In message <15744848-5638-ad01-2c9c-a89825f9d1b0@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp>, Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote:
Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
Come now Mr. Cohen, please do tell us who you paid for rights to the 168.198.0.0/16 block, which belongs to the Australian government,
If you think the Australian government haven't transfer its IP address to Mr. Cohen, all you should do is let the Australian government accuse Mr. Cohen.
It is a well known fundamental tenet of logical reasoning and argument that it is not possible for -anyone- to prove a negative, which is what you've just asked me to do. I certainly cannot prove, to any degree of certainty, that the Australian national government, in its infinite wisdom, didn't send one of its stealthy representatives to meet Mr. Cohen in some dark back allley, on some dark night, somewhere in Canberra, and that this mysterious representaive did not meet Mr. Cohen and then sell him the government's rights in, and titles to the 168.198.0.0/16 block. If that had happened, then I wouldn't know about it. None of us would. (And stranger things quite certainly -have- happened when it comes to government corruption.) All I can do is make it quite plain that I believe that this theory of events is somewhere beyond implausible. In any event, it is not for me to prove the negative in this case. Rather, it is incumbant upon Mr. Cohen to prove his implicit -and- explicit affirmative assertion that he has or had some rights (i.e. -any- rights) to the 168.198.0.0/16 block or to any of the numerous other nice juicy and valuable IPv4 blocks, all of size /16 or greater, that he, with the help of his friends, appears to have been using of late. With regards to any of these numerous valuable IPv4 blocks, both legacy and otherwise, Mr. Cohen offers us not a single shread of proof that he has now, or ever had, any rights at all to any of these blocks whatsoever, insisting instead that we all just take his word on faith. Is this the behaviour of an honest man, attempting, reasonably, to defend his reputation and his good name? I think not. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Mr. Cohen is clearly hiding something. And not just one thing, but many things. With respect to the Australian government, none of us needs to wait for it to wake from its slumber in order to know precisely what happened here. If I am on the street, near a school or a University, and if I see a man back a large truck up to a bicycle rack and then see the man get out and use a large set of bolt cutters to cut the locks on bicycle after bicycle, loading them one by one into the truck, then I, for one, do not need to await the arrival of the true owners of said bicycles in order to know that something is seriously amiss -or- to take action to stop what is going on. That may be your approach to such situations, but it is not mine. The difference is what some people might call "civilization" and without it we are all doomed. Regards, rfg P.S. For those who may still harbor any doubts about Mr. Cohen's claims, I encourage you all to speak with a certain Mr. Alister van Tonder, (Alister.vanTonder (at) capetown.gov.za - phone: +27-21-400-9080), a network engineer employed by the City of Cape Town, who I'm sure will be only to happy to describe to you, as he did to me, the efforts that he and his collegues were forced to expend in order to just simply take back the City's rightful property, the 165.25.0.0/16 block, from the clutches of Mr. Cohen and his allies at FDCServers and Cogent.