Agreed. As you said, it only has value while people choose to contend for it. It reminds me of Magic: The Gathering... The cards only have value while people choose to care... as soon as people stop caring, they become relegated to the realm of collector's items... valued by a few but not the masses.

Isn't that overkill? 640K sites ought to be enough for anyone!

How about "thanks slashdot for reminding me to plug in my time machine drive". :)

There haven't been any accidents in the USA that resulted in leaked radiation. 60 years of experience suggest that your assertion, "no amount of mitigation makes it a rational chance to take", is incorrect. Experience suggests that in fact risk can be managed. "billions of years" is also incorrect: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chernobyl-Still-Radioactive-After-23-Years-129912.shtml

Sorry for the belated reply, but since you asked questions I felt I should followup. My comment should be parsed like this: The first sentence (about right to criticize) was commentary addressing the last sentence of the parent post. The remaining sentences address the address the assertion that people in China are happier. I never said anything about unemployment or laziness. I didn't call anyone in China or USA lazy. My comment about "top of class" was referring to the competitiveness required to attend university school. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China I didn't say that all people in China like the way things are.... what I said was that they understand the competitive situation and they know (given the current government) they're not going anywhere if they happen to fail at academics. The way things are in China right now, a university dropout is extremely unlikely to be successful. In the USA, academic performance is only loosely tied to your potential for success. Bill Gates dropped out of university and went on to become one of the richest people in the world.

In the USA, we don't need to be "qualified" to criticize anything. Simply put, in the USA, our expectations are higher because there is more potential and more possibility. In China, if you're not at the top of the class, your life options suddenly become much more limited (source: Chinese girlfriend). Everyone in China knows it to be true and accepts it as the way of things. In the USA, your opportunities are only limited by your own drive and life choices. It's easy to be "happy" when you don't know what you're missing. Ignorance is bliss.

So why not reword the idea so that it doesn't cost money: the right to..."be unencumbered by the government when accessing local or world-wide communication services funded by the individual or private enterprise"

Web spam is a tricky beast.

• With everybody (borrowing?) content from everyone else these days, it's hard to differentiate legitimate content from fake content.
• it is common for even legitimate businesses to present several brands (same product) to the public to increase the likelihood consumers will buy from them. FTD flowers is a perfect example.
• It's easy to manipulate the long-tail by making automated changes to text and website templates or mash together several text sources.

It's a tough problem to which there isn't a single magical solution. My company hopes to mitigate at least some of these problems over time. The initial results from our website correlation system give us reason to hope that this problem can be solved.