In case you haven't figured it out yet, Anonymous Cowards always post at 0. Since a post can only go down to -1, only one point is required to squish your post. And plenty of people are now getting 10 points in a single round of moderation, which makes it even easier.
That is an interesting question. Though believe it or not, a large amount of spam does come from address-harvesting. Have you tried doing a google search for any email address that you receive spam at? You'll likely find that address on a website somewhere.
Not much spam goes around by way of spammers randomly trying email addresses, and last I heard the address *@*.* does not actually send an email to every valid address.
I can imagine they are not allowed to delete spam
The current administration has already shown lack of concern over what they are or are not allowed to delete in terms of email. Why would they worry about email deletion regulations when spam is the issue?
Teach the use of (ftp) servers for sharing large documents,
Considering how terrible ftp is for security, do we really want to teach government officials to use that? Not that email is good either, but ftp almost asks to be compromised.
And I could just see our government IT officials trying something brilliant with ftp like changing the port number with each successive POTUS to match their number in the order of US presidents.
Real world data always helps. Thank you - I don't own a Wii, and actually did not realize the Wiimotes used AA batteries. I figured since hardly anything else that costs more than $10 does, that the Wiimotes would have a built-in LiOn battery or something.
How much additional power do Wii users consume in the process of charging their Wiimotes? The other systems all have usable wired controllers that don't need to be charged - but most Wii owners have at least two battery-powered Wiimotes that need recharging from time to time.
Provided Stevens doesn't ask for a recount, and accepts defeat, the republicans won't have to hold the vote that they postponed yesterday regarding his status as a senator. This time they can just let the people dismiss their convict friend from the US Senate for them.
Will they sell the AIX division to Lenovo just like they did with the thinkpad?
If there is any meaningful demand for the AIX desktop systems, I would think it would be worth money to someone, and hence IBM would follow their usual strategy of blundering the protift potential by selling it off to someone else to make money on it instead.
Medicine is great if you are prepared for the huge amount of student loan debt that comes with it.
There are a variety of ways to deal with that.
There are several programs that will essentially relieve your debt if you do a few years rural practice
Some schools have BS/MD programs for students who would otherwise be "traditional" pre-med in undergrad - finish the two degrees in less than the usual 8 years (and hence take in less debt)
Research physician (MD/PhD) programs are usually paid in full by the school
If you go into a high-paying specialty you will pull in enough money that your debt will be irrelevant
not too nerdy professions that nonetheless require a talent for math, engineering, or science
There are some areas of scientific research that really aren't all that terribly nerdy. What are her hobbies? If there is something that she does for fun, she may be able to find a scientist that works on making it better...
Not all components of scientific research happen in traditional lab environments.
Most prerequisites for medicine (or dentistry, veterinary medicine, or chiropractic school) are science classes. If she does well as math and science, she may way to consider those paths.
Then why do you accuse him of wanting to start an invasion? If you actually heard what he said you would know that all the blathering about an invasion is nothing more than right-wing FUD.
appear to have forgotten that Americans are not the only people paying attention to the Presidential Election.
Interesting you should bring that up, considering most other countries favored Obama over McCain in our election by extremely wide margins.
But you seem to OK the invasion of the sovereign nation of Pakistan.
Simply wrong. I never said that. I said Obama was not suggesting an invasion, and neither was I.
It's NOT OK to invade a sovereign nation, with whom we've previously gone to war, and never actually declared peace with.
How can you declare peace when there was no declaration of war? That statement doesn't make sense. We haven't declared war since WWII.
Nonetheless, as I already said I never supported the invasion of Iraq.
and is simply a case of splitting hairs.
No, it is much, much more than splitting hairs.
An invasion involves ground forces and generally the toppling of a government.
Bin Laden could be attacked without the need for that. If you have one target in an inaccessible region that you want to attack, then a missile strike would suffice for that aim. There was never a time when Obama supported the invasion of Pakistan, no matter how much you may want to claim it to be. Obama was talking about attacking Bin Laden.
Strange that when McCain stated he would "follow Bin Laden to the gates of Hell" to attack him, nobody took that to mean an invasion.
So by this statement I take it you believe their is "Conservative Analysis" and "The Truth".
Not true. Conservatives have said things that were factually accurate. However, you base your claims against Obama on misinterpretations of what he has said. If you actually read the transcripts of what he has said, rather than taking people's opinionated interpretations of those statements, you would see where your interpretations are wrong.
The reason why I am pointing out that you are using "conservative analysis" is because your statements clearly show that you have not actually heard or read Obama's statements. You repeatedly insist that he wants an invasion, when that is simply not true. There is absolutely no merit to any claims of Obama calling for an invasion.
No one said that the Surge was the ONLY thing that improved the situation on the ground
Then I don't understand why you have a problem with Obama agreeing that the situation improved after the surge. If you agree that the surge was one of many things that happened during a period of decreased violence, then what are you holding against Obama's statement?
The only way you can look the surge as only being a minor player in the improvements in Iraq
I'm not aware of anyone who tried to classify the surge as being of greater or lesser significance than the other factors I mentioned before.
refuse to accept the possibility that the Bush administration finally got it at least partially right
I would say that the surge, which was the Bush administrations hail-mary play for the war, was a factor in a complicated situation that showed an improvement (in terms of less violence for a designated area). Partially right? I guess for certain values of right...
You keep tossing around the idea that we should know when we are getting out, but thats naive at best.
No, I didn't ask for a designated time (when). I asked for a designated, well defined point. No such point exists yet. I earlier described a few of the huge problems with the current defined end point, which will pretty much prevent us from ever leaving.
The instability in Iraq is OUR fault.
I do agree that the war that Bush started is the root cause of the Instability in Iraq. At no point in time did I ever agree with the invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq.
Running away because we don't like the prospects is irresponsible.
Is it more responsible to leave our combat forces on the ground in Iraq indefinitely? Sure, our government caused the problem, but what is our obligation to fix it? Does it mean we need to stay there until the end of time?
WWII ended with unconditional surrenders.
No it didn't. We had soldiers placed all over Europe and southeast Asia for decades.
Our combat operations from WWII ended after the surrenders. Our combat operations in Iraq have not ended, and show no signs of being done anytime soon. And the war objective whack-a-mole doesn't help either.
If we were to invade this section of Pakistan
This is where you took Obama's statement incorrectly. There was no mention of an invasion. Attacking targets on the ground does not necessitate an invasion. As I already stated, there are inaccessible regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan that could be difficult even for Pakistan's army to reach in a timely fashion. So why would we expect that our ground forces could get there more quickly?
We wouldn't. These remote areas would be hit with remote forces. It has nothing to do with an invasion.
just don't expect the rest of us to drink the Kool-Aid as well
No Kool-aid required. Just read the facts instead of reading conservative analysis.
There is no clearly defined and attainable end point for Bush's invasion of Iraq - which bears almost zero resemblance to WWII.
Obama never suggested the invasion of Pakistan. Attacking a target within a country is not the same thing as invading said country.
implies that you believe the surge wasn't the primary motivator of the improvements, and that they may have occurred without the surge
Some of the changes certainly would have happened regardless of the surge. The first that comes to mind is the summer reduction in violence. We have seen that every summer since we invaded Iraq, there is a summer reduction in insurgent violence. Tony Snow has previously eluded to why this happens - it is damned hot in Iraq in the summer. If we are willing to allow the Iraqi "government" to take the summer off because of the heat, why is it hard to accept that the insurgency slows down in the summer, especially when we have several years' worth of data to support that?
Second, if you look at where the violence is, you'll see that primarily only the areas where the surge took place (primarily Baghdad) saw an actual decrease in violence. There are other areas of Iraq that saw insurgency levels remain the same or even slightly increase.
So we can agree that for the areas where the surge was applied, there was a decrease in insurgent activity and sectarian violence when comparing pre- and post- surge data. However, the surge is not the only variable in play for those data sets.
Hence it is not conclusive that the surge was the only thing that improved the ground situation in Baghdad.
a defined end. When Iraq is stable enough to take care of it's own defense and governance without the aid of our military and bureaucratic machine
The problem lies in the vagueness of that end. For one, who makes that decision? Iraq has already asked for us to work towards leaving, but we are still there.
And what are we talking about Iraq defending against? Sure, there are insurgents in Iraq that came from other countries, but there are also Iraqis fighting each other. So which conflict(s) is/are we concerned about? Remember that under Saddam, Iraq had a government that was lead by an ethnic minority and there are three significant ethnic groups in Iraq today. Are we saying we won't leave until the people who are in Iraq (and were there before we invaded) stop fighting each other? After all, some of those ethnic conflicts were present before we even took over the country. Hence the end goal of the Iraq war is incredibly vague.
Similarly, in WWII
There is almost no similarity at all between WWII and the war in Iraq.
In WWII we attacked aggressor nations who had attacked us or invaded countries that asked for our help in their liberation. In Iraq we have invaded a sovereign nation who had no realistic chance of harming us or our allies.
WWII ended with unconditional surrenders. In Iraq there is nobody to offer surrender.
If Canada or Mexico said they'd initiate military actions within the continental US using attack helicopters and Special Forces Personnel, I doubt you would see it as acceptable and not as an unprovoked act of aggression worthy of a potential declaration of war.
There is a profound difference between a potential attack within the US and the possibility of launching an attack within Pakistan. The terrain and accessibility of Pakistan is dramatically different than within the US. When talking about the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region where Bin Laden has previously frequented, we are talking about extremely inaccessible terrain. Even if you had intelligence with exact GPS coordinates for someone in that area, it could take the Pakistani army days to get there (at which point the target has left). However, those same regions are accessible to cruise missiles from US warships.
We're not talking about catching the Unabomber, here. Even the most rugged terrain in the US is pretty accessible in comparison to some parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Before Bush we had 8 years of Tax the rich and redistribute it to the poor
That is a grave oversimplification. If you look at the national budget you'll find that very little of the federal budget is redistributed to the poor. A comparatively larger sum goes towards our war efforts. And as we have returned towards regressive taxation, more federal spending has been done on credit rather than on income.
Freezing science research budgets
That's not the same thing as cutting them.
Actually, in the current situation, a freeze on science budget amounts to a cut. Scientific research involves a lot more than just guys sitting around with calculators. Laboratories need power, heat, communications, space, transportation, etc. All those costs have risen over the past years. And with research budgets not rising at the same rate as the increase in those expenses, you end up with a net loss of income for research as more money has to go towards keeping the lab running.
The war in Iraq (or any war for that matter) has always been of indefinite length
However the war in Iraq is different in that there have never been any clearly defined goals for ending the war. Most other overseas conflicts have had set endpoints - the invasion of Iraq does not.
surge started to work (which he refuses to admit
You must have missed the presidential debates. Obama agreed that the conditions in Iraq improved after the surge. However you cannot study a war in a vacuum and stating that the surge was the one and only reason for those improved conditions is just not logical.
neither candidates healthcare plan affected the cost of my employer provided plan
Are you forgetting that the McCain plan was going to tax the cost of your healthcare plan (which has not been done before) in your income taxes?
that doesn't make it a negative from everyones point of view.
I didn't say it was bad for everyone. Just as regressive taxation helps some portion of people (less than 1%), the McCain healtcare plan would have likely helped some people as well.
Obama on the other hand threatened military action against our allies
Are you referring to when he said he would attack inside Pakistan to kill Bin Laden? That is not the same as attacking the nation, government, or people of Pakistan.
At my alma mater, Comparative Literature showed up on your transcript as "CLit", or "CLIT", depending on where your transcript was printed. Hence you could take your A in CLIT and proclaim that you had "mastered the clit" in college.
ICANN is going to start selling new gTLDs that will turn the current DNS system into arbitrary mish-mash anyways. Just wait until we start seeing links to.cheapdrugs domains, and we try to find the DNS info for that.
Then we'll find ourselves longing for the current DNS problem.
don't we still have farmers paid to NOT grow crops?
Yes, we do.
To keep the prices up?
That is not the only reason why we do that.
Allowing certain fields to lie fallow for a season is responsible farming. The most common application of farmers being paid to not grow crops (that I am aware of) involves farmers who are asked to leave some fraction (say 1/4 or so) of their total farming land fallow each season. They are still growing crops, just not as much as they would if they farmed all their land that year.
However, this is actually a responsible technique from the long-term perspective because of the impact that farming has on the land. If a farmer leaves 1/4 un-farmed each year, then that means their land undergoes 3 year on, 1 year off cycles of fertilizer, pesiticide, irrigation, tilling, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm patenting the process of removing the humor from a lawyer
I suspect you are way too late to patent such a process.
Watch moderators waste their points on your post
In case you haven't figured it out yet, Anonymous Cowards always post at 0. Since a post can only go down to -1, only one point is required to squish your post. And plenty of people are now getting 10 points in a single round of moderation, which makes it even easier.
But thanks for playing!
How much of that is spam?
That is an interesting question. Though believe it or not, a large amount of spam does come from address-harvesting. Have you tried doing a google search for any email address that you receive spam at? You'll likely find that address on a website somewhere.
Not much spam goes around by way of spammers randomly trying email addresses, and last I heard the address *@*.* does not actually send an email to every valid address.
I can imagine they are not allowed to delete spam
The current administration has already shown lack of concern over what they are or are not allowed to delete in terms of email. Why would they worry about email deletion regulations when spam is the issue?
Teach the use of (ftp) servers for sharing large documents,
Considering how terrible ftp is for security, do we really want to teach government officials to use that? Not that email is good either, but ftp almost asks to be compromised.
And I could just see our government IT officials trying something brilliant with ftp like changing the port number with each successive POTUS to match their number in the order of US presidents.
It's called a gamecube controller, the flip panel at the top lets you plug them in and use.
But how many gamecube controllers are included in the purchase of a Wii?
I could be mistaken, but I thought the two other current systems each came with one wired controller.
Real world data always helps. Thank you - I don't own a Wii, and actually did not realize the Wiimotes used AA batteries. I figured since hardly anything else that costs more than $10 does, that the Wiimotes would have a built-in LiOn battery or something.
How much additional power do Wii users consume in the process of charging their Wiimotes? The other systems all have usable wired controllers that don't need to be charged - but most Wii owners have at least two battery-powered Wiimotes that need recharging from time to time.
Please explain William Jefferson, D, who had $90,000 cash in his freezer, and why Pelosi hasn't tried to schedule a vote to throw him out of congress.
I believe you are talking about this William Jefferson. If you read up on the case, you'll find that his trial has not yet begun. By contrast, Ted Stevens is a convicted felon.
There is no comparison between the two with the Jefferson trial still upcoming.
Provided Stevens doesn't ask for a recount, and accepts defeat, the republicans won't have to hold the vote that they postponed yesterday regarding his status as a senator. This time they can just let the people dismiss their convict friend from the US Senate for them.
Will they sell the AIX division to Lenovo just like they did with the thinkpad?
If there is any meaningful demand for the AIX desktop systems, I would think it would be worth money to someone, and hence IBM would follow their usual strategy of blundering the protift potential by selling it off to someone else to make money on it instead.
Medicine is great if you are prepared for the huge amount of student loan debt that comes with it.
There are a variety of ways to deal with that.
not too nerdy professions that nonetheless require a talent for math, engineering, or science
There are some areas of scientific research that really aren't all that terribly nerdy. What are her hobbies? If there is something that she does for fun, she may be able to find a scientist that works on making it better...
Not all components of scientific research happen in traditional lab environments.
Most prerequisites for medicine (or dentistry, veterinary medicine, or chiropractic school) are science classes. If she does well as math and science, she may way to consider those paths.
video is not a verb.
No. Jaguar. 1995 XK12, Six-Litre.
I'd rather doubt the 1995 XK12, as cool as it was, was any competitor to the Jaguar XJ220.
They're bringing change you can feel.
Oh, wait that was Oklahoma?
I did actually hear what Obama said.
Then why do you accuse him of wanting to start an invasion? If you actually heard what he said you would know that all the blathering about an invasion is nothing more than right-wing FUD.
appear to have forgotten that Americans are not the only people paying attention to the Presidential Election.
Interesting you should bring that up, considering most other countries favored Obama over McCain in our election by extremely wide margins.
But you seem to OK the invasion of the sovereign nation of Pakistan.
Simply wrong. I never said that. I said Obama was not suggesting an invasion, and neither was I.
It's NOT OK to invade a sovereign nation, with whom we've previously gone to war, and never actually declared peace with.
How can you declare peace when there was no declaration of war? That statement doesn't make sense. We haven't declared war since WWII.
Nonetheless, as I already said I never supported the invasion of Iraq.
and is simply a case of splitting hairs.
No, it is much, much more than splitting hairs.
An invasion involves ground forces and generally the toppling of a government.
Bin Laden could be attacked without the need for that. If you have one target in an inaccessible region that you want to attack, then a missile strike would suffice for that aim. There was never a time when Obama supported the invasion of Pakistan, no matter how much you may want to claim it to be. Obama was talking about attacking Bin Laden.
Strange that when McCain stated he would "follow Bin Laden to the gates of Hell" to attack him, nobody took that to mean an invasion.
So by this statement I take it you believe their is "Conservative Analysis" and "The Truth".
Not true. Conservatives have said things that were factually accurate. However, you base your claims against Obama on misinterpretations of what he has said. If you actually read the transcripts of what he has said, rather than taking people's opinionated interpretations of those statements, you would see where your interpretations are wrong.
The reason why I am pointing out that you are using "conservative analysis" is because your statements clearly show that you have not actually heard or read Obama's statements. You repeatedly insist that he wants an invasion, when that is simply not true. There is absolutely no merit to any claims of Obama calling for an invasion.
No one said that the Surge was the ONLY thing that improved the situation on the ground
Then I don't understand why you have a problem with Obama agreeing that the situation improved after the surge. If you agree that the surge was one of many things that happened during a period of decreased violence, then what are you holding against Obama's statement?
The only way you can look the surge as only being a minor player in the improvements in Iraq
I'm not aware of anyone who tried to classify the surge as being of greater or lesser significance than the other factors I mentioned before.
refuse to accept the possibility that the Bush administration finally got it at least partially right
I would say that the surge, which was the Bush administrations hail-mary play for the war, was a factor in a complicated situation that showed an improvement (in terms of less violence for a designated area). Partially right? I guess for certain values of right...
You keep tossing around the idea that we should know when we are getting out, but thats naive at best.
No, I didn't ask for a designated time (when). I asked for a designated, well defined point. No such point exists yet. I earlier described a few of the huge problems with the current defined end point, which will pretty much prevent us from ever leaving.
The instability in Iraq is OUR fault.
I do agree that the war that Bush started is the root cause of the Instability in Iraq. At no point in time did I ever agree with the invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq.
Running away because we don't like the prospects is irresponsible.
Is it more responsible to leave our combat forces on the ground in Iraq indefinitely? Sure, our government caused the problem, but what is our obligation to fix it? Does it mean we need to stay there until the end of time?
WWII ended with unconditional surrenders.
No it didn't. We had soldiers placed all over Europe and southeast Asia for decades.
Our combat operations from WWII ended after the surrenders. Our combat operations in Iraq have not ended, and show no signs of being done anytime soon. And the war objective whack-a-mole doesn't help either.
If we were to invade this section of Pakistan
This is where you took Obama's statement incorrectly. There was no mention of an invasion. Attacking targets on the ground does not necessitate an invasion. As I already stated, there are inaccessible regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan that could be difficult even for Pakistan's army to reach in a timely fashion. So why would we expect that our ground forces could get there more quickly?
We wouldn't. These remote areas would be hit with remote forces. It has nothing to do with an invasion.
just don't expect the rest of us to drink the Kool-Aid as well
No Kool-aid required. Just read the facts instead of reading conservative analysis.
There is no clearly defined and attainable end point for Bush's invasion of Iraq - which bears almost zero resemblance to WWII.
Obama never suggested the invasion of Pakistan. Attacking a target within a country is not the same thing as invading said country.
implies that you believe the surge wasn't the primary motivator of the improvements, and that they may have occurred without the surge
Some of the changes certainly would have happened regardless of the surge. The first that comes to mind is the summer reduction in violence. We have seen that every summer since we invaded Iraq, there is a summer reduction in insurgent violence. Tony Snow has previously eluded to why this happens - it is damned hot in Iraq in the summer. If we are willing to allow the Iraqi "government" to take the summer off because of the heat, why is it hard to accept that the insurgency slows down in the summer, especially when we have several years' worth of data to support that?
Second, if you look at where the violence is, you'll see that primarily only the areas where the surge took place (primarily Baghdad) saw an actual decrease in violence. There are other areas of Iraq that saw insurgency levels remain the same or even slightly increase.
So we can agree that for the areas where the surge was applied, there was a decrease in insurgent activity and sectarian violence when comparing pre- and post- surge data. However, the surge is not the only variable in play for those data sets.
Hence it is not conclusive that the surge was the only thing that improved the ground situation in Baghdad.
a defined end. When Iraq is stable enough to take care of it's own defense and governance without the aid of our military and bureaucratic machine
The problem lies in the vagueness of that end. For one, who makes that decision? Iraq has already asked for us to work towards leaving, but we are still there.
And what are we talking about Iraq defending against? Sure, there are insurgents in Iraq that came from other countries, but there are also Iraqis fighting each other. So which conflict(s) is/are we concerned about? Remember that under Saddam, Iraq had a government that was lead by an ethnic minority and there are three significant ethnic groups in Iraq today. Are we saying we won't leave until the people who are in Iraq (and were there before we invaded) stop fighting each other? After all, some of those ethnic conflicts were present before we even took over the country. Hence the end goal of the Iraq war is incredibly vague.
Similarly, in WWII
There is almost no similarity at all between WWII and the war in Iraq.
In WWII we attacked aggressor nations who had attacked us or invaded countries that asked for our help in their liberation. In Iraq we have invaded a sovereign nation who had no realistic chance of harming us or our allies.
WWII ended with unconditional surrenders. In Iraq there is nobody to offer surrender.
If Canada or Mexico said they'd initiate military actions within the continental US using attack helicopters and Special Forces Personnel, I doubt you would see it as acceptable and not as an unprovoked act of aggression worthy of a potential declaration of war.
There is a profound difference between a potential attack within the US and the possibility of launching an attack within Pakistan. The terrain and accessibility of Pakistan is dramatically different than within the US. When talking about the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region where Bin Laden has previously frequented, we are talking about extremely inaccessible terrain. Even if you had intelligence with exact GPS coordinates for someone in that area, it could take the Pakistani army days to get there (at which point the target has left). However, those same regions are accessible to cruise missiles from US warships.
We're not talking about catching the Unabomber, here. Even the most rugged terrain in the US is pretty accessible in comparison to some parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Before Bush we had 8 years of Tax the rich and redistribute it to the poor
That is a grave oversimplification. If you look at the national budget you'll find that very little of the federal budget is redistributed to the poor. A comparatively larger sum goes towards our war efforts. And as we have returned towards regressive taxation, more federal spending has been done on credit rather than on income.
Freezing science research budgets
That's not the same thing as cutting them.
Actually, in the current situation, a freeze on science budget amounts to a cut. Scientific research involves a lot more than just guys sitting around with calculators. Laboratories need power, heat, communications, space, transportation, etc. All those costs have risen over the past years. And with research budgets not rising at the same rate as the increase in those expenses, you end up with a net loss of income for research as more money has to go towards keeping the lab running.
You may recall A recent article on how Fermilab was aided on a $1M annual budget shortfall that came from rising energy costs.
The war in Iraq (or any war for that matter) has always been of indefinite length
However the war in Iraq is different in that there have never been any clearly defined goals for ending the war. Most other overseas conflicts have had set endpoints - the invasion of Iraq does not.
surge started to work (which he refuses to admit
You must have missed the presidential debates. Obama agreed that the conditions in Iraq improved after the surge. However you cannot study a war in a vacuum and stating that the surge was the one and only reason for those improved conditions is just not logical.
neither candidates healthcare plan affected the cost of my employer provided plan
Are you forgetting that the McCain plan was going to tax the cost of your healthcare plan (which has not been done before) in your income taxes?
that doesn't make it a negative from everyones point of view.
I didn't say it was bad for everyone. Just as regressive taxation helps some portion of people (less than 1%), the McCain healtcare plan would have likely helped some people as well.
Obama on the other hand threatened military action against our allies
Are you referring to when he said he would attack inside Pakistan to kill Bin Laden? That is not the same as attacking the nation, government, or people of Pakistan.
At my alma mater, Comparative Literature showed up on your transcript as "CLit", or "CLIT", depending on where your transcript was printed. Hence you could take your A in CLIT and proclaim that you had "mastered the clit" in college.
If you can't name any of the positive solutions McCain proposed
I can name solutions that McCain proposed, but I wouldn't consider them positive from my point of view
None of those would I consier positive.
ICANN is going to start selling new gTLDs that will turn the current DNS system into arbitrary mish-mash anyways. Just wait until we start seeing links to .cheapdrugs domains, and we try to find the DNS info for that.
Then we'll find ourselves longing for the current DNS problem.
don't we still have farmers paid to NOT grow crops?
Yes, we do.
To keep the prices up?
That is not the only reason why we do that.
Allowing certain fields to lie fallow for a season is responsible farming. The most common application of farmers being paid to not grow crops (that I am aware of) involves farmers who are asked to leave some fraction (say 1/4 or so) of their total farming land fallow each season. They are still growing crops, just not as much as they would if they farmed all their land that year.
However, this is actually a responsible technique from the long-term perspective because of the impact that farming has on the land. If a farmer leaves 1/4 un-farmed each year, then that means their land undergoes 3 year on, 1 year off cycles of fertilizer, pesiticide, irrigation, tilling, etc.