From what I gather, it's still somewhat common for people to find relics of the prohibition era (e.g. remains of speakeasies and distilleries) buried underground somewhere even today.

You're basically assuming that Chinese culture is (or at least "ought to be") the same as that of the West. Most of these workers are migrants. That means they work a lot of hours in a short time period and then go back home afterwards with the intention that they'll have made more working a few months at the factory than they would have made all year in their local farming community.

I recommend watching this:

https://www.ted.com/talks/lesl...

Really you aren't speaking for their best interests. You think you are, but you aren't. If you told all of them what you just said here, they'd probably think you're a self righteous stuck up bourgeois asshole.

No, just saying that I can't recall any period where the first lady has ever been exempt from public lampooning.

The problem with that statement is that it is so non-descriptive that it is just meaningless.

Take me for example, I'm a huge mishmash of opposing spectrum:

I'm in favor of legalizing almost anything drug related, gambling related, and sex related (including legalizing prostitution) and I'm also very much atheist. Many will describe that as being very left wing.

However I'm also very pro-second amendment, pro-capitalism, and very supportive of freedom of association (including allowing religious establishments to refuse to provide contraception, allowing people to smoke in places open to the public, allowing private businesses to refuse service to anybody for *any* reason.) Many will describe that as being very right wing.

Yet neither description seems to work in my case.

Narrowing political viewpoints into a one dimensional spectrum is likewise dumb. When I hear somebody say x is right or left of y, my first thought is: On what subject?

I mean shit, if you look at this political compass (which is at least two dimensional, but still a very bad way to label political viewpoints as IMO there are easily hundreds of different dimensions) Adolph Hitler is pegged pretty damn close to being a centrist on the left/right scale, yet Milton Friedman is pegged as far right:

http://www.politicalcompass.or...

Like I said, meaningless.

And before somebody says I'm an anarcho-libertarian on that two dimensional compass, that is also false. I very much support the rule of law and prefer a government to establish order so that everybody can have a common set of enforced rules that permit commerce (capitalism just isn't possible without the rule of law and/or a set of guidelines to make sure that transactions occur in a fair and just manner in addition to having a robust system for dispute resolution -- something that anarchy cannot have.)

The first lady has always been a target with every president. SNL and MadTV both frequently ran sketches that made Barbara Bush look dumb and/or get trash talked by other people. Though recently Michelle Obama made herself a really bad target. She was at a store when some random customer who didn't recognize her asked her if she could grab something off of the top shelf (Michelle is my height, 5'11", and I get asked that kind of thing often) and so she later made a stink about it in the media saying that it was an example of racism.

You mean like that playboy comic that showed the Bush kids running a meth lab?

Sorry but this "my party is better than yours" crap is just that: crap.

Eh...I'd say democrats do. They were referring to the president as being a monkey long before the current president's term.

Oh, and also ICANN doesn't have any say in this matter. They just set the rules and enforcement for ownership of domain names and IP blocks. That would be like asking the US Patent and Trademark office to set rules against wifi signal jamming.

They can't. For example, the current protections that exist for preventing IP spoofing for example aren't universal. The IETF did create an RFC for blocking them at the ISP level, but not all ISPs have chosen to implement. In fact, a lot of standards the IETF has created either aren't used or are broken all the time.

You'd need some kind of legal entity to enforce it, and said legal entity could blackhole any ISP that doesn't comply by removing it from the global BGP table.

This is actually how some games used to work. For example, the original Starcraft worked that way.

This lead to a bunch of problems though; namely each user was exposing their public IP address to each other, and back in the days of winnuke this was problematic from a DoS perspective. Not only that but the games would tend to suffer much worse latency problems as a result of it.

Today I imagine such a setup would be even worse. There are apparently businesses out there that sell services to other gamers where they'll ddos somebody for you for x amount of time for x amount of dollars. They go by the name of "booter" services. You just plug in an IP address and pay the fee and that person gets knocked off of the internet for your desired duration.

Presently the most popular way of doing this is to find the persons's IP address by knowing their skype name. The machines that do the DDoSing are of course everyday users with machines that have a trojan, rootkit, or whatever installed, and their owners are unaware.

In my opinion, egress filtering is definitely the way to do it, but don't just restrict it to block IP spoofing. Various groups already have a rather large honeypot infrastructure in place to identify ddos sources; I think what ought to be done is have some bayesian logic applied to this traffic to figure out what is legit and what isn't, and apply egress filtering to what are probably compromised systems at their ISP border routers.

This wouldn't be easy to implement though; we'd need some kind of international treaty body similar to maritime treaty to enforce those kinds of rules. The rules would need to be very specific so as to be only for the purpose of preventing DDoS attacks, and nothing else (even other kinds of hacking or illegal activity should not be filtered.)

In other words, you're one of those "the past was always better than the present" people that another slashdot article mentioned.

Here's a little dose of reality: Until about 150 years ago, the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government; the state governments could do whatever they wanted, including censorship, banning religions, etc. In fact, in the early days of the US, some states didn't allow ANYBODY to vote for the federal government. In New York for example, the state government decided by itself what representatives to send, what electors to send, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Case in point:

http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

And he actually got modded up too. We don't need the media to feed us this shit, it's just average idiots that do it. This person probably isn't even aware that until about 150 years ago, the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government; the state governments could do whatever they wanted, including censorship, banning religions, etc. In fact, in the early days of the US, some states didn't allow ANYBODY to vote for the federal government. In New York for example, the state government decided by itself what representatives to send, what electors to send, etc.

It's not just news outlets, it's sensational people as well, and there are a LOT of them, especially on slashdot. For example, how many people routinely claim that the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer?

Well lets do a little then and now comparison:

Rich 100 years ago meant you owned an actual car, which was likely a piece of shit that poor people of today would even scoff at. Rich 50 years ago meant you owned more than one television, televisions which look like crap and had tiny screens compared to ones that poor people have access to in abundance today. Rich 30 years ago meant you had a car phone, which had crap coverage and no data, and perhaps a portable computer and perhaps a laser disc player. Middle class in the same era meant maybe owning a commodore vic-20.

If you were poor 100 years ago you could barely afford to eat enough calories to meet your minimum daily needs. Today poor people are often overweight, and I've seen homeless people carry a laptop to starbucks, and the money they get from begging usually goes towards booze or cigarettes (any actual food or clothing they need are usually given to them for free by food banks, and if they so choose, they can get free or close to free section 8 housing.)

In spite of all of this, its only politically correct to say that we're poorer now than we have ever been, mainly because a lot of people are incredibly dumb and can't tell the difference between money and wealth (money, by definition, does not make somebody rich or wealthy.)

Now, does some government spreadsheet say that we have more poor today than before? Yeah, probably, but mainly because the goalpost is constantly getting pushed up. Just to put things into perspective: If minimum wage ACTUALLY kept up with inflation from the day it was first introduced, then it would be only $4.15 an hour today.

Source:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Anyways my point is, it's not just news outlets that are at fault here. Most people, for whatever reason, hold the general belief that everything is always worse in the present day than it was in the past. Penn and Teller did an episode on this once:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...