The Friday Five is taking a break this week, so this gives me an excuse to catch up on old questions that I'd missed. Here's the set from Sept 12th:

1. Is the name you have now the same name that's on your birth certificate? If not, what's changed? I've had my name changed once, when I was 21 and about to get married, I dropped my last name and replaced it with what used to be my middle name. It was both symbolic of how I felt about my family (my father in particular) and pragmatic because I prefer them to not notice me.

2. If you could change your name (first, middle and/or last), what would it be? Um, already done folks. My name is Roger Earl by choice.

3. Why were you named what you were? (Is there a story behind it? Who specifically was responsible for naming you?) First name, nope, just sounded good to my Mom apparently. My middle/last name is named after my great uncle Earl who was my favorite relative.

4. Are there any names you really hate or love? What are they and why? I don't like the name Frank, just because it's my father's and brother's name. That's pretty straightforward, but aside from that a name is just a name.

5. Is the analysis of your name at kabalarians.com / triggur.org / astroexpert accurate? How or how isn't it? Hey, if you look up Rog on triggur.org it says it's from the Mesopotamian root meaning "Complete Bastard". You can decide for yourself whether that's a load of bunk or not.

kabalarians.com kind of contradicts that and says I have "a practical, logical, analytical approach to life and a great deal of patience."

By the time I got to astroexpert I was bored of the whole concept.

It's Saturday, but I haven't done a Friday Five in awhile, so here's the lastest:

1. Who is your favorite singer/musician? Why? It depends on my mood. At the moment I'm kinda thinking Stevie Ray Vaughan because of the passion he put into his music, on the other hand, I'm also thinking Yello because no other band makes me want to dance as much as they do.

2. What one singer/musician can you not stand? Why? Garth Brooks. I dunno, he just sorta rubs me the wrong way and I find his music really bland.

3. If your favorite singer wasn't in the music business, do you think you would still like him/her as a person? If Mr. Vaughan wasn't dead I suppose? Depends on whether or not he'd appreciate my occasionally morbid sense of humour.

4. Have you been to any concerts? If yes, who put on the best show? Plenty, mostly when I was younger. At first I automatically loved the bands whom I thought were coolest, but after awhile, the art of performance and spectacle became more important, so I'll have to say the best large crowd performance was Rush (whom I've seen 3 times, I'm thinking of one particular time tho) and the best small crowd performance was Big Sugar (Gordie Johnson was intense the first time I saw them).

5. What are your thoughts on downloading free music online vs. purchasing albums? Do you feel the RIAA is right in its pursuit to stop people from dowloading free music? I think the RIAA is rather short-sighted and I feel that the DMCA contradicts earlier, better attempts at Copyright exceptions, mostly the Home Audio Recording Act.

When radio was invented, they thought it would cause havok with music copyrights (mostly sheet music at the time, Gershwin, etc.). It did, but a new and even more profitable industry arose. When cassette tapes hit the mass-market, they thought it would ruin things, but again it just opened up new markets. The same has been true with CDRs and the same would be true of downloaded music if the RIAA would just get its head out of its ass and stop interfering with the natural process.

I think that transference of Copyright from the original creators should be abolished. People would have much more respect for the RIAA if it was protecting rightful owners, rather than corporate "work for hire" thieves.

The RIAA is not fighting for music, it's not fighting for artists, it's fighting for its own legacy and self-interests.

Maybe these topics have been hammered to death already eh? Ahh well, blame it on the Friday Five.

Verisign has single-handedly broken the Internet. Oh sure, things are mostly working, but there's a significant part broken just the same. It's happened in the past few days and you may have noticed it: all DNS queries for .com and .net domains resolve, whether they exist or not.

That's not the way it's supposed to work. If a domain name doesn't exist, then it's supposed to not resolve, which for most Web users that means a "site not found" error from the browser. That normally happens very quickly, say if you made a typo or tried to guess a domain name incorrectly. Right now, instead, requests are bogged down and here is why:

Verisign is essentially in charge of .com and .net domain names every since they purchased Network Solutions in 2001. They've gotten greedy. They are now hijacking every non-resolvable request for a (.com or .net) domain and redirecting those requests to 64.94.110.11 so they can market their own search engine.

Try it. At a command prompt, type "ping whateverstupiddomain431thatcantpossiblyexist.com" and watch the requests to 64.94.110.11 time out!

As a web-coder, this is DRIVING ME INSANE. It breaks my spam filters for starters, since I can no longer have my software check to see if a forged domain is incorrect or not. It also breaks my email verification for Gameslate and that downright pisses me off. On top of which, domain requests that are incorrect are now incredibly sloooow as they are hijacking so many requests that whatever server(s) sitting at 64.94.110.11 are not responding correctly.

As far as I'm concerned, (whether there is a law covering this or not, I'm unaware), this is bordering on criminal behavior from Verisign. I do expect we'll see some heavy-handed lawsuits for the huge volume of standards-compliant software that this is playing havok with.

Verisign should lose their privileges as a top-level domain controller. They paid $21 billion to have those privileges and they've fucked them up.

Whomever came up with this at Verisign is either a short-sighted moron or exceedingly arrogant to think that the world will just assume they have the right to do whatever they wish with the TLDs they operate. Anyone involved with this should never be allowed to work in the IT industry again. I think Verisign should have their business license revoked for such extreme greed-driven incompetence. Figure out the names of the person(s) involved and blacklist them from employment and business in general. That's the best punishment for greedy pigs with no cares about the infrastructure of the systems they are in charge of: bankrupt them.

If you own Verisign stock, dump it. It's not going to be worth much if this kind of idiocy continues.

If you do any business (domain registration, SSL certificates, whatever) with Verisign, be sure to let them know how you feel about them mucking about with the DNS operations. In fact, anyone on the Internet, being a customer of domain name usage of some sort, can make a complaint with ICANN (the folks who regulate TLDs) via email (registrar-info@icann.org) or using this handy online form. You can also make complaints to your local ISP, I'm certain they will pass them along.

The quickest and most likely solution to this problem is that hardware and software companies will create workarounds that will force the standards back into place. Apparently BIND (the popular DNS software) is already being patched now, but solving this problem yesterday is still too slow for my liking. It shouldn't have happened in the first place.

I just found this device (see picture) in Earth & Beyond. It gave me a bit of a chuckle so I thought I would share it with you.

I like it when RPGs have a good sense of humour, far too many of them take themselves too seriously. There've been other amusing moments, I've noticed that when you take on passengers they will complain if you get into a firefight and will make comments about any hijacked cargo that you take aboard: "A Bogeril Solar Sail III! Cool!".

While I'm on the amusements, here's a tourist snapshot of myself and Glen on a spacestation, here's the most gaudy painted player ship I've seen and here's a demonstration of what a nice butt I have.

My class doesn't actually have the rally skill that the device pictured requires, but I can attempt to reverse-engineer the device and try to build an improved model which I will give to lurch (who can rally). I doubt however that any of us free birds will actually hear any "Linnart Skinnert" from the game while the device is in use.