Unless you have a theory about why AOL and Compuserve sharing emails would have killed mosaic, it was still going to happen and still would have killed AOL.

Is it just me or does that sound like a political statement proven more apt on a daily basis?

The key stat though is the radiation released. Coal plants release far more than nuclear plants. It really is silly to treat that emission with less care than emissions from a nuclear plant.

The nice thing about the radioactive releases from reactors is that they *DO* go away.

Unlike most of those chemicals, we do have a reasonable understanding of radiation's effects.

Read the last paragraph of the section of the Wikipedia article you pointed us to to see why this is all insignificant.

In what way does Fukushima have anything to do with normal operation?

We would also have to live in shielded homes and never go outside due to background radiation (global average 24mSv/a)

What was that about 2000 then?

I don't think a limited internetwork would have helped them even if they started that early. Keep in mind that the internet swallowed FIDO Ryme, UUCP, and others as well even though those were free and often had inter-network gateways.

The internet still would have swallowed them all as soon as it became available. It wasn't just about email, it was also about web pages, and exchanging files (legal and not). It was about content none of them would have ever allowed on their servers. It was about all those small ISPs trouncing them on price.

That's all true, but not exactly what I meant. Consider some of the killer apps out there. AOL would have done better if they had as much varied content as the web, but they couldn't create it themselves. They never even thought of streaming radio, and never would have. Even when they acquired shoutcast, it languished under them. It might have kept them around longer if they had either implemented it within their walled garden or allowed someone else to, but they didn't have the vision required.

Because of that and many more examples, the migration to the internet was inevitable. The walled gardens all died out for that same reason. All of them would have been better served allowing it within their gardens but none could let go of corporate control freakery long enough to survive.

I am well left of the Democrats as they are today and I agree with ShanghaiBill. In what way is an attempted ban on all commercial use (which means employed use) not killing employment? As he said, the very same activity with the very same equipment and observance of safety is banned if it is commercial. If there was some articulable reason that commercial use would present additional hazards, that would be fine, but I have seen none and the FAA has offered none.

Regulation is not intrinsically bad (in fact, it's often essential) but it needs to be justifiable.

Yes. The more often you do it, the more likely you are to be good at it. The more you spent on your gear, the more protective of that gear you will be. The more you stand to lose if your gear is damaged or destroyed, the more careful you will be to avoid incidents (your booked clients aren't going to wait forever while you try to fix your busted up camera and drone).

There is a good argument to include self-employed contractors into the hobby group for the purposes of regulation. It's when you get big enough that decision making, execution, and consequences are separated that you stray into constructive psychopathy.

The best regulations tread lightly and try to avoid regulating things that aren't actually a problem. I am all for good regulations made with appropriate restraint. I oppose regulation that would also encompass things that have been unregulated for years and caused no significant problems.

Whatever new regulation the FAA comes up with needs to exclude the entirety of hobby RC aircraft (which have been safely enjoyed for decades). Most of the devices in question are small and light weight. Even a complete failure wouldn't be likely to seriously injure someone if it fell on them.

You write as if the parks and neighborhoods are littered with chopped off body parts, pools of blood and corpses from RC aircraft accidents.

Quick, without googling, name an RC aircraft related bystander fatality! Now, name more of them than there have been bizarre office supply related accidental deaths.

Not likely. AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc were all doing fine until the internet came along. One by one, they reluctantly began offering internet as part of their services. By the late '90s they were nothing more than expensive ISPs with training wheels. Had they linked up and disconnected (or never connected) from the internet, they would have died faster.

Minitel was way ahead of it's time, but eventually lost out to the internet. It simply didn't keep up. No single entity could hope to keep up with a large loosely connected community such as the internet where everything was open enough that you didn't have to play Mother may I with a manager or some committee to deploy interesting new software.

Network effects are powerful. And the internet was the biggest network out there.

Actually, AOL capitulated to the Mom'n'Pops that were already doing flat rate billing. Those 'arcane' clients were fully GUI in the Windows world. This was in the era when you used Trumpet Winsock to dial the internet because Bill Gates was sure it was a passing fad when Win95 was put together.

First time users will likely know more about what they're about to get if it's legal. School health class, PSAs, etc will be more free to give practical advice once it's no longer a matter of 'condoning criminal activity'

One interesting finding is that while alcohol and THC both increase reaction time and lead to distractability, alcohol users tend to be oblivious to that and drive dangerously while THC users tend to remain aware of their impairment and drive more carefully to compensate.

The road blocks just need to go. I doubt they catch more people than just watching traffic for people driving poorly. I'm certainly not advocating for DUI but everything around it has gone to cuckoo-land. Debate over the permissible BAC is purely political at this point. It has no basis in statistics or science. The NTSB has completely skewed the statistics by counting a sober driver with alcohol anywhere in the proximity an alcohol related accident. (Yes, man has heart attack and plows into a restaurant where alcohol is served, it's an alcohol related accident!). Given that, it's hard to know if it's even a problem we have anymore.