Who Will Fix the Internet? No One, Apparently 370
blackbearnh writes "It seems like everyone focuses on the latest and greatest killer Internet applications, but the underlying infrastructure that all of them run on is showing its age. That's the claim made by a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor. IPv4 is relatively ancient, and even stalled improvements like IPv6 aren't significant enough to matter, according to some researchers. With no one 'in charge' of the Internet, it's almost impossible to get any sweeping technical improvements made, especially since there's no financial incentive on the part of the ISPs and telecoms to invest in basic infrastructure. CalTech Professor John Doyle puts it this way: 'To the extent I've been working in this field for the last 10 years, I've been mostly working on band-aids. I'm really trying to get out of that business and try to help the people, the few people, who are really trying to think more fundamentally about what needs to be done.'"
Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:5, Funny)
Let the porn industry fix the internet. They're responsible for most of the traffic.
Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly you don't know what the Christian Science Monitor [wikipedia.org] is. The CSM is not only widely regarded, winning numerous (ironically) Pulitzer Prizes, but given it's awesome "Fuck you, you lying douche bag, Joseph Pulitzer!" origin, it's positively punk rock.
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no way to respond? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well there are 2 links to respond to them at the bottom of every page; labeled "Feedback" and "Contact Us." Certainly they're not like Slashdot where they're mostly commentary, but then not every site can be nor should be. You could, though, submit a Christian Science Monitor article to Slashdot and probably start a quite good discussion.
As for their articles often being rants, I'll sometimes think someone is ranting when I disagree with them. Often articles are written for people whom are informed, whom br
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False.
This is an urban legend that is not true either now (porn made the net boom), or back in the past (porn killed Betamax cause they chose VHS). If you look at the actual video output the porn industry is only ~5% of sales. The dominant force is Hollywood, followed by the school market, then local TV studios, finally business, and porn is a distant last place.
Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:5, Funny)
sales
You...pay...for pornography?
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Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:5, Funny)
And then, if they get a wife, they're back to porn. Is circle of life. Or something.
Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:5, Funny)
I can just see the scene- The door bell going, the bored housewife answering the door, and some badly dubbed sys admin appears, announces he's here to fix her internet as a dodgy 70's funk soundtrack starts up...
Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:5, Funny)
Admin: Excuse me miss, I'm here to fix your PPP WAN connection.
Housewife: Oh! My.. (blushes). Well, please come in
(The Admin lurches in, slightly sweaty and breathing through his mouth)
Housewife: Can I get you anything? Cake or cookies?
Admin: No, thanks, I'm lactose intolerant. Cookies give me gas. Where's your ethernet router?
Housewife: (deeper blushes) Oh, my. How about a drink then? Scotch?
Admin: I'd take a mountain dew. Diet though. I'm watching my weight.
(He pats an ample belly. The housewife's eyes grow wide.)
Housewife: I'll.... I'll get you something right away. (She hurries off to the kitchen)
Admin: (Calling after) Where's the computer?
Housewife: The computer?! It's, ahhh, in the living room.
(The Admin waddles to the computer, which is neatly set on a small, immaculately dusted table with pullout keyboard shelf. He rips the table out from the wall, kneels down and begins rummaging amidst the jungle of wires at the back. After some time he pauses, and turns around to see the Housewife standing over him with a glass of soda and a plate of potato chips. She has been there for some time.)
Admin: Oh thank's! (He's wolfs down the meager glass and munches on a few chips).
Housewife: You're welcome. Have you found the problem yet?
Admin: Oh yeah. (He's wipes his greasy fingers on his front of his shirt). I need to adjust your broadband for IPv6.
Housewife: I...see. And, what might that involve? Will I have to call my husband? He's at work right now.
Admin: Naww. It shouldn't take a minute. I've got your upgrade right here!
(He reaches into the fanny pack on the front of his tool belt and rummages around. The Housewife begins to feel faint)
Admin: Here it is! (He draws a small sleek black router from the pouch)
Housewife: And what's that for?
Admin: It's for your line. I just have to rejig everything.
(He back about and resumes his rummaging. The Housewife slumps back on the sofa and stares silently.)
Admin: All done. Can you check to see if it's working?
Housewife: What?
Admin: On the computer. Check to see if your internet is working. Open your browser and go to ipv6.google.com
Housewife: Oh! (See hikes up her dress and sits and the computer desk. As she clicks, she hikes the dress up intermittantly.)
Admin: Is it working?
Housewife: Oh! (Her voice is noticeably more sultry) Something went wrong. I seem to have come across some kind of... pornographic website. Could you take a look?
Admin: It's probably a virus. You should use Ubuntu. I could partition your drives for you if you like.
(He lumbers up from the floor and leans over towards the desk. As he presses against her and brusquely takes the mouse from her grasp, the Housewife finally succumbs and passes out.)
(When she awakes, she is lying on the floor with the Admin sitting at the desk.) /media. It should work seamlessly. Anyway, I have to get back to the office.
Housewife: What.. what happened?
Admin: (The admin glances at here, then turns back to the computer screen.) I fixed the problem on the Windows partition and installed Ubuntu Jaunty on a second partition. It should be working fine now. I've set up the dual boot to load up Ubuntu by default, but you can change it by editing the Lilo files.
Housewife: What about my computer files?
Admin: Everything's accessible from Nautilus. I've mounted your old drives as WINDOZE_OLD in
(He gathers his tools and makes for the door)
Housewife: Wait! What about my husband's files from work? What about his emails.
Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:4, Funny)
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Ideally you'd want to build "Internet 2". Start by getting major bandwidth intensive services onboard like Steam, NetFlix, Xbox Live, maybe some of the larger web entities like Google, eBay, Amazon etc. and market it as a better faster way to get your content similar to the way FIOS is being advertised now.
The Pr0n industry will jump on board quickly (like they always do) and once that ball is rolling
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We already have Internet2 [wikipedia.org]
I think you mean Internet 1.5 since it'll just be an improvement of 1.0.
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Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I would think that file sharing is the biggest part of the traffic, followed by porn.
What do you think a large slice of file sharing consists of?
Re:Let the porn industry take the lead... (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, I think you both are forgetting SPAM...
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Net traffic is Bit Torrent, then email, then porn, then the rest...
The Whole Point if the Internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Whole Point if the Internet... (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose IANA could start handing out IPv6 addresses only from now on, that'd shake the industry up quickly enough; and if ICANN announced that they would turn off IPv4 on its DNS roots, it'd have the same effect.
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I suppose IANA could start handing out IPv6 addresses only from now on, that'd shake the industry up quickly enough...
They won't have much choice in ~700 days [ipv6forum.com]. It's so close, I don't think there's much point bringing the date forward.
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Because it won't happen in ~700 days, it will happen in ~700+X days, where X is time bought with stupid last ditch efforts like spewing NAT everywhere and reselling/freeing unused blocks of ipv4 addresses. Any way to avoid spending those X days working with a broken Internet is a positive in my book.
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The only thing "on hold" is the USA, not IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
The Internet is improving everyday as better routers, faster servers, new better cables/antennas are deployed, the last mile connection options are also multiplying. IPv6 is put on hold as there is no real need for it at the moment.
IPv6 is NOT on hold. Most of Asia are already using IPv6. If you use Apple there's a good chance you're using IPv6 without even realising it. The EU is mandating moves to IPv6 in the coming years, and I imagine most countries are doing something similar.
The US may have its head in the sand, but that doesn't mean everyone else does.
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Re:The only thing "on hold" is the USA, not IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
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Most of Asia are already using IPv6.
Yes, fractions of a percent, just like the US who "has its head in the sand."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment [wikipedia.org]
Re:The only thing "on hold" is the USA, not IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
The US doesn't have its "head in the sand". The US government and corporations are simply in the position of having large blocks of IPv4 addresses, so there's far less urgency. Of course China is using IPv6 - they came along too late to get many v4 addresses, and v6 already existed when they started building out infrastructure. The US market is relatively mature, as well, so you're not going to see the kind of demand growth you have in other places. We could last for decades on NATs.
Re:The only thing "on hold" is the USA, not IPv6 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Whole Point if the Internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up. The only reason the Internet is not augmented TV by now is that nobody had the ability to "fix" it.
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I agree completely mod GP way up. The organization with the power to "Fix" the internet will have the power to control it.
You just have to ask yourself "how much money would the RIAA pay to 'fix' the internet?" to see how bad this could get.
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I tend to agree, and dislike the direction the article (summary) seems to be trying to push the underlying facts in. However, there's no reason to think that the internet couldn't be fixed by simply thinking up a compelling, simple, elegant solution.
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there's no reason to think that the internet couldn't be fixed by simply thinking up a compelling, simple, elegant solution.
You're assuming that there is a simple, elegant solution. There may not be one!
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there's no reason to think that the internet couldn't be fixed by simply thinking up a compelling, simple, elegant solution.
And there is no reason to think that the current economic crisis can't be fixed by simply thinking up a simple and elegant way of generating free energy.
Re:The Whole Point if the Internet... (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, "An ISP big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."
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Kind of like the history of various civilizations and nations. In most every case, they begin their rise to prosperity with a diffuse and decentralized nature. Then the bureaucracy forms that squeezes the life out of it in the name of bettering it.
Centralized control is to freedom as Marketing is
Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
It is unfortunate, though, that even in business, the incentive of profit is outweighed by the incentive of short-term profit.
Upgrading infrastructure is a big investment over the long term, which makes sense to you and me, but to your average MBA, the question is "what's the ROI for the next two quarters?" and of course, the short-term ROI on a long-term investment is always poor.
So, the upgrades aren't made, and everyone goes on pretending nothing's going to go wrong (if it's not going to go wrong this quarter, there's no danger!) and nothing happens until the problem has been put off for so long that suddenly, it's right around the corner and it's obvious that catastrophe is the only possible result from continuing to ignore it. Then, even more money than would have gone into a phased upgrade goes into an emergency upgrade, patching things left and right, dealing with outages, and generally making a mess of things.
It's the way everything works, though, really -- matters of climate change, unsustainable financial practices -- so long as doomsday isn't tomorrow, no one cares.
I Thought We'd Been Through This? (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically, it'll start to happen when we really do run out of IP addresses and things get desperate and it will happen when someone comes up with a sane and straightforward guide for making IPv6 co-exist happily with existing IPv4 networks and making sure everyone knows about it. Until those things happen there is zero incentive to rip out and replace or tinker with something so fundamental. Band aids are the order of the day and have been in every piece of fundamental infrastructure since time imemorial. We must leave this 'rip out and replace' culture in computing far behind otherwise no one can ever take us seriously.
Re:I Thought We'd Been Through This? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Thought We'd Been Through This? (Score:5, Funny)
ATDT 5601750
(beep beep boop beep bleep blep boop)
(squuuuuuooooosh)
(aaaaeeeh)
.
.
.
CONNECT 1200
I agree. There's nothing wrong with the internet, so why bother fixing it? As you can see I can access it just fine and I never needed to upgrade one single bit of my equipment.
+++
ATH
@&%*@... &*(&%(*... CARRIER LOST
Re:I Thought We'd Been Through This? (Score:5, Informative)
@&%*@... &*(&%(*... NO CARRIER
Fixed that for you :)
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Re:I Thought We'd Been Through This? (Score:5, Funny)
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IPv6 can happily coexist with IPv4 (well, almost).
For example, I'm writing this from a dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 machine, which has world-reachable IPv6 address with ipsec used to confine dangerous services only to trusted clients. I also have a notebook which runs mobile IPv6 and transparently switches from wired to wireless connections. I also have several Windows machines which happily interoperate with my Linux machines (using ipsec and everything).
My only problem? Lack of native IPv6 transit from my provide
Not Necessarily a bad thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the internet's virtues are a result of the fact that it grew up before anybody outside of a narrow circle knew that it was going to be significant, so its development was relatively uncrippled. We aren't going to have that opportunity again. Any "new internet" proposal is going to have the grubby claws of "stakeholders" all over it.
Re:Not Necessarily a bad thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a good point. If you want to see the kind of Internet the industry wants, look at the US mobile phone market.
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Proactive...not (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Proactive...not (Score:4, Insightful)
This looks like a job for... (Score:2, Funny)
We need more competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Having some centralized organization handle network upgrades will work out about as well as it did in the 90's, ie not at all. They'll just pocket the money and continue to clamp down on their customers. The only way to improve service is to increase competition.
Re:We need more competition (Score:4, Informative)
If we allowed more competition,...
It's not merely an issue of allowing more competition. For example, here in California cable TV is not a state-granted monopoly. And yet, you will find close to zero overlapping cable TV regions. Why? Because it makes little economic sense to the operators to do that. One operator, having paid for infrastructure, can lower prices in its region to below what a new competitor could afford, because the new competitor, having to lay down duplicate infrastructure, will be taking it over the barrel on paying for its new infrastructure. So the new operator just shies off from the whole thing. It's really a kind of willful collusion, but there's nothing evil about it. It's just good, obvious business sense.
At best, you can hope for the phone company, the cable company, and maybe some new third leg of wireless operators to form some kind of three way competitive market for delivery services. I don't think this is nearly enough, however, for any thing at all resembling competition. Markets with relatively small numbers of participants tend to engage in huge amounts of tacit collusion. Basically, it's very easy for the various players to watch each other's prices, set similar price points, and become lax about the whole thing. The victim is the consumer.
Real competition occurs in thriving markets where new competitors enter with innovations that lower the fundamental cost basis of their products. This forces competitors to adopt similar innovations or die. This seldom happens in small markets with a static set of competitors, because they're all set in their ways, and know the others are set in their ways. I.e., they can happily never change a thing and GET AWAY WITH IT.
So basically, don't hold your breath on any kind of real competition occurring here. While I'm a big fan of competitive markets, I'm a big cynic on this market. On a bad day, in a bad mood, I think we should just regulate the entire thing.
C//
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I want to believe you. But it's just not true.
For example, the UTOPIA [utopianet.org] network offers much faster speeds than are available from any other providers. They've been around for 5 years, and yet they still haven't really caught on.
It's unfortunate, but as long as most people are getting the pages and applications they want, when they want them, they'll be happy with not-the-fastest-speed. And most of the time, that's what happens.
Complacency FTW!
Improvements ARE being made... (Score:5, Insightful)
and it's not the internet that needs to improve (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of the "problems with the Internet" are not technical problems so much as social, legal, and financial ones.
SPAM would be an example - except that today's legal approach has failed catastrophically to address the issue. The US has a weak "you can spam" act, and the UK is worse (Spam can only be stopped, one spammer to spammee "information" flow at a time, starting from the second message any given spammer sends to any given recipient). But the problem is not IP. Nor is the problem, fundamentally, that anonymous virtually-free email is possible (it is a system that has many important benefits - from global accessibility, to anonymity). The problem is unscrupulous users who exploit the internet by sending spam.
The Network Neutrality debate is driven by under-investing ISPs who want to run an under-resourced cheap network, and split it into many segmented markets, where they can charge each separate segment as much as it will bear without going into bankruptcy. This will fossilise current usage models of the network, and be a huge barrier to innovation.
Many of today's security "problems of the Internet" are no more Internet problems than mugging or burglary are a problem with streets. The real problem is undetected criminals, and insecure computers and protocols.
Most of these issues either are being addressed - or can be addressed without "fixing" the Internet.
Hands off (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem correlates to what makes the Internet so successful: it's a wide-open, essentially unregulated space.
With no centralized authority, you get benefits like anonymity (see how long that lasts once the bureaucrats get their hooks in it--oh noes! the terrorists! think of the children! we must track each user), innovation (in just a few years we've gone from hypertext to graphical MMORPGs--I can just see trying to get the paperwork through on that one) and freedom (I don't suppose the good people at 760 United Nations Plaza would be interested in protecting the freedom of expression of fascists, for instance).
Of course, with anonymity comes spam, with innovation you get new and better malware, and with freedom you get a lot of crazy talk. But unless you're ready to throw the baby out with the bath water, it's probably best to leave well enough alone. Since politicians of all stripes are essentially unable to understand opportunity costs or unintended consequences, I shudder each time I read one of these FUD-o-thons.
Be thankful for the problems you have (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep off the Grass, or myLawn (Score:2)
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Or corporate europe or corporate asia. Corporate America is not any better or worse than the others.
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Al Gore (Score:2)
Simple: Who ever makes something that catches on (Score:2)
Aside from that, the summary doesn't make a lot of sense. What does IPv4 have to do with the internet being broken? We're just running out of IP addresses but even now it's not an
fundamentally wrong (Score:2)
TFA says that the internet was just an experimental demo that worked too well and ended up getting adopted. Wrong. It started as an experimental but real network that was to be used for real work. The basic principles were deliberately, and well, chosen.
The environment has changed, but the basic principle of a simple network with intelligence at the "edges" - in the devices that connect to the basic bit-shuffling network - is sound. That above all is what has allowed so many innovative services to be rapidl
Main problem (Score:2)
We will see the massive changes in tech when the CS and IT folks who entered the market in the 2000s make it to management and start controlling the tech. These are individuals that have grown up with change and are adaptable to it. A large numbe
Technical vs. Practical (Score:2)
The internet has very many technical shortcoming and many businesses make their living off of compensating for them. It turns out that the trade-off between fixing the technical problems and paying someone to compensate for them falls in favor of paying someone. What's the problem here? The only reason to make the technical changes is when the costs are too high (which apparently hasn't happened yet) or physical limits are reached (e.g. running out of IP v.4 addresses). I don't see a problem with this..
Consumer-friendly condensed version (Score:2)
"I am stuck on Band-aids, 'cause band-aids stuck on me,
I am stuck on Band-aids, 'cause band-aids stuck on me,
updating specs is a PITA now,
with dysfunctional ISPs,
We're all stuck on Band-aids now, 'cause of our sucky ISP!" "
IPV6? Do you really want to give each toaster an individual ip addresses? You know toasters have a plan! [youtube.com]
Businesses... (Score:2)
... the eyeballs are on the internet advertisers are itching to get at eyes that are no longer on television.
Let's not also forget gaming, tv and porn is on the internet. Also a significant amount of ecommerce happens online (amazon.com, ebay, etc, etc).
Quite frankly this is like crying wolf when there are no wolves around.
It needs fixing? (Score:2)
Did somebody accidentally the internet again?
Most of the proposed "upgrades" are worse. (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the proposed "upgrades" are worse. There was a "Clean Slate Program" [stanford.edu] at Stanford, but the general idea was to put the network firmly under the thumb of the carriers, turning the Internet into something like mobile telephony. That didn't fly.
IPv6 and IPSEC would fix most of the problems down at the IP level. It might be useful if the FCC mandated that US ISPs must support IPv6 to consumers by some date. More likely, China may mandate IPv6; they need the address space. The 2008 Olympics was mostly run on IPv6, so the technology is working there.
Exhaustion (Score:3, Insightful)
IPV4 addresses will be exhausted at a time according to the following formula:
Wiggabu + 18 months
where Wiggabu represents the time you are currently reading this equation.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
The article author thinks IPv6 is just a band-aid, though he admits it would fix the address shortage. He is talking, vaguely, about an architectural upgrade but doesn't really say *what*. He only says "more research is needed", which I translate to "give me more funding".
Do you have any insight as to what he's talking about, other than "get off your ass on IPv6"?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only conclusion that I can draw from the silence on the actual upgrade is that it's something we wouldn't like.
My understanding from my experience and research into the subject is that in order to upgrade the Internet...
The Tubes demand SACRIFICE!
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My understanding from my experience and research into the subject is that in order to upgrade the Internet...
The Tubes demand SACRIFICE!
Well, Ted Kennedy did die today. I wonder if that was some deal between Ted Stevens (D-AK, "Mr. Tubes") and the Devil to keep Stevens out of prison. Satan's minion just got the wrong Ted...
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Sorry, my mistake. It does, however, make the switch look that much more nefarious as Ted Kennedy was most definitely a D.
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I honestly don't even think IPv6 is needed. We just need recall some of those huge blocks of IP addresses that have been allocated for no good reason and implement NAT/proxies more widely.
Just about every single company uses firewalls nowadays anyway, there is absolutely no reason for them to have huge blocks of IP addresses like they currently do (they don't even use them!).
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I honestly don't even think IPv6 is needed. We just need recall some of those huge blocks of IP addresses that have been allocated for no good reason and implement NAT/proxies more widely.
NAT requires jumping through all sorts of hoops to try to get back to the host-to-host connectivity that IP used to allow. It's slowing the adoption of things like IPSEC and makes any application that requires peer-to-peer connections a chore to set up. NAT is not a good thing.
Just about every single company uses firewalls nowadays anyway, there is absolutely no reason for them to have huge blocks of IP addresses like they currently do (they don't even use them!).
While I agree that some organizations have many more addresses than they will ever use, firewalls have nothing to do with NAT. Every company *should* use a firewall, of course, but firewalls worked perfectly well before NAT, and they
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
To quote an article [ipv6tf.org] I once read that addressed what you are saying:
The long and the short of it is that NAT is only a band-aid... it is not a scalable solution. NAT can only be "good enough" as long as the above issues remain unimportant to a majority of people.
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And, most importantly
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
* NAT prevents direct attacks on Internet- connected machines
* NAT prevents snooping of internal network structures
You misspelled "firewall"
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Oh, and if you reassigned all of the large, assigend-but-unused, IPv4 blocks at the current allocation rate, they would all be gone
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
To add to the other good replies to your message.
"Recalling" those "huge" blocks (and note that there is no legal justification for any entity to be able to do so) would also only be a band-aid. If you "recall" all of the /8 blocks that are globally assigned that are likely underutilized, you only extend the lifetime of IPv4 by a handful of years.
Many people point to NAT as a way to prevent the depletion of IPv4 address space, but what most of them don't realize is that NAT (despite the huge problems that hitch along for the ride) has *already* served that purpose. We're *still* running out of IPv4 address space, even with ubiquitous use of NAT (including being hobbled by the problems that it brings). If NAT hadn't seen widespread use already, we would have run out of IPv4 address space years ago.
NAT creates problems, and it doesn't even fix the problem that people are positioning it to fix (ie, the depletion of IPv4 address space). We're still going to run out, we still need to transition to IPv6, even if you "recall" those big blocks and make everyone use NAT. Taking the steps you suggest only extends the horizon of the problem, and only extends it by a relatively small amount.
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Well, think about it this way -- why *hasn't* the transition to IPv6 gone smoother/faster? Answer: the current architecture (with its dead-end-to-dead-end philosophy) is not designed to be upgraded. Presumably, some day, some one with ambition will come up with a networking protocol that is *better* than IPv6 (not talking about bigger address space, I mean even better protocol design.) I have problems believing that in a million years we would still be running IPv6 because no one will have come up with a
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sure, supply and demand. Where the demand is great because of IPv4 address shortage -- Asia -- it hasn't stalled and has been rolled out robustly. Where it is NOT in demand, because there is no shortage of IPv4 addresses in the U.S., it has stalled. Aside from large address space, there really isn't a compelling benefit to switch to IPv6. As much as geeks like things like mandatory IPsec support, autoconfig, etc. they are geek appealing and not appealing to the masses.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm afraid the powers that be, will be the ones 'in charge' of the New and Improved internet, and can bet your sweet ass, they won't make the mistakes they did last time that leaves them without total control.
Their corporate masters, will force them to have severe control on what content can be pumped over it, pretty much necessitating control on what can connect to it (so much for having control of your computer), and the govt. and lawyers will certainly make it where you can't be anonymous, and you will likely need a special license to publish on it.
Personally? No thanks, with all its bugs and problems, and tons of cruft out there, I'll be happy to stick with the current internet system that is out there. I like the idea that I can hook a computer on it, and instantly become a peer with any other computer out there, no matter if it is a farm kid on dial up, or a massive corporation's data center. My box/server is equal, and I can do and publish damned near anything I want.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that congestion control on the Internet is strictly based on the Van Jacobsen hacks to TCP/IP. These work pretty well, but they have problems. First, a lot of IP traffic is not TCP. Second, various IP protocols like Bittorrent actually game congestion control to get more than their fair share of the pipe, and there's really no way to prevent this (e.g., what Comcast tried isn't a good solution).
The belief that no-one is working on this is incorrect, however. There's some very good work being done [irtf.org] in the IRTF (a research organization associated with the IETF). They did a really cool presentation on their work at the Stockholm IETF this month. There are really good people at various ISPs and running the backbones. It is not the case that it's all on autopilot and slowly decaying. E.g., check out Hurricane Electric [he.net]. Comcast has a very good team.
The most hopeless thing I see on the Internet is the continued prevalence of operating systems that are highly vulnerable to attack due to poorly-thought-out security models. Apple is starting to do some interesting work on this - they recently hired the guy who did BitFrost for the OLPC project, for example. A big complaint about Bitfrost is that it's not necessarily all that useable, but if anyone can fix that, it's probably Apple. Would be nice if Microsoft weren't backsliding on this.
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Yes. It's a very respectable source indeed. Also, Christian Science (promoted by Christian Scientists) is entirely different from the science promoted by Christians (who are a different group).
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Ignorance is bliss, personified. (Score:5, Informative)
Ignorance is bliss, and you, sir, seem to be positively rolling in it. CSM, strange as it may seem, is generally regarded as being of surpassing quality (vastly superior to your "mainline" news channels and rags).
The irony is that most religious people I know revile the CSM as being liberal, ungodly, and in all manner of secular.
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Re:Christian... science ? (Score:5, Funny)
Your attempt to make us panic and throw a metric shitload of money into your inadequate research to end net-neutrality has failed. The average slashdot reader knows more about the intricacies of the Internet than you expect and can therefore tell you that doom's day is far off. We know that because the Terminators need IPv6 to keep track of their innumerable minions.
No IPv6 no doom's day.
Thank you for your time,
Average Slashdot Joe
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It's called Christian Science Monitor basically because the founder was also the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist and she demanded that it be called that. Despite it's name, the paper is 95% secular and is actually known for its fair and balance reporting, especially for avoiding sensationalism (ironically in this case). Their staff has even won a handful of Pulitzer Prizes over the years.
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It's a religion that has existed longer since you've been alive. They come up quite regularly in popular entertainment as the most respectable group who believe in "faith healing" and avoid surgery etc.
Independently from their oddities, they've published a very highly regarded news source called the Christian Science Monitor for many decades. They are respected for their independent voice, accurate reportage, and even handed investigation.
This is all common knowledge. Read about something that isn't a co
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Well...while I don't believe quite as they do...
1) Nothing in "Christian" precludes "Science".
2) The converse is also true.
3) The term, "Christian Science", is something that is typically placed in front of the writings and beliefs that have come from the Church of Christ, Scientist (Not to be at all confused with Scientology! :-D) One of several Protestant denominations.
4) The term, I believe, came into use when Mary Baker Eddy founded the denomination back in 1879, in Boston, MA.
It's not a "specification
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Anyone cares to tell me what the words 'christian' and 'science' are doing together ? I mean, do they live in a universe with different rules with different science or what ? No, I'm not thinking about the evolution denier idiots, I assume this refers to run of the mill christians. So why the specification ?
Your average 'run of the mill' Christian believes that Science is a set of rules and theories about a universe created by God.
Science for it's part, hasn't found anything that flat-out irrefutably contradicts a universe that has been intelligently designed...and it has found no irrefutable evidence that it has. Personally I don't see a conflict between the words 'Christian' and scientist anymore than I would see one between 'gay' and 'scientist'.
What are they going to do? Cover up the 'gay' gene if i