In all fairness, you have an excellent spaceship, the Earth.

Yes

I'm disappointed that someone for SETI would say such a thing, because it is totally relevant.

If humans showed up to the Galapagos and the iguanas lined up flies in a row, tried to offer them flies, or other signed of intelligence then they would of treated them much differently then if they acted like any other non-sentient animal.

I'm not saying they would have treated them the better, just different.

No we are a democratic republic, and I would guess that most of the people on slashdot that participate in these discussions vote. I do and I can tell you I am not happy with my reps, but I do my best without devoting my life to it. The ironic thing with your post is I thik we would be in worse shape if the US was a straight democracy.

It's sad, but this seems really risky to me.

Your letter could end up going to an ass hat who has some power and no idea about technology. This could spiral out of control to end up with you looking at their private financial records and the sending them "veiled" threats about "identity theft". Who knows maybe you even hacked it so the email would come to you!

Even if these ridiculous accusations are found to be untrue it could be a major pain to deal with.

Unfortunately doing the right think like this, especially in the United States, is not worth the risk.

Living in the US all my life, this is quite suprising. We are tought that trail by jury is basically the highest form of justice and basic right of all people. Could you shed any light why the Netherlands views has such a poor view of trial by jury. Thanks, Joe

I have heard that china can not invade taiwan due to lack of troop transports, but couldn't china rectify that quikcly, ie within a year. Its not like troop transports are new tech or anything? I'm seriously asking. Thanks, Joe

I use to, and while it is still of a stretch now, it saddens me to think that it gets easier over time.

Wait .... how is anycast harder, this seems way simpler to me then some DNS trickery. With anycast you have multiple servers answer to the same IP address and then announce that IP (or really block). Then routing figures out the least cost path. This is what routing is suppose to do. With DNS you need the DNS server to figure out where the client is and provide the best response. Since DNS doesn't have any path information (like routing does) you have to add all kinds of crap to figure out which answer to give. It sounds like in this situation the crap Akamai isn't the right crap.

More and more events are refereed to as terrorism and it's only a manner of time before all criminals will be called terrorists. But it will be after we get rid of rights and due process for terrorists.

No, the second gulf war was a complete and utter failure. We sent troops in to prevent Al Qaeda from gaining WMDs from Saddam. We lost thousands of lives on our side and they lost at least 10x as many and the objective turned out to be completely pointless, as Saddam didn't have any WMDs and he wasn't in any sort of talks with Al Qaeda.

While I don't disagree with your statement, it assumes that the stated goal (i.e. the one above) was the same as the real goal.

I completely 100% agree that what they advertised is a scam, but if I step back a couple of years, it's completely amazing that we are complaining about only getting 8Mbps.

Were the Fort Hood shootings really an act of Terrorism?

I only ask since it was an attack on military personnel at a military base?

Yes civilians were killed and wounded, but there are many documented instances where civilians are killed or wounded in attacks by the US military and most do not consider those attacks terrorism.

Don't get me wrong I in no way condone the attack, but I'm starting to think the word terrorism is being used for too many things.

Bing knows exactly what you want to Google ...
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1915736

Care to share your ISP and location? Maybe can help others avoid them.