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[...] but letting a loved one literally die of starvation while you watch is a cruel legal reality.

For a different persecutive, please read this article by Helen Nearing: At The End Of A Good Life:

Came a day he said, "I think I'll go on water. Nothing more." From then on, for about ten days, he only had water. He was bed-ridden and had little strength but spoke with me daily. In the morning of August 24, 1983, two weeks after his 100th birthday, when it seemed he was slipping away, I sat beside him on his bed.

IMO this was the most peaceful and dignified death imaginable. This is the way I would like to go.

Aww, there's nothing wrong with taxation per se, so long as there is only ONE tax and it's small. Isn't taking the pork away the only real means of scaling back the government and making those in government "service" actually work for a living? (And if you happen to work in the gov and really do work, I don't mean you, I mean your boss. Ahh! Gotcha' there, didn't I?)

I don't mind rich people. Know some pretty nice ones, in fact. Wouldn't want to live that way myself - always worried about five cents on the dollar - bleh... Nonetheless, if government should have any power to regulate and restrain, it should be on that "1%" of the population that has the financial ability to advance their special interests as opposed to the other 99% who just want to get by and prosper moderately.

Youtube is fast becoming a moot media outlet, much as Rupert Murdoch's rebooted Myspace is. It doesn't matter who or what is to blame; things change, usually (but not always) for the worse. Look on it as the natural decay of democratic capitalism since that what a ponzi scheme actually is: "a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned". If that doesn't describe the FED, I don't know what does.

I think Democratic Capitalism is fading into obsolescence now because people are just too savvy to the ways that corporations have been manipulating them psychologically for the last 50 years; pigeon-holing people into demographic, SRI VALS consumer groups, leading them by the nose via media and political outlets and the like. It's kind of humbling to realise that I've been part of that for the last 30 years... Corporations have taken over the administration of the Government, and quite frankly, people are growing tired of Nike, Coke, McDonald's, Microsoft and News Corp. making all the rules and telling us who we are, how and where to live and what we should eat, drink and wear.

It's great to live in a society of convenience, but not at the expense of my liberties. Losing those piecemeal has been the greatest inconvenience of all.

Umm, we already *can* feed them. Right now. The fact is, the world currently produces enough food to provide for everyone on earth (link). The problem is this food doesn't reach the people who need it, primarily due to poverty.

Check out http://context.org/ICLIB/IC02/Gilman2.htm about the Spanish cooperative Mondragón http://mondragon.mcc.es/ing/index.asp .
It is in the eigth place of the largest Spanish corporations and is very succesfull in the worlwide market place since *decades*. And they do keep growing!

Well in my opinion we should be looking for the "technological silver bullets" becauase that is were the future resides. Bush is worried that the US economy would be wrecked by taxing energy consumption, then what does he think a disastrous war that is costing hundreds of billions of dollars is going to do.

I use to think that people were naive if you thought the war in Iraq was about oil and now I think you are naive if you think it wasn't about the control of oil and contracts in oil field development. Lets just put it this way, the war in Iraq was not about WMD and it wasn't about terrorism.

It is good tho to see Bush acknowledging that our dependance on oil is a national security. Amory Lovins has been saying this for years. In fact, our dependence is not unlike a chemically dependent junkie who will do things to get his next fix that he would not normally do.

Regardless imagine if the money that was spent in Iraq was spent on the development of new demand and supply side technology such as hybrid vehicles, cheap diode lighting, solar sail lighting, better building techniques and terrestrial and extraterrestrial solar energy production, safer and cleaner nuclear, wave energy and of couse the holy grail of fusion energy.

Further the taxing of energy consumption would not create economic disaster as Bush states and as you note in the UK. It would harm certain segments such as traditional energy suppliers but creates and fosters others industries that are self sustaining and pay long term dividends. It would create a whole new economy dedicated to supplying new forms of energy and using what we have more efficiently.

When I learned about the reactors aboard submarines, how they're built and how they're run my next thought was that we should make civilian power plants the same way. I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the Navy but, from what I've seen, I do think that they are a good example of how to run a nuclear power program.

Small, standardized, modular, portable, self-contained plants that could be added easily to a power grid, refueled at one central location and disposed of in its own container seem to be the most obvious sway to proceed with nuclear energy. Yes, the front end cost may be higher but in the long run, its a better way to go.

I suggest you, too, take another look at communism, especially since like most people you equate it with what the likes of Stalin and Mao brought about.

Who's responsible for preserving information if the copyright holder doesn't do it? There's a lot of material generated over the past century that's turning to dust, or has been shoveled into landfills (many MGM props/old negatives were THROWN AWAY by the studio in the 70's to save space...)

With this mania about preventing copies, I can see a day when NOBODY can benefit from when copyright expires on an item, because it's long mouldered away, neglected by it's owner, and locked away from those who would have preserved it. Really, copyright should be shortened to a reasonable period, or else compulsory licensing to libraries and archives should be part of the deal, in order to ensure that the stuff the copyright owner makes money off of today can be enjoyed by the public tommorrow.

After all, the intent of copyright was to ensure the public had access to creative works, but making sure the creator had an incentive (ie, they got paid) to release their work and profit by it. But the key intent is to make sure that the work is acessible to all, so that the public as a whole can benefit. After all, that's why we have libraries, so that the society as a whole can be enriched.

Unfortunately, there are some who believe the exact opposite, that money should come before the public good... and they can afford to hire politicians to write laws that enforce that belief, and the lawyers to make it stick. The irony here is that corporations too were created for the public good.

And it doesn't look like any concrete reform is going to come out of Enron and Worldcom. We really need to address the issue of corporations divorcing themselves from the rest of society, and acting as if they're above the law. Perhaps we need to go back to chartering corporations with specific aims that can benefit the public, by power of the state legislatures again?

How is it "dishonest" for me to "prefer commercial software" and to not "look for ways to keep from paying other software engineers"?

Well, (remember that I am NOT the person who said it was dishonest) I don't think it is dishonest either.

On the other hand, consider where the money goes when you spend (say) $55 on a piece of packaged software. These are all guestimates, but you could theoretically go out and find the exact numbers:

$2 goes to a shipping company
$10 goes to a retail chain
$3 goes to a packaging company
$5 goes to government (tax)
$1 goes to a media company (for cdroms)
$1 goes to an advertising company
~$33 goes to the company which originally hired x software developers.

This $33 goes into the company balance sheets as revenues, and is further distributed between: shareholders, executives, accountants, overhead (such as heat, electricity, water), support staff, janitorial staff, more taxes, charities, and FINALLY...

maybe $10 goes to software engineers like you.

So you, a software engineer, lost $55, and some software engineers somewhere eventually recovered about $10. That means that the set of all software engineers lost ~$45 on that transaction.

On the other hand, if you kept that money and used open source software to achieve the same purpose (assuming it is even possible to do this), then you pay nothing, but eventually might get the itch to fix bugs (since you are more than capable). You are not obligated to do this, but might decide to do it if you so incline, or if somehow you determine that it is to your advantage (i.e. if you will become 10% more efficient if only a particular bug was fixed). IF you decide to fix a bug, then you are not obligated to share your fix with anyone else, but you might decide to do so out of the desire to give something back, or possibly in order to save yourself the trouble of redoing the change whenever an updated version of the software comes out. What does the software industry lose from that transaction? Nothing, no matter what you do. What do you gain? Roughly equivalent software, some experience, and a sense of accomplishment and community.

In my opinion, there is an open source software economy which operates orthogonally to the "economy" which is described by economists. This is because knowledge (encoded within source code) can be assembled relatively inexpensively, and reproduced for virtually nothing. This makes open source software a perfect candidate for a gift economy.

According to this link "Antelope meat called for a gift economy because it was perishable and there was too much for any one person to eat." We have the same situation with our software and our information today. Information loses relevance (value) over time, so it makes sense to share it with whoever can derive value from it, in the hope that others will do the same with the information that you need. By making open source software available to everyone, everyone wins, including us software engineers.

But the heart and soul of STAR WARS is undeniably the characters: rakish Han Solo the rogue with a heart of gold, trading insults with spunky Princess Leia, so beautiful and so brave; gung-ho Luke Skywalker, the hero right out of Joseph Campbell, who manages to be annoying and inspiring at the same time; even characters like R2-D2 and Chewbacca, who don't have a coherent line in the script, are developed as recognizable personalities! A cast straight out of Shakespeare or Dickens is what makes Lucas' film an immortal classic.

Don't get me wrong, Space battles and lightsaber duels are great, but let's hope Lucas is able to inject some life into the two-dimensional caricatures who pranced around onscreen during Episode I (name three differences between Obi-Wan and Kwi-Gon-Jinn's personalities, or for that matter, between Obi-Wan and Queen Amidiala), otherwise those of us for whom the STAR WARS flame burns bright in our hearts may be in for another ho-hum prequel.

U.S. workers average more hours on the job per year than workers in any other industrialized country -- Greenies.

Time to destigmatize leisure time! Being particularly lazy, I've been watching the work phenomenon closely. When I worked at an investment bank, the analysts would routinely put in 80-100 hours per week. A paralegal friend of mine easily put in more. To no effect: they aren't going to retire earlier, they've experienced less life, and the money was eh.

Unless your job is your career (lifer entrepreneurs, artists), I don't see a problem with working 20hrs a week to live. In a resource-rich, modern and enlightened society, there shouldn't be a stigma attached to doing as little labor as possible, especially if that labor is nonessential to your interests. Of course, capitalism doesn't seem to be set up this way... but apparently it's possible to survive in an industrialized culture while doing less work, so long as you're not American:

France & Germany make do with shorter work weeks. Germans are much more productive than either the Japanese or the Americans. They don't spend their time off recuperating so that they can go back to work on Monday, which seems to be the case in the States. And, Not all of the industrialized world has the same balance of work and non-work time that we do in the US. Work Time, Free Time.

A hasty Google search has more info on this topic.

In his award-winning "Culture" books, scifi writer Iain M. Banks creates stories in a created a post-plenty universe where all physical needs are satisfied without cost. Difficult to envision, but he does a good job.

No, I'm afraid you've got it backwards. You see, to these "jerks", you're just another "jerk". The solution isn't knocking everyone in line. The solution is for people to learn to respect each other from where they're coming from.

Changing folks' attitudes are the solution. Your message makes it seem you want to go bust heads (though I grant messages can be interpreted quite differently than intended). Why? Because you're upset that others aren't appreciating you. At the root, this is the same attitude problem that the others have. You just behave differently and have developed a martyr complex as a result.

Please don't take this as a personal attack. It's just that I used to get just as worked up and have since learned that confronting folks doesn't solve anything. The solution is to change your own attitude, and ironically, by so doing you can change others.

This story really brought it home to me:

http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC04/Dobson.htm

I have to agree with the feeling Katz expresses. The U.S. Constitution protects us against excessive government power, and by and large succeeds. But what protects us against multinational corporations? Corporations are coming to control and scrutinize ever-greater areas of our lives: homeowners associations, pre-employment urinalysis, grocery store discount "clubs". I don't even want to get started on my personal rants on the subject....

Instead, I offer a 27-year-old poem by Wendell Berry. Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front . The poem speaks for itself. Read the whole thing, but I offer here the first stanza as a teaser:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

I have to agree with the feeling Katz expresses. The U.S. Constitution protects us against excessive government power, and by and large succeeds. But what protects us against multinational corporations? Corporations are coming to control and scrutinize ever-greater areas of our lives: homeowners associations, pre-employment urinalysis, grocery store discount "clubs". I don't even want to get started on my personal rants on the subject....

Instead, I offer a 27-year-old poem by Wendell Berry. Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front . The poem speaks for itself. Read the whole thing, but I offer here the first stanza as a teaser:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.