I have to wonder what kind of deviation exists in the sample for human safety. It would seem to me from my limited toprope gym climbing experience that some humans are significantly safer than others, and in addition to that, a constant communication stream tends to also increase overall safety as well as response time, by binding attention to you. I would also add that unlike the mechanical auto-belay system (which I have used on a trip to Toronto), a human is (for what little it might be worth) capable of reacting intelligently to unexpected situations, whereas the device would simply fail.

...ever heard of a photon? :-P

What's up with the anti-NN articles lately? Smells of astroturf if you ask me, to be honest, though I'm wondering how it got past firehose stuff. This article is just the usual FUD approach, I thought slashdot was a bit more capable of recognizing such. The article boils down to some simple appeals to partisanship, fear of being on the "losing side" (when we all are unless you happen to be one of the F500 CEOs or something else equally silly), fear of oppressive government control / fear of the government 'breaking' the internet (the Order and Report is actually very specific and focuses merely on anti-competitive cartel/monopoly tactics)...

I am hoping the headline was a joke, done to suggest thoughts of *intentional* drug users rather than the mythological addict, essentially hyperbolic negation of the intended result. Of course I could be wrong, we do live in a world where people presume that just because someone else likes to do something they don't quite understand it must be evil wrong immoral deadly and antisocial.

The incentive is simple.

If you have enough to give, and you appreciate what I do, there's a chance you'll give. If you don't have enough or don't appreciate it, you weren't going to give anyway.

If you do something for other people that they appreciate, and they see a way to help you, they'll likely do so, especially at low cost to them.

comcast+bittorrent=problem.

I am kinda surprised you didn't think of that one.

most utility right-of-ways in the US were created by and are maintained by government action, which is one of many good reasons people want net neutrality, as these cable runs should be treated as public goods, maintained by a carrier that was granted a situational monopoly, the alternative would be to return the land/etc. to the people. Don't forget also that most of the cable that exists was laid with significant amounts of public funding as well, this system belongs in large part to the government/to the people, or at least that's how it should be given who paid for it. Letting AT&T/Comcast/etc. have their way *again* after rolling over on the issue of the infrastructure itself is simply a horrible idea. These corporations have shown time and again how little regard they have for both public good *and* the right of the people to govern themselves, they should not be allowed this incredible power grab.

said so-called "leech class" would actually be more accurately described as a combination of a large artistic/creative class, and a large class of DIY-minded individuals, who if they were ensured their basic needs would happily work to improve their own surroundings. Want mega-engineering projects? Well, when workers cost $0, you can pull off a *lot*.

Oh, I should add, direct election of senators is not the problem. Gerrymandering and *lack* of direct election for representatives on the other hand is a *serious* problem

I have to agree with most of what you said, but I take serious issue with your attack on UI benefits, which invariably stimulate spending and work to keep people from falling entirely out of the system while the economy recovers (as opposed to tax cuts for the rich which just cost the govt money it could be using to serve the people, same as all these acts of war...)

If this country had Basic Income then none of this would be important of course, but the US Federal Govt and most if not all state governments would rather let some 10-25% (depending on who you ask) of the country end up jobless, penniless and homeless (let alone having no access to any health-care, which is *still* a huge problem despite the claims of those who pushed the latest bills through) through no fault of their own. (Remember, UI benefits are only paid out to those who lost their job through no fault of their own, these are not benefits paid to those who are fired for cause or (usually) those who simply quit).

This is actually rarely the case, in the US at least its the cop's word against anyone else's and people still generally tend to believe the person in uniform (jury trial) or side subtly with other authority figures (judge only trial), and so even when we have footage from numerous cell phones of what happened, police still rarely get more than a temporary suspension for murder.

I'd also be surprised if it was as good as it sounds up in canada, at least in parts of the country, considering the recent police state in Toronto during the summits. They did everything they could to make peaceful protest impossible and to arrest anyone who was involved, right up to and including passing a law that went into effect *before* its manditory announcement time, and would be quickly found illegal itself anyway once it did become public, so that they could arrest people and charge them with this to keep them out of the way. Of course all the cases got dropped unless they could provoke more charges, but that didn't matter, they got their control for the most part.

media collections are very much important data, especially rare/hard-to-find items, losing my media collection would be a rather serious inconvenience, and therefore to me does qualify for at least an on-site backup (at least of the audio, I want to buy enough space for video backup too but I just don't have the money)

If a hurricane, earthquake or flood manages to take out my onsite backups, its likely taken out most of the onsite itself, and honestly, any data I have that is more important to me than the physical posessions in my home is already backed up in many places just because I want to have access to it everywhere I go, so I've replicated across a few cloud services and a VPS box. If we manage to get enough natural disasters to get rid of all of my data all at once then sure, I'll be a bit pissed, but I suspect I can reconstruct even that from what I know, considering about the most important data I can come up with are software and other things I've been writing and somehow far more important, my contact networks, my phone book and e-mail contact lists are about the most important data I have as a social creature in a networked world, but I suspect I could reconstruct even that if I manage to find a few of my friends post-disaster.

off-site backups are nice, and indeed can save you from a total failure of your security, but if you have any idea how to set up a network in the first place, this shouldn't really be a worry unless you are not picky enough about who else you let on, *and* happen to run software that is currently a major unattended malware target, which for whatever reason, linux and osx don't seem to be. Assuming your security doesn't become a problem (which with a decent firewall it shouldn't), the only other reasons for offsite are to hopefully sidestep any given local disaster; offsite doesn't even necessarily make your data more secure unless you're talking about offline offsite, which S3 very much is not, because with online offsite you're hoping someone else's security is good enough, their power conditioning is good enough, etc.

I think this is to be considered more a replacement to train and long-haul truck routes rather than local truck delivery, but I could be wrong