The first article you point to doesn't seem to say anything one way or the other - which would be unsurprising if this were, as you suggest, a complete misinterpretation. A brief perusal of the Web doesn't provide a lot of evidence beyond the two books I mentioned, which in itself suggests Dyer and Ward may have blown this out of proportion. However, I did find one scientific article by Meyer and Kump on the subject. It suggests:

at times in Earth history, notably the Late Ordovician, Late Devonian, and Late Permian, widespread shelf and cratonic-basinal anoxia, and, at least in the latter two cases, photic-zone euxinia, have accompanied mass extinction (Wilde & Berry 1984; Wignall & Hallam 1992; Wang et al. 1993, 1996; Bond et al. 2004). Could sulfide poisoning serve as the kill mechanism in these extinctions?

Biomarker evidence perhaps provides a more compelling link between euxinia and extinction for the Late Devonian and Late Permian (Grice et al. 2005). . . . But why would a collapse of marine productivity trigger terrestrial ecosystem disruption and extinction?

Sulfide release from the oceans serves as a link to terrestrial biotic crisis during the end-Permian. One-dimensional atmospheric modeling by Kump et al. (2005) predicted that toxic levels of H2S could rapidly accumulate in the well-mixed troposphere once reaction of sulfide with atmospheric hydroxyl radical reduced OH to very low levels. The abrupt rise in atmospheric H2S concentrations would be accompanied by rising atmospheric methane levels and destruction of the ozone layer. Not only would terrestrial organisms be unable to escape the toxic effects of H2S, but they also would be subject to high levels of UV radiation following the predicted collapse of the ozone layer.

This does sound very tentative. On the other hand, it corresponds with my tenuous understanding of the claims of Dyer and Ward. Can you shed any light? I don't want to be going around making false claims.

It's called a Canfield Ocean. It involves a loss of oxygen from the oceans, which emit hydrogen sulfide gas. The sea literally turns purple while the air is toxic and green. Scientists have theorized that such a transformation has been responsible for mass extinctions to it the past. Here's what Gwynne Dyer says about it in his book Climate Wars:

The evidence is still unclear on whether we run a substantial chance of triggering a Canfield ocean and a greenhouse extinction if we let global warming get out of hand. As with many aspects of this issue, we would only find out for sure when it was too late to do anything about it. But itâ(TM)s the only outcome of the current climate crisis that might convert a massive dieback of the human population into an actual extinction.

Apparently it's also explained in detail in Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky.

To all who said about Apple's lock-down "but the iPhone is not a computer", this was always the end game. The argument was that the iPhone is not a computer (a general-purpose platform), therefore it's OK to restrict what users can do with it. (And besides, they said, we'll still have our PCs.) They confused cause and effect. The iPhone is not a computer because it is locked-down.

With Apple making money hand over fist, it should be no surprise that Microsoft wants in. Will they succeed in their attempt at control? I don't know. But I'm certainly not going to make excuses for them.

Don't give me the any flak about hating Apple. My desktop is a Mac. But my new laptop runs Linux.

Your claim about God and creativity is roughly correct. God was the creator; it was the role of artists to reflect the majesty of God's creation. See M.H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp. The development of the idea of authorship was partly a response to the upheavals of the industrial revolution. I have attempted to explain this in a video about the invention of the author. The video description includes references for further reading.

To address the larger point, audiences are significant contributors to the value and meaning of artistic works, as I explain in a video about audience labor. For something like Star Wars I would even suggest that the audience is the major contributor. However, the artist remains the largest individual contributor to his or her work, and before the audience gets involved they clearly haven't contributed much. It is the hits, not the also-rans, that in a sense belong to the audience.

Taking credit for their works was instituted in pre-modern copyright law. In 17th century England copyright was a censorship regime for licensing publishers, rather than a mechanism for rewarding authors. In order to allow the crown to keep tabs on who wrote what, the law required authors' names to be printed in books. Taking credit for their writing was a response to government monitoring, not the assertion of proprietorship that it later became.

Finally, Lucas is hardly the author of his films. Many, many people worked on them. The habit of giving credit for a film to a single person obscures their essential contributions. The recent copyright suit against one of the guys who made the storm trooper helmets gives a hint at how copyright can unjustly focus all credit in one individual.

This also shows that Apple is more valuable than air. After all, air is free!

Uh, yeah. The idea that price equals value is dangerous ideological mumbo-jumbo. Prices tell what something costs to buy. They do not indicate what it is worth to have. This is why political economists (particularly Marxist ones these days) distinguish between use value and exchange value.

Examples of market prices failing to reflect use values are too numerous to count. Fancy clothes and cars vs basic food, for example, or the most valuable things in life - such as love, meaning in life, and human kindness - that are only available for free.

The BBC also incinerated film copies of the episodes. My understanding is that this was done in order to save space in their archive. (I remember something about a leaking roof.)

When foreign stations licensed the show, they were sent copies of the episodes with instructions to return them or destroy them after broadcast. A number of episodes that survived did so because those stations failed to follow through. They violated the BBC's copyright (presumably unintentionally due to poor license compliance). Ironically, such episodes survived because of copyright infringement.

Beyond the loss of Web material like the Hitchhiker's Guide site, or of software for no longe obtainable platforms, I fear we may face a similar situation in the future due to DRM. The Doctor Who case demonstrates that the copyright holder cannot always be trusted with preservation of significant works[1], and copying is the best insurance against destruction.

[1] I emphasize significant works, by which I particularly mean those that are distributed widely. (Not personal journal articles as mentioned by another poster.) When works are distributed to the public, the public gains an interest in them. This interest is not reflected in law, but it does exist. (Indeed, I would argue that this interest arises because the public, through its activities of interpretation and evangelism, creates much of the value of such works. Think Star Wars or Rocky Horror.)

You are throwing up a whole lot of red herrings and not addressing my point.

You say "I'm sure there's some blanket term of service that allows them to drop wikileaks." Maybe so. But the reason they actually did give was bogus. It is not less bogus because you have a vague idea that they could find something else, and I find it reprehensible that you would give a bad argument a free pass on such flimsy grounds.

Amazon's excuse was a claim that WikiLeaks infringed copyright. This is not true, and it sets a bad precedent for future abuses of copyright. I did not talk about "cyber vandalism," nor about the ability of private businesses to "do anything they want to." Check out my previous comment it that second point is what you're interested in. You'll have to go to my profile page though - I'm not going to link to it. It's not what I'm talking about here.

Amazon had valid reasons for dropping wikileaks

What, that WikiLeaks did not "own" the documents? Copyright infringement? Under U.S. law, material produced by the government are public domain - it belongs to the public. How is a bogus claim of copyright infringement "valid"?

Private companies have no requirement to respect anyone's freedom of speech or press and have every right to refuse to do business with other individuals or entities.

Sure, just like I have the "right" to cheat on my wife. Just as Swiss banks had the "right" to refuse to release money to the families of Holocaust victims when they were unable to produce death certificates.

You are confusing legality with ethics.

Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web, or that the government can control the internet, etc.? They are granted power because we give it to them.

This is a myth. If it were true, the actions of the government would reflect the wishes of the majority. But it isn't true:

it is not in fact true that the idea that groups will act in their self-interest follows logically from the premise of rational and self-interested behavior. It does not follow, because all of the individuals in a group would gain if they achieved their group objective, that they would act to achieve that objective, even if they were all rational and self-interested. Indeed unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.- Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action

A single actor or small number of actors will always have an advantage if it requires coordination of a large number of people to oppose them. There are a number of reasons for this, among them:

• In a large group individuals will attempt to free-ride, not contributing to the collective effort.
• While the collective benefit may be very large, the benefit to individuals is very small. They may lack sufficient incentive to act. In other words, transaction costs are high. This is why we have firms - organizations that operate in the market but are not organized like a market internally.
• When all or most members of a group are required to cooperate in order to act effectively, each member of the group knows that his or her individual action is unlikely to make the difference between success or failure. The larger the group, the less significant the individual action. So, for example, many people don't vote: they know it is highly unlikely that their vote will make any difference to the outcome.

Web 2.0 offers NOTHING but a high-latency compatibility minefield

I appreciate the sentiment. There's lots of poorly or foolishly applied Javascript out there. And I assume you are engaging in hyperbole when you say "NOTHING." But I am convinced of the potential of judiciously applied Javascript.

I created Marginalia, an annotation extension for Moodle. It allows users to highlight passages of text and write notes in the margin. It has won rave reviews from many instructors and students. This is simply not possible without Javascript: it's supplementing the display of structured text, maintaining the benefits of HTML (compared to the opacity of an embedded applet, Flash, or what have you).

Oops. I those equal signs lost their angle brackets. I didn't notice they needed to be escaped in t post title. I meant to say expression => identity, speech => truth.

Speech and expression are not the same thing. Speech is a kind of expression, but not all expression is speech. Though the definition of "speech" has been broadly interpreted by U.S. courts to include many forms of expression.

However, there is still a substantial difference in emphasis. Speech is primarily understood in terms of communicating ideas. The tradition of free speech is tied to the Enlightenment conception of rational political discourse, according to which reasoned argument between informed individuals can rise above their particular interests to arrive at universal truths and a consensus about the public good.

Expression encompasses ideas, but it is also closely associated with individual feelings and identity. It is not focused on truth, implying a more relative understanding of individual experience in the tradition of the romantics. Furthermore, it does not suggest a separation of form from content. The form, in many cases, is the expression.

I think this is a fundamental difference. Take the idea/content distinction in copyright, for example. This makes pretty good sense when dealing written political argument (and copyright was designed for written texts). It breaks down when applied more broadly to expression, in which the form becomes inseparable from content which is not really "ideas." How do we separate the idea of a song from the form of the music?

You talk about communicating a "message." In reality, decades of research have found that communication is not so straightforward: expression is always interpreted by the audience, often in ways that the originator did not intend. This ability to interpret and make one's own meanings is also an important freedom of communication.

I am not a lawyer. Courts define terms in their own ways that may or may not connect to common understandings or empirical evidence. However, as a scholar of communication I find that expression is closer to how people actually communicate, debate, and engage in public life than is rational ideal on which the concept of free speech is based.

Corporations have been considered to be people since the 14th ammendment passed

Not quite. And the Wikipedia article glosses over what really happened, implying that personhood was granted by a court ruling. It wasn't. The 14th amendment was not initially interpreted as granting personhood to corporations. The decisive precedent was set in 1886 - by a court reporter (!), not a judicial decision. See Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc., pp. 13-14:

. . in 1886, in a legal maneuver that has yet to be conclusively explained, a Supreme Court clerk with documented affinity for corporate interests incorrectly summarized an opinion in the headnotes of the decision on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The clerk wrote, "The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourtheenth Amendment to the Constitution . . . which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." There was no legal basis for this statement, nor any discussion about it from the justices. From then on, however, corporations were free to claim the rights of personhood. The more precedents that were established, the more embedded the law became. Over the next twenty-five years, 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases went before the Supreme Court. Two hundred eighty-eight of them were brought by corporations claiming their rights an natural persons.

Here are more details about the incident - along with optimism that the courts were chipping away at corporate personhood. That was 2003. Since then as we know the supreme court has confirmed the rights of corporations as persons. I can't think of a better example of the distinction between morality and the law (well, apart from the appalling travesty of Dred Scott, which has a certain malevolent symmetry to this).

In reality, the government has much better tools it could re-purpose to stifle dissent.

Your argument has nothing to do with mine. I said nothing about government stifling dissent. The possibility had not even crossed my mind. You say that as though the mere fact that government does not stifle dissent does not magically produce democracy. It just ain't so.

You are focusing on controversial speech and dissent. This is a grave error. If you look at the formation of consensus and uncontroversial speech it is very clear how copyright can concentrate communicative and political power.

Democracy is founded on speech and expression, as I outlined. It is the positive consequence of political speech and participation. People actually need to be informed, to engage each other in discourse, to form opinions, to gather information, and to express their interests. (Nor is this an exclusive list - they also need to form identities, work together in communities and so on.) There has been a lot of work in this area in fields ranging from political science to cultural studies. See for example the work of Jürgen Harbemas, for example, who revived the concept of the public sphere.

To the extent that citizens are restricted or hindered in their attempts to take part in democratic discourse, democracy is limited. Exclusion from cultural discourse has similar effects. When this is the outcome, it does not matter whether it is because of direct or indirect intervention from government or private actors. With copyright we have an institution that is can obviously limit the engagement of citizens in the activities that produce a democratic society. An argument can be made for a given copyright regime the benefits (including informing the populace and creating spaces for discourse and deliberation) exceed the harms. Regardless of the net effect, it does not erase the the conflict between promoting discourse on the one hand and limiting it on the other.