Monday, October 22, 2012

Internet as a One World Government driving force

I'm starting to think that the proliferation of the Internet is going to be a huge driving factor of the creation of a One World Government. Sovereign governments right now are at a loss for how to police their own citizens when committing crimes on the Internet, when it crosses borders. Every day I see stories, like this Lifehacker article, showing the struggle to keep the Internet a free, yet policed environment. Which prompted this idea to pop into my head.

Given that the Internet is a global structure, it's difficult for sovereign nations to interact with eachother and police these things well. Take, for instance, The Pirate Bay. This BitTorrent host is by far, the single largest facilitator of piracy in the world. And the FBI and RIAA would love nothing more than to shut them down, and take a peek at their servers to see who's been pirating, then go after them too. The problem is, TPB's servers are (or at least were) located in Sweeden. The RIAA and FBI have zero jurisdiction to physically confiscate them, making copyright infringement very difficult.

Given that our thirst for connectivity via the Internet just continues to grow, and will continue as time moves forward, this is eventually going to become a very big issue. More so than just making sure people get paid for intellectual copyright. It's not too far fetched to see that eventually, most of our interaction will be via the Internet. We will, essentially, live online. I think when it get's to that point, it'll seem like a no brainer to consider a kind of One World Government.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Even Microsoft's Programmers Get Simple Things Wrong

In CS classes, we're always taught to mind our edge cases. Looks like someone forgot to match beginning at 1 instead of 0 or vice versa.