The USERS are. There has been in this world a growing sentiment in the masses that things should just work the way they want, expect, or imagine them and it is SOMEONE ELSE'S job to make that happen.
Microsoft has succeeded at this to a degree that a scant ten years ago would have been scoffed and laughed at had anyone made the claim then. Windows XP simply works, does so very well, and very very stably when run properly and conscienciously. It is NOT Microsoft's fault that their product is sitting in a world full of people looking to abuse and vandalize any machine they can and willing to immediately take advantage of so many of the things that Microsoft put in specifically to enhance the experience.
In a well run environment, much of Windows supposed weaknesses are actually great ways to expand upon Windows and do new things. But the world is not a well run environment and the users themselves are often the same blend of evil, incompetence, and negligence that composes things like the US Postal Service and the people who decided what kinds of shoes to make in the Soviet Union.
I use AV software and antispyware. I almost NEVER get hits on them because I don't install things in my e-mail, don't go to bad sites, don't do all the things basic pc education says repeatedly not to do. Most users don't behave that way. Heck, you're lucky if you can get your support customers to understand the concept of shutting Windows (or Linux or Mac) down properly.
Simply put, Microsoft has been very anti-malware proactive in my experience, they've bought Claria, and are probably satisfied that there's not that big an issue with it. I'm not going to get all tinfoil hat and join a FUD screamfest about it. If I download and install stupid crap, that's not Microsoft's fault, that's MINE.
Simply put a small charge of explosives in the case and when it gets stolen, boom, check the news for "fence killed by stolen laptop", wait for the/. posting "innocent man killed by exploding Windows laptop", and comment here.
These situations are just fodder for more posts, so why noy enjoy it?
...that bloated is a matter of perspective and a little bit of willful ignorance if not downright idiocy.
Windows is said to be bloated, yet 99% of the examples revolve around the simple mistake of using the default installation and not picking and choosing only what you need. Do this and Windows XP sings along nicely. Most of the so-called bloat is eliminated. I personally enjoy stress-testing my systems and tend to install every last thing I can and see what happens.
Same thing applies to Fedora Core. I installed minimal which was below what I wanted, I installed average default which was more, and I installed everything. Everything cured 90% of dependency lag (the time it takes Yum/Up2Date to download depedencies when it finds them missing).
The true bloat is two parts and first is in what loads whether you want it to or not and that can be managed after installation very quickly from either Gnome or KDE management apps.
The second is the kernel itself which does have a lot compiled in that need not be on each system. However, this is true of the default kernels on a number of distros. How many are purely what Linus tosses out and how many are creations of the distributors?
Should we have to recompile kernels? No, but until someone writes a really good script for recompiling the kernel based on interactive questioning down to what I need and nothing more, I'll deal with it.
...for just a few more months and closed it in 95, then where would this suit be?
Of course, everyone ascribes to Microsoft the mastery of the mythical magical power of money, so therefore the only reason Microsoft would shut down an effort so soon after Go did and sold to AT&T would naturally be, mission accomplished. Not the very real reason that it was just not going to happen back in 1995 the way Go or Microsoft wanted.
Go is being a real opportunist and they need to be slapped down. The Linux world needs to understand that their derision for Microsoft doesn't change the fact that opportunistic lawsuits happen all the time. The SCO affair should make that abundantly clear. How long till some small distro outfit sues Red Hat or Novell? If there's merit, there's merit, but this doesn't smell like it and neither does SCO's actions and if things keep up like this, it is bad news for any IT company for the future.
...even more reasons for organized criminals, state torturers, and other miscreants to pull your fingernails out.
Never mind your wife's addiction to nail polish.
"I don't care what a deal they cut you it was! The mortgage records were on those fingers!"
Hmmm... Fake nails, chips inserted, stylish data carrying mechanism... Back off! Prior art!
Just try patenting that Bezos!
Which is exactly the problem with F/OSS. First, it is overloaded with anti-capitalist yahoos who want everything for free, second, the license structure is befuddling and split between several ideas of how such things should work, and three, you have a zillion people writing a zillion things as the base from which to work with and now you're expected to reign in the chaos and somehow defy the very F/OSS model to make money?
Not conducive to success at all. Meanwhile closed source is still making kick ass money that F/OSS people can only wish they'd ever see. The kind of money that Debian could use.
Careful, Bezos might try to patent it and you know how good he is at catching the USPTO asleep... "Hmmm... I wonder if we could also patent Domestic Boar Baby Back Rib Trombone Cases..."
Indeed. It's funny how people go about lecturing others about IP issues here on slashdot and then they seem to use the words "patent", "trademark" and "copyright" (or even worse "copywrite") interchangeably.
I've seen it since I first started looking over legal protection for what I wrote and finally my eyes glazed over and my jaw sunk into a permanent open in shock format on this subject when no less than three different lawyers didn't know.
...from those of us living where government was too stupid to know the difference between copyrights and patents and has ignited a building war over what Intellectual Property should mean or be.
There's probably a bunch more Dune references that could be made. Insert all here. Now that we're done with that, we can get on with the Soviet Russia,...Overlords, and other staples.
Just wanted to get that out of the way.
Besides, anyone who had a martinet of a high school math teacher has had a taste of being a human computer. "You want how many digits of the square root of pi? What are you smoking Mr. (blipped)? No, no, no, I am not writing them longhand. You can take a dot matrix print like everyone else."
I can understand OSS having potentially high operating costs from failures and training, but how can you justify high initial costs for something that is free?
You can't unless you have cash to burn. Every time I look at it, I'm ahead by less than 5% with Linux over Windows and that is totally outweighed in my book by the need for productivity being held up by dependency Hell, needs to modify source and rebuild, endless configuration that requires pounding a keyboard to dust faster than a data entry clerk, etc.
If I had no choice but to use Linux it would be Red Hat, and then I'd be paying just as I would with MS.
I'm still waiting...
on
Real Wood iPod
·
· Score: 2, Funny
...for someone to rebuild an iPod with vacuum tubes and a bakelite case.
Well how nice that you had the luxury to do that. Take less pay for being happier.
The rest of the world does not work that way. Work is done for money, money is used to keep a roof over one's head and food in one's belly, survival and comfort being primary as you yourself stated. I find making less money and being forced to live in a smaller place with less comforts and having less food on the table not to make me happy. Free oral sex all day as perk would not change that never mind open source.
Open Source is not a source of innovation. If anything, it is a chaotic pond of organic sludge and we're hoping it produces something. Meanwhile, Microsoft (and even Apple) are doing the equivalent of nanotechnology by actually consciously making big working systems with the organic parts. OSS land? Waiting for the pot to boil.
None at all. But then I am sure it is totally absurd to suggest that employees who sit and work with a dull, miserable and boring environment all day are going to provide exactly the same productivity as employees who are working in a pleasant and stimulating environment.
There is a difference between a pleasant and stimulating environment and the tools used. Windows or any other OS on any piece of hardware are tools. Painting the handle of a hammer in warm pastels would be pleasant but doesn't make a roofer more productive (it just puts money in Martha Stewart's pocket). Having topless cheerleaders for that matter would be greatly stimulating, but would only make for the roofer falling to great injury or death.
You can rice up an econobox all you want, it is still not going to do the job of a vehicle built for racing. You can put twenty million candlepower worth of extraneous lighting on a fifteen year old Peterbilt and it still isn't going to make it carry any more cargo. Efficiency of the tool is what matters and Windows apps are exceedingly efficient tools thanks to a common and pervasive platform model of objects, interfaces, and methods. No dependency Hell, no willy-nilly everything is different and needs its own paradigm, no lack of interoperability. Use the IDE that embraces the architecture most fully, that everyone else uses, and everything fits.
Lastly, the IT/Internet sector had plenty of pleasant and stimulating environments. At companies which produced less than nothing and went utterly bankrupt after absurdly overvalued IPOs which were followed by everyone bailing with their ill-gotten gains. Leather couches, roller skates at work, and bar stools for seats in front of 21-inch monitors may have been stimulating and pleasant, but I don't recall them actually resulting in productivity of any kind.
Now in cubicle land where people do real work... Well, compare the average big corporation's IT department with the aforementioned "pleasant and stimulating environments". In corporate IT, more work is done before lunch every day than was ever done in anything more pleasant and stimulating surroundings because it needs to be done and there's a paycheck in it. A decent paycheck trumps any kind of pleasant and stimulating. Hooters girls giving me massages would be pleasant and stuimulating, but would not make me more productive.
Perhaps the author, being an elitist know-it-all about lovely user interfaces should look around a bit.. there's plenty of examples, such as Window Blinds from Stardock.
But the answer truely is that software doesn't need to be pretty to be functional. Most of the time all the eye-candy crap just gets in the way or slows it down.
I own and use Stardock's apps and have for years. They are great, very pretty, very innovative, and very memory and processor hungry. At 1280x1024x32 on WinXP w/256MB RAM and a decent nVidia card, you will slow your performance down to about one eighth what it was, one quarter if you turn on MS' WinXP goodies like translucency and so on.
xcompmgr? Compositing? Unstable, buggy, and slow. At the very best I've slowed my Linux boxes to a crawl for five or ten minutes between crashes. At worst, X starts but neither GDM nor KDM will properly start. Usually, it boots and starts the desktop and crashes within five minutes.
Eye candy on either Windows or Linux is at this time a waste of time, but infinitely more stable on Windows than Linux. OSX? Apple has been all about style over substance since forever so why should this surprise me? With Object Desktop I can my XP machine even prettier. Doesn't mean it changes the underlying apps to do anything any faster.
Inspired and exciting design makes people more productive.
Tell that to the safety manager at the average factory or machine shop. You'll get laughed out of the building. New, inspired, exciting does NOT make for more productive. It makes for new, inspired, and exciting. That's fine for a roller coaster, but not fine for the technically involved specifics of designing and constructing it. You'd hardly call the behind-the-scenes of mechanical engineering exciting or inspired, but you would call them productive.
I love Cartoon Network and other outfits for showing anime, I really do. But they take so damn long to get anything over here that all the total anime freaks with friends in Japan will already have seen it nine thousand times over before it gets here, and if you let them sit you down in front of their DVD player, so will you. For once I'd like to enjoy something without nineteen of my friends having already told me everything a year or two in advance.
Anyone RTFM and note the link stating that Macross is being adapted? This is going to be mental whiplash for anyone who watched Robotech and never paid attention to the creators repeatedly stating that it was constructed from three different anime series. Now people who've seen Macross Plus and Macross II on cable are gonna think, "I was wondering what all this was about."
All because in America, anime is still just a gimmick for making money and not a pointer as to how to make better cartoons.
Unfortunately, while electrostatic and magnetic forces are important, they are additive to the picture and not dominant. That is, all charges are going to act on each other and influence them, but gravity and so forth have influence as well, especially because space-time curvature must be obeyed by electrostatic and magnetic forces. Too bad they are trying so hard to ignore decades of evidence that doesn't fit their theory. First sign of it not being fit to be taken seriously.
Between continued dupe-a-mania and the thought going through my mind of the bugs from Joe's Apartment getting their own pimped out rides, I think I've had enough for one night. Good night/.
If I were to build a starship to travel into the galaxy, I'd have to settle about 16,000 patent claims and divy up a fortune of funds between thousands of organisations.
Bad assumption. If you built a genuine starship, you'd be out of their jurisdiction inside of 0.0000000000021 seconds. However, I do not know if any of the inventions involved are already patented in other star systems you might visit and what royalties they may want.
This looks like a mission very well done thus far and is the sort of thing we should do at every opportunity.
For the future, I'd like to see us mass-producing multi-use probes and sending small convoys of them out across the system. I'd also like to see more space telescopes sent out and about to capture data to send home. Imagine sending something about half the size of Hubble to orbit between Mars and Jupiter.
most of the opposition is knee-jerk and FUD. Like the "evil Bushies" are going to take away your pr0n collection.
(insert rolling eyes emoticon here)
I think the US government is well aware how dangerous the Internet and the flow of information across it is to its enemies. Iran and company can only be ever destabilized by the Internet and cutting themselves off completely will leave them behind more and more. Opening up access will accellerate disaffection in those nations more and more. Either way, the days of these totalitarians is numbered.
Yet supposedly the US government is suddenly going to do all sorts of nasty things with their control of the root servers.
I doubt Microsoft, IBM, General Motors, CitiBank, etc. would put up with that nor would any of the other many thousands of businesses and in short order, their money would do the talking to congressmen.
Slashdot Mirror
The USERS are. There has been in this world a growing sentiment in the masses that things should just work the way they want, expect, or imagine them and it is SOMEONE ELSE'S job to make that happen.
Microsoft has succeeded at this to a degree that a scant ten years ago would have been scoffed and laughed at had anyone made the claim then. Windows XP simply works, does so very well, and very very stably when run properly and conscienciously . It is NOT Microsoft's fault that their product is sitting in a world full of people looking to abuse and vandalize any machine they can and willing to immediately take advantage of so many of the things that Microsoft put in specifically to enhance the experience.
In a well run environment, much of Windows supposed weaknesses are actually great ways to expand upon Windows and do new things. But the world is not a well run environment and the users themselves are often the same blend of evil, incompetence, and negligence that composes things like the US Postal Service and the people who decided what kinds of shoes to make in the Soviet Union.
I use AV software and antispyware. I almost NEVER get hits on them because I don't install things in my e-mail, don't go to bad sites, don't do all the things basic pc education says repeatedly not to do. Most users don't behave that way. Heck, you're lucky if you can get your support customers to understand the concept of shutting Windows (or Linux or Mac) down properly.
Simply put, Microsoft has been very anti-malware proactive in my experience, they've bought Claria, and are probably satisfied that there's not that big an issue with it. I'm not going to get all tinfoil hat and join a FUD screamfest about it. If I download and install stupid crap, that's not Microsoft's fault, that's MINE.
Well if you Google for "Shanda" and "panda" you get this little site. You might not want to click the adult content link on that page.
Simply put a small charge of explosives in the case and when it gets stolen, boom, check the news for "fence killed by stolen laptop", wait for the /. posting "innocent man killed by exploding Windows laptop", and comment here.
These situations are just fodder for more posts, so why noy enjoy it?
...that bloated is a matter of perspective and a little bit of willful ignorance if not downright idiocy.
Windows is said to be bloated, yet 99% of the examples revolve around the simple mistake of using the default installation and not picking and choosing only what you need. Do this and Windows XP sings along nicely. Most of the so-called bloat is eliminated. I personally enjoy stress-testing my systems and tend to install every last thing I can and see what happens.
Same thing applies to Fedora Core. I installed minimal which was below what I wanted, I installed average default which was more, and I installed everything. Everything cured 90% of dependency lag (the time it takes Yum/Up2Date to download depedencies when it finds them missing).
The true bloat is two parts and first is in what loads whether you want it to or not and that can be managed after installation very quickly from either Gnome or KDE management apps.
The second is the kernel itself which does have a lot compiled in that need not be on each system. However, this is true of the default kernels on a number of distros. How many are purely what Linus tosses out and how many are creations of the distributors?
Should we have to recompile kernels? No, but until someone writes a really good script for recompiling the kernel based on interactive questioning down to what I need and nothing more, I'll deal with it.
The bloat in any FC is not that bad, really.
Now I can finally get a rip of the collected works of the Starland Vocal Band!
...for just a few more months and closed it in 95, then where would this suit be?
Of course, everyone ascribes to Microsoft the mastery of the mythical magical power of money, so therefore the only reason Microsoft would shut down an effort so soon after Go did and sold to AT&T would naturally be, mission accomplished. Not the very real reason that it was just not going to happen back in 1995 the way Go or Microsoft wanted.
Go is being a real opportunist and they need to be slapped down. The Linux world needs to understand that their derision for Microsoft doesn't change the fact that opportunistic lawsuits happen all the time. The SCO affair should make that abundantly clear. How long till some small distro outfit sues Red Hat or Novell? If there's merit, there's merit, but this doesn't smell like it and neither does SCO's actions and if things keep up like this, it is bad news for any IT company for the future.
...even more reasons for organized criminals, state torturers, and other miscreants to pull your fingernails out.
Never mind your wife's addiction to nail polish.
"I don't care what a deal they cut you it was! The mortgage records were on those fingers!"
Hmmm... Fake nails, chips inserted, stylish data carrying mechanism... Back off! Prior art!
Just try patenting that Bezos!
Which is exactly the problem with F/OSS. First, it is overloaded with anti-capitalist yahoos who want everything for free, second, the license structure is befuddling and split between several ideas of how such things should work, and three, you have a zillion people writing a zillion things as the base from which to work with and now you're expected to reign in the chaos and somehow defy the very F/OSS model to make money?
Not conducive to success at all. Meanwhile closed source is still making kick ass money that F/OSS people can only wish they'd ever see. The kind of money that Debian could use.
Careful, Bezos might try to patent it and you know how good he is at catching the USPTO asleep... "Hmmm... I wonder if we could also patent Domestic Boar Baby Back Rib Trombone Cases..."
Indeed. It's funny how people go about lecturing others about IP issues here on slashdot and then they seem to use the words "patent", "trademark" and "copyright" (or even worse "copywrite") interchangeably.
I've seen it since I first started looking over legal protection for what I wrote and finally my eyes glazed over and my jaw sunk into a permanent open in shock format on this subject when no less than three different lawyers didn't know.
Simple short form rule is that names of things are trademarks (Compaq), inventions of physical items or processes are patents (sewing machine attachments), and creative (or not so creative) assemblage of information is copyrights (*cough*, Brittney Spears CDs, *cough*, *hack*, *wheeze*). Three different subjects and three different departments. Now we've got the last being mixed up with the second one. We might as well just give trademarks to items and copyrights to names. © and ® and (P) oh my.
...from those of us living where government was too stupid to know the difference between copyrights and patents and has ignited a building war over what Intellectual Property should mean or be.
Our prayers go with you.
There's probably a bunch more Dune references that could be made. Insert all here. Now that we're done with that, we can get on with the Soviet Russia, ...Overlords, and other staples.
Just wanted to get that out of the way.
Besides, anyone who had a martinet of a high school math teacher has had a taste of being a human computer. "You want how many digits of the square root of pi? What are you smoking Mr. (blipped)? No, no, no, I am not writing them longhand. You can take a dot matrix print like everyone else."
I can understand OSS having potentially high operating costs from failures and training, but how can you justify high initial costs for something that is free?
You can't unless you have cash to burn. Every time I look at it, I'm ahead by less than 5% with Linux over Windows and that is totally outweighed in my book by the need for productivity being held up by dependency Hell, needs to modify source and rebuild, endless configuration that requires pounding a keyboard to dust faster than a data entry clerk, etc.
If I had no choice but to use Linux it would be Red Hat, and then I'd be paying just as I would with MS.
...for someone to rebuild an iPod with vacuum tubes and a bakelite case.
Well how nice that you had the luxury to do that. Take less pay for being happier.
The rest of the world does not work that way. Work is done for money, money is used to keep a roof over one's head and food in one's belly, survival and comfort being primary as you yourself stated. I find making less money and being forced to live in a smaller place with less comforts and having less food on the table not to make me happy. Free oral sex all day as perk would not change that never mind open source.
Open Source is not a source of innovation. If anything, it is a chaotic pond of organic sludge and we're hoping it produces something. Meanwhile, Microsoft (and even Apple) are doing the equivalent of nanotechnology by actually consciously making big working systems with the organic parts. OSS land? Waiting for the pot to boil.
If only Henson had lived, we might not be visited with these travesties.
None at all. But then I am sure it is totally absurd to suggest that employees who sit and work with a dull, miserable and boring environment all day are going to provide exactly the same productivity as employees who are working in a pleasant and stimulating environment.
There is a difference between a pleasant and stimulating environment and the tools used. Windows or any other OS on any piece of hardware are tools. Painting the handle of a hammer in warm pastels would be pleasant but doesn't make a roofer more productive (it just puts money in Martha Stewart's pocket). Having topless cheerleaders for that matter would be greatly stimulating, but would only make for the roofer falling to great injury or death.
You can rice up an econobox all you want, it is still not going to do the job of a vehicle built for racing. You can put twenty million candlepower worth of extraneous lighting on a fifteen year old Peterbilt and it still isn't going to make it carry any more cargo. Efficiency of the tool is what matters and Windows apps are exceedingly efficient tools thanks to a common and pervasive platform model of objects, interfaces, and methods. No dependency Hell, no willy-nilly everything is different and needs its own paradigm, no lack of interoperability. Use the IDE that embraces the architecture most fully, that everyone else uses, and everything fits.
Lastly, the IT/Internet sector had plenty of pleasant and stimulating environments. At companies which produced less than nothing and went utterly bankrupt after absurdly overvalued IPOs which were followed by everyone bailing with their ill-gotten gains. Leather couches, roller skates at work, and bar stools for seats in front of 21-inch monitors may have been stimulating and pleasant, but I don't recall them actually resulting in productivity of any kind.
Now in cubicle land where people do real work... Well, compare the average big corporation's IT department with the aforementioned "pleasant and stimulating environments". In corporate IT, more work is done before lunch every day than was ever done in anything more pleasant and stimulating surroundings because it needs to be done and there's a paycheck in it. A decent paycheck trumps any kind of pleasant and stimulating. Hooters girls giving me massages would be pleasant and stuimulating, but would not make me more productive.
Perhaps the author, being an elitist know-it-all about lovely user interfaces should look around a bit.. there's plenty of examples, such as Window Blinds from Stardock.
But the answer truely is that software doesn't need to be pretty to be functional. Most of the time all the eye-candy crap just gets in the way or slows it down.
I own and use Stardock's apps and have for years. They are great, very pretty, very innovative, and very memory and processor hungry. At 1280x1024x32 on WinXP w/256MB RAM and a decent nVidia card, you will slow your performance down to about one eighth what it was, one quarter if you turn on MS' WinXP goodies like translucency and so on.
xcompmgr? Compositing? Unstable, buggy, and slow. At the very best I've slowed my Linux boxes to a crawl for five or ten minutes between crashes. At worst, X starts but neither GDM nor KDM will properly start. Usually, it boots and starts the desktop and crashes within five minutes.
Eye candy on either Windows or Linux is at this time a waste of time, but infinitely more stable on Windows than Linux. OSX? Apple has been all about style over substance since forever so why should this surprise me? With Object Desktop I can my XP machine even prettier. Doesn't mean it changes the underlying apps to do anything any faster.
Inspired and exciting design makes people more productive.
Tell that to the safety manager at the average factory or machine shop. You'll get laughed out of the building. New, inspired, exciting does NOT make for more productive. It makes for new, inspired, and exciting. That's fine for a roller coaster, but not fine for the technically involved specifics of designing and constructing it. You'd hardly call the behind-the-scenes of mechanical engineering exciting or inspired, but you would call them productive.
I love Cartoon Network and other outfits for showing anime, I really do. But they take so damn long to get anything over here that all the total anime freaks with friends in Japan will already have seen it nine thousand times over before it gets here, and if you let them sit you down in front of their DVD player, so will you. For once I'd like to enjoy something without nineteen of my friends having already told me everything a year or two in advance.
Anyone RTFM and note the link stating that Macross is being adapted? This is going to be mental whiplash for anyone who watched Robotech and never paid attention to the creators repeatedly stating that it was constructed from three different anime series. Now people who've seen Macross Plus and Macross II on cable are gonna think, "I was wondering what all this was about."
All because in America, anime is still just a gimmick for making money and not a pointer as to how to make better cartoons.
had some weird people in it.
Unfortunately, while electrostatic and magnetic forces are important, they are additive to the picture and not dominant. That is, all charges are going to act on each other and influence them, but gravity and so forth have influence as well, especially because space-time curvature must be obeyed by electrostatic and magnetic forces. Too bad they are trying so hard to ignore decades of evidence that doesn't fit their theory. First sign of it not being fit to be taken seriously.
Between continued dupe-a-mania and the thought going through my mind of the bugs from Joe's Apartment getting their own pimped out rides, I think I've had enough for one night. Good night /.
If I were to build a starship to travel into the galaxy, I'd have to settle about 16,000 patent claims and divy up a fortune of funds between thousands of organisations.
Bad assumption. If you built a genuine starship, you'd be out of their jurisdiction inside of 0.0000000000021 seconds. However, I do not know if any of the inventions involved are already patented in other star systems you might visit and what royalties they may want.
This looks like a mission very well done thus far and is the sort of thing we should do at every opportunity.
For the future, I'd like to see us mass-producing multi-use probes and sending small convoys of them out across the system. I'd also like to see more space telescopes sent out and about to capture data to send home. Imagine sending something about half the size of Hubble to orbit between Mars and Jupiter.
most of the opposition is knee-jerk and FUD. Like the "evil Bushies" are going to take away your pr0n collection.
(insert rolling eyes emoticon here)
I think the US government is well aware how dangerous the Internet and the flow of information across it is to its enemies. Iran and company can only be ever destabilized by the Internet and cutting themselves off completely will leave them behind more and more. Opening up access will accellerate disaffection in those nations more and more. Either way, the days of these totalitarians is numbered.
Yet supposedly the US government is suddenly going to do all sorts of nasty things with their control of the root servers.
I doubt Microsoft, IBM, General Motors, CitiBank, etc. would put up with that nor would any of the other many thousands of businesses and in short order, their money would do the talking to congressmen.