That's certainly one brand of libertarian, but libertarianism is a pretty broad swath of ideas. I'd say that most libertarians would be just fine with using government to find a way to internalize the externalities, to make whoever causes them to pay them. What libertarians don't like is the idea that money should be forcibly collected from everyone in order to cover the externalities... which, incidentally, still allows those who directly benefit from them to avoid paying their way.

There's nothing low about "freesource zealotry", particularly among those who actually contribute their time and skills to free software. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I've always done this. I have one short, low-entropy password which I use on ALL low-risk web sites. For example, it's the one I use on slashdot. I don't really care if anyone gets in and starts posting stuff as me. In fact it might be a good thing, since it would give me some plausible deniability for the stupid things I sometimes say :-)

For important sites (e.g. financial), I use long, randomly-generated passwords and manage them in a password manager, which itself is protected with a very strong password. But for everything else, that's too much effort and serves no purpose. And for my "crown jewels" account -- my e-mail account, which if hacked would provide the intruder with the ability to reset most all of my other passwords -- I use a strong password and have two-factor authentication enabled.

Sigh.

Slashdot, how far you have fallen.

Interesting. What tests are you thinking of that could so easily establish anthropogenic global warming?

That's more than a bit disingenuous of you... the law has been around, but the court's rather bizarre interpretation of it, that it requires search engines to remove links but doesn't require the source sites to remove the content, is extremely new. A more reasonable interpretation is that if some information should be removed the target should get the source site to remove it, which will automatically cause it to disappear from search engines, given that they're mere indexes.

Agreed. Microsoft did not have a monopoly on browsers. Actually, no court ever said they did. What the court said was that they had a monopoly on desktop operating system software... which is itself a questionable conclusion, but less so given the way Microsoft had the PC distribution channels locked up.

I don't think market share tells the whole story, especially with respect to something like web search, because the effort required to use a different search engine is basically zero. Using a PC operating system other than Microsoft Windows was much more difficult back when MS was in anti-trust court.

For that matter, Google's market share isn't that overwhelming. In the US it's only 68%. In much of Asia it's less than 10%. In Europe it's higher, granted, in excess of 80%, but that still doesn't overcome the ease-of-switching factor, IMO.

I often avoid driving long distances because I have a hard time staying awake. It doesn't matter if I'm sleepy or not, after an hour or so behind the wheel, I start having a hard time. I drink lots of caffeine, eat spicy snacks, etc., and that usually manages to keep me alert, but sometimes even that isn't enough. I find pulling my arm hair or slapping my legs or face, hard, works pretty well to shock me back into alertness. If it gets really bad, I pull over and jog up and down the side of the road for a few minutes. All in all, I have a set of coping strategies that work reasonably well, and I haven't actually fallen asleep and wrecked in almost 25 years.

But it still worries me, every time I set out on a long road trip I can't avoid.

If this really can detect when I'm actually falling asleep, and safely, gently take over and steer the car to a stop, I'd love it. I'd still use my same stay-awake strategies, but having the automated backup would really reduce my anxiety (which anxiety, BTW, does not seem to contribute to keeping me awake).

We probably can't observe the multiverse. What we can do is postulate how events might play out if, as is suspected, subatomic particles have some interaction with their counterparts in "nearby" universes. We can model the various possible explanations and use the models to generate testable predictions. Assuming that process ultimately rules out some of the models and favors others, we still won't know that there really are multiple universes, all we'll know is that a model that assumes there are, and assumes they interact in specified ways, is a good explanation for the observed phenomena. "Good" in the sense of being as simple as possible, and no simpler, hard to modify without contradicting observations, etc. Other explanations might work, but just be conceptually weirder and harder for us to think about.

Or maybe we'll eventually find something in the model that demands a multiverse, and for which we can find no other simple, consistent explanations. That will tend to convince us that it really exists. Or maybe the theory will show us a way that we can scale up the interactions to the macro level, where we can observe the multiverse. Or maybe we'll find something that contradicts the multiverse... or maybe none of the above will happen and the whole concept is just a game for very clever people.

Many things are possible, that's why it's fun :-)

Maybe. But this is an area in which we actually can make observations that allow us to refine the math, because it does make testable predictions.

That's great to hear. I didn't realize you were a Microsoftie (though it's on your /. bio). I work for Google, but I'm all for strong, healthy competition.

Neither did Reagan. It's easy to find counterexamples.

The many-worlds hypothesis usually used in explaining the oddities in QM doesn't assume different physics.

Yeah, we're fully aware of the problem. Improvements are in the pipeline. I'm not sure I can disclose what, exactly, although there's obviously no reason to be secretive about this.

By that argument, everything we know about stars, quasars, black holes, and virtually everything else that isn't on our planet and relatively close to the surface is all speculative, too. Nearly everything we know about the stuff not immediately at hand is based on mathematical models, calibrated against "observations" which are often very, very indirect and themselves dependent on many layers of mathematical models derived the same way.

I don't know enough about QM and many worlds theories to know how much really is well-supported, but from what little I've read, the many-worlds hypothesis seems to provide a much better explanation of the spooky action at a distance effects we observe than the alternatives.