...no more dangerous to our existence than natural intelligence is.

And no less, for that matter.

There is nothing inherent to being "artificial" that should cause intelligence to be necessarily more hostile to mankind than a natural intelligence is, so while the idea might make for intriguing science fiction, I am of the opinion that many people who express serious concerns that there may be any real danger caused by it are allowing their imaginations to overrule rational and coherent thoughts on the matter.

So if you are an ISP providing a secondary DNS service, you're happy to create accounts with ssh/rsync access for 10 000 customers who all have more lax security than you do?

Sure. You give them all a shell account with access to their own zone files, and you require them to provide a public key for authentication (no passwords to attack). Then, you have a separate process that watches for changes and updates the official zone files that the daemon reads. Clearly, a daemon that has write access to all of the zone files is inherently less safe than a series of ssh accounts, each with access to only a single user's files, coupled with a daemon that has only read-only access to copies of the original zone files.

Why do creators of copyrighted work owe free stuff to the public?

Because in the course of the long haul, society benefits from a continually diverse influx of creative works. Certainly there is a valid argument (and one that I very strongly support) that the creator or agents authorized by the creator should be allowed a monopoly on controlling content that they distribute for a limited time, but if that content is not ultimately allowed to be freely copied by the society that it was provided for, then the content creator is disincentivized (is that a word?) from actually providing or creating other works. Given that almost the entire point of copyright in the first place was to give the creator some kind of assurance that their works could not be freely copied by other people even if they published, thereby providing an incentive to publish and so have the potential to enrich society by an influx of creative works, not ultimately releasing the work into public domain after some set period (where, if society is so inclined, the public can then further transmogrify it or build upon it to create even more diverse works in the future to the extent that other intellectual property whose ownership may survive the copyright expiration, such as trademarks, are properly respected), is wholly counterproductive to the real benefit of copyright.

Disney holds a trademark on Mickey Mouse, and can retain said ownership into perpetuity. That aspect alone can rightfully keep anyone else from utilizing the character in their own works, forever, if Disney so desires, but the works themselves are copyrighted, and the duration on copyright should necessarily be limited to maximize any potential benefit it can offer to society. IMO, no copyright should last more than 30 or so years after the date of first publication, and probably less for certain types of works that are continually deprecated by newer works such as computer software.

And that's exactly where the current form of copyright not only fails to address its original purpose but actually works against its purpose.

The purpose was to give people an incentive to create works of art by giving them an monetary incentive to do so. If you can monopolize something great for a time (instead of fearing that whatever you create immediately being copied by anyone, rendering your work worthless), you have an incentive to create something great and reap the rewards of your work. That's fine.

Now, last thing I heard about "happy birthday" was that it makes 5 grand a DAY for Warner. Now, imagine you made "happy birthday". And got 5 grand a day from it. Where the fuck is your incentive to EVER create anything again? 5 grand a day? Fuck, I couldn't be assed to do anything but sit there and rake in the money for the rest of my life. Why bother work ever again if you already get more money than you can sensibly spend without doing anything?

Those are as common as pimples at a school dance. If you can't find a phone with those features, you haven't been looking.

Because then you know it doesn't work. Would you put some faith in the healing effect of something labeled "sugar pills"?

Where the hell do you get your history "knowledge" from?

Where does that "US invests in Germany" story come from? The US propped its economy up for another ten years with the money flowing in from Europe and the shit hit the fan a decade belatedly, but investment certainly was not the name of the game of the time. The money was mostly used to fund the bubble that popped in 1929 because there was simply nobody abroad that could actually serve as a demand for all the junk the US pumped out (in case this sounds familiar, well, history repeats itself).

But that was not even the main reason for the rise of the national socialists. The economy crisis itself (that started pretty much right after the war in Germany and most of the rest of Europe to a lesser degree) was even a minor reason. The main reason was the feeling of unfair treatment and the thirst for revenge.

George Clemeceau was the driving force behind the "crippling" of Germany. His idea was that a Germany that cannot wage war will secure France's eastern border. So his goal for the peace between Germany and France after WW1 was to ruin Germany. On the outside, that plan is solid: A country with no money, no political power and no military power is no threat.

What he didn't take into account was that a country that you abuse to the point of breaking will resist this treatment. Especially when the general feeling is that this treatment is not deserved.

The first reason for this was the front line at the end of WW1. When you look at the front line between Germany and France, you will notice that by the time the armistice was called, the front line was actually well within the territory of France. From the point of view of a German soldier, there was no obvious reason that they lost. Hell, we won territory! We ain't the losers here! And certainly not losers that deserve to be crippled in such a way!

Well, you also should take into account that a century ago, waging war was not an "evil" thing. War was, quite literally, just politics with other means. And it was seen as such. Wars also never had that kind of dimension before. War was something where two countries fight, after a while they settle, some territory changes hands and everyone moves on. That's what wars were like 'til then. The idea that wars end governments was pretty new then. But this just as a side note.

The army still standing rather deep in enemy territory when the armistice was signed and the "unfair" treatment by the French quickly led to the Dolchstosslegende, the myth that the German army was not really beaten but that it was assassinated by a stab in the back by ... well, insert you favorite internal enemy here. Jews, socialists, old government, pick your favorite scapegoat.

Combine this now with a peace that doesn't aim at peace but at crippling the country losing the battle and you probably find out why this is a breeding ground for radical ideologies. And we learned our lesson here. Any country you try to neutralize by ruining it will do anything to shake off those shackles. No matter the cost.

Not long enough.

Democracy isn't a system that enables absolute freedom. It's a system that allows one faction to impose their will on another faction. Taken to its extreme it becomes a tyranny of the masses.

Actually, it's not that simple. The DNS compression scheme is horrendous, although that can be easily isolated. Most of the complexity of DNS servers come from the 1) caching, recursive logic for client-side servers, 2) automating zone transfers, 2) various schemes for avoiding DoS attacks. Dedicated servers like NSD and unbound, which either server a zone _or_ implement recursive lookups for clients, can be a little simpler.

I've never understood why DNS servers bother with zone transfers. These days, it would take an average admin three minutes to toss together something involving a cron job, rsync, and ssh that would do the same job without adding all that extra code and the extra attack surface that comes along with it. Heck, with access to platform-specific file system event APIs, you could probably come up with something that worked a lot better, up to and including near-instantaneous updates. That entire feature just seems like pure bloat, and that's coming from somebody who actually uses zone transfers....

Children are incapable of deception until they are about 3 years old.

That assertion is incorrect, as another commenter has posted. Although anecdotal, my youngest grandaughter is not even 2 and has been recently caught a couple of times trying to manipulate her mom or dad into giving her attention at a moment's notice by sometimes pretending to be hurt when she was not. Being only a year and a half old, she's not particularly adept at such deception (so bad at it. in fact, that it's almost funny), but it's still quite definitely a form of lying, even if it is mostly non-verbal.

On the subject of apes, I've suggested that somebody should really try teaching an ape to read beyond the scope of a parlor trick where it is simply doing it to satisfy some immediate physiological need or desire, and hopes that by performing said stunt, it will induce its owner or keeper into giving it such a reward. The ultimate test of reading comprehension would be when it can learn entirely new skills by reading about how to perform them instead of being trained by somebody else. The new skills do not necessarily have to be complex, nor do they necessarily have to be performed expertly, but if they were able to read, they should at least know the mechanical and cognitive steps involved in the task, and be able to make what are readily observable attempts at performing them, and also be able to realize when they are not following such steps. For example, could an ape learn to play a simple count-and-capture game such as Mancala by reading the rules, even if the ape had never been taught the game by a human? A six-year old child can learn to play such a game by reading the rules (not necessarily very well, but the child will still know the rules of the game and competently demonstrate an ability to follow them even without having been instructed how to play by anyone else). If chimpanzees or other similar apes are so cognitively similar to humans, it seems to me that this should be possible.

Also... arguing that some humans can't read or write is drawing on exceptions rather than the rule when a person has been raised in an environment where that education is actually provided.