General Purpose Computing Classified as a Weapon, License Required
A number of high-profile hacking incidents have led to an increasing demand from politicians and the media for a computer lockdown.
...except for all the other alternatives. Here is an article arguing that
Federation is the Worst of all Worlds.
It's not. One might argue that the article is really an advertisement for an at-best tangentially related product
and that drumming up support for it necessitated changing the subject of the conversation - but I'm going to take
its claims at face value and argue against them as they were argued.
Liu Cixin's Postulate
There are many ideas about why it is that we find ourselves alone in our stellar neighborhood (and indeed, may find ourselves alone in the galaxy). The phenomenon itself is called the
Fermi Paradox, which like all physical paradoxes is a bit of a misnomer. It's more of an oddity, really, given what little we know about the probabilities involved we'd intuitively expect the cosmos to look different than it does.
From
this New Yorker article about the geopolitical stance of the most successful science fiction writer of our time:
Discord is eating the (chat) world, in the same way that Facebook has eaten social blogging, and Google has eaten email.
General Interference with Organizations and Production
Organizations and Conferences
After getting kicked off Youtube, the Blender foundation is now
experimenting with hosting their own videos on a peer-to-peer network. The reason for the ban seems to be that Blender didn't enable ads on their content, so hosting their content for "free" was a money-losing proposition for Youtube. While it is debatable whether Youtube actually loses money by hosting popular videos ad free (considering how they still show ads on the video page itself, profit from the network effect and viewer retention that comes with the video, and are able to inject heavily monetized videos into the viewer's follow-up queue) or whether Youtube should maybe just force ads on every creator instead of just banning their channel out of the blue one day, none of these address the root problem.
Tech billionaires are still looking for scientists to help them break out of
the computer simulation that they suppose is our world. Its difficult to look at this world view without taking the personal perspective of the believer into account, but lets examine these claims on their own merits first.