No. The total loss of a species to study and learn from is a loss. That's not neutral. Its not like one species is dying to be replaced by another; right now were are experiencing decreasing bio-diversity.

My entire argument is centered on what is to the ultimate benefit of humanity. And another respondent even (rightfully) called my position "anthropocentric". I'm not sure what to make of your comment; except to say: "swing and a miss".

With the rapidly rising influence of feminism on the Web and the related backlash movements, it seems like we could be having an interesting, intellectual discussion about what is going on, and how it's affecting tech culture.

Seriously? Have you ever tried to have a discussion with a (third-wave intersectional) feminist? First they yell mansplaining, then they yell derailing, then they yell for the authorities, and if that doesn't work they cut off communication.

So you don't have anything to counter? Ok.

Yea, my memory and posting when drinking. it was actually 14yr old so old enough for consent (at the time), the case was in the BC Supreme court and was more of a reference case on the Constitutionality of Canada's polygamy laws.
The real problem is/was getting enough evidence to prosecute for sexual abuse. To quote the special prosecutor,

Value judgements have their place; but leaping to them tends to involve jumping over a host of important factors.

The point isn't about who you blame, it's the fact that the capability has gotten a whole lot easier and cheaper.

Unfortunately, despite not being iBeagle, you will find your beagle's battery...difficult to user service...when depleted. Also problematic to restore from backup.

While they are admittedly a staple of low-budget action shlock; it seems that the 'celebrities, politicians, and high level business executives'(none of those midlevel guys, do you know what a kidnapping costs, per kilogram of hostage?) would be the least relevant targets for this flavor of attack.

Fancy prominent people are valuable, strategically relevant, or have deranged and dangerous fans. Such people have merited considerable human effort on the part of assorted attackers more or less since the invention of enough society to be hierarchical.

A cheap, ubiquitous, trivial-to-implement; and quite possibly also legal (no reasonable expectation of privacy, yadda yadda) tracking mechanism doesn't change the game for them, it changes the game for every last Joe and Jane Nobody with some RF widget. As cellphones have demonstrated, enough bluetooth to track nearby bluetooth radios, and enough cellular hardware to report back to the mothership is smaller than a deck of cards, especially if installed somewhere with access to power. It's also cheap, potentially vanishingly so compared to things like billboard/signage space in well traveled areas, or other plausible deployment points.

"The CEO of SomethingDyne Corp has been kidnapped! Can you backtrace his bluetooth?" makes a better B movie; but this tracking technique is far more promising as a cheap, ubiquitous, mass observation mechanism(probably for some bullshit 'audience engagement metrics' thing, not even a proper authoritarian dystopia) than it is for picking off some dude in an armored limo with a couple of those ear-radio guys flanking him.

How many fifteen year old laptop drives have you tried to spin up lately? Now compare that failure rate with optical or tapes.
As I wrote above, the life has been extended (it used to be a lot of failures in a lot less than fifteen years) but the underlying modes of failure like the one I mentioned above are still there. Another unpowered failure mode is highly polished parts diffusing together over time so the drive "sticks", once again less of an issue than it used to be due to design changes taking that into account - quite a lot of it done around 2000.

Whatever you think of the various sides of this argument, it's interesting to me to look at how different the sides are.

The US is, on average, far more concerned about pornography and other sexual issues than the UK, but there is not and never will be any significant discussion of government-mandated filters, outside of specific situations like government-run schools. The reason is our belief in the importance of free speech. Although there are plenty of Americans who would like to ban porn, no one at a national level says it out loud. No one seriously talks about it even at local, highly homogeneous levels, because everyone knows it won't fly.

The UK is somewhat less prudish than the US, but is perfectly willing to carve out large exceptions to free speech wherever it's convenient. Therefore, British pols do talk seriously about trying to ban porn, except for adults who opt out.

Europe (as a whole; there are exceptions) is even less concerned about free speech than the UK, but apparently considers porn to be something worth fighting for, to the degree that they're willing to invest at least a little effort in fighting to keep porn available to kids in the UK.

FWIW, I think porn is bad. Conceptually, there's nothing wrong with human sexuality, but porn presents an extremely distorted view of human sexuality. I think regular consumption of hardcore pornography, particularly by adolescents, skews expectations and perceptions in ways that have negative consequences. That said, I have no interest in trying to ban it. I do filter it on my home network, but that's a half measure which mostly serves as an early warning system (I get notified of attempts to get to porn sites) which offers a chance to talk the issues over if I find my kids looking for it.

All of which mostly says that I'm a fairly typical American parent: concerned about porn but unwilling to take the strong anti-freedom steps needed to effectively ban it :-)

I can't tell if your suggesting that's good or bad. I think its good.

That's not anthropocentric. That's personal / self-interested / ego-centric.

That's a strange way of looking at it. They are seeking to learn and recover that which is -lost-. I can't see how not finding that which is lost is somehow doing us any good.

Granted the longer we wait to find that which is lost the better our technology for preserving it is but that is offset by
- a how long do we wait? clearly if we wait forever we never benefit from finding it; and anything else is entirely arbitrary. Searching

- some of what is lost is often slowly and sometimes quickly deteriorating. waiting for the future to find it may not leave us anything to find.

is just not British!

Probably not. Perhaps I should have clarified that things going extinct is universally bad for humanity.

And yes, obviously prior extinctions leading to the evolution of humanity were not bad for humanity.

On the other hand, humanity going extinct would be exceedingly bad for humanity.

Other species co-existent with humanity now going extinct, in the sense that it represents a reduction in biodiversity to draw on and study is also bad for humanity.

Right, it is not good or bad relative to the universe; its not "objectively" bad. Its not immoral. But it is still unversally bad from the subjective perspective of the species going extinct, or the species relying on it.

That, in this case, would be us. Granted we aren't dependent on the galapagos iguana the way we are dependent on chickens or corn, but we are dependent on the existing bio-diversity of earth to advance a wide variety of sciences, and the loss of that diversity is a loss to humanity. Particularly the Galapagos. Both due to its scientific value as a long isolated ecosystem; and culturally for its historic significance.

In the late 1970s in junior high we would ride the bus and get off at random stops and write down pay phone numbers. Then when we got home we would call the numbers and do all sorts of gags.

The one that inexplicably worked well was telling people that had won money from a radio station. Why they believed that an 8th grader sounded like a disk jockey is still beyond me.

It's almost kind of sad that kids of today can't get that experience. There's very few pay phones left and I bet none of them accept incoming calls. It was also pretty safe from a get in trouble perspective. Call logging and tracing would have been a huge endeavor and we never called any one pay phone more than a few times or suggested anything violent or even all that ribald.

The only thing that makes any sense at all for consumers is USB hard drives

They have a far shorter average offline life than the optical media. For one thing the bearings have a finite life as the lubricant breaks down over time - a lot longer than it used to be but still less on average than media problems with the optical disks.
What is viable is to shuffle stuff off those USB drives onto newer ones a few years down the track, but if you are not prepared to do that eventually the optical stuff is going to come out as far more reliable.

That's just shifting the problem to someone who cares far less about the problem than you do. It leaves you one corporate restructure or changed business plan away from losing the lot and one backhoe incident away from not being able to get it when you want it.
External USB drives are a very good stopgap or even ongoing solution for home users that don't want to mess about with optical media.