How is 2% that you can't do anything about in any way more important than the 98% that you could but don't do anything about?

Absolutely correct. But it shows there's potential to survive even a disaster of that scale.

Quality of life will certainly be a hell of a lot lower than we're used to though.

Its a difference of locality. Fukushima dumping and Gulf oil are disasters to be sure, but they're fairly localized on a global scale (yes yes things get spread around but they also get diluted as they do.)

Measuring things like CO2 is being done on a global scale and its shown that, generally speaking, its going up everywhere. Yes there's still some areas that will be higher than average and some lower than average, but across all of that, there's an overall upward trend not a one-time occurrence that dissipates over time.

In basically all evolutionary contexts, rate of change is far more applicable than absolute values. Life seems to be able to adapt to damned near anything. But it doesn't adapt very fast.

Of course "life survives" is a very different discussion from "humans survive," which is what we're usually most concerned with.

Not when they can walk down to their grocery store and see the isles overflowing.

There's absolutely no evidence that GMO is even bad for you. Of course there's also no evidence that GMO isn't bad for you either. It just hasn't been around long enough (and it changes fast enough) that the necessary long-term studies simply haven't been done yet. Anyone who tries to tell you one way or the other with decisiveness is just being opinionated with little to no backing.

We do know some things about GMO though: They've helped increase agricultural yield significantly (good thing!) They've been used to destroy small farmers via patent trolling and other garbage legal battles (bad thing) and there's strong evidence that they're pushing our crops towards monogenetics (VERY bad thing.)

But in terms of human health, the jury is still out when it comes to real evidence. You can find the odd study along the lines of "a rat got cancer after eating the human equivalent of 14kg of GMO corn per day for a month" but you can find plenty of studies along those lines for non-GMO foods (and practically anything else as well.. "too much of anything is bad" may be cliche, but its almost always true.) Yes in some sense that means GMO corn can "cause" cancer but the consumption rate is so out of scale from any real-life context that it doesn't really indicate much in the larger debate.

Enough people know how to garden that building back to farming wouldn't likely take terribly long, at least on a small (community) scale. Putting up a basic house isn't terribly difficult either if you don't have to worry about building codes and inspectors -- sure you'll have a somewhat higher chance of it collapsing on you and killing you but enough people will build non-collapsing houses that it won't be the end of us.

Remember there's been at least one point in history where the human population was on the scale of 1,000. Total. And we pushed through that and thrived. It would have been a hard life to be sure but humans are pretty crafty creatures and even if we drop back to the level of primitive knowledge, we're still fairly good at figuring out how to bend the environment to our will.

Destroying life in the oceans would be bad for sure.. but not as bad (in the context of human extinction) as destroying the atmosphere. We can survive without fish. We can't survive without air.

The trouble is that the "right thing" on a large enough scale is often only defined retrospectively by those who retain power. How different would the world be if the USSR had won the cold war?

Its easy to say "Communism is bad" when you're just parroting what you've been told for the past 50 years.. Its a lot harder to say it objectively because the only communist countries we've really known have had to operate under the yolk of the US anti-communist rampage.

Hell, morally speaking, the greed-based capitalist philosophy is the one that should be "wrong," at least if you go by the teachings of every kindergarten teacher ever.

Well I didn't read the details of how they're planning to set this up, but it seems to me that if they have any access to the private keys at all, then they're doing it wrong.

The private keys must be generated and held privately to be secure (I think that might have something to do with the name..)

The public key is the only part that should ever be known by or transmitted to a second party (never mind a third party or a MITM.)

Pfft what do you think they are? Real people?

Corporations don't need or want none of that "responsibility" crap when we hand them new rights and privileges! Trying to claim otherwise is an obvious sign of a communist! Or terrorist. Or whatever we hate these days because oh shiny!

The difference is that the web developer doesn't have an agreement with Adblock, whereas they DO have an agreement with Google.

So Google has a higher responsibility to make sure things work "right" than adblock does. If adblock messes up a page layout somehow and you try to bring that up with the page developer they're going to go tell you to piss off. If its Google messing up their page however, things are a little hairier because there's an actual deal in place there.

Then they need to give me a way to opt-out of ad-encrusted videos all together. Or better yet, make it an opt-in so that I'm consciously aware that I'm "paying" them by viewing ads.

If it was money (rather than time) that they just arbitrarily siphoned out of me without my consent, they would be right the hell up shit creek. My time has value as well so why should they be allowed to take it without my consent?

Even if that's only the couple of seconds it takes me to decide whatever video I'm trying to watch is or isn't worth the 30 seconds of ads, that's still 10-20% of the ad being shown to me -- and in the case that I decide its not worth it, that's a few seconds of my time that I've given to them that I got nothing for in return.

Add that up over however many thousand Youtube videos a person is likely to browse in a year these days and that's quite a chunk of time blown without my consent and potentially without even the limited benefit to me of watching someone's cat being dumb.

I don't mind Google's in-line ads. They're usually fairly unobtrusive and they at least try to customize them to the content I'm viewing at the time. But the Youtube video ads are more along the lines of the old Geocities-era flashing crap.. you know the exact same crap that Adsense mostly supplanted -- horribly obnoxious and completely unavoidable other than closing the window (or having an ad blocker.)

There's a bit of a practicality problem there -- every website would need to reformat its layout to handle the "has ads" vs "doesn't have ads" contexts.

And if they don't (and lets be honest, you have to expect that most of them won't,) the adspace will just have to be filled up with something else. So you're essentially replacing one waste of space with a different waste of space.

I suppose if the different waste of space was at least not a link, it would save the occasional misclick taking you to some BS sales site and having to hit the back button.

Well you'd save a lot of money, but you'd be pretty short on the gaming stick. No Playstation, no XBox, no Steam, no Origin, no MMOs, no Minecraft, etc etc. You'd be limited to basically whatever Good Old Games has available and the occasionally indie game you stumble across by chance.

http://sourceforge.net/directory/games/mmorpg/os:windows/freshness:recently-updated/Didn't Google that one too hard I take it..

That's really the trick. Unfortunately its close to impossible. What meaningful link could there possibly be between my 60-level, 1000-max-stat fantasy game and your 200-level, 100-max-stat science fiction game?

Even among similar games, there will be huge disconnects in content and lore making this particularly challenging. You could set up farms of a handful of cooperating servers to be sure, but to get that "Massively" part in there, you really won't get away with just "linking them together." Someone will have to spend the money and time on developing an actual large-scale server farm, advertising the game to enough people to make it worthwhile, etc.

All of that is expensive.

But if you just want a small MUD-scale server of a few dozen people, that should be totally in the realm of possibility.

That's far too wide. Any new laws or changes to existing laws to address this particular problem will need to be specific to the issue of online-mediated DRM. Because if its not, too many counter-examples crop up (or more likely, are made up) in order to shut the law down before it comes into effect.

Really though, what the EFF is asking for is probably the best you can do.. its not really plausible to burden the developer with this -- they can't keep unprofitable servers running without going bankrupt (and then guess what -- those servers will stop running anyway) and requiring them to release a serverless patch is at best going to get you some shoddy half-assed patch that probably breaks so much that the game's unplayable anyway.

Sony, Microsoft and Steam could in theory push something like this through -- as part of their certification process, they could require that the developers provide a server-free version to be held in escrow until such time as said servers are actually shut down (and would have to be updated with every new submitted patch of course.)

But of course none of those companies have any reason to accept such a large responsibility other than being nice to consumers.. its something I could see Steam doing if the outrage got big enough.. not going to hold my breath on MS or Sony bothering.