You, good sir, are completely wrong. First off, I refer you to an earlier post of mine where I explained in detail why this is not only art, but do a simple analysis of it. It is, most certainly, art.
In general, your definition of art is very much to narrow. Let's take Duchamps Fountain for instance. This is one of the most famous works of art produced in the world, and it was infact voted the most influential work of art in the 20th century by 500 british art-experts. It's been discussed endlessly. You know what it is? It's a urinal. Literally, a normal urinal found in any public restroom. It's signed "R. Mutt". That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. He literally just unscrewed it, cleaned it up, signed it, and put it on a pedestal. Oh yeah, it's lying down. And that is the most influential piece of art in the 20th century. When it came out it sparked a massive controversy whether indeed this was art at all, some people using your definition saying that it was obviously not art, and some people said it obviously was. Today it is universally accepted as not only art, but high art. Can you guess why? I'll give you a hint: I've already said one of the (many) reasons three sentances ago.
You need to drastically alter your definition and perception of art if you are ever to be able to go to a modern gallery.
But therein lies the artistic point, doesn't it? I hate to be too art-schooly (actually, I don't, I quite enjoy it), but there is obviously something much more behind what you say. These pictures are beautiful, but they can be just as beautiful if generated by other input, say for instance love-letters, the collected works of Shakespeare, or the Bill of Rights. But also spam. We think of spam as somehow less valuble, less good than these other things, but one could argue (and that is what I think the artist does with his art) that this is only because we choose to look at it from this perspective. The words themselves, when broken down to atomic form, has no intrinsic meaning (they are just a permutation of gplyphs drawn from a set of 25), they only provide an isomorphic mapping with some (very human) concepts. But the words themselves are just dots and curves and lines. If we remove this familiar mapping, and transform the words into shapes that have no meaning to us we see that this is only a construct of the human mind. Since (I assume) there is another isomorpic mapping between the words and the shapes (one input becomes only one shape, and a shape can come only from one specific input) there is no semantic difference (that is to say, there are no difference in meaning), only a difference in grammar (or form, more accuratly). Get it?
A lot of people complain, indeed a number of them in this story (note: I'm not referring to the parent), that this kind of art, modern art, is stupid, simplistic, masturbatory and only for some bored richpeople who hasn't worked an honest day in their lives. Well, they are wrong, and if you say that you are an asshole. Fine, you don't get modern art, that's ok, you don't have to. But there are people that do care about this, and they care very deeply. They spend their whole lives pursuing art, and they do not deserve to be spat on by people who "don't get it". It's arrogant, it's mean-spirited, it's disrespectful and plain ignorant.
Slashdotters don't appriciate it when people tell them they are wasting away their lives surfing the web, learning obscure programming languages, playing computer games, etc. So stop behaving like dicks to other people then!
...is going fairly well. I cannot say that I've follow this closely from across the pond, but a recent Slate article praises the judge for not falling for the government line, doing exactly the opposite of what this other judge did (ie he said that the "We have to be careful for our national security!" stuff is a bunch of hooey).
And here I was lead to believe (by various slashdotters, you know who you are!) that when it comes to litigation, the EFF was nigh incompetent. Looks like they're doing better than the ACLU, although it might just be a different judge thing.
Re:Now YOU look stupid.
on
Driving Plan 9
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ahh, but you are mistaken in your praise of Plan 9, most of us Ed Wood aficionados knows that that isn't his masterpiece, indeed it is trivial in comparison to the behemoth of Glen or Glenda (also known on sensational posters as "I Changed My Sex!"), wherein Wood himself stars as transvestite and Bela Lugosi is an insane rambling doctor.
All jokes aside, Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.
While this is true, there are always risks with using older machines. They are not as safe as they were 20 years ago, not because they are "broken", but because they can much easier break. No matter how much you replace on it, it's still a very, very old machine. With creaky joints.
Dammit, never for get to close a tag! Lets try again
Well, if you look at Alexa THey are fairly similar, however Alexa is notoriously inexact. For one thing, it doesn't work if you use firefox, which constitutes around 60% of both sites. Google Trends paints a more believable story perhaps with slashdot remaining fairly steady and digg slowly climbing and finally overtakes slashdot. Note though that slashdot doesn't really lose any traffic to digg. I'd say that's fairly accurate even though it's only measuring web-searches.
Yeah, it's a good point you make. It really should be an option, even though personally I think I would prefer it the standard way. But you never know....
Well, it does underline threads in which you have new messages. I don't think I would like that the latest one is the first because that would break the whole threading logic, who replies to whom. In any case, without threading my mailbox would be completely unmanagable since I subscribe to the wikipedia mailinglist which gets atleast 50 messages a day (and no, I don't read them all:P)
I must say, of all the suggestions that the were there, the one by far that appealed most to me was the threading visualization in ReMail. That thing was awesome! Especially if you are on a mailinglist or two that easily fills your mailbox with lots of threaded emails. While I like the tree structure of threads, this could be a great companion too it. What would be perfect would be for in the general inbox the it showed the messages threaded and then in every individual email it would show the connection to the others in an arc mode.
It was a shame you couldn't download the ReMail client, I would have switched from Thunderbird for that feature alone. Infact, I would pay someone to develop an extension for Thunderbird that implemented that thing correctly!
I remember reading in The Art of Computer Programming by Don Knuth in the chapter where he gives an interpreter for his fictional MIX computer (and, just to mess with us, it's written for the MIX computer!). I remember him saying that he didn't really want to do this because he didn't like simulators and interpreters, and he describes a situation where there were three or four layers of simulators running on top of each other, just because everyone had been to lazy redo the damn programming! When new hardware came in, instead of adapting the software they simply run it through a simulator of the old machine.
Then you need to be in a union too. Coming from a country where everyone is in a union (Sweden), I find it absurd to hear a distinction between unionized jobs and non-unionized jobs. In the modern world, everyone should be in a union.
While such words do indeed exist in english, they are the exception rather than the rule. Learn a language like French or Danish, and you'll really see what "not sounding like it's spelled" means.
For instance, in danish, the word for "head" is "hoved". It's pronunoced (and this only a very vague approximation, you really need to hear it out loud) "who-ehh", but instead of speaking from the tounge, speak from the throat. Same thing with "very", which is "meget" in danish, which is pronounced something like "my-ehh".
1. IPv6 is coming along plenty well, thank you.
Are you high? When was the last time you were assigned an IPv6 address by your ISP? When was the last time ANYONE was assigned an IPv6 address? When was the last time you connected with an IPv6 address on the internet?
2. Yes, NAT sort of works like a cheap hardware firewall. So does a cheap hardware (or free software) firewall.
True, but that is just one of the many benefits of a NAT router. So you don't need a hardware firewall. A free software firewall is ofcourse also great security, but it's way better if it's behind a firewall.
3. Ever hear of a router? There isn't a dichotomy between a NAT router and an "old style hub."
Emm, yes, but what's your point? A NAT can effectively distribute a single IP for several machines, thus solving the problem of IPs running out and provide pretty damn good security. So you should get a router (that does those things worse and are harder to configure for the average user) instead?
4. Insults to intelligence aren't a good idea here. And "open a port", despite being common terminology, is wrong. It's establishing a static route. Actually static NAT. It's allocating a scarce resource. And it shouldn't be necessary.
This is really the only downside to NAT, and it's really not much of an issue. It's mindnumbinly easy to do, and it is automatic for most software. Also, "open ports" is not wrong at all, it perfectly describes what is happening. Normally, you cannot connect to a computer behind a NAT router because as soon as the traffic reaches a router on a port that is not mapped to a local IP, it's dropped. The port is "closed". So you "open" it. Is there anything hard to understand about this little analogy? It's not like "ports" are actual physical ports on your computer, so why is "open port" any different?
5. Same goes for UPnP. It doesn't solve any real problems, it just hides them from the user. It's also lousy for security (wait, I thought NAT was great for security?). It also shouldn't be necessary.
The security problem with UPnP is way overstated. I know many people see it as this huge problem, but it really isn't. There are two percieved problems with UPnP. 1) That spyware and worms and other bad stuff can open ports and 2) That software with security problems can open ports that make the computer vulnerable to attacks that uses exploits of that software. These are both very bad arguments. If you already have spyware on your system, you're fucked, the fact that it can open ports really is irrelevant. As for the other issue, if the (buggy) software really needs an open port to function, you'd have to open it manually anyway! As I said, the security problems with UPnP is waaaaay overstated.
6. Screwing with the assumption that devices are routable, and that you can reach me at the same place you see me coming from is not a good idea
This is a very academic argument with virtually no practical relevance. First off, if you haven't specifically asked for it (that, set up a server on your computer or requested the traffic by, say, going to a webpage), then no, you shouldn't be able to reach me. I don't want you to reach me, and the only reason to try is to try and infect my computer. Second, you can make academic arguments all day long, but at the end of the day, it's the results that count. And the result is that NAT works, and it works well. Plain and simple.
NAT routers effectively solves the problem of IPs running out, or atleast it's delayed the problem by a decade or so (plenty of time for IPv6 to get started, which will probably take just as long or longer). They provide great security for anyone that has them, even people with absolutly no computer skills whatsoever, and they are a great simple way to set up networks? The downside? Every once in a while you have to open a port, much of which is done automatically with you even having to bother. Looking over your little list, the only arguments you presented against NAT-routers are that you shouldn't have to open a port, and that in the perfect world they shouldn't be needed? Those are lousy arguments.
I do agree that it is a hack, but it's an awesome hack at that. And while it is true that in the super-strictest theoretical sense, it counters TCP/IP philosophy, I'd rather have a technology that solves the ip-problem with out any pains and which provides mindnumbingly good security for people who don't even know what a firewall is.
And by the way, what point did the grand-parent (now grand-grand-parent) make? I couldn't see any except him saying "NAT suXXZor d00d!"
NAT is a wonderful technology. First of all it really solves the issue with IP-addresses running low beautifully (and saying "well, IPv6 would work even better!" are lousy arguments, it will take an enourmous amount of time before IPv6 is fully implemented, probably atleast a decade). Actually since the widespread adoption of NAT routers, it isn't even really a problem anymore!
Secondly, it's the most important thing ever to happen to internet security. Bar none. Due to how the NAT protocol works (by mapping ports based on outgoing requests), it works as a cheap very good hardware firewall. All the stupid windows exploits that works by looking for unsecure services with open ports is not a problem anymore. A person behind a NAT-router is completly stealthed and invisible to the outside world. The only remaining way to get into someones computer is if someone actually downloads the software themself or if they're using IE. Either way, they're probably to stupid to run a software firewall (which would protect them) (and yes, I love to use singular they, in case you were wondering;)
Third, it's also great if you share your internet connection with several other computers (either at home or in a corporate environment). Old style hubs would simply broadcast incoming data to all computers in the local network. NAT doesn't do that, it maps local IPs to ports and only transmits to them. Which means that if you don't want every single person on your local network being able to read your email or know that you browsed to men-seeking-men.com, NAT works perfectly.
I'm guessing you are critizingNAT because at one point you wanted to run some software that required you act as a server and you were to dumb to figure out how to open a port? That must be it since it's really the only downside to NAT. Well, that's being solved too. More and more people are learning how to open ports easily (maybe you'll learn someday too!), and even better, software is learning how to do it automatically using either UPnP or getting help from third party servers to do it (that is, the two computers who wishes to talk to eachother connects to a third party server who informs them of the others IP and currently open port, that way the port is already mapped to the correct local IP so the two computers can connect. This is the trick that Skype, amongs others, are using).
Long story short, NAT is an amazing technology. Very soon the mapping ports issue won't even be a problem when all routers support UPnP and software takes advantage of it. Long story even shorter: you're dead wrong.
I've heard this argument several times, and I don't really buy it. I mean, if North Korea wanted to attack South Korea they could crush them like a bug regardless of landmines. I mean, it's not like it's terribly hard to launch a volley of missiles that would make Seoul into a parking lot, and the fields of landmines could be dismantled in a few weeks with a and army as huge and dedicated as North Koreas. More so because the leaders wouldn't be so afraid to take huge losses (since when has North Korea had much respect for human lives?)
Besides, they could easily ship hundreds of thousands of soliders by the water if they wanted too. I just don't buy the argument that North Korea are afraid of the landmines. No, they're afraid of being attacked (and possibly nuked) by the western world. They may be able to kick South Koreas ass, but if NATO and some European countries got involved, they'd be in for a spanking.
So why does the US oppose the treaty? Honestly, I have no idea. They were one of the initiators of the treaty, and while I have no love for the present political situation in the US, they would never resort to the heartlessness that is landmines. And don't come with your "industrial military complex campaign contributions"-arguments either. That doesn't really apply to this case.
Then again, I might be wrong. I am no general or military strategist after all. Maybe all that's stopping a war that would make every conflict since Vietnam pale in comparison is a few hundred thousand landmines. I just don't buy it.
Yeah, I know, I've thought of this too. The reason is a historical one ofcourse, the top-level domain told you which root nameserver you should look at. Had the internet been developed today, we probably wouldn't need the tlds and we'd figure out a better approach. But, it is like it is, and that's just fine with me.
Slashdot Mirror
You, good sir, are completely wrong. First off, I refer you to an earlier post of mine where I explained in detail why this is not only art, but do a simple analysis of it. It is, most certainly, art.
In general, your definition of art is very much to narrow. Let's take Duchamps Fountain for instance. This is one of the most famous works of art produced in the world, and it was infact voted the most influential work of art in the 20th century by 500 british art-experts. It's been discussed endlessly. You know what it is? It's a urinal. Literally, a normal urinal found in any public restroom. It's signed "R. Mutt". That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. He literally just unscrewed it, cleaned it up, signed it, and put it on a pedestal. Oh yeah, it's lying down. And that is the most influential piece of art in the 20th century. When it came out it sparked a massive controversy whether indeed this was art at all, some people using your definition saying that it was obviously not art, and some people said it obviously was. Today it is universally accepted as not only art, but high art. Can you guess why? I'll give you a hint: I've already said one of the (many) reasons three sentances ago.
You need to drastically alter your definition and perception of art if you are ever to be able to go to a modern gallery.
But therein lies the artistic point, doesn't it? I hate to be too art-schooly (actually, I don't, I quite enjoy it), but there is obviously something much more behind what you say. These pictures are beautiful, but they can be just as beautiful if generated by other input, say for instance love-letters, the collected works of Shakespeare, or the Bill of Rights. But also spam. We think of spam as somehow less valuble, less good than these other things, but one could argue (and that is what I think the artist does with his art) that this is only because we choose to look at it from this perspective. The words themselves, when broken down to atomic form, has no intrinsic meaning (they are just a permutation of gplyphs drawn from a set of 25), they only provide an isomorphic mapping with some (very human) concepts. But the words themselves are just dots and curves and lines. If we remove this familiar mapping, and transform the words into shapes that have no meaning to us we see that this is only a construct of the human mind. Since (I assume) there is another isomorpic mapping between the words and the shapes (one input becomes only one shape, and a shape can come only from one specific input) there is no semantic difference (that is to say, there are no difference in meaning), only a difference in grammar (or form, more accuratly). Get it?
A lot of people complain, indeed a number of them in this story (note: I'm not referring to the parent), that this kind of art, modern art, is stupid, simplistic, masturbatory and only for some bored richpeople who hasn't worked an honest day in their lives. Well, they are wrong, and if you say that you are an asshole. Fine, you don't get modern art, that's ok, you don't have to. But there are people that do care about this, and they care very deeply. They spend their whole lives pursuing art, and they do not deserve to be spat on by people who "don't get it". It's arrogant, it's mean-spirited, it's disrespectful and plain ignorant.
Slashdotters don't appriciate it when people tell them they are wasting away their lives surfing the web, learning obscure programming languages, playing computer games, etc. So stop behaving like dicks to other people then!
...is going fairly well. I cannot say that I've follow this closely from across the pond, but a recent Slate article praises the judge for not falling for the government line, doing exactly the opposite of what this other judge did (ie he said that the "We have to be careful for our national security!" stuff is a bunch of hooey).
And here I was lead to believe (by various slashdotters, you know who you are!) that when it comes to litigation, the EFF was nigh incompetent. Looks like they're doing better than the ACLU, although it might just be a different judge thing.
Ahh, but you are mistaken in your praise of Plan 9, most of us Ed Wood aficionados knows that that isn't his masterpiece, indeed it is trivial in comparison to the behemoth of Glen or Glenda (also known on sensational posters as "I Changed My Sex!"), wherein Wood himself stars as transvestite and Bela Lugosi is an insane rambling doctor.
All jokes aside, Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.
While this is true, there are always risks with using older machines. They are not as safe as they were 20 years ago, not because they are "broken", but because they can much easier break. No matter how much you replace on it, it's still a very, very old machine. With creaky joints.
Well, I'm assuming that most of us arn't quite so discriminating in our monkey-spanking material.
Yeah, because incase you lose all of your porn, it's so hard nowadays to find more of it on the internet.
Dammit, never for get to close a tag! Lets try again
Well, if you look at Alexa THey are fairly similar, however Alexa is notoriously inexact. For one thing, it doesn't work if you use firefox, which constitutes around 60% of both sites. Google Trends paints a more believable story perhaps with slashdot remaining fairly steady and digg slowly climbing and finally overtakes slashdot. Note though that slashdot doesn't really lose any traffic to digg. I'd say that's fairly accurate even though it's only measuring web-searches.
Well, if you look at Alexa THey are fairly similar, however Alexa is notoriously inexact. For one thing, it doesn't work if you use firefox, which constitutes around 60% of both sites. Google Trends paints a more believable story perhaps with slashdotremaining fairly steady and digg slowly climbing and finally overtakes slashdot. Not though that slashdot doesn't really lose any traffic to it. I'd say that's fairly accurate even though it's only measuring web-searches.
Don't you mean InterNet?
Yeah, it's a good point you make. It really should be an option, even though personally I think I would prefer it the standard way. But you never know....
Well, it does underline threads in which you have new messages. I don't think I would like that the latest one is the first because that would break the whole threading logic, who replies to whom. In any case, without threading my mailbox would be completely unmanagable since I subscribe to the wikipedia mailinglist which gets atleast 50 messages a day (and no, I don't read them all :P)
I must say, of all the suggestions that the were there, the one by far that appealed most to me was the threading visualization in ReMail. That thing was awesome! Especially if you are on a mailinglist or two that easily fills your mailbox with lots of threaded emails. While I like the tree structure of threads, this could be a great companion too it. What would be perfect would be for in the general inbox the it showed the messages threaded and then in every individual email it would show the connection to the others in an arc mode.
It was a shame you couldn't download the ReMail client, I would have switched from Thunderbird for that feature alone. Infact, I would pay someone to develop an extension for Thunderbird that implemented that thing correctly!
I remember reading in The Art of Computer Programming by Don Knuth in the chapter where he gives an interpreter for his fictional MIX computer (and, just to mess with us, it's written for the MIX computer!). I remember him saying that he didn't really want to do this because he didn't like simulators and interpreters, and he describes a situation where there were three or four layers of simulators running on top of each other, just because everyone had been to lazy redo the damn programming! When new hardware came in, instead of adapting the software they simply run it through a simulator of the old machine.
Then you need to be in a union too. Coming from a country where everyone is in a union (Sweden), I find it absurd to hear a distinction between unionized jobs and non-unionized jobs. In the modern world, everyone should be in a union.
For us wikipedians, that was damn funny! You should get modded to a 5, so mods, pay attention.
While such words do indeed exist in english, they are the exception rather than the rule. Learn a language like French or Danish, and you'll really see what "not sounding like it's spelled" means.
For instance, in danish, the word for "head" is "hoved". It's pronunoced (and this only a very vague approximation, you really need to hear it out loud) "who-ehh", but instead of speaking from the tounge, speak from the throat. Same thing with "very", which is "meget" in danish, which is pronounced something like "my-ehh".
1. IPv6 is coming along plenty well, thank you.
Are you high? When was the last time you were assigned an IPv6 address by your ISP? When was the last time ANYONE was assigned an IPv6 address? When was the last time you connected with an IPv6 address on the internet?
2. Yes, NAT sort of works like a cheap hardware firewall. So does a cheap hardware (or free software) firewall.
True, but that is just one of the many benefits of a NAT router. So you don't need a hardware firewall. A free software firewall is ofcourse also great security, but it's way better if it's behind a firewall.
3. Ever hear of a router? There isn't a dichotomy between a NAT router and an "old style hub."
Emm, yes, but what's your point? A NAT can effectively distribute a single IP for several machines, thus solving the problem of IPs running out and provide pretty damn good security. So you should get a router (that does those things worse and are harder to configure for the average user) instead?
4. Insults to intelligence aren't a good idea here. And "open a port", despite being common terminology, is wrong. It's establishing a static route. Actually static NAT. It's allocating a scarce resource. And it shouldn't be necessary.
This is really the only downside to NAT, and it's really not much of an issue. It's mindnumbinly easy to do, and it is automatic for most software. Also, "open ports" is not wrong at all, it perfectly describes what is happening. Normally, you cannot connect to a computer behind a NAT router because as soon as the traffic reaches a router on a port that is not mapped to a local IP, it's dropped. The port is "closed". So you "open" it. Is there anything hard to understand about this little analogy? It's not like "ports" are actual physical ports on your computer, so why is "open port" any different?
5. Same goes for UPnP. It doesn't solve any real problems, it just hides them from the user. It's also lousy for security (wait, I thought NAT was great for security?). It also shouldn't be necessary.
The security problem with UPnP is way overstated. I know many people see it as this huge problem, but it really isn't. There are two percieved problems with UPnP. 1) That spyware and worms and other bad stuff can open ports and 2) That software with security problems can open ports that make the computer vulnerable to attacks that uses exploits of that software. These are both very bad arguments. If you already have spyware on your system, you're fucked, the fact that it can open ports really is irrelevant. As for the other issue, if the (buggy) software really needs an open port to function, you'd have to open it manually anyway! As I said, the security problems with UPnP is waaaaay overstated.
6. Screwing with the assumption that devices are routable, and that you can reach me at the same place you see me coming from is not a good idea
This is a very academic argument with virtually no practical relevance. First off, if you haven't specifically asked for it (that, set up a server on your computer or requested the traffic by, say, going to a webpage), then no, you shouldn't be able to reach me. I don't want you to reach me, and the only reason to try is to try and infect my computer. Second, you can make academic arguments all day long, but at the end of the day, it's the results that count. And the result is that NAT works, and it works well. Plain and simple.
NAT routers effectively solves the problem of IPs running out, or atleast it's delayed the problem by a decade or so (plenty of time for IPv6 to get started, which will probably take just as long or longer). They provide great security for anyone that has them, even people with absolutly no computer skills whatsoever, and they are a great simple way to set up networks? The downside? Every once in a while you have to open a port, much of which is done automatically with you even having to bother. Looking over your little list, the only arguments you presented against NAT-routers are that you shouldn't have to open a port, and that in the perfect world they shouldn't be needed? Those are lousy arguments.
Or you can go over to the dark side of the force and find a nice little bittorrent site. When I was a student, I lost all my morals paying the rent.
I do agree that it is a hack, but it's an awesome hack at that. And while it is true that in the super-strictest theoretical sense, it counters TCP/IP philosophy, I'd rather have a technology that solves the ip-problem with out any pains and which provides mindnumbingly good security for people who don't even know what a firewall is.
And by the way, what point did the grand-parent (now grand-grand-parent) make? I couldn't see any except him saying "NAT suXXZor d00d!"
Even though I know you are kidding, I still have to fight my fist of death not to kick your ass for even mentioning trickle-down-economics ;)
NAT is a wonderful technology. First of all it really solves the issue with IP-addresses running low beautifully (and saying "well, IPv6 would work even better!" are lousy arguments, it will take an enourmous amount of time before IPv6 is fully implemented, probably atleast a decade). Actually since the widespread adoption of NAT routers, it isn't even really a problem anymore!
Secondly, it's the most important thing ever to happen to internet security. Bar none. Due to how the NAT protocol works (by mapping ports based on outgoing requests), it works as a cheap very good hardware firewall. All the stupid windows exploits that works by looking for unsecure services with open ports is not a problem anymore. A person behind a NAT-router is completly stealthed and invisible to the outside world. The only remaining way to get into someones computer is if someone actually downloads the software themself or if they're using IE. Either way, they're probably to stupid to run a software firewall (which would protect them) (and yes, I love to use singular they, in case you were wondering ;)
Third, it's also great if you share your internet connection with several other computers (either at home or in a corporate environment). Old style hubs would simply broadcast incoming data to all computers in the local network. NAT doesn't do that, it maps local IPs to ports and only transmits to them. Which means that if you don't want every single person on your local network being able to read your email or know that you browsed to men-seeking-men.com, NAT works perfectly.
I'm guessing you are critizingNAT because at one point you wanted to run some software that required you act as a server and you were to dumb to figure out how to open a port? That must be it since it's really the only downside to NAT. Well, that's being solved too. More and more people are learning how to open ports easily (maybe you'll learn someday too!), and even better, software is learning how to do it automatically using either UPnP or getting help from third party servers to do it (that is, the two computers who wishes to talk to eachother connects to a third party server who informs them of the others IP and currently open port, that way the port is already mapped to the correct local IP so the two computers can connect. This is the trick that Skype, amongs others, are using).
Long story short, NAT is an amazing technology. Very soon the mapping ports issue won't even be a problem when all routers support UPnP and software takes advantage of it. Long story even shorter: you're dead wrong.
I've heard this argument several times, and I don't really buy it. I mean, if North Korea wanted to attack South Korea they could crush them like a bug regardless of landmines. I mean, it's not like it's terribly hard to launch a volley of missiles that would make Seoul into a parking lot, and the fields of landmines could be dismantled in a few weeks with a and army as huge and dedicated as North Koreas. More so because the leaders wouldn't be so afraid to take huge losses (since when has North Korea had much respect for human lives?)
Besides, they could easily ship hundreds of thousands of soliders by the water if they wanted too. I just don't buy the argument that North Korea are afraid of the landmines. No, they're afraid of being attacked (and possibly nuked) by the western world. They may be able to kick South Koreas ass, but if NATO and some European countries got involved, they'd be in for a spanking.
So why does the US oppose the treaty? Honestly, I have no idea. They were one of the initiators of the treaty, and while I have no love for the present political situation in the US, they would never resort to the heartlessness that is landmines. And don't come with your "industrial military complex campaign contributions"-arguments either. That doesn't really apply to this case.
Then again, I might be wrong. I am no general or military strategist after all. Maybe all that's stopping a war that would make every conflict since Vietnam pale in comparison is a few hundred thousand landmines. I just don't buy it.
Very cool. Thanks for the link!
Yeah, I know, I've thought of this too. The reason is a historical one ofcourse, the top-level domain told you which root nameserver you should look at. Had the internet been developed today, we probably wouldn't need the tlds and we'd figure out a better approach. But, it is like it is, and that's just fine with me.