That would not protect from race conditions.

Why do you think those industries have such monopolies? Because the corporations can have the government write rules and regulation in their favor, that can just outlaw the competition, or raise the barriers to entry to unreachable for would-be competitors.

Look at the internet for an example of a relatively un-regulated environment, as a contrast.

How are they going to enforce this? It's not really possible to check who typed in the password, from across the net...

Not to put too fine a point on it, it sounds like you're comparing the effects of the Great Firewall on the citizens/netizens of China to the effects on you, somewhere (as you say) other than America, because...you can't download bittorrents.

The purpose of the Great Firewall is to block information on political issues (and other things). Of course there are "more important" topics that are being suppressed with the Great Firewall, but copyright is a completely legitimate political issue. An important aspect of "democracy" is that people don't necessarily agree on issues, or even on which issues are important.

North Korea is one big death camp. All communist countries are like that.

Our western democracies are not much better, since they're all violence-based systems in this regard similar to the communist ones. The difference is that our western democracies are less insane than North Korea. But still not sane enough. So I'm not shot for writing this, like I would be in NK, for example, but half of what I earn is still taken away from me, under the threat of deadly violence and enslavement... at least I can keep the other half.

Since all land on our planet is either taken up by western democracies or worse systems, there's really no place to hide from all this madness. (Hopefully Seasteading can change that.) But until then I regard our planet as one big prison, while some areas like North Korea are death camp areas within the large prison world. I'm glad I wasn't born in NK or a similar place at least.

NASA could not build a reusable space vehicle successfully, so I don't trust their ability to build a moon base either.

I think building moon bases will be left up to private companies, just the same way as building reusable spaceraft is up to them now.

Naturally, this statement has caused another stir, angering people who think Hawking shouldn't be meddling with religious ideas. Stephen Green, director of lobby group Christian Voice, told Cambridge News that "the comparisons to a computer switching off shows a man who is only able to think of things in a materialistic way."

Hawking shouldn't be meddling with his own afterlife. It's owned by the Christians... not!

Fortunately, the Christians and other sicknesses of this world can't follow us there when we leave.