Yep, them's the breaks. A friend of mine says that Ice Ages are God's way of saying "Next!" - wipe the slate, bring in somebody new. :) I completely disagree with the guilt-reasoning of many environmentalists. That's a matter of values, which imply a belief system. To stick strictly with the pure evolutionary model, you can not say whether what humans do is "good" or "bad" for the Earth, only whether it's successful by some practical measure. IOW, if we "destroy the Earth", by which is generally meant, "make Earth unfit for human habitation and wipe out a large number of other species in the process including ourselves", then that can be described as a bad idea, unwise and not improving our situation, but it's no more "good" or "bad" than an ice age. "Good" and "bad" imply evil, which is an alien concept to evolution. In that event we will have merely created a replacement ecosystem, which some of us may or may not live to experience but cockroaches probably will. "Next!" is the cry of Mother Nature at that point - just as She said back when the Oxygen Catastrophe eliminated the dominant life forms.

Closely related to ropadopology, pretending to be an idiot

Also rubber band airplanes. Wind them up, at one point you get exactly that shape. IDK if the math of the shape was ever explored though. Oftentimes 'discoveries' are things that we, the great unwashed, saw all the time but never noticed. And that's OK - we need people who say, "That's funny..."

The fact that these things concern you constitute a very good counter-argument. It was just 500+ years ago that a law was passed in England making it illegal to strike your wife with a stick thicker than your thumb. Feudal Lords throughout Europe (or China, or India, or pretty much everywhere) thought nothing of sacrificing 1/4 of an entire population on a whim, or a perceived insult.

The whole "we're screwing the planet up" thing is a self-serving egoism. It's revisiting the "We are the Humans. We are Different from these lowly animals." The correct view, IMHO, is that we are a logical (or reasonable, if you prefer) extrapolation of the continued progress of complexity in evolution. The lowly African termite terraforms a substantial piece of real estate, radically altering the local ecosystem and constructing a mound that hosts its own internal ecosystem that is quite different. We do much the same, on a similar relative scale to our own size. We can be seen as Life creating a mechanism to allow Life to migrate off this planet to others, expanding across the solar system - after all, where we go, Life will go with us. There may be bears, grasshoppers and sharks living on exoplanets in the future, and we will have been Life's way of constructing a 'spore' to carry it across the silent dark wastes of space to new fertile ground. When that happens, the relatively minor modifications we have made to this ecosystem to provide the resources to do that will not seem so important. And in the meantime, some of the best minds have pointed out that utilizing space resources has the potential of improving the standard of living of every human by a factor of 10 within 100 years, while restoring large parts of the ecosystem due to the elimination of the need for tearing up the earth any more.

That's essentially the same argument that the early single cell creatures said about these new fangled 'organisms' - "Look at those guys! Not one of those cells could survive on its own! All they do is sit there and pulse on and off, in sequence. It's like a huge conga line. And some other cells can't even do that - all they do is act as a pipe to deliver food! If something happened to that 'organism' they'd all die in a few seconds. I'd rather be out here on my own, hunting for my own food."

The fact is that civilization has the inevitable effect of reducing the overall net 'fitness' of the typical individual to the external environment. Medicine keeps people alive who would have died at birth, straightens their teeth so they can marry and have more kids with crooked teeth, and eliminates the need to maintain strength and endurance, since we don't have to hunt for food or survive a month without it. We are trading individual fitness for group fitness.

If civilization goes, though, the genes are still there. I am confident that some folks would figure a way to survive - a year's worth of food in a coal mine might be enough for a few hundred people. The fittest for the new world would survive. Maybe they'd be riding giant cockroaches instead of horses (but only if temp, humidity, CO2 and O2 all go much higher.)

Think of it as accelerated evolution. How many eyes you got? Only three? I have five! And two of them are on my shoulders! :P

I think I'll beg to differ, at least on the first sentence, at least on a matter of scale and influence. The second one is what I would term an 'issue in progress' - we won't really know the outcome for another five or ten years. Recognize that both sides of that question are corporate, so the sparring will continue for a long time.

I first used the Internet in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I worked at companies that had DoD or research connections. At that time it was essentially email and file transfer, and it's quite possible that without commercial creativity, it might still be stuck there. Sorry this is long and digressional, but I enjoyed writing it, so there. :)

I acquired my first domain name in 1991, before the WorldWideWeb program - the program by Tim Berners-Lee, which ran on and was inspired by the NextStep system. Every program on the NeXT was capable of incorporating any form of media, including email with video and voice snippets, etc. WorldWideWeb fit right into the other similar programs on the NeXT - his real achievement was conceiving of the HTML language, which allowed (in theory) other computer systems to support similar capabilities. NeXT itself was inspired by SmallTalk, the Xerox Alto, and lessons learned in the Macintosh. Almost all of the above was done in commercial and academic research settings. Lee's own work was somewhat outside CERN's "real" purpose, and was allowed rather than driven by CERN - the closest thing to a government that I've mentioned. So nearly all of this was work being done for mostly commercial reasons (just as IBM Labs, Xerox PARC, and ATT Labs were commercial projects), but lived on top of the fairly mundane (from our point of view, today) vision funded by DARPA to ease data transfer between big mainframes at research facilities in support of rather vague defense related goals.

IMHO, without the commercial creativity and openness to finding new ways to get an advantage by improving the Internet, SendMail would be a lot simpler because it would still only support the two or three earliest mail protocols - it's possible that not even SMTP would have been invented, to clean up the email protocol problem. Government, in the form of DARPA, took the essential step of deciding to connect things together - this is a classic infrastructure initiative. And Al Gore, bless his little heart, did sponsor the bill to allow commercial use of the Internet. Before that, from my own experience, using the net was not easy, and having an actual presence on the net was hard and expensive. Getting a connection through some other company (see the history of UseNet) took weeks, and probably money - a 56Kbit line cost IIRC over $100/month in 1981 and a T-1 (1Mbit/s) was about $1500/month unless my memory fails me, plus you had to pay whoever you were connecting to. Getting a domain name took weeks after that, and depended on one guy, Jon Postel (RIP), to update his manually maintained list.

Nearly everything you know about the modern net, every protocol commonly used, every feature you depend on, is the result of capitalist innovation, not government projects. And I think this is a good example of how government and business - and not least academia and creative individuals (often with $ in their eyes) can each do what they do best. Some folks disagree but I think government is generally pretty good at building and maintaining highways, and providing the regulatory infrastructure that allows businesses to compete evenly without a race to the unsafe and dastardly bottom. And businesses, if not _too_ large, both benefits from that and provides the creative fluidity that makes things better. (From my view of systems theory, IMHO any market where any business has control of over about 20% of the market, and all but one have less than 12% or so, is essentially frozen and non-competitive. But that's another topic.) Neither is perfect, but over time I think we continue to converge toward a better situation - and whining about the problems is one of the most important factors in pushing that progress.

I like Canada a lot, have a lot of relatives there (hence the Canadian citizenship). I wouldn't mind living there, other than the cold.

However what with all that, I understand some of the downsides. There are things which aren't as good there as in the US (Internet is one of them in general, cellphone service another). There are some that are better. There are others that are kinda a wash, in that the problems are different than the problems in the US.

I find that people who have never been there, only been there only briefly, have a much rosier opinion of the situation in Canada than I do, or than my family that lives there does.

Or as it was called, "wheelage" in his day.

It isn't quite as good as people think with regards to money and politics, and certainly not with regards to the Internet. Canada's 'net speeds vs costs do not compare all that well to the US's.

Canada is a very nice (if cold) country that I visit every summer (I'm a dual citizen) but it isn't the utopia some Americans seem to think it is.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm happy to hear that the performance problems with later versions of iOS aren't universal. What puzzles me now is why different people seem to have had such wildly different results with apparently the same device and iOS version.

This kind of brings me back to one of my earlier points though, which is that it's unfortunate we can't risk upgrading to see what our own experience would be because there is no downgrade path if that experience turns out to be negative.

You half-quote Marx, thereby mis-attributing his motive by way of omission. The remainder of that statement is: "The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations."

The vision of Marx is that of the children's fable, "Stone Soup". It is also as implausible.

I'm with Adlai Stevenson, on this one:
"Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice."

Remember, private property of the Iroquois Nation culture is not the same thing as private property defined by post-industrial, debtor-capitalism. Arguing against the latter doesn't make you opposed to the former.

But nuance? It's so European... Why not just reach for your gun?

Yeah, ignorant - and only HALF of the story in this headline.

Tom Wheeler, the new incoming FCC Chairman is a leading industry lobbyist. GIGO.

"Wheeler has been around telecommunications policy circles for years and has served as a lobbyist for the cable industry's trade group, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, and the wireless industry's trade association, CTIA-The Wireless Association. He spent 12 years as the head of the CTIA."
http://www.cnet.com/news/senate-confirms-tom-wheeler-as-fccs-new-chairman/

Please state in quotes. Preferably as a one-line axiomatic statement.

His diagnosis was acute and accurate. It is his prescription which was lacking - through naivete, not corruption or malice.

It would be a better world - and a more ideally Christian world - if it were a post-state Marxist utopia, vs. one envisioned by Ayn Rand.

...the campbell soup can (one hit wonder)...

My God, so much outspoken ignorance from people who can't even be bothered to look at a wikipedia article.