Geez, use metric already:

labrat@yggdrasil:~$ units
2411 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units
You have: 498438559990 kilograms
You want: petagrams
        * 0.49843856
        / 2.0062653

1/2 petagram. Easy.

Newflash^2: Lag is explicitly network lag for any online game unless otherwise specified, since online lag completely overshadows almost all other types of local-to-host delays. If you're talking about a solo, unnetworked game, sure, "lag" might mean something else.

Now, of course, if you're talking to complete duffers, who will complain that their computer's slow when a remote webserver is slow to respond, and that the Internet is slow while their disk drive I/O light is solid on, and in almost all other ways have no idea what causes delays, then sure, "lag" could mean anything.

I've been on the Internet a long time, so I remember sri-nic.arpa, nic.ddn.mil, rs.internic.net, and even downloading the Internet host address file, with about 8000+ IPs in it. The early organization was very clear about preserving the namespace of domain names for future generations, with base policies (I believe these are all correct, but it might just be 3 out of 4) of:

* The domain name must relate to the purpose of your organization.

* .net is reserved for network infrastructure, .org for only non-profits, .com for commercial (.mil and .edu are still fairly pristine), etc.

* You must establish two nameservers, that must not be on the same subnet, and must already be providing DNS for the requested domain.

* Each requester gets a single domain, the idea being that the requester's entire organization would then be fully served.

Although they weren't really thinking about the upcoming explosion in web use, their thinking certainly allowed for an explosion in *sub* domain names. So instead of lots of ridiculous domains like www.iatemygrandmamovie.com, we might have later seen something like iatemygrandma.movie.com, with some group running a movie.com site, and an easy way to find a bunch of them, instead of the crapshoot we have now.

So where did the corruption set in? Once the idea of charging for a domain name popped up, some bright boy got a gleam in his eye when a company - I think it might have been Proctor and Gamble - violated registration policy by requesting scores of domain names based on ailments (and possibly some body parts). There was a similar polydomain request by some other group around the same time. Both generated a flurry of controversy. And our illustrious registrar suddenly demonstrated its modern, capitalist colors, dumping the past, conservative policies and making its new mission one of simply selling off every possible domain name, in every possible TLD, as fast as possible.

Effectively, they sold out on future generations' needs in an exercise of total, corrupt greed. The registrar flipped on every policy, encouraging multiple registration of domains, flagrantly pushing registration in every possible TLD, dropping the domain server requirement, dropping the relevancy concept, and now even pushing for more TLDs, in order to sell even more completely unnecessary extra domains.

The idea of allowing some company to register thousands of obviously unrelated domains for cybersquatting would have been anathema in the pre-profit days, but Network Solutions just doesn't care. And that ridiculous article completely misses *all* of this.

I'm glad he's going to be okay! And this is so much better than putting him in a completely isolated box and thinking, with uncertainty, "well, he's probably...".