Jan 20, 2012 CHEERS and JEERS!
Jan. 20th, 2012 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maxomaiJEERS to fallout from the Libyan Civil War. Last February, Gaddafi hired just a hell of a lot of mercenaries to suppress protests and then fight the Benghazi insurgency that would ultimately be his undoing. Since that war ended, the mercenaries have gone home .. with the weapons Gaddafi provided them .. and are now fighting in civil wars of their own. Unfortunately, we can expect a lot more of this crap in the next few years.
CHEERS to the near-defeat of SOPA! Congress decided to suspend SOPA and the Senate version, PIPA, indefinitely, or at least until they can work out some of the thorny issues. Post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that, but the SOPA blackouts and the emails they generated certainly had something to do with this. Now we just need to make sure that it doesn't come back.
Feh to the takedown of MegaUpload. The good: it has been argued that this demonstrates why SOPA is unnecessary. The bad: for all the illegitimate uses this site had, it 10-100 times as many legitimate uses. The takedown is akin to razing an apartment building because one tenant is making meth. The sheer lost productivity that has resulted has got to be staggering. The ugly: over the next year, web sites will start to deploy, and enforce, policies that make it harder to use their services for piracy; but we can expect a lot of very ugly examples to be made in the near future.
CHEERS to the once and future space age! No, we don't have faster than light travel or trade agreements with the nearest galactic power, but thanks to a the Sprite and the Kicksat, you can send your own satellite into space for $300. That's three hundred US dollars. Between being able to do more with a kilogram of stuff, and the privatization of launches making a kilogram of stuff cheaper to send into orbit, a revolution in space utilization akin to the PC revolution in computing is right around the corner.
CHEERS to the near-defeat of SOPA! Congress decided to suspend SOPA and the Senate version, PIPA, indefinitely, or at least until they can work out some of the thorny issues. Post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that, but the SOPA blackouts and the emails they generated certainly had something to do with this. Now we just need to make sure that it doesn't come back.
Feh to the takedown of MegaUpload. The good: it has been argued that this demonstrates why SOPA is unnecessary. The bad: for all the illegitimate uses this site had, it 10-100 times as many legitimate uses. The takedown is akin to razing an apartment building because one tenant is making meth. The sheer lost productivity that has resulted has got to be staggering. The ugly: over the next year, web sites will start to deploy, and enforce, policies that make it harder to use their services for piracy; but we can expect a lot of very ugly examples to be made in the near future.
CHEERS to the once and future space age! No, we don't have faster than light travel or trade agreements with the nearest galactic power, but thanks to a the Sprite and the Kicksat, you can send your own satellite into space for $300. That's three hundred US dollars. Between being able to do more with a kilogram of stuff, and the privatization of launches making a kilogram of stuff cheaper to send into orbit, a revolution in space utilization akin to the PC revolution in computing is right around the corner.
