Actually, we know almost all basic chemistry, and the range of (stable) molecules that silicon can form is orders of magnitude less than for carbon.

Well, yeah, but I didn't want to offend the pedants even further. Unless the laws of physics (and therefore basic chemistry) are very different elsewhere in the galaxy, it's not unreasonable to think that carbon-based, liquid-water-dependent lifeforms are the most probable. In fact, I'd be willing to bet a tidy sum of money that the overwhelming majority of unique forms of life are not terribly dissimilar from ours as far as the underlying chemistry is concerned. They might be fantastically alien in all sorts of other strange ways, but they'll still be based on simple organic polymers. But this is still irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because even if there were different forms of life, we have no idea how we might detect them at astronomical distances.

I wish I had mod points. Every time I hear about planets not being able to support life, this is my first thought.

And every time a story about extraterrestrial life gets posted on Slashdot, several dozen people say exactly the same thing, as if they've had some brilliantly original insight that the scientists researching the subject missed. No one is explicitly ruling out the possibility that there are gaseous lifeforms living in the clouds of gas giants, or silicon-based rock monsters like the one in Star Trek. Hell, it would be a huge discovery if we found something like that. But since we're presently incapable of observing such lifeforms firsthand, and have no idea what we should be looking for at a distance of light-years, we have to settle for looking for the planetary "signatures" of temperature, oceans, oxygen content, etc. It may not satisfy the pedants, but it's still extremely difficult by itself. When we're capable of actually exploring other solar systems directly, then maybe we can start to look for fantasy lifeforms on frozen airless rocks and methane clouds.

All the hundreds of bases on foreign soil should be liquidated, and the foreign countries that get those back should start footing the bill for their own defense. Then we'll see how much they want to cry about American expansionist policies and so on.

In fairness, it's generally not the South Koreans (to pick one obvious example) complaining about American expansionism.

So you'd prefer the opposite order? Wars first, offshore oil exploration later?

What's the alternative? Do you think you can convince everyone that deprivation is better than plenty? Do you think the government will suddenly start adopting sound economic policies rather than economic policies to satisfy greed and envy and entitlement and grievance and short-term political goals? What would cause that to happen? And if it happened, what would cause it to continue?

Why should billions of people drastically cut their living standards to help a few thousand in the Maldives? Why should poor people agree to pay a lot more for energy to help rich FL coastal dwellers?

Do people on the coast matter more than everyone else?

Verizon can afford more lawmakers than you.

That's not an answer though. It's a description of the problem.

The reality is: they don't seem to care. If you want them to care, shouldn't you try to understand why they don't?

I know. So a different answer might be to break up the monopolies and tell local governments that they can't make long term monopoly deals any more.

It's not good in either case. We should head in the other direction.

Verizon can afford more government friends than you can. Do you honestly foresee a time when they won't? If not, maybe you shouldn't want things to be decided based on who has more government friends?

Perhaps a rule where cable or satellite TV providers are prohibited from operating centralized peering points. If Verizon had to buy their bandwidth from upstream providers, they wouldn't be able to choke L3. And L3 would have to bid against Verizon's upstream providers to get Netflix's business.

Essentially, less economic centralization in the network infrastructure would provide for more opportunities for competitive bidding all along the chain. Everyone would end up with more customer-focused incentives.

This is a different answer. Thanks.

They seem to have very limited interest in what their customers want for Netflix streaming quality. What is their incentive to care?

I covered that with "the government should threaten Verizon and force them to operate the network contrary to Verizon's best interests".

"I want it and my government friends have guns..." Is this the best we can do?

Why should Verizon do the upgrade? Why would they want to? To make Level 3 happy? To make Netflix happy? What is their incentive?

The only answers I've seen for this on Slashdot are:
- the government should threaten Verizon and force them to operate the network contrary to Verizon's best interests,
- the government should seize Verizon's network
- no answer, just crying about how you're entitled to better Netflix video quality

Got anything better?

Not everything. Here's the list so far.