Usenet binaries are SOOO much better than torrents. Zero chance of letters from your ISP, you have no reliance upon other people to keep seeding forever, you max out your pipe (mines 30Mbit) all the time, you yourself don't need to seed forever (go ahead and delete it when you finish,) and there is some great software that automates everything you want.
For example, I don't need to hit the pirate bay and find an ideal release of the dark knight rises. Instead I type the name (even a partial name) into couchpotato, and it automatically finds it. I can even tell it what quality I want it in, whether it is a full 50GB blu-ray rip, or maybe aim for 1080p with 10GB file size. (Generally I do the later, and only do BD rips for really good movies.)
I can also automate downloading all of my favorite shows as they air without having to manually do anything. Dexter, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and others automatically download on to my NAS without having to visit a single website. Just set it to get that show, and forget it. That program is called sickbeard. If a release of an episode is broken (happens sometimes, happens even more on torrents,) and a proper is released, it automatically downloads the proper release and discards the bad one.
No, the government censors. DMCA? We're not allowed to talk about breaking digital locks. If you do, you go to jail. The MPAA themselves cannot put you into jail, but they can force the government's hand thanks to that law.
The MPAA can sue you as well. But ultimately, how do they collect? They can't just go to your home and start taking your belongings and drain your bank account. They need a court order for that. The government makes that possible, and they send in the police to take it and hand it over.
If you got rid of corporations, you'd basically destroy the economy, and prevent a new one from growing.
Also, everything you said above also works when you apply it to unions.
The Bakers Union destroyed the American icon of treats - Hostess. After they did so, the Bakers Union leaders basically came away saying it was a victory because they stood their ground and sent a message, meanwhile 18,000 people lost their jobs, while the union leadership kept theirs. Hostess didn't fail due to mismanagement either, look at the practices the unions forced upon them. Workers who handled snacks weren't allowed to handle bread. Workers who handled bread weren't allowed to handle snacks. Bread truckers were supposed to refuse snacks on their trucks, even if they were headed to the same store. Instead they had to have a separate truck for snacks. The unions forced this practice due to a mutual agreement between two separate unions so that they didn't have to compete for jobs.
Unions also hate technology. Technology often costs them their jobs, and they force their industries to stay behind as a result. When shipping first started moving to storage crates, the unions forced their employers to allow the dock workers to remove the contents of the crate while it was on land, then put the crate on the ship, then individually load its contents back into the crate. Why? Because the union couldn't stand the thought of the dock workers losing their job. Technologies change, and there will always be frictional unemployment.
And then you have the bureaucracy the UAW creates. Employees who work at their station aren't allowed to correct problems with their equipment when it malfunctions, even if it is an easy fix. If they fix it themselves, then technicians who ARE supposed to fix it will file a grievance with their union, and the station worker will get reprimanded or even fired. How on earth can you compete on the global economy if you have to put up with that? It's no wonder GM and Chrysler went bankrupt.
The bosses of these unions talk their members up about how they need to prevent their employers from having a six figure income so that the employees can have a greater share, but meanwhile they are forced to give up their money to pay the union boss a six figure income or else they'll be forced out of their union, and then fired because the union has a stranglehold on employer contracts.
Unions also buy out the government, to our detriment! The sugar industry lobbied for the sugar tariffs. Because of the sugar tariffs, sugar is too expensive to be used in most food. Agricultural unions also pushed for corn subsidies. While the rest of the world uses sugar in their food, we use high fructose corn syrup. The chemists who create the world's soda pretty much all reside here, yet they make soda with sugar for the rest of the world, while ours has high fructose corn syrup.
Did this save any jobs? Not a chance, it just kept those unions happy.
In fact, union involvement has actually cost jobs. The steel industry lobbied for steel tariffs, saying that they'd lose their jobs if they had to compete with the global economy. The result of that is we pay a lot more for steel in America. Meanwhile, other countries pay less for steel. American goods now cost more, which means those goods now have a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. Steelworkers keep their jobs, but at the expense of many more jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Thank you unions!
As for your "clever social systems", those were tried many times, and all of them failed. Look at the Icarians, they were basically given an already built city for nothing at all when its previous inhabitants were forced out of it by the government. Yet somehow, they managed to have a rapidly declining economy until it all fell apart. Many *many* communes have risen and fallen for the exact same reasons. The only even remotely successful "clever social systems" were dictatorships, with millions dead in their wake.
And why on earth would you want a zero sum game? That implies no growth at all. Without growth, you are guaranteed to fail.
You talk as if loving the constitution is a bad thing.
I don't identify as right wing. In fact, I don't really like the titles of left or right. They make people take sides as if they were fans of a football team instead of thinking individually about individual issues. Sadly, that is all that the elections have turned in to, and why I have reservations about even bothering to vote, because the issues aren't even important. Why, for example, was Romney's dog a major issue?
Like most, you've bought into it. Just because I'm against Obama, you automatically identify me as the enemy.
I voted for Jeff Flake (for being anti-SOPA and anti-earmarks) and basically ignored the rest of the ballot.
Make no mistake about it, this IS the government doing it. What happened is the government has effectively given the MPAA governing powers.
The whole reason ACTA is currently law is because Hollywood basically purchased Obama. If he ran it through the houses, as is required in the constitution, it wouldn't have passed due to the recent furor over SOPA. So, he just ignored the constitution and signed it anyways. If you need proof, look here:
All of those "free" poses, endorsements, and photo shoots from Hollywood celebrities weren't actually free, and Obama knew that. He had to take care of those who got him elected in order to get re-elected. This is the "change" that many "hoped" for.
If you think that's bad, the slashdot article last week that claimed that NASA was about to announce some big discovery on mars was also fake, or at least really REALLY exaggerated.
You know whats sad, is the submitter commented that this article was fake before samzenpus moved it to the front page. Apparently some editors don't read the comments either. I'd say it more resembles digg.
No, it's not contamination. If you read the article, you can clearly see a picture of cheap beads that the hippie chicks that hang around Berkley wear.
You can tell this is fake is because they messed up there. See, they said "earthshaking" when a legit article would have said "marsshaking", because this, of course, is on mars.
You say important right now because of that. Does that mean it won't be important later?
The climate WILL change, and there's nothing we can do about it. Even if we disappeared tomorrow, or if we didn't exist at all, or if Obama had a different 2008 campaign slogan...Change WILL happen.
As far as being catastrophic, I don't really think so. In fact I'll just flat out say no, it WILL NOT happen. We've had tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and more, yet we go on living anyways. People choose to live in areas where they well know that disaster can strike at any moment. San Fransisco sits right on a fault line. Hawaii itself is one giant volcano. We've already seen what happens when a city that resides below sea level (New Orleans) receives a hurricane.
However there isn't going to be a doomsday where suddenly a million natural disasters all happen at once. Rather, these changes happen over time. There will be plenty of fresh water. The climate was far more favorable to life in those warmer conditions then as it is now.
Mass migrations will not happen. Many people live comfortably in environments that you and I would consider to be inhospitable. Hell, I myself live in an environment that you probably consider inhospitable (if not you, I already know many who do.) I keep my room at 80 degrees all year long, and the weather out here is triple digits throughout most of the year. Doesn't bother me one bit. My area is fully nuclear powered, so the climate isn't going to take away my energy supply any time soon.
There are people in some areas of Chile who have adapted to living in very cold and relatively low oxygen environments in high mountains. They don't grow very tall, have a significantly higher lung capacity, and have thick skin on their feet so that they can walk around barefoot comfortably even when it is freezing cold outside.
Basically what I'm telling you here is that all of the Hollywood movies (2012 comes to mind) and Al Gore doomsday predictions will not happen. Besides, Al Gore himself already said that we are beyond the point of no return, so we may as well get used to it.
Well is there anything factually incorrect with what I said above? Your argument reminds me of Christians when they claim that a billion strong can't be wrong...about their god and whatnot. Ultimately, the truth is the truth, regardless of how many people believe in it.
Besides, not a thing I have said is at odds with anything the "armies of PhD's" as you put it, have said.
And as for your signature, actually environmentalists are recognized by the UN as being responsible for the majority of global acts of terrorism (to the tune of around 40%,) which includes halting scientific research that both advances technology, physics, and the cures of tomorrow. Here are a few slashdot articles on the matter:
In the comments you can also find links to even more eco-terrorism happening globally, for example the group that is burning high crop yield farms (which have saved literally millions of lives) because they believe high yield crop farms harm the earth.
You really ought to re-think who you call a terrorist.
There's another category which is at odds with the environmentalist movement, which is where I sit. Yeah, we've got global warming. Is it important? I'd say no.
We can't predict when cold or warm cycles will happen with any good degree of accuracy. However they do come. What we do know for sure is that the continents will eventually drift to become Pangaea Ultima. In such a configuration, there can't be any polar ice caps, and the globe will be much hotter than it is now.
The earth was in such a configuration before in age of Pangaea, and life did quite well then. We had monstrous macro scale life, namely dinosaurs and very large dragonflies, and the earth was the greenest it has ever been. This is what the eco movement describes as a doomsday scenario for all macro-scale life, yet the fossil evidence tells us otherwise.
Many species will die, the rest will adapt, and new ones will show up. As for us...we've been pretty good at adapting so far. We've survived through periods much warmer than now, periods much colder than now, and we witnessed other species go extinct in time immemorial, such as the wooly mammoth. Due to the homeostatic nature of all life, we don't like change. But that doesn't really matter, it will happen anyways.
The only things we need to be careful of is making sure we don't contaminate the soil and cause any more species to go extinct than will otherwise happen. Things like cap and trade won't address that at all, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and water has a much greater impact on the greenhouse effect than any other gasses, (something like 33%) not to mention its atmospheric ppm is much higher than all others.
Also related to this, mildly off topic, and I'll probably get modded troll for saying this, but recycling paper is incredibly stupid. Paper isn't going to cause us to run out of trees any more than eating food is going to make us run out of carrots or tomatoes. For quite some time now, paper has been made from selectively bred trees that are grown on farms for the express purpose of making that and other fibrous materials. These trees grow very few branches and have some other properties ideal for paper that wild trees can't match. These trees are literally considered an agricultural product, and are ripe for harvest every 8 years.
Recycled paper is a waste of resources and is ultimately pointless. Unlike metals, paper becomes less useful each time you recycle it, not to mention it is expensive. People only recycle paper or buy recycled paper because it makes them feel good, other than that it has no practical purpose.
The google incident also happened with youtube, and it didn't have anything to do with DNS or any kind of name services.
Without going into details of how dynamic routing protocols work, what I can tell you is that in order for one router to determine which direction a packet should go, some body or some thing has to tell it where it should go. In the case of ISP routers, this routing protocol is BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol. What happened here is that a major Pakistani provider wanted to censor youtube in Pakistan by changing the BGP configuration to redirect packets intended for youtube IP addresses into a bit bucket (think/dev/null) ergo there is no youtube access.
Problem is, BGP then advertised these black hole routes to the rest of the internet as it is designed to do. With that happening, many routers on the internet decided that pakistan was the optimal route to youtube so they sent their packets that way instead of the correct direction. Many people couldn't access youtube as a result.
The incident with google.com was a similar problem, only that was caused by administrative error rather than deliberate censorship.
Some say that the simple answer is to make BGP less trusting of lower tier or even some neighbor routers. However that would make anycast addressing a lot more difficult and manual process when things change. (Examples of anycast addresses include google public DNS, 8.8.8.8. There are many servers throughout the world that have that IP address, the purpose being that you have low latency access no matter where you are.)
The whole point of dynamic routing protocols is to keep things working by automatically adjusting routes when e.g. hardware breaks, or we add new routes. If everything had to be done by hand every time a change was made, the internet would be a LOT less reliable.
What's in a label? The left in England call themselves conservatives. That those in the US on the right identify as conservative also hold strong individualistic views, doesn't necessarily make them conservative.
In my mind, western conservatives would be like Italy, where there are blaspheme laws:
Compared to them, I think the US would fit the classic definition of being progressive.
Notice though that I disclaimed my post with "in my opinion", as should you. You'll hear different declarations on who gets what label depending on who you ask. Go ask the mythtv developers why they don't have version 1.0 after so many years of stable public releases, and you'll see what I mean about labels.
In my opinion, the US isn't conservative, more like individualistic. Yes, there are religious loudmouths, but they aren't common, you just hear about them more because they are loud where the others are not. Most people, republican or democrat, have religious views on the back of their mind but don't proselytize them. Except, of course, politicians like Jesse Jackson Jr. or Rick Santorum.
Conservatives say ban sex from the internet. Progressives say ban anything that somebody might consider offensive, even going so far as to put harmless internet trolls in jail. Individualists say that if you don't like what you see, change the channel.
The US, by and large, is the later of the three. We don't ban pornography, and we don't have hate speech laws. Freedom of speech is more absolute here than anywhere else, pretty much the only limit is speech that causes physical harm.
Though the left likes to claim that deregulation and austerity is conservative, and so does the media at large, it isn't. It is very much libertarian.
These aren't things that would change if the US didn't hold the keys to the internet.
The control of the internet lands on one organization: IANA. Right now, IANA delegates its powers to ICANN. IANA is merely responsible for deciding who gets what IP addresses and domain names. The ITU wants to usurp that power for themselves, for who knows what ends, or why they think the status quo is wrong.
In any case, even if say the ITU, the EU, China, or even nobody at all had the keys to IANA, the US would still be able to go after Dotcom and Wikileaks due to pre-existing treaties and strong arming tactics that don't require the internet to even exist in the first place.
Regardless though, there is no such thing as an "open internet" in your definition of the term. SOMEBODY has to decide who gets what names and numbers. There are theoretical ways of decentralizing DNS, (which in my opinion will be riddled with problems, although it will at least perform the intended function) but you CAN NOT decentralize IP address assignments without introducing a whole mess of other problems. It would be akin to not having a regulatory authority on who gets licenses to any given RF spectrum.
I don't know about that. From an evolutionary standpoint, "racism" as it were tends to prevail. Nearly all advanced lifeforms lend a favoritism towards their own clan, and shun others. I think the idea is that your familial gene survives and spreads, while theirs does not.
In any case, some well known geniuses were also well known racist asshats, e.g. Bobby Fischer. And there's this:
Actually while the media (and Janet Napolitano) like to make terrorism look like a right wing thing that was a bomb just waiting for a match in spite of no evidence to support that, the majority of terrorism is committed by mexican drug cartels and left wing groups, such as animal liberation and earth liberation movements.
(Interestingly enough, there was a rise of blogs trying to exonerate her a few months back because some nutter shot up a bunch of Sikh's, though beyond that, there's nothing of note.)
One thing to consider though, is that even if we were to disappear tomorrow...or better yet, even if we never existed to begin with, the climate will still change. It always has, and it always will.
The Pangaea theory holds that at one point we didn't have any ice caps. Pangaea Ultima predicts that it will be that way again. It wasn't just bacteria that lived in these much warmer climates either. At those times, large scale beasts like dinosaurs and giant insects roamed the earth, and in fact the earth was far greener than it is today.
As for humans, we'll either have to evolve or adapt, or both. In any case, it IS inevitable, no matter what we do. The only "environmental friendly" things we should worry about, in my opinion, are releasing contaminants into the soil and oceans. Though, strangely enough, life has a way of thriving in environments that we consider contaminated, such as Chernobyl.
This is mainly caused by advancements in agriculture, which include things that environmentalists hate, like genetically modified crops, and otherwise non-organic foods, the later of which has been proven to be insufficient for human needs in the long term - the time, resources, and eneergy required to produce organic foods is much greater than that of non-organic foods, and the landmass required to go all organic would require cutting down more forests. Ironic, isn't it? One thing they promote is at odds with another thing they promote.
I was opposed to gTLD's at first, but I thought about another existing problem that we have, which gTLD's may fix.
If you own a trademark, let's say videolan. You figure, ok, let's pick up videolan.org. But oh wait, we need to prevent domain squatters from grabbing up the same names on.net,.us,.com, etc etc etc. Now instead of one domain name to maintain and pay for, you have numerous. Hell, you may have to pick up a domain name for every common TLD out there just to prevent squatters from grabbing it and then packaging spyware with it, so that your software package doesn't get a bad name due to asshats loading it with spyware.
Maybe not necessarily that far, but it's annoying when I type in e.g. vlc.com, and I end up with some domain squatter page. It would be a lot better if I could just trust a tld called videolan, and the owners of that project don't have to track numerous.
I don't know about anybody else, but I get annoyed as hell when I type a domain name that I am pretty sure belongs to who I think it does, only to find out that a squatter has it. Ok, big deal, go to the right one next time. Except now the squatter page is in my autocomplete, and I have to be careful about when I arrow down and hit enter, unless I go through and delete it.
I think we either go back to the system where.com.net and.org were supposed to go to their respective organization types, or just allow the gTLD system to go through.
And restricting.sucks or.wtf because they find it offensive is just stupid politically correct bullcrap. Why not ban sucks.com while you're at it? (oh look, an ad squatter has it!)
Slashdot Mirror
Usenet binaries are SOOO much better than torrents. Zero chance of letters from your ISP, you have no reliance upon other people to keep seeding forever, you max out your pipe (mines 30Mbit) all the time, you yourself don't need to seed forever (go ahead and delete it when you finish,) and there is some great software that automates everything you want.
For example, I don't need to hit the pirate bay and find an ideal release of the dark knight rises. Instead I type the name (even a partial name) into couchpotato, and it automatically finds it. I can even tell it what quality I want it in, whether it is a full 50GB blu-ray rip, or maybe aim for 1080p with 10GB file size. (Generally I do the later, and only do BD rips for really good movies.)
I can also automate downloading all of my favorite shows as they air without having to manually do anything. Dexter, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and others automatically download on to my NAS without having to visit a single website. Just set it to get that show, and forget it. That program is called sickbeard. If a release of an episode is broken (happens sometimes, happens even more on torrents,) and a proper is released, it automatically downloads the proper release and discards the bad one.
No, the government censors. DMCA? We're not allowed to talk about breaking digital locks. If you do, you go to jail. The MPAA themselves cannot put you into jail, but they can force the government's hand thanks to that law.
The MPAA can sue you as well. But ultimately, how do they collect? They can't just go to your home and start taking your belongings and drain your bank account. They need a court order for that. The government makes that possible, and they send in the police to take it and hand it over.
If you got rid of corporations, you'd basically destroy the economy, and prevent a new one from growing.
Also, everything you said above also works when you apply it to unions.
The Bakers Union destroyed the American icon of treats - Hostess. After they did so, the Bakers Union leaders basically came away saying it was a victory because they stood their ground and sent a message, meanwhile 18,000 people lost their jobs, while the union leadership kept theirs. Hostess didn't fail due to mismanagement either, look at the practices the unions forced upon them. Workers who handled snacks weren't allowed to handle bread. Workers who handled bread weren't allowed to handle snacks. Bread truckers were supposed to refuse snacks on their trucks, even if they were headed to the same store. Instead they had to have a separate truck for snacks. The unions forced this practice due to a mutual agreement between two separate unions so that they didn't have to compete for jobs.
Unions also hate technology. Technology often costs them their jobs, and they force their industries to stay behind as a result. When shipping first started moving to storage crates, the unions forced their employers to allow the dock workers to remove the contents of the crate while it was on land, then put the crate on the ship, then individually load its contents back into the crate. Why? Because the union couldn't stand the thought of the dock workers losing their job. Technologies change, and there will always be frictional unemployment.
And then you have the bureaucracy the UAW creates. Employees who work at their station aren't allowed to correct problems with their equipment when it malfunctions, even if it is an easy fix. If they fix it themselves, then technicians who ARE supposed to fix it will file a grievance with their union, and the station worker will get reprimanded or even fired. How on earth can you compete on the global economy if you have to put up with that? It's no wonder GM and Chrysler went bankrupt.
The bosses of these unions talk their members up about how they need to prevent their employers from having a six figure income so that the employees can have a greater share, but meanwhile they are forced to give up their money to pay the union boss a six figure income or else they'll be forced out of their union, and then fired because the union has a stranglehold on employer contracts.
Unions also buy out the government, to our detriment! The sugar industry lobbied for the sugar tariffs. Because of the sugar tariffs, sugar is too expensive to be used in most food. Agricultural unions also pushed for corn subsidies. While the rest of the world uses sugar in their food, we use high fructose corn syrup. The chemists who create the world's soda pretty much all reside here, yet they make soda with sugar for the rest of the world, while ours has high fructose corn syrup.
Did this save any jobs? Not a chance, it just kept those unions happy.
In fact, union involvement has actually cost jobs. The steel industry lobbied for steel tariffs, saying that they'd lose their jobs if they had to compete with the global economy. The result of that is we pay a lot more for steel in America. Meanwhile, other countries pay less for steel. American goods now cost more, which means those goods now have a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. Steelworkers keep their jobs, but at the expense of many more jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Thank you unions!
As for your "clever social systems", those were tried many times, and all of them failed. Look at the Icarians, they were basically given an already built city for nothing at all when its previous inhabitants were forced out of it by the government. Yet somehow, they managed to have a rapidly declining economy until it all fell apart. Many *many* communes have risen and fallen for the exact same reasons. The only even remotely successful "clever social systems" were dictatorships, with millions dead in their wake.
And why on earth would you want a zero sum game? That implies no growth at all. Without growth, you are guaranteed to fail.
You talk as if loving the constitution is a bad thing.
I don't identify as right wing. In fact, I don't really like the titles of left or right. They make people take sides as if they were fans of a football team instead of thinking individually about individual issues. Sadly, that is all that the elections have turned in to, and why I have reservations about even bothering to vote, because the issues aren't even important. Why, for example, was Romney's dog a major issue?
Like most, you've bought into it. Just because I'm against Obama, you automatically identify me as the enemy.
I voted for Jeff Flake (for being anti-SOPA and anti-earmarks) and basically ignored the rest of the ballot.
Make no mistake about it, this IS the government doing it. What happened is the government has effectively given the MPAA governing powers.
The whole reason ACTA is currently law is because Hollywood basically purchased Obama. If he ran it through the houses, as is required in the constitution, it wouldn't have passed due to the recent furor over SOPA. So, he just ignored the constitution and signed it anyways. If you need proof, look here:
http://www.ustr.gov/acta
http://www.ustr.gov/webfm_send/1862 (PDF)
http://www.ustr.gov/webfm_send/1740 (PDF)
All of those "free" poses, endorsements, and photo shoots from Hollywood celebrities weren't actually free, and Obama knew that. He had to take care of those who got him elected in order to get re-elected. This is the "change" that many "hoped" for.
If you think that's bad, the slashdot article last week that claimed that NASA was about to announce some big discovery on mars was also fake, or at least really REALLY exaggerated.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/11/27/nasa_mars_discovery_misunderstanding_mission_leader_excited_about_entire.html
You know whats sad, is the submitter commented that this article was fake before samzenpus moved it to the front page. Apparently some editors don't read the comments either. I'd say it more resembles digg.
No, it's not contamination. If you read the article, you can clearly see a picture of cheap beads that the hippie chicks that hang around Berkley wear.
You can tell this is fake is because they messed up there. See, they said "earthshaking" when a legit article would have said "marsshaking", because this, of course, is on mars.
You say important right now because of that. Does that mean it won't be important later?
The climate WILL change, and there's nothing we can do about it. Even if we disappeared tomorrow, or if we didn't exist at all, or if Obama had a different 2008 campaign slogan...Change WILL happen.
As far as being catastrophic, I don't really think so. In fact I'll just flat out say no, it WILL NOT happen. We've had tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and more, yet we go on living anyways. People choose to live in areas where they well know that disaster can strike at any moment. San Fransisco sits right on a fault line. Hawaii itself is one giant volcano. We've already seen what happens when a city that resides below sea level (New Orleans) receives a hurricane.
However there isn't going to be a doomsday where suddenly a million natural disasters all happen at once. Rather, these changes happen over time. There will be plenty of fresh water. The climate was far more favorable to life in those warmer conditions then as it is now.
Mass migrations will not happen. Many people live comfortably in environments that you and I would consider to be inhospitable. Hell, I myself live in an environment that you probably consider inhospitable (if not you, I already know many who do.) I keep my room at 80 degrees all year long, and the weather out here is triple digits throughout most of the year. Doesn't bother me one bit. My area is fully nuclear powered, so the climate isn't going to take away my energy supply any time soon.
There are people in some areas of Chile who have adapted to living in very cold and relatively low oxygen environments in high mountains. They don't grow very tall, have a significantly higher lung capacity, and have thick skin on their feet so that they can walk around barefoot comfortably even when it is freezing cold outside.
Basically what I'm telling you here is that all of the Hollywood movies (2012 comes to mind) and Al Gore doomsday predictions will not happen. Besides, Al Gore himself already said that we are beyond the point of no return, so we may as well get used to it.
That already happened once. Remember skynet?
Well is there anything factually incorrect with what I said above? Your argument reminds me of Christians when they claim that a billion strong can't be wrong...about their god and whatnot. Ultimately, the truth is the truth, regardless of how many people believe in it.
Besides, not a thing I have said is at odds with anything the "armies of PhD's" as you put it, have said.
And as for your signature, actually environmentalists are recognized by the UN as being responsible for the majority of global acts of terrorism (to the tune of around 40%,) which includes halting scientific research that both advances technology, physics, and the cures of tomorrow. Here are a few slashdot articles on the matter:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/05/28/2124231/eco-anarchists-targeting-nuclear-and-nanotech-workers
http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/26/2242248/neuroscientist-halts-research-to-stop-extremists
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/10/2349225/terrorist-target-mexican-nanotechnology-professors
http://it.slashdot.org/story/08/09/12/1657211/greek-hackers-target-cerns-lhc
http://science.slashdot.org/story/01/07/01/1634213/eco-terrorism
In the comments you can also find links to even more eco-terrorism happening globally, for example the group that is burning high crop yield farms (which have saved literally millions of lives) because they believe high yield crop farms harm the earth.
You really ought to re-think who you call a terrorist.
There's another category which is at odds with the environmentalist movement, which is where I sit. Yeah, we've got global warming. Is it important? I'd say no.
We can't predict when cold or warm cycles will happen with any good degree of accuracy. However they do come. What we do know for sure is that the continents will eventually drift to become Pangaea Ultima. In such a configuration, there can't be any polar ice caps, and the globe will be much hotter than it is now.
The earth was in such a configuration before in age of Pangaea, and life did quite well then. We had monstrous macro scale life, namely dinosaurs and very large dragonflies, and the earth was the greenest it has ever been. This is what the eco movement describes as a doomsday scenario for all macro-scale life, yet the fossil evidence tells us otherwise.
Many species will die, the rest will adapt, and new ones will show up. As for us...we've been pretty good at adapting so far. We've survived through periods much warmer than now, periods much colder than now, and we witnessed other species go extinct in time immemorial, such as the wooly mammoth. Due to the homeostatic nature of all life, we don't like change. But that doesn't really matter, it will happen anyways.
The only things we need to be careful of is making sure we don't contaminate the soil and cause any more species to go extinct than will otherwise happen. Things like cap and trade won't address that at all, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and water has a much greater impact on the greenhouse effect than any other gasses, (something like 33%) not to mention its atmospheric ppm is much higher than all others.
Also related to this, mildly off topic, and I'll probably get modded troll for saying this, but recycling paper is incredibly stupid. Paper isn't going to cause us to run out of trees any more than eating food is going to make us run out of carrots or tomatoes. For quite some time now, paper has been made from selectively bred trees that are grown on farms for the express purpose of making that and other fibrous materials. These trees grow very few branches and have some other properties ideal for paper that wild trees can't match. These trees are literally considered an agricultural product, and are ripe for harvest every 8 years.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oregonwild/2086083298/
Recycled paper is a waste of resources and is ultimately pointless. Unlike metals, paper becomes less useful each time you recycle it, not to mention it is expensive. People only recycle paper or buy recycled paper because it makes them feel good, other than that it has no practical purpose.
The google incident also happened with youtube, and it didn't have anything to do with DNS or any kind of name services.
Without going into details of how dynamic routing protocols work, what I can tell you is that in order for one router to determine which direction a packet should go, some body or some thing has to tell it where it should go. In the case of ISP routers, this routing protocol is BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol. What happened here is that a major Pakistani provider wanted to censor youtube in Pakistan by changing the BGP configuration to redirect packets intended for youtube IP addresses into a bit bucket (think /dev/null) ergo there is no youtube access.
Problem is, BGP then advertised these black hole routes to the rest of the internet as it is designed to do. With that happening, many routers on the internet decided that pakistan was the optimal route to youtube so they sent their packets that way instead of the correct direction. Many people couldn't access youtube as a result.
The incident with google.com was a similar problem, only that was caused by administrative error rather than deliberate censorship.
Some say that the simple answer is to make BGP less trusting of lower tier or even some neighbor routers. However that would make anycast addressing a lot more difficult and manual process when things change. (Examples of anycast addresses include google public DNS, 8.8.8.8. There are many servers throughout the world that have that IP address, the purpose being that you have low latency access no matter where you are.)
The whole point of dynamic routing protocols is to keep things working by automatically adjusting routes when e.g. hardware breaks, or we add new routes. If everything had to be done by hand every time a change was made, the internet would be a LOT less reliable.
It also works to say that we shouldn't jail people, because we're not sure that we're jailing somebody who's guilty.
My view is maximum punishment where warranted. Maximum punishment varies by person. Some people want death, so the punishment should be life.
What's in a label? The left in England call themselves conservatives. That those in the US on the right identify as conservative also hold strong individualistic views, doesn't necessarily make them conservative.
In my mind, western conservatives would be like Italy, where there are blaspheme laws:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/02/07/10/0450203/italian-police-censor-blasphemous-websites
Compared to them, I think the US would fit the classic definition of being progressive.
Notice though that I disclaimed my post with "in my opinion", as should you. You'll hear different declarations on who gets what label depending on who you ask. Go ask the mythtv developers why they don't have version 1.0 after so many years of stable public releases, and you'll see what I mean about labels.
IANA is the hand of the department of commerce, they answer directly to them.
In my opinion, the US isn't conservative, more like individualistic. Yes, there are religious loudmouths, but they aren't common, you just hear about them more because they are loud where the others are not. Most people, republican or democrat, have religious views on the back of their mind but don't proselytize them. Except, of course, politicians like Jesse Jackson Jr. or Rick Santorum.
Conservatives say ban sex from the internet. Progressives say ban anything that somebody might consider offensive, even going so far as to put harmless internet trolls in jail. Individualists say that if you don't like what you see, change the channel.
The US, by and large, is the later of the three. We don't ban pornography, and we don't have hate speech laws. Freedom of speech is more absolute here than anywhere else, pretty much the only limit is speech that causes physical harm.
Though the left likes to claim that deregulation and austerity is conservative, and so does the media at large, it isn't. It is very much libertarian.
These aren't things that would change if the US didn't hold the keys to the internet.
The control of the internet lands on one organization: IANA. Right now, IANA delegates its powers to ICANN. IANA is merely responsible for deciding who gets what IP addresses and domain names. The ITU wants to usurp that power for themselves, for who knows what ends, or why they think the status quo is wrong.
In any case, even if say the ITU, the EU, China, or even nobody at all had the keys to IANA, the US would still be able to go after Dotcom and Wikileaks due to pre-existing treaties and strong arming tactics that don't require the internet to even exist in the first place.
Regardless though, there is no such thing as an "open internet" in your definition of the term. SOMEBODY has to decide who gets what names and numbers. There are theoretical ways of decentralizing DNS, (which in my opinion will be riddled with problems, although it will at least perform the intended function) but you CAN NOT decentralize IP address assignments without introducing a whole mess of other problems. It would be akin to not having a regulatory authority on who gets licenses to any given RF spectrum.
I don't know about that. From an evolutionary standpoint, "racism" as it were tends to prevail. Nearly all advanced lifeforms lend a favoritism towards their own clan, and shun others. I think the idea is that your familial gene survives and spreads, while theirs does not.
In any case, some well known geniuses were also well known racist asshats, e.g. Bobby Fischer. And there's this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198112/Sleek-swift-deadly--Hitlers-stealth-bomber-turned-tide-Britain.html
Actually while the media (and Janet Napolitano) like to make terrorism look like a right wing thing that was a bomb just waiting for a match in spite of no evidence to support that, the majority of terrorism is committed by mexican drug cartels and left wing groups, such as animal liberation and earth liberation movements.
http://seeingredaz.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/janet-napolitano-right-wing-extremists-pose-national-security-threats/
(Interestingly enough, there was a rise of blogs trying to exonerate her a few months back because some nutter shot up a bunch of Sikh's, though beyond that, there's nothing of note.)
One thing to consider though, is that even if we were to disappear tomorrow...or better yet, even if we never existed to begin with, the climate will still change. It always has, and it always will.
The Pangaea theory holds that at one point we didn't have any ice caps. Pangaea Ultima predicts that it will be that way again. It wasn't just bacteria that lived in these much warmer climates either. At those times, large scale beasts like dinosaurs and giant insects roamed the earth, and in fact the earth was far greener than it is today.
As for humans, we'll either have to evolve or adapt, or both. In any case, it IS inevitable, no matter what we do. The only "environmental friendly" things we should worry about, in my opinion, are releasing contaminants into the soil and oceans. Though, strangely enough, life has a way of thriving in environments that we consider contaminated, such as Chernobyl.
In many places, e.g. the US, plant coverage is growing, not shrinking.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10521-forest-growth-is-encouraging-say-researchers.html
This is mainly caused by advancements in agriculture, which include things that environmentalists hate, like genetically modified crops, and otherwise non-organic foods, the later of which has been proven to be insufficient for human needs in the long term - the time, resources, and eneergy required to produce organic foods is much greater than that of non-organic foods, and the landmass required to go all organic would require cutting down more forests. Ironic, isn't it? One thing they promote is at odds with another thing they promote.
If you live in such a place where that is likely to happen, I think market demographics are the least of your privacy concerns.
Are you suggesting that the Dharma Initiave did their experiments on a pumice raft? Nonsense.
I was opposed to gTLD's at first, but I thought about another existing problem that we have, which gTLD's may fix.
If you own a trademark, let's say videolan. You figure, ok, let's pick up videolan.org. But oh wait, we need to prevent domain squatters from grabbing up the same names on .net, .us, .com, etc etc etc. Now instead of one domain name to maintain and pay for, you have numerous. Hell, you may have to pick up a domain name for every common TLD out there just to prevent squatters from grabbing it and then packaging spyware with it, so that your software package doesn't get a bad name due to asshats loading it with spyware.
Maybe not necessarily that far, but it's annoying when I type in e.g. vlc.com, and I end up with some domain squatter page. It would be a lot better if I could just trust a tld called videolan, and the owners of that project don't have to track numerous.
I don't know about anybody else, but I get annoyed as hell when I type a domain name that I am pretty sure belongs to who I think it does, only to find out that a squatter has it. Ok, big deal, go to the right one next time. Except now the squatter page is in my autocomplete, and I have to be careful about when I arrow down and hit enter, unless I go through and delete it.
I think we either go back to the system where .com .net and .org were supposed to go to their respective organization types, or just allow the gTLD system to go through.
And restricting .sucks or .wtf because they find it offensive is just stupid politically correct bullcrap. Why not ban sucks.com while you're at it? (oh look, an ad squatter has it!)