Well, in this case you would still have some basic idea about what the corporation is doing (bottling soda).
Which would be preferable as long as your first priority is knowing exactly what the company is doing, rather than, say, selling lots of soda, making a profit, and staying in business. Count me out. I find "Big Brother" a futile and obnoxious concept in any context.
If the Coca-Cola Inc. decides to enter a new market and start making, say, chemical weapons, then it would probably need to inform the shareholders about the new move.
Probably, yes. Management's fiduciary duty to the owners would require informing them in a timely manner of the new risk to their investment capital, since -- despite the opinion of long-time Pepsi-drinkers -- Coca-Cola has no obvious expertise in making chemical weapons.
But if management decides to change the formula of their existing product, do they need to inform the shareholders ahead of time? Nope. When you buy stock in Coca-Cola, you're expressing trust in the company. You're not buying the right to arbitrary micromanagement of management's decisions. If you don't like management's decisions, your only individual remedy is to sell your stock.
The production should then be overseen by the government.
Uh, why? Why would government do this job better? You need people who are experts in the safe production of deadly chemicals, e.g. folks with PhDs in inorganic chemistry. Why would the government find it easier to hire such people than Coke? History in fact suggests just the opposite, that highly-qualified people prefer private industry jobs than the equivalent jobs in government.
Now, suppose that people from some agency invents a revolutionary new, extremely painful and in most cases fatal interrogation technique...
They should get raises and pats on the back. The job of people in defense research agencies is to sit around sipping energy drinks and thinking up fiendish and horrific new methods of inflicting pain on our enemies. As a citizen I want the nastiest, scariest, most feared military on the planet. Best guarantee of peace I know.
and start using it in the field.
Against whom? My enemies? In that case, medals and commendations all around. As a citizen, I expect ruthless efficiency from my government when it comes to waging war. War is not a debating club. People are killed. War is a hideous last resort against evil, and the only moral imperative is to win it and win it quickly.
Or do you mean against my friends or fellow citizens? In that case, these folks are rogues -- doing this is already forbidden -- and they need to be purged, lose their jobs, maybe get sent to jail or executed, depending on the severity of the offense.
Shouldn't it be your right to know about that particular use of your tax dollars and maybe even object to it?
Collectively? Of course. As an individual? No. I've got more than enough on my private plate to occupy my attention. I elect Congressman to do this job. If they can't keep on top of stuff like this and make sure my interests are zealously guarded, then what the hell am I paying them for? They need to be replaced with more competent people, and I'll see to it in a November or two.
And even if the President would care about what goes on in deep-dark secret labs, he would still need to ask the right questions.
You speak as if the agencies set the agenda and the President is an onlooker. That's not the way it is. The President sets the agenda, with the voice of the voters who elected him ringing in his ears and the dazzling hope of being re-elected dangling before his eyes. The agencies work for him. If people in them wander off mission they lose their jobs, typically, because he's an ambitious man in a hurry.
I'm not saying that every action of the state should require a public app
Hmm, and yet I thought the finite speed of light was primarily an empirical fact, and perhaps secondarily a way to prevent silly violations of causality, id est to prevent everything from happening at once. And, that the Lorentz transformation was less a postulate to be applied so much as a consequence to be derived from the more fundamental notion that c should be constant in all reference frames.
Alas, I sure hope I've not been laboring under a misapprehension. I would be forced to mod myself down to -1, Doofus. Although if someone has already modded me down to -1, Offtopic or -1, Blithering, I suppose I would be modding myself more across than down -- the topology of/. modspace being kind of unclear.
I do know of people who fuss about relativistic corrections to core electron energies, but they seem a clannish, chthonic lot of Stoors, much given to muttering darkly under their caffeinated breath. I avoid 'em. Now, to me the most interesting bold-as-brass entry of relativity into ordinary (e.g. valence-shell) atomic physics is through magnetic fields. Add a pinch of vector potential to your kinetic energy operator, expand, stir, simmer, season lightly -- and, presto, fine-structure constants everywhere. Like toadstools after a good rain.
At which point the sober theorist sits back and looks quite thoughtfully at the trailing Coulumb energy term, with its implicit infinite value of c...
Way off topic, but your link says Glenn Martyna moved to IBM/Watson. Christ, better buy some IBM stock.
By the way, a trivial point with respect to this: Isn't it relativity, not QM, that forbids superluminal communication? I seem to recall non-relativistic QM with instantaneous action at a distance (e.g. Coulomb's Law) being alive and well in the realm of quantum chemistry, or perhaps really anywhere pair creation is not an issue.
I have some very limited experience with this kind of computing, and I don't think the compiler is anywhere near the limiting factor.
I strongly suspect the limiting factor is algorithms. That is, the problem is designing code that can efficiently use a massively parallel machine. It's enormously difficult to even imagine how a problem could be solved by breaking it up into 65,000 mini-problems that can be solved simultaneously, and therefore mostly but not entirely independently. People just don't think that way. (Or rather, they do, but only at such a basic level close to the neurons that they are utterly unaware of how it's done.)
This is one reason "parallel computing" has been the Wave Of The Future(TM) for decades, and exhibits the same kind of "promise" as fusion power -- namely, we are told that ten years from now it will change everything -- and we hear it again every ten years.
The government is by definition a public body that we, ideally, control.
Yes, but not each of us personally. We don't live in a direct democracy, where every action of the state requires our explicit approval and understanding.
The deal is, we elect representatives, and they have complete access to all information in the government, and complete control over everything it does, secret or otherwise. If the President wants to know exactly what the NSA is doing in some deep-dark secret lab, he'll ask and be told. If your Senator wants a briefing on ultrasecret Pentagon plans to dominate the world, he'll get one. And so forth. From the point of view of a Republic, if the President sees it, then "we" the people have seen it -- because he represents us. That's why he's elected, not a king by right of birth or something.
We're supposed to be electing people we trust to manage responsibly on our behalf whatever secrecy the government needs to defend our interests. If they can't be trusted to decide on our behalf what should and should not be kept secret, we shouldn't be electing them. Contrariwise, people who are elected should reasonably be assumed to have the trust of the majority. (They may not have the trust of the minority who voted against them, of course, but that's just too bad, them's the breaks in a majority-rule system.)
Electing folks and then second-guessing them all the time is nuts. It would be like the shareholders of Coke (to use your example) demanding to take part, individually, in each and every corporate decision. The regular business of Coca-Cola, Inc. (bottling soda) would grind to a halt, and what you'd get instead from your corporate officers would be a lot of showboating for daily opinion polls, avoidance of any knotty issues sure to piss off this or that vocal subgroup, dithering and a lack of leadership, and a strenuous effort to avoid speaking plainly. Er, sound a bit familiar?
"However, at another level, the Pentagon appears to be relaxing slightly: it seems to be loosening its post 9/11 grip on the ideas of private inventors, with the number having patents barred on the grounds of national security halving in the last year.
In the financial year to 2004, DTSA imposed 61 secrecy orders on private inventors, a number that had been climbing inexorably since 9/11. But up to the end of financial 2005, only 32 inventors had "secrecy orders" imposed on their inventions."
Well, I remember the original (1968) release of "2001," even though I was just a kid. And I think to understand its impact it's important to put it into the context of the late 60s early 70s.
Lots of people seem to think those were hopeful optimistic times, but my memory is very different. They seemed dark and chaotic times, with on the one hand amazing promise (spaceships to the Moon! transistors! jet airplanes!) and on the other depressing and scarily intractable problems (nuclear war only five minutes away, "Silent Spring" despoilation of the environment, Vietnam, assassinations, and race riots).
"2001" was absorbing on the minute-to-minute attention span level, with its passion for plausible portrayals of not too distant future technology. Lots of people wanted to see where all that moon rocket stuff might be taking us. CGI was utterly unknown! If you wanted to see it, you mostly had to use your imagination. Kubrick brought imagination to life. It was marvelous in 1968, although I admit it looks cheesy and obsessed with minor detail in the jaded present, when we are used to seeing entirely realistic "photographs" of star destroyers taking off from planets full of alien species and talking robots. The time they spent showing us what weightlessness would be like! Absurd by today's standards, naturally, but at the time it was fantastic. So that's what it's like! is how I remember viewing it.
But also "2001" reassured the dark fears we had about our future, by sketching a grand Master Plan for us that did not fail to acknowledge our present struggles with the consequences of our amazing new technology ("Open the fucking pod bay doors, Hal!") but which suggested that we would someday transcend them spectacularly, that we would master our bewildering and dangerous new tools (computers, missiles and thermonuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert) just as thoroughly as the ape-man mastered the thighbone of the antelope, because there was a plan, a purpose, or at least a general theme to our existence.
And "2001" said these things in the sardonic, skeptical mood we admired at the time. People say "2001" was predictive, or challenged complacency, or provoked insight, but I say phooey on this: it was just comfort food for the 1968 mind. It said "Yea, all these new machines and things are scary, but Fear Not for there is a Plan and you will transcend your tools as you always have. And, by the way, here's some cool previews of what it'll be like to travel to the Moon in 30 years' time. Enjoy!"
that is as effective as examining the wake of a ship to determine where it is going
Er, that's actually a pretty good way to know where the ship is going, because the ship has inertia.
Are you saying the Taoists deny that people and the organizations they create have inertia? That knowing, for example, how a person has behaved is not a pretty good basic guide to knowing how they will behave?
I'm as much into the wonderful unguessable future as the next person, but frankly, the part of the future that is completely impossible to predict is fairly small. And that's a good thing. Plenty of mundane but important facts about the future are very predictable on the basis of the past -- e.g. the Sun will come up on schedule all next week, next winter will be about as cold as this one, so I might as well not sell my warm coat and save up some money for heating bills, and in 2006 as in 2005 and 2004 four or five big hurricanes will hit the Gulf Coast, so we might as well fix those levees now while the wind's not blowing.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that you're not finding it as easy as you'd like to avoid reading/. comments with which you disagree, which you find idiotic, et cetera. That can be a pain, I know. Whenever I read the comments of someone who powerfully disagrees with me, I often find myself spending precious time and thought refining my arguments to make them more logically compelling, rephrasing my language so as to make my point clear even to idiots, and sometimes even questioning my own assumptions to be quite certain they are necessary and evident even to people with experience, cultural background or priorities very different from my own. Troubling and tiresome! It's much more pleasant to read feedback from an audience that instantly understands what I mean and agrees with me because they think just like me.
So I sympathize. Perhaps you can offer a suggestion to the/. editors that they let you greatly expand your "foe" list? I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't be allowed to mark every last commenter on/. as a "foe" if you want.
Dear me, you sound quite angry. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. Perhaps I should have expressed myself less sardonically. I just assumed from the aggressive take-no-prisoners style of your own comments that you wouldn't be upset by a fairly robust style of disagreement. Please accept my apologies for clearly misunderstanding the sort of argument you're willing to entertain.
Of course I won't "mark" you as a "foe." Indeed, I've never "marked" anyone as such and can't really see beginning. I feel a bit old to be keeping a "big meanies" and "bestest friends ever" list.
Christ, we'd better get this problem under control, then, no? I say we need someone strong and powerful to put an end to the abuse of power by strong and powerful people.
At the same time, the House should be strengthened...
Hmm, I'm having a hard time following this...let's see, the answer to government's abuse of its power is to increase the power of government...um...drat...
[scratches head]
No,wait...now I get it! You mean we should increase the power of good government and decrease the power of bad. Of course! Why didn't I think of that? Now, all we need to do is sit down and write this nifty idea into law. A Constitutional amendment along the following lines ought to do the trick:
No part of government that is Bad shall have any power over the people of these here United States. On the contrary, all power shall reside strictly with the part of government which is Good.
Problem solved! But I wonder why Madison didn't think to write this into the Constitution itself? Maybe he was drunk?
Ah yes, but if the less corrupt bastard wins, then next time an even less corrupt bastard will run, since obviously the less corrupt you are the more likely you are to win. Naturally, the time after that, Mr. L. C. Bastard will be outflanked by a much less corrupt bastard, who will win, because the gosh-darn voters keep preferring the less corrupt candidate, no matter what the other guy promises....and, by and by, you'll have bastards that are as pure as driven snow running for office. Evolution in action!
O' course, if you the predator of politicians don't do your part to cull the herd every four years, then natural selection doesn't work. That was the point, eh?
Yes, I realize that Toyota USA is chartered in the US, and Ford Japan is in Japan. Why does the legal ownership change the analysis? It's still the case that the design and leadership of Toyota is in Japan, but they have huge numbers of customers in the US, and the design and leadership of Ford is in the US, but they have a comparatively small number of customers in Japan. Hence the general fact remains it's more important for a Japanese manufacturer to make sure his American consumers can find him on the 'net than vice-versa. (If you don't want to think in terms of retail customers browsing the Web, substitute mid-level managers needing e-mail contact with the head office.) You have only to look at the trade balance to see this, anyway.
Yes, I realize companies would readily find a way around any disruption of DNS service. Of course they would. Far too much money is at stake! But I suggest this only supports my original argument. Because, guess which companies are going to be eager to fix the inability of which customers to reach them? That would be foreign companies looking to reach US customers. Not the reverse. Trade balance again.
Well, I appreciate your explaining it all like that. Very clearly said.
I suppose the point where I don't follow you is here:
Thus form then on, anyone asking for F will never be refered to that particular server and DNS goes on working as it always has.
Don't you mean "anyone not in the country in question"? Meaning, if France wants to just set up their own root server, and require every packet traversing French networks be routed according to the French root-file, what's to prevent it? Yes, I realize if the rest of the world says phooey the result is that France talks only to itself. (France would not like this, but some countries, e.g. China, might not find it so bad.) Obviously the success of a DNS snit-fit revolt completely relies on people other than your lone self going along.
But my point is, the legal ownership of the computers seems pretty unimportant. That US interests own servers in foreign countries doesn't give them any significant control over foreign DNS, because the "control" is really just a matter of agreement by the foreign operators and foreign governments. They've agreed to use US root files largely because, well, everyone else does. They could change their mind. And if they persuaded many other to do so, too, that would be effective. Otherwise, not.
I appreciate your saying that the lower servers cannot force change on the higher servers. What I'm getting at is that the upper servers only flourish -- only have that trust -- if they are subscribed to by lots and lots of lower servers. So it isn't entirely a one way thing. Or rather, it's one-way in the short-term, from a strictly IP point of view, but it's two-way in the long-term, considering political and human considerations.
If you look at human life expectancies, they have been increasing for the past 500 years.
The life expectancy at birth has gone up quite a lot, yes. But that mean less that people are living a lot longer than that more people are living what we think of as a "normal" lifespan of 75 years or so. For example, here the CDC has some nice tables of historical life expectancy in the US by age. So, from 1900 to 2002 the US life expectancy at birth increased from 49 to 77 years. Impressive, no?
But the life expectancy at age 85 has only increased from 4.0 to 6.5 years. That is, if you were 85 in 1900 you could expect to live to be 89. If you were 85 in 2002 you could expect to live to be 92. That's much less impressive.
OK, hot from the CDC we learn the following average death rates (in persons per 100,000 population per year) from causes that have nothing to do with old age:
accidents: 30.4
infectious disease: 28.0
murder: 8.5
Grand total, 66.9 per 100,000 per year. From which it follows that the average person has a 0.0669% chance of dying each year from some reason other than old age. The rough estimate of your life expectancy is then reasonably close to the inverse of this number, i.e. 1500 years.
Nice enough, but hardly forever. More troubling, however, is that these rates are for a population that is quite young. Suppose instead we use the results for old people, 85 and over, who are unfortunately far more susceptible to accidents and disease:
accidents: 276.2
infectious disease: 1183.6
murder: 3.
Grand total of 1462.8, which means your average 85-year-old has a 1.46% chance of dying each year from causes unrelated to chronic "old-age" diseases like heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. The inverse of this is 68 years, for a grand total lifespan of 153 years. Lots shorter. And wet get intermediate results if we use the results for other older age groups, but not the oldest.
Which is to say, you can only get a 1000-year lifespan if you not only defeat the usual diseases of old age (cancer, atherosclerosis, etc.) but also stop the clock on practically every consequence of aging from fading vision to slowing reflexes to slower healing to more brittle bones. A very tall order indeed.
Governments can be pretty creative about how they use the law. You could pass a law "just in case" and suspend its application, or apply it selectively, when the company in question did or did not do what you wanted. Or you could not bother to pass a law at all, but just issue a few emergency decrees. Or El Presidente could just order the Special Ops guys to apply the necessary persuasion to the necessary people some moonless night.
That's the nice thing about government. Since it's force-based, you don't need anyone's consent, and you don't need to follow anybody's rules. You aren't restricted by what people, even lots of people, think is reasonable. You can just tell anyone within your borders exactly what to do and when, on pain of jail or a bullet. It's very effective.
So I just don't see how, realistically speaking, any machine in country X is anything other than, ultimately, under the complete control of country X. Country X may certainly find it wise or lucrative to allow some degree of control by Foo, Inc., located in Country Y. But that's a choice, not a necessity.
I thought extraterritoriality only applied to embassies and consulates and such, not to Internet hosts. That is, if a server is in another country, isn't it entirely subject to the laws of that country? Which means, I hazard, that any "controlling" US business interest can exert only so much "control" as the host country feels like allowing? Am I missing something here?
I mean, there's this odd recurring question I've seen of: "What happens if the US government turns Evil?" Well, in that case, what's to stop the countries in which these servers are actually located from seizing the servers and operating them as they see fit? In fact, seeing as how the entire DNS system is just basically a large collection of text files appropriate distributed, I don't see why, if the US government turns Evil, the rest of the world can't just reprogram the whole DNS shebang in about 10-20 days, tops. Problem solved! Or am I missing something again?
Dear me, I don't think it would be the US economy that suffers more. Remember the trade balance! On the world economic stage the United States is far more often a consumer than a producer.
The commercial part of the Internet is largely used for reaching customers, yes? And the largest and wealthiest concentration of customers, that every company with a website in the world would like to reach is in the United States. That is, it's way more important to Toyota, Inc. that Americans reach www.toyota.com correctly than it is important to Ford that Japanese reach www.ford.com correctly.
There's a good reason the US can throw its weight around with import tariffs. The market in the US is so large that access to it can make or break an international producer. The same is not true about a US producer, since he has direct access to the enormous domestic market. Same thing with 'net access, I'm afraid. In this silly game the US holds four aces. I'm not saying this makes their position right, just that in a real showdown the official UN-sponsored "international" DNS system seems likely to go the way of the official UN-sponsored "international" language (French), namely it would end up being used by UN bureaucrats and governments only.
I trust you'll forgive my initial misapprehension on the grounds that, were one in an apparently serious discussion of whether or not the Earth is flat, one might becomes a bit deaf to the tone of gentle irony.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in this case you would still have some basic idea about what the corporation is doing (bottling soda).
Which would be preferable as long as your first priority is knowing exactly what the company is doing, rather than, say, selling lots of soda, making a profit, and staying in business. Count me out. I find "Big Brother" a futile and obnoxious concept in any context.
If the Coca-Cola Inc. decides to enter a new market and start making, say, chemical weapons, then it would probably need to inform the shareholders about the new move.
Probably, yes. Management's fiduciary duty to the owners would require informing them in a timely manner of the new risk to their investment capital, since -- despite the opinion of long-time Pepsi-drinkers -- Coca-Cola has no obvious expertise in making chemical weapons.
But if management decides to change the formula of their existing product, do they need to inform the shareholders ahead of time? Nope. When you buy stock in Coca-Cola, you're expressing trust in the company. You're not buying the right to arbitrary micromanagement of management's decisions. If you don't like management's decisions, your only individual remedy is to sell your stock.
The production should then be overseen by the government.
Uh, why? Why would government do this job better? You need people who are experts in the safe production of deadly chemicals, e.g. folks with PhDs in inorganic chemistry. Why would the government find it easier to hire such people than Coke? History in fact suggests just the opposite, that highly-qualified people prefer private industry jobs than the equivalent jobs in government.
Now, suppose that people from some agency invents a revolutionary new, extremely painful and in most cases fatal interrogation technique...
They should get raises and pats on the back. The job of people in defense research agencies is to sit around sipping energy drinks and thinking up fiendish and horrific new methods of inflicting pain on our enemies. As a citizen I want the nastiest, scariest, most feared military on the planet. Best guarantee of peace I know.
and start using it in the field.
Against whom? My enemies? In that case, medals and commendations all around. As a citizen, I expect ruthless efficiency from my government when it comes to waging war. War is not a debating club. People are killed. War is a hideous last resort against evil, and the only moral imperative is to win it and win it quickly.
Or do you mean against my friends or fellow citizens? In that case, these folks are rogues -- doing this is already forbidden -- and they need to be purged, lose their jobs, maybe get sent to jail or executed, depending on the severity of the offense.
Shouldn't it be your right to know about that particular use of your tax dollars and maybe even object to it?
Collectively? Of course. As an individual? No. I've got more than enough on my private plate to occupy my attention. I elect Congressman to do this job. If they can't keep on top of stuff like this and make sure my interests are zealously guarded, then what the hell am I paying them for? They need to be replaced with more competent people, and I'll see to it in a November or two.
And even if the President would care about what goes on in deep-dark secret labs, he would still need to ask the right questions.
You speak as if the agencies set the agenda and the President is an onlooker. That's not the way it is. The President sets the agenda, with the voice of the voters who elected him ringing in his ears and the dazzling hope of being re-elected dangling before his eyes. The agencies work for him. If people in them wander off mission they lose their jobs, typically, because he's an ambitious man in a hurry.
I'm not saying that every action of the state should require a public app
Hmm, and yet I thought the finite speed of light was primarily an empirical fact, and perhaps secondarily a way to prevent silly violations of causality, id est to prevent everything from happening at once. And, that the Lorentz transformation was less a postulate to be applied so much as a consequence to be derived from the more fundamental notion that c should be constant in all reference frames.
/. modspace being kind of unclear.
Alas, I sure hope I've not been laboring under a misapprehension. I would be forced to mod myself down to -1, Doofus. Although if someone has already modded me down to -1, Offtopic or -1, Blithering, I suppose I would be modding myself more across than down -- the topology of
I do know of people who fuss about relativistic corrections to core electron energies, but they seem a clannish, chthonic lot of Stoors, much given to muttering darkly under their caffeinated breath. I avoid 'em. Now, to me the most interesting bold-as-brass entry of relativity into ordinary (e.g. valence-shell) atomic physics is through magnetic fields. Add a pinch of vector potential to your kinetic energy operator, expand, stir, simmer, season lightly -- and, presto, fine-structure constants everywhere. Like toadstools after a good rain.
At which point the sober theorist sits back and looks quite thoughtfully at the trailing Coulumb energy term, with its implicit infinite value of c...
Uh, sorry -- what was it you were saying?
Uh...I have nothing to say, actually.
But you came to see anyway, didn't you?
Admit it, you're actually a fan. Har har.
Way off topic, but your link says Glenn Martyna moved to IBM/Watson. Christ, better buy some IBM stock.
By the way, a trivial point with respect to this: Isn't it relativity, not QM, that forbids superluminal communication? I seem to recall non-relativistic QM with instantaneous action at a distance (e.g. Coulomb's Law) being alive and well in the realm of quantum chemistry, or perhaps really anywhere pair creation is not an issue.
I have some very limited experience with this kind of computing, and I don't think the compiler is anywhere near the limiting factor.
I strongly suspect the limiting factor is algorithms. That is, the problem is designing code that can efficiently use a massively parallel machine. It's enormously difficult to even imagine how a problem could be solved by breaking it up into 65,000 mini-problems that can be solved simultaneously, and therefore mostly but not entirely independently. People just don't think that way. (Or rather, they do, but only at such a basic level close to the neurons that they are utterly unaware of how it's done.)
This is one reason "parallel computing" has been the Wave Of The Future(TM) for decades, and exhibits the same kind of "promise" as fusion power -- namely, we are told that ten years from now it will change everything -- and we hear it again every ten years.
The government is by definition a public body that we, ideally, control.
Yes, but not each of us personally. We don't live in a direct democracy, where every action of the state requires our explicit approval and understanding.
The deal is, we elect representatives, and they have complete access to all information in the government, and complete control over everything it does, secret or otherwise. If the President wants to know exactly what the NSA is doing in some deep-dark secret lab, he'll ask and be told. If your Senator wants a briefing on ultrasecret Pentagon plans to dominate the world, he'll get one. And so forth. From the point of view of a Republic, if the President sees it, then "we" the people have seen it -- because he represents us. That's why he's elected, not a king by right of birth or something.
We're supposed to be electing people we trust to manage responsibly on our behalf whatever secrecy the government needs to defend our interests. If they can't be trusted to decide on our behalf what should and should not be kept secret, we shouldn't be electing them. Contrariwise, people who are elected should reasonably be assumed to have the trust of the majority. (They may not have the trust of the minority who voted against them, of course, but that's just too bad, them's the breaks in a majority-rule system.)
Electing folks and then second-guessing them all the time is nuts. It would be like the shareholders of Coke (to use your example) demanding to take part, individually, in each and every corporate decision. The regular business of Coca-Cola, Inc. (bottling soda) would grind to a halt, and what you'd get instead from your corporate officers would be a lot of showboating for daily opinion polls, avoidance of any knotty issues sure to piss off this or that vocal subgroup, dithering and a lack of leadership, and a strenuous effort to avoid speaking plainly. Er, sound a bit familiar?
From TFA itself:
"However, at another level, the Pentagon appears to be relaxing slightly: it seems to be loosening its post 9/11 grip on the ideas of private inventors, with the number having patents barred on the grounds of national security halving in the last year.
In the financial year to 2004, DTSA imposed 61 secrecy orders on private inventors, a number that had been climbing inexorably since 9/11. But up to the end of financial 2005, only 32 inventors had "secrecy orders" imposed on their inventions."
Well, I remember the original (1968) release of "2001," even though I was just a kid. And I think to understand its impact it's important to put it into the context of the late 60s early 70s.
Lots of people seem to think those were hopeful optimistic times, but my memory is very different. They seemed dark and chaotic times, with on the one hand amazing promise (spaceships to the Moon! transistors! jet airplanes!) and on the other depressing and scarily intractable problems (nuclear war only five minutes away, "Silent Spring" despoilation of the environment, Vietnam, assassinations, and race riots).
"2001" was absorbing on the minute-to-minute attention span level, with its passion for plausible portrayals of not too distant future technology. Lots of people wanted to see where all that moon rocket stuff might be taking us. CGI was utterly unknown! If you wanted to see it, you mostly had to use your imagination. Kubrick brought imagination to life. It was marvelous in 1968, although I admit it looks cheesy and obsessed with minor detail in the jaded present, when we are used to seeing entirely realistic "photographs" of star destroyers taking off from planets full of alien species and talking robots. The time they spent showing us what weightlessness would be like! Absurd by today's standards, naturally, but at the time it was fantastic. So that's what it's like! is how I remember viewing it.
But also "2001" reassured the dark fears we had about our future, by sketching a grand Master Plan for us that did not fail to acknowledge our present struggles with the consequences of our amazing new technology ("Open the fucking pod bay doors, Hal!") but which suggested that we would someday transcend them spectacularly, that we would master our bewildering and dangerous new tools (computers, missiles and thermonuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert) just as thoroughly as the ape-man mastered the thighbone of the antelope, because there was a plan, a purpose, or at least a general theme to our existence.
And "2001" said these things in the sardonic, skeptical mood we admired at the time. People say "2001" was predictive, or challenged complacency, or provoked insight, but I say phooey on this: it was just comfort food for the 1968 mind. It said "Yea, all these new machines and things are scary, but Fear Not for there is a Plan and you will transcend your tools as you always have. And, by the way, here's some cool previews of what it'll be like to travel to the Moon in 30 years' time. Enjoy!"
that is as effective as examining the wake of a ship to determine where it is going
Er, that's actually a pretty good way to know where the ship is going, because the ship has inertia.
Are you saying the Taoists deny that people and the organizations they create have inertia? That knowing, for example, how a person has behaved is not a pretty good basic guide to knowing how they will behave?
I'm as much into the wonderful unguessable future as the next person, but frankly, the part of the future that is completely impossible to predict is fairly small. And that's a good thing. Plenty of mundane but important facts about the future are very predictable on the basis of the past -- e.g. the Sun will come up on schedule all next week, next winter will be about as cold as this one, so I might as well not sell my warm coat and save up some money for heating bills, and in 2006 as in 2005 and 2004 four or five big hurricanes will hit the Gulf Coast, so we might as well fix those levees now while the wind's not blowing.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that you're not finding it as easy as you'd like to avoid reading /. comments with which you disagree, which you find idiotic, et cetera. That can be a pain, I know. Whenever I read the comments of someone who powerfully disagrees with me, I often find myself spending precious time and thought refining my arguments to make them more logically compelling, rephrasing my language so as to make my point clear even to idiots, and sometimes even questioning my own assumptions to be quite certain they are necessary and evident even to people with experience, cultural background or priorities very different from my own. Troubling and tiresome! It's much more pleasant to read feedback from an audience that instantly understands what I mean and agrees with me because they think just like me.
/. editors that they let you greatly expand your "foe" list? I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't be allowed to mark every last commenter on /. as a "foe" if you want.
So I sympathize. Perhaps you can offer a suggestion to the
Dear me, you sound quite angry. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. Perhaps I should have expressed myself less sardonically. I just assumed from the aggressive take-no-prisoners style of your own comments that you wouldn't be upset by a fairly robust style of disagreement. Please accept my apologies for clearly misunderstanding the sort of argument you're willing to entertain.
Of course I won't "mark" you as a "foe." Indeed, I've never "marked" anyone as such and can't really see beginning. I feel a bit old to be keeping a "big meanies" and "bestest friends ever" list.
That is very impressive. I doubt you could do better on the Moon.
Christ, we'd better get this problem under control, then, no? I say we need someone strong and powerful to put an end to the abuse of power by strong and powerful people.
At the same time, the House should be strengthened...
Hmm, I'm having a hard time following this...let's see, the answer to government's abuse of its power is to increase the power of government...um...drat...
[scratches head]
No,wait...now I get it! You mean we should increase the power of good government and decrease the power of bad. Of course! Why didn't I think of that? Now, all we need to do is sit down and write this nifty idea into law. A Constitutional amendment along the following lines ought to do the trick:
No part of government that is Bad shall have any power over the people of these here United States. On the contrary, all power shall reside strictly with the part of government which is Good.
Problem solved! But I wonder why Madison didn't think to write this into the Constitution itself? Maybe he was drunk?
Ah yes, but if the less corrupt bastard wins, then next time an even less corrupt bastard will run, since obviously the less corrupt you are the more likely you are to win. Naturally, the time after that, Mr. L. C. Bastard will be outflanked by a much less corrupt bastard, who will win, because the gosh-darn voters keep preferring the less corrupt candidate, no matter what the other guy promises....and, by and by, you'll have bastards that are as pure as driven snow running for office. Evolution in action!
O' course, if you the predator of politicians don't do your part to cull the herd every four years, then natural selection doesn't work. That was the point, eh?
Yes, I realize that Toyota USA is chartered in the US, and Ford Japan is in Japan. Why does the legal ownership change the analysis? It's still the case that the design and leadership of Toyota is in Japan, but they have huge numbers of customers in the US, and the design and leadership of Ford is in the US, but they have a comparatively small number of customers in Japan. Hence the general fact remains it's more important for a Japanese manufacturer to make sure his American consumers can find him on the 'net than vice-versa. (If you don't want to think in terms of retail customers browsing the Web, substitute mid-level managers needing e-mail contact with the head office.) You have only to look at the trade balance to see this, anyway.
Yes, I realize companies would readily find a way around any disruption of DNS service. Of course they would. Far too much money is at stake! But I suggest this only supports my original argument. Because, guess which companies are going to be eager to fix the inability of which customers to reach them? That would be foreign companies looking to reach US customers. Not the reverse. Trade balance again.
Well, I appreciate your explaining it all like that. Very clearly said.
I suppose the point where I don't follow you is here:
Thus form then on, anyone asking for F will never be refered to that particular server and DNS goes on working as it always has.
Don't you mean "anyone not in the country in question"? Meaning, if France wants to just set up their own root server, and require every packet traversing French networks be routed according to the French root-file, what's to prevent it? Yes, I realize if the rest of the world says phooey the result is that France talks only to itself. (France would not like this, but some countries, e.g. China, might not find it so bad.) Obviously the success of a DNS snit-fit revolt completely relies on people other than your lone self going along.
But my point is, the legal ownership of the computers seems pretty unimportant. That US interests own servers in foreign countries doesn't give them any significant control over foreign DNS, because the "control" is really just a matter of agreement by the foreign operators and foreign governments. They've agreed to use US root files largely because, well, everyone else does. They could change their mind. And if they persuaded many other to do so, too, that would be effective. Otherwise, not.
I appreciate your saying that the lower servers cannot force change on the higher servers. What I'm getting at is that the upper servers only flourish -- only have that trust -- if they are subscribed to by lots and lots of lower servers. So it isn't entirely a one way thing. Or rather, it's one-way in the short-term, from a strictly IP point of view, but it's two-way in the long-term, considering political and human considerations.
Gotta love the Internet. Elapsed time, Google to PDF data file, about 90 seconds. Cheers.
If you look at human life expectancies, they have been increasing for the past 500 years.
The life expectancy at birth has gone up quite a lot, yes. But that mean less that people are living a lot longer than that more people are living what we think of as a "normal" lifespan of 75 years or so. For example, here the CDC has some nice tables of historical life expectancy in the US by age. So, from 1900 to 2002 the US life expectancy at birth increased from 49 to 77 years. Impressive, no?
But the life expectancy at age 85 has only increased from 4.0 to 6.5 years. That is, if you were 85 in 1900 you could expect to live to be 89. If you were 85 in 2002 you could expect to live to be 92. That's much less impressive.
OK, hot from the CDC we learn the following average death rates (in persons per 100,000 population per year) from causes that have nothing to do with old age:
Grand total, 66.9 per 100,000 per year. From which it follows that the average person has a 0.0669% chance of dying each year from some reason other than old age. The rough estimate of your life expectancy is then reasonably close to the inverse of this number, i.e. 1500 years.
Nice enough, but hardly forever. More troubling, however, is that these rates are for a population that is quite young. Suppose instead we use the results for old people, 85 and over, who are unfortunately far more susceptible to accidents and disease:
Grand total of 1462.8, which means your average 85-year-old has a 1.46% chance of dying each year from causes unrelated to chronic "old-age" diseases like heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. The inverse of this is 68 years, for a grand total lifespan of 153 years. Lots shorter. And wet get intermediate results if we use the results for other older age groups, but not the oldest.
Which is to say, you can only get a 1000-year lifespan if you not only defeat the usual diseases of old age (cancer, atherosclerosis, etc.) but also stop the clock on practically every consequence of aging from fading vision to slowing reflexes to slower healing to more brittle bones. A very tall order indeed.
Governments can be pretty creative about how they use the law. You could pass a law "just in case" and suspend its application, or apply it selectively, when the company in question did or did not do what you wanted. Or you could not bother to pass a law at all, but just issue a few emergency decrees. Or El Presidente could just order the Special Ops guys to apply the necessary persuasion to the necessary people some moonless night.
That's the nice thing about government. Since it's force-based, you don't need anyone's consent, and you don't need to follow anybody's rules. You aren't restricted by what people, even lots of people, think is reasonable. You can just tell anyone within your borders exactly what to do and when, on pain of jail or a bullet. It's very effective.
So I just don't see how, realistically speaking, any machine in country X is anything other than, ultimately, under the complete control of country X. Country X may certainly find it wise or lucrative to allow some degree of control by Foo, Inc., located in Country Y. But that's a choice, not a necessity.
I thought extraterritoriality only applied to embassies and consulates and such, not to Internet hosts. That is, if a server is in another country, isn't it entirely subject to the laws of that country? Which means, I hazard, that any "controlling" US business interest can exert only so much "control" as the host country feels like allowing? Am I missing something here?
I mean, there's this odd recurring question I've seen of: "What happens if the US government turns Evil?" Well, in that case, what's to stop the countries in which these servers are actually located from seizing the servers and operating them as they see fit? In fact, seeing as how the entire DNS system is just basically a large collection of text files appropriate distributed, I don't see why, if the US government turns Evil, the rest of the world can't just reprogram the whole DNS shebang in about 10-20 days, tops. Problem solved! Or am I missing something again?
Dear me, I don't think it would be the US economy that suffers more. Remember the trade balance! On the world economic stage the United States is far more often a consumer than a producer.
The commercial part of the Internet is largely used for reaching customers, yes? And the largest and wealthiest concentration of customers, that every company with a website in the world would like to reach is in the United States. That is, it's way more important to Toyota, Inc. that Americans reach www.toyota.com correctly than it is important to Ford that Japanese reach www.ford.com correctly.
There's a good reason the US can throw its weight around with import tariffs. The market in the US is so large that access to it can make or break an international producer. The same is not true about a US producer, since he has direct access to the enormous domestic market. Same thing with 'net access, I'm afraid. In this silly game the US holds four aces. I'm not saying this makes their position right, just that in a real showdown the official UN-sponsored "international" DNS system seems likely to go the way of the official UN-sponsored "international" language (French), namely it would end up being used by UN bureaucrats and governments only.
I have a dentist appointment for a root canal!
So noted!
I trust you'll forgive my initial misapprehension on the grounds that, were one in an apparently serious discussion of whether or not the Earth is flat, one might becomes a bit deaf to the tone of gentle irony.