That aroused my curiosity and I am such a geek, I just had to get a rough idea. I reckon that reasonably regular sex will lay down about a mile a month [and I think you know what I'm saying], but you're welcome to do your own math.
If women [and men too I guess] came with a 500 mile warranty, marriage wouldnt be such a scary prospect:/ and divorce would be far less common.
Banning soft money would help some, but not a great deal. The real issue is the electorate. In a democracy, people get the government they deserve. The depravity of the populace depends partly upon the media. And the depravity of the media depends partly upon the populace. People like media that agrees with them, they dont read newspapers for information but to make them feel good about themselves. This is a situation with positive feedback [in engineering sense: it's not a stable situation]. The media get worse and worse while people get stupider and stupider. Or things can move in the other direction. Normally you need a good shake up to turn things around [losing a war for instance, shakes things up].
> A $5 billion aircraft carrier probably took nearly 5 years to build. During that 5 years, 18,000 jobs were created (from the/. article) and those 18,000 families had food on the table and contributed large portions of that $5 billion back into our economy, thus helping it greatly. Do you really think that even half of the $5 billion was on materials as opposed to labor? Labor is nearly _ALWAYS_ the most expensive cost in any production.
Woah, listen to the economics professor everyone. You have a point, but you could have got the same benefit to the economy by building a $5 billion gigantic rotating barbie doll. Just how big a barbie could you build with $5 billion. I don't know, but I bet I could figure it out with $1 million. Plus, this would provide lasting employment because you would need to make clothes for it. Include tourist money and we have a winner.
> all new truly innovative things tend to be created by interested individuals, who tend to release them open-source or freeware
> truly innovative things tend to be created by interested individuals - agreed
> tend to release them open-source or freeware
I am not convinced of that. Only about thirty major applications have been invented so far. [Word processor, Spreadsheet, webbrowser, RDBMS, music editor, pixel manipulators[photoshop], vector manipulator[corel]...] The last major new application I can think of was napster. The only really important end user application that was *invented* as open source was the webbrowser.
> Your "new renaissance" is already happening, all around you
No, we have different standards. The revolution I am thinking of definitely isn't happening around me, or if it is, it's hidden from view right now.
> Anyone who wants to engage in some activity A has only to go online and download any of a number of open-source or freeware systems for doing A.
Yeah, everything has been invented already. Oh, wait.... haven't I heard that before somewhere.
The reason software market seems dead at the moment, is we stopped making new applications. The small proportion of developers with an ounce of genuine inventiveness have spent last few years on server side. This doesnt mean that there are no new killer apps out there. In fact, we are due for a new renaissance.
> 3.5) Developers firmly tell sales/marketing no and why not, cc owner
Try it in a US corporate structure and your career will be stuck in mud forever. You will be penalised for lacking a "can do" attitude. Meanwhile some other twinkie will claim that everything is fine and promise delivery. Then they fail miserably. Now comes the weird part: The collosal failure of the twinkie will be immediately forgotten and he will be promoted, but your negative attitude will be remembered. Nobody is less popular than the guy who correctly anticipates failure. When it turns out you were right, somehow the PHBs will figure failure is your fault even if you are not involved at all.
In terms of what will help you climb the corporate ladder, these are your options in declining order:
1. Predict success and succeed 2. Predict success and fail 3. Predict failure and succeed 4. Predict failure and fail [or don't try]
Option 4 is a LONG way below option 2.
I am not recommending [2], just pointing out how things work. A better option is to get the hell out of that kind of environment.
> My friend has come to the conclusion that a six-way group marriage is the most stable group of people possible.
This is what happens when you spend too much time with your nose in physics books and not enough time with members of the opposite sex.
There is a reason why the chinese symbol for discord is the symbol for 2 women in a house.
If this is such a stable arrangement, I suppose there are plenty of examples of stable 6 way marriages.
If you want real stability use 6 manchester city supporters. They will be happy to get away from any mention of ManU for a year or two. Alternatively pick a bunch of swingers.
Farmer Giles of Ham is a treat, and rather counteracts the impression that Tolkein puts too much faith in nobility. Offtopic, but just for bragging points, I actually met Tolkein although i was too young to remember virtually anything of that. Can any other/.ers make this claim ?
I don't know whether you are on drugs or not, but you are on the right lines. There *is* a connection between information and energy and this topic is introduced quite nicely in "Feynman on Computing", a very important book that strangely very few people have heard of. The connection is a lot weirder than you might think.
If anybody thinks Feynman was a pseudo scientist, they are an idiot.
Nice rant, misses a fair bit of the point though. The main problem is not paper money, whether backed by gold or not. The main problem is that most money is invented by private banks when people take out loans. We need a greater percentage of debt free money in circulation to avoid boom and bust.
Now that P4's have hyperthreading I think it makes much more sense to get one of those. That way you dont need a tornado in your box to keep things cool and you get 80% of the benefit of dual processors.
> His assumptions on the role of coding is all wrong for anything but the most basic of projects.
No, yours are. The kind of projects which work well the way you are talking about are equivalent to compiling an encyclopedia. The kind of projects he is talking about are equivalent to writing a great novel.
I would not normally go out of my way to critise a fellow Earl, and funnily enough I too worked at EPCC while at EdU [are they still using transputers?] but you're wrong and here is why:
You cannot design software properly before you write it. You can try, but some unforseen problem will bite you in the ass.
When they make a new airliner, they model the entire thing on a computer first. The CAD model is an unambiguous model of the plane. Important subsystems in it are modelled and analysed independently and in conjunction with the components around it.
So, if writing software was similar, we would first model the software on a computer. Oh, er, wait a moment. In an important sense, software is a design. The only unambiguous design is the actual software [otherwise we could make the design the programming language]. So, one could have a notion of starting with a fuzzy design and gradually making it clearer, but you can still end up with a bad design.
High level programming languages are the most elegent way we can think of to describe logic. Writing the software cannot be separated from creating the design. Trying to "design" everything up front does not work. It cannot work, because it is equivalent to trying to create the design before you create the design.
Having recently read "Toxic sludge is good for you" [strongly recommended] I am very curious about where the funding for OpenForum comes from. It seems deliberately ambiguous about where it gets funding or what it does, which gives a whiff of the PR industry. It is fairly standard practise for PR firms to form organisations with misleading names purely to put forward viewpoints beneficial to certain special interests. Does anyone care to refute this ?
Wow. You really believe this don't you ? I never realised the RIAA/MPAA was a plot by the democrats before.
Try to get your head around this idea: there are people who consider the democrats and republicans as two wings of same party. Your fear and hatred of democrats sounds to them like a stalinist denouncing leninism when someone proposes capitalism.
> That is the difference between a left and a right government
I wonder why the terms "left" and "right" exist. There are thousands of issues where people can have an opinion, even if one allowed the unrealistic simplification of classifying each one along a single line, it's still meaningless to try and map N-dimensional space to 1D.
> I wonder why normal citizens vote right parties.
Leaving aside the idiocy of branding politics along a straight line for the moment, this is an easy question. People vote according to their perceived interests, which are largely derived from what they hear on TV/radio. Since the vast majority of media is controlled by a small number of rich people, the media favours policies which are beneficial to the owners of the media. This happens by subtle osmotic processes rather than direct censorship - editors/journalists who tend to agree with the owners get promoted, those who dont wither or change profession.
> the best justification for free mp3 sharing was that there was no alternative
No, that was never the best justification. The best justification is that the copyright laws have outgrown their usefulness to society and are being exploited by a small number of large corporations to the detriment of everybody else, including the artists who actually create the music.
What we need is a rethink of copyright laws. Since laws are a product of money more than morality, depriving those companies with a vested interest in maintaining status quo (or something worse) of revenue may be considered a moral duty if one feels strongly enough.
This goes rather deeper than not paying for latest crap from InSync.
Property is an essential part of capitalism, one cannot have a functioning capitalist society without strong property rights.
The concept of IP [copyrights, patents, trademarks] is enforced to bring IP into capitalist framework. It works fairly well, however the fact that IP can be copied for free makes a big difference to the optimal balance that can be achieved.
Capitalism is successful principally because it is a good mechanism for optimal distribution and use of scarce resources. If the resources aren't intrinsically scarce, introducing artificial scarcity [through IP laws] might not be the best option.
As the world advances almost the entire output of society becomes IP. With nanotech and replicators the IP content of material goods will be even more significant component. In such a world, allowing everybody access to all IP would make almost everybody massively richer.
So you see, the best argument for free mp3 sharing is that in the long run it benefits humanity;)
If you are shooting a film, you typically need more than 10x as much film as eventual footage.
It's not just that you need multiple takes per scene, you often film from separate angles simultaneously and then splice together as you see fit. Also, you shoot far more scenes than you want and put together the bits you like later.
> one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates
I sure hope you are just making a joke. If you're not being deliberately stupid, I impressed by your natural talent.
Anything that obtains energy from vibrations or sound is going to dampen those vibrations or muffle the sound [same thing really]. If phones can save energy like this, maybe you can levitate by pulling your own hair up. In fact, I recommend you try this.
The code will be part of us, except there won't be an us, there will only be I.
The most exciting imminent development in computers is better human computer interaction (HCI). Much, much better HCI. The implications of this are somewhat surprising. Right now you type on your keyboard, its inefficient. Well lets just imagine the key board and type in space then used a camera hooked up to a computer to observe the fingers. This is possible today but pointless. How about if electrodes were planted in your arm and acted on the signals before they reached your fingers. Again, we could do this today. How about we tracked the signals back and intercepted them via an implant in the brain. This is today's cutting edge. However things are moving fairly fast. There already exist mechanisms that can detect brainwaves and people have been trained to move a mouse around a screen just by thinking about it. The interface is kinda clunky at the moment, they have to think about sex to move left and right, or oceans to move up and down. Still, it's a proof of concept, things will improve.
People are talking about wearable PC's, but I don't think it will be long before people routinely use computer implants. With the kind of information density, we can manage these days it's actually worthwhile. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to remember everything ever said to you, or said by you. If nothing else, it would be a great help when you get into one of those "he said, she said" arguments. With todays technology you could build a portable device that remembers and voice recognizes everything you ever hear for five years. A little further down the line, and you'll be able to get an implant which will let you remember everything you ever saw. When the interface gets good enough, it will be pointless to worry about whether its stored in neurons or stored on a chip.
British Telecom are already working on the foundations for a device that could be installed in the brain to store everything you ever see,hear feel touch or smell. Its called project "Soul Catcher", I'm not making this up.
And for all those out there who think we're going to evolve into a race of cyborgs: you're crazy... it'll go MUCH further than that.
After all, once people have got decent hardware implanted in their heads, do you think we're going to be satisfied with a 200baud connection (human speech). No, we'll use the hardware in our heads to communicate with other people (through the hardware in their heads). With sufficient communication, it stops making sense to talk about multiple communicating processors - you end up with a single, massively parallel computer. When people get used to taking part in the enhanced meta-brain it will become literally unthinkable to go back being an individual entity. You might as well try to imagine what it would be like to be a mollusc. Don't believe me ? - we already have this idea of "however did we manage without the internet", it's only been in mainstream use for 2 years !
We will become the Borg, but not in a bad way. If you combine the properties of humans and computers and end up with something which does not have the best of both, then you haven't done it right. The internet will evolve from being a global suppository of all human knowledge into actually being humanity. We will be the nodes on the network. It won't take long either. Just a couple of hundred years or so at this rate.
Of course, this is bound to cause a little friction during the transitional period. Some people will doubtless object, and probably consider the end of humanity as we know it to be a bad thing. I don't think the induhviduals (as Dogbert would have it) will stand much of a chance though, they'll be seriously out-smarted and the reliance which regular humanity places on computers will make them pathetically unable to fight against those who have plugged in. The HumaNet might have to annihilate them to protect itself. It's a bit like the old ches
I used to think I was a libertarian too. Everything seemed simple back then. Maximise personal freedom as long as your freedom does not intrude on anybody else's. Strong property rights, what's mine is mine and waht's yours is yours, charity is a personal choice, not something that should be government mandated etc etc.
However, we live in a world of finite resources. Capitalism has innate tendancy for power and resources to consolidate and monopolise, ie the rich get richer. What happens to those with nothing when everything is already owned ? Without interference their status becomes no better than slavery. They can seek alternative employer, but the employers can collude to keep those without resources in effective slavery. We see it already in sweatshops around the world. This is not an abberation, it is the inherent tendancy. So, if you are comfortable that those born with resources end up effectively owning those without, then fine. Otherwise you might want to rethink a little.
Slashdot Mirror
That aroused my curiosity and I am such a geek, I just had to get a rough idea. I reckon that reasonably regular sex will lay down about a mile a month [and I think you know what I'm saying], but you're welcome to do your own math.
:/ and divorce would be far less common.
If women [and men too I guess] came with a 500 mile warranty, marriage wouldnt be such a scary prospect
Banning soft money would help some, but not a great deal. The real issue is the electorate. In a democracy, people get the government they deserve. The depravity of the populace depends partly upon the media. And the depravity of the media depends partly upon the populace. People like media that agrees with them, they dont read newspapers for information but to make them feel good about themselves. This is a situation with positive feedback [in engineering sense: it's not a stable situation]. The media get worse and worse while people get stupider and stupider. Or things can move in the other direction. Normally you need a good shake up to turn things around [losing a war for instance, shakes things up].
Your post seems confused to me.
What do you propose as a solution to this problem ?
> A $5 billion aircraft carrier probably took nearly 5 years to build. During that 5 years, 18,000 jobs were created (from the /. article) and those 18,000 families had food on the table and contributed large portions of that $5 billion back into our economy, thus helping it greatly. Do you really think that even half of the $5 billion was on materials as opposed to labor? Labor is nearly _ALWAYS_ the most expensive cost in any production.
Woah, listen to the economics professor everyone. You have a point, but you could have got the same benefit to the economy by building a $5 billion gigantic rotating barbie doll. Just how big a barbie could you build with $5 billion. I don't know, but I bet I could figure it out with $1 million. Plus, this would provide lasting employment because you would need to make clothes for it. Include tourist money and we have a winner.
> all new truly innovative things tend to be created by interested individuals, who tend to release them open-source or freeware
> truly innovative things tend to be created by interested individuals
- agreed
> tend to release them open-source or freeware
I am not convinced of that. Only about thirty major applications have been invented so far.
[Word processor, Spreadsheet, webbrowser, RDBMS, music editor, pixel manipulators[photoshop], vector manipulator[corel]...] The last major new application I can think of was napster. The only really important end user application that was *invented* as open source was the webbrowser.
> Your "new renaissance" is already happening, all around you
No, we have different standards. The revolution I am thinking of definitely isn't happening around me, or if it is, it's hidden from view right now.
> Anyone who wants to engage in some activity A has only to go online and download any of a number of open-source or freeware systems for doing A.
Yeah, everything has been invented already. Oh, wait.... haven't I heard that before somewhere.
The reason software market seems dead at the moment, is we stopped making new applications. The small proportion of developers with an ounce of genuine inventiveness have spent last few years on server side. This doesnt mean that there are no new killer apps out there. In fact, we are due for a new renaissance.
> 3.5) Developers firmly tell sales/marketing no and why not, cc owner
Try it in a US corporate structure and your career will be stuck in mud forever. You will be penalised for lacking a "can do" attitude. Meanwhile some other twinkie will claim that everything is fine and promise delivery. Then they fail miserably. Now comes the weird part: The collosal failure of the twinkie will be immediately forgotten and he will be promoted, but your negative attitude will be remembered. Nobody is less popular than the guy who correctly anticipates failure. When it turns out you were right, somehow the PHBs will figure failure is your fault even if you are not involved at all.
In terms of what will help you climb the corporate ladder, these are your options in declining order:
1. Predict success and succeed
2. Predict success and fail
3. Predict failure and succeed
4. Predict failure and fail [or don't try]
Option 4 is a LONG way below option 2.
I am not recommending [2], just pointing out how things work. A better option is to get the hell out of that kind of environment.
> Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.
Build a man a fire, and he is warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he is warm for the rest of his life.
> (the chicken did btw...)
Why do you reckon that, it was the egg. It was laid by some bird that wasnt quite a chicken.
> My friend has come to the conclusion that a six-way group marriage is the most stable group of people possible.
This is what happens when you spend too much time with your nose in physics books and not enough time with members of the opposite sex.
There is a reason why the chinese symbol for discord is the symbol for 2 women in a house.
If this is such a stable arrangement, I suppose there are plenty of examples of stable 6 way marriages.
If you want real stability use 6 manchester city supporters. They will be happy to get away from any mention of ManU for a year or two. Alternatively pick a bunch of swingers.
Farmer Giles of Ham is a treat, and rather counteracts the impression that Tolkein puts too much faith in nobility. /.ers make this claim ?
Offtopic, but just for bragging points, I actually met Tolkein although i was too young to remember virtually anything of that. Can any other
This is not a difficult concept, try again...
Ant - ant's nest
Neuron - brain
middle manager - corporation
raindrop - thunderstorm
When something is made up of lots of pieces, the object itself can have a behaviour which is distinct to the consituent parts.
I don't know whether you are on drugs or not, but you are on the right lines. There *is* a connection between information and energy and this topic is introduced quite nicely in "Feynman on Computing", a very important book that strangely very few people have heard of. The connection is a lot weirder than you might think.
If anybody thinks Feynman was a pseudo scientist, they are an idiot.
hmmm, I think I would rather have it the other way round.
[score -1] msyoginist
Nice rant, misses a fair bit of the point though.
The main problem is not paper money, whether backed by gold or not. The main problem is that most money is invented by private banks when people take out loans. We need a greater percentage of debt free money in circulation to avoid boom and bust.
Now that P4's have hyperthreading I think it makes much more sense to get one of those. That way you dont need a tornado in your box to keep things cool and you get 80% of the benefit of dual processors.
> His assumptions on the role of coding is all wrong for anything but the most basic of projects.
No, yours are. The kind of projects which work well the way you are talking about are equivalent to compiling an encyclopedia. The kind of projects he is talking about are equivalent to writing a great novel.
I would not normally go out of my way to critise a fellow Earl, and funnily enough I too worked at EPCC while at EdU [are they still using transputers?] but you're wrong and here is why:
You cannot design software properly before you write it. You can try, but some unforseen problem will bite you in the ass.
When they make a new airliner, they model the entire thing on a computer first. The CAD model is an unambiguous model of the plane. Important subsystems in it are modelled and analysed independently and in conjunction with the components around it.
So, if writing software was similar, we would first model the software on a computer. Oh, er, wait a moment. In an important sense, software is a design. The only unambiguous design is the actual software [otherwise we could make the design the programming language]. So, one could have a notion of starting with a fuzzy design and gradually making it clearer, but you can still end up with a bad design.
High level programming languages are the most elegent way we can think of to
describe logic. Writing the software cannot be separated from creating the design. Trying to "design" everything up front does not work. It cannot work, because it is equivalent to trying to create the design before you create the design.
Having recently read "Toxic sludge is good for you" [strongly recommended] I am very curious about where the funding for OpenForum comes from. It seems deliberately ambiguous about where it gets funding or what it does, which gives a whiff of the PR industry. It is fairly standard practise for PR firms to form organisations with misleading names purely to put forward viewpoints beneficial to certain special interests. Does anyone care to refute this ?
Wow. You really believe this don't you ? I never realised the RIAA/MPAA was a plot by the democrats before.
Try to get your head around this idea: there are people who consider the democrats and republicans as two wings of same party. Your fear and hatred of democrats sounds to them like a stalinist denouncing leninism when someone proposes capitalism.
> That is the difference between a left and a right government
I wonder why the terms "left" and "right" exist. There are thousands of issues where people can have an opinion, even if one allowed the unrealistic simplification of classifying each one along a single line, it's still meaningless to try and map N-dimensional space to 1D.
> I wonder why normal citizens vote right parties.
Leaving aside the idiocy of branding politics along a straight line for the moment, this is an easy question. People vote according to their perceived interests, which are largely derived from what they hear on TV/radio. Since the vast majority of media is controlled by a small number of rich people, the media favours policies which are beneficial to the owners of the media. This happens by subtle osmotic processes rather than direct censorship - editors/journalists who tend to agree with the owners get promoted, those who dont wither or change profession.
> the best justification for free mp3 sharing was that there was no alternative
;)
No, that was never the best justification. The best justification is that the copyright laws have outgrown their usefulness to society and are being exploited by a small number of large corporations to the detriment of everybody else, including the artists who actually create the music.
What we need is a rethink of copyright laws. Since laws are a product of money more than morality, depriving those companies with a vested interest in maintaining status quo (or something worse) of revenue may be considered a moral duty if one feels strongly enough.
This goes rather deeper than not paying for latest crap from InSync.
Property is an essential part of capitalism, one cannot have a functioning capitalist society without strong property rights.
The concept of IP [copyrights, patents, trademarks] is enforced to bring IP into capitalist framework. It works fairly well, however the fact that IP can be copied for free makes a big difference to the optimal balance that can be achieved.
Capitalism is successful principally because it is a good mechanism for optimal distribution
and use of scarce resources. If the resources aren't intrinsically scarce, introducing artificial scarcity [through IP laws] might not be the best option.
As the world advances almost the entire output of society becomes IP. With nanotech and replicators the IP content of material goods will be even more significant component. In such a world, allowing everybody access to all IP would make almost everybody massively richer.
So you see, the best argument for free mp3 sharing is that in the long run it benefits humanity
If you are shooting a film, you typically need more than 10x as much film as eventual footage.
It's not just that you need multiple takes per scene, you often film from separate angles simultaneously and then splice together as you see fit. Also, you shoot far more scenes than you want and put together the bits you like later.
100:1 is generous, 10:1 is minimal.
> one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates
I sure hope you are just making a joke. If you're not being deliberately stupid, I impressed by your natural talent.
Anything that obtains energy from vibrations or sound is going to dampen those vibrations or muffle the sound [same thing really]. If phones can save energy like this, maybe you can levitate by pulling your own hair up. In fact, I recommend you try this.
Exactly. This is more insightfull than funny.
The code will be part of us, except there won't be an us, there will only be I.
The most exciting imminent development in computers is better human computer interaction (HCI). Much, much better HCI. The implications of this are somewhat surprising. Right now you type on your keyboard, its inefficient. Well lets just imagine the key board and type in space then used a camera hooked up to a computer to observe the fingers. This is possible today but pointless. How about if electrodes were planted in your arm and acted on the signals before they reached your fingers. Again, we could do this today. How about we tracked the signals back and intercepted them via an implant in the brain. This is today's cutting edge. However things are moving fairly fast. There already exist mechanisms that can detect brainwaves and people have been trained to move a mouse around a screen just by thinking about it. The interface is kinda clunky at the moment, they have to think about sex to move left and right, or oceans to move up and down. Still, it's a proof of concept, things will improve.
People are talking about wearable PC's, but I don't think it will be long before people routinely use computer implants. With the kind of information density, we can manage these days it's actually worthwhile. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to remember everything ever said to you, or said by you. If nothing else, it would be a great help when you get into one of those "he said, she said" arguments. With todays technology you could build a portable device that remembers and voice recognizes everything you ever hear for five years. A little further down the line, and you'll be able to get an implant which will let you remember everything you ever saw. When the interface gets good enough, it will be pointless to worry about whether its stored in neurons or stored on a chip.
British Telecom are already working on the foundations for a device that could be installed in the brain to store everything you ever see,hear feel touch or smell. Its called project "Soul Catcher", I'm not making this up.
And for all those out there who think we're going to evolve into a race of cyborgs: you're crazy... it'll go MUCH further than that.
After all, once people have got decent hardware implanted in their heads, do you think we're going to be satisfied with a 200baud connection (human speech). No, we'll use the hardware in our heads to communicate with other people (through the hardware in their heads). With sufficient communication, it stops making sense to talk about multiple communicating processors - you end up with a single, massively parallel computer. When people get used to taking part in the enhanced meta-brain it will become literally unthinkable to go back being an individual entity. You might as well try to imagine what it would be like to be a mollusc. Don't believe me ? - we already have this idea of "however did we manage without the internet", it's only been in mainstream use for 2 years !
We will become the Borg, but not in a bad way. If you combine the properties of humans and computers and end up with something which does not have the best of both, then you haven't done it right. The internet will evolve from being a global suppository of all human knowledge into actually being humanity. We will be the nodes on the network. It won't take long either. Just a couple of hundred years or so at this rate.
Of course, this is bound to cause a little friction during the transitional period. Some people will doubtless object, and probably consider the end of humanity as we know it to be a bad thing. I don't think the induhviduals (as Dogbert would have it) will stand much of a chance though, they'll be seriously out-smarted and the reliance which regular humanity places on computers will make them pathetically unable to fight against those who have plugged in. The HumaNet might have to annihilate them to protect itself. It's a bit like the old ches
I used to think I was a libertarian too. Everything seemed simple back then. Maximise personal freedom as long as your freedom does not intrude on anybody else's. Strong property rights, what's mine is mine and waht's yours is yours, charity is a personal choice, not something that should be government mandated etc etc.
However, we live in a world of finite resources. Capitalism has innate tendancy for power and resources to consolidate and monopolise, ie the rich get richer. What happens to those with nothing when everything is already owned ? Without interference their status becomes no better than slavery. They can seek alternative employer, but the employers can collude to keep those without resources in effective slavery. We see it already in sweatshops around the world. This is not an abberation, it is the inherent tendancy. So, if you are comfortable that those born with resources end up effectively owning those without, then fine. Otherwise you might want to rethink a little.