Everything requires an E-mail account. You need an E-mail account to make a Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. account. It's the "out of band" communications method with which someone can be reached that is universal and not tied to any specific company or provider.

If E-mail has to go away, something else needs to replace it in this manner. Phone numbers could be one way; there's already services that exclusively use phone numbers to authenticate (Telegram messenger for instance). The problem is most people, including myself, don't want to give their phone number out to everyone. E-mail, I could care less, or create a throwaway account.

E-mail is too useful. It needs to stick around.

Nonsense. What Hoover actually did while on office indicates his "underlying philosophy", which was far from "leave it alone". In any case, regardless of any philosophy, the fact is that he intervened to an unprecedented extent, with predictable results.

You said that Hoover "let the free market work on its own". Hiring someone who believed in that approach and then proceeding to ignore their advice does not constitute letting the market work on its own.

There are varying accounts regarding the Panic of 1837. Quoting Wikipedia:

So van Buren wasn't re-elected, but that may simply be due to unfair perceptions and public sentiment in spite of the recovering economy, rather than any real problem with his policies. In any case it didn't turn out like the Great Depression, where the economic downturn dragged on for over a decade.

History says otherwise. The free market improves the welfare of the vast majority. A few benefit more than average, and a few benefit less, but the effect on the median is positive.

Without the market most of the people alive today would be dead of starvation, with the remaining few engaged in subsistence farming. The only people who aren't better off are those very few incapable of participating, in general due to a severe physical or mental handicap. Even those considered very poor are better off with the market than they would be without it.

Fiscal policy is central planning. It amounts to price controls on money, which have far-reaching effects throughout the economy.

It sounds like you're arguing for the pacifist position. While I would agree that there is never any good reason to start a war, nor to escalate one, I have to say that simply laying down and dying on cue when an enemy attacks is not a particularly attractive option, nor one I feel anyone is obligated to accept. As a universal principle it would inevitably be self-defeating, as the more ethical side would always be wiped out, leaving those inclined toward war to dominate by default.

It may take two sides to fight a war, but it only takes one side to start it. The victim of an attack has a right to proportional self-defense. I moreover have no objection to others voluntarily choosing to aid in that defense. The key point is to consciously limit yourself to just stopping the attack, as decisively as possible but with a minimum of collateral damage, without becoming the very thing you're fighting against.

The question no one seems able to answer is this: how do you "give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing" when no one is producing food or housing for sale? Coming up with extra money is trivial; getting goods onto shelves so people can spend that money on things they need is the hard part, particularly if you don't intend to resort to forced labor.

I have no doubt that people will find ways to occupy themselves and perhaps earn some extra spending money for luxuries, but there are plenty of hard, dirty, unpleasant jobs that no one would choose to do if their basic needs were already met for free, and they can't all be automated with near-term levels of technology. I foresee a glut of artists and entertainers, and precious few farmers, janitors, and sanitation engineers.

Between increased inflation, new public works projects, the Federal Farm Board, immigration restrictions, tax increases, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Bacon-Davis Act, the Home Loan Bank System, pressure enacted on the NYSE to block short selling, and various other examples of interference from 1929 to 1932, I don't see how you can possibly say that Hoover "let the free market work on its own". In hindsight the New Deal was really Hoover's creation, not Roosevelt's.

Laisse-faire had been the policy prior to 1929. It's no accident that 1929 is remembered as the start of "The Great Depression", in contrast to previous events such as the depression of 1819, the Panic of 1837, and the depression of 1920-1921. The Great Depression is the first case where the federal government tried to end a depression by decree and regulation and public spending rather than taking the hands-off approach. The result was a disaster, from which they seem to have learned very little.

America's Great Depression

The free market may not operate under a mandate, but it has the effect of improving the general welfare. Government, by contrast, has the mandate, but is incapable of carrying it out. Interference by central planners just makes matters worse. This is a case where principles and pragmatism are in perfect alignment.

There is a big difference between "war should be considered as a last resort to get our way" and "war shouldn't be considered at all except as a way to prevent something even worse" (where the list of things considered "worse than war" is extremely short). Whether war is justified at all is a more important issue than where it ranks on a list of options, though I do agree that other options should always come first.

While you did know that you'd find ads, that doesn't imply that you "intentionally loaded Slashdot to get ... ads". You just wanted the news & discussion; the ads are an unwanted side effect, impurities in the data stream. You agreed to accept whatever the site sends you in response to your request, but that doesn't imply you have to display it, run embedded code, or follow the links. A good web-browser with plugins like Ad Block will help to refine the signal from the noise, simultaneously improving both load times and security.

The logical place to deal with this issue would be higher up in the stack, like with SCTP's multihoming support. Rather than advertising multiple routes to the same IP address, you let the other endpoint know that you can be reached at multiple IP addresses. If one ISP has an outage, you transparently switch the traffic over to another address.

Unfortunately, this requires updating applications to use different protocols; there is no backward-compatible way to retrofit this form of multihoming into TCP or UDP.

IPv6 is intended to change how routing is done. The larger addresses make it easier to allocate prefixes hierarchically, as opposed to the smaller blocks which must be joined together for IPv4. For example, top-level prefixes could be naively assigned by combining 8 bits of latitude with 10 bits of longitude to create 256k /18s each covering approximately 800 square miles. Each /18 would have room to allocate each of up to ~1 billion customers a /48 prefix composed of 64k /64 subnets, each having 2**64 unique addresses. The resulting routing tables should be highly compressible; for example, there would probably be a single preferred route from a given location for all packets destined for a particular country or state. Only the closer destinations would need individual routes.

Populate the net with files like this full of E-mail addresses that are not valid. Have dummy accounts on the appropriate servers that will accept the logins, allow the spambots to think they're successfully sending E-mails when in fact they're all going into the bit bucket.

For added effect, make the servers respond v e r y s l o w l y under these accounts, taking tens of seconds to "send" the E-mail, a minute or so to log in, etc. Basically, slow the spam bots down and waste their time. Of course, the bots will probably eventually evolve to detect such shenanigans, but why make spammers' jobs easy? :)

Kids should have at least a couple of months out of the year when they can just not worry about their studies and have fun and BE KIDS.

I mean, jeez! You only get to be a kid once. Let them enjoy those summer vacations. When I think back to my childhood, my fondest memories are during those summer vacations! Why the heck should we take that away from our future generations?

Leave summer vacation in place. And stop freaking shortening it.

That's true. They dedicated a team to porting MacOS 10.10 to Apple II but they unexpectedly all quit the company. Apple is baffled.

isn't helping each other some form of intelligence? Given that it brought them to all those places, I'd say it is. So yes, smarter.