Mind being a bit more verbose? What is it exactly that makes the ICANN/Verisign root preferable to some of the alternatives? I think your statement is non-obvious to a lot of people here.
Yes, in the past there has been a lot of "tempest in a teapot" kinds of squabbles in the alt DNS scene. The scene is maturing rapidly, though. We are approaching the point of having a unified alternate root, a sort of federal namespace. We are still in the beta stage, metaphorically, but it won't be long before we're ready for a 1.0 release.
For me it would have to be OpenNIC. TINC is fine, but I think the basic idea of a democratically governed namespace is important enough to decide the issue. At least for me.
As far as the issue of cooperation between the roots, that is something we are working on quite a bit now. In the last few months OpenNIC has begun peering TLDs from both AlterNIC and the Pacific Root (including quite a few that are also in the ORSC root, such as.biz). We are currently trying to work out agreements with TINC (answer your email, guys!), ORSC and name.space. The only group which seems to be resolutely set against cooperation is new.net. If you have no other reason not to use them, that should be enough.
OpenNIC also provides full resolution of the ICANN/Verisign and country code TLDs, and all of the other legacy TLDs.
The main obstacle to cooperation is the existence of multiple claims to a few popular TLD strings.Both ORSC and AlterNIC, for example, claim.nic. And.xxx. And some others with obvious symbolic and/or commercial significance. We are trying to work these issues out. We are making progress, I think, in spite of some of the egos involved.
I urge everyone who is sick of ICANN to start using one of the alternate roots. I recommend OpenNIC, but that should soon become irrelevant with the establishment of a more or less unified alternate namespace.
I would also urge people who believe in this to register domain names in alternate namespace and to make content available under those domains. After all, the only way we'll ever get any kind of widespread adoption is by having content that is sufficiently compelling to make people complain to their ISPs about not being able to see it.
Interesting you should point this out, because that is exactly the policy we have over at the OpenNIC. Each TLD (we only have four now) has a root nameserver, which is synched with a central master server. These are dispersed (at present we have servers in the Bay Area, LA, New York and New Jersey).
See http://www.opennic.glue/public_servers.html
or
http://www.opennic.unrated.net/public_servers.html if you're not using opennic nameservers.
Of course, we don't sell domain names. They're free.
Well, that depends entirely on the charter. Charters for TLDs are rather like bylaws. And the charter, at least in the OpenNIC system, depends on the will of the domain name holders in that TLD. So if the charter needs changing, or the users of the TLD want it to be differenct, it's as simple as calling for a vote.
In the case of the current charter of.parody, a site must be active and have content that can be construed as appropriately "parodic" in order to be immune from reassignment. So squatting can't really happen. If you're not using it, you lose it if someone else wants it. This might sound draconian, but, hey, the domains are free! And this aspect of the charter can always be modified by a vote of the users. If you don;t like it, get a.parody domain name and convince your fellow domain holders to change it!
Flexibility is the key, and majority rule. Did I mention common sense?
The solution to the problem is not, as some people have suggested, doing away with domain names altogether. Neither is the answer to establish IP guidelines for all of the Inclusive Name Space.
Rather, the solution is to establish an Inclusive Name Space which has a few very simple rules relating to the introduction of new top-level domains. The inclusive name space will consist of a set of top-level domains, each of which has a charter. That charter defines the kind of IP rules which will apply within that TLD..edu is a good example. It has an explicit charter allowing registration of domain names only by 4-year post-secondary educatiobnal institutions. While some errors have been made in the application of this charter (see www.exeter.edu. e.g.), for the most part it has made.edu a meaningful TLD. You can type [university].edu and get where you are going.
Further, within.edu, some institutions have something like a prior right to their names. Therefore, harvard could not register stanford.edu, since this would be prohibited by the charter. When was the last time you heard about a domain name dispute in.edu? They are mostly in.com, because it is 1/2 chartered (it is supposed to be for commercial organizations after all, at least it was originally) and 1/2 general (NetSol, since they were out to make a buck, sold domain names to anybody who wanted one, so you got a lot of non-commercial orhanizations and individuals in there). This ambiguity is why we have so many problems with.com,.net and.org.
This is why we need new TLDs, and we need new chartered TLDs. And this is what the OpenNIC is all about. We already have a few new strictly-chartered TLDs (.oss for open source projects,.bbs for BBS things, web-logs and the like,.geek for geek-related pages,.parody for parodies). Within these TLDs, IP considerations are more or less non-existent. McDonalds could never register mcdonalds.oss, unless the open-sourced their cash-register software or something.:^P
There is a place for generic top-level domains. These should be operated on a first-come first-served basis, however. For everything else, we need strictly-chartered TLDs. And this is precisely the difference between the OpenNIC and other TLD operators. We believe in strict charters. Everyone else (including ICANN/Verisign/etc) seems to just want to sell a bunch of names and get rich. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, in principle. But it's no way to run a namespace.
1) new.net is old.hat. Why should we prefer it to ICANN? What the hell's the difference? New.net might bring the prices of SLDs down a bit from competition, if it succeeds, (though it is now charging about the same as NSI) but it is fundamentally an inferior solution to the problem than is ICANN. I mean, at least ICANN is to some degree publically accountable (though to a small degree). New.net is ruled by corporate fiat. It could fold at any moment, and feels itself under no obligation to respect existing claims apart from its own. What we really need is democratic namespace governance, where the inclusive namespace is treated not a cash cow to milk, but rather as a global resource to be managed. ICANN made a gesture in this direction by allowing some elected board members. They failed miserably in this attempt, though, by stacking the board with appointees and board-nominated candidates. ICANN now has zero legitimacy as a democratically-governed body, and it would take more humility and faith in the democratic model than Vint Cerf and his cronies can muster to reverse its current trajectory. In short, ICANN has killed itself by arrogance and mismanagement. It is toast. At present, the only democratic alternative is the OpenNIC. Check it out.
2) The objection that is always brought up when the possibility of alternative root systems is mentioned is that nobody supports them. As someone said a few comments above, "when AOL supports it, then I'll buy it". But I want to make several points. First, for many purposes one does not need every joe sixpack out there to be able to access one's domain. Community sites like/. or k5 have a dedicated, stable body of readers. All they need is for THOSE READERS to be able to resolve their alt domain name. This is very different from ecommerce sites, like amazon, who need universal resolution. Many applications get by fine without universal resolution. Second, it is very easy to operate sites on two domain names at the same time. An example: the JEdit project, and open source programmer's editor, can be seen at both www.jedit.oss (.oss is the OpenNIC TLD for open source software projects) and at jedit.sourceforge.net. It makes no difference. There are many more examples, including the Linux Dreamcast Project, LAngband, TODD, dj in a box, and more. And since.oss domain names are FREE, why not use both?
In short, for all of you who don't like ICANN, and who don't think new.net is any better, support and use the OpenNIC.
Excellent quote. That sums it right up. As the Village Voice article make very clear, there is are a lot of big egos in the Alt DNS world. Basically, a lot of people want to be Vint Cerf.
Well, we don't need another Vint Cerf. We need a way of operating our namespace which is accountable and cannot be held hostage by monied interests - as has certainly been the case with ICANN, and would probably be the case with name.space and others as well. Hell, new.net IS a monied interest.
For this reason, I am a member of OpenNIC. Membership and full voting rights are available to anyone with an interest and internet access.
Carbon dating, from the reports I've read is only accurate at more than 5,000 years and less than 80,000. They say this because at about 80,000 years, quite a few organisms are just plain out of C-14.
Actually, c-14 is useful for dates as recent as a century ago. It is only useful to about 40,000 years ago, since most c-14 has decayed into c-12 by that time. Very precise measuring techniques can push that back a bit, but I don't think as far as 80,000 years ago.
Actually, dating based on the radioactive decay of isotopes is horribly flawed.
It assumes a *lot* about the composition of the Earth today being the same as it was millions of years ago. No-one can ever prove [or disprove] this assumption, so the reliability of carbon dating is based on how much you trust the infallibility of science.
I Am An Archaeologist, and I can tell you that at least for the relatively recent past (last 10000 years or so) radiocarbon dating works very well. It is not infallible, of course, and that is why any archaeologist who is responsible and has a decent budget will run multiple radiocarbon dates in a single context, to make sure you don't have a crazy outlier.
Radiocarbon dating assumes only three things:
1: that the rate of radioactive decay of the carbon-14 isotope has remained constant.
2: that the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio in the atmosphere was the same 'back then' as it is now (or was before we started setting off nuclear weapons blasts...),
3: that the carbon in the sampe being dated was derived exclusively from atmospheric carbon dioxide. and,
4: that c-14 and c-12 are absorbed into plant tissues (and subsequently into animal tissues) at the same rate. That is, that plant A does not absorb proportionately more c-14 than does plant B, and so on up the food chain.
The first assumption is a pretty safe one, since to doubt that would be to call into question very fundamental physical principals. I think the halflife of c-14 is about 5580 years, but that's just off the top of my head.
The second assumption is obviously false, since cycles in the sun's radiation output affect the amount of carbon 14 produced in the upper atmosphere. For the recent past (4-5000 years) this has been corrected for by testing the c-14/c-12 ratio in precisely-dated (annual) tree rings in very old trees. So this is not a problem for recent times, and the difference even as much as 20000 years ago is probably not more than 1000 years or so. Again, not too much of a problem.
The third and fourth assumptions are also problems, but the problems are understood and are being explored as we speak. Every year the correction methods for c-14 dating get more sophisticated. The important thing to remember, though, is that we are down to pretty fine points now. Any error introduced by failures of assumptions three and four would be in the range of a few centuries, max. Significant, but not enough to invalidate conclusions about the antiquity of human cultures, say.
Sorry for the long post. I just wanted to point out tha while it is true that radiometric dating methods do make certain assumptions about conditions in the past, the limitation which these impose on the accuracy of the technique are well-understood and are taken into consideration by archaeologists and paleontologists.
I also want to say that, like any scientific tool, radiometric dating is imperfect. But it is a hell of a lot better than simply guessing, or throwing up our hands. Do we want to study the past systematically and rigorously? If so, we must use these tools. If not, then, heck, the Bible was good enough for my grand-pappy.
The classification of the specimen is a problem, as the authors of the Nature article acknowledge. However, the age is not. The specimens (> 1 BTW) were found in well-documented geological strata. These strata have been well-dated using a variety of techniques, but especially potassium-argon dating, which is useful for volcanic rocks on this time range.
For more on potassuim-argon dating, here is a brittanica.com link
Also, nobody ever said anything about "characteristics of human and chimpanzee". To the extent that we are all hominids, of course it shares traits with the apes and with humans. It's not some sort of missing link, though...
Yes, indeedy. There are a number of alternate roots out there that operate very reliable DNS systems with an expanded namespace. For a list, see this page. (That's www.opennic.glue for those of you using openDNS, though both will work, of course.) Some of these are real fly-by-night operations. Others are long-term, commercial ventures. Some are market-capitalist (such as name-space and pacroot, and, now, new.net), others are more anarchist (anarchyNIC, possibly ORSC), and still others are democratically organized (OpenNIC).
When is ICANN going to realize that DNS is not rocket science? And when is the internet citizenry going to realize that they DO have a choice in their namespace? I mean, do you just accept all the defaults when you install an OS or an application? Of course not, you choose the options that are right for your needs and purposes. The choice of namespace should be the same way.
Won't be too long before the RIAA will get the USA Marines to enforce their copyright.
Or private mercenaries/assassins. We are talking about a lot of money here, and ruthless people. Remember, no cops/British law in sealand means no protection from extra-legal activity, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, in the past there has been a lot of "tempest in a teapot" kinds of squabbles in the alt DNS scene. The scene is maturing rapidly, though. We are approaching the point of having a unified alternate root, a sort of federal namespace. We are still in the beta stage, metaphorically, but it won't be long before we're ready for a 1.0 release.
Claim your namespace.
As far as the issue of cooperation between the roots, that is something we are working on quite a bit now. In the last few months OpenNIC has begun peering TLDs from both AlterNIC and the Pacific Root (including quite a few that are also in the ORSC root, such as .biz). We are currently trying to work out agreements with TINC (answer your email, guys!), ORSC and name.space. The only group which seems to be resolutely set against cooperation is new.net. If you have no other reason not to use them, that should be enough.
OpenNIC also provides full resolution of the ICANN/Verisign and country code TLDs, and all of the other legacy TLDs.
The main obstacle to cooperation is the existence of multiple claims to a few popular TLD strings.Both ORSC and AlterNIC, for example, claim .nic. And .xxx. And some others with obvious symbolic and/or commercial significance. We are trying to work these issues out. We are making progress, I think, in spite of some of the egos involved.
I urge everyone who is sick of ICANN to start using one of the alternate roots. I recommend OpenNIC, but that should soon become irrelevant with the establishment of a more or less unified alternate namespace.
I would also urge people who believe in this to register domain names in alternate namespace and to make content available under those domains. After all, the only way we'll ever get any kind of widespread adoption is by having content that is sufficiently compelling to make people complain to their ISPs about not being able to see it.
Claim your namespace.
See http://www.opennic.glue/public_servers.html
or
http://www.opennic.unrated.net/public_servers.html if you're not using opennic nameservers.
Of course, we don't sell domain names. They're free.
Claim your namespace.
In the case of the current charter of .parody, a site must be active and have content that can be construed as appropriately "parodic" in order to be immune from reassignment. So squatting can't really happen. If you're not using it, you lose it if someone else wants it. This might sound draconian, but, hey, the domains are free! And this aspect of the charter can always be modified by a vote of the users. If you don;t like it, get a .parody domain name and convince your fellow domain holders to change it!
Flexibility is the key, and majority rule. Did I mention common sense?
Claim your namespace.
The solution to the problem is not, as some people have suggested, doing away with domain names altogether. Neither is the answer to establish IP guidelines for all of the Inclusive Name Space.
Rather, the solution is to establish an Inclusive Name Space which has a few very simple rules relating to the introduction of new top-level domains. The inclusive name space will consist of a set of top-level domains, each of which has a charter. That charter defines the kind of IP rules which will apply within that TLD. .edu is a good example. It has an explicit charter allowing registration of domain names only by 4-year post-secondary educatiobnal institutions. While some errors have been made in the application of this charter (see www.exeter.edu. e.g.), for the most part it has made .edu a meaningful TLD. You can type [university].edu and get where you are going.
Further, within .edu, some institutions have something like a prior right to their names. Therefore, harvard could not register stanford.edu, since this would be prohibited by the charter. When was the last time you heard about a domain name dispute in .edu? They are mostly in .com, because it is 1/2 chartered (it is supposed to be for commercial organizations after all, at least it was originally) and 1/2 general (NetSol, since they were out to make a buck, sold domain names to anybody who wanted one, so you got a lot of non-commercial orhanizations and individuals in there). This ambiguity is why we have so many problems with .com, .net and .org.
This is why we need new TLDs, and we need new chartered TLDs. And this is what the OpenNIC is all about. We already have a few new strictly-chartered TLDs (.oss for open source projects, .bbs for BBS things, web-logs and the like, .geek for geek-related pages, .parody for parodies). Within these TLDs, IP considerations are more or less non-existent. McDonalds could never register mcdonalds.oss, unless the open-sourced their cash-register software or something. :^P
There is a place for generic top-level domains. These should be operated on a first-come first-served basis, however. For everything else, we need strictly-chartered TLDs. And this is precisely the difference between the OpenNIC and other TLD operators. We believe in strict charters. Everyone else (including ICANN/Verisign/etc) seems to just want to sell a bunch of names and get rich. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, in principle. But it's no way to run a namespace.
Claim your namespace.
2) The objection that is always brought up when the possibility of alternative root systems is mentioned is that nobody supports them. As someone said a few comments above, "when AOL supports it, then I'll buy it". But I want to make several points. First, for many purposes one does not need every joe sixpack out there to be able to access one's domain. Community sites like /. or k5 have a dedicated, stable body of readers. All they need is for THOSE READERS to be able to resolve their alt domain name. This is very different from ecommerce sites, like amazon, who need universal resolution. Many applications get by fine without universal resolution. Second, it is very easy to operate sites on two domain names at the same time. An example: the JEdit project, and open source programmer's editor, can be seen at both www.jedit.oss (.oss is the OpenNIC TLD for open source software projects) and at jedit.sourceforge.net. It makes no difference. There are many more examples, including the Linux Dreamcast Project, LAngband, TODD, dj in a box, and more. And since .oss domain names are FREE, why not use both?
In short, for all of you who don't like ICANN, and who don't think new.net is any better, support and use the OpenNIC.
Claim your namespace.
Also scooped by nerdperfect
http://www.nerdperfect.null/display.np?sid=543
for users of OpenDNS.
http://www.nerdperfect.com/display.np?sid=543
for users of legacy DNS.
Claim your namespace.
Well, we don't need another Vint Cerf. We need a way of operating our namespace which is accountable and cannot be held hostage by monied interests - as has certainly been the case with ICANN, and would probably be the case with name.space and others as well. Hell, new.net IS a monied interest.
For this reason, I am a member of OpenNIC. Membership and full voting rights are available to anyone with an interest and internet access.
Claim your namespace.
Have a nice day.
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.
Actually, c-14 is useful for dates as recent as a century ago. It is only useful to about 40,000 years ago, since most c-14 has decayed into c-12 by that time. Very precise measuring techniques can push that back a bit, but I don't think as far as 80,000 years ago.
Claim your namespace.
Actually, dating based on the radioactive decay of isotopes is horribly flawed.
It assumes a *lot* about the composition of the Earth today being the same as it was millions of years ago. No-one can ever prove [or disprove] this assumption, so the reliability of carbon dating is based on how much you trust the infallibility of science.
Personally, I don't trust it at all.
Dumbass.
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.
Radiocarbon dating assumes only three things:
1: that the rate of radioactive decay of the carbon-14 isotope has remained constant.
2: that the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio in the atmosphere was the same 'back then' as it is now (or was before we started setting off nuclear weapons blasts...),
3: that the carbon in the sampe being dated was derived exclusively from atmospheric carbon dioxide.
and, 4: that c-14 and c-12 are absorbed into plant tissues (and subsequently into animal tissues) at the same rate. That is, that plant A does not absorb proportionately more c-14 than does plant B, and so on up the food chain.
The first assumption is a pretty safe one, since to doubt that would be to call into question very fundamental physical principals. I think the halflife of c-14 is about 5580 years, but that's just off the top of my head.
The second assumption is obviously false, since cycles in the sun's radiation output affect the amount of carbon 14 produced in the upper atmosphere. For the recent past (4-5000 years) this has been corrected for by testing the c-14/c-12 ratio in precisely-dated (annual) tree rings in very old trees. So this is not a problem for recent times, and the difference even as much as 20000 years ago is probably not more than 1000 years or so. Again, not too much of a problem.
The third and fourth assumptions are also problems, but the problems are understood and are being explored as we speak. Every year the correction methods for c-14 dating get more sophisticated. The important thing to remember, though, is that we are down to pretty fine points now. Any error introduced by failures of assumptions three and four would be in the range of a few centuries, max. Significant, but not enough to invalidate conclusions about the antiquity of human cultures, say.
Sorry for the long post. I just wanted to point out tha while it is true that radiometric dating methods do make certain assumptions about conditions in the past, the limitation which these impose on the accuracy of the technique are well-understood and are taken into consideration by archaeologists and paleontologists.
I also want to say that, like any scientific tool, radiometric dating is imperfect. But it is a hell of a lot better than simply guessing, or throwing up our hands. Do we want to study the past systematically and rigorously? If so, we must use these tools. If not, then, heck, the Bible was good enough for my grand-pappy.
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.
For more on potassuim-argon dating, here is a brittanica.com link
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716 ,62600+1+61049,00.html
Also, nobody ever said anything about "characteristics of human and chimpanzee". To the extent that we are all hominids, of course it shares traits with the apes and with humans. It's not some sort of missing link, though...
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.
When is ICANN going to realize that DNS is not rocket science? And when is the internet citizenry going to realize that they DO have a choice in their namespace? I mean, do you just accept all the defaults when you install an OS or an application? Of course not, you choose the options that are right for your needs and purposes. The choice of namespace should be the same way.
My 2 cents.
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.
Or private mercenaries/assassins. We are talking about a lot of money here, and ruthless people. Remember, no cops/British law in sealand means no protection from extra-legal activity, either.
Claim your namespace.
They play great, too! I've had some problems getting hardware accelleration working in Quake II but other than that all of these run great.
Check out the Linux Quake HOWTO, and the Linux DOOM FAQ.
Peace.
Claim your namespace.
http://www.gracenote.com/players.html/OS=oth/type= plcd/player=Jukebox
They call it Unix/Linux, but really it's just 'other'
Claim your namespace.
The OpenNIC nameservers and OpenNIC DNS are unaffected though....
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.
Claim your namespace.