Bloomberg does not want to learn to code -- he is promoting a business with operations in NYC that will bring jobs into NYC. I do not think there is anything wrong with the mayor of NYC promoting such an organization, but why should/. glorify Bloomberg instead of just glorifying CodeAcademy?
You cannot make the old model profitable. You cannot get the geany back in the bottle.
You most certainly can stuff the geany [sic] back in the bottle. Have you noticed how, over the past few years, most people have switched to using web apps instead of desktop software? Have you noticed how demands for faster Internet connections coupled with FCC regulations and court decisions have allowed a small group of ISPs to become critical to the workings of the Internet? All it will take is the right legislation to turn the Internet into a massive cable TV system, where decisions about what is or is not allowed on the network are made in board rooms by small groups of powerful executives.
The turning point was when people became scared of P2P distribution systems. If networks like Gnutella had been better developed, things would be different -- congress would have to literally destroy the Internet to return the power to the old media executives. Instead, we have a reliance on easy-to-regulate centralized systems, and the media companies only need to conquer or destroy those systems to reclaim their power. The legislation that follows SOPA will be designed to help those companies run the services that people depend on, so that consumers can go back to being consumers and stop trying to become part of the distribution system.
What makes you think that such people would care about the Internet being restructured to look like the cable TV system?
In my experience, most people fall into one of two categories:
People who dismiss the idea that SOPA or PIPA are as bad as everyone says.
People who simply cannot believe that such a law could even exist in America
The first group will never oppose SOPA because they see nothing wrong with it, and no amount of argument will convince them otherwise. The second group is shocked to find out just what sort of laws are already on the books: they cannot believe that something like the DMCA could have ever passed in America.
I know many people who do not believe me when I try to explain what the DMCA actually made illegal. How could software that allows people to do something as innocent as rip a DVD and play the movie on another device be illegal? How could a converter that fixes problems created by HDCP be illegal? After a while, though, people start to understand -- when you show them the law, the relevant court cases, and so forth. Usually they would lose interest, but when it is something that directly affects them, like being unable to play a movie they paid for on a tablet they own and then being told they need to pay for the movie again, they suddenly become interested.
Unfortunately, SOPA will have to pass before those people can be affected by its provisions, and by then it will be too late. Amazingly, even people who understand how bad the DMCA is and agree that life would be better if it were repealed (or at least if the anti-circumvention clause were repealed) seem to be unwilling to believe that SOPA and its provisions could happen.
So to answer your question, there is no one-liner that explains to people how SOPA Is bad for them. They do not have a concept of where technology might go, how the Internet works, or how a bill like SOPA could lead to problems.
Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the Matrix is; you have to see it for yourself.
Gee, if someone wrote a program to automatically submit a claim against a site, and someone else wrote an extension to use that program to submit a claim against every single internet site on the planet, and many many people used it all at the same time, I wonder what would happen?
People would be arrested for filing false reports until everyone was too terrified to keep up the effort. Filing a false report is not a form of protest; protests are supposed to be held in free speech areas where nobody has to be bothered.
How about the simplest explanation possible: this is what the authoritarian governments of China and Iran do, and they have been heavily criticized by the very hypocrites who are voting for this law. Why mire people down with technical issues when we can take the direct approach that reminds them that their elected representatives are corrupt, two-faced, and failing to represent their interests?
There would just be a person, a group or a company that made a lot of money on that innovative idea. From our perspective the differences would be impercetable.
No, there would have been substantial differences. Attempts to make things like web browsers or search engines would have been mired in patents and royalties. The success of the Internet is partly (perhaps primarily) due to the fact that anyone can implement the standard at any time -- you can connect any computer to the Internet, period. There is no lock-in, just a standard that everyone uses and that nobody has to pay for.
Have you noticed how many different audio and video codecs there are? Imagine if there were that many incompatible computer networks and technologies. In the best case, web browsers, search engines, and the systems being built on top of those technologies would have taken many more years to reach prominence while "the market" we all waited for patents to expire. In the more likely case, such things would have never existed; we would be using proprietary, incompatible systems and instead of one web browser we would need a plethora of different browsing programs, each with a different set of restrictions and royalty structures and each incompatible with every other.
Imagine the difficulty of creating a search engine that tried to provide results from across myriad networks, each with patented protocols. It would be so expensive to operate that advertising dollars could never keep it afloat, and that is assuming that the licensing terms even allow licensees to run such an operation. The world's search engines would all be behind paywalls, accessible only to university students and employees of wealthy businesses.
Remember that the Internet was formed by merging several different networks. If the protocols on which the Internet is built had been patented, those networks would not have truly merged; people would have computers that could connect to one or the other of those networks, and would have to pay to access gateways. The biggest advantage of the Internet is that you do not have to worry about which network you are on, and you do not have to pay to send messages across different networks. The networks that comprise the Internet would, in many cases, be incompatible without a common protocol (IP).
There is no shortage of able-bodied young people, there is a shortage of work for them and a prevailing attitude that anyone who does blue collar work is some kind of failure in life. We also encourage companies to export jobs to other countries, where working in a factory is not considered to be the mark of failure and where being educated is not considered to be something shameful.
We need a cultural shift, that's all. The media needs to stop telling young men that no woman will want them if they work a blue collar job, stop telling young women to abandon any man who is not a millionaire, and most importantly stop telling our young people that engineers are antisocial nerds.
So all the competitors who spent millions on research and development and arrived at the same conclusions should just eat the loss? Please, patents make no sense for software and should be limited to machines and physically realized inventions.
Frankly, given how much innovation comes from publicly funded research in computer science and from startups that do not have a patent war chest, I find it difficult to believe that ending the age of software patents would somehow kill innovation in this country. Most of the major leaps forward in software have occurred because people could build on the work of others, and not have to worry about going to court because of an algorithm buried deep in their code. Just about all the software in use today is built on many layers of other software.
To put it another way, had TCP been patented, there would be no world wide web, no Google, and pretty much all the flashy technology that the news media loves to report on would never have been created.
It is the money being used to buy off US politicians, who then put pressure on Canadian politicians. The US is Canada's biggest trading partner and visa versa, so what the US wants has a big impact on what the Canadians do.
They did not want [to brainwash the public about copyrights], as that would have been logical, truthful, and fair
Copyrights are and have always been a regulation on industry, and have never and will never be appropriate for policing the behavior of individual people. The age of copyrights is dead because every individual person is in a position to mass produce perfect copies of covered works in the privacy of their homes, and send those copies to other people at high speed. We have entered a post-industrial age for the production of art and useful science, and copyright law has been rendered obsolete.
Why else do you think DRM is being pushed? The big media companies know that nobody outside of the industry gives copyright a full second's thought when they make copies of music and movies for their friends or even for complete strangers on the Internet. DRM exists as the industry's answer to post-copyright reality, a response to the "problem" of people being able to make copies en masse and the ineffectiveness of legal processes in stopping that sort of behavior.
I support the idea to compensate artists, but quite frankly, it is becoming as hard to convince people of that as it is to educate them about copyrights in the first place.
Most people fully support the idea of compensating artists for their creative work, but they do not see copyrights as being imperative for that. People routinely pay to go to live concerts, or leave money in a street performer's box/hat, or buy a CD from a band they like. Copyright has nothing to do with it; people understand that artists need to eat and will give money to artists they think do a good enough job to be paid for it. People are voting with their wallets, not thinking about copyright law.
I am not going to operate a base station in the United States. Yes, amateurs have done satellite operations in the past, but there is no doubt that some well-meaning person will send an encrypted message -- and thus create a legal mess for a US operator. It is a great idea, but it is pretty hard to hide a satellite base station and pretty easy to run afoul of the law with this proposal.
In 20 years, its quite possible that to get access to "general purpose components" to roll your own you have to be defense contractor
I do not think it will ever be impossible to buy transistors, capacitors, resistors, wires, and LEDs. At the end of the day, those things are enough to build a general purpose computer -- if you are really, really, really patient and committed to it. CMOS logic ICs will never stop being sold, because they have a lot of civilian uses -- it is just cheaper sometimes to use a NOT gate than to program a microcontroller (e.g. if you need to make two lights flashing in an alternating pattern, a single six-NOT gate CMOS IC and a capacitor is enough, and the hardware costs equal that of a microcontroller).
Now, making use of such a thing is another story. You are probably not going to get any web browser to run on your wire-wrap homebrew computer. My bank's website requires javascript, and there is no way a javascript interpreter is going to run on some hacked together CMOS logic computer (just imagine trying to wire up enough RAM to load a javascript interpreter). As I think we both agree, the problem is not merely about having general purpose computers, it is about being able to use them to live in our modern society.
More importantly, if open computers are rare and most people do not have them, banks, schools, and other organizations that we need to communicate with to be a part of society will stop granting access to open computers. Imagine if your bank only offered access via an iPad app -- unthinkable now, but if the iPad represented 90% of the "home" computer market (remind me, why do we not just call it a "PC"?), it would not be unreasonable for businesses to only release iPad apps, much in the same way that some websites are only compatible with IE or require Silverlight. A system with an open design and no restrictions on use will do little good if it cannot enable people to connect to the systems they need to connect to, and people who might otherwise buy an open system could be forced to buy something else (and they may not be willing to buy both).
The ecosystem matters here, more than the law. Nothing can stop someone from homebrewing a computer and running Minix or NetBSD on it.
Most of america is also car-illiterate, financially-illiterate, woodworking-illiterate, sewing-illiterate, hunting-illiterate, gardening-illiterate and cooking-illiterate.
At one time, this was not the case. There used to be at least one person in each household who could sew, and thus repair clothing. There used to be at least one person in each household who could cook, and thus allow the family to eat a hot mean.
The difference with computers is that people have been conditioned by the media, from the very beginning of the computer age, to believe that computers are incomprehensible. Rather than encourage a culture where at least one person in each household is computer literate, we have encouraged a culture where everyone fears their computers.
As we look at how to improve our society, I think concerns about cooking/food-illiteracy and financial-illiteracy are far more pressing than bemoaning that people don't bother to learn how to navigate a directory structure.
Except that a computer with an Internet connection is a free speech enabling tool, and computers have to be able to do a lot of things to be successful at that. People need to know enough about their computers to defeat national firewalls and avoid being caught having off-limits discussions if we want to defeat censorship.
It is better to discuss making "open" computing simple, easy and relevant rather than berating people for wanting to get on with their lives.
Except that "simple" computers are also computers that are easy for governments and corporations to control. If you hide everything that might scare users, how will anyone figure out how to use an alternate DNS server when their country starts hijacking domains? How are people going to get banned software if they cannot change their software sources?
Just look at cell phones as an example of "simple" computing. Cell phone typically hide all of the details of their operation from their users, who are meant to think that they are holding a fancy cordless phone (when in fact they are holding a computer with a fancy radio attached to it). Cell phone companies disable a variety features on your phone (e.g. bluetooth file transfers, AT modem capabilities, etc.), but it is not at all clear how one might reenable those features -- it takes someone with exceptional technical skills to jailbreak phones. Imagine receiving a laptop that would not allow you to run ssh, and now imagine if getting ssh to run required more technical skill on your part than actually using ssh.
Please, most people have no clue what Reddit is, what Slashdot is, and they only know of Anonymous because of the Fox11 report. They know of SOPA because there are commercials urging them to support it, but they have no idea what exactly they are supporting, except that they have been told it will "create jobs." There will be no year of crowdsourcing; more likely, 2012 will be another "year that the Internet became less free as corporations found more ways to monetize it."
Sorry, I just had to. Still, the fact that we have software that is simple enough for apes to use probably means that we crossed a usability threshold at some point in the past few years. Apes have similar psychology and brain structures to humans (this should make sense) so we seem to have discovered more "natural" computer interfaces.
Spreading ourselves around the solar system might be a good idea insofar as it will reduce the probability that we kill ourselves. However, the resources that would be required just to set up a permanent colony on the moon are enormous, and there are a lot of other pressing needs competing for those resources. Frankly, I would not be surprised if the manner in which those resources are obtained triggered the sort of species-destroying war that setting up the colony was meant to mitigate.
For the near future, this planet is it, barring substantial improvements in technology. If we need to choose between a billion dollars spent establishing a colony on a celestial body or spent on developing sustaining methods of producing food in impoverished nations, the production of food must take precedence.
Richard Nixon had nothing on the Bush or Obama administrations. The past two presedencies have been the most secretive and constitution-breaking in American history.
Slashdot Mirror
Bloomberg does not want to learn to code -- he is promoting a business with operations in NYC that will bring jobs into NYC. I do not think there is anything wrong with the mayor of NYC promoting such an organization, but why should /. glorify Bloomberg instead of just glorifying CodeAcademy?
You can't just arrest millions of people -- where do you put them, who handles the paperwork?
Which country do you live in, and how hard is it to immigrate? In my country, we have plenty of experience with mass arrests and imprisonment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs
You cannot make the old model profitable. You cannot get the geany back in the bottle.
You most certainly can stuff the geany [sic] back in the bottle. Have you noticed how, over the past few years, most people have switched to using web apps instead of desktop software? Have you noticed how demands for faster Internet connections coupled with FCC regulations and court decisions have allowed a small group of ISPs to become critical to the workings of the Internet? All it will take is the right legislation to turn the Internet into a massive cable TV system, where decisions about what is or is not allowed on the network are made in board rooms by small groups of powerful executives.
The turning point was when people became scared of P2P distribution systems. If networks like Gnutella had been better developed, things would be different -- congress would have to literally destroy the Internet to return the power to the old media executives. Instead, we have a reliance on easy-to-regulate centralized systems, and the media companies only need to conquer or destroy those systems to reclaim their power. The legislation that follows SOPA will be designed to help those companies run the services that people depend on, so that consumers can go back to being consumers and stop trying to become part of the distribution system.
In my experience, most people fall into one of two categories:
The first group will never oppose SOPA because they see nothing wrong with it, and no amount of argument will convince them otherwise. The second group is shocked to find out just what sort of laws are already on the books: they cannot believe that something like the DMCA could have ever passed in America.
I know many people who do not believe me when I try to explain what the DMCA actually made illegal. How could software that allows people to do something as innocent as rip a DVD and play the movie on another device be illegal? How could a converter that fixes problems created by HDCP be illegal? After a while, though, people start to understand -- when you show them the law, the relevant court cases, and so forth. Usually they would lose interest, but when it is something that directly affects them, like being unable to play a movie they paid for on a tablet they own and then being told they need to pay for the movie again, they suddenly become interested.
Unfortunately, SOPA will have to pass before those people can be affected by its provisions, and by then it will be too late. Amazingly, even people who understand how bad the DMCA is and agree that life would be better if it were repealed (or at least if the anti-circumvention clause were repealed) seem to be unwilling to believe that SOPA and its provisions could happen.
So to answer your question, there is no one-liner that explains to people how SOPA Is bad for them. They do not have a concept of where technology might go, how the Internet works, or how a bill like SOPA could lead to problems.
Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the Matrix is; you have to see it for yourself.
Gee, if someone wrote a program to automatically submit a claim against a site, and someone else wrote an extension to use that program to submit a claim against every single internet site on the planet, and many many people used it all at the same time, I wonder what would happen?
People would be arrested for filing false reports until everyone was too terrified to keep up the effort. Filing a false report is not a form of protest; protests are supposed to be held in free speech areas where nobody has to be bothered.
How about the simplest explanation possible: this is what the authoritarian governments of China and Iran do, and they have been heavily criticized by the very hypocrites who are voting for this law. Why mire people down with technical issues when we can take the direct approach that reminds them that their elected representatives are corrupt, two-faced, and failing to represent their interests?
Perhaps you should talk to a lawyer, or the ACLU, or the EFF?
There would just be a person, a group or a company that made a lot of money on that innovative idea. From our perspective the differences would be impercetable.
No, there would have been substantial differences. Attempts to make things like web browsers or search engines would have been mired in patents and royalties. The success of the Internet is partly (perhaps primarily) due to the fact that anyone can implement the standard at any time -- you can connect any computer to the Internet, period. There is no lock-in, just a standard that everyone uses and that nobody has to pay for.
Have you noticed how many different audio and video codecs there are? Imagine if there were that many incompatible computer networks and technologies. In the best case, web browsers, search engines, and the systems being built on top of those technologies would have taken many more years to reach prominence while "the market" we all waited for patents to expire. In the more likely case, such things would have never existed; we would be using proprietary, incompatible systems and instead of one web browser we would need a plethora of different browsing programs, each with a different set of restrictions and royalty structures and each incompatible with every other.
Imagine the difficulty of creating a search engine that tried to provide results from across myriad networks, each with patented protocols. It would be so expensive to operate that advertising dollars could never keep it afloat, and that is assuming that the licensing terms even allow licensees to run such an operation. The world's search engines would all be behind paywalls, accessible only to university students and employees of wealthy businesses.
Remember that the Internet was formed by merging several different networks. If the protocols on which the Internet is built had been patented, those networks would not have truly merged; people would have computers that could connect to one or the other of those networks, and would have to pay to access gateways. The biggest advantage of the Internet is that you do not have to worry about which network you are on, and you do not have to pay to send messages across different networks. The networks that comprise the Internet would, in many cases, be incompatible without a common protocol (IP).
There is no shortage of able-bodied young people, there is a shortage of work for them and a prevailing attitude that anyone who does blue collar work is some kind of failure in life. We also encourage companies to export jobs to other countries, where working in a factory is not considered to be the mark of failure and where being educated is not considered to be something shameful.
We need a cultural shift, that's all. The media needs to stop telling young men that no woman will want them if they work a blue collar job, stop telling young women to abandon any man who is not a millionaire, and most importantly stop telling our young people that engineers are antisocial nerds.
So all the competitors who spent millions on research and development and arrived at the same conclusions should just eat the loss? Please, patents make no sense for software and should be limited to machines and physically realized inventions.
Frankly, given how much innovation comes from publicly funded research in computer science and from startups that do not have a patent war chest, I find it difficult to believe that ending the age of software patents would somehow kill innovation in this country. Most of the major leaps forward in software have occurred because people could build on the work of others, and not have to worry about going to court because of an algorithm buried deep in their code. Just about all the software in use today is built on many layers of other software.
To put it another way, had TCP been patented, there would be no world wide web, no Google, and pretty much all the flashy technology that the news media loves to report on would never have been created.
It is the money being used to buy off US politicians, who then put pressure on Canadian politicians. The US is Canada's biggest trading partner and visa versa, so what the US wants has a big impact on what the Canadians do.
Same song different tune.
why is Iran an enemy of the US?
Might have something to do with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_Iran
Also, this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
This too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
Actually, he borrowed the strategy from the CIA's playbook:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
Hm...the fault of religious leaders you say...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_firewall_of_china
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA
Yeah, it is not like there could be any secular reason why people might try to set up a national firewall...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_firewall_of_china
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA
They did not want [to brainwash the public about copyrights], as that would have been logical, truthful, and fair
Copyrights are and have always been a regulation on industry, and have never and will never be appropriate for policing the behavior of individual people. The age of copyrights is dead because every individual person is in a position to mass produce perfect copies of covered works in the privacy of their homes, and send those copies to other people at high speed. We have entered a post-industrial age for the production of art and useful science, and copyright law has been rendered obsolete.
Why else do you think DRM is being pushed? The big media companies know that nobody outside of the industry gives copyright a full second's thought when they make copies of music and movies for their friends or even for complete strangers on the Internet. DRM exists as the industry's answer to post-copyright reality, a response to the "problem" of people being able to make copies en masse and the ineffectiveness of legal processes in stopping that sort of behavior.
I support the idea to compensate artists, but quite frankly, it is becoming as hard to convince people of that as it is to educate them about copyrights in the first place.
Most people fully support the idea of compensating artists for their creative work, but they do not see copyrights as being imperative for that. People routinely pay to go to live concerts, or leave money in a street performer's box/hat, or buy a CD from a band they like. Copyright has nothing to do with it; people understand that artists need to eat and will give money to artists they think do a good enough job to be paid for it. People are voting with their wallets, not thinking about copyright law.
I am not going to operate a base station in the United States. Yes, amateurs have done satellite operations in the past, but there is no doubt that some well-meaning person will send an encrypted message -- and thus create a legal mess for a US operator. It is a great idea, but it is pretty hard to hide a satellite base station and pretty easy to run afoul of the law with this proposal.
In 20 years, its quite possible that to get access to "general purpose components" to roll your own you have to be defense contractor
I do not think it will ever be impossible to buy transistors, capacitors, resistors, wires, and LEDs. At the end of the day, those things are enough to build a general purpose computer -- if you are really, really, really patient and committed to it. CMOS logic ICs will never stop being sold, because they have a lot of civilian uses -- it is just cheaper sometimes to use a NOT gate than to program a microcontroller (e.g. if you need to make two lights flashing in an alternating pattern, a single six-NOT gate CMOS IC and a capacitor is enough, and the hardware costs equal that of a microcontroller).
Now, making use of such a thing is another story. You are probably not going to get any web browser to run on your wire-wrap homebrew computer. My bank's website requires javascript, and there is no way a javascript interpreter is going to run on some hacked together CMOS logic computer (just imagine trying to wire up enough RAM to load a javascript interpreter). As I think we both agree, the problem is not merely about having general purpose computers, it is about being able to use them to live in our modern society.
More importantly, if open computers are rare and most people do not have them, banks, schools, and other organizations that we need to communicate with to be a part of society will stop granting access to open computers. Imagine if your bank only offered access via an iPad app -- unthinkable now, but if the iPad represented 90% of the "home" computer market (remind me, why do we not just call it a "PC"?), it would not be unreasonable for businesses to only release iPad apps, much in the same way that some websites are only compatible with IE or require Silverlight. A system with an open design and no restrictions on use will do little good if it cannot enable people to connect to the systems they need to connect to, and people who might otherwise buy an open system could be forced to buy something else (and they may not be willing to buy both).
The ecosystem matters here, more than the law. Nothing can stop someone from homebrewing a computer and running Minix or NetBSD on it.
Most of america is also car-illiterate, financially-illiterate, woodworking-illiterate, sewing-illiterate, hunting-illiterate, gardening-illiterate and cooking-illiterate.
At one time, this was not the case. There used to be at least one person in each household who could sew, and thus repair clothing. There used to be at least one person in each household who could cook, and thus allow the family to eat a hot mean.
The difference with computers is that people have been conditioned by the media, from the very beginning of the computer age, to believe that computers are incomprehensible. Rather than encourage a culture where at least one person in each household is computer literate, we have encouraged a culture where everyone fears their computers.
As we look at how to improve our society, I think concerns about cooking/food-illiteracy and financial-illiteracy are far more pressing than bemoaning that people don't bother to learn how to navigate a directory structure.
Except that a computer with an Internet connection is a free speech enabling tool, and computers have to be able to do a lot of things to be successful at that. People need to know enough about their computers to defeat national firewalls and avoid being caught having off-limits discussions if we want to defeat censorship.
It is better to discuss making "open" computing simple, easy and relevant rather than berating people for wanting to get on with their lives.
Except that "simple" computers are also computers that are easy for governments and corporations to control. If you hide everything that might scare users, how will anyone figure out how to use an alternate DNS server when their country starts hijacking domains? How are people going to get banned software if they cannot change their software sources?
Just look at cell phones as an example of "simple" computing. Cell phone typically hide all of the details of their operation from their users, who are meant to think that they are holding a fancy cordless phone (when in fact they are holding a computer with a fancy radio attached to it). Cell phone companies disable a variety features on your phone (e.g. bluetooth file transfers, AT modem capabilities, etc.), but it is not at all clear how one might reenable those features -- it takes someone with exceptional technical skills to jailbreak phones. Imagine receiving a laptop that would not allow you to run ssh, and now imagine if getting ssh to run required more technical skill on your part than actually using ssh.
Please, most people have no clue what Reddit is, what Slashdot is, and they only know of Anonymous because of the Fox11 report. They know of SOPA because there are commercials urging them to support it, but they have no idea what exactly they are supporting, except that they have been told it will "create jobs." There will be no year of crowdsourcing; more likely, 2012 will be another "year that the Internet became less free as corporations found more ways to monetize it."
Let's put it in schools!
Sorry, I just had to. Still, the fact that we have software that is simple enough for apes to use probably means that we crossed a usability threshold at some point in the past few years. Apes have similar psychology and brain structures to humans (this should make sense) so we seem to have discovered more "natural" computer interfaces.
Spreading ourselves around the solar system might be a good idea insofar as it will reduce the probability that we kill ourselves. However, the resources that would be required just to set up a permanent colony on the moon are enormous, and there are a lot of other pressing needs competing for those resources. Frankly, I would not be surprised if the manner in which those resources are obtained triggered the sort of species-destroying war that setting up the colony was meant to mitigate.
For the near future, this planet is it, barring substantial improvements in technology. If we need to choose between a billion dollars spent establishing a colony on a celestial body or spent on developing sustaining methods of producing food in impoverished nations, the production of food must take precedence.
Richard Nixon had nothing on the Bush or Obama administrations. The past two presedencies have been the most secretive and constitution-breaking in American history.