Well... I agree that the only reasonable conclusion is that there are just too fucking many of us. If we don't bring the population down ourselves, somehow (as, of course, we won't), the system will self-regulate and do it for us, somehow (most likely in some way we won't much care for, like a cataclysmic natural disaster or a global pandemic).

An interesting question is how we could possibly bring the population down in a reasonably palatable way. Massive emigration to colonies in space? We just don't have the technology for that. Birth control? As someone else said, this would pretty soon cause enormous social problems with growing numbers of elderly relying on shrinking numbers of younger people for support (a very mild version of this problem can already be seen in countries like Japan). Something else? If so, what?

Who cares about games? I used to have a Zaurus, and it was (mostly) great for note-taking, calendaring, web surfing, MP3 playing, even casual video viewing. Plus, it ran Linux, was pretty hackable and had a terminal. And it fit nicely in a pocket, although it was a tad heavy. My Symbian smartphone sorta kinda does (most of) the same things, but not quite as well and it doesn't have a proper keyboard.

I want a pocket computer, but nobody makes those anymore now that everything, for some reason, has to look like a damn Iphone. The Pandora looks very interesting. If only they hadn't wasted so much space on those game controller thingies and instead made the keyboard a little bit bigger.

I'm not railing on you. I'm just saying that some things, no matter how useful*, are not for everyone.

* The usefulness of juggling with chainsaws can be debated. This is not career advice.

It's also not guaranteed that a peer in the swam is downloading or uploading. The only way to be 99% sure is to send/receive to/from a given peer. But, if you don't send/receive 100% of the content to/from that single peer, it would be hard to claim copyright infringement, as you couldn't prove a full copy had been shared by that IP address.

Sure, but do the courts know that?

...did anyone think it was a good idea to give Facebook your webmail password, as they are constantly pestering you to do? "We won't store your password." Yeah right.

And your example is flawed in other ways too. For example, Hitler didn't pick Jews arbitrarily; he picked them because they were the terrorists/commies/witches of their time, widely believed to be trying to destroy Western civilization for some vague nefarious ideological reasons. It was easy for Hitler to fan that fear, and to convince people the Jews were trying to destroy their lifestyle and would never stop, so the people needed to give him the power to deal with the problem; in other words, exactly the same shit as we are having nowadays.

Just for that, I'd mod you up if I had mod points. Thank you.

According to TFA, analysts expect Youtube to turn a profit this year. And, while it's not entirely clear, it appears that these analysts made this prediction before news of video rentals came out.

Whatever happened to Google Losing Up To $1.65M a Day On YouTube? And where is their revenue coming from, anyway? Can they really make that much from the relatively few ads they have, or is Google engaging in a little creative bookkeeping to make it appear that Youtube is doing great? Why would they do that?

You're proving the very point you're arguing against. Those countries were indeed properly conquered by the US, who then responsibly and honorably proceeded to help them rebuild their infrastructure, adopt democracy, and subsequently regain independence. However... Notice how there are no recent examples in the list? Remember how the US has acted in similar cases recently? Usually, they have gone in, screwed things up even worse than they were before, and then left. Iraq may yet turn out to be different -- probably because they have oil.

Depends on how you look at it. Relative to its stated purpose, yes, of course. Relative to its actual purpose (keeping people fearful, distracted and obedient; grateful, even), I'm sure it'll do just fine.

Ever since I, somewhat reluctantly, started using Facebook, I have followed the simple policy of making everything I post as public as possible, while simply not posting anything I don't want any random web surfer to see. If this change will make more people snap out of their false sense of Facebook privacy, all the better, I say.

What you're saying is that it wouldn't be smart for the NSA to put a backdoor in Windows. But what we're discussing here is whether or not they may actually have done it. The way I see it, the two are completely different.

I don't think so, since the double slashes only apply to Internet schemes anyway. RFC1738 says:

Yeah, I could be wrong. Thanks for the reference; I used to read a lot of RFCs but haven't done much of that recently. And unfortunately, like I said, I don't remember what sources I used or where I heard that bit about the network protocol. RFC1738 is dated Dec. -94 and presumably wasn't even available for much of the time I spent working on that thesis.

Back when I wrote a thesis on dissemination of company-internal information via the world-wide web, in 1994 or so, I remember stating that originally, an indication of which network protocol to use was meant to go between the slashes. But since, in the real world, the network protocol was always TCP/IP, this was made the default and whatever was once put between the slashes was dropped.

Of course, I don't remember the source or anything.

In other words, your computer and thousands of others would devote some bandwidth and storage to backing up chunks of each other's data, sharing where appropriate, making available to the wolrd+dog where appropriate. Files that you want backed up would be broken up into redundant little pieces, and distributed among your peers, and in return, you'd do the same for others.

Sounds a bit like DIBS, the Distributed Internet Backup System. Or at least like my wishful-thinking fantasies about DIBS, since I haven't gotten around to actually trying it yet.

Sure, why not? Or better yet, use an immutable drive image. E.g., in VirtualBox:

1. Set things up in the guest the way you want them. Shut the guest down.
2. Detach the drive image from the virtual machine.
3. VBoxManage modifyhd --type immutable TheDrive.vdi (this step, unfortunately, can't be done from the GUI).
4. Reattach the drive.
5. Profit! Your virtual machine always starts up to the state in step 1, no matter what you did in the previous session.

I'm sure other virtualization packages have similar features.