INTERESTING: Fixing Haiti long-term

Saturday, January 23, 2010

http://economics.gmu.edu/wew/articles/10/Haiti%27sAvoidableDeathToll.htm

A MINORITY VIEW
BY WALTER WILLIAMS
RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2010

Haiti’s Avoidable Death Toll

*** begin quote ***

The way out of Haiti’s grinding poverty is not rocket science. Ranking countries according to: (1) whether they are more or less free market, (2) per capita income, and (3) ranking in International Amnesty’s human rights protection index, we would find that those nations with a larger free market sector tend also to be those with the higher income and greater human rights protections. Haitian President Rene Preval is not enthusiastic about free markets; his heroes are none other than the hemisphere’s two brutal communist tyrants: Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

*** end quote ***

We can’t fix it, but let’s keep the crooked leaders out of the USA. Persona Non Grata.

# # # # #

Leave a Comment » | INTERESTING | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj

TECHNOLOGY: ENUM won’t be implemented by the vested ISPs

Saturday, January 23, 2010

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/01/enum-dragging-telephone-numbers-into-the-internet-age.ars/2

ENUM: Dragging telephone numbers into the Internet Age

E-mail, IM, Facebook, phones—what if all of these ways to reach you over a network could be condensed into a single, unique number? The ENUM proposal aims to do just that, by giving everyone a single phone number that maps to all of their identifiers. Here’s how it works, and why it isn’t already widely used.

By Rudolf van der Berg | Last updated January 13, 2010 11:30 PM

*** begin quote ***

The main issue is that the ENUM standard (RFC 3761) demands that ENUM is a public service and that the control of the telephone number lies in the hands of the end-user. For this reason, it’s known as “Public-” or “User ENUM.” This is all in line with the Internet’s user- and endpoint-centric creed. This becomes quite clear if you read, for instance, the documentation of Nominet, which controls the UK’s ENUM registry (the +44 registry). It explicitly states that users can bypass their communications provider when they register in the ENUM registry. A significant amount of money is made by today’s telephony providers (be they traditional providers or ISPs providing VoIP bundled with Internet access). Telephony providers see User ENUM as a threat to their bottom line and are therefore not keen on introducing the technology nationally.

*** end quote ***

The inet was driven by motivated individuals, not gooferments, not ISPs, not companies.

We need to get back to the fast innovation cycle of the old inet!

# # # # #

Leave a Comment » | Technology | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj