It's true that the Nobel Peace Prize has been unreasonably politicized — not so much with Liu Xiaobo, but certainly with Gore and Obama. Then again, international events are intrinsically political and always have been.

I don't know what to say about the Confucius Peace Prize, though. Confucius was not about either peace or war — he was about extreme social conservatism. I suspect that one of these days, the world is going to stop finding China cute and see it for what it is: a first world colonialist culture with a high developed traditional theory of realpolitik and a chip on its shoulder about not being treated with sufficient respect. China will then be a much more interesting foil to the United States than it is now.

I mean, assuming the United States and China both still exist and haven't destroyed each other or merged into some horrible monster.

Yes, that's one part of it - I hate the sensation of time spent without something going on. Listening to Beethoven or exercising doesn't give me that feeling, but playing computer games (when I was too young to understand myself) always did.

However, what I really like about writing code or prose is the sensation that time outside of my mind is going more slowly than time inside. I struggle with some piece of construction for what seems like days; then I look up and only an hour has passed on the clock. The physical world has been traveling near the speed of light - my mind, however, has had the advantage of much more time, untrackably. That's the opposite of what happens with a game, where two hours can disappear in the world and I have the sensation that only a few minutes have passed.

Programming and writing are the only things I know of that make me feel, truly, I've made a sort of gain in my struggle to stay ahead of time. Sort of like your signature says: "Reality, to be commanded, must be destroyed," though maybe you meant it in a different sense.

You know, as a form of challenging relaxation, only coding and writing prose really satisfy me. I used to watch people playing Doom in the computer lab for hours and maybe days, but I could never get into it. Sim City was worse. Even among the geekish, I guess I'll never really fit in.

See this, in all the W'ks clamor?

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent "virtual" computers – again located somewhere on the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both "free" and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. [From John Naughton]

All this is off-topic, but I think we're in a paradigm-shifting earthquake right now.

Yes, but there are NASes, monitors, this that and the other. I guess I could rebuild everything much more efficiently than it is now, in frankness.

Has increased greatly since I began running multiple servers 24 hours. I hope some day it becomes possible to run really efficient, low-power professional servers.

Got to wait until I feel Ubuntu/tablet is working relatively well.

Yes, that would be just fine.

Any thoughts about the feasibility of Clean Slate and other proposals to "remake" the Internet?

I'm not asking for predictions so much as informed thoughts about what the obstacles are to this actually happening. I used to think the Internet was perfectly anonymous, until I encountered (second-hand) the Chinese renrou sousuo yinqing "human flesh search engine"). Cyberspace is bound to physical servers and wires and antennas; can the majority of these be controlled? Is the political will now accumulating for it to happen?

This is really a momentous time in history. For the first time since the Cold War ended, there is a serious international political conflict in which everyone everywhere may see that they have some economic or intellectual stake.

After September 11th, I heard many older people in New York say, "I hoped not to live long enough to see this." Well, I'm grateful to be alive now to see this. It is a very important conflict.

For many Slashdot readers, this is old news. But the interesting thing is how awareness of web-privacy issues has hit the mainstream. The Wall Street Journal (whose news pages typically have at least half a dozen trackers on them) has been running a whole series on simple tools to avoid being tracked online.

I think the place of the Internet in society is entering a new phase.

Gee, where does that leave me?

I've been disappointed with both the Apple and Droid phones. I can't honestly say I am looking forward to either for my next smartphone purchase — I've really been thinking about going back to an old fashioned just-a-phone, and using a NanoNote or whatever of its kind might become available.

What I really want is a programmable opensource palmtop that also has phone functionality. A jailbroken phone is a poor substitute for an opensource palmtop. I've never felt right since the HP 100lx went out of production.

Maybe next year.