Mod this fellow up! Greed isn't even ackowledged in Communist theory. It is integral to Capitalism, and why Capitalism springs up spontaneously in human society.
Capitalist motivation arguably occurs in nature too. Google the bowerbird, whose domestic displays help compete for mates.:)
Meh. This has happend before and its ordinary cyclic behavior. The idea that there is any trend to "civil war" is absurd, since the US has no poverty in Great Depression terms.
The only folks who think the sky is falling haven't been watching the heavens.
Communism is inferior to Capitalism because it DENIES greed as a legitimate motivation, does not offer ANY route to INDIVIDUAL economic advancement (because the group takes all you produce to hand it out to others), and because it CANNOT TOLERATE A PERSONAL RIGHT TO PROPERTY.
Capitalism springs up NATURALLY, and SPONTANEOUSLY in human society. Communism is merely the invention of some pissed-off Germans who wanted to break systems and take stuff.
Communism INHERENTLY requires violent force to TAKE property in order to destroy class distinction. There is no other possible way to do this, and your deliberate failure to mention it is mendacious.
That means the only means to self-advancement is to use government to obtain personal power. THAT requires pretending to support "Communism" while becoming a Commissar or member of another protected, powerful class.
"From each according to his abilities" requires a structure to COERCE such behaviors. The self is worthless, but by a feat of ideological acrobatics the group is somehow worthy to demand and take everything from the individual in order to hand out to "each according to his needs".
"The level of ignorance that people express about how it's been tried and failed just boggles my mind, when it hasn't even been tried once."
Kid, that puppy is dead in the basket. The only way to survive the purge of Capitalists is to be the Bolshevik pulling the trigger at their firing squad, and when one has made that leap why not shoot Mensheviks too? Humans are much more LOGICAL than you give them credit for. Communism is not logical. It is terribly appealing to naive, emotional, simple people.
You are invited to test it by establishing a Commune. Go ahead. Have at it, and keep us informed about your success!
Industrial production is among the very few legit civilian uses of high-powered lasers. Too bad you'll eventually have to deal with the legal fallout from morons playing with them.
It is to be hoped "recreational" idiot buyers only blind themselves, but we know there will eventually be innocent victims.
I hear ya! I've been fighting the move to send my mail by the horribly unreliable (deleted) mail carrier and retain my reliable-over-many-years Manning Post Office service but some bureaucrat decided to hand a few hundred yards of "route" over to (deleted).
Apparently some Post Offices don't run a tight ship and their diversity hires don't actually have to perform their damn jobs. Too bad the "good" Post Office is more likely to be closed or reduced...
As far as the SPECIES is concerned, mass starvation really doesn't matter.
What's missing from the debate (it's taboo to discuss it) is we have no "collective" good and the ONLY limiting factors on human population are Famine, War, Pestilence and Death.
I benefit from the Third World consuming fewer resources, and approve when its denizens kill each other. I don't hear of any mass Slashdotter exodus to go sort out Africa etc, so I'll venture none of you give a shit either.
Nature (hey kids, we don't exist outside it!) is COMPETITIVE and the slow zebra should get eaten.
Conventional tanks do, but HYBRID tanks and AFVs can turn off their engines and "stealth loiter" on battery power with sensors active and weapons ready to fire.
AFV tech isn't static, and batteries are improving.
OLD electric M-113 demo (this was done when SLAB was the only battery game in town):
"Spoken like a true warrior, hiding behind a civilian so the enemy doesn't shoot you."
That works sometimes, and there is no reason at all for unconventional fighters to have rules of war which exclusively function to handicap those who obey them.
The only reason for conventional fighters to have rules of war is to maintain the ritual moral fig leaf. That's a valid reason, but never forget such reasons are situational.
Armed struggle isn't sportsmanship and the idea that it should be is a handicap to be taken advantage of by those smart enough to see beyond it.
""US Government Contracting: Selling useless crap at highly inflated prices to uniformed people for over 200 years."
This is a baby step towards some very necessary tech.
What an enemy can see he can kill, and top-attack ATGW are deadly.
Controlling thermal signature will be vital to survival on the modern battlefield because thernal sights are already so effective they are preferable day or night.
Optical sighting can be disrupted by smoke (of various types), and IR sighting can be disrupted by phosphorous ordnance (phosphorous is far from merely being an incendiary!) but one cannot plaster everything with smoke and phosphorous for obvious reasons.
At this point it's not unreasonable to expect anyone assembling a PC will have access to plenty of other scrounged parts and/or working computers. People throw away good PCs and PCs with salvageable parts every day.
Even an old Windows 98 machine is more than sufficient for downloading all the distros you might wish to sample.
Contrary to your experience, I don't have many driver problems at all with older hardware. Since older hardware is cheap/free, anything I DO have problems with goes on a Winbox.
However, the reason Windows users don't want Linux is SIMPLY that it's not Windows. They wouldn't give a shit if it worked perfectly. That's not on their radar, at all, ever. I can set up nice stable Linux machines all day but users HAVE their invested YEARS of experience in Windows and don't want to throw that away.
"in 2014 hundreds of millions of XP boxes go EOL."
By then they'll be so obsolete it will be time for fresh hardware for those who care, or yet another clean install for those who don't care about EOL (most users).
"And then guys like me will simply strip or dump all those XP boxes and you won't gain shit."
Good, more boxes for me to reload with XP and sell at the flea market. (Tried Linux, no one wants them.)
To end users, "Windows" IS the computer. They have time invested in learning it, and don't NEED to learn anything different. They don't give a fraction of a fuck about what anyone else thinks they should do.
I prefer Linux, but consumers and non-geeks could care less.
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Mod this fellow up!
Greed isn't even ackowledged in Communist theory. It is integral to Capitalism, and why Capitalism springs up spontaneously in human society.
Capitalist motivation arguably occurs in nature too. Google the bowerbird, whose domestic displays help compete for mates. :)
Marx, let's be kind, was an academic wanker who had a Very Appealing theory which could be used to attack People Who Had Power.
"It doesn't seem crazy on its face, though, that people can be conditioned socially to value something other than material wealth."
Not...so....fast....
Translate "material wealth" to "food, clothing, shelter and COMFORT" which are what "wealth" really means.
Meh. This has happend before and its ordinary cyclic behavior. The idea that there is any trend to "civil war" is absurd, since the US has no poverty in Great Depression terms.
The only folks who think the sky is falling haven't been watching the heavens.
Communism is inferior to Capitalism because it DENIES greed as a legitimate motivation, does not offer ANY route to INDIVIDUAL economic advancement (because the group takes all you produce to hand it out to others), and because it CANNOT TOLERATE A PERSONAL RIGHT TO PROPERTY.
Capitalism springs up NATURALLY, and SPONTANEOUSLY in human society. Communism is merely the invention of some pissed-off Germans who wanted to break systems and take stuff.
Communism INHERENTLY requires violent force to TAKE property in order to destroy class distinction. There is no other possible way to do this, and your deliberate failure to mention it is mendacious.
That means the only means to self-advancement is to use government to obtain personal power. THAT requires pretending to support "Communism" while becoming a Commissar or member of another protected, powerful class.
"From each according to his abilities" requires a structure to COERCE such behaviors. The self is worthless, but by a feat of ideological acrobatics the group is somehow worthy to demand and take everything from the individual in order to hand out to "each according to his needs".
"The level of ignorance that people express about how it's been tried and failed just boggles my mind, when it hasn't even been tried once."
Kid, that puppy is dead in the basket. The only way to survive the purge of Capitalists is to be the Bolshevik pulling the trigger at their firing squad, and when one has made that leap why not shoot Mensheviks too? Humans are much more LOGICAL than you give them credit for. Communism is not logical. It is terribly appealing to naive, emotional, simple people.
You are invited to test it by establishing a Commune. Go ahead. Have at it, and keep us informed about your success!
Industrial production is among the very few legit civilian uses of high-powered lasers. Too bad you'll eventually have to deal with the legal fallout from morons playing with them.
It is to be hoped "recreational" idiot buyers only blind themselves, but we know there will eventually be innocent victims.
"Gawd help us all in a couple of years when we're all just good little consumers."
Nah. Just another market cycle. I'm not opting in to this one and therefore don't give a fuck.
"We need to put peoples health above all else."
Precisely why?
I hear ya!
I've been fighting the move to send my mail by the horribly unreliable (deleted) mail carrier and retain my reliable-over-many-years Manning Post Office service but some bureaucrat decided to hand a few hundred yards of "route" over to (deleted).
Apparently some Post Offices don't run a tight ship and their diversity hires don't actually have to perform their damn jobs. Too bad the "good" Post Office is more likely to be closed or reduced...
"Google is destroying computers."
Not mine.
"Imagine if you had to do all your real development and coding within some web application."
Why? I don't nor will I ever.
The idea that other people are competitors is not Politically Correct, even though competition is the norm in Nature.
"It means we're all fucked."
Who are this "we" of which you speak?
As far as the SPECIES is concerned, mass starvation really doesn't matter.
What's missing from the debate (it's taboo to discuss it) is we have no "collective" good and the ONLY limiting factors on human population are Famine, War, Pestilence and Death.
I benefit from the Third World consuming fewer resources, and approve when its denizens kill each other. I don't hear of any mass Slashdotter exodus to go sort out Africa etc, so I'll venture none of you give a shit either.
Nature (hey kids, we don't exist outside it!) is COMPETITIVE and the slow zebra should get eaten.
"Tanks produce a LOT of heat."
Conventional tanks do, but HYBRID tanks and AFVs can turn off their engines and "stealth loiter" on battery power with sensors active and weapons ready to fire.
AFV tech isn't static, and batteries are improving.
OLD electric M-113 demo (this was done when SLAB was the only battery game in town):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbWbkOkTydk
"Spoken like a true warrior, hiding behind a civilian so the enemy doesn't shoot you."
That works sometimes, and there is no reason at all for unconventional fighters to have rules of war which exclusively function to handicap those who obey them.
The only reason for conventional fighters to have rules of war is to maintain the ritual moral fig leaf. That's a valid reason, but never forget such reasons are situational.
Armed struggle isn't sportsmanship and the idea that it should be is a handicap to be taken advantage of by those smart enough to see beyond it.
""US Government Contracting: Selling useless crap at highly inflated prices to uniformed people for over 200 years."
This is a baby step towards some very necessary tech.
What an enemy can see he can kill, and top-attack ATGW are deadly.
Controlling thermal signature will be vital to survival on the modern battlefield because thernal sights are already so effective they are preferable day or night.
Optical sighting can be disrupted by smoke (of various types), and IR sighting can be disrupted by phosphorous ordnance (phosphorous is far from merely being an incendiary!) but one cannot plaster everything with smoke and phosphorous for obvious reasons.
That paper is about as serious as the Daily News.
Submissions linking to it have no place here.
Just build on piles or stilts. Pile driving equipment is simple enough, and the raised housing makes for useful shade underneath.
They have been common in Asia for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
"Not only can you finally ditch that aging Vista or XP machine, with shiny Windows 8 but now you can have a shiny new CPU too!"
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like (everyone else) to subscribe to them.
At this point it's not unreasonable to expect anyone assembling a PC will have access to plenty of other scrounged parts and/or working computers. People throw away good PCs and PCs with salvageable parts every day.
Even an old Windows 98 machine is more than sufficient for downloading all the distros you might wish to sample.
That would be, to descend into the vernacular, "fucking SWEET".
"Now if only we had programmers left who cared about efficiency..."
If only my aunt had a dick she'd be my uncle.
Contrary to your experience, I don't have many driver problems at all with older hardware. Since older hardware is cheap/free, anything I DO have problems with goes on a Winbox.
However, the reason Windows users don't want Linux is SIMPLY that it's not Windows. They wouldn't give a shit if it worked perfectly. That's not on their radar, at all, ever. I can set up nice stable Linux machines all day but users HAVE their invested YEARS of experience in Windows and don't want to throw that away.
"in 2014 hundreds of millions of XP boxes go EOL."
By then they'll be so obsolete it will be time for fresh hardware for those who care, or yet another clean install for those who don't care about EOL (most users).
"And then guys like me will simply strip or dump all those XP boxes and you won't gain shit."
Good, more boxes for me to reload with XP and sell at the flea market. (Tried Linux, no one wants them.)
To end users, "Windows" IS the computer. They have time invested in learning it, and don't NEED to learn anything different. They don't give a fraction of a fuck about what anyone else thinks they should do.
I prefer Linux, but consumers and non-geeks could care less.
"This shit is like drug dealing."
Addicts choose to be addicted. Tough shit.