link/Internet Full

ARIN, the regional registrar for North America estimates that IP address exhaustion will happen this year. Although predicted since the 1990s (and planned for, with the IPv6 standard since 1995-ish), only about 1% of internet hosts are upgraded to IPv6 (which doubles the address space in such ridiculous overkill that nearly every atom in the universe [by rough estimates] may have an IPv6 address assigned).

Hey, maybe they're just dawdling so they can get some free military "networking" equipment (wired.com).

link/Government Poisoning Citizens

Via Craig, we get this heartwarming story of the US government adding poison to then-illegal alcohol during Prohibition.

Slate

They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Of course, they'd never do anything like that these days, right?

link/Genetically-engineered pigs

This is such fucking horseshit. Problem: hosing out factory pig farms put too much pig shit in rivers, ground water, etc. Solution: genetically engineer the pigs to have less phosphorous in their shit??!! What could possibly go wrong? Where's the phosphorous really *going*?

Better solution: DON'T BE LAZY by simply hosing out the stupid factory pig farms. Let the pigs live in real straw (instead of standing on metal grates always) and compost the shit/straw like we have for the other 10000 years. No problem.

For the "possibly go wrong" column, let me remind you that we finally (!) started researching GM corn and surprise-surprise, it causes organ damage:

abstract

We present for the first time a comparative analysis of blood and organ system data from trials with rats fed three main commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), which are present in food and feed in the world. [..] Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system.

Corn -- since it's heavily subsidized in the US, to the extent that you can purchase corn for less than the cost of production -- is in an assload of things. Almost certainly in most processed, cheap sugar and a lot of the weird unpronouncable ingredients in things.