It doesn't matter if US firms run those domains and so they're under US jurisdiction, the fact is.com,.net and.org have long been recognised as the domains for international organisations as opposed to organisations content with a single specific nationality or set of nationalities, and so if the US can't be trusted to maintain them for that purpose then it's time the US handed them over to somewhere like the UN where they genuinely can be managed to a standard they're intended for.
You're right that this isn't new, but it only serves to reaffirm the urgency that the US must give up control of these international domains. With it's escalating seizures now affecting legitimate international businesses enough is enough.
It's not, an organisation requiring international consensus is not going to be able to pull off controversal decisions because you'd never get that consensus.
Many years ago, when WIPO was created it swayed towards much more relaxed IP laws than we have currently, this is because African nations wanted things like medicine and technology to come down in price faster so that their countries could experience benefits of western society sooner. The US didn't like the fact it got outvoted so side-stepped WIPO and created the WTO which is less democratic so that it could try and force international IP policies to go it's way. This is evidenced in the fact the US uses a lot of weight to try and force nations into the WTO, to force them to accept WTO rulings against them, yet has largely ignored WTO rulings against it on issues such as lumber, steel, cotton, gambling and so forth.
If the internet was in international hands you'd never get the domain seizures authorised that the US currently allows as you'd never get the political support for what is a US agenda. Similarly though you'd never get Chinese style censorship as there are too many nations that would be against it.
Technical issues would still be resolved just as well, because when technical issues arise there's really little political need or desire to hijack the issue and prevent a resolution passing - things like that are purely technical.
So all in all it'd be a much better situation than the current status quo where the US unilaterally imposes censorship on the internet based on it's ethnocentric vision of gambling and IP law.
Really, for the most part the only people who want it to stay in the US are American nationalists, xenophobes, and those with a vested interest in retaining the power it affords. There's a few folk in between who are ignorant about the UN and don't realise that it's far more than just the security council and that it already handles other international tasks like international mailing, maritime rules, air transport rules, telecomms and so forth perfectly well without any such drama that Schmidt is peddling.
What a horribly naive and ignorant statement. European research funding and a Brit invented the web, does that mean they should control the web?
What's debt got to do with anything anyway? It's the US and nations most closely aligned to it that hold far and away the majority of the world's debt whilst those nations in the UN whom the US sees as enemies such as China that hold far and away the largest surpluses. Bringing debt into it makes no sense as the US has far more than anyone else. Sorry if these facts upset your ignorant nationalist world view though.
"Then you have the example above, where popular TV show (in Canada at least) skewers the whole movement. I dunno, maybe down the road it'll be remembered as the first internet counter-culture; something wicked cool that a bunch of kids born in the 1990s were a part of."
*facepalm*
I'm afraid generations in the decades before you beat you to it.
Whilst I'm happy to see it return to the internet, the culture of which you speak was thriving in the 80s and 90s. Look up the Chaos Computer Club, Cult of the Dead Cow, Legion of Doom, Masters of Deception, Phrack, 2600, Kevin Mitnick. Even these guys weren't the first but it was pretty prevalent before the kids of the 90s were even born, let alone walking and properly talking. It died off a little at the end of the 90s and early 00s, but now seems to be back.
A number of the older modern activists prominent right now didn't just pop up in recent years, people like Julian Assange for example were also there the first time around:
A major reason for it's failure is that they only ever invested half-arsed in it.
It was only ever released in North America, we never saw it over here in Europe for example.
In the modern globally connected world, taking a small share of a single market (i.e. North America) wont work as any chatter will be drowned out by the rest of the world saying "WTF is the Zune? anyway, about my iPod...".
It may seem less risky to do a staged release over a period of years, but it also strikes me as less likely to succeed than an all out here's our new product, available to everyone, everywhere, at the same time with a fuck load of hype in the run up to it.
Zune's failure was much less about the product, and much more about the marketing and release planning.
No you wouldn't because it's still the FPTP system. Your version is relatively young, but here in the UK it's matured as a self-evolving system to the point where you get to see just how bad it is. Parties with as little as 30% of the popular vote ending up with an effective 100% of power meaning up to 70% of people are stuck under a government they do not want with no power against it.
The FPTP system has never been good, and never will be. It's purpose is merely to ensure certain groupings who can muster the most organised minority can force their will upon the rest of the population unopposed. It is not a genuinely democratic system.
The problem isn't your citizens misunderstanding the voting system, the problem IS the voting system - plenty of people here in the UK know full well they elect representatives yet it hasn't done anything to improve the health of our democracy. Fundamentally there's no benefit in electing a representative when that representative can represent as little as 20% of his constituents in the worst case - what use is a representative system when the representative doesn't even come close to representing the general will of his or her constituents?
Wow, that's a hell of a long rant, but seeing as you outright lied in your first sentence, or are at least completely and utterly ignorant of even more recent history (i.e. early to mid 20th century) then I couldn't see any point in reading the rest as this demonstrates you'll see only what you want to see and aren't capable of producing a rational argument.
I guess it depends on your point of view, but personally last time I went looking for a house and looked at a rather nice semi-detached I didn't think "Oh, I wonder how easy it'll be to get an ASBO slapped on the neighbours if they make too much noise", I instead thought "I wonder how much it'd cost to slap up a bit of sound proofing against that wall", and ultimately decided "I don't really want to put up with noisy neighbours, so I'll go for a detached even if it's a bit smaller".
Your screaming kids analogy is quite apt. in fact, do you think an ASBO against screaming kids would be succesful?
Annoying or not, it's something you accept as a possible issue when you share a wall with someone else.
You've obviously not driven round the country lanes around here where every cock drives around with full beam on permanently, and those that don't stick their fog lights on because they seem to be under the impression that the fog light symbol in their car means "turn these on when the driving conditions are anything other than sunny and dry".
Sure you can see them coming, but once they're facing you good luck seeing anything else, including being able to judge whether you're even on the road still or not!
I prefer the A1/M1 over the country lanes of rural Yorkshire any day, due to the obscene amount of twats who apparently never really figured out what lights, when.
"Companies EXIST to make money for their INVESTORS, nobody else."
You know, it wasn't always this way, nor is it this way for every company.
Did you ever stop to think that it may be precisely this attitude that's at the core of the precarious world financial situation that's been ongoing for over 4 years now?
Companies exist in whatever form society chooses to allow them to exist, if the tide of opinion in general society is changing to the belief that companies should exist in part to contribute back to society then that is what companies should truly exist for - not some arbitrary definition that you've decided is the one true reason for the existence of companies.
Yes, I suspect this wont survive judicial review in court.
But then, they repeatedly gave the lady who was too noisy when having sex ASBOs and seemed to win in court when she carried on fucking regardless of them so who knows.
This is still completely false, you're now desperately trying to jump to a technical argument to defend what is a social issue.
The fact is if you go out into the street the vast majority of people would far and away say they wanted their privacy protected and do not want to be tracked. By defaulting to on Mozilla isn't making the option pointless - they're making the option reflect what people actually want.
If 100% of people access a site with do not track turned on, it doesn't mean the option is invalidly set, it means people don't want to be fucking tracked - ignoring the preference of almost the entirety of their userbase can not simply be excused with "Well everyone has it on so we just ignore it". For starters it's likely under new laws in a number of countries that this would leave them wide open to succesful and costly legal action.
It's a sidestep by Mozilla to avoid pissing Google off without whom they could not continue to survive now that their browser has lost and is continuing to lose marketshare and nothing more than that. No one cares if they're not interested in protecting privacy - god only knows it's clear Microsoft and Google aren't yet their browsers are still popular, but to pretend they're the browser that's all about privacy with options the majority of users (when I say majority I mean nearly all, like, 99.99%) would prefer turned on but many will never realise exists they're saying one thing and doing another.
No you couldn't argue it for every new config option because not every new config option is about user privacy, nor has every other config option been at the centre of a controversy about whether Mozilla is putting their paymasters wishes over their userbase backed up by a statement full of logical fallacies released by Mozilla on the issue.
I'd say those points make this situation rather stand out such that the point is if Mozilla were genuine about user choice on the issue of privacy they'd have made an exception for this option, they haven't made such a claim for any other options though so the argument isn't relevant to them.
I think it's pretty much decided anyway though, both American and Chinese courts are very biased to companies that stem from and are based in their respective nations, if Proview can't win in China, it doesn't stand a chance in hell in the US so the outcome is pretty clear at this point anyway - rightly or wrongly, I'd say Proview has lost.
Reading this thread is the first I knew about it, so the choice has hardly been presented to me.
No, Mozilla decided for me ever since this option appeared whenver that was that I do want to be tracked, which is not, nor has it ever been my choice.
If users aren't aware of, or aren't directly presented with the choice, then the net result is indistuinguishable from the user having never been given a choice in the first place.
It's not nonsense, but I have to ask, do you have any connection to Mozilla/Firefox? you seem to be pretty rabidly defending some pretty irrational points.
I find it a little sad that you criticise the GP for being modded insightful then go on to post what you did which makes absolutely no sense.
Mozilla in the content you've posted claims not to take a position on Do Not Track, and they claim it's the users choice. By determining that the default state is that users do not want to be tracked however they've already explicitly made a choice for the user, they've decided that any user who is not aware of the option wants to be tracked, which is false - I can say this with certainty as I wasn't aware of the option but found it not set. Mozilla has thus made a choice for me that I didn't want.
So you're defending the indefensible, Mozilla is doing the same, they're claiming to take the moral high ground by giving users choice, when in reality, for the vast majority of their userbase, they HAVE made the choice for them, by defaulting to off. Mozilla have decided they do want most of it's users, and certainly it's most vulnerable and technically illiterate users who don't know how to change the option to be tracked.
"Also CRT never really came down in price - stayed more or less the same, as materials/manufacturing/transportation are the bulk of their cost."
Didn't it? the whole reason I bought a 17" CRT and then a few years later a 19" as a teen was because they drastically dropped into my price range. They most certainly did drop in price, just as drastically as larger LCD/TFTs have in recent years since the panel manufacturers got their wrists slapped for colluding on price.
I firmly remember the standard monitor size available on computers in the early 90s onwards into the early 00s jumping from 14" to 15", to 17" and to 19" and above before the LCDs and TFTs started to steal the show. The sizes increased for no reason other than costs came down. I remember this because I had the unfortunate job of replacing the flyback transformer and such on a fair few of them over the years until the cost benefits of doing so deteriorated away.
I've always been intrigued about what happens when they make so much profit there's not much they can do growthwise with it though.
Take ICANN, if it's meant to be non-profit, what the fuck is it going to do with the billions upon billions it'll make from custom TLDs? Just drain it out the economy into a pointless cash pile? or grossly over inflate staff wages?
Yes, the real morale of the story is "Don't give a fuck what dipshit bloggers say". Going on to then debunk what they say publicly only feeds their blog views more and hence increases their ad revenue, which in turn makes it more profitable to be a random dipshit blogger talking utter shite.
Why are culture clashes a bad thing? to push anything through would need consensus and technically sound solutions to real problems aren't going to be something that are affected by cultural barriers.
Cultural clashes means that there will never be consensus on controversal issues like web censorship, and so it seems far better than the current situation where the US unilaterally takes down foreign websites and companies as a result.
The countries that censor wont have full reign to do what they want, everyone would have to agree which is far superior to the current status quo where a country that censors (the US) has unilateral control over too much and abuses that to push it's own failing economic model of focussing too heavily on IP.
That's the most meaningless comprison I've ever heard in my life.
In 2000 years time, if humans then discover the Harry Potter books, do you really believe that because they pinpoint then ancient London that that somehow has any bearing on whether the tales of magic and wizards contained within also hold any validity? Even Star Trek envisaged some devices which have now become reality, but in 2000 years time it'd be equally daft to think Star Trek really happened during this era based on the existence of those devices.
Most works of fiction have some real world inspiration. It doesn't make them true stories around which we should build our lives though. The Bible is absolutely no different, you've just been conditioned and/or fooled yourself into believing The Bible is somehow different to other works of fiction, that's absolutely not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter if US firms run those domains and so they're under US jurisdiction, the fact is .com, .net and .org have long been recognised as the domains for international organisations as opposed to organisations content with a single specific nationality or set of nationalities, and so if the US can't be trusted to maintain them for that purpose then it's time the US handed them over to somewhere like the UN where they genuinely can be managed to a standard they're intended for.
You're right that this isn't new, but it only serves to reaffirm the urgency that the US must give up control of these international domains. With it's escalating seizures now affecting legitimate international businesses enough is enough.
Updated and added ads? You know the XBox 360 has had ads on the dashboard since release right?
The dashboard may have changed, but there have always been ads there, they certainly weren't just added in one of the updates.
The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee who is British, at CERN, a Franco-Swiss European research institute.
The internet is a different thing altogether.
It's not, an organisation requiring international consensus is not going to be able to pull off controversal decisions because you'd never get that consensus.
Many years ago, when WIPO was created it swayed towards much more relaxed IP laws than we have currently, this is because African nations wanted things like medicine and technology to come down in price faster so that their countries could experience benefits of western society sooner. The US didn't like the fact it got outvoted so side-stepped WIPO and created the WTO which is less democratic so that it could try and force international IP policies to go it's way. This is evidenced in the fact the US uses a lot of weight to try and force nations into the WTO, to force them to accept WTO rulings against them, yet has largely ignored WTO rulings against it on issues such as lumber, steel, cotton, gambling and so forth.
If the internet was in international hands you'd never get the domain seizures authorised that the US currently allows as you'd never get the political support for what is a US agenda. Similarly though you'd never get Chinese style censorship as there are too many nations that would be against it.
Technical issues would still be resolved just as well, because when technical issues arise there's really little political need or desire to hijack the issue and prevent a resolution passing - things like that are purely technical.
So all in all it'd be a much better situation than the current status quo where the US unilaterally imposes censorship on the internet based on it's ethnocentric vision of gambling and IP law.
Really, for the most part the only people who want it to stay in the US are American nationalists, xenophobes, and those with a vested interest in retaining the power it affords. There's a few folk in between who are ignorant about the UN and don't realise that it's far more than just the security council and that it already handles other international tasks like international mailing, maritime rules, air transport rules, telecomms and so forth perfectly well without any such drama that Schmidt is peddling.
What a horribly naive and ignorant statement. European research funding and a Brit invented the web, does that mean they should control the web?
What's debt got to do with anything anyway? It's the US and nations most closely aligned to it that hold far and away the majority of the world's debt whilst those nations in the UN whom the US sees as enemies such as China that hold far and away the largest surpluses. Bringing debt into it makes no sense as the US has far more than anyone else. Sorry if these facts upset your ignorant nationalist world view though.
"Then you have the example above, where popular TV show (in Canada at least) skewers the whole movement. I dunno, maybe down the road it'll be remembered as the first internet counter-culture; something wicked cool that a bunch of kids born in the 1990s were a part of."
*facepalm*
I'm afraid generations in the decades before you beat you to it.
Whilst I'm happy to see it return to the internet, the culture of which you speak was thriving in the 80s and 90s. Look up the Chaos Computer Club, Cult of the Dead Cow, Legion of Doom, Masters of Deception, Phrack, 2600, Kevin Mitnick. Even these guys weren't the first but it was pretty prevalent before the kids of the 90s were even born, let alone walking and properly talking. It died off a little at the end of the 90s and early 00s, but now seems to be back.
A number of the older modern activists prominent right now didn't just pop up in recent years, people like Julian Assange for example were also there the first time around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Hacking_and_conviction
..and except where it involves religious objection to things like abortion.
Or in other words he's about freedom and personal liberty but only where it suits him personally.
Just like every other politician then.
A major reason for it's failure is that they only ever invested half-arsed in it.
It was only ever released in North America, we never saw it over here in Europe for example.
In the modern globally connected world, taking a small share of a single market (i.e. North America) wont work as any chatter will be drowned out by the rest of the world saying "WTF is the Zune? anyway, about my iPod...".
It may seem less risky to do a staged release over a period of years, but it also strikes me as less likely to succeed than an all out here's our new product, available to everyone, everywhere, at the same time with a fuck load of hype in the run up to it.
Zune's failure was much less about the product, and much more about the marketing and release planning.
No you wouldn't because it's still the FPTP system. Your version is relatively young, but here in the UK it's matured as a self-evolving system to the point where you get to see just how bad it is. Parties with as little as 30% of the popular vote ending up with an effective 100% of power meaning up to 70% of people are stuck under a government they do not want with no power against it.
The FPTP system has never been good, and never will be. It's purpose is merely to ensure certain groupings who can muster the most organised minority can force their will upon the rest of the population unopposed. It is not a genuinely democratic system.
The problem isn't your citizens misunderstanding the voting system, the problem IS the voting system - plenty of people here in the UK know full well they elect representatives yet it hasn't done anything to improve the health of our democracy. Fundamentally there's no benefit in electing a representative when that representative can represent as little as 20% of his constituents in the worst case - what use is a representative system when the representative doesn't even come close to representing the general will of his or her constituents?
Wow, that's a hell of a long rant, but seeing as you outright lied in your first sentence, or are at least completely and utterly ignorant of even more recent history (i.e. early to mid 20th century) then I couldn't see any point in reading the rest as this demonstrates you'll see only what you want to see and aren't capable of producing a rational argument.
I guess it depends on your point of view, but personally last time I went looking for a house and looked at a rather nice semi-detached I didn't think "Oh, I wonder how easy it'll be to get an ASBO slapped on the neighbours if they make too much noise", I instead thought "I wonder how much it'd cost to slap up a bit of sound proofing against that wall", and ultimately decided "I don't really want to put up with noisy neighbours, so I'll go for a detached even if it's a bit smaller".
Your screaming kids analogy is quite apt. in fact, do you think an ASBO against screaming kids would be succesful?
Annoying or not, it's something you accept as a possible issue when you share a wall with someone else.
You've obviously not driven round the country lanes around here where every cock drives around with full beam on permanently, and those that don't stick their fog lights on because they seem to be under the impression that the fog light symbol in their car means "turn these on when the driving conditions are anything other than sunny and dry".
Sure you can see them coming, but once they're facing you good luck seeing anything else, including being able to judge whether you're even on the road still or not!
I prefer the A1/M1 over the country lanes of rural Yorkshire any day, due to the obscene amount of twats who apparently never really figured out what lights, when.
"Companies EXIST to make money for their INVESTORS, nobody else."
You know, it wasn't always this way, nor is it this way for every company.
Did you ever stop to think that it may be precisely this attitude that's at the core of the precarious world financial situation that's been ongoing for over 4 years now?
Companies exist in whatever form society chooses to allow them to exist, if the tide of opinion in general society is changing to the belief that companies should exist in part to contribute back to society then that is what companies should truly exist for - not some arbitrary definition that you've decided is the one true reason for the existence of companies.
Yes, I suspect this wont survive judicial review in court.
But then, they repeatedly gave the lady who was too noisy when having sex ASBOs and seemed to win in court when she carried on fucking regardless of them so who knows.
This is still completely false, you're now desperately trying to jump to a technical argument to defend what is a social issue.
The fact is if you go out into the street the vast majority of people would far and away say they wanted their privacy protected and do not want to be tracked. By defaulting to on Mozilla isn't making the option pointless - they're making the option reflect what people actually want.
If 100% of people access a site with do not track turned on, it doesn't mean the option is invalidly set, it means people don't want to be fucking tracked - ignoring the preference of almost the entirety of their userbase can not simply be excused with "Well everyone has it on so we just ignore it". For starters it's likely under new laws in a number of countries that this would leave them wide open to succesful and costly legal action.
It's a sidestep by Mozilla to avoid pissing Google off without whom they could not continue to survive now that their browser has lost and is continuing to lose marketshare and nothing more than that. No one cares if they're not interested in protecting privacy - god only knows it's clear Microsoft and Google aren't yet their browsers are still popular, but to pretend they're the browser that's all about privacy with options the majority of users (when I say majority I mean nearly all, like, 99.99%) would prefer turned on but many will never realise exists they're saying one thing and doing another.
No you couldn't argue it for every new config option because not every new config option is about user privacy, nor has every other config option been at the centre of a controversy about whether Mozilla is putting their paymasters wishes over their userbase backed up by a statement full of logical fallacies released by Mozilla on the issue.
I'd say those points make this situation rather stand out such that the point is if Mozilla were genuine about user choice on the issue of privacy they'd have made an exception for this option, they haven't made such a claim for any other options though so the argument isn't relevant to them.
I think it's pretty much decided anyway though, both American and Chinese courts are very biased to companies that stem from and are based in their respective nations, if Proview can't win in China, it doesn't stand a chance in hell in the US so the outcome is pretty clear at this point anyway - rightly or wrongly, I'd say Proview has lost.
Reading this thread is the first I knew about it, so the choice has hardly been presented to me.
No, Mozilla decided for me ever since this option appeared whenver that was that I do want to be tracked, which is not, nor has it ever been my choice.
If users aren't aware of, or aren't directly presented with the choice, then the net result is indistuinguishable from the user having never been given a choice in the first place.
It's not nonsense, but I have to ask, do you have any connection to Mozilla/Firefox? you seem to be pretty rabidly defending some pretty irrational points.
I find it a little sad that you criticise the GP for being modded insightful then go on to post what you did which makes absolutely no sense.
Mozilla in the content you've posted claims not to take a position on Do Not Track, and they claim it's the users choice. By determining that the default state is that users do not want to be tracked however they've already explicitly made a choice for the user, they've decided that any user who is not aware of the option wants to be tracked, which is false - I can say this with certainty as I wasn't aware of the option but found it not set. Mozilla has thus made a choice for me that I didn't want.
So you're defending the indefensible, Mozilla is doing the same, they're claiming to take the moral high ground by giving users choice, when in reality, for the vast majority of their userbase, they HAVE made the choice for them, by defaulting to off. Mozilla have decided they do want most of it's users, and certainly it's most vulnerable and technically illiterate users who don't know how to change the option to be tracked.
"pigeons are like flies"
I hear the same used to be said about passenger pidgeons in the 19th century with their 3bn+ bird flocks.
Didn't turn out so well though.
"Also CRT never really came down in price - stayed more or less the same, as materials/manufacturing/transportation are the bulk of their cost."
Didn't it? the whole reason I bought a 17" CRT and then a few years later a 19" as a teen was because they drastically dropped into my price range. They most certainly did drop in price, just as drastically as larger LCD/TFTs have in recent years since the panel manufacturers got their wrists slapped for colluding on price.
I firmly remember the standard monitor size available on computers in the early 90s onwards into the early 00s jumping from 14" to 15", to 17" and to 19" and above before the LCDs and TFTs started to steal the show. The sizes increased for no reason other than costs came down. I remember this because I had the unfortunate job of replacing the flyback transformer and such on a fair few of them over the years until the cost benefits of doing so deteriorated away.
I've always been intrigued about what happens when they make so much profit there's not much they can do growthwise with it though.
Take ICANN, if it's meant to be non-profit, what the fuck is it going to do with the billions upon billions it'll make from custom TLDs? Just drain it out the economy into a pointless cash pile? or grossly over inflate staff wages?
Yes, the real morale of the story is "Don't give a fuck what dipshit bloggers say". Going on to then debunk what they say publicly only feeds their blog views more and hence increases their ad revenue, which in turn makes it more profitable to be a random dipshit blogger talking utter shite.
Why are culture clashes a bad thing? to push anything through would need consensus and technically sound solutions to real problems aren't going to be something that are affected by cultural barriers.
Cultural clashes means that there will never be consensus on controversal issues like web censorship, and so it seems far better than the current situation where the US unilaterally takes down foreign websites and companies as a result.
The countries that censor wont have full reign to do what they want, everyone would have to agree which is far superior to the current status quo where a country that censors (the US) has unilateral control over too much and abuses that to push it's own failing economic model of focussing too heavily on IP.
That's the most meaningless comprison I've ever heard in my life.
In 2000 years time, if humans then discover the Harry Potter books, do you really believe that because they pinpoint then ancient London that that somehow has any bearing on whether the tales of magic and wizards contained within also hold any validity? Even Star Trek envisaged some devices which have now become reality, but in 2000 years time it'd be equally daft to think Star Trek really happened during this era based on the existence of those devices.
Most works of fiction have some real world inspiration. It doesn't make them true stories around which we should build our lives though. The Bible is absolutely no different, you've just been conditioned and/or fooled yourself into believing The Bible is somehow different to other works of fiction, that's absolutely not the case.