That's a pretty amusing article, but he has it easy. My own curse is with race car drivers... as soon as I start rooting for them, a freak accident is sure to follow.
I was hired once to supervise a Windows admin who used a private class B for everything... we were on 172.x.x.x addresses, which allowed for 16 Class B's. So we had a class B for our main office (70 nodes), a class B for the branch office (15 nodes)... a class B for the colo (6 nodes)... a class B for each VP's home PC.... say what?
He was convinced that they'd be faster if we didn't subnet 'em.
Aside from fact that nobody will pay for web content anyway (geez, didn't we learn ANYTHING from teh dot-com bust?), the problems with micropayments are setup costs and transaction costs. There's no way to make them low enough for 1-cent transactions. PayPal seems to have reduced the practical minimum to a couple of dollars, but there's still a hassle factor that technology isn't going to overcome; this is the barrier to micropayments.
Think of cash... there's no setup hassle or cost, and minimal transaction hassle... anybody can pay with cash, anybody can accept it. Now THAT's efficient. And when you think about it, nobody even sells anything for a penny cash anymore, much less through a payment system that involves computers, the Internet, and a third party.
Well, "AOL Support" could mean that the setup program installs AOL software, creates a desktop icon, makes aol.com your home page, and offers to sign you up for an account.
If you actually WANT to be a Unix sysadmin, then you're probably not smart enough.
Seriously, though, you're never too old, if you're good. I started in IT when I was almost 40. I definitely started at the bottom, made maybe $15K the first year working part-time. But results get noticed, and once you have a track record to show, age ceases to matter. In fact, I've done very well by billing myself as "an adult," which often hits a nerve with suits who have been burned by too many 20-somethings who weren't reliable or trustworthy.
You do encounter that mentality of people who think young people are technically smarter, and in many ways, it's true. For example, I can't do math in my head as fast as I used to. But there's much more to being a good sysadmin than just technical smarts.
Oh, BTW, I started out doing Novell/DOS/Windows, and the transition to Unix wasn't easy. I definitely ran into a lot of resistance from Solaris snobs, who saw Windows experience and figured that I was some sort of gates-butt-licking lowlife. Over the years, I managed to get more and more involved in the Unix stuff, and now I have a cage full of Solaris servers to call my own.
And you know something? It turns out Solaris sucks just as bad as Windows.
Funny, I relocated to the SF area a couple years ago, and as an experiment, I didn't order any paper checks. I managed to get by the first year using only one of the temporary checks they gave me. I finally ordered paper ones, and I've used four of them, of which three were for goverment agencies (DMV, IRS, State tax). Nearly everything else is paid online... I use a credit card to buy gas and food, and pay that bill online weekly. I carry some cash (cigarettes and junk food account for most of that), but it's a small percentage of what goes through my bank account. So I'm nearly cashless.
Still, even though it's plausible to go without cash, in order to eliminate it, you'd have to get the sellers to stop accepting it. How would you do that? The only way would be if the government eliminated cash completely, for example, if they offered to redeem it for credit up to a certain date, and refused to back it thereafter.
For starters, the implications for personal privacy would be substantial, and there would likely be widespread public outcry. But more to the point, cash is a simple method of anonymous exchange that allows economic activity to take place at a very low level. Eliminating it would impact many transactions, as some have observed. Some are illegal, such as drug deals, but others are benign... flea markets and garage sales, poker games, tipping, lemonade stands, and a lot of everyday economic activity among poorer people.
So I just don't see how it's possible, no matter how close we come, to being able to eliminate cash entirely, nor should we want to. We will be pretty close, in fact, we already are pretty close... if we choose to, we can live with minimal cash. But I don't want to go without it completely, and I don't think many others will either. Anonymous paper cash is a pretty profound invention, and electronic transactions will only replace it for transactions that offer substantial improvement in convenience or that require some sort of accountability.
Thanks for saving me the time of writing essentially the same thing. This is another in a string of stupid articles written by journalists who think they know something the CIA doesn't, written to analyze a different war than the one we'll be fighting.
And some stuff in the article is obviously urban legend, such as, "The people sitting at the far end of such a cave would not even notice that you dropped a bomb that exploded at the entrance." Get serious. This is lame, and we'll see the same dumb stories all over network news the next few weeks.
For that matter, be careful what you do if you connect to an open wireless network.
It would be simple to set up an access point, leave it open, and sniff traffic of whoever connects. If nothing else, I'd think you could collect POP passwords pretty easily.
The urge to seek revenge is healthy, natural and understandabale. But thankfully, we won't actually go on some sort of killing spress just becasue we can. The very fact that we both feel that urge and can resist it is the sign that we're a great people.
More likely, we'll take some action to dismantle these organizations, which can be done without bombs and rockets or civilian casualties. We may have to kill some people, but not many, and mostly just the responsible ones. And the rest of the world will be safer for our having eliminated some of these groups. That won't stop them from complaining about us, of course.
What has hamstrung us up until now was that we've tried to do it through the criminal justice system, which in America requires a higher level of proof than is available in most terrorist bombings.
Personally, I advocate using a devastating American weapon that doesn't require such conclusive proof. A class-action lawsuit against the governments that "marketed terrorism to children".
They'll WISH they were nuked.
Actually, I'm not kidding about this.... this is New York, remember, loaded with lawyers. I think it would be easy to convince a civil jury to seize all of a foreign nation's assets, and I'm CERTAIN that somebody will try.
Right.... and remember the blatant statistical lie in this whole thing.... of the 50% of sites that are "owned by major corporations," a huge portion are personal sites on Geocities or AOL or MSN that are created by individuals.
Keep your priorities straight....
on
Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 3, Funny
It's simply a matter of keeping your eye on the real priorities. Attractive females get the best service, get their systems tuned to the max. Everybody else can damn well figure it out for themselves.
Telecom is, throughout the US, one of the most thoroughly regulated industries. Ever since the new regulations (which were called deregulation) were passed, the FCC has been aggressively regulating the "deregulation" process. And we see the results.
What I'm amazed at is the pervasive idea that somehow regulations help the smaller competitors. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Regulations always favor those with the biggest lobbying efforts. And once they're in effect, it's always more cost-effective for a big company to comply with the regulations than it is for a small competitor. Or, if they want them changed or if they want an exemption, it's more cost-effective for a big company to lobby for it.
When there's a billion dollars at stake in the political arena, a company can spend $900 million on lobbying and still make a profit. This is not a system that favors innovators and smaller players.
>> whether it ethical to do so without informing users,
Well, just because Ralph Nader was the last one to figure what's going doesn't make it unethical. This guy apparently thinks consumers are a bunch of idiots and has named himself their spokesman. What does that tell you?
It bears repeating... of all the intellectual property laws, trademarks are the most clearly justified, since both producers and consumers benefit from them. A trademark isn't a product, it's an identity, and the consumer generally benefits by knowing who he's dealing with and what product he's purchasing.
This is probably also a cash-preservation measure. Think about it.... there's a certain inventory ($8 million and rising as of 4/28), and now it can be sold without being replaced. By liquidating their hardware inventory, they generate enough cash to keep the doors open for a few more months.
Yes, a lot more information will be lost in the digtal age than in previous times. But an awful lot more will be preserved, too.
The archeological record always seems to improve with technology. From stone etchings to written scrolls to printed matter and photography and on into the 20th century, the more technology people had, the better record they left of themselves.
"I don't believe it, but hey, you can't disprove it."
Well, if you feel so strongly about science, and you acknowledge that this theory can't be disproven, then why do you feel so confident that it's not true?
It is a reality that we can't know whether the world "actually" evolved over millions of years, or whether it was created in the space of seven days to look as if it had evolved. This throws people for a loop if they put blind faith in logic, or seek logical, scientific explanations for everything.
I don't go to church, but I don't worship pure logic, either. Truth lies, as Hayek observed, "between instinct and reason." Deal with it.
Yes, of course, there's room for small mom and pop ISP's. The problem is, very few people want to pay the extra costs for all that personalized service.
Sure, it's nice to be able to chat with a tech you know on IRC, but think about the math... how much are you paying? How many customers can he chat with? What does he need to be paid to make it worth his while?
If people wanted to pay $40 a month or so, maybe more of these ISP's could survive. But they (i.e. "we") don't want to pay that much. In fact, even the best dialup service is so miserable that most folks I know are using the free services when they need dialup access.
And in fairness, not all those little ISP's are any good. Some are pretty ragtag operations, and tech support is often provided by whoever is stupid enough to take the job. Yeah, I've had some good ones. But I recall one in particular, the classic small ISP started by a bunch of Linux geeks, really great guys. They had plenty of business (mostly corporate leased lines), but had a terrible time hiring qualified people, so they finally cashed in and sold out to Verio. More power to 'em, I say.
This is not about evil corporations gobbling up the little guy, it's about consumers saying they prefer low prices and consistency mediocre service. The Verios of the world have bailed out a lot of little ISPs and put some cash in the pockets of the folks who worked hard to start 'em. If the little guys couldn't sell out, they might just go broke, and that would truly suck.
Cutting through a lot of the hogwash that's thrown about on this issue.... there's one very simple reason that states can't charge tax on out-of-state sales. They don't have the jurisdiction to enforce it! If a state passed a law saying that out-of-state companies had to collect sales tax, and some company violated it, how could the state enforce that law, unless the company had an office or something in the state?
And that's the crux of the matter, and between that issue and the Constitutional restrictions against interstate trade barriers, proposals like this don't stand a chance. And they shouldn't.
And I'm tired of hearing how states "lose" revenue just because the don't have the power to tax everything they want to tax. They don't lose any money, no money leaves the state coffers. Yes, they take less from the consumer when it's an out-of-state sale, but that's quite different from "losing" money. This speaks to the issue that money doesn't belong to the state, it belongs to the people. New Hampshire doesn't have any sales tax. Do they lose anything when a NH resident buys out of state? Of course not. Nor does California or Massachusetts or any of the other greedy legislatures who think they have some entitlement to a portion of everything we spend.
Strictly speaking, no the 'net hasn't peaked. Usage will continue to grow, and new services will come to pass.
But the hype has definitely peaked. Growth has dropped to a steady pace. What I find is that after having had broadband for a while now, I'm still surfing the same sites in the same way that I was three years ago.
Broadband content? Yawn. What can the net offer that 300-channel cable doesn't? Not much A little more variety, video on demand, but not much better than PPV.
Interactive TV? Who the hell wants it? Some folks are really into Netmeeting or CU-SEEME, but they're really just a niche. They'll become a bigger niche, but still a niche.
Voice over IP? A nice improvement for businesses, maybe, it allows people to take their business phone number home. Sort of like call forwarding.
Wireless? Yeah, nice, but how is wireless e-mail going to change our society? Everybody I know already has e-mail, I send 'em a message, and they answer later. No need to for continuous mobile access.
Wireless Voice-over-IP? Sounds like a cell phone to me.
Wireless video? Sounds like TV.
Might be nice to do comparison shopping or product research on a Palm Pilot while I'm at the mall. But it won't be a drastic change.
So the article makes a good point, even though the headline is sort of overstated (and what good headline isn't?). Internet growth will continue, but it will be incremental. Most of the Killer Apps are already in use. To the extent that the 'net can change society, it's pretty much already happened. As good a sign as any is the rash of dot-com failures; late-coming investors and entrepreneurs have already found out the hard way that the exciting part of the revolution is behind us.
Well, whatever you do, don't let the Florida courts design them.
First you'll miss your deadlines, then they'll decide that your deadlines weren't important, and then when they do finally finish the design, the legistlature will overrule them.
Hee hee. Environmentalists get so touchy when you challenge their religion.
Main point of my comment was to note the use of the language, and the implications of using the word "heal". Another common misuse is the phrase "fragile ecosystem." As if it could break and then we wouldn't have an ecosystem. Of course, any change would "break" the ecosystem as it exists today. By the same token, since change is inevitable, it will inevitably "break" regardless of what mankind does. Of course, it's a continuous process, constantly "breaking" and adapting, and new balances are formed constantly.
While we're on the subject of misusing the language, the very term "ozone hole" is incorrect. There is no hole, there is no place on the globe where there isn't an ozone layer. What is observed is a polar region where it is (and always has been) thinner than at the equator, and that the characterisitics of that region are changing. But the "thickness" of that region changes gradually from the immediate polar area, where it is thinnest, to the equator where it is thicker. There are no edges to the "hole", no boundaries. To say that the "hole" is a certain size is an arbitrary declaration.
Without delving into the scientific discussion, I think one should learn to see these sorts of linguistic tricks, and learn to be wary of them. Often they are used to convince you of something, and changing the language is an insidious way to manipulate public opinion. Both nazism and communism promised "freedom," but they did so by perverting the meaning of the word.
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That's a pretty amusing article, but he has it easy. My own curse is with race car drivers... as soon as I start rooting for them, a freak accident is sure to follow.
I was hired once to supervise a Windows admin who used a private class B for everything... we were on 172.x.x.x addresses, which allowed for 16 Class B's. So we had a class B for our main office (70 nodes), a class B for the branch office (15 nodes) ... a class B for the colo (6 nodes)... a class B for each VP's home PC.... say what?
He was convinced that they'd be faster if we didn't subnet 'em.
No.
Next question.
Aside from fact that nobody will pay for web content anyway (geez, didn't we learn ANYTHING from teh dot-com bust?), the problems with micropayments are setup costs and transaction costs. There's no way to make them low enough for 1-cent transactions. PayPal seems to have reduced the practical minimum to a couple of dollars, but there's still a hassle factor that technology isn't going to overcome; this is the barrier to micropayments.
Think of cash... there's no setup hassle or cost, and minimal transaction hassle... anybody can pay with cash, anybody can accept it. Now THAT's efficient. And when you think about it, nobody even sells anything for a penny cash anymore, much less through a payment system that involves computers, the Internet, and a third party.
Well, "AOL Support" could mean that the setup program installs AOL software, creates a desktop icon, makes aol.com your home page, and offers to sign you up for an account.
Gotta learn to read through the marketing-speak.
If you actually WANT to be a Unix sysadmin, then you're probably not smart enough.
Seriously, though, you're never too old, if you're good. I started in IT when I was almost 40. I definitely started at the bottom, made maybe $15K the first year working part-time. But results get noticed, and once you have a track record to show, age ceases to matter. In fact, I've done very well by billing myself as "an adult," which often hits a nerve with suits who have been burned by too many 20-somethings who weren't reliable or trustworthy.
You do encounter that mentality of people who think young people are technically smarter, and in many ways, it's true. For example, I can't do math in my head as fast as I used to. But there's much more to being a good sysadmin than just technical smarts.
Oh, BTW, I started out doing Novell/DOS/Windows, and the transition to Unix wasn't easy. I definitely ran into a lot of resistance from Solaris snobs, who saw Windows experience and figured that I was some sort of gates-butt-licking lowlife. Over the years, I managed to get more and more involved in the Unix stuff, and now I have a cage full of Solaris servers to call my own.
And you know something? It turns out Solaris sucks just as bad as Windows.
Funny, I relocated to the SF area a couple years ago, and as an experiment, I didn't order any paper checks. I managed to get by the first year using only one of the temporary checks they gave me. I finally ordered paper ones, and I've used four of them, of which three were for goverment agencies (DMV, IRS, State tax). Nearly everything else is paid online... I use a credit card to buy gas and food, and pay that bill online weekly. I carry some cash (cigarettes and junk food account for most of that), but it's a small percentage of what goes through my bank account. So I'm nearly cashless.
Still, even though it's plausible to go without cash, in order to eliminate it, you'd have to get the sellers to stop accepting it. How would you do that? The only way would be if the government eliminated cash completely, for example, if they offered to redeem it for credit up to a certain date, and refused to back it thereafter.
For starters, the implications for personal privacy would be substantial, and there would likely be widespread public outcry. But more to the point, cash is a simple method of anonymous exchange that allows economic activity to take place at a very low level. Eliminating it would impact many transactions, as some have observed. Some are illegal, such as drug deals, but others are benign... flea markets and garage sales, poker games, tipping, lemonade stands, and a lot of everyday economic activity among poorer people.
So I just don't see how it's possible, no matter how close we come, to being able to eliminate cash entirely, nor should we want to. We will be pretty close, in fact, we already are pretty close... if we choose to, we can live with minimal cash. But I don't want to go without it completely, and I don't think many others will either. Anonymous paper cash is a pretty profound invention, and electronic transactions will only replace it for transactions that offer substantial improvement in convenience or that require some sort of accountability.
Thanks for saving me the time of writing essentially the same thing. This is another in a string of stupid articles written by journalists who think they know something the CIA doesn't, written to analyze a different war than the one we'll be fighting.
And some stuff in the article is obviously urban legend, such as, "The people sitting at the far end of such a cave would not even notice that you dropped a bomb that exploded at the entrance." Get serious. This is lame, and we'll see the same dumb stories all over network news the next few weeks.
For that matter, be careful what you do if you connect to an open wireless network.
It would be simple to set up an access point, leave it open, and sniff traffic of whoever connects. If nothing else, I'd think you could collect POP passwords pretty easily.
The urge to seek revenge is healthy, natural and understandabale. But thankfully, we won't actually go on some sort of killing spress just becasue we can. The very fact that we both feel that urge and can resist it is the sign that we're a great people.
More likely, we'll take some action to dismantle these organizations, which can be done without bombs and rockets or civilian casualties. We may have to kill some people, but not many, and mostly just the responsible ones. And the rest of the world will be safer for our having eliminated some of these groups. That won't stop them from complaining about us, of course.
What has hamstrung us up until now was that we've tried to do it through the criminal justice system, which in America requires a higher level of proof than is available in most terrorist bombings.
Personally, I advocate using a devastating American weapon that doesn't require such conclusive proof. A class-action lawsuit against the governments that "marketed terrorism to children".
They'll WISH they were nuked.
Actually, I'm not kidding about this.... this is New York, remember, loaded with lawyers. I think it would be easy to convince a civil jury to seize all of a foreign nation's assets, and I'm CERTAIN that somebody will try.
Right.... and remember the blatant statistical lie in this whole thing.... of the 50% of sites that are "owned by major corporations," a huge portion are personal sites on Geocities or AOL or MSN that are created by individuals.
It's simply a matter of keeping your eye on the real priorities. Attractive females get the best service, get their systems tuned to the max. Everybody else can damn well figure it out for themselves.
Telecom is, throughout the US, one of the most thoroughly regulated industries. Ever since the new regulations (which were called deregulation) were passed, the FCC has been aggressively regulating the "deregulation" process. And we see the results.
What I'm amazed at is the pervasive idea that somehow regulations help the smaller competitors. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Regulations always favor those with the biggest lobbying efforts. And once they're in effect, it's always more cost-effective for a big company to comply with the regulations than it is for a small competitor. Or, if they want them changed or if they want an exemption, it's more cost-effective for a big company to lobby for it.
When there's a billion dollars at stake in the political arena, a company can spend $900 million on lobbying and still make a profit. This is not a system that favors innovators and smaller players.
>> whether it ethical to do so without informing users,
Well, just because Ralph Nader was the last one to figure what's going doesn't make it unethical. This guy apparently thinks consumers are a bunch of idiots and has named himself their spokesman. What does that tell you?
I live in a third-world economy, and the air here in California is pretty clean.
is there room for consumer confusion? Yes
It bears repeating... of all the intellectual property laws, trademarks are the most clearly justified, since both producers and consumers benefit from them. A trademark isn't a product, it's an identity, and the consumer generally benefits by knowing who he's dealing with and what product he's purchasing.
This is probably also a cash-preservation measure. Think about it.... there's a certain inventory ($8 million and rising as of 4/28), and now it can be sold without being replaced. By liquidating their hardware inventory, they generate enough cash to keep the doors open for a few more months.
A quick look at the financials suggests that VA is quickly running out of cash.
I don't see a problem with this. I'll just buy the advertised products, and pay for them with superimposed images of dollar bills.
What's the big deal?
"if someone would only release something like this for Outlook that turns off VBScript..."
Hey, wait just a minute there. I get paid good money to do that. Don't go replacin' me with no worm.
Yes, a lot more information will be lost in the digtal age than in previous times. But an awful lot more will be preserved, too.
The archeological record always seems to improve with technology. From stone etchings to written scrolls to printed matter and photography and on into the 20th century, the more technology people had, the better record they left of themselves.
"I don't believe it, but hey, you can't disprove it."
Well, if you feel so strongly about science, and you acknowledge that this theory can't be disproven, then why do you feel so confident that it's not true?
It is a reality that we can't know whether the world "actually" evolved over millions of years, or whether it was created in the space of seven days to look as if it had evolved. This throws people for a loop if they put blind faith in logic, or seek logical, scientific explanations for everything.
I don't go to church, but I don't worship pure logic, either. Truth lies, as Hayek observed, "between instinct and reason." Deal with it.
Yes, of course, there's room for small mom and pop ISP's. The problem is, very few people want to pay the extra costs for all that personalized service.
Sure, it's nice to be able to chat with a tech you know on IRC, but think about the math... how much are you paying? How many customers can he chat with? What does he need to be paid to make it worth his while?
If people wanted to pay $40 a month or so, maybe more of these ISP's could survive. But they (i.e. "we") don't want to pay that much. In fact, even the best dialup service is so miserable that most folks I know are using the free services when they need dialup access.
And in fairness, not all those little ISP's are any good. Some are pretty ragtag operations, and tech support is often provided by whoever is stupid enough to take the job. Yeah, I've had some good ones. But I recall one in particular, the classic small ISP started by a bunch of Linux geeks, really great guys. They had plenty of business (mostly corporate leased lines), but had a terrible time hiring qualified people, so they finally cashed in and sold out to Verio. More power to 'em, I say.
This is not about evil corporations gobbling up the little guy, it's about consumers saying they prefer low prices and consistency mediocre service. The Verios of the world have bailed out a lot of little ISPs and put some cash in the pockets of the folks who worked hard to start 'em. If the little guys couldn't sell out, they might just go broke, and that would truly suck.
Cutting through a lot of the hogwash that's thrown about on this issue.... there's one very simple reason that states can't charge tax on out-of-state sales. They don't have the jurisdiction to enforce it! If a state passed a law saying that out-of-state companies had to collect sales tax, and some company violated it, how could the state enforce that law, unless the company had an office or something in the state?
And that's the crux of the matter, and between that issue and the Constitutional restrictions against interstate trade barriers, proposals like this don't stand a chance. And they shouldn't.
And I'm tired of hearing how states "lose" revenue just because the don't have the power to tax everything they want to tax. They don't lose any money, no money leaves the state coffers. Yes, they take less from the consumer when it's an out-of-state sale, but that's quite different from "losing" money. This speaks to the issue that money doesn't belong to the state, it belongs to the people. New Hampshire doesn't have any sales tax. Do they lose anything when a NH resident buys out of state? Of course not. Nor does California or Massachusetts or any of the other greedy legislatures who think they have some entitlement to a portion of everything we spend.
Strictly speaking, no the 'net hasn't peaked. Usage will continue to grow, and new services will come to pass.
But the hype has definitely peaked. Growth has dropped to a steady pace. What I find is that after having had broadband for a while now, I'm still surfing the same sites in the same way that I was three years ago.
Broadband content? Yawn. What can the net offer that 300-channel cable doesn't? Not much A little more variety, video on demand, but not much better than PPV.
Interactive TV? Who the hell wants it? Some folks are really into Netmeeting or CU-SEEME, but they're really just a niche. They'll become a bigger niche, but still a niche.
Voice over IP? A nice improvement for businesses, maybe, it allows people to take their business phone number home. Sort of like call forwarding.
Wireless? Yeah, nice, but how is wireless e-mail going to change our society? Everybody I know already has e-mail, I send 'em a message, and they answer later. No need to for continuous mobile access.
Wireless Voice-over-IP? Sounds like a cell phone to me.
Wireless video? Sounds like TV.
Might be nice to do comparison shopping or product research on a Palm Pilot while I'm at the mall. But it won't be a drastic change.
So the article makes a good point, even though the headline is sort of overstated (and what good headline isn't?). Internet growth will continue, but it will be incremental. Most of the Killer Apps are already in use. To the extent that the 'net can change society, it's pretty much already happened. As good a sign as any is the rash of dot-com failures; late-coming investors and entrepreneurs have already found out the hard way that the exciting part of the revolution is behind us.
Well, whatever you do, don't let the Florida courts design them.
First you'll miss your deadlines, then they'll decide that your deadlines weren't important, and then when they do finally finish the design, the legistlature will overrule them.
Hee hee. Environmentalists get so touchy when you challenge their religion.
Main point of my comment was to note the use of the language, and the implications of using the word "heal". Another common misuse is the phrase "fragile ecosystem." As if it could break and then we wouldn't have an ecosystem. Of course, any change would "break" the ecosystem as it exists today. By the same token, since change is inevitable, it will inevitably "break" regardless of what mankind does. Of course, it's a continuous process, constantly "breaking" and adapting, and new balances are formed constantly.
While we're on the subject of misusing the language, the very term "ozone hole" is incorrect. There is no hole, there is no place on the globe where there isn't an ozone layer. What is observed is a polar region where it is (and always has been) thinner than at the equator, and that the characterisitics of that region are changing. But the "thickness" of that region changes gradually from the immediate polar area, where it is thinnest, to the equator where it is thicker. There are no edges to the "hole", no boundaries. To say that the "hole" is a certain size is an arbitrary declaration.
Without delving into the scientific discussion, I think one should learn to see these sorts of linguistic tricks, and learn to be wary of them. Often they are used to convince you of something, and changing the language is an insidious way to manipulate public opinion. Both nazism and communism promised "freedom," but they did so by perverting the meaning of the word.