I find the use of the term 'drone' rather irksome because the vast majority aren't actually very automated(quadcopters and similar obviously have automated stability control, and some of the fancy ones can be handed a set of waypoints and told to make it so; but 'autonomy' is presently the realm of short-term, safety-enclosed lab environments).
That said, I'm not sure rebranding is going to save them. This isn't a situation like NMR/MRI, where 'nuclear' is a scary word; but basically everyone is 100% onboard with better diagnostic imaging. This is a situation where the capabilities that used to require the budget for a helicopter or fixed wing aircraft and crew are falling rapidly in cost, and increasing rapidly in bang-per-buck. If somebody has preexisting suspicions of any aircraft user, or would-be aircraft user, they aren't going to be entirely pleased to hear that the people they don't trust can now do whatever it is they wish to do for less money, and thus more often and in more places, along with groups that previously didn't have access to aircraft getting in on the action.
Precisely because the value proposition is so compelling, drones don't really need the PR boost, they'll be adopted one way or another just because they are so useful; but it's simply a fact, independent of their name, that they are so, so, very useful to a variety of groups that just don't have a warm and fuzzy reputation.
The larger helicopters do have to stay further away, because of the noise(and sometimes local regulatory bodies); but they certainly will flatten whatever they fall on a great deal more forcefully(in the context of civilian helicopters 'light' still tends to mean a metric ton or more).
It probably doesn't hurt that a lot of the larger short-duration/high-stability drones are hexacopters or even octocopters. Losing an engine isn't going to do one of those any good; but with the onboard gyros and some clever coding by the Control Theory guy, the odds of at least achieving a relatively civilized crash aren't so bad.
A full size helicopter with that many independent engines would be consigned to the 'heroic freaks of history' category, and probably never actually see use.
The one curious thing is that the low risk of failure is 'when the drone is handled by an experienced pilot'; but it is attributed to sophisticated auto-abort features in the drones' programming, something that presumably works without regard for who is at the controls.
I don't doubt that an experienced pilot helps, or that having a mechanism send the drone back to base if it detects the battery heading toward thermal runaway is a good idea, it just seems a very odd description.
It would appear that success can lead you into error in either direction:
You've got the companies that ossify, refusing to do anything even slightly disruptive to their cash cows, which they contentedly milk until the world changes around them. Then you've got the companies that (whether because of internal hubris and megalomania, or because Wall Street Demands It) decide that merely making tons of money isn't good enough, and anything less than 'malignant tumor' growth rates are utterly unacceptable, which swiftly forces them into all kinds of ill-advised ventures(especially likely to be ill-advised if they are trying for hyper-growth and feuding with an internal ossified faction that refuses to let any novel project that threatens the old ways go forward, shackling all the ill-advised tie-ins to really ill-advised requirements).
Neither path tends to end well. The ossified end up being fossilized, in the sense that requires you to be dead first, sooner or later, and the metastatic end up, at best, as holding companies that happen to own a bunch of unrelated businesses, and, at worst, lost in a morass of increasingly unfocused and risible ventures, and pockmarked with money-sink departments.
Rise and shine Mr. Freeman. Wake up and smell
the trolling
I'm trying to provide an incentive for Slashdot to add a "+0, somebody had to do it" mod.
Plus, half-life jokes lose humor quite rapidly at first; but people dislike solving differential equations, so they usually just wave their hands and admit that they remain at least slightly funny more or less forever!
to the problem of what the NSA is doing. And if an organization does it within Europe, what then?
There's also the problem that hard outer shells tend to have a very tepid time protecting networks of nontrivial size if the stuff inside is still all soft and squishy.
You aren't going to run a network the size of Europe, or even part of it, without almost anybody who cares having a few listening stations set up, and if you plan on extending your EuroNet to anybody except specific state functionaries sending secure email to one another, you'll still have loads of users chattering with servers outside your shiny new network.
Is it probably a good idea not to use US cloud services corporations if you don't want the Americans watching you? Sure. Are the subsequent steps markedly more difficult? Oh definitely.
(Plus, the UK is a longstanding double-plus Freedom Buddy, and Germany has long been quite cooperative, so we'll see if they can find enough countries not collaborating with the US to even fill out a network...)
My understanding is that the concern is not about these relatively trivial trade negotiations specifically(though if any of the unnamed 'customers' who found the intelligence products useful were American firms rather than government entities, that would make the US claims of not engaging in economic espionage for the benefit of individual companies rather tenuous); but about the broader question of whether US clandestine activity has the slightest regard for attorney-client relations(in this case, Indonesia had engaged a US law firm, and the Australians noted that the goodies might involve that material).
Some lawyers (particularly the ones dealing with political unlikeables, like the Gitmo remnants) have long suspected that the usual protections for attorney-client privilege were being more or less blatantly violated; but the matter has remained unresolved because, without some evidence, nobody ever has standing, the court finds the plaintiffs' concerns to be merely speculative, etc.
This case, while singularly un-sinister in terms of the matter at hand, strongly suggests that attorney-client communications are open season for the US clandestine services, if they care, which is news given the protections theoretically afforded to such(particularly in light of the revelation of DEA, and possibly other, use of 'parallel construction' to generate non-tainted 'independent' discovery of evidence uncovered by classified surveillance mechanisms that they did not wish to disclose at trial, even to the judge or prosecution, much less the defense).
But why are these things not open-source?
It sounds like Canonical are just a bunch of a**holes.
There are really two different issues at play here: Does Canonical have packages in Ubuntu that aren't licensed such that a derivative distro couldn't use them without begging for permission? (that they have copyright over: if Canonical managed to get a 'yeah, you can put our firmware blob in your repository; but that license is non-transferable' agreement out of some hardware vendors, that wouldn't be GPL-purist; but it wouldn't really be Canonical's call that FungusNix isn't allowed to reproduce those packages). To the best of my knowledge, while some of their server-side stuff (Landscape, Ubuntu One) is proprietary on the server end, there aren't any Canonical-owned client packages that aren't GPLed.
The second issue is that of Trademark: Here, Canonical shows no signs of enthusiasm for losing their trademarks through inaction, and they definitely have the law on their side if anybody starts naming distros in a way that suggests a connection with their projects.
However, I don't think that this is really a bad thing, or that OSS licensing would even be desirable(if it appeared that a distro were deliberately sneaking trademarked assets into every nook and cranny, or doing something analogous to the old Nintendo Gameboy cartridge header logo lockout stunt, I'd prefer that they die in a fire, that would be a different case entirely). Trademarks are a (sloppy, antiquated; but nevertheless common) tool for knowing what people and companies are associated with what products and services. This seems like a good and valuable function. Isn't it good to be able to distinguish between something that is or isn't provided by Canonical? Now(as trademark law allows) it is perfectly valid for non-Canonical (har, har) distros to make it clear that they are derived from a Canonical distro, they can even mention it by name(just as store-brand products are free to say 'compare to X-Name-Brand-Product!'). They just can't insinuate that they have an association with Canonical that they do not.
This is about Australia or didn't you catch that? Slashdot is an AMERICAN site. What about Snowden and the NSA?
"Five Eyes", AC: We have a longstanding agreement with some of our select Freedom Buddies, to engage in 'intelligence sharing' and, when convenient, have one of us do what it would be illegal for another of us to do, then pass the results along, nice and squeaky clean.
I certainly couldn't tell you about the degree to which this is or isn't a wildly unequal partnership, or whether that varies by issue and location; but in this case (Australia volunteering to be oh-so-helpful to the US on a matter between the US and Indonesia), I suspect that team Australia wasn't exactly reigning the NSA in...
Just got a Z10, I love it! It's OK if you guys hate me though:)
No, no, I find endangered species from vanishing ecosystems to be quite interesting. Some of them are also cute, tasty, or a source of fascinating new biologically active compounds. Like those wacky Amazonian frogs.
On a scale from 'paid vacation' to 'hahaha, paid vacation' do we have any estimates on the penalty for this sort of fantastic adherence to good evidence handling practices and adherence to both the security of an investigation in progress and the rights on anyone who turns out to be investigated but uninvolved?
(Incidentally, who wants to bet that the officers involved may not have adhered to every tedious little 'best practice' in their handling of past cases? Sure is a good thing that they aren't in a position where sloppiness could cause real damage or anything, or I might be concerned.)
I'm amazed that he managed to get through that entire essay without mentioning the proverbial elephant in the room: Unless you are working on a project you own, or being paid as befits your schedule (in which case it still may be a bad idea for the reasons the essay does mention) your 60-hour workweek isn't merely 'not a badge of honor' it's a sign that you are doing two jobs for one salary because haha, what the fuck are you going to do about it, sucker?
The merely pragmatic considerations of fatigue degrading certain cognitive functions of various important sorts aren't false, and may even be the primary concern in the cases of self-employed contractors and startup jockeys with equity stakes(that they might even keep after the VCs are finished with them...); but if you are working for a paycheck and reporting to a boss, your bigger problem isn't whether working those additional hours makes you a less visionary creative or whatever. It's the fact that your effective pay, per hour, is plummeting (and in the way that annihilates your life outside of work, and sucks you dry, rather than just making you feel poorer, as working 40 hours for a stagnant or declining salary would).
Please stop taking advice from Americans, or that horrible cable lich of yours, and try electing somewhat less dangerous animals to office. Maybe one of your horrid spiders, with the lethal venom and all the hideous staring eyes. It may have somewhat draconian positions on voter envenomation; but I assure you that it will be substantially stronger on civil liberties and copyright issues.
I admit that 'we' does not include everyone; but it's worth considering interkin3tic's comment about hipsters, above, as well as just thinking about money:
Earning more money than other people, so that you can buy really expensive stuff that they can't is one way to achieve a scarcity-victory; but so is being the guy who helped Now Famous Band set up their gear back when they were playing dive bars: that experience probably cost as much as a few PBRs; but not even the people now buying front-row seats at Now Famous Band's concerts can match you on it. Similar alternatives exist in fashion: some people go more-famous-designer-than-you-proles-can-afford, some people shoot for most-unconventional-thrifted-retro.
Some forms of novelty and exclusivity seeking are, of course, much more dangerous than others (hipsters bragging about obscure bands they've roadied for? Minimally harmful. London Whales spinning exotic credit default swaps in order to out-yacht their neighbors? Bit of a problem.) Novelty seeking that isn't particularly resource intensive would likely be unproblematic in the context of a hypothetical post-scarcity society, novelty seeking based on conspicuous consumption is incompatible with one: either the post-scarcity part wins out, and the Joneses can always keep up with you, or the consumption part wins out, and you can do something ostentatious enough to induce scarcity.
Did I make the separation between my position and the position being imputed to the 'customers likely to be offended' group for the purpose of the comparison insufficiently clear?
Or am I on the hook for insensitivity to that group, for imputing a more overt characterization than they might use of their position?
Perhaps more importantly, why would the category 'interactive movie' even get to exist when the category 'game' already does?
I realize that movies (sorry, 'Films') are High Art while 'games' are arcade trash and murder simulators for maladjusted children, so maybe this is an attack-by-superior-culture-cred; but if one looks past that, I'm not certain why a medium that has always been non-interactive (even theatre, while it often doesn't choose to use them, recognizes 'breaking the fourth wall' and audience interaction as potential elements of a piece), would be entitled to branch out into an area built by game devs.
He couldn't be more wrong, the more likely scenario is collapse due to over population and limited resources.
The one handy thing (much as it irks ethnic nationalists and pension-fund planners) is that, time and again, humans have shown signs of not actually wanting to breed like rabbits. Fuck like them? Sure; but add a bit of wealth and access to prophylaxis, and birthrates go down. The process gets tricky because adding the wealth and medical access usually makes the last one or two giant crops of high-birthrate babies start surviving at far greater than premodern rates immediately, while it takes time for the birthrate to fall, leading to a nasty little spike; but once you can separate hot animalistic fucking from years of tedious childcare, people tend to. Crazy.
In line with Star Trek's "Every species except humans has some ludicrously rigid hardcoded trait" style, that is a Ferengi problem; but I suspect that it'd be a major issue for at least some people and some cultures in a hypothetical post-scarcity environment.
In fact, we don't even need to hypothesize: In situations where supply starts to increase, particularly when it increases to the point where everybody who is remotely anybody can have some for pocket change, you virtually always see the creation of additional 'tiers' of artificially scarce versions. The fact that the creator bothers with this is a revenue maximizing move(and so the same incentive wouldn't exist if there were no scarcity generally, and no reason to bother with this 'revenue' nonsense); but the fact that it works... there's the rub. Everyone can have a high quality reproduction of FuzzyFuzzyFungus' masterpeice 'The Hyphae Horror', for the simple cost of printing; but they'll still pay more for the numbered-limited-to-500 edition, more still for print #1 in that edition. Why? All the prints are identical; any you value the one that possesses 'firstness'?
I suspect that people would love to get away from scarcity in whatever areas they feel are out of their grip right now(whether they are super poor and that is food and shelter, middle class and that is healthcare and college, and so on); but, in our perversity, we seem to still crave the exclusive, the unique, the rare, in whatever nonessentials are relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the use of the term 'drone' rather irksome because the vast majority aren't actually very automated(quadcopters and similar obviously have automated stability control, and some of the fancy ones can be handed a set of waypoints and told to make it so; but 'autonomy' is presently the realm of short-term, safety-enclosed lab environments).
That said, I'm not sure rebranding is going to save them. This isn't a situation like NMR/MRI, where 'nuclear' is a scary word; but basically everyone is 100% onboard with better diagnostic imaging. This is a situation where the capabilities that used to require the budget for a helicopter or fixed wing aircraft and crew are falling rapidly in cost, and increasing rapidly in bang-per-buck. If somebody has preexisting suspicions of any aircraft user, or would-be aircraft user, they aren't going to be entirely pleased to hear that the people they don't trust can now do whatever it is they wish to do for less money, and thus more often and in more places, along with groups that previously didn't have access to aircraft getting in on the action.
Precisely because the value proposition is so compelling, drones don't really need the PR boost, they'll be adopted one way or another just because they are so useful; but it's simply a fact, independent of their name, that they are so, so, very useful to a variety of groups that just don't have a warm and fuzzy reputation.
Also, it was an American drone. It might have been commandeered by the NSA to kill a suspected terrorist.
In Virginia, it's probably also worth checking to see whether it was hunting season at the time or not...
The larger helicopters do have to stay further away, because of the noise(and sometimes local regulatory bodies); but they certainly will flatten whatever they fall on a great deal more forcefully(in the context of civilian helicopters 'light' still tends to mean a metric ton or more).
It probably doesn't hurt that a lot of the larger short-duration/high-stability drones are hexacopters or even octocopters. Losing an engine isn't going to do one of those any good; but with the onboard gyros and some clever coding by the Control Theory guy, the odds of at least achieving a relatively civilized crash aren't so bad.
A full size helicopter with that many independent engines would be consigned to the 'heroic freaks of history' category, and probably never actually see use.
The one curious thing is that the low risk of failure is 'when the drone is handled by an experienced pilot'; but it is attributed to sophisticated auto-abort features in the drones' programming, something that presumably works without regard for who is at the controls.
I don't doubt that an experienced pilot helps, or that having a mechanism send the drone back to base if it detects the battery heading toward thermal runaway is a good idea, it just seems a very odd description.
I expect that this initiative will be 136.24% more efficient than the already foolproof 'don't be evil' mandate that Google follows...
It would appear that success can lead you into error in either direction:
You've got the companies that ossify, refusing to do anything even slightly disruptive to their cash cows, which they contentedly milk until the world changes around them. Then you've got the companies that (whether because of internal hubris and megalomania, or because Wall Street Demands It) decide that merely making tons of money isn't good enough, and anything less than 'malignant tumor' growth rates are utterly unacceptable, which swiftly forces them into all kinds of ill-advised ventures(especially likely to be ill-advised if they are trying for hyper-growth and feuding with an internal ossified faction that refuses to let any novel project that threatens the old ways go forward, shackling all the ill-advised tie-ins to really ill-advised requirements).
Neither path tends to end well. The ossified end up being fossilized, in the sense that requires you to be dead first, sooner or later, and the metastatic end up, at best, as holding companies that happen to own a bunch of unrelated businesses, and, at worst, lost in a morass of increasingly unfocused and risible ventures, and pockmarked with money-sink departments.
... with light pollution.
Given the available light sources, they probably used the term to complain about the servant holding the torch getting soot on their lenses.
I suspect that you'd have to punch a curator and run to take some of those pieces outside...
I sort of thought they get rid of most debt based arrests.
In theory, the US abolished debtors' prisons in the early 1830s(details vary by state, as usual).
In in practice, well, you can always spin a new set of legalisms to achieve the same effect, can you not?
Rise and shine Mr. Freeman. Wake up and smell the trolling
I'm trying to provide an incentive for Slashdot to add a "+0, somebody had to do it" mod.
Plus, half-life jokes lose humor quite rapidly at first; but people dislike solving differential equations, so they usually just wave their hands and admit that they remain at least slightly funny more or less forever!
Probably prepare for unforseen consequences.
to the problem of what the NSA is doing. And if an organization does it within Europe, what then?
There's also the problem that hard outer shells tend to have a very tepid time protecting networks of nontrivial size if the stuff inside is still all soft and squishy.
You aren't going to run a network the size of Europe, or even part of it, without almost anybody who cares having a few listening stations set up, and if you plan on extending your EuroNet to anybody except specific state functionaries sending secure email to one another, you'll still have loads of users chattering with servers outside your shiny new network.
Is it probably a good idea not to use US cloud services corporations if you don't want the Americans watching you? Sure. Are the subsequent steps markedly more difficult? Oh definitely.
(Plus, the UK is a longstanding double-plus Freedom Buddy, and Germany has long been quite cooperative, so we'll see if they can find enough countries not collaborating with the US to even fill out a network...)
Ah yes. The 'Special Administrative Measures' case. Do remind me about how that relates to this story?
My understanding is that the concern is not about these relatively trivial trade negotiations specifically(though if any of the unnamed 'customers' who found the intelligence products useful were American firms rather than government entities, that would make the US claims of not engaging in economic espionage for the benefit of individual companies rather tenuous); but about the broader question of whether US clandestine activity has the slightest regard for attorney-client relations(in this case, Indonesia had engaged a US law firm, and the Australians noted that the goodies might involve that material).
Some lawyers (particularly the ones dealing with political unlikeables, like the Gitmo remnants) have long suspected that the usual protections for attorney-client privilege were being more or less blatantly violated; but the matter has remained unresolved because, without some evidence, nobody ever has standing, the court finds the plaintiffs' concerns to be merely speculative, etc.
This case, while singularly un-sinister in terms of the matter at hand, strongly suggests that attorney-client communications are open season for the US clandestine services, if they care, which is news given the protections theoretically afforded to such(particularly in light of the revelation of DEA, and possibly other, use of 'parallel construction' to generate non-tainted 'independent' discovery of evidence uncovered by classified surveillance mechanisms that they did not wish to disclose at trial, even to the judge or prosecution, much less the defense).
But why are these things not open-source? It sounds like Canonical are just a bunch of a**holes.
There are really two different issues at play here: Does Canonical have packages in Ubuntu that aren't licensed such that a derivative distro couldn't use them without begging for permission? (that they have copyright over: if Canonical managed to get a 'yeah, you can put our firmware blob in your repository; but that license is non-transferable' agreement out of some hardware vendors, that wouldn't be GPL-purist; but it wouldn't really be Canonical's call that FungusNix isn't allowed to reproduce those packages). To the best of my knowledge, while some of their server-side stuff (Landscape, Ubuntu One) is proprietary on the server end, there aren't any Canonical-owned client packages that aren't GPLed.
The second issue is that of Trademark: Here, Canonical shows no signs of enthusiasm for losing their trademarks through inaction, and they definitely have the law on their side if anybody starts naming distros in a way that suggests a connection with their projects.
However, I don't think that this is really a bad thing, or that OSS licensing would even be desirable(if it appeared that a distro were deliberately sneaking trademarked assets into every nook and cranny, or doing something analogous to the old Nintendo Gameboy cartridge header logo lockout stunt, I'd prefer that they die in a fire, that would be a different case entirely). Trademarks are a (sloppy, antiquated; but nevertheless common) tool for knowing what people and companies are associated with what products and services. This seems like a good and valuable function. Isn't it good to be able to distinguish between something that is or isn't provided by Canonical? Now(as trademark law allows) it is perfectly valid for non-Canonical (har, har) distros to make it clear that they are derived from a Canonical distro, they can even mention it by name(just as store-brand products are free to say 'compare to X-Name-Brand-Product!'). They just can't insinuate that they have an association with Canonical that they do not.
This is about Australia or didn't you catch that? Slashdot is an AMERICAN site. What about Snowden and the NSA?
"Five Eyes", AC: We have a longstanding agreement with some of our select Freedom Buddies, to engage in 'intelligence sharing' and, when convenient, have one of us do what it would be illegal for another of us to do, then pass the results along, nice and squeaky clean.
I certainly couldn't tell you about the degree to which this is or isn't a wildly unequal partnership, or whether that varies by issue and location; but in this case (Australia volunteering to be oh-so-helpful to the US on a matter between the US and Indonesia), I suspect that team Australia wasn't exactly reigning the NSA in...
Just got a Z10, I love it! It's OK if you guys hate me though :)
No, no, I find endangered species from vanishing ecosystems to be quite interesting. Some of them are also cute, tasty, or a source of fascinating new biologically active compounds. Like those wacky Amazonian frogs.
On a scale from 'paid vacation' to 'hahaha, paid vacation' do we have any estimates on the penalty for this sort of fantastic adherence to good evidence handling practices and adherence to both the security of an investigation in progress and the rights on anyone who turns out to be investigated but uninvolved?
(Incidentally, who wants to bet that the officers involved may not have adhered to every tedious little 'best practice' in their handling of past cases? Sure is a good thing that they aren't in a position where sloppiness could cause real damage or anything, or I might be concerned.)
I'm amazed that he managed to get through that entire essay without mentioning the proverbial elephant in the room: Unless you are working on a project you own, or being paid as befits your schedule (in which case it still may be a bad idea for the reasons the essay does mention) your 60-hour workweek isn't merely 'not a badge of honor' it's a sign that you are doing two jobs for one salary because haha, what the fuck are you going to do about it, sucker?
The merely pragmatic considerations of fatigue degrading certain cognitive functions of various important sorts aren't false, and may even be the primary concern in the cases of self-employed contractors and startup jockeys with equity stakes(that they might even keep after the VCs are finished with them...); but if you are working for a paycheck and reporting to a boss, your bigger problem isn't whether working those additional hours makes you a less visionary creative or whatever. It's the fact that your effective pay, per hour, is plummeting (and in the way that annihilates your life outside of work, and sucks you dry, rather than just making you feel poorer, as working 40 hours for a stagnant or declining salary would).
Probably good practice for the bold future!
My Dear Antipodean Friends,
Please stop taking advice from Americans, or that horrible cable lich of yours, and try electing somewhat less dangerous animals to office. Maybe one of your horrid spiders, with the lethal venom and all the hideous staring eyes. It may have somewhat draconian positions on voter envenomation; but I assure you that it will be substantially stronger on civil liberties and copyright issues.
I admit that 'we' does not include everyone; but it's worth considering interkin3tic's comment about hipsters, above, as well as just thinking about money:
Earning more money than other people, so that you can buy really expensive stuff that they can't is one way to achieve a scarcity-victory; but so is being the guy who helped Now Famous Band set up their gear back when they were playing dive bars: that experience probably cost as much as a few PBRs; but not even the people now buying front-row seats at Now Famous Band's concerts can match you on it. Similar alternatives exist in fashion: some people go more-famous-designer-than-you-proles-can-afford, some people shoot for most-unconventional-thrifted-retro.
Some forms of novelty and exclusivity seeking are, of course, much more dangerous than others (hipsters bragging about obscure bands they've roadied for? Minimally harmful. London Whales spinning exotic credit default swaps in order to out-yacht their neighbors? Bit of a problem.) Novelty seeking that isn't particularly resource intensive would likely be unproblematic in the context of a hypothetical post-scarcity society, novelty seeking based on conspicuous consumption is incompatible with one: either the post-scarcity part wins out, and the Joneses can always keep up with you, or the consumption part wins out, and you can do something ostentatious enough to induce scarcity.
Did I make the separation between my position and the position being imputed to the 'customers likely to be offended' group for the purpose of the comparison insufficiently clear?
Or am I on the hook for insensitivity to that group, for imputing a more overt characterization than they might use of their position?
Perhaps more importantly, why would the category 'interactive movie' even get to exist when the category 'game' already does?
I realize that movies (sorry, 'Films') are High Art while 'games' are arcade trash and murder simulators for maladjusted children, so maybe this is an attack-by-superior-culture-cred; but if one looks past that, I'm not certain why a medium that has always been non-interactive (even theatre, while it often doesn't choose to use them, recognizes 'breaking the fourth wall' and audience interaction as potential elements of a piece), would be entitled to branch out into an area built by game devs.
He couldn't be more wrong, the more likely scenario is collapse due to over population and limited resources.
The one handy thing (much as it irks ethnic nationalists and pension-fund planners) is that, time and again, humans have shown signs of not actually wanting to breed like rabbits. Fuck like them? Sure; but add a bit of wealth and access to prophylaxis, and birthrates go down. The process gets tricky because adding the wealth and medical access usually makes the last one or two giant crops of high-birthrate babies start surviving at far greater than premodern rates immediately, while it takes time for the birthrate to fall, leading to a nasty little spike; but once you can separate hot animalistic fucking from years of tedious childcare, people tend to. Crazy.
A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
In line with Star Trek's "Every species except humans has some ludicrously rigid hardcoded trait" style, that is a Ferengi problem; but I suspect that it'd be a major issue for at least some people and some cultures in a hypothetical post-scarcity environment.
In fact, we don't even need to hypothesize: In situations where supply starts to increase, particularly when it increases to the point where everybody who is remotely anybody can have some for pocket change, you virtually always see the creation of additional 'tiers' of artificially scarce versions. The fact that the creator bothers with this is a revenue maximizing move(and so the same incentive wouldn't exist if there were no scarcity generally, and no reason to bother with this 'revenue' nonsense); but the fact that it works... there's the rub. Everyone can have a high quality reproduction of FuzzyFuzzyFungus' masterpeice 'The Hyphae Horror', for the simple cost of printing; but they'll still pay more for the numbered-limited-to-500 edition, more still for print #1 in that edition. Why? All the prints are identical; any you value the one that possesses 'firstness'?
I suspect that people would love to get away from scarcity in whatever areas they feel are out of their grip right now(whether they are super poor and that is food and shelter, middle class and that is healthcare and college, and so on); but, in our perversity, we seem to still crave the exclusive, the unique, the rare, in whatever nonessentials are relevant.