>Politicans are for sale. Deal with it. Surely it's better that it be our dollars doing the buying than those of our opponents
I dig it. But my real question is, why do geeks have such a narrow platter of political issues? Obviously there are a few things that are close to the heart... but there's an awful lot of stuff in the world that's still a hideous mess, and still would be even if all of our concerns over privacy, etc, were suddenly resolved the way we'd like.
Geeks talk about the "geek elite", but as a political entity it's a no-show -- geek activism is for the most part only concerned with the geek world. Which is fine, sort of. But I believe geeks have the potential to hold real power as an electorate, because the current economy is geek-driven. This means that the old utopian dreams (information liberates, etc) could finally have force behind them. Why shy away from this?
For example, there's a growing sentiment in the US Congress (particularly, but in no way exclusively, the GOP) towards a sort of new isolationism. To a geek, this seems pretty bogus. And on top of that, it seems unbelievably dangerous. I see a lot of discussion on/. about the thinning of international boundaries and how people/politicians don't understand what it's going to mean to be part of a global economic/political/information architecture in the 21st century. Perhaps this is because no one ever bothered to tell them?
Which brings us back to buying votes. Perhaps I'm no longer cynical (realistic?:)) enough to list that as the key step, but surely we could do more. I guess making sure everyone votes is a good step.
In my mind the Igs have always have this sort of problem -- on the one hand they're giving awards to people who have done actual scientific work on stuff that's just out to lunch, but on the other hand they give awards for stuff that is anti-scientific, misanthropic, etc. The awards suffer from the fact that they both condone and condemn, depending on who gets the award.
Re:What about better security?
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 1
>Does IPV6 do anything about better authentication/security? Yes. IPsec, IP-level authentication and encryption, is included in IPv6. It is available for IPv4 as well. Several free implementations (KAME, FreeS/Wan, etc) are under development.
Re:It's all about widespread acceptance
on
CNN On IPv6
·
· Score: 1
The problem is, no one wants to. In particular, the people who are building the routers. Routing tables are huge under IPv4, but memory is cheap. No one wants to handle the extra work that the routers would have to shoulder under 6. Getting the world to run at line rate is not easy, especially after looking at all the stuff that's packed into IPv6...
Building a good IPv6 router requires IPv6 (obviously), but also extensions for RIP, OSPF, BGP4 (ack!), ISIS,... to handle the bigger name spaces. I believe that many of these extensions are floating around in drafts. But they're not very widely deployed (if they are at all). And until the backbone routers all speak IPv6 (or some other solution, like MPLS tunnels to keep the "good" IPv6 traffic away from "bad" IPv4 routers), IPv6 traffic will be restricted to sketchy IPv4 tunnels.
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For reference, info and source for angband and about 10^3 variants can be found at thangorodrim.angband.org.
I dig it. But my real question is, why do geeks have such a narrow platter of political issues? Obviously there are a few things that are close to the heart... but there's an awful lot of stuff in the world that's still a hideous mess, and still would be even if all of our concerns over privacy, etc, were suddenly resolved the way we'd like.
Geeks talk about the "geek elite", but as a political entity it's a no-show -- geek activism is for the most part only concerned with the geek world. Which is fine, sort of. But I believe geeks have the potential to hold real power as an electorate, because the current economy is geek-driven. This means that the old utopian dreams (information liberates, etc) could finally have force behind them. Why shy away from this?
For example, there's a growing sentiment in the US Congress (particularly, but in no way exclusively, the GOP) towards a sort of new isolationism. To a geek, this seems pretty bogus. And on top of that, it seems unbelievably dangerous. I see a lot of discussion on /. about the thinning of international boundaries and how people/politicians don't understand what it's going to mean to be part of a global economic/political/information architecture in the 21st century. Perhaps this is because no one ever bothered to tell them?
Which brings us back to buying votes. Perhaps I'm no longer cynical (realistic? :)) enough to list that as the key step, but surely we could do more. I guess making sure everyone votes is a good step.
In my mind the Igs have always have this sort of problem -- on the one hand they're giving awards to people who have done actual scientific work on stuff that's just out to lunch, but on the other hand they give awards for stuff that is anti-scientific, misanthropic, etc. The awards suffer from the fact that they both condone and condemn, depending on who gets the award.
>Does IPV6 do anything about better authentication/security?
Yes. IPsec, IP-level authentication and encryption, is included in IPv6. It is available for IPv4 as well. Several free implementations (KAME, FreeS/Wan, etc) are under development.
Building a good IPv6 router requires IPv6 (obviously), but also extensions for RIP, OSPF, BGP4 (ack!), ISIS, ... to handle the bigger name spaces. I believe that many of these extensions are floating around in drafts. But they're not very widely deployed (if they are at all). And until the backbone routers all speak IPv6 (or some other solution, like MPLS tunnels to keep the "good" IPv6 traffic away from "bad" IPv4 routers), IPv6 traffic will be restricted to sketchy IPv4 tunnels.