Certainly narrows down the activites available to drunken bridesmaids. Should be easier to get them to shed the one-time-only dresses now that dancing is off the agenda. Perhaps this is a good development.

Actually I do follow Amercian politics - as only ex-pats and people who have left the States do. My reply ignored the current crop of political idiots (nice turn of phrase by the way) and was hopefully representative of the people. The people all realized long ago that the political system was broken and pointless - one glance at any branch of the US government proves that. Since people have realized they can't expect leadership from leaders many have moved back into the driver's seat and have been guiding the next generation in the leadership void.

The only partially sensible person visible in the current GOP Hunger Games (meaning the nomination process) unfortunately drifts into periodic bouts of lunacy - which unortunately kills his chances. I'm referring to Ron Paul who has a good grasp of the fundamental economic issues which have cornered the US into a debt position it can't get out of without serious pain. Decades of abusing the great power in the hands of the Fed, printing money and abusing Reserve Currency status have brought the States to a Greece-like position. Pretty soon, the rest of the world will get royally pissed with Bernanke/Greenspan watering down the Reserve Currency, and will move the Reserve Currency outside the grasp of the Fed. When that happens, watch out! - Wall Street will be a bit player in the global economy and the tail will wag the dog.

I have to wonder about these studies. Seems like they ignore the population's ability to modify their behaviour based on the events of the times in which they live. Most societies are currently realizing that the baby boomer's frat party is over, and our children will live in a different world than we were born into. By reaching this understanding, we are all actively changing how we prepare our children for the future. My parent's generation had concepts like lifelong employment, pensions and isolated economies. My generation is adapting to fragmented employment, self insuring for old age and global economic influences. My son's generation is very aware that employment prospects are grim without very focused education and preparation. Quality of life standards are redistributing globally on a daily basis. As a result of the changing world and it's impact on various societies, many of the conditions required to reach MIT's predicted disaster scenario are changing radically. Fossil fuel pricing changes are certainly real. The effect on casual motoring, inefficient vehicle purchase and the old-school cachet of driving Hummers and Escalades is visibly changing to admiration of Prius and other vehicles. At the same time, emerging economies aren't getting cheap gas, and will never go through the V-8 powered 60's and 70's that I did.

Computer predictions on a societal level are about as useful as using Excel to predict business performance. If Excel was such a good tool the whole tech market bubble would never have burst, because all the projected growth and ridiculous valuations would be true. Idiots behind analytical tools can predict any result they envision, and construct plausible worksheet scenarios to reach that goal. The real challenge is in critically questioning their assumptions and formulas - while also realzing that the world changes continually making those assumptions worthless.

Question everything. Doubt everyone. Make your own future. The timeline of our life may progress at a fixed rate, but the conditions affectting it do not. Massive influences can happen in fractions of seconds - and societies DO respond. Look at the USA - once freedom and liberties there meant something very different than they do today. 9/11 changed the whole mentality in the US in seconds. The Supreme Court just made it legal to strip search anyone for any infraction. Wasn't like that in the US I was born into in 1960.

You might want to read about how DNS works - you can substitute real IP addresses in your local hosts file to allow your system to find servers where their DNS lookup is blocked by your ISP. You can read about creating an encrypted SSH tunnel to an external proxy server - so your web requests are external to your ISP. You can read about the Onion Router project - where your web access is handled outside your ISP's perview. There are lots of commercial services allowing non-technical access to this type of ISP bypass - so this is not just for folks like me. You can extrude externally localed IP addesses through a tunnel to your system, effectively placing your system ouside your ISP's control. Perhaps reading about implementing OpenDNS would be worthwhile.

Fundamentally whatever someone does on the Internet can be bypassed by someone else with equal or better knowledge. Understanding the OSI layered communication model provides a framework for analyzing what your ISP is doing. Most simple schemes for controlling the user herd are towards the top of the model - and can be bypassed pretty easily. A little more complex is port blocking, but that can be handled by changing what ports you are communicating on - or by piggybacking traffic on ports that can not be easily blocked as they are used for critical services. Content scanning can be bypassed by tunneling encryptped traffic to an external proxy - and no ISP is going to block encrypted traffic on 443 - or ecommerce won't work. No ISP is going to block 587, 993 or normal SSL/TLS ports used for mail transit. In really extreme cases you can send/receive external data inside content packets for legitimate traffic. Who knows what data you've got in an email stream? Who knows what data is lurking inside unused bits in a JPG file?

Basically, if you know enough and have someone outside the fence willing to act on your behalf, there isn't really anything that can stop you. The more complex the problem, the slower the solution - but there isn't any perfect way for ANY ISP to plug every hole. Just allowing basic, limited Internet services creates huge opportunities for exploitation.

My original post was intended to provoke people into reading and understanding more about how things work - because that understanding is the thing that used to distinguish Slashdotters from Facebookers and Twits. The world "under the hood" is way more interesting to me than sitting on the bus with someone else driving the route they choose on the schedule they set.

Guess you don't have a 60" HIgh Def TV, you like watching commercials, you like public seating, you like paying $25 for oversalted greasy popcorn & a pail of carbonated chemicals. Oh yeah, and they want you to pay 13-17 dollars per butt for the priviledge of watching content on their schedule with no pause for bathroom breaks, someone kicking the chair behind you and watching through the sneeze/virus fog of 200 people.

Me? I'd rather watch at home, skip all the commercials, avoid the one-time only delivery, eat better quality food and have a cold beer with my wife. I guess we have different priorities than your Earth. What are you, a NATO shill?

Jesus, what has happened to /.?

Doesn't anyone read anymore? See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by ... wait for it ... Eric Raymond. Available online. Basic routing protocols DO route around damage - how about READING about RIP and BGP?

Anyone who CAN read can find ways to avoid getting coralled by their ISP, government or corporate overloards. The fun of the Internet is that the only thing obstructing your path to freedom is your own ignorance. Fight your own ignorance and you can be free. How do you think political dissidents bypass censorship?

Why do you think content overloards are still fighting their losing battle instead of thinking ways around the problem? If they had half a brain, they would embed the commericial message they are paid to present inside the content, and they would willingly release their product for cheaper (free as in beer?), wider and more long lived distribution. Charge way more to "advertisers" doing product placements to compensate for revenue lost in theatrical release. The advertisers will pony up the cash because they know their message will live forever and not have recurring payments for broadcast. Product placement advertising costs are far cheaper than traditional commercials - but they won't stay that way once Hollywood wakes up.

No one wants to pay to sit in large dark public rooms, smelling other people's offgassing while eating horrid overpriced "snacks" when they can watch great quality content at home in their media rooms. The Hollywood business model failed a long time ago.

People have already figured out the content delivery system championed by the US entertainment industry is broken. And they are routing around it. Since that horse left the barn long ago, the people relying on the revenue from it should get ahead of the problem and fix their business model. Why can't people even see and understand the events happening around them.

OneSwarm is pretty close, except the connectivity is based on a social paradigm. I'd rather a random connection selection where members IP addresses are continually distributed in a random fashion (along with a cutlist of the missing). I realize there is a performance degradation in such a randomized pool, but I think it a necessary evil. Slow, reliable and free is better than removeable. I would be interested in further thought on how performance would scale with the size of the pool. And also what the optimum distrbution / replication of data elements would be. I'm sure that there are stats out there for the effective performance of torrrents - and corollary data for RAID5 implementations.

Roundabouts exist here in Canada and they've been on the increase. Traffic is generally much faster during non-peak periods, but it can get stalled during peak periods if the majority of traffic is coming from one direction. Once a flow is established, it is hard for other entrances to break into the stream, as people on the circle have the right of way to entrants. In tourist areas circles give the buses a place to turn around without the usual trouble. These things really work well when not placed in a major commuter route. I'd much rather travel around in a city with circles than stop lights. And the center creates a focal place for flowers and general beautification not found in city center intersections. My suburb (Orleans) looks much nicer with the traffic lights removed and circles in their place.

Money Replicator? - Actually this would be the US Federal Reserve. Since the US dollar is the global reserve currency, they can control the value of the world's holdings by printing money as they see fit. Without a tangible, auditable limited availability like gold backing the reserve currency, it all is smoke and mirrors controlled by the Fed.