The one does not exclude the other. There's nothing stopping you from doing what Google did - funding development a CUDA accellerated Theora codec if you feel so inclined (and if you have the money). :-)

I guess Google thought Theora on the desktop was "good enough" and wanted to focus on ubiquity rather than perfection - for now.

Non-technical problems, such as H.264 requiring licensing patents.

Patents are specifically intended to restrict usage of technology (to those who are inclined to pay for it).

So - a royalty-free product which produces comparable (if slightly inferior) results *should* become the ubiquitously available option. It is as it should be. :-)

I very much doubt, however, that Apple and Microsoft will include Theora in their web browsers or in the iPhone. I think it is much more likely that the patent-encumbered option is set to become more ubiquitous than the free option, due to corporate politics. (After all, neither Apple's or Microsoft's products support Theora or Vorbis out of the box now.)

Baidu's real spiders obey robots.txt. However there are plenty of malicious spiders out there who pretend to be Baidu in their User-agent string - giving Baidu a bad name in this area.

IPv6 does nothing to protect you against malicious routing updates, as far as I'm aware.

IPsec is a mandatory feature of an IPv6 stack, but nobody's forcing anyone to use it.

This hijack was on the routing level, not the DNS level.

Blacklisting China's IP ranges would do nothing to protect you against bad routing - something you as an end user don't have any control over.

In the area of Swiss army knives, yes.

It's just as likely Victorinox bought some solution from some third party using some kind of snake-oil cryptography, and slapped their brand on it in good faith.

Two seats, not one - ever since the Lisbon Treaty was ratified.

As far as I know, yes - the Pirate Party Australia does not currently hold any seats.

If by "they" you mean the collection Pirate Parties in general, you'll find that Piratpartiet (Sweden) has two Members of European Parliament. That's more than some "established" or "legitimate" political parties in Sweden. ;-) Pretty good for a joke.

Here's a graph of the network structure as seen by BGP.

AS29216 at the right is the AS which I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET is located in. As we can see, it is only reachable through AS8674 (NETNOD-IX).

Which in turn is reachable directly from a few different AS:es, including AS24151 (CNNIC-CRITICAL-AP).

My guess is that Netnod simply started filtering out the routes to AS29216 via AS8674 on the BGP session to AS24151.

The DNS server itself might have been using BGP, it might not have. But in the end every system on the Internet is reachable with some kind of BGP route somewhere.