It's their software, shouldn't they be able to sell it or not sell it where they wish?
Of course, but at the same time it is Korea's intellectual property laws and legal system that artificially restrict people from making free copies anyway. It is their laws, they should be able to legalize or criminalize copying Windows as they wish, right?
The current Word 2003 is completely backwards compatible with all prior Word document formats. Perhaps you failed to load the appropriate import filter when you first installed Office?
Yes perhaps I, and everyone else running on multiple platforms has incorrectly installed Word. Mind you, some of these documents do open in OpenOffice and in very old versions of Word (that are no longer available for purchase). As near as I can tell most of them were created on Office 95 and 97 for Windows, and Office 2000 for the mac.
There are ten-year-old documents out there that we have no difficulty opening whatsoever.
I suspect your documents do not contains as many interesting uses of tables and other less used features. In any case I'm certainly not the only one with these problems, you can find them discussed on many forums. I know I found plenty of problems and few solutions last time I looked.
This could potentially be a machine resource issue and not a Word issue at all. We have purchasing contracts that run in excess of 200 pages and we've never had any difficulty opening such files.
I doubt it. Machine specific problems do not usually show up on such a wide variety of desktops and laptops, nor are they usually cross-platform. Perhaps you do not have as many graphics embedded in your files? I think we ran into problems at about 200 pages with one graphic every 10 pages or so.
You'd have to quantify what constitutes "decent XML" and "usable HTML" for this comment to make much sense. Word 2003 can export in both formats and they look just fine to us.
Are you joking? The HTML coming out of Word looks like it was written by a deranged Klingon. It is unreadable and unmaintainable. As to the XML, XML with large chunks of arbitrary binaries embedded are not very useful. XML tags in a specified format with specified attributes, as based upon the paragraph and character styles are what would be useful for a real documentation project. There is a reason companies pay Quadralay a thousand dollars a seat to get decent XML from Word, that reason is that Word's XML is useless.
I haven't experienced this issue, so I can't comment on it. However, if it's true and not peculiar to your installation I could certainly see why it would be annoying.
This has always been true, how can you not have noticed it? The only people I know of who are not aware of this are people who have only used Word, and thus except it as "normal" for a word processor.
The nebulous "messes up images for me" comment leaves much to be desired. We place bitmaps of all sorts in Word docs with no problem at all. Admittedly it does make the file size bloat dramatically, but that's hardly Word's fault as graphical data is obviously much larger than textual data.
First, placing images can be done by linking or importing and it makes a big difference, as does the file format. It is annoying to have to reformat all graphics in multiple formats, for the web and for print because the editor cannot handle them properly. Second, a reasonable layout application allows you to view lower quality versions of the images you embed so that it does not suck up all the RAM caching them and thus bring the system to a slow crawl, as it approaches the available system RAM limit.
I'm a bit confused as to what constitutes "inferior spellchecking." Are you saying the spell check feature does not work? Obviously that is not true. Are you saying it doesn't do what you need it to do? Well, that's very subjective so you can hardly call it a generalized problem with Word, now, can you? If you don't like the default dictionary, you can customize it.
Yup, then I can have one customized spell checking library for Word, and one customized spell checking library for every other application I use. Talk about useless duplication of effort.
As for "standard services" elsewhere on your system, I believe it's up to the third-party provide
Oh wait, I forgot one. Spanish menus. I used to run Word in English, but every now and again the spell checker would run across an acronym (I think IS-IS was one of them) where it would suggest it was an incorrectly spelled word in the Spanish language. At this point all the menus would convert to Spanish and resetting the language to some other language would fail with an error. The only fix was to quit the program and restart it. That one drove me nuts!
I must say though, without bias, that MS Office has to be their greatest product. It just works and I haven't ever had any issues with it at all.
I've used Word casually and professionally on both Windows and Mac OS X. I also use OpenOffice upon occasion. Without trying to compare the two, here are few problems I've had with Word that have prompted me to avoid it:
Closed, ever changing file format - I have old word files I inherited that don't open in any program I can get my hands on, and others that only open in OpenOffice. These were created on an old version of Word. I don't trust.doc files to be usable in the future.
Large documents - at about 200 pages with the occasional graphic, Word consistently fails to properly save or open files. Sometimes it will save a file and the file will no longer open at all. Sometimes it will corrupt the document beyond all hope of recovery. At one point I was saving files, closing them, and then re-opening them before making a back-up every time I edited the files.
Output formats - In order to get decent XML, properly formatted from word you need to buy an expensive add on program, like Webworks pro. Ditto for usable HTML.
Formats stored in carriage returns - what could be more annoying than storing all the formatting info for a paragraph in the carriage return of that paragraph? Why does all this info disappear if I merge two paragraphs. How can this have not been fixed yet?
Images - Word messes up images for me regularly and inserting large numbers of images consumes enormous resources, making the whole program slow down considerably.
Spellchecking, grammar checking, translation, dictionary, thesaurus - Word still can't use the standard services available to other applications on my system forcing me to use their inferior spellchecking, etc. or to copy and paste text out of word, into another program, and then back if I want to lookup a word in an online dictionary, or translate a paragraph from or to another language.
All of these are reasons why I can't use Word as a professional solution for general text/document editing. That is not to say that OpenOffice is any better, it has plenty of its own problems, but if you haven't run into any of these using Word then you must not use it very much or for a large variety of tasks.
Yet you fail to understand why the US would not want to give up that very same power. There's no motivation to do so.
You fail to understand, there is nothing stopping the UN from going their own way and they have voted to do so, although they have not hashed out the specifics. This leaves the US in the situation of do we A) keep running our own server and make all companies register each domain twice if they want to do business in the US and try to figure out a way to resolve conflicting domains with the rest of the world, or B) cooperate with the rest of the world and avoid these issues, while not looking like a cartoon villain. Lots of countries have chosen a policy of nationalism and isolationism, but it almost inevitably ends badly. Believe it or not the majority of people are more interested in reaching local hosts and services than they are in reaching ones in the US and most of the customers and most markets are not in the U.S. If the US tries to bully on this issue it will cause problems for everyone, but mostly for US citizens and IT people. The motivation for the US is to keep the internet running smoothly for its citizens and commercial entities. Here's what the headlines may read in the U.S., "UN Takeover Breaks the Internet." Here is what you will read in newspapers in the rest of the world, "US Refusal to Comply with UN Directives Causes Internet Outages for US Citizens and Web Sites" or something similar.
Google is using the same model that all the internet dot bombs used. Spend spend spend, the good pr will get people to like us and we'll figure out a way to make a profit later.
Yeah, because all the dot bombs were profitable for four years running in the post dot bomb era. Google is making money. Guess what, Microsoft has not broken even yet on the Xbox. Is it going to be cancelled too?
There have been tons of articles talking about why Google leaves almost everything in beta... it's so they can avoid legal action, e.g. Google News.
Really? Care to provide some links? I've seen some idle speculation to that effect by uninformed yahoos that don't know designating something as beta has no meaning to most end users and thus provides no legal protection. They are in beta because they are side projects that have not finished development yet. Google talk is months old, has one bare-bones client for one platform. It is a beta, not a finished service called a beta.
You must not be familiar with the law or legal precedent as it applies here.
He asserts, yet has nothing to back it up. Look up "Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. " and note that all but one appellate court (the one in which the google case was filed) has filed supporting precedent. Why would that be, do you suppose? Maybe because they hope to force the issue to the supreme court (which is virtually guaranteed with split appellate rulings) thus tying the whole thing up in court for years while they try to pass laws to make what Google is doing illegal. Or did you not bother actually looking into this and you're just parroting uninformed crap you read somewhere.
The hail marry lynch pin they are trying to use is that each individual author has not contacted them; however organizations like the author's guild represent many many many authors. Google can't pick and choose who hands them legal documents on behalf of the authors.
That is a minor point of procedure and unimportant. Google is within it's rights to copy entire works and republish even if author's ask them not to. The whole offer to not publish works if an author asked is just a courtesy.
By the way Google search appliance does not do good business. I don't know what world you are living in, but even Google has admitted that to date its not doing as well as they has hoped.
I am pretty sure I read that the appliance division became profitable shortly after the first mini appliance sales cycle, but I don't have a link to back it up. Do you have one to repudiate it?
but I doubt you have ever used one and it would be wasted.
Actually I have used one, but never set up or configured one. It beat our old solution by a mile, although I have no idea what the cost differential was.
Anyways, enjoy this Google stuff now, because it won't last if Google doesn't change their model, and soon.
I see, and what successful, profitable, multimillion dollar company do you run?
any case, as you can tell, I'm not a Google fan boy like yourself. I'm more of a realist.
I'm not a "Google fan boy" as you claim. I don't even use Google for my daily searches (well it is one of several whose results I aggregate.) I do, however, appreciate a lot of the products they bring to market. Their search, maps, etc. are groundbreaking not just for the technology, but for not being annoying like all their competitor's offerings. Subtle, well targeted ads make a huge difference. Also, their tendency to use open standards, like Jabber for their IM offering is something that could greatly improve instant messaging for everyone. It is the first offering from a major player that puts the customer ahead of trying to get a lock-in on the market. I understand the limitations and disagree with some of their choices, but I also appreciate what they have done. I see idiots on Slashdot all the time bitch and moan about how often Google related articles are posted. Here's a
The root list that the US maintains (as you put it) is the property of the US, and by extension, property of the citizens of the US. This list constitutes alot of work, information, and as a result, power. I can't think of a single reason we have for wanting to give it away.
How about this, the work is only valuable if everyone agrees to keep using it. They don't. Only 2 nations in the whole UN voted to keep using it, including the US. The list is not very long and did not take a lot of work. It is less than a thousand entries if I recall correctly and everyone has a copy. The issue here is that they are no longer going to agree to use the changes the US makes to it and are going to use the changes they make. Their is no reason for them not to and a lot of reasons for them to do so.
dare you to walk into the YellowPages office and suggest that they donate their database of clients, addresses, and phone-numbers to some independant consortium made up of representatives of the various companies that are listed within. They will laugh at you.
This isn't a database of clients etc., this is analogous to the list of area codes, which is something a UN committee already governs. Take your uninformed nationalist rhetoric and sit on it. If I was running a foreign country and had an investment of billions in networking gear, infrastructure, and personnel I'd sure as hell move to a standard not controlled by the US as soon as humanly possible. If you can't understand why the world would not want to be at the US's mercy for their internet lookups and that the US is being a spoiled brat about power and trust shifting away from them, then you are completely clueless. It is happening, the only real question is will the US play ball or cry like a baby and go home, damaging its ability to communicate with the rest of the world in the process.
It looks like another nail in the Google Print Coffin. Author's Guild and AAP both suing.
OK. They have been sued over their regular page indexing as well, but that did not end google searching. Google has the legal precedent here and seems likely to prevail.
Can we add this to the growing list of projects that Google has released that just haven't panned out, dare I say flopped? Google Search appliance, Google Web Accelerator, GTalk, Google Reader, Personalized Search, Google Ride Finder, Google Personalized Home Page, ummm... yes we can add it, Google Print. LOL.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Google search appliances do good business. Plenty of places buy them to index their internal networks. Gtalk? It has barely entered beta and you call it a flop? You know what? Some Parkinsons researchers I know were just commenting the other day how useful google scholar is and how they use it all the time. They had not heard of Google books yet, but all of them were interested when I mentioned it. Google has dozens of projects going, mostly just to test the waters and a lot of them end up integrated into google search. I know I use it for research. Maybe you should get a clue. These things may not be really popular, but they are profitable and useful and people use a lot of them every day. Speculating that legal action will kill a project is all well and good, but it would be even better if you had a clue about the subject or had read the laws and precedent setting cases before making said uninformed speculations.
It does seem a strange interpretation of copyright laws that copyright owners have to opt out of Google's "humanitarianism". Someone point me to an article that explains how this works
It's really pretty simple. It is legal to copy and republish small excerpts of works without the permission of the copyright holder. It is legal to copy the entire work for the purpose of creating the proper excerpt, provided you do not otherwise use the work (and you meet 4 legal criteria) without the permission of the copyright holder. This is called "fair use" and is defined by U.S. law. Google is copying entire works, but only in order to republish a small excerpt as is their right under the law. Legally, they don't even have to stop doing this if the copyright holder asks them to, but they are doing so to be nice.
It seems no different to the codicil Mitchell Glazier opted music copyright holders into in the days before their contracts included any online/digitalised clauses.
Except they aren't selling the works and they aren't giving anyone more than a small excerpt of the work unless the copyright holder specifically asks them to or unless the copyright has expired on that work. All of this has been gone over many times, so have you just not been paying attention or is someone paying you to spread this FUD?
Yeah, and I'm starting a new search engine that will only index pages whose copyright holder's permission I've secured. It won't be nearly as useful, but it will avoid possibly upsetting content producer's. Never mind that opt-in indexing and searching will limit it to a tiny subset of works and most works will be permanently excluded since most copyright is held by unknown and pretty much uncontactable parties. All sarcasm aside, the open content alliance is great, but they will never include the majority of works.
Suppose a democracy activist wants to register domain names like downwithchina.com. If China had a say in ICANN affairs, it could push to have such domain names prohibited.
Sure they could, if they were so inclined, but it wouldn't work because most countries would not agree to it and because that decision has to be made by whomever is running.com, not who is deciding who is running.com. It is very hard to try to micromanage that sort of thing, especially when you are in a democratic committee. You may notice international trade agreements do not ban shipping books critical of China and international telephone agreements do not ban saying bad things about China. China already censors the internet for its people, it does not care about the rest and can't do anything even if it has a representative in the committee. Get it? This article is sensationalist and obviously written by people with little understanding of the realities of the situation.
I just don't get this whole.xxx thing. I mean just who decides what sites would have to go there?
That is obvious, the web publisher who is registering a domain, decides that.xxx is appropriate for his or her content. Much as most ISPs choose to host a.net address and hospitals would like to have the.med domain so they can be easily found, porn vendors would like a.xxx domain to help people find them and to reduce traffic to their site from people not looking for porn and unlikely to spend money there. It is basically impossible to pass effective laws requiring sites with porn to host there, since you'd have to pass and enforce that law in every country in order to make it have any meaning. This also means if schools want to filter.xxx it is good for them, which reduces the cost and annoyance to porn sites. It further means that a law passed to force hosting in.xxx and restrict customers from using it in any way will backfire, since it will then motivate porn hosting to move back to.com, etc.
A.kids or whatever domain is a good idea too, with a company to certify the domain sales, but.xxx is just like any other TLD. It is nice for commerce and great for filtering and finding what you want, but useless for censorship.
I imagine Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China having a say in the operation of the world's biggest experiment in free speech and shudder. As much as I dislike the state of affairs in Washington DC and you dislike ICANN, it could get a LOT worse. Do you want countries that murder people who don't agree with the state religion having a say in DNS?
Why not? They all have a say right now for international telephone calls, and we don't seem to have any problems. Ditto with international shipping. It's not like these would be the only countries with a say. Why should this one area suddenly impose censorship, when the UN has not done so in all the other areas there are international committees making polices for? These countries don't need a say in DNS to censor their people, they can already do that by better means. They need it to insure that the system remains operational and so that they are not gouged when attempting to register domains, something the US has had trouble with in the past and present and which they all fear will get worse in the future. They've all put billions into this and while they are looking at investing billions more our answer to their request for guarantees is, "trust us." Sorry, the US is not trustworthy and everyone knows it. If it was, this would not be an issue.
.xxx would be banned universally yet all objectionable (read as not fit for a five year old) content would be forced to.xxx to avoid lawsuits.
Yeah, um because porn vendors would all decide to host on a domain that was universally blocked. The internet is a global enterprise and you can't pass a law that says porn all has to be hosted in one particular domain or laws blocking that domain because the content is in multiple countries and nothing stops publishers from moving.
let us instead create.kids and lock the kiddies browswer[sic] to only go there.
I think the proposed.kids domain is a great idea, but their is no reason it can't co-exist with.xxx. Your fears about censorship are unfounded. TLDs make great filters but are next to useless as control mechanisms.
I can't help but think that if Microsoft worked with a state and university to encourage closed source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to closed source projects worldwide that everyone would say how dare a company try to buy a university into spreading it's FUD.
Open source is a feature of software that benefits some users and purchasers of software. Closed source is the lack of that feature. With that in mind, I think I would object to any company partnering with a University to specifically create software without a given, beneficial feature. For instance, I would applaud "Google partners with universities to create more worm resistant software." I would be less thrilled about, "Google partners with local universities to create software that is not any more resistant to worms." Thus Google investing and helping to create software with a given feature is something most people find to be a good thing, but Google or anyone else partnering to create software specifically without a given feature, because it is good for their business model, well that is not something most of us would appreciate.
It would also make porn a lot easier to censor. I know plenty of people who thought it was a bad idea, and they are hardly religious.
I disagree. A.xxx domain would make porn easier to find and easier to filter, but no easier to censor. You see censorship implies what you are doing is against the will of the publisher. If porn publishers open sites in.xxx because they want to be filtered so they don't get random hits by school kids and whatnot, that is not censorship. Likewise if schools filter the domain, since publishers do not want to reach that audience. If, however, some group wanted to use the presence of the.xxx domain to censor porn from their intended customers, it would fail miserably. It is just not practical to pass laws in every country around the world to force porn to move entirely to the.xxx domain, and if that domain cannot reach it's intended audience the content will move elsewhere.
As a voluntary method of sorting it works great, but as a means of censorship, it is very , very weak.
There are a multitude of reasons to not have the.xxx extension put in, among which is the thought that it leads to a frightening grip on free speech and such.
You know there is a difference between creating a domain for a economically important subset of the internet and passing laws regarding trying to force particular use of that domain. By your logic we should only have one domain, after all having a.uk TLD could lead to free speech issues and censoring and prejudice against the British.
easy control measures being placed to cease access to anything that the ones in control (college, ISP, etc.) deem necessary.
If many colleges do such a thing, porn would move back to.com, where the customers are. If an ISP tried to restrict the porn domain they'd lose half their customers. It is almost impossible to pass laws enforcing particular uses of a TLD due to the global nature of the internet. Sure the US might pass laws that say all porn must be in.xxx and then restrict colleges from serving it, but how do they stop hosting in every other country from putting porn in.com then? TLDs are useful for sorting, but make for a piss-poor control measure. Trying to stop the creation of any new TLDs out of fear that others will use them as such a measure is very counter productive. you might as well be opposed to automobiles because they will allow oppressive governments to reach possibly rebellious discussion groups more quickly.
For example, when a teenage boy searches the net from his room for a school project, and just happens to run across some unrelated porn, there is a very good chance that he will divert his attention to the porn site for several minutes while he takes care of his immediate needs. Porn site operators know about this, and they count on it.
You obviously don't know anyone in the porn industry and have not really thought about it as a business model. This is exactly what porn vendors do not want. Kids don't have credit cards for the most part and are unlikely to spend much money. If they do have credit cards (their own or their parents) they are likely monitored by a guardian. This can result in contested charges, PR problems "won't you please think of the children," and unhappy customers, and unwanted attention for their clientele who usually prefer a discreet site.
Porn cites, for the most part, do not need to thrive on accidental hits. There are so many people actively looking their main goal is to quickly turn away those who are not likely to hand them credit card info, while catering to those who are. One of their largest expenses is bandwidth and a lot of that does not go to actual customers and does not earn them any money. The last thing porn sites want is kids stumbling across their site and either causing problems by gaining access or wasting bandwidth. Many sites, especially ones without a large established base, would be happy to transition over to help people find them and reduce the chances of the scenario you describe above.
And conversely, you have no standards. If, hypothetically, 45 year old men having sex with 12 year olds was popular (Denmark scenario), you would have no problem with it, because the majority of the people are in favor.
Instead of standards I have ethical beliefs. You see I don't have sex with children and I don't steal office supplies. This is because I don't particularly want to have sex with children and even if I did, I would find it unethical to put someone who is not mature enough to handle the situation in that situation. I support enforcing this belief upon others, because it is protecting the rights of children, not because I find it unethical though. Talking about having sex with children, drawing pictures of it, etc. do not infringe upon anyone else's rights and I don't support trying to legally restrain people from so doing. A pedophiles rights end the minute they try to infringe upon those of a child. My rights end the minute I try to restrain the free speech of a pedophile.
You are fine with promoting a.KKK domain, again, as long as its popular.
The minute the KKK does something to violate someone else's rights I'm fully in favor of stopping them, whether they are in the majority or the minority. If, however, there is enough interest and traffic to justify creating a.kkk domain, then I am not opposed to it. That is because no matter how much I disagree with their ideas and principals, it is not worth sacrificing my own. My disapproval and rights end when I try to take away their right to free speech. There is a great quote, "I may hate what you say, but I'll die to protect your right to say it." Shouldn't you have learned all of this in your 5th grade civics class?
But in the first place I don't find anything immoral about Christian groups using completely legitimate methods to get their views represented.
No one else argued against that either. The only statement I made is that "puritans" (which I was using in a generic way, obviously not referring to the original puritans) have successfully lobbied (note this is not the same as using democracy, it is bypassing the democratic system using money and a loophole that allows legitimized bribes) to hinder free expression for the whole world by making it harder for people to voluntarily sort information, and thus gain access to said free expression.
Trying to turn this whole discussion into a vilification of Christian groups who used the very freedoms that people seem to want - freedom of expression, freedom to petition the government, freedom to maintain their culture and beliefs - is ridiculous.
Then why are you trying to steer the conversation that way? I never mentioned christians at all. I think a lot of people either do not understand or just want to ignore the bill of rights and why it was created. The U.S. system of government is a very indirect democracy, but democracy itself is a pretty flawed concept. A famous quote says, "democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner." The bill of rights was designed to keep a "tyranny of the majority" from infringing upon the basic human rights of minorities. While obeying the will of the people is the best way we have to decide policy and actions, at the same time it needs to be held in check to prevent abuse. Democracy fails when the majority votes that the minority must give them all their money or when the majority votes that the minority must convert to their religion.
That is why people object to Christians using laws to enforce their religion. It is unconstitutional and it infringes upon "certain unalienable rights" like the right to free expression or the freedom to choose a religion. Thus far, there has been no danger to the Christians that a majority will vote to take away their basic rights, so many do not even understand the concept. Basically if 75% of the country converted to Islam tomorrow and voted to make it illegal to quote the Christian bible, the Bill of rights would still make sure Christians could do just that. That is because the rights of the majority, whether Christian or Islamic, end just as soon as they start infringing upon the rights of others.
Christians, even devout ones by some measures, are the majority in this country yet every time they exercise the clout that comes from this status they are criticized and attacked.
No, they are criticized, and rightfully so, when they try to use it in unconstitutional ways to restrict the freedoms of others.
In this particular case, to argue that other countries, many of whom have truly repugnant governments and in some case truly repugnant cultures, deserve control because conservative Christians have too much control is just ridiculous.
That is a straw man argument, no one but you has mentioned such a thing.
If we are arguing the relative freedom of various countries and how that should affect their "right" to control the internet then I will strongly stand up for the US as having more freedom than almost any country (bar possibly a few western European ones) in the world or in fact in history.
Again, no one but you is arguing that. What we are doing is citing specific examples of mismanagement, not generally arguing the relative "freedom" of countries. The basic argument is that it is childishly stupid to trust any one government to currently and forever act in the best interests of the entire world and that it is much more reasonable for the entire world to be represented and make decisions together in a democratic fashion.
This entire sub-thread about one specific mismanagement of the root TLD assignment process is merely one illustration of that. No one voted t
If you want.XXX based solely on its POPULARITY then you must also accept a.GOD TLD, because sheer numbers say just as many people are into.GOD as into.XXX. And you must also accept a.NYC because, hey, New York is big, and lots of people would like a.NYC TLD. ad infinium[sic]
If there is enough interest in a.pee domain and enough traffic to that site to warrant it, I'm fine with it. The same goes for.kkk and.god. New York city already has a lower level domain and they seem to being doing just fine with it. Popularity is sort of like democracy no? If most people want it then it should be created, ala the will of the people, or have you come up with a better method of decision making? Perhaps a dictatorship where you make all the decisions for everyone else and decide which domains are too icky and which are acceptable? What the world is demanding is representation and a world body to make these decisions, rather than one country deciding for the whole world. Your religious and sexual hang-ups are no concern of mine, just don't try to enforce them on the majority who disagrees with you. You might want to talk to a shrink about them too.
You do realize you are illustrating a classical logical fallacy right? When someone criticizes something, arguing that someone else is doing something worse in no way mitigates the initial bad behavior. "Sure I kicked a dog but he blew up a building" is a piss-poor argument for the morality of dog kicking.
What does your statement have to do with anything we're talking about, other than to get in a politically-charged jab? But to answer the second part of question, I'd hope it would be reasonably obvious that a nation may be compelled to retain an element of control over things that it created, has a huge historical and ongoing investment in, and in which it has a major vested interest.
It has the same thing in common as yours; it has nothing to do with what were were discussing. As for control of what we created, it all runs over phone lines, the invention of which was by a non-american. Do the british have a responsibility to maintain control over all telephone communications? Other countries have invested more in building and maintaining the internet than the U.S. has as well as made significant contributions to the technology including inventing the WWW, the DNS system for which we are discussing. Why should other countries invest yet more in a system when the US insists on charging them fees and maintaining the sole capability to shut anyone they want down?
Yes. One arguably major misstep and egregious violation by Verisign, which was then corrected under the contract terms. So you're saying it's not possible for a contractor to err or intentionally misbehave anywhere outside the US?
No, merely that in other places when a contractor screws you over like that, with no warning you might at least consider bids from other contractors rather than granting them an unprecedented lengthy extension to their contract without allowing other bids.
As to the rest of your points, it sounds like your issue is really with ICANN...
ICANN derives its authority from the US government and replacing it is exactly what is being proposed.
I would still guess that more physical machines serving in roots are located within the US, even though this really has no bearing one way or another on this discussion.
You would guess wrongly and it has bearing in who pays for and maintains the machines and has the ability to direct what root list they direct to (i.e. if their is a split what percentage of internet users will immediately be on the non-US system.
Howso?
One of the major concerns is the fragility of the current system. Right now a political decision could have the U.S. government order the root system to redirect traffic to Iran. This could happen overnight, causing huge problems and a lengthy outage before the world managed to shift to a non-US controlled root. That decision could be made by any number of individuals in the U.S. government and would effect the whole world.
By moving to a UN controlled system with distributed root control and a procedure for making changes, no single individual or country could shut Iran off from the whole world. It would take an agreement by the UN representatives and then each country acting upon that agreement. Thus it is a lot less likely for sudden, disruptive problems to occur do to government control.
What's deficient about it or its management now? Be specific, keeping in mind that I don't really think we randomly need to introduce new and arbitrary TLDs.
Aside from the fragility, their is the non-competative assigning of TLDs to US only for profit companies. Why should the US profit by maintaining a choke-hold on the internet? As far as more TLDs, well most of the world disagrees with you as does the IETF and the IANA, which are pretty much the two most important and well respected bodies for internet standards. But it is the fragility that is most important I guess. Who wants to invest in building a house at the bottom of a hill, when the guy living at the top is a psycho with a stack of boulders he promises he will never roll down at you?
But they already have made such an investment. And further, you act is if such an investment is completely negated if the US makes changes. Any change that would "cripple" any other nation's technical invest
So lets say Joe Lieberman and other liberals next want to regulate VIOLENCE. So they architect a.GUN TLD.
This has nothing to do with regulation. This is about commerce and accurate discovery of information. I strongly support the creation of a.xxx domain, but I also oppose legislation forcing companies to host all porn there. I believe most websites selling porn would be happy to voluntarily move to a.xxx domain so their customers can find them and so they can be easily filtered by schools, etc. that porn vendors don't want wasting their bandwidth anyway.
Likewise if someone wanted to create a.gun domain for websites relating to guns and selling guns and gun accessories, I don't have any objection. Legislating that all gun sales sites and sites discussing guns have to be hosted within that tld, however, would be violation of free speech and I would strongly oppose it. Hospitals have been demanding a.med for years and many have enabled an alternate root, just so they can easily find other hospitals and medical networks. As for your other tld examples, they are inane and I don't even understand what the point is you are trying to make. Do you even have a point?
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It's their software, shouldn't they be able to sell it or not sell it where they wish?
Of course, but at the same time it is Korea's intellectual property laws and legal system that artificially restrict people from making free copies anyway. It is their laws, they should be able to legalize or criminalize copying Windows as they wish, right?
The current Word 2003 is completely backwards compatible with all prior Word document formats. Perhaps you failed to load the appropriate import filter when you first installed Office?
Yes perhaps I, and everyone else running on multiple platforms has incorrectly installed Word. Mind you, some of these documents do open in OpenOffice and in very old versions of Word (that are no longer available for purchase). As near as I can tell most of them were created on Office 95 and 97 for Windows, and Office 2000 for the mac.
There are ten-year-old documents out there that we have no difficulty opening whatsoever.
I suspect your documents do not contains as many interesting uses of tables and other less used features. In any case I'm certainly not the only one with these problems, you can find them discussed on many forums. I know I found plenty of problems and few solutions last time I looked.
This could potentially be a machine resource issue and not a Word issue at all. We have purchasing contracts that run in excess of 200 pages and we've never had any difficulty opening such files.
I doubt it. Machine specific problems do not usually show up on such a wide variety of desktops and laptops, nor are they usually cross-platform. Perhaps you do not have as many graphics embedded in your files? I think we ran into problems at about 200 pages with one graphic every 10 pages or so.
You'd have to quantify what constitutes "decent XML" and "usable HTML" for this comment to make much sense. Word 2003 can export in both formats and they look just fine to us.
Are you joking? The HTML coming out of Word looks like it was written by a deranged Klingon. It is unreadable and unmaintainable. As to the XML, XML with large chunks of arbitrary binaries embedded are not very useful. XML tags in a specified format with specified attributes, as based upon the paragraph and character styles are what would be useful for a real documentation project. There is a reason companies pay Quadralay a thousand dollars a seat to get decent XML from Word, that reason is that Word's XML is useless.
I haven't experienced this issue, so I can't comment on it. However, if it's true and not peculiar to your installation I could certainly see why it would be annoying.
This has always been true, how can you not have noticed it? The only people I know of who are not aware of this are people who have only used Word, and thus except it as "normal" for a word processor.
The nebulous "messes up images for me" comment leaves much to be desired. We place bitmaps of all sorts in Word docs with no problem at all. Admittedly it does make the file size bloat dramatically, but that's hardly Word's fault as graphical data is obviously much larger than textual data.
First, placing images can be done by linking or importing and it makes a big difference, as does the file format. It is annoying to have to reformat all graphics in multiple formats, for the web and for print because the editor cannot handle them properly. Second, a reasonable layout application allows you to view lower quality versions of the images you embed so that it does not suck up all the RAM caching them and thus bring the system to a slow crawl, as it approaches the available system RAM limit.
I'm a bit confused as to what constitutes "inferior spellchecking." Are you saying the spell check feature does not work? Obviously that is not true. Are you saying it doesn't do what you need it to do? Well, that's very subjective so you can hardly call it a generalized problem with Word, now, can you? If you don't like the default dictionary, you can customize it.
Yup, then I can have one customized spell checking library for Word, and one customized spell checking library for every other application I use. Talk about useless duplication of effort.
As for "standard services" elsewhere on your system, I believe it's up to the third-party provide
Oh wait, I forgot one. Spanish menus. I used to run Word in English, but every now and again the spell checker would run across an acronym (I think IS-IS was one of them) where it would suggest it was an incorrectly spelled word in the Spanish language. At this point all the menus would convert to Spanish and resetting the language to some other language would fail with an error. The only fix was to quit the program and restart it. That one drove me nuts!
I must say though, without bias, that MS Office has to be their greatest product. It just works and I haven't ever had any issues with it at all.
I've used Word casually and professionally on both Windows and Mac OS X. I also use OpenOffice upon occasion. Without trying to compare the two, here are few problems I've had with Word that have prompted me to avoid it:
All of these are reasons why I can't use Word as a professional solution for general text/document editing. That is not to say that OpenOffice is any better, it has plenty of its own problems, but if you haven't run into any of these using Word then you must not use it very much or for a large variety of tasks.
Yet you fail to understand why the US would not want to give up that very same power. There's no motivation to do so.
You fail to understand, there is nothing stopping the UN from going their own way and they have voted to do so, although they have not hashed out the specifics. This leaves the US in the situation of do we A) keep running our own server and make all companies register each domain twice if they want to do business in the US and try to figure out a way to resolve conflicting domains with the rest of the world, or B) cooperate with the rest of the world and avoid these issues, while not looking like a cartoon villain. Lots of countries have chosen a policy of nationalism and isolationism, but it almost inevitably ends badly. Believe it or not the majority of people are more interested in reaching local hosts and services than they are in reaching ones in the US and most of the customers and most markets are not in the U.S. If the US tries to bully on this issue it will cause problems for everyone, but mostly for US citizens and IT people. The motivation for the US is to keep the internet running smoothly for its citizens and commercial entities. Here's what the headlines may read in the U.S., "UN Takeover Breaks the Internet." Here is what you will read in newspapers in the rest of the world, "US Refusal to Comply with UN Directives Causes Internet Outages for US Citizens and Web Sites" or something similar.
Google is using the same model that all the internet dot bombs used. Spend spend spend, the good pr will get people to like us and we'll figure out a way to make a profit later.
Yeah, because all the dot bombs were profitable for four years running in the post dot bomb era. Google is making money. Guess what, Microsoft has not broken even yet on the Xbox. Is it going to be cancelled too?
There have been tons of articles talking about why Google leaves almost everything in beta... it's so they can avoid legal action, e.g. Google News.
Really? Care to provide some links? I've seen some idle speculation to that effect by uninformed yahoos that don't know designating something as beta has no meaning to most end users and thus provides no legal protection. They are in beta because they are side projects that have not finished development yet. Google talk is months old, has one bare-bones client for one platform. It is a beta, not a finished service called a beta.
You must not be familiar with the law or legal precedent as it applies here.
He asserts, yet has nothing to back it up. Look up "Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. " and note that all but one appellate court (the one in which the google case was filed) has filed supporting precedent. Why would that be, do you suppose? Maybe because they hope to force the issue to the supreme court (which is virtually guaranteed with split appellate rulings) thus tying the whole thing up in court for years while they try to pass laws to make what Google is doing illegal. Or did you not bother actually looking into this and you're just parroting uninformed crap you read somewhere.
The hail marry lynch pin they are trying to use is that each individual author has not contacted them; however organizations like the author's guild represent many many many authors. Google can't pick and choose who hands them legal documents on behalf of the authors.
That is a minor point of procedure and unimportant. Google is within it's rights to copy entire works and republish even if author's ask them not to. The whole offer to not publish works if an author asked is just a courtesy.
By the way Google search appliance does not do good business. I don't know what world you are living in, but even Google has admitted that to date its not doing as well as they has hoped.
I am pretty sure I read that the appliance division became profitable shortly after the first mini appliance sales cycle, but I don't have a link to back it up. Do you have one to repudiate it?
but I doubt you have ever used one and it would be wasted.
Actually I have used one, but never set up or configured one. It beat our old solution by a mile, although I have no idea what the cost differential was.
Anyways, enjoy this Google stuff now, because it won't last if Google doesn't change their model, and soon.
I see, and what successful, profitable, multimillion dollar company do you run?
any case, as you can tell, I'm not a Google fan boy like yourself. I'm more of a realist.
I'm not a "Google fan boy" as you claim. I don't even use Google for my daily searches (well it is one of several whose results I aggregate.) I do, however, appreciate a lot of the products they bring to market. Their search, maps, etc. are groundbreaking not just for the technology, but for not being annoying like all their competitor's offerings. Subtle, well targeted ads make a huge difference. Also, their tendency to use open standards, like Jabber for their IM offering is something that could greatly improve instant messaging for everyone. It is the first offering from a major player that puts the customer ahead of trying to get a lock-in on the market. I understand the limitations and disagree with some of their choices, but I also appreciate what they have done. I see idiots on Slashdot all the time bitch and moan about how often Google related articles are posted. Here's a
The root list that the US maintains (as you put it) is the property of the US, and by extension, property of the citizens of the US. This list constitutes alot of work, information, and as a result, power. I can't think of a single reason we have for wanting to give it away.
How about this, the work is only valuable if everyone agrees to keep using it. They don't. Only 2 nations in the whole UN voted to keep using it, including the US. The list is not very long and did not take a lot of work. It is less than a thousand entries if I recall correctly and everyone has a copy. The issue here is that they are no longer going to agree to use the changes the US makes to it and are going to use the changes they make. Their is no reason for them not to and a lot of reasons for them to do so.
dare you to walk into the YellowPages office and suggest that they donate their database of clients, addresses, and phone-numbers to some independant consortium made up of representatives of the various companies that are listed within. They will laugh at you.
This isn't a database of clients etc., this is analogous to the list of area codes, which is something a UN committee already governs. Take your uninformed nationalist rhetoric and sit on it. If I was running a foreign country and had an investment of billions in networking gear, infrastructure, and personnel I'd sure as hell move to a standard not controlled by the US as soon as humanly possible. If you can't understand why the world would not want to be at the US's mercy for their internet lookups and that the US is being a spoiled brat about power and trust shifting away from them, then you are completely clueless. It is happening, the only real question is will the US play ball or cry like a baby and go home, damaging its ability to communicate with the rest of the world in the process.
It looks like another nail in the Google Print Coffin. Author's Guild and AAP both suing.
OK. They have been sued over their regular page indexing as well, but that did not end google searching. Google has the legal precedent here and seems likely to prevail.
Can we add this to the growing list of projects that Google has released that just haven't panned out, dare I say flopped? Google Search appliance, Google Web Accelerator, GTalk, Google Reader, Personalized Search, Google Ride Finder, Google Personalized Home Page, ummm... yes we can add it, Google Print. LOL.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Google search appliances do good business. Plenty of places buy them to index their internal networks. Gtalk? It has barely entered beta and you call it a flop? You know what? Some Parkinsons researchers I know were just commenting the other day how useful google scholar is and how they use it all the time. They had not heard of Google books yet, but all of them were interested when I mentioned it. Google has dozens of projects going, mostly just to test the waters and a lot of them end up integrated into google search. I know I use it for research. Maybe you should get a clue. These things may not be really popular, but they are profitable and useful and people use a lot of them every day. Speculating that legal action will kill a project is all well and good, but it would be even better if you had a clue about the subject or had read the laws and precedent setting cases before making said uninformed speculations.
It does seem a strange interpretation of copyright laws that copyright owners have to opt out of Google's "humanitarianism". Someone point me to an article that explains how this works
It's really pretty simple. It is legal to copy and republish small excerpts of works without the permission of the copyright holder. It is legal to copy the entire work for the purpose of creating the proper excerpt, provided you do not otherwise use the work (and you meet 4 legal criteria) without the permission of the copyright holder. This is called "fair use" and is defined by U.S. law. Google is copying entire works, but only in order to republish a small excerpt as is their right under the law. Legally, they don't even have to stop doing this if the copyright holder asks them to, but they are doing so to be nice.
It seems no different to the codicil Mitchell Glazier opted music copyright holders into in the days before their contracts included any online/digitalised clauses.
Except they aren't selling the works and they aren't giving anyone more than a small excerpt of the work unless the copyright holder specifically asks them to or unless the copyright has expired on that work. All of this has been gone over many times, so have you just not been paying attention or is someone paying you to spread this FUD?
Google should follow MSN and Yahoo on this one.
Yeah, and I'm starting a new search engine that will only index pages whose copyright holder's permission I've secured. It won't be nearly as useful, but it will avoid possibly upsetting content producer's. Never mind that opt-in indexing and searching will limit it to a tiny subset of works and most works will be permanently excluded since most copyright is held by unknown and pretty much uncontactable parties. All sarcasm aside, the open content alliance is great, but they will never include the majority of works.
Suppose a democracy activist wants to register domain names like downwithchina.com. If China had a say in ICANN affairs, it could push to have such domain names prohibited.
Sure they could, if they were so inclined, but it wouldn't work because most countries would not agree to it and because that decision has to be made by whomever is running .com, not who is deciding who is running .com. It is very hard to try to micromanage that sort of thing, especially when you are in a democratic committee. You may notice international trade agreements do not ban shipping books critical of China and international telephone agreements do not ban saying bad things about China. China already censors the internet for its people, it does not care about the rest and can't do anything even if it has a representative in the committee. Get it? This article is sensationalist and obviously written by people with little understanding of the realities of the situation.
I just don't get this whole .xxx thing. I mean just who decides what sites would have to go there?
That is obvious, the web publisher who is registering a domain, decides that .xxx is appropriate for his or her content. Much as most ISPs choose to host a .net address and hospitals would like to have the .med domain so they can be easily found, porn vendors would like a .xxx domain to help people find them and to reduce traffic to their site from people not looking for porn and unlikely to spend money there. It is basically impossible to pass effective laws requiring sites with porn to host there, since you'd have to pass and enforce that law in every country in order to make it have any meaning. This also means if schools want to filter .xxx it is good for them, which reduces the cost and annoyance to porn sites. It further means that a law passed to force hosting in .xxx and restrict customers from using it in any way will backfire, since it will then motivate porn hosting to move back to .com, etc.
A .kids or whatever domain is a good idea too, with a company to certify the domain sales, but .xxx is just like any other TLD. It is nice for commerce and great for filtering and finding what you want, but useless for censorship.
I imagine Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China having a say in the operation of the world's biggest experiment in free speech and shudder. As much as I dislike the state of affairs in Washington DC and you dislike ICANN, it could get a LOT worse. Do you want countries that murder people who don't agree with the state religion having a say in DNS?
Why not? They all have a say right now for international telephone calls, and we don't seem to have any problems. Ditto with international shipping. It's not like these would be the only countries with a say. Why should this one area suddenly impose censorship, when the UN has not done so in all the other areas there are international committees making polices for? These countries don't need a say in DNS to censor their people, they can already do that by better means. They need it to insure that the system remains operational and so that they are not gouged when attempting to register domains, something the US has had trouble with in the past and present and which they all fear will get worse in the future. They've all put billions into this and while they are looking at investing billions more our answer to their request for guarantees is, "trust us." Sorry, the US is not trustworthy and everyone knows it. If it was, this would not be an issue.
Yeah, um because porn vendors would all decide to host on a domain that was universally blocked. The internet is a global enterprise and you can't pass a law that says porn all has to be hosted in one particular domain or laws blocking that domain because the content is in multiple countries and nothing stops publishers from moving.
let us instead create .kids and lock the kiddies browswer[sic] to only go there.
I think the proposed .kids domain is a great idea, but their is no reason it can't co-exist with .xxx. Your fears about censorship are unfounded. TLDs make great filters but are next to useless as control mechanisms.
I can't help but think that if Microsoft worked with a state and university to encourage closed source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to closed source projects worldwide that everyone would say how dare a company try to buy a university into spreading it's FUD.
Open source is a feature of software that benefits some users and purchasers of software. Closed source is the lack of that feature. With that in mind, I think I would object to any company partnering with a University to specifically create software without a given, beneficial feature. For instance, I would applaud "Google partners with universities to create more worm resistant software." I would be less thrilled about, "Google partners with local universities to create software that is not any more resistant to worms." Thus Google investing and helping to create software with a given feature is something most people find to be a good thing, but Google or anyone else partnering to create software specifically without a given feature, because it is good for their business model, well that is not something most of us would appreciate.
It would also make porn a lot easier to censor. I know plenty of people who thought it was a bad idea, and they are hardly religious.
I disagree. A .xxx domain would make porn easier to find and easier to filter, but no easier to censor. You see censorship implies what you are doing is against the will of the publisher. If porn publishers open sites in .xxx because they want to be filtered so they don't get random hits by school kids and whatnot, that is not censorship. Likewise if schools filter the domain, since publishers do not want to reach that audience. If, however, some group wanted to use the presence of the .xxx domain to censor porn from their intended customers, it would fail miserably. It is just not practical to pass laws in every country around the world to force porn to move entirely to the .xxx domain, and if that domain cannot reach it's intended audience the content will move elsewhere.
As a voluntary method of sorting it works great, but as a means of censorship, it is very , very weak.
There are a multitude of reasons to not have the .xxx extension put in, among which is the thought that it leads to a frightening grip on free speech and such.
You know there is a difference between creating a domain for a economically important subset of the internet and passing laws regarding trying to force particular use of that domain. By your logic we should only have one domain, after all having a .uk TLD could lead to free speech issues and censoring and prejudice against the British.
easy control measures being placed to cease access to anything that the ones in control (college, ISP, etc.) deem necessary.
If many colleges do such a thing, porn would move back to .com, where the customers are. If an ISP tried to restrict the porn domain they'd lose half their customers. It is almost impossible to pass laws enforcing particular uses of a TLD due to the global nature of the internet. Sure the US might pass laws that say all porn must be in .xxx and then restrict colleges from serving it, but how do they stop hosting in every other country from putting porn in .com then? TLDs are useful for sorting, but make for a piss-poor control measure. Trying to stop the creation of any new TLDs out of fear that others will use them as such a measure is very counter productive. you might as well be opposed to automobiles because they will allow oppressive governments to reach possibly rebellious discussion groups more quickly.
For example, when a teenage boy searches the net from his room for a school project, and just happens to run across some unrelated porn, there is a very good chance that he will divert his attention to the porn site for several minutes while he takes care of his immediate needs. Porn site operators know about this, and they count on it.
You obviously don't know anyone in the porn industry and have not really thought about it as a business model. This is exactly what porn vendors do not want. Kids don't have credit cards for the most part and are unlikely to spend much money. If they do have credit cards (their own or their parents) they are likely monitored by a guardian. This can result in contested charges, PR problems "won't you please think of the children," and unhappy customers, and unwanted attention for their clientele who usually prefer a discreet site.
Porn cites, for the most part, do not need to thrive on accidental hits. There are so many people actively looking their main goal is to quickly turn away those who are not likely to hand them credit card info, while catering to those who are. One of their largest expenses is bandwidth and a lot of that does not go to actual customers and does not earn them any money. The last thing porn sites want is kids stumbling across their site and either causing problems by gaining access or wasting bandwidth. Many sites, especially ones without a large established base, would be happy to transition over to help people find them and reduce the chances of the scenario you describe above.
And conversely, you have no standards. If, hypothetically, 45 year old men having sex with 12 year olds was popular (Denmark scenario), you would have no problem with it, because the majority of the people are in favor.
Instead of standards I have ethical beliefs. You see I don't have sex with children and I don't steal office supplies. This is because I don't particularly want to have sex with children and even if I did, I would find it unethical to put someone who is not mature enough to handle the situation in that situation. I support enforcing this belief upon others, because it is protecting the rights of children, not because I find it unethical though. Talking about having sex with children, drawing pictures of it, etc. do not infringe upon anyone else's rights and I don't support trying to legally restrain people from so doing. A pedophiles rights end the minute they try to infringe upon those of a child. My rights end the minute I try to restrain the free speech of a pedophile.
You are fine with promoting a .KKK domain, again, as long as its popular.
The minute the KKK does something to violate someone else's rights I'm fully in favor of stopping them, whether they are in the majority or the minority. If, however, there is enough interest and traffic to justify creating a .kkk domain, then I am not opposed to it. That is because no matter how much I disagree with their ideas and principals, it is not worth sacrificing my own. My disapproval and rights end when I try to take away their right to free speech. There is a great quote, "I may hate what you say, but I'll die to protect your right to say it." Shouldn't you have learned all of this in your 5th grade civics class?
But in the first place I don't find anything immoral about Christian groups using completely legitimate methods to get their views represented.
No one else argued against that either. The only statement I made is that "puritans" (which I was using in a generic way, obviously not referring to the original puritans) have successfully lobbied (note this is not the same as using democracy, it is bypassing the democratic system using money and a loophole that allows legitimized bribes) to hinder free expression for the whole world by making it harder for people to voluntarily sort information, and thus gain access to said free expression.
Trying to turn this whole discussion into a vilification of Christian groups who used the very freedoms that people seem to want - freedom of expression, freedom to petition the government, freedom to maintain their culture and beliefs - is ridiculous.
Then why are you trying to steer the conversation that way? I never mentioned christians at all. I think a lot of people either do not understand or just want to ignore the bill of rights and why it was created. The U.S. system of government is a very indirect democracy, but democracy itself is a pretty flawed concept. A famous quote says, "democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner." The bill of rights was designed to keep a "tyranny of the majority" from infringing upon the basic human rights of minorities. While obeying the will of the people is the best way we have to decide policy and actions, at the same time it needs to be held in check to prevent abuse. Democracy fails when the majority votes that the minority must give them all their money or when the majority votes that the minority must convert to their religion.
That is why people object to Christians using laws to enforce their religion. It is unconstitutional and it infringes upon "certain unalienable rights" like the right to free expression or the freedom to choose a religion. Thus far, there has been no danger to the Christians that a majority will vote to take away their basic rights, so many do not even understand the concept. Basically if 75% of the country converted to Islam tomorrow and voted to make it illegal to quote the Christian bible, the Bill of rights would still make sure Christians could do just that. That is because the rights of the majority, whether Christian or Islamic, end just as soon as they start infringing upon the rights of others.
Christians, even devout ones by some measures, are the majority in this country yet every time they exercise the clout that comes from this status they are criticized and attacked.
No, they are criticized, and rightfully so, when they try to use it in unconstitutional ways to restrict the freedoms of others.
In this particular case, to argue that other countries, many of whom have truly repugnant governments and in some case truly repugnant cultures, deserve control because conservative Christians have too much control is just ridiculous.
That is a straw man argument, no one but you has mentioned such a thing.
If we are arguing the relative freedom of various countries and how that should affect their "right" to control the internet then I will strongly stand up for the US as having more freedom than almost any country (bar possibly a few western European ones) in the world or in fact in history.
Again, no one but you is arguing that. What we are doing is citing specific examples of mismanagement, not generally arguing the relative "freedom" of countries. The basic argument is that it is childishly stupid to trust any one government to currently and forever act in the best interests of the entire world and that it is much more reasonable for the entire world to be represented and make decisions together in a democratic fashion.
This entire sub-thread about one specific mismanagement of the root TLD assignment process is merely one illustration of that. No one voted t
Pi is exactly 3!
If you want .XXX based solely on its POPULARITY then you must also accept a .GOD TLD, because sheer numbers say just as many people are into .GOD as into .XXX. And you must also accept a .NYC because, hey, New York is big, and lots of people would like a .NYC TLD. ad infinium[sic]
If there is enough interest in a .pee domain and enough traffic to that site to warrant it, I'm fine with it. The same goes for .kkk and .god. New York city already has a lower level domain and they seem to being doing just fine with it. Popularity is sort of like democracy no? If most people want it then it should be created, ala the will of the people, or have you come up with a better method of decision making? Perhaps a dictatorship where you make all the decisions for everyone else and decide which domains are too icky and which are acceptable? What the world is demanding is representation and a world body to make these decisions, rather than one country deciding for the whole world. Your religious and sexual hang-ups are no concern of mine, just don't try to enforce them on the majority who disagrees with you. You might want to talk to a shrink about them too.
You do realize you are illustrating a classical logical fallacy right? When someone criticizes something, arguing that someone else is doing something worse in no way mitigates the initial bad behavior. "Sure I kicked a dog but he blew up a building" is a piss-poor argument for the morality of dog kicking.
What does your statement have to do with anything we're talking about, other than to get in a politically-charged jab? But to answer the second part of question, I'd hope it would be reasonably obvious that a nation may be compelled to retain an element of control over things that it created, has a huge historical and ongoing investment in, and in which it has a major vested interest.
It has the same thing in common as yours; it has nothing to do with what were were discussing. As for control of what we created, it all runs over phone lines, the invention of which was by a non-american. Do the british have a responsibility to maintain control over all telephone communications? Other countries have invested more in building and maintaining the internet than the U.S. has as well as made significant contributions to the technology including inventing the WWW, the DNS system for which we are discussing. Why should other countries invest yet more in a system when the US insists on charging them fees and maintaining the sole capability to shut anyone they want down?
Yes. One arguably major misstep and egregious violation by Verisign, which was then corrected under the contract terms. So you're saying it's not possible for a contractor to err or intentionally misbehave anywhere outside the US?
No, merely that in other places when a contractor screws you over like that, with no warning you might at least consider bids from other contractors rather than granting them an unprecedented lengthy extension to their contract without allowing other bids.
As to the rest of your points, it sounds like your issue is really with ICANN...
ICANN derives its authority from the US government and replacing it is exactly what is being proposed.
I would still guess that more physical machines serving in roots are located within the US, even though this really has no bearing one way or another on this discussion.
You would guess wrongly and it has bearing in who pays for and maintains the machines and has the ability to direct what root list they direct to (i.e. if their is a split what percentage of internet users will immediately be on the non-US system.
Howso?
One of the major concerns is the fragility of the current system. Right now a political decision could have the U.S. government order the root system to redirect traffic to Iran. This could happen overnight, causing huge problems and a lengthy outage before the world managed to shift to a non-US controlled root. That decision could be made by any number of individuals in the U.S. government and would effect the whole world.
By moving to a UN controlled system with distributed root control and a procedure for making changes, no single individual or country could shut Iran off from the whole world. It would take an agreement by the UN representatives and then each country acting upon that agreement. Thus it is a lot less likely for sudden, disruptive problems to occur do to government control.
What's deficient about it or its management now? Be specific, keeping in mind that I don't really think we randomly need to introduce new and arbitrary TLDs.
Aside from the fragility, their is the non-competative assigning of TLDs to US only for profit companies. Why should the US profit by maintaining a choke-hold on the internet? As far as more TLDs, well most of the world disagrees with you as does the IETF and the IANA, which are pretty much the two most important and well respected bodies for internet standards. But it is the fragility that is most important I guess. Who wants to invest in building a house at the bottom of a hill, when the guy living at the top is a psycho with a stack of boulders he promises he will never roll down at you?
But they already have made such an investment. And further, you act is if such an investment is completely negated if the US makes changes. Any change that would "cripple" any other nation's technical invest
So lets say Joe Lieberman and other liberals next want to regulate VIOLENCE. So they architect a .GUN TLD.
This has nothing to do with regulation. This is about commerce and accurate discovery of information. I strongly support the creation of a .xxx domain, but I also oppose legislation forcing companies to host all porn there. I believe most websites selling porn would be happy to voluntarily move to a .xxx domain so their customers can find them and so they can be easily filtered by schools, etc. that porn vendors don't want wasting their bandwidth anyway.
Likewise if someone wanted to create a .gun domain for websites relating to guns and selling guns and gun accessories, I don't have any objection. Legislating that all gun sales sites and sites discussing guns have to be hosted within that tld, however, would be violation of free speech and I would strongly oppose it. Hospitals have been demanding a .med for years and many have enabled an alternate root, just so they can easily find other hospitals and medical networks. As for your other tld examples, they are inane and I don't even understand what the point is you are trying to make. Do you even have a point?