When Social Security "runs out of money," retirees will be paid from the General Fund. If that doesn't happen, there is no place on Earth that the Senators and Representatives can hide to escape the wrath of the retirees.
no place on earth? of course there is. it's called "outside the concentration camp walls" - because a concentration camp is where the outraged pensioners will end up if they don't shut the fuck up to avoid getting labelled "terrorist".
what, you thought all those fascist "anti-terror" laws were about suicide bombers and angry white men with guns? get real! it's preparation for when the general public finally realise how badly we're all being fucked over by the corporate kleptocrats and their servant politicians.
Normally, anything that reduces the average citizen's complicity in their own oppression by the powers that be(*) is a good thing....but replacing ownership of personal property with rental and/or licensing does not achieve that. it's worse. It removes even the choice to "opt-out" if/when you decide your life would be much better without wage-slavery (not uncommon if you manage to pay off your house mortgage or otherwise own it outright).
(*) i.e. the actual capitalists (not the working and middle-classes who have been deluded into thinking that THEY are capitalists), the 0.001%, those who actually own & control everything of significant value - including the "means of production".
Why won't you pay for apps, is it a matter of principle?
Principle and security.
I won't pay for apps because there's no fucking way I'm ever putting a credit card number or any other banking-related information anywhere near a device as insecure as a phone or a tablet. My phone will never have any ability to spend my money or incur debt.
And IDGAF if there's some procedure to get my money back in case of fraud or theft - I don't want to spend days, weeks, or months arguing with customer service drones to get my money back, the time and hassle and annoyance will never and CAN never be compensated for.
Ditto for Microsoft Windows. I'd never log in to my bank or paypal or buy anything on ebay or any other web site from a Windows machine. I have a Win 7 machine for steam (it's a gaming "console" used for games and nothing else, sometimes via my KVM switch and sometimes via in-home streaming to my main linux desktop machine), to play games that won't run on Linux or WINE. I've never bought one game via the Win7 box, and never will, I buy them in a browser on my Linux box.
Also, the vast majority of apps (free or not) are shit - either worthless shit, or less-than-worthless shit with malware and spyware. Out of the hundreds of thousands of android apps, probably only a few hundred at most aren't shit. Any most of those are available on F-Droid anyway.
If you feel there are no apps worth even a cent, you're probably not looking hard enough. Or at all.
I don't feel any particular need to look. There's nothing I feel is missing from my phone or my tablet. There's nothing I want it to do that it doesn't already do.
There's probably some way to buy android apps in a browser on my desktop, like I do for steam. I've never cared enough to find out. And it would require me to log in to google in my PC browser and on my phone/tablet (one of my reasons for using microg is so that I don't have to do that) meaning that whatever app I bought would cost me more than just a few bucks, it would cost me my privacy too.
- - - - - - - - -
Any new android device I buy immediately gets unlocked and the stock OS replaced with some AOSP variant plus https://microg.org/ (because GAPPS is spyware and comes with a shitload of uninstallable crap like youtube and google maps and pinyin & hindi keyboards), and F-Droid. For a handful of free apps that are only on google play store, I use YALP.
(Unfortunately, Lineage doesn't enable signature spoofing, which is required by microg, so it typically isn't my first choice unless there's an unofficial version of Lineage for that particular device which enables it)
I'll never own an Apple phone or tablet because they don't allow that option.
and Stylus for fixing up CSS abominations like cretinously specifying widths and font sizes in pixels. Also to set "display: none !important;" on annoyances like animations (including animated avatar gifs on forum websites)
BTW, while I agree with pretty much everything in the article, it's kind of ironic that the pxlnv.com web site itself has a fair amount of bullshit on it too - including sizes specified in pixels, and event bullshit to hijack mouseclicks, context-menu, keydown and other events - none of which is necessary for the page contents, it works just fine with all js disabled (and some CSS hackery in FF's Inspector to make it legible with non-pixlel sizes - if I intended to spend more time on the site, I'd do a more thorough fix with Stylus).
No. Biblical descriptions of Armageddon are bullshit stories by some guy who ate too many magic mushrooms on Patmos.
Making references to Armageddon is the crackpot's argument from authority. Doesn't matter how insane the Bible is, there's enough other cretins who value it that it bolsters many lunatic arguments.
Are you people really this fucking stupid or is it just convenient to be deliberately obtuse?
Race is getting into the data used by the prediction models because of the many decades of racial profiling used by cops.
If cops routinely charge poor and black kids for possession of dope while routinely letting off white middle-class kids with a warning, then that's going to affect the crime stats that influence the model. Same when they routinely stop and frisk black people but not whites - a percentage of those stopped are going to be in possession of contraband or have an outstanding warrant or whatever.
If courts sentence black people far more often than white people for the same crimes than that's also going to affect the crime stats.
I shouldn't be saying "if" there because the examples given above are exactly the kinds of racial & social-class discrimination that cops and courts do.
This all leads to self-fulfilling prophecy (oops, "prediction"...this is sciency-sounding stuff not hocus pocus voodoo). If you only ever look for crime in poor, black neighbourhoods but never in rich white neighbourhoods then the crime stats are going to say that poor and/or black people are criminals, but rich white people aren't.
This isn't just speculation about what might happen. This is actually what has happened every single time some kind of "data-based" crime prediction has been tried. It inevitably duplicates and reinforces the already existing biases.
This is not the "Tech Industry"'s war on kids, it's the Marketing Industry's, the propagandists, the people shapers. It's not even new, Vance Packard was warning about this in the 1950s, and he wasn't the only one. The marketers they've had over 60 years since then to refine their techniques.
The tech - smartphones, internet, whatever - is just a new tool that they've adopted and twisted to their purposes. Unfortunately, it's a very effective tool for them - made even more effective by decades of habituating people to ubiquitous propaganda.
Marketing is one of the greatest evils ever to be invented. A crime against humanity - and should be prosecuted and sentenced as such.
Libertarians believe that only physical violence or the direct threat of it can be coercion, and even then only when it comes from poor or black people.
Violence from angry white men is just self-defence by the most oppressed people ever to exist in the world, or sometimes it's necessary discipline for their women, children, and other property.
Don't be ridiculous, developers can't be expected to remember and type long complicated command lines.
It'll be a button, with a dialog box for the options. A huge blinking button in prime screen real-estate so nobody can miss it. In a stunningly helpful UI innovation almost as good as Clippy, the mouse pointer will gravitate towards the button whenever the user is idle for a few seconds.
It'll be trademarked, marketed, and patented as One Click Programming.
> First, require all eligible voters to vote as they do in Australia. > There is a financial penalty for not voting.
Yes, there's a fine for not voting here. It's only ever paid by those too stupid to tick the "I was too sick to vote" box on the "Why didn't you vote?" form you get sent - i.e. almost nobody.
This might seem pointless, but it has the effect of making not-voting almost as much work as voting. Actually, an equivalent amount of work since it's trivially easy to ask for a postal ballot so you can vote by mail. It also reminds you that it's your duty as a citizen of a democracy to get off your fucking arse and vote - it's less than an hour once every few years.
Every electorate here has polling booths in local schools and town halls and other places anyway, so even voting in person rarely takes more than half an hour or so. On a Saturday (not a fucking Tuesday - which disenfranchises many workers). Voting is open all day up to 6pm. Or you can vote early at your local town hall or by post.
Both early voting and postal votes are still anonymous, your vote is inside a sealed envelope which is inside another sealed envelope with your name on it (matching your electoral enrolment). When the votes are tallied, the external envelope is checked to make sure it's a valid enrolment and to prevent multiple-voting, and the internal envelope is added - unopened - to the pile of votes to be counted.
and if you don't like any of the candidates you can always invalidate your ballot (i.e. vote "informal") by writing some "fuck you all" or some shit on it.
The ballot papers are randomised so that nobody gets the advantage of being the first on the ballot paper - some fuckwits just vote 1 2 3 4 5... in order down the page. AKA donkey voting
BTW, our last federal election was an anomaly with much lower voter turnout than usual (about 9% didn't vote), but Australia routinely gets 95+% voter turnout in every election.
You were given a choice between a populist (and popular) orange Nazi clown (with a theocratic VP) and a corporate stooge same as all the other corporate stooges who've been elected in the past.
A vote isn't always an expression of support. It's a tool that can be used to prevent the greater evil from winning. You're stuck with one of the two no matter what you do, so the only sane response is to make sure that the worst candidate doesn't win.
By choosing not to vote against the Nazi, you effectively voted for him. This is (partly) on you - you can't evade your share of the responsibility.
Clinton would have been "more of the same" but that's nowhere near as bad as the current accelerated radical path to fascist theocracy.
That's what you should have done - not vote for HC but vote against the nazi clown.
Voting against the greater evil isn't even a novel or unusual voting strategy - given that you'll probably never get a great candidate that you can support without reservation, it makes sense to vote so that you minimise the harm that can be done by any politician. i.e. this should be the default strategy of every citizen.
And then you work to get rid of the electoral colleges and implement a preferential voting system so that third-party votes aren't wasted - if your 1st preference doesn't win, your vote is transferred to your 2nd preference, and then to your 3rd and so on until it eventually ends up with a candidate who has a majority of votes.
You'll probably still end up with something close to a two-party system but the two major parties have to be careful not to alienate too many other voters - which discourages extremist policies and actions. It also leaves open enough space for new parties to arise and gain enough support to eventually displace one of the current major parties (or at least shift their policies in the same direction).
Unless someone can replicate a sound exactly, comparing a new hash to a recorded hash will fail.
You're right. that would take some super advanced technology. I read about something like that in a really far-fetched futuristic science fiction novel once - I think they called it a "tape recorder" or something like that. The sequel had some nonsensical-sounding "mp3 recorder". Fucking ridiculous, right? The space-detective in it even magically figured out that the bad guys had spliced together words and even phonemes from lots of different recordings to create the phrase "my voice is my password". who could believe absurd shit like that?
The folks who use those libraries should be buying maintenance contracts on that software. That was the original business plan for FOSS.
You're speaking out of your arse. Free Software never had any kind of business plan, "original" or otherwise. It isn't now and never has been about business - it has always been about software freedom: the right of users to see, modify, and redistribute the code of any software they use...and for anyone they redistribute to to ALSO have those exact same rights to do what they want with it (i.e. you can sell it but you can't stop your customer - or anyone else - from also selling it or giving it away)
If someone makes some money from writing or distributing it, then that's fine but nobody really gives a fuck - that's not and never has been what Free Software is about. It's certainly not part of "the plan".
Doesn't have to replace all radiologists. It just needs to read the MRI and write an automated report so fast and well, that a single radiologist can sit at home in his jammies and double check AI radiology reports for entire regions of hospitals. One radiologist doing the work of dozens.
Every corporation needs some low-level shit-kicker to carry the responsibility and blame (and if you think you're not a shit-kicker, ask yourself "Am I at CEO or Director level or higher?" - if the answer is "No" then you're a shit-kicker and you don't matter. at all).
At the moment, there's lots of these jobs. In the near future, there will be far fewer - almost none - of these liability-fuse jobs, and a near-endless supply of replacements.
gig economy = hustle every day of your (short) working life. and for fuck's sake, have the decency to fuck off and die quickly when age begins shaving 5% or 10% off your hustle speed.
that's a true workers' paradise - according to libertarian useful idiots and other corporate mouthpieces.
But that's theft - from the corporation and from the existing share-holders. And as we all know from the endless propaganda, taxation is theft, so theft is taxation.
Aren't you ignorant Libertarian (in the American psychopathic anarcho-capitalist sense of the word) retards supposed to be against taxation?
In a different universe, we could have pluggable filesystem modules that could be built against each kernel source[1] without having to get it all into the same tree.
We have that in this universe.
If the kernel API changed, the FS devs would have to adapt to be compatible, but at least they wouldn't have to fight with the maintainers and the maintainers wouldn't have to be bothered by their patches. It wouldn't solve a technical problem -- after all, the build system hardly gives two shits where the source comes from -- but it would solve a major human problem.
Oh well, we can dream right?
You don't have to dream, you can have this right now with ZFS on Linux. And several other filesystems too. It works, there's nothing actually "wrong" with it, but it's a lot less desirable than you think.
Almost every time there's a new kernel release, the ZFS modules won't compile against it. There's usually a delay of a few days to a few weeks before ZoL is patched to compile with the new kernel.
It's a minor hassle, but an annoying one. The features offered by ZFS are more than worth the hassle.
The solution is to not install new kernels until you know for sure that ZFS is updated to work with them.
In debian terms, 'apt-mark hold' the linux-image-* and linux-headers-* packages so that an apt upgrade wont auto-upgrade them. Upgrade them manually with 'apt-get install' after the zfs-dkms & spl-dkms & other packages have been upgraded, and then remember to hold them with apt-mark again.
IMO it's best to also hold all the ZFS-related packages too, and manually upgrade them immediately before manually upgrading the kernel. Then hold them again. Otherwise you could end up with the userland portions of zfs (libs and zfs/zpool/etc utils) that are different (and possibly incompatible) versions to what is running in the kernel. Mostly harmless, most of the time, but not something I want to do with fileystems that contain the bulk of my files.
So, at first your claim was that the point of atheism was to "steal power from god". Now it is to "ridicule older religions as absurd fairy tales".
That's called shifting the goal posts. and it's as bullshit an argument method as the rest of what you wrote.
"God exists, therefore God exists" is not proof of anything, it's a tautology. You don't have to read hundreds of pages of tautological nit-picking to dismiss something as bullshit. You just have to recognise its built-in assumptions and realise that if the premises are bullshit then the conclusions are bullshit.
BTW, don't think i didn't notice the phrase "older religions" you snuck in there, with the implication that atheism is a religion like any other, just a new one.
Atheism is not a religion. Atheism is the rejection of religion, all of them, because religions ARE absurd fairy tales.
Worse, the purpose of those fairy tales is to prop up the existing power structures, to tell people to be content with their lot, because the locally-fashionable divinity/divinities have anointed their rulers with the right to rule - therefore any dissent is not only illegal according to secular laws, it is blasphemy and a crime against the local god(s).
There is no god, or gods. Gods are just stories humans invented to entertain, amuse, scare, and/or control each other.
A grapeseed or canola plant that incorporates a marine gene to produce omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA) is the different product, and is exactly what I said would be patentable.
except for (at least) three major problems that prevent patenting:
You can't patent things, and you can't patent ideas, you can only patent inventions, i.e. specific processes and methods for doing specific things.
And thirdly, you can't patent the obvious. Getting commonly grown plants to produce more useful nutrients by copying the genes that produce those nutrients from one organism to another is completely fucking obvious, not just to an expert in the field but to even the most lightly-informed layman.
It might be possible to patent the specific process of copying the genes from one organism to another (if it's novel enough), but not the result and not the idea of doing so.
In computer science, another name for an algorithm is a "machine". Machine and algorithm are one and the same. A pocket watch implements an algorithm - the number of teeth on this gear divided by the number of teeth on that gear, etc. It's a machine, or algorithm, made up of gears (multiplications) arranged in a certain way to yield a useful result.
It isn't, and they're not the same. Nothing you've written here bears any resemblance to reality or truth. What you've written is a very self-serving piece of bullshit. An algorithm is not a machine, but if you can sucker people into believing that it is, then that justifies patenting software.
This bullshit is propaganda of the same order as the term "intellectual property" - designed to sucker people into believing that copyrights, patents, and trademarks are a) all the same kind of thing, and b) magically akin to physical property and therefore intuitively deserving of the same protection under the law.
The rest, well, stealing power from God is rather the point of atheism, isn't it?
That's exactly equivalent to saying "Stealing power from Mithras/Osiris/Thor/Baal/Zeus/Xochipilli/Russell's Teapot/IPU/FSM/other-fictional-entity is rather the point of atheism, isn't it?"
No, the point of atheism is to not be enslaved by absurd fairy tales.
BTW, you religious types ought to be grateful that copyright has only existed for a few hundred years - otherwise your religions would never have survived the copyright-infringement law suits over their origin stories.
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no place on earth? of course there is. it's called "outside the concentration camp walls" - because a concentration camp is where the outraged pensioners will end up if they don't shut the fuck up to avoid getting labelled "terrorist".
what, you thought all those fascist "anti-terror" laws were about suicide bombers and angry white men with guns? get real! it's preparation for when the general public finally realise how badly we're all being fucked over by the corporate kleptocrats and their servant politicians.
Normally, anything that reduces the average citizen's complicity in their own oppression by the powers that be(*) is a good thing....but replacing ownership of personal property with rental and/or licensing does not achieve that. it's worse. It removes even the choice to "opt-out" if/when you decide your life would be much better without wage-slavery (not uncommon if you manage to pay off your house mortgage or otherwise own it outright).
(*) i.e. the actual capitalists (not the working and middle-classes who have been deluded into thinking that THEY are capitalists), the 0.001%, those who actually own & control everything of significant value - including the "means of production".
Principle and security.
I won't pay for apps because there's no fucking way I'm ever putting a credit card number or any other banking-related information anywhere near a device as insecure as a phone or a tablet. My phone will never have any ability to spend my money or incur debt.
And IDGAF if there's some procedure to get my money back in case of fraud or theft - I don't want to spend days, weeks, or months arguing with customer service drones to get my money back, the time and hassle and annoyance will never and CAN never be compensated for.
Ditto for Microsoft Windows. I'd never log in to my bank or paypal or buy anything on ebay or any other web site from a Windows machine. I have a Win 7 machine for steam (it's a gaming "console" used for games and nothing else, sometimes via my KVM switch and sometimes via in-home streaming to my main linux desktop machine), to play games that won't run on Linux or WINE. I've never bought one game via the Win7 box, and never will, I buy them in a browser on my Linux box.
Also, the vast majority of apps (free or not) are shit - either worthless shit, or less-than-worthless shit with malware and spyware. Out of the hundreds of thousands of android apps, probably only a few hundred at most aren't shit. Any most of those are available on F-Droid anyway.
I don't feel any particular need to look. There's nothing I feel is missing from my phone or my tablet. There's nothing I want it to do that it doesn't already do.
There's probably some way to buy android apps in a browser on my desktop, like I do for steam. I've never cared enough to find out. And it would require me to log in to google in my PC browser and on my phone/tablet (one of my reasons for using microg is so that I don't have to do that) meaning that whatever app I bought would cost me more than just a few bucks, it would cost me my privacy too.
- - - - - - - - -
Any new android device I buy immediately gets unlocked and the stock OS replaced with some AOSP variant plus https://microg.org/ (because GAPPS is spyware and comes with a shitload of uninstallable crap like youtube and google maps and pinyin & hindi keyboards), and F-Droid. For a handful of free apps that are only on google play store, I use YALP.
(Unfortunately, Lineage doesn't enable signature spoofing, which is required by microg, so it typically isn't my first choice unless there's an unofficial version of Lineage for that particular device which enables it)
I'll never own an Apple phone or tablet because they don't allow that option.
blockchain and bitcoin hype is ridiculous, but this is just absurd.
"Kangaroo bonds" (they bounce right back, right?) and "bond-i". yeah, right.
And since when does the World Bank tell the Commonwealth Bank of Australia what to do?
yep, uBlock Origin and uMatrix are essential.
Canvas Blocker and Decentraleyes too.
and Stylus for fixing up CSS abominations like cretinously specifying widths and font sizes in pixels. Also to set "display: none !important;" on annoyances like animations (including animated avatar gifs on forum websites)
BTW, while I agree with pretty much everything in the article, it's kind of ironic that the pxlnv.com web site itself has a fair amount of bullshit on it too - including sizes specified in pixels, and event bullshit to hijack mouseclicks, context-menu, keydown and other events - none of which is necessary for the page contents, it works just fine with all js disabled (and some CSS hackery in FF's Inspector to make it legible with non-pixlel sizes - if I intended to spend more time on the site, I'd do a more thorough fix with Stylus).
No. Biblical descriptions of Armageddon are bullshit stories by some guy who ate too many magic mushrooms on Patmos.
Making references to Armageddon is the crackpot's argument from authority. Doesn't matter how insane the Bible is, there's enough other cretins who value it that it bolsters many lunatic arguments.
Are you people really this fucking stupid or is it just convenient to be deliberately obtuse?
Race is getting into the data used by the prediction models because of the many decades of racial profiling used by cops.
If cops routinely charge poor and black kids for possession of dope while routinely letting off white middle-class kids with a warning, then that's going to affect the crime stats that influence the model. Same when they routinely stop and frisk black people but not whites - a percentage of those stopped are going to be in possession of contraband or have an outstanding warrant or whatever.
If courts sentence black people far more often than white people for the same crimes than that's also going to affect the crime stats.
I shouldn't be saying "if" there because the examples given above are exactly the kinds of racial & social-class discrimination that cops and courts do.
This all leads to self-fulfilling prophecy (oops, "prediction"...this is sciency-sounding stuff not hocus pocus voodoo). If you only ever look for crime in poor, black neighbourhoods but never in rich white neighbourhoods then the crime stats are going to say that poor and/or black people are criminals, but rich white people aren't.
This isn't just speculation about what might happen. This is actually what has happened every single time some kind of "data-based" crime prediction has been tried. It inevitably duplicates and reinforces the already existing biases.
This is not the "Tech Industry"'s war on kids, it's the Marketing Industry's, the propagandists, the people shapers. It's not even new, Vance Packard was warning about this in the 1950s, and he wasn't the only one. The marketers they've had over 60 years since then to refine their techniques.
The tech - smartphones, internet, whatever - is just a new tool that they've adopted and twisted to their purposes. Unfortunately, it's a very effective tool for them - made even more effective by decades of habituating people to ubiquitous propaganda.
Marketing is one of the greatest evils ever to be invented. A crime against humanity - and should be prosecuted and sentenced as such.
Attitudes like this are WHY they end up killing themselves.
I hope you don't really have any kids.
Libertarians believe that only physical violence or the direct threat of it can be coercion, and even then only when it comes from poor or black people.
Violence from angry white men is just self-defence by the most oppressed people ever to exist in the world, or sometimes it's necessary discipline for their women, children, and other property.
Don't be ridiculous, developers can't be expected to remember and type long complicated command lines.
It'll be a button, with a dialog box for the options. A huge blinking button in prime screen real-estate so nobody can miss it. In a stunningly helpful UI innovation almost as good as Clippy, the mouse pointer will gravitate towards the button whenever the user is idle for a few seconds.
It'll be trademarked, marketed, and patented as One Click Programming.
> First, require all eligible voters to vote as they do in Australia.
> There is a financial penalty for not voting.
Yes, there's a fine for not voting here. It's only ever paid by those too stupid to tick the "I was too sick to vote" box on the "Why didn't you vote?" form you get sent - i.e. almost nobody.
This might seem pointless, but it has the effect of making not-voting almost as much work as voting. Actually, an equivalent amount of work since it's trivially easy to ask for a postal ballot so you can vote by mail. It also reminds you that it's your duty as a citizen of a democracy to get off your fucking arse and vote - it's less than an hour once every few years.
Every electorate here has polling booths in local schools and town halls and other places anyway, so even voting in person rarely takes more than half an hour or so. On a Saturday (not a fucking Tuesday - which disenfranchises many workers). Voting is open all day up to 6pm. Or you can vote early at your local town hall or by post.
Both early voting and postal votes are still anonymous, your vote is inside a sealed envelope which is inside another sealed envelope with your name on it (matching your electoral enrolment). When the votes are tallied, the external envelope is checked to make sure it's a valid enrolment and to prevent multiple-voting, and the internal envelope is added - unopened - to the pile of votes to be counted.
and if you don't like any of the candidates you can always invalidate your ballot (i.e. vote "informal") by writing some "fuck you all" or some shit on it.
The ballot papers are randomised so that nobody gets the advantage of being the first on the ballot paper - some fuckwits just vote 1 2 3 4 5 ... in order down the page. AKA donkey voting
BTW, our last federal election was an anomaly with much lower voter turnout than usual (about 9% didn't vote), but Australia routinely gets 95+% voter turnout in every election.
You were given a choice between a populist (and popular) orange Nazi clown (with a theocratic VP) and a corporate stooge same as all the other corporate stooges who've been elected in the past.
A vote isn't always an expression of support. It's a tool that can be used to prevent the greater evil from winning. You're stuck with one of the two no matter what you do, so the only sane response is to make sure that the worst candidate doesn't win.
By choosing not to vote against the Nazi, you effectively voted for him. This is (partly) on you - you can't evade your share of the responsibility.
> Who could I have voted for?
You didn't have to vote for anyone.
You vote against the greater evil - Trump.
Clinton would have been "more of the same" but that's nowhere near as bad as the current accelerated radical path to fascist theocracy.
That's what you should have done - not vote for HC but vote against the nazi clown.
Voting against the greater evil isn't even a novel or unusual voting strategy - given that you'll probably never get a great candidate that you can support without reservation, it makes sense to vote so that you minimise the harm that can be done by any politician. i.e. this should be the default strategy of every citizen.
And then you work to get rid of the electoral colleges and implement a preferential voting system so that third-party votes aren't wasted - if your 1st preference doesn't win, your vote is transferred to your 2nd preference, and then to your 3rd and so on until it eventually ends up with a candidate who has a majority of votes.
You'll probably still end up with something close to a two-party system but the two major parties have to be careful not to alienate too many other voters - which discourages extremist policies and actions. It also leaves open enough space for new parties to arise and gain enough support to eventually displace one of the current major parties (or at least shift their policies in the same direction).
You're right. that would take some super advanced technology. I read about something like that in a really far-fetched futuristic science fiction novel once - I think they called it a "tape recorder" or something like that. The sequel had some nonsensical-sounding "mp3 recorder". Fucking ridiculous, right? The space-detective in it even magically figured out that the bad guys had spliced together words and even phonemes from lots of different recordings to create the phrase "my voice is my password". who could believe absurd shit like that?
You're speaking out of your arse. Free Software never had any kind of business plan, "original" or otherwise. It isn't now and never has been about business - it has always been about software freedom: the right of users to see, modify, and redistribute the code of any software they use...and for anyone they redistribute to to ALSO have those exact same rights to do what they want with it (i.e. you can sell it but you can't stop your customer - or anyone else - from also selling it or giving it away)
If someone makes some money from writing or distributing it, then that's fine but nobody really gives a fuck - that's not and never has been what Free Software is about. It's certainly not part of "the plan".
Every corporation needs some low-level shit-kicker to carry the responsibility and blame (and if you think you're not a shit-kicker, ask yourself "Am I at CEO or Director level or higher?" - if the answer is "No" then you're a shit-kicker and you don't matter. at all).
At the moment, there's lots of these jobs. In the near future, there will be far fewer - almost none - of these liability-fuse jobs, and a near-endless supply of replacements.
gig economy = hustle every day of your (short) working life. and for fuck's sake, have the decency to fuck off and die quickly when age begins shaving 5% or 10% off your hustle speed.
that's a true workers' paradise - according to libertarian useful idiots and other corporate mouthpieces.
But that's theft - from the corporation and from the existing share-holders. And as we all know from the endless propaganda, taxation is theft, so theft is taxation.
Aren't you ignorant Libertarian (in the American psychopathic anarcho-capitalist sense of the word) retards supposed to be against taxation?
We have that in this universe.
You don't have to dream, you can have this right now with ZFS on Linux. And several other filesystems too. It works, there's nothing actually "wrong" with it, but it's a lot less desirable than you think.
Almost every time there's a new kernel release, the ZFS modules won't compile against it. There's usually a delay of a few days to a few weeks before ZoL is patched to compile with the new kernel.
It's a minor hassle, but an annoying one. The features offered by ZFS are more than worth the hassle.
The solution is to not install new kernels until you know for sure that ZFS is updated to work with them.
In debian terms, 'apt-mark hold' the linux-image-* and linux-headers-* packages so that an apt upgrade wont auto-upgrade them. Upgrade them manually with 'apt-get install' after the zfs-dkms & spl-dkms & other packages have been upgraded, and then remember to hold them with apt-mark again.
IMO it's best to also hold all the ZFS-related packages too, and manually upgrade them immediately before manually upgrading the kernel. Then hold them again. Otherwise you could end up with the userland portions of zfs (libs and zfs/zpool/etc utils) that are different (and possibly incompatible) versions to what is running in the kernel. Mostly harmless, most of the time, but not something I want to do with fileystems that contain the bulk of my files.
So, at first your claim was that the point of atheism was to "steal power from god". Now it is to "ridicule older religions as absurd fairy tales".
That's called shifting the goal posts. and it's as bullshit an argument method as the rest of what you wrote.
"God exists, therefore God exists" is not proof of anything, it's a tautology. You don't have to read hundreds of pages of tautological nit-picking to dismiss something as bullshit. You just have to recognise its built-in assumptions and realise that if the premises are bullshit then the conclusions are bullshit.
BTW, don't think i didn't notice the phrase "older religions" you snuck in there, with the implication that atheism is a religion like any other, just a new one.
Atheism is not a religion. Atheism is the rejection of religion, all of them, because religions ARE absurd fairy tales.
Worse, the purpose of those fairy tales is to prop up the existing power structures, to tell people to be content with their lot, because the locally-fashionable divinity/divinities have anointed their rulers with the right to rule - therefore any dissent is not only illegal according to secular laws, it is blasphemy and a crime against the local god(s).
There is no god, or gods. Gods are just stories humans invented to entertain, amuse, scare, and/or control each other.
except for (at least) three major problems that prevent patenting:
You can't patent things, and you can't patent ideas, you can only patent inventions, i.e. specific processes and methods for doing specific things.
And thirdly, you can't patent the obvious. Getting commonly grown plants to produce more useful nutrients by copying the genes that produce those nutrients from one organism to another is completely fucking obvious, not just to an expert in the field but to even the most lightly-informed layman.
It might be possible to patent the specific process of copying the genes from one organism to another (if it's novel enough), but not the result and not the idea of doing so.
It isn't, and they're not the same. Nothing you've written here bears any resemblance to reality or truth. What you've written is a very self-serving piece of bullshit. An algorithm is not a machine, but if you can sucker people into believing that it is, then that justifies patenting software.
This bullshit is propaganda of the same order as the term "intellectual property" - designed to sucker people into believing that copyrights, patents, and trademarks are a) all the same kind of thing, and b) magically akin to physical property and therefore intuitively deserving of the same protection under the law.
That's exactly equivalent to saying "Stealing power from Mithras/Osiris/Thor/Baal/Zeus/Xochipilli/Russell's Teapot/IPU/FSM/other-fictional-entity is rather the point of atheism, isn't it?"
No, the point of atheism is to not be enslaved by absurd fairy tales.
BTW, you religious types ought to be grateful that copyright has only existed for a few hundred years - otherwise your religions would never have survived the copyright-infringement law suits over their origin stories.
Ethel shook her twigs angrily. And Billy just laughed.