Given your statement, I think you'd appreciate Coyne's approach. It's self-admittedly pugnacious. He declares there's no room for dialog, only destructive monologuing. At first, the social signaling and negative attitudes are off-putting, but by the end, his signaling seems to successfully in-group the audience and ostracize the theologians. It's kind of fascinating.

That's kind of doable now with (what is colloquially referred to as) HTML5. I know you're referring to the atrocity of running the actual convolution with browser JavaScript engines, but as it stands, you can specify the convolution filter in ECMAScript and pass it off to WebGL. The early part of this video has a pretty cool demo.

http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/gwt-html5.html

We already have the tools to do everything you described. The real problems are:

Educating users -- a lot of people are not aware of anything other than the web
Getting the tools into the countries like China

No, mrogers is right.

People who think we already have the tools don't understand the problem well enough. Broad-based education is an end, not a means. If it is a mandatory means (God help us), then we need tools to get us there.

As an important semantic point, if the scheme that gets us to our goals isn't already in motion, then we don't have the tools yet. To think otherwise is to confuse collective behavior with volition.

The ability to commit suicide is a hedge against slavery. The ability to say "no" (a relatively recent innovation in history) is a hedge against shitty "contracts."

The ability to coordinate with like-minded people on a large scale in economic, social, and political dimensions is a hedge against the limited set of opportunities afforded to us by traditional capital, consolidated media, and mere voting.

Shirky's right. Improved, sophisticated, unstifled collaboration that allows people to raise their heads out of the prepackaged trough of opportunity is of primary importance today, to be prioritized even above addressing problems of government control over media talking points.

The consumer sector is not organized enough to launch an effective boycott against a large company. To pretend that such capacity exists today only serves to reinforce this glaring defect in our society.

Interesting tidbit in Discover Magazine. Apparently the cells do well with plain phosphorous, but if the cells grow in an arsenic-dense medium, the cells enlarge and special vacuoles appear. It's fascinating stuff.

If the concern is that L3 is going to route Netflix traffic through Comcast's network to a non-Comcast destination, I'd buy the argument. But is that even on the table?

Don't forget the role of Akamai. The reason that Netflix switched from them to L3 is because Akamai was charging them the true cost of moving that many bits across the country.

Alternatively, due to Comcast's monopoly abuse, NetFlix and Akamai were absorbing costs that, in a fair market, would be absorbed by Comcast and the consumer.

This is an interesting isomorphic thought exercise, but it contributes very little to the discussion.

The question of traffic ratios is more pertinent to traditional network peering, where the two networks are using each other's network as a waypoint to get traffic to get from point A to point B. Then there's routing distance and shared interconnect costs, but those are different questions. All of the NetFlix traffic is for Comcast customers, so it's absolutely disingenuous to refer to traffic ratios here.

Now, running a Tier 1 backbone provider and running a large consumer ISP are different businesses, and there are legitimate fair market questions about how differences in service and revenue models should frame peering arrangements.

But there are other narratives that frame the L3/Comcast discussion too, and dismissing or trivializing those (particularly in a disingenuous way) in an effort to be meta-contrarian is, well... something I don't feel very positive about.

"What Level 3 wants is to pressure Comcast into accepting more than a twofold increase in the amount of traffic Level 3 delivers onto Comcast's network--for free," Waz said in the Comcast statement. "In other words, Level 3 wants to compete with other CDNs, but pass all the costs of that business on Comcast and Comcast's customers, instead of Level 3 and its customers. "

Wait, L3 should pay Comcast for the privilege of supplying more of the content Comcast customers want? After paying to increase their own capacity?

No, the net neutrality geeks are right. This is simultaneously leveraging their consumer monopoly and protecting their video business. A competitive ISP without mixed interests wouldn't be pursuing this angle.

Two slamdunk thinking toys for kids are:
Marble Race and Lego Creationary.

Stratfor published a fairly comprehensive article on this subject. The following link looks like a registration wall, but my understanding is that they'll just put the article in your inbox.

http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20101008_china_and_future_rare_earth_elements&h=a37a5

Hell, it goes beyond wage and work conditions. Targeting full employment and, presumably, the national interest, China has spent years dumping subsidized loans into mining. They've been exporting REEs below even their ridiculously low cost.

*What's funny

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it." Frederic Bastiat

I think you just described white America's exploitation of underprivileged labor. What funny is that they've even managed to inculcate this naive economic morality into people who are harmed by it.