> Your point is that socialism is selling high priced crap?
As a former resident of the USSR, I can tell you that socialism is exactly that. Selling high priced crap, and buying high priced crap (when you can get it, that is)
He has conquered the technical world, he has conquered the cooking world, now he needs to buy a ring and conquer the physical world by becoming the ULTIMATE FIGHTING CHAMPION!!!
The kind of game you can put in a browser is not the kind of game you are used to. Browser games are like Angry Birds; toys, not serious games. You get a few minutes of enjoyment that can be had at any time you want. But if you want a lengthy game with decent graphics, like say, Fallout, or Civilization, or Empire Earth, or Sims, then no, those are not going into a browser. The thing is, nobody is making those kinds of games any more. Fallout 3 was the last one as far as I'm concerned. From now on it's just mindless toys for mindless enjoyment.
Artificial intelligence has been the technology of the future for over 40 years. The current state of it is pathetic, and there is no significant research going on. So it will continue to be the technology of the future for a very very long time.
A killer problem with NAT-PT, at least if you are talking ISP carrier grade NAT, is that the NAT gateway has to fake an client v4-only A DNS record for the v6-only AAAA server. You can't do this reliably at internet scale.
Sure you can. You overestimate the number of hosts contacted. There's probably only a couple of thousand hosts ever accessed by regular users; google, facebook, twitter, news. I doubt you'll fill a 16bit subnet with them all. Furthermore, this only needs to be done for v6 hosts, of which there are currently none. All the popular sites will still have v4 addresses, so the DNS proxy might not even have to do anything at all for a long time. If you do it at the individual customer level, such as by putting NAT-PT in the cable modem (which is what I was suggesting in the first place), the table will be even smaller, if it exists at all. Scalability problems do NOT exist at this level.
Oh, and your fancy NAT46 device has to be less expensive than 6rd (a v6 over v4 tunnel from your broadband modem to a relay at the ISP)
The whole point is to NOT make the customers switch to v4. You v6 geeks seem to assume that everybody wants v6 and will get it as soon as it's available. That's a serious delusion. Nobody but geeks wants it. Nobody will switch unless they are forced to. Because once you switch, stuff breaks. There's plenty of hardware and applications that simply do not work over v6. All the hosts people want to reach are still v4 and are always going to be. The only real problem is the not-yet-realized lack of v4 addresses, and NAT-PT can solve that without making anybody switch to v6.
That's called NAT-PT and I've just had a huge flamewar about it on the last IPv6 article. Basically, all the v6 geeks here hate NAT and think nobody should be allowed to have such a thing. Hence, the RFC has been deprecated and nobody is even trying to implement it.
> Do you really want a "walled garden" internet where we're limited to being passive consumers of big content?
Walled gardens require central servers, but they are not created by them. You can rent a server for less than you're now paying for your broadband connection and host whatever you want.
> Things "end users" may require end-to-end connectivity for: > remote logins
No they won't. I've never needed to login to my home computer, and will never need to. I couldn't do it anyway, since I turn it off when I don't use it, like most people do. Geeks who login to their home computers from conferences are so extremely rare, there is no way it can justify designing the internet around them. Besides, you can do that through an ssh proxy, like your probably do already.
> hosting servers
It is much better to rent a server at a data center. You get a much better connection there, and it's cheaper.
> games
Games already require central servers.
> voip and video communications
Already go through a central server.
> p2p
P2P is used almost exclusively for downloading pirated content. As I said before, this problem is political in nature. It would have been much more efficient to let ISPs mirror any content their users download. This would take so much traffic off the backbones, we could host ten whole other internets over them. All it would take is for people to stand up to the government and change the law they disagree with. We're supposed to be a democracy, right? Instead, people are content to keep breaking the law and invent things like P2P that make it easier to not get sued. You think that makes it harder for the government to control you? Think again. The only power the government is supposed to have is to crack down on criminals, and all you've done is give it the excuse to do so whenever it dislikes you for some reason. You can't solve a legal problem by technical means.
> That whole end-to-end principle thing just passed you by, eh?
On the contrary, the whole end-to-end principle has got to go away. End users don't need to connect to other end users. They connect to content servers, which are few in number. The only exception today is P2P protocols, the reasons for which are political, not technical. Fix the politics, and the internet will work just fine without IPv6.
> So.... you don't drive a car, live in a pre-built house, or shop at any known stores, even supermarkets?
I don't choose those from ads, since I never see any.
> Newsflash: most advertising works not to capture clicks, but to instill in you a sense of trust
Only scoundrels want you to trust them. Whenever somebody wants your trust, you can be sure he is out to rip you off. An honest business sells its products because they are good, not because it messed with your mind until believe they are.
> you don't know what brand to buy, but one seems more "familiar" to you
Bullshit. You must choose what you buy by knowing what you are buying. Do you know what the product is? Do you know what it does? What it's made of? How much it costs? What other products are available that fulfill the same function? What price-feature tradeoffs will you need to make? Ads answer none of these questions. Instead they brainwash you into thinking that a certain brand will make you cool, or attractive, or relaxed, or whatever, until purchasing is no longer a rational choice, but a result of subliminal suggestions to your base emotions. When you do that, you stop being a human being and become an animal. To do such a thing to a person is a filthy, immoral thing, and I am truly amazed why it is tolerated.
Yes, I read that. None of those problems are important on a home network (except bittorrent, but I already mentioned that you can fix it by sending hostnames). A home user contacts a couple of hundred sites at most, so there are no problems with scalability.
NAT-PT was only intended as temporary IPv4 to IPV6 transition mechanism, not as "solution" anyway. So you'd have to do transition sooner or later anyway.
My point is that the home user need never transition to IPv6 at all. Ever. We do not need persistent internet addresses. We already have DNS for that. IPv6 is an ugly solution for a nonexistent problem. I hate it. I hate the API, I hate that the address doesn't fit into an integral type, I hate that sockaddr_in6 is not a power of 2 in size and the address is not aligned. The kernel API is a pain with it. The autoconfiguration protocol is a pain and much more complicated that DHCP. And finally, there is the plain fact that there is no way I'm running without NAT. NAT is the right thing to do, both as a layer of security, and as a reminder that the contents of my home network is nobody's damn business.
A much better solution is to keep IPv4 on the leaf networks and implement a translation protocol on the backbone. The internet is not a network of equally important hosts. You have content servers and you have users. The former is few in numbers and is easily handled by NAT-PT DNS proxy. The users don't talk to each other directly, but through some server, so don't need to be globally routable.
Nah, I'm just being a troll. I don't know why I still post in the first place. Since the latest UI redesign travesty the site is pretty much dead. I haven't read anything interesting here in months. A few more, and I'm leaving for good.
Bring back NAT-PT! It was prematurely obsoleted due to scalability concerns. Those concerns are indeed valid, but only for large networks. On a home network with a couple of users it is a perfectly viable solution. Put NAT-PT on a router appliance, give it an IPv6 address, and it will let the home network transparently pretend that IPv6 does not exist. Yes, there are a few obvious problems with the few protocols that send IP addresses, like bittorrent, but a simple client fix can easily send hostnames instead. Otherwise, it will just work, and nobody will have to care about IPv6 except ISPs.
Many of the transition problems arise from the insistence that everybody want IPv6. Normal people don't care about IPv6, don't want IPv6, and couldn't care less what it is. Instead of starting to convert from the bottom up, with users going IPv6 first on their home networks, and then the ISPs and backbones switching when everybody has moved, do it the other way around. Convert the backbones to IPv6 down to ISP level. Then the consumers can use NAT-PT appliances to pretend that that did not happen and keep on going without any disruption.
Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person clicks on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link. Use of a computer to commit this type of Internet fraud is a felony in many jurisdictions.
So, not using Adblock is a crime? I mean, I consider advertising an immoral practice and I have never purchased anything I saw in an ad, and would never do that in the future. Then if some obnoxious ad got through my defenses and tricked me into clicking on it, I'd be committing a felony? Man, that sure is pretty harsh. And here we have people bragging how they support sites by not blocking ads (under the assumption that they block ads everywhere else), while in reality they are nothing but criminals.
Remember kids, not blocking ads can be a crime! Your life would be ruined and spent in the pound-me-in-the-you-know-what federal penitentuary. Be safe! Surf smart! Use adblock!
Thank you for reminding us what is wrong with the open source community today.
> FYI You're one of those guys who just doesn't get it.
Of course I'm one of those guys. I'm not in your little club where everyone knows every bleeding edge API by telepathy. Or maybe in the club of geniuses who can look at MesaGL source code and find those precious 50 lines that are necessary to communicate to DRI that I want to blit a buffer. I'm one of those fools who actually need to see a simple example, or to read API documentation, neither of which is available.
Yes, it's nice that the graphics backend is finally starting to work in Linux. But I'll still have to wait until the day when kernel developers deign to notice us regular people and explain which of those fancy APIs are actually for us to write games and other stuff with. And maybe even explain what we have to do to render a triangle or blit an image to the screen. Using small words, of course, since fucking fools like us can't be expected to understand anything complicated. Or, better yet, nobody without 20 years of kernel programming experience should be allowed to write graphics applications on Linux. That'll keep Linux pure and without any of that bad software that regular guys like me can write.
Gee, I'd love to ditch the bloated monster of OpenGL and X and just use DRI. Only there is absolutely no documentation on how to do it. From what I have read so far I'm under impression I'd have to write a whole graphics driver, which, needless to say, is INSANELY difficult. Trying to look up API documentation and examples on anything but OpenGL is impossible. I am not even sure which API they are trying to promote, or what they all are for. For instance, is GEM a replacement to EGL or its backend? Is DRI an alternative to GEM, or an implementation of it? Then you have EXA, Gallium3D, Vdpau, DRM, and God knows how many alphabet soup APIs, all without a shred of documentation or a even a simple example. I don't know about you, but I'll just wait until the driver people figure out what the hell it is they want to do and then see what the API is then. Maybe they'll even write an example. Maybe then we'll finally have games written for Linux.
Perhaps this is a good time to consider upgrading to git, eh? Nothing like a server outage to remind you of the problems associated with a central repository, which you probably haven't even backed up.
I've been trying to find how to do the following, but I can't find even what it's called. I want to have an IPv4 network, without IPv6 anywhere in it, but be able to access IPv6 hosts. This is possible because the number of hosts I wish to reach is very small, and it is very feasible to have a kind of a proxy that would intercept DNS and IP requests (is this tunneling?) and map IPv6 addresses to some IPv4 addresses. DNS requests returning IPv6 content would be rewritten to contain these IPv4 values and all incoming and outgoing IP packets would be translated 6-4 through the table of these previously looked up hosts. I'm guessing the table will have a couple of hundred entries, at the most, so performance should not be a problem. This way I could not care if anything out there is IPv6 and just keep going, pretending that it does not exist. Now, this is all pretty obvious to me, so I am sure somebody has though of this before. What is it called? And where can I get the software to do it?
>> You believe you can trust the AMA to set good standards. I don't know why you do that. > I'll turn that around: You believe you can trust a bunch of people with zero medical expertise in your community > to set standards for medical practices and care. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you're just naturally foolish.
You might be ok with the government imposing trust in itself on you at the point of a gun, but I am not. I want to make my own decisions about what is acceptable, I do not want those decisions forced on me by armed thugs. And yes, I may even end up trusting someone who has little medical expertise and make a mistake; that is my right. I do not want the nanny state to protect me from making bad decisions, making mistakes, or screwing up in whatever manner, even if that gets me killed. It's the true meaning of freedom.
That said, nothing stops you from finding your own medical experts and getting their opinion on doctors in the area. If you want "medical expertise", nobody should be able to stop you from finding it, just as they should not be able to stop me from not wanting it.
>> The EMTs in the ambulance should have a pretty good idea which doctors in the area are incapable of doing surgery. > Oh no, that would never do - then they're imposing THEIR choices on ME. That's not freedom!
They are not imposing their choices on you. You are perfectly free to stay on the side of the road and bleed to death. Rough? Sure. Unfair? Nope. Just like a farmer should know that he needs to prepare for the next year by saving some seed to plant, you should plan for problems like this. If the farmer eats his own seed corn over the winter, people are free to rip him off in the spring when he wants to buy seed from those who prepared. Likewise, your safety is your responsibility. You should have known what doctor to go to in the first place. Especially if you are stupid enough to go to a bad neighborhood where you can get stabbed. The free market is free because it does not force you to do anything, even if it would be for your own good. Since you did not prepare when you should have, you are stuck with a couple of EMTs who are probably 2-year community college graduates whose opinion will decide whether you will live or die. Tough. Next time, if there is one, you would be wiser, and prepare better. Personal freedom includes having the freedom to screw up and die.
> The key thing is, along with those recommendations, I knew that there was a certain minimum level > of capability each doctor had to have in order to hang a shingle and practice medicine. Beyond > that minimum, I was able to make choices based on the recommendations of family, friends, and > co-workers. It's amazing how a reputation-based system can coexist with minimum licensing standards!
Until you realise that licensing is a reputation based system, with the difference being that the value of the reputation bestowed by a license is imposed on you at gunpoint. You do not have the freedom to choose who provides the minimum qualifications. Under a free market, you could turn to a variety of reputation brokers, who would tell you which doctor has had what qualifications. All without having to force every doctor to adhere to a single arbitrary standard or throwing doctors in jail because they don't even though their level of training may be perfectly adequate for my needs. What you keep forgetting is that whatever the government does, it does at the point of a gun. If you just stop thinking that you have to impose your opinions on everybody, you might be a better person for it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Your point is that socialism is selling high priced crap?
As a former resident of the USSR, I can tell you that socialism is exactly that. Selling high priced crap, and buying high priced crap (when you can get it, that is)
He has conquered the technical world, he has conquered the cooking world, now he needs to buy a ring and conquer the physical world by becoming the ULTIMATE FIGHTING CHAMPION!!!
The kind of game you can put in a browser is not the kind of game you are used to. Browser games are like Angry Birds; toys, not serious games. You get a few minutes of enjoyment that can be had at any time you want. But if you want a lengthy game with decent graphics, like say, Fallout, or Civilization, or Empire Earth, or Sims, then no, those are not going into a browser. The thing is, nobody is making those kinds of games any more. Fallout 3 was the last one as far as I'm concerned. From now on it's just mindless toys for mindless enjoyment.
Artificial intelligence has been the technology of the future for over 40 years. The current state of it is pathetic, and there is no significant research going on. So it will continue to be the technology of the future for a very very long time.
So why is ZFS the only feature ever mentioned? I don't care about ZFS, only servers want that. What does BSD have that normal people want?
Sure you can. You overestimate the number of hosts contacted. There's probably only a couple of thousand hosts ever accessed by regular users; google, facebook, twitter, news. I doubt you'll fill a 16bit subnet with them all. Furthermore, this only needs to be done for v6 hosts, of which there are currently none. All the popular sites will still have v4 addresses, so the DNS proxy might not even have to do anything at all for a long time. If you do it at the individual customer level, such as by putting NAT-PT in the cable modem (which is what I was suggesting in the first place), the table will be even smaller, if it exists at all. Scalability problems do NOT exist at this level.
The whole point is to NOT make the customers switch to v4. You v6 geeks seem to assume that everybody wants v6 and will get it as soon as it's available. That's a serious delusion. Nobody but geeks wants it. Nobody will switch unless they are forced to. Because once you switch, stuff breaks. There's plenty of hardware and applications that simply do not work over v6. All the hosts people want to reach are still v4 and are always going to be. The only real problem is the not-yet-realized lack of v4 addresses, and NAT-PT can solve that without making anybody switch to v6.
That's called NAT-PT and I've just had a huge flamewar about it on the last IPv6 article. Basically, all the v6 geeks here hate NAT and think nobody should be allowed to have such a thing. Hence, the RFC has been deprecated and nobody is even trying to implement it.
> Do you really want a "walled garden" internet where we're limited to being passive consumers of big content?
Walled gardens require central servers, but they are not created by them. You can rent a server for less than you're now paying for your broadband connection and host whatever you want.
> Things "end users" may require end-to-end connectivity for:
> remote logins
No they won't. I've never needed to login to my home computer, and will never need to. I couldn't do it anyway, since I turn it off when I don't use it, like most people do. Geeks who login to their home computers from conferences are so extremely rare, there is no way it can justify designing the internet around them. Besides, you can do that through an ssh proxy, like your probably do already.
> hosting servers
It is much better to rent a server at a data center. You get a much better connection there, and it's cheaper.
> games
Games already require central servers.
> voip and video communications
Already go through a central server.
> p2p
P2P is used almost exclusively for downloading pirated content. As I said before, this problem is political in nature. It would have been much more efficient to let ISPs mirror any content their users download. This would take so much traffic off the backbones, we could host ten whole other internets over them. All it would take is for people to stand up to the government and change the law they disagree with. We're supposed to be a democracy, right? Instead, people are content to keep breaking the law and invent things like P2P that make it easier to not get sued. You think that makes it harder for the government to control you? Think again. The only power the government is supposed to have is to crack down on criminals, and all you've done is give it the excuse to do so whenever it dislikes you for some reason. You can't solve a legal problem by technical means.
Today's websites are apps. They are complicated, bug-infested programs, with ugly UI and high latency. Just like Windows.
> That whole end-to-end principle thing just passed you by, eh?
On the contrary, the whole end-to-end principle has got to go away. End users don't need to connect to other end users. They connect to content servers, which are few in number. The only exception today is P2P protocols, the reasons for which are political, not technical. Fix the politics, and the internet will work just fine without IPv6.
> So.... you don't drive a car, live in a pre-built house, or shop at any known stores, even supermarkets?
I don't choose those from ads, since I never see any.
> Newsflash: most advertising works not to capture clicks, but to instill in you a sense of trust
Only scoundrels want you to trust them. Whenever somebody wants your trust, you can be sure he is out to rip you off. An honest business sells its products because they are good, not because it messed with your mind until believe they are.
> you don't know what brand to buy, but one seems more "familiar" to you
Bullshit. You must choose what you buy by knowing what you are buying. Do you know what the product is? Do you know what it does? What it's made of? How much it costs? What other products are available that fulfill the same function? What price-feature tradeoffs will you need to make? Ads answer none of these questions. Instead they brainwash you into thinking that a certain brand will make you cool, or attractive, or relaxed, or whatever, until purchasing is no longer a rational choice, but a result of subliminal suggestions to your base emotions. When you do that, you stop being a human being and become an animal. To do such a thing to a person is a filthy, immoral thing, and I am truly amazed why it is tolerated.
Yes, I read that. None of those problems are important on a home network (except bittorrent, but I already mentioned that you can fix it by sending hostnames). A home user contacts a couple of hundred sites at most, so there are no problems with scalability.
My point is that the home user need never transition to IPv6 at all. Ever. We do not need persistent internet addresses. We already have DNS for that. IPv6 is an ugly solution for a nonexistent problem. I hate it. I hate the API, I hate that the address doesn't fit into an integral type, I hate that sockaddr_in6 is not a power of 2 in size and the address is not aligned. The kernel API is a pain with it. The autoconfiguration protocol is a pain and much more complicated that DHCP. And finally, there is the plain fact that there is no way I'm running without NAT. NAT is the right thing to do, both as a layer of security, and as a reminder that the contents of my home network is nobody's damn business.
A much better solution is to keep IPv4 on the leaf networks and implement a translation protocol on the backbone. The internet is not a network of equally important hosts. You have content servers and you have users. The former is few in numbers and is easily handled by NAT-PT DNS proxy. The users don't talk to each other directly, but through some server, so don't need to be globally routable.
Nah, I'm just being a troll. I don't know why I still post in the first place. Since the latest UI redesign travesty the site is pretty much dead. I haven't read anything interesting here in months. A few more, and I'm leaving for good.
With a live mouse down your pants, you'll confess to anything!
Bring back NAT-PT! It was prematurely obsoleted due to scalability concerns. Those concerns are indeed valid, but only for large networks. On a home network with a couple of users it is a perfectly viable solution. Put NAT-PT on a router appliance, give it an IPv6 address, and it will let the home network transparently pretend that IPv6 does not exist. Yes, there are a few obvious problems with the few protocols that send IP addresses, like bittorrent, but a simple client fix can easily send hostnames instead. Otherwise, it will just work, and nobody will have to care about IPv6 except ISPs.
Many of the transition problems arise from the insistence that everybody want IPv6. Normal people don't care about IPv6, don't want IPv6, and couldn't care less what it is. Instead of starting to convert from the bottom up, with users going IPv6 first on their home networks, and then the ISPs and backbones switching when everybody has moved, do it the other way around. Convert the backbones to IPv6 down to ISP level. Then the consumers can use NAT-PT appliances to pretend that that did not happen and keep on going without any disruption.
So, not using Adblock is a crime? I mean, I consider advertising an immoral practice and I have never purchased anything I saw in an ad, and would never do that in the future. Then if some obnoxious ad got through my defenses and tricked me into clicking on it, I'd be committing a felony? Man, that sure is pretty harsh. And here we have people bragging how they support sites by not blocking ads (under the assumption that they block ads everywhere else), while in reality they are nothing but criminals.
Remember kids, not blocking ads can be a crime! Your life would be ruined and spent in the pound-me-in-the-you-know-what federal penitentuary. Be safe! Surf smart! Use adblock!
> That's because you're a fucking tool
Thank you for reminding us what is wrong with the open source community today.
> FYI You're one of those guys who just doesn't get it.
Of course I'm one of those guys. I'm not in your little club where everyone knows every bleeding edge API by telepathy. Or maybe in the club of geniuses who can look at MesaGL source code and find those precious 50 lines that are necessary to communicate to DRI that I want to blit a buffer. I'm one of those fools who actually need to see a simple example, or to read API documentation, neither of which is available.
Yes, it's nice that the graphics backend is finally starting to work in Linux. But I'll still have to wait until the day when kernel developers deign to notice us regular people and explain which of those fancy APIs are actually for us to write games and other stuff with. And maybe even explain what we have to do to render a triangle or blit an image to the screen. Using small words, of course, since fucking fools like us can't be expected to understand anything complicated. Or, better yet, nobody without 20 years of kernel programming experience should be allowed to write graphics applications on Linux. That'll keep Linux pure and without any of that bad software that regular guys like me can write.
Gee, I'd love to ditch the bloated monster of OpenGL and X and just use DRI. Only there is absolutely no documentation on how to do it. From what I have read so far I'm under impression I'd have to write a whole graphics driver, which, needless to say, is INSANELY difficult. Trying to look up API documentation and examples on anything but OpenGL is impossible. I am not even sure which API they are trying to promote, or what they all are for. For instance, is GEM a replacement to EGL or its backend? Is DRI an alternative to GEM, or an implementation of it? Then you have EXA, Gallium3D, Vdpau, DRM, and God knows how many alphabet soup APIs, all without a shred of documentation or a even a simple example. I don't know about you, but I'll just wait until the driver people figure out what the hell it is they want to do and then see what the API is then. Maybe they'll even write an example. Maybe then we'll finally have games written for Linux.
So what's this "kythera" that they were so afraid of? Is it coming?
> SVN is available, though CVS isn't
Perhaps this is a good time to consider upgrading to git, eh? Nothing like a server outage to remind you of the problems associated with a central repository, which you probably haven't even backed up.
Steve Jobs: "You are so grounded!"
I've been trying to find how to do the following, but I can't find even what it's called. I want to have an IPv4 network, without IPv6 anywhere in it, but be able to access IPv6 hosts. This is possible because the number of hosts I wish to reach is very small, and it is very feasible to have a kind of a proxy that would intercept DNS and IP requests (is this tunneling?) and map IPv6 addresses to some IPv4 addresses. DNS requests returning IPv6 content would be rewritten to contain these IPv4 values and all incoming and outgoing IP packets would be translated 6-4 through the table of these previously looked up hosts. I'm guessing the table will have a couple of hundred entries, at the most, so performance should not be a problem. This way I could not care if anything out there is IPv6 and just keep going, pretending that it does not exist. Now, this is all pretty obvious to me, so I am sure somebody has though of this before. What is it called? And where can I get the software to do it?
Clearly, the bacteria were scared off by the smell.
Would the masking tape double the capacity of the device? 'Cause I'm very experienced in doing that before.
>> You believe you can trust the AMA to set good standards. I don't know why you do that.
> I'll turn that around: You believe you can trust a bunch of people with zero medical expertise in your community
> to set standards for medical practices and care. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you're just naturally foolish.
You might be ok with the government imposing trust in itself on you at the point of a gun, but I am not. I want to make my own decisions about what is acceptable, I do not want those decisions forced on me by armed thugs. And yes, I may even end up trusting someone who has little medical expertise and make a mistake; that is my right. I do not want the nanny state to protect me from making bad decisions, making mistakes, or screwing up in whatever manner, even if that gets me killed. It's the true meaning of freedom.
That said, nothing stops you from finding your own medical experts and getting their opinion on doctors in the area. If you want "medical expertise", nobody should be able to stop you from finding it, just as they should not be able to stop me from not wanting it.
>> The EMTs in the ambulance should have a pretty good idea which doctors in the area are incapable of doing surgery.
> Oh no, that would never do - then they're imposing THEIR choices on ME. That's not freedom!
They are not imposing their choices on you. You are perfectly free to stay on the side of the road and bleed to death. Rough? Sure. Unfair? Nope. Just like a farmer should know that he needs to prepare for the next year by saving some seed to plant, you should plan for problems like this. If the farmer eats his own seed corn over the winter, people are free to rip him off in the spring when he wants to buy seed from those who prepared. Likewise, your safety is your responsibility. You should have known what doctor to go to in the first place. Especially if you are stupid enough to go to a bad neighborhood where you can get stabbed. The free market is free because it does not force you to do anything, even if it would be for your own good. Since you did not prepare when you should have, you are stuck with a couple of EMTs who are probably 2-year community college graduates whose opinion will decide whether you will live or die. Tough. Next time, if there is one, you would be wiser, and prepare better. Personal freedom includes having the freedom to screw up and die.
> The key thing is, along with those recommendations, I knew that there was a certain minimum level
> of capability each doctor had to have in order to hang a shingle and practice medicine. Beyond
> that minimum, I was able to make choices based on the recommendations of family, friends, and
> co-workers. It's amazing how a reputation-based system can coexist with minimum licensing standards!
Until you realise that licensing is a reputation based system, with the difference being that the value of the reputation bestowed by a license is imposed on you at gunpoint. You do not have the freedom to choose who provides the minimum qualifications. Under a free market, you could turn to a variety of reputation brokers, who would tell you which doctor has had what qualifications. All without having to force every doctor to adhere to a single arbitrary standard or throwing doctors in jail because they don't even though their level of training may be perfectly adequate for my needs. What you keep forgetting is that whatever the government does, it does at the point of a gun. If you just stop thinking that you have to impose your opinions on everybody, you might be a better person for it.