I don't want to disagree with this essay... to first order. But it's important not to take the emphasis on passion too far.

Because this hypothesis doesn't explain the existence of passionate but untalented people. Such people exist. Dear god, do they exist. There are people who play a hell of a lot of guitar and are nevertheless not very good. There are people who write a lot of novels and stories but can't produce enjoyable prose, or sellable prose.

To paraphrase Edison, success is 90% perspiration. But that still leaves 10% for inspiration. You need directed passion, and the ability to properly channel and manage your passion is a talent. It might not be an inherited talent -- you can develop it -- but you need to do more than just noodle around for more hours than the other noodlers. You need to develop a specific constellation of skills in order to make progress.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, the most important talent is meta-analysis. You have to be able to self-analyze and self-correct. (If you can't hear the fact that you're unable to play on the beat or keep a steady rhythm it doesn't matter how many guitar chords you know.) You need the social skills and awareness to seek out criticism, listen to it, and act upon it. (If you don't hear your fellow musicians dropping hints, or don't act upon those hints, you won't get better.) And you have to cultivate abilities that may seem unrelated to the problem at hand... because you recognize, consciously or instinctively, that they are essential to your goal. (Professional scientists, for example, need a lot of sales, political, management, and literary skills. And, famously, our stock consumer PCs ship with lots of fonts in part because Steve Jobs audited a calligraphy class during his brief career as a college dropout.)

1) ICANN has nothing to do with ICE seizing domains.

2) wikileaks.org was NOT seized by ICE, in case you didn't know (their nameserver operator, everydns, terminated service due to alleged AUP breach). They should probably just run their own nameservers if it's too much for a free provider to handle.

3) DNS is hierarchical in structure, but very decentralised from a technical point of view. In fact, you might call it "P2P", since anybody can join the network and run their own resolver.

4) #dnsissexy - the average user doesn't even know it exists.

5) Not happy with something? ICANN is a community. (I'm not saying it's perfect - nothing is!).

6) Really really pissed about something? Free speech, courts, democracy.

7) Really pissed AND lazy? Use a ccTLD. I hear .ly is cool.

What are people like Sunde proposing? The PR is sensationalist and contradictory, with talk of an alternative root (where would it be located? who would control it?), and a new bittorrent-like protocol (no idea how this could even work).

Anyway, I'm standing up for the status quo. It works phenomenally well.

Child pornography is basically the trump card of the pro-censorship argument. Nobody is in favour of it, everybody thinks it's awful, even really passionate freedom-of-speech types often think an "except for child pornography" clause is an allowable compromise.

But the truth is that anybody who wants child pornography on the Internet can already get it, if they try hard enough. Many of us who've worked for large web companies are aware that one of the first forms of abuse that happens to any service that allows image uploading is that it starts getting used to distribute child porn. Shutting down domain names will do nothing because the people who deal in this stuff have been having their shit seized and shut down for years already.

By the same token, DNS is not essential to preventing censorship. We can send each other IP addresses through social networks, distribute shortlinks to servers that change every hour, or any one of a hundred other methods.

The balance to strike is: is censorship of material we think legitimate happening often enough right now that we want to make it easier to route around, knowing that doing so will make it harder to censor stuff that we find universally objectionable? A month ago I'd have said no, but today I'm not so sure. And that's a dangerous consequence of the actions the US government is taking in response to these leaks. By cracking down, they risk provoking a revolution that will make it impossible to control these things in future.

Yes, a LOT of success comes from effort, but to say that talent doesn't exist is absurd. People who have a talent in a given field, AND work with and hone that talent will always do better than people without talents that try to get into a field they aren't fit for.

In the old days people didn't mix vodka and gin in cocktails as they were much stronger than they are now. In Casino Royale Bond acts a particularly flashy, arrogant show-off type gambler. In the early 50s when the novel is set (although please do bear in mind that the story was heavily influenced by wartime events in the Naval Intelligence Division) people never mixed Gin and Vodka in a Martini, and a Martini was always stirred with a special spoon to avoid chipping the ice.

Bond, being the flashy type ordered his Martini with Vodka, which would then need to be shaken in order to avoid the oilyness that came with the potato-based vodkas of the time as per the wikipedia article. The act of it being shaken would've aroused much interest from people who would have asked what the gentleman was drinking, to which the response would seem incredible in a kind of 'who does this guy think he is' type of way. The casino is supposed to be a high brow csaino that will have seen better days, Bond was breaking etiquette to show off how big his balls were and to attract Le Chiffre's attention.

The other thing on a more technical point is that a modern vesper cannot be made with the same ingredients as the original (as the formulas have changed). In order to get something close you need a strong but fairly easy drinking vodka (at least 43% ABV), a neutral Gin as close to 53% as possible, Lillet Blanc (a white vermouth) and either a tincture of quinine or a dash of orange bitters. My personal recommendation would be for Berry Bros No. 3 Dry London Gin, Potocki Vodka, Lillet Blanc and Orange Angostura Bitters. Stirring takes longer to cool the drink down to the right temperature (around 1-3 degrees C), whereas shaking takes considerably less time, but you'll get ice particles in the resulting drink. As the drink cools more water melts into the drink, diluting the cocktail. Thus a shaken Martini is generally slightly stronger than a stirred one. The oxygenation of the mix also gives the drink a sharpness that you don't get in a stirred martini, but most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

The TL;DR for all of this is, vespers should be shaken and not stirred, or poured and layered (as per the Duke's bar), no other martini should be shaken - unless it's pure Gin and Vermouth in which case it can be gently shaken to waltz time.

Child porn is illegal because its creation damages the child. Its continued distribution is not the primary problem, the fact that it was created in the first place is. So the solution to child porn is to find it, use good-old-fashioned police work to find who made it, and use the legal system to remove that person's access to children.

No need to break the Internet and restrict free speech for this very-special case. Let's spend the money we want to spend on censoring the Internet on more detectives, so that child abuse can be eliminated!

The same goes for "counterfeit goods" or whatever the DHS used as rationale for seizing domain names. Don't break the Internet; just buy one of the fake watches, ask UPS where it was shipped from, get a warrant, and bust the guys! Right?

(I fear that in the US, though, the problem with child porn is not that children were abused, but that people like something in a sexual way. Consider the person who was mailed a box of comic books that depicted "under-age" children in a sexual context. The government wanted to put him in prison for 15 years. For receiving a box of books.

"Sexting" is another example. It's doubtful that one can abuse one's self, but the government still wants to put people in prison for it.

What I find most amusing is that all people look pretty much alike when naked. I don't understand why naked pictures are such a hot-button political issue. It seems like the government just doesn't really want any depictions of sex [children, adults, tentacles, or otherwise] around at all.

But I digress.)