passing that religious people were the ones that stopped it. You know they paid lobbyists a bunch of money to bribe, err persuade politicians to send letters to ICANN.
You think Microsoft would tolerate a porn site with flaccid, tiny penises on microsoft.xxx? Or do you think they'd buy the domain right away?
Well, if someone beat them to it, they would not have much choice, but I don't really care. Adding a TLD does nothing to trademarks. What is your point?
I am against any new TLD. We don't segregate TLDs now, we certainly won't with more TLDs.
Wow, you should really read a book on logic. This is called "non sequitur." Because the TLD system is not being appropriately used now for some TLDs you assert it will not be used appropriately if we have more of them. And you think this why? Actually .net, .edu, .gov, and .org are all used appropriately. So are most of the country specific TLDs. Further, there is a lot or reason to believe that a significantly larger number of TLDs would make their use more appropriate as the expense of registering all of the across the board would become greater and there would be more opportunities for variety. In fact, the main reason .biz and.info have been misused is because the registrars gave companies with .coms the right of first choice on them and they did not really have a significantly different purpose.
Why not a .geek.
There is not enough interest. Porn makes up a lot of the internet, geek news does not.
There are a ton of blogs. How about a .blog TLD?
I doubt many people would want this one either. It is a type of medium, not really a subject. The domain system is broken down by topic, traditionally, not medium. We have e-mail, web, and FTP all on the same domain. Blogging is more akin to a protocol than a topic, really. The thing is pretty much everything you mention differs from .xxx in the same way. None of them make up a significant chunk of the internet. Anyway, I'm all for more TLDs being created. Classifying information by domain gives me more info about what it is.
Porn companies are just like regular companies, just out to make a buck, and they won't just all fall lock-step into .xxx because it arrives. Especially not when they have well known .com addresses.
Then what's the harm of giving them the opportunity if they want it? Me, I'm 100% certain a lot of porn sites would jump at the chance to have a short, simple, easy to remember web address in .xxx and reduce the number of unprofitable hits they get from kids and typos. Porn companies don't want bad press from kids visiting their sites. They do want people to easily remember how to get to them. I think this could be very beneficial to them, to anyone who wants to find/remember porn sites, and to those who want to filter porn out.
It seems likely that the obvious sequence of events will be first and most obviously, providers of pornography will get .xxx sites to makes themselves easy to find. Next and just as obivously[sic], a lot of people and places will filter out .xxx sites. And finally, people providing content that some consider pornographic will be forced to put their web sites in the .xxx domain thus causing serious issues concerning free speech.
I'm not sure this last one will happen. It may in certain countries with restrictive policies, but at the same time those countries mostly already filter porn and users already get around it with proxies, P2P, or by accessing sites made just for them.
An alternative to the first extreme outcome that's just as bad is that if it isn't on .xxx then companies that provide filtering services may be forbidden from filtering it for fear of impeding someone's freedom of speech thus impeding someone else's freedom of choice.
Umm, I don't know anywhere that regards the freedom of speech that way. Users, their agents, and non-government organizations are free to filter any speech they want. Are you thinking of some particular jurisdiction?
Why would you want to do this?
Why would you want any TLD? Why have a .edu, they can just be part of .com and this removes the risk that someone may filter out all .edu material for some reason. The answer is more information is better than less information to me, the end user. Whether I am filtering out porn or specifically seeking porn the classifications of Website and mailing list operators as to whether or not their sites is "xxx" is useful to me.
Sellers of porn do not need a .xxx domain to identify their content anymore than providers of any other kind of information need a special domain for their data. There are far better ways to identify what they do outside of the domain name, and by doing so they have a much better chance of lessening government meddling in their business.
What are likely causes of government interference with the porn business? What justifications are likely to be provided. The most common I've seen actually sway people to a pro-censorship stance is the old emotive plea "won't someone think of the children?" Well, children do accidentally find porn despite their parent's attempt to prevent that. And, children are often prevented from finding useful information that is not porn, due to overly broad filters. These are real problems.
Would the creation of a .xxx domain cause many sites to move there? I think so. Would that make filtering easier and possibly lessen these problems? I think so. Is there a better solution available that is workable? If so, I haven't seen it. That is why I think it is an idea that should not be rejected out of hand.
As a Christian (aka "Religous[sic] wacko") I can see a _very_ good reason to have a .xxx domain.
First, christian != religious wacko. There are plenty of reasonable, intelligent christians. The particular individuals to which I am referring are mostly televangelists, members of neo-conservative movements, and people who call themselves christian, but don't have any idea what christ was advocating and instead subscribe to a myriad of "common-knowledge" beliefs that have little to do with christianity.
Porn is degrading to women, and it does destroys relationships
I can respect your right to hold that opinion. Personally, I think materials considered by many to be pornographic can be quite beautiful and artful. Appreciation for the human form seems to me to have no conflict with belief and respect for the creator of that form. As for images "destroying relationships" well that just sounds like an attempt to escape from personal responsibility. Images are images and if just the presence/availablity of those images is too much strain on your relationship, then you may have other, more serious problems.
No more - "sorry honey - I didn't know what I was doing" crap.
Anyone who believes such a protestation of ignorance should hold themselves responsible for the consequences.
By having a ".xxx" domain, I can set my firewall to instantly block all of the porn in the world. Thus stoping[sic] temptation and at the same time protecting my children from seeing things that they are too young to understand.
And that ability is what it should provide. It should allow you and anyone else to easily understand whether the provider of content has classified it as "XXX' or not thus allowing you to be more informed.
Admittly[sic] - having a .xxx domain would make a lot of software filtering package redundant ... I wonder if those businesses voted "no to .xxx"
I doubt it. Many people will still want to filter out information on drugs, violence, and any number of other topics. Further, many people will disagree with the classifications of the content providers. This won't stop a .com in Europe from having topless images on their site, which a person in Kuwait may want to filter. It may decrease the market for such filters in some locations, though, which for public institutions would be a good thing. Too many of the filtering systems no are over-broad and filter content about everything from breast cancer to the communist party. It is my understanding that certain religious organizations spent a lot of money to lobby the government and that is what stopped the .xxx domain from being created.
Of course, this is just if the switch from .com to .xxx is mandatory.
I don't think it would likely be constitutional to make the switch mandatory in the US. Making it mandatory is useless unless it is a global law anyway, which is not going to happen.
If it's not, and it's only encouraged, that leads to another problem... A few angry calls later, and I might be pressured to move my domain.
Art has been pressured to labeled as porn and removed from view since there was a US. And yet, you still see nudes in museums and galleries. I'm pretty sure the court system and artists are ready to deal with said pressure. The choice of what TLD to register in is a matter of opinion, but I think many big porn companies would like to have the option of .xxx for their own and everyone else's benefit.
You missed the point. That is a very US-centric naming. In some places governments are organizations. In some places businesses are called "the foo organization." Why would an individual be an organization? My point was that TLDs can have different meanings in different cultures, but are still useful. Just because XXX means different things in different places is no reason not to provide that classification. Most of the world spoke out in favor of it.
The problem here is that cumsluts.com isn't in demand by anyone other than porn sites. Likewise, I can't see ibm.xxx being used for anything, so you aren't freeing up any sort of naming capacity.
But there is overlap too. Foot.com hosts a podiatrist site. Are you telling me no foot fetish site wants foot.xxx?
Yeah, and everything that isn't safe for the kids will be stuck there for the very same reason.
Except, that isn't that way the rest of the world has worked. Children can still see nudes at the art museum. There would be pressure to move things there, but at least in the US it will be very, very hard to force anyone to use it. Porn sites will want to because it will be profitable. I don't see how the availability of this domain hurts anyone.
At that point there's no benefit to having a meaningful content label in the URL when you can simply look at the page's content to see what type of site it is.
The benefit for finding a site is small. Some people will go to feet.xxx, just to see what is there, but that is not the main benefit. The reason for people to move to .xxx is not findability, but rememberability. Think, "Damn, this new computer is fast and all, but I don't have all my bookmarks from my last one. It's too bad my old one died. I can only remember the names of a few sites." What sites will they remember? Will "feet.xxx" be one of them? Will "sexcity-47.eroticanetimagesinc.com?" Now think of all the people running Windows with only one user account who don't want their wife/kids to see porn bookmarks.
I think you will discover that most sites will opt out of schemes that make it easier for their content to be filtered. Porn sites receive revenue from people browsing them while at work, or while in a public library. I would argue that the revenue they would lose by making themselves easily blocked would be dwarfed by the amount they lose handling complaints.
Actually, the majority of major porn sites opt in to filtering schemes. The bandwidth, complains, and negative publicity cost more than not being filtered.
I'm not sure why you think of extra bandwidth usage as a con here.
A curious ten year old consumes bandwidth, is unlikely to subscribe to a site, and can generate huge amounts of negative publicity (which causes customers to leave pronto since they want to be discreet). This is random traffic sites don't want. For the most part, people who run filters are not a porn site's audience. Anyone who browses porn from the library is too poor to subscribe. Kids/schools are already mentioned. Universities don't filter in general. What market are filters losing them? Go ahead and write to a porn site and ask them.
Why do you think porn sites have the reputation of being banner ad swamps?
Because of cross-advertising agreements and large, consolidated porn companies that run hundreds of different sites. The ads direct you to other sites they own, so you'll spend more and don't have to search (and maybe find the competitor). How many porn site ads do you find on mainstream sites? The answer is very few, for the above reasons.
Your run-of-the-mill porn site, however, could care less if their content were properly labeled and would likely advocate against forced labeling, because they do, in fact, get some (probably small) percentage of their memberships by way of accidental visits.
Small operations don't label because it costs money up front and they aren't that technically savvy. They do register a domain, because it is necessary. They don't want to be forced to do expensive labeling, but they would certainly see opportunity in a .xxx domain. I don't know of any porn sites that opposed this and some requested it. It was stopped by lobbyists for religious groups.
Or you can just presume that that's going to happen, skip the middle step, and avoid using a domain that can be so easily stomped on.
Except that is not going to happen. People won't pass up the opportunity to have a short, rememberable way for customers to find their site again. and they won't ignore a domain very similar to their current one, but even more easily identifiable. In any case, that is just an argument as to why people would not move to a .xxx. If you truly believe that, let them make one and if no one goes there, it is no loss.
Oh, I have no doubt that there would be lots of people registering names there, especially category/content label-style names, such as feet.xxx. But I strongly suspect that most of these domain registrations will end up pointing to servers that simply issue HTTP redirects to other, existing porn sites, most likely on more established DNS domains (.com).
So they'll have an xxx in addition to the .com, it's a money-making opportunity for registrars and nothing else.
They are only more filterable if they move to .xxx, not just grab both locations. In many cases good, rememberable .coms are taken, but .xxx are available and the sites on the .com don't want them. I expect at first many popular sites would grab both a .com and .xxx, and some new sites would appear only on .xxx. That right there is of some benefit. Slowly, over time, sites operators may drop the .com altogether, since it brings in more cost-causing instead of money-making hits, the .com registration fee keeps going up, and trademarks are established that are defensible across all domains.
Yes, some conservative Christian groups oppose it, for the reason that they feel that it will "legitimize porn". I also oppose a .xxx TLD, for completely different reasons...
Of course people oppose it for differing reasons, I did not mean to imply otherwise. What I stated, however, is that the .xxx domain was stopped by religious lobbyists, which I think is pretty well documented at this point.
There is a difference between blocking and filtering. Current attempts to scan content and use it to categorize sites as "porn" or "not porn" have thus far failed miserably. People don't include the metadata you advocate and I don't see them being universally applied at any point in the near future. You argue that the granularity is an issue, but realistically, lots of sites provide just porn and would like others to be able to easily determine that both for purposes of filtering and reasons of advertising. Those sites provide a whole lot of low-hanging fruit. This is the reason we have a domain system in the first place, to easily categorize large swaths of the internet for various purposes. Sure if content providers try to sneak by filters this will not stop them, but most don't want to and if they do, they can also avoid including the metadata you advocate and take other steps. If people are trying to mislead others, it is a whole different problem, but usually that is not the case.
Remember that this is not xxx.us -- this is a .xxx *TLD*. It applies to *everyone*.
Yep, different cultures have different opinions on classification. The same goes for other proposed and existing domains like .med (is homeopathy medicine in your culture?), .org (is a government an organization, what about businesses?). To account for this some sites will register with multiple TLDs. This is the proper behavior. In some countries the whole .xxx domain would be filtered and the system would route around the damage as porn purveyors register in the wrong TLD to reach their customers. All of these are real issues.
That said, it would be nice if I could go to foo.xxx knowing that I can find some type of XXX content there. It would be nice if I could filter .xxx for a school, knowing that I am not unintentionally blocking content the kids should see (unless it was improperly registered). The TLD system is global, and I don't expect each and every boob on the internet to only show up in that site, but I do expect most of the hardcore grannies on amputees anal action sites to be filtered, and I expect they would be. Those sites want to to know where they are and don't want people not interested. Each site would have to decide for itself, but I imagine a lot of sites would move there, which is good because it is just providing the end user with more granularity of classification. Having .xxx and .com lets me know something about the sites that are in one or the other (which is a subset of sites, admittedly). That really is why the TLD system exists, even if it is drastically underused today. Further, we have
This all presumes that there's universal agreement (across cultures and legal regimes) and a completely clear definition/dividing line for what is and is not porn.
Not at all. I'm in no way advocating laws mandating this. Every Website can decide for themselves if they are "XXX" based upon what they think their audience is looking for. The dominance of the search engine allows people to find "safe sex" discussions or "porn" with ease. The real issue is allowing people to easily filter for the majority of dedicated porn sites and giving porn purveyors more space and easier advertising. Short, easy to remember names are limited. feet.xxx is easy for foot fetishists to remember and would be prime new real estate. Given that their main purpose is selling porn, I don't think it s unreasonable for said site to expect to be filtered already (most porn sites already submit themselves to all the filter programs they can). If they also want to host a discussion on "safe sex" that they want minors to access they are better of hosting it elsewhere, with or without a .xxx TLD.
As for the please think of the children pleas, that will never stop. After porn is segmented and moved away and there's nary a tit on .com, .net or .org, then they'll move on to something else. Violent flash animations maybe.
Your logic is flawed. It is the classic "the world will never be perfect so why make any improvements" logical fallacy.
I love how you blame it on religious people in the government. Some of us have other objections to .xxx. Like that it's stupid.
It was religious lobbyists that were behind stopping .xxx via a strongly worded letter from government officials to ICANN. Are you arguing that this is not the case? I did not know anyone was still questioning the chain of events.
All that will happen is current porn sites will also buy a .xxx and ICANN will make a fortune as companies have to buy yet another domain name to make sure they own their domain name with every TLD.
This is possible, but I don't think it is probable. First, that behavior is a symptom of the ".com is all there is" mentality of the Web today. It will become less severe as more young, internet savvy people grow up. Second, the more domains exist and are in common use, the less important it will be to squat on inappropriate domain names in the wrong TLD. Third, unlike general purpose commerce sites and organizations who want as many hits as possible no matter what, porn sites have a vested interest in reducing hits from the wrong places. Bad publicity, lawsuits, and wasted bandwidth hit their bottom dollar. The existence of a .xxx domain makes it that much easier for a porn site with a name like "shoes.com" to be sued for misrepresenting themselves and under various morality acts. Fourth, a .xxx domain opens up room for new sites. feet.com is probably taken by podiatrists, but they would never register feet.xxx. This makes room for both podiatrists and foot fetishists. Finally, given that .com has been handed off and will be facing ever increasing registration fees, many sites might like the option to drop it altogether and move to a cheaper domain. Trademark laws should be adequate to stop new porn vendors from trading on their name by grabbing the domain later on.
So you think a .xxx TLD is stupid, huh? And the arguments you provide apply equally against the creation of any new domain, or any domain other than .com. Is it your opinion that we should just scrap the TLD system altogether and move everything into .com. I'm sure Verisign would love that. I think your opinion is shortsighted and wrong, but it is duly noted.
Unless it's mandatory, porn sites will still prefer to be dot-coms.
I disagree. If a .xxx domain existed, porn sites would move to it because it would make them easier to find and recognize. Also, it would make them easier to filter, which is something that right now most prefer, since it reduces their wasted bandwidth and complaints. Major porn sites, generally, register with filtering programs now to make them easier to filter. The only reason this would fail is if governments did make it mandatory and filters were put in place in an attempt to censor. I'm sure in some countries attempts would be made to "wipe-out" porn, by filtering .xxx banning porn entirely. Sites would then appear in other domains to cater to the market.
If you don't believe me, just think of the sites that would be available. Do you truly believe feet.xxx would not be registered within hours of the xxx domain going live? Having a .xxx domain is just extra advertising and continuing the already popular trend of making themselves easily filterable. I think people would slowly shift to it.
I've not yet seen a reason to have the .xxx domain. I'm not opposed, per se, but I have a hard time understanding the point to it.
Why do we have any TLDs? We can just shove everything into .com right? The point is to organize the internet into usable chunks both for content providers and consumers. Now I don't know about you, but I'd say porn makes up a significant chunk of the internet. Porn providers want consumers to easily be able to find them. They don't want young children to find them since kids generally don't have credit cards and if they do their parents look at the bills and likely will complain. They don't want people who don't like porn visiting them since it costs them bandwidth and is more likely to result in outrage/persecution of them.
Having an XXX domain gives porn purveyors a place to go where no one can complain they "accidentally" stumbled upon them. It will stop all of the "please think of the children" emotive pleas, since anyone concerned can just filter the XXX domain. This is the whole reason the domain system exists.
As to the reason some people oppose it. Certain religious wackos and the con-men who prey upon religious wackos like having an enemy. Most of them say that "porn is evil" and needs to be stopped. They aren't interested in letting everyone make up their own minds, or easily have a choice. Their concern is in telling each and every one of us what we can and can't do based upon their weird religious interpretations. As a result, they want to increase, not decrease outrage. This means they want children and other people who might accidentally access porn to do so as much as possible. They hope that by making it more difficult for people to find what they want, more difficult to avoid what they don't want, and more difficult to filter based upon easy categorization that they can outright ban porn in the entire world, rather than just let those who to see it do so and avoid it themselves.
Since a lot of these religious wackos and con-men are involved in the US government, which in holds ICANN's leash, they are using ICANN to push this agenda upon the world. That, understandably, makes much of the rest of the world less confident that the US will not use ICANN to push other agendas that conflict with global interests.
Apple has no business in the workplace until it opens up it's[sic] hardware to competition.
That is just not going to happen. You see, Apple is complete vertical chain for a reason. That reason is Microsoft. Jobs realized a long time ago that having a closed ecosystem was a problem and he did something about it. He founded NextStep. Then they were killed by MS's monopoly. Sure they had better hardware and better software, but unless you can get your software pre-installed and get developers to work on it you won't reach more than a tiny minority of the market. No hardware company will pre-install OS X, because MS will just raise the price of Windows for them and suddenly they can't compete in the mainstream market. That leaves them stuck completely reliant upon Apple, and competing with them at the same time, which is a terrible place to be. So you might think, "well Apple could fix that if they ditched the hardware business." Yeah, now you go to the board of director's of the second most profitable computer retailer and tell them you want to stop selling computers and focus on the part of your business that makes only 10% of your money.
The truth is, unless the government does its job and breaks MS up into two or more OS companies and/or enforces open standards there is no way Apple can safely move into that market.
Linux, on the other hand, may be able to walk in and save the day for big business. Linux is not a company. It is a OS supported by many companies and is ideally customizable for large corporate environments. Every large organization should be looking at it. If Linux grabs just 20% of the desktop through business and Apple grabs 20% of the home market, things will really start to change. Cross-platform will be an important characteristic and real standards might be followed.
Basically, I agree with you, but it will not happen because Apple would go out of business.
It wasn't all that long before the PC had Microsoft Windows to match Apple's GUI, and unlike Apple there were a whole host of alternatives waiting in the wings should Windows falter-- alternatives such as BeOS, OS/2, Linux and XWindows.
How amusing, of that list, only OS/2 did not run on macs.
Good service? If Dell doesn't satisfy, there's hundreds of other suppliers.
True, but they are all in the commodity PC market and if you take a look at consumer reports and other independent reviews you'll see the best of them rank about the same as Apple for hardware quality and customer support. Most of those that do rank the same are at least as expensive as Apple machines.
In recent years, Apple has looked a little more interesting with the move to OS X and a bit more variety in hardware such as the option to run on an Intel CPU.
The OS is certainly their strongest differentiator.
But the whole iPod thing seems to me to be more of the same toy like approach. Shiny, pretty, cute exterior that is easy and friendly, but what's under the hood is not quite as nice.
You sound like one of those guys who always buys the car with the biggest engine and ignores everything else about it. It is the whole package and the experience it gives you that is important.
You may not have noticed but Windows has not been updated in a while. In fact, it is about 5-10 years behind OS X technologically. Now I use Windows and OS X and Linux and NetBSD pretty much on a daily basis. On the workstation though, OS X is king. There are just so many things it can do easily that Windows can't do at all. You talk about how PCs have more software. You're right, they do. Especially weird niche applications. For most people, however, there is easy access to more software while running OS X than there is on Windows. This is because pretty much all of the command line and X-Windows applications built for Linux and the BSDs also run on OS X... without shutting down your computer and rebooting into another OS and wasting tons of time. Yes I know about cygwin; no it is not sufficient.
The truth of the matter is, switching to my Windows box feels like taking a step back in time to an earlier, more primitive age. What do you mean I can't set my laptop to work as a external disk for another machine? What do you mean I can't autodiscover all the printers, shared directories, streaming media, and IM clients on the network? What do you mean my spellchecker, grammar checker, text manipulation scripts, language translation services, dictionary, thesaurus, and online lookups don't work universally in all text in all applications? What do you mean I can't easily make a PDF of any file I can see? What do you mean I can't run dozens of memory and processor hungry applications all the time without it affecting the performance? You mean I have to shut down my graphics suite if I want World of Warcraft to perform acceptably? What do you mean there is no usable shell environment? What do you mean there is no compiler and no support for all the common scripting languages? What do you mean there is no GUI based scripting of actions?
Are you starting to get the point? A lot of people are "switching" these days. Almost inevitably there is a several month period where they are constantly gushing about how wonderful their new computer is. Unless you regularly use both systems, you don't understand why. If you do, you know that Windows is just way, way, way behind almost across the entire board. OS X is not right for everyone, but for a general purpose computer for those who don't have some special needs, it truly is way out in the lead.
If the only way to legally run OS X is to buy it from Apple with a Mac, well I can live with that. Macs are some of the nicest hardware on the market and contrary to common perception, cost about the same as other vendors with the same quality, reliability, and support. They don't have as much selection for price points, but they hit the
"What if they said "screw you, I'm going home" and stopped officially selling product in the EU?"
...No, stop, wait, that's not what would happen. In the beginning nothing would happen, all those computers running MS would continue to work just fine. But new computers will not be running Windows.
Actually, none of the above would happen. What would happen would be the MS shareholders would hold an emergency meeting and fire whoever made that decision. Then they would put a new person in charge who would apologize for his predecessor's insanity and go back to business as usual. No one passes up billions in profit to avoid less than a quarter of that in fines. No one strategically gives one of the largest markets in the world to their competitors.
Even if they did, they would still be violating EU law and refusing to comply with a court order, they'd just be breaking more laws as well. If ever there was a more blatant antitrust violation than refusing to do business with all of Europe, I've never heard of it. MS has people and a huge number of assets in Europe. The people can be thrown in jail if they don't comply. The assets can be seized. MS can't move their property out of the EU. They can't convince all their employees to illegally emigrate somewhere. They certainly can't somehow move their "intellectual property" out of the EU, since it is controlled and enforced by the EU governments.
Most likely in that event, MS europe would be ordered to divorce themselves from their parent corporation and would operate as a separate company (or companies). They would be forced to abide by EU law or they'd be tossed in jail. The intellectual property rights owned by MS would be granted to them within the EU.
know it sounds sexist... They have a track record of being less-susceptible to corruption and more prone to sensible thinking.
You're right, that does sound sexist. How do you statistically measure that women are more prone to "sensible thinking" ...or is this just your personal, anecdotal opinion? What evidence do you have to support your belief?
2) Not recognizing MSFT's intellectual property would be a very, very stupid move. It would put in doubt all the other company's IP security. And what legal basis is there anyway?
Let me give you an analogy. Fining Microsoft would be a very, very stupid move. It would put in doubt all other company's money having security.
They broke the law and are being punished. If they refuse to comply with the court's punishment, the EU courts are well within their rights to toss the executives in jail and confiscate funds or property, including intellectual property. If someone in the US is convicted of breaking the law and then refuses to comply with the court orders we do the same thing. They are challenging the authority of the courts on their home turf. Not giving them the bloodiest nose ever would make everyone think the courts have no power.
Windows wouldn't be open source because... who would have the source? It would be free.
Several European countries have access to the source for Windows as well as a number of companies and presumably the source is stored somewhere in at least one MS facility. I doubt the EU would open source it anyway though. They would probably order MS Europe to split off from MS USA and form several new companies who hold the copyright on all the same intellectual property. These new companies, made up of former MS USA execs would compete fairly against one another and other companies in Europe because none would have a monopoly to abuse.
Punishing microsoft by fine is stupid when the problem is perceived to be so large
A fine is an almost mandatory part of the punishment. It gives MS execs hard data on how much breaking the law costs them. It also gives the EU millions of dollars of incentives to not take bribes from MS. Mind you it only makes sense as one of several punishments.
That would be too disruptive to normal business in Europe. The world is operating under a monopoly with huge barriers to entry. The whole point of MS's lock-in is that they have made it very hard to do business without their software. The courts need to address this in some way. One way is by ordering MS to document their secret interactions with other products, so that they can't leverage their monopoly and those secrets to gain yet another monopoly.
A web browser is far more afield for them than OS stability/security tools, and they ended up having no legal issues due to IE - it's still in the OS.
First, they were convicted in three jurisdictions for bundling IE. Second, the product does not matter, just the market. MS had a much better case with IE because the market was very indirect. Everyone was giving the product away and using indirect advertising to make money. With spyware there is a direct, healthy, competitive market. People buy anti-spyware from a dozen companies. That is all the courts care about because that is how monopolies are defined, by markets.
You're simply retarded, there will be and can be no legal challenge to this, and if anyone brings one they will lose, badly.
You are ignorant. You obviously have not bothered to read the Sherman Act.
And you seem to forget monopoly laws (which are ridiculous when applied to intellectual property, but thats beside the point) are intended to protect consumers, not businesses. You're going to have an uphill battle convincing anyone that this hurts consumers now, or in the future.
Monopoly laws don't care about intellectual property, they care only about markets. They are intended to protect free markets, under the belief that free markets benefit the consumer. When customers can choose the best of several products, for a given price; companies strive to make better products at lower prices in order to compete with one another and make money. This benefits consumers. When one company who has a monopoly in one market enters a second market by bundling two products (as defined by markets into which they are sold) and combining the prices of those products (you don't think the MS coders who wrote this are working for free do you?) they subvert the free market. Why would someone buy a second anti-virus suite when they were forced to pay for one included "free" with Windows? Some will, but only people who need a better product so much that they are willing to pay twice; once when they buy Windows and again when they buy the competitor. In this way, most people settle for whatever is bundled and consumers don't get the best product and certainly not at the best price. All of this should have been covered in Econ 101. Please educate yourself before spouting off ignorant rants in the future.
MS could argue that with Windows Defender they are creating a proactive way to deal with undiscovered holes.
Sure they can. Of course it has nothing to do with the way the law regards monopolies. They could start selling "OS covers" that are hard cases to protect your media upon which your OS is stored from breaking and they would be guilty if they bundled it with Windows. The reason for this is that monopolies are defined by markets, not by products. There is a market for anti-spyware. If MS enters that market by bundling anti-spyware with windows then they are breaking the law. If a single car manufacturer were left standing and had a monopoly they could claim an imitation of "the club" was a proactive way to augment their cheap locks. The courts don't care. All they see is that there is a market for "the club" and a monopoly is moving in by using the illegal tactic of bundling.
First M$ creates an entire industry focused around fixing holes in their OS. Now they are threatening to fix their own holes and that industry is mad at them? It seems to me this is like horses being mad at cars for making them obsolete.
No, they created a market for mitigating the effects of the holes in their OS. Now they are not fixing the holes, but entering the market for mitigating the effects of those holes by illegally leveraging their existing monopoly. Let me be clear on this. Bundled or not there is no legal way for MS to enter the "Windows hole mitigation" market. They can fix their OS so it does not have holes, but they can't illegally enter a market by bundling with their monopoly and they can't enter the market separately, because then they are leveraging the holes they have left in the monopoly to double-dip on customers. Both are illegal.
My current email solution is to host my own mail server from my home, however, I would like to start using a freemail service since I can't access my home mail server from work due to an overly restrictive firewall/proxy policy.
Depending upon what the firewall/proxy policy is, you might want to consider just setting up your e-mail server to serve webmail as well. There are free webmail solutions for quite a few mail servers. For some of the easiest, it is as simple as checking a box and making sure port 80 is open. I mention this because it is nice not to have to be at the mercy of a third party for you spam filtering needs.