The files weren't transfered, but they were available, and that's supposed to be the same as distributing?
Of course it's not; it's just the same as broadcasting an open offer to distribute to anyone who asks.
And what's wrong with that? I mean, the police may be pissed by my "Murder-For-Hire" advertisements, but until they actually catch me in the act of killing someone there's nothing they can do about it, right?
Everybody may have seen Hubble's pictures of the Eagle Nebula a million times, but for the first time we'll get to see what it looks like *from the back*!
I just hope they make Google Warp Drive (beta) open source.
And there isn't a finite number of them, ready to "run out" if there are too many applicants. In science and engineering fields, in particular, where continued progress is always "standing on the shoulders of giants", each new discovery or new invention always seems to open up the opportunity to make several further discoveries or inventions.
Perhaps we ought to start subsidizing economics majors as well...
Of course, some of those economics majors will tell you that there are more efficient ways to accomplish such a subsidy. Instead of convoluted schemes to get a certain demographic of would-be science/math/engineering students to become teachers, why not just raise pay for teachers with those degrees? Would it be so horrible if our schools got applicants who have already graduated instead of having to wait for applicants who haven't entered college yet? Would college loans be too hard to get for would-be teachers who knew they had higher paying jobs to look forward to?
...a balance and due consideration of all sides...
Ironically, in the middle of your effort to point out what's wrong with political discussion in the USA, you're encouraging one of the more insidious flaws in mainstream media coverage: the idea that "due consideration" will always be "evenly balanced". Sometimes the right way to "Teach the Controversy" is just to point out the objective facts which make the fringe side of the controversy look stupid, not to fill 50% of your story with flat-earther quotes and title the whole thing "Shape of Earth: Views Differ".
Most online discussion is even worse, since people have ten thousand popular blogs to choose from and so naturally gravitate to the ones that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs - so instead of reading stories that don't challenge our objectively questionable views, we get to read stories that don't challenge any of our views. By this standard, Slashdot's political discussions are actually pretty good - the tech crowd skews more libertarian than average, but because Slashdot is not inherently a political site there's still enough liberals and conservatives and socialists and such in the crowd to make things interesting, most of whom aren't just trolls. The nested comments are lightyears ahead of most sites for encouraging constructive debate, and if you set your threshold to 4 or lower you'll even get to read the most well-written anti-groupthink side of that debate.
Your link says the atmosphere's heat capacity is equivalent to that of the top 3.2m of ocean. We have 361e12 square meters of ocean, so the top 3.2 meters at 1000 kg/m^3 would be about 1.16e18 kilograms of water, which at 4186 J/kg/K gives a total heat capacity of 4.84e21 J/K. So dissipating our hypothetical asteroid's 6e19 J into the whole atmosphere would raise the temperature by about 0.012 K, not 20 K.
Not only did tens of millions of protesters fail to stop the Iraq War, they didn't even stop its authors from being re-elected.
Weblogs and protests share the problem that they are only effective at communicating to people who are already receptive to your cause (and who therefore don't immediately close your webpage or dismiss your marchers as crazies). At least with weblogs you can give those people long, complex arguments linked to supporting evidence. With protests you'd better hope that your message can be effectively conveyed by 20 letters on a cardboard sign.
The person you answered here said nothing about Orwell or Rand, but did make some very important and disturbing factual points about non-fictional events, none of which you responded to.
If you make no statement of copyright it's automatically "all rights reserved" (in the US). You can give copies of code you write to anyone you want with no explicit license.
I think the grandparent post meant, "If you want to distribute someone else's code, you need a license, or you are in violation of copyright law." Even that statement could be nitpicked, since there is software out there which was distributed with no statement of copyright decades ago when an explicit statement was necessary, and there are things like bare bones header files which may not be copyrightable, but it's basically correct.
Don't you think it's kind of funny that everyone calls aluminum foil "tin foil" and accepts aluminum foil as a substitute for tin foil, even though they're two completely different metals? It's all part of the brainwashing, my friend. THEY know that our protective helmets won't work unless made from real tin.
Bush just didn't explain that it was the same sort of "honor among thieves" that keeps mobsters from ratting each other out.
Someone explain to me again why impeachment is "off the table"? Why, when Republicans have clearly gone nuts, do the Democrats not have any?
I guess it's possible that most Democrats just aren't any more honorable than most Republicans - why take the political risk of punishing politicization of the bureaucracy and the destruction of checks and balances, when you'll be poised to exploit those new powers yourselves in a few years?
Before the big bang? That was back when God was in college.
So God is in grad school now? And He picked a research project that took ten billion years to start generating really interesting results? Man, I thought *my* thesis was taking too long...
Yes: "modifying the next version for the console audience" is, in fact, the computer game equivalent of adding Ted McGinley to your cast. Brace yourselves for "Civilization: Invisible War"!
Like the other poster said, I think your warehouse analogy only works for closed source voting machines.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an "open source voting machine", because there are no computers that execute only human-readable source code. Making it harder to slip trojans in the source code is better than nothing, but there's still no way to be sure that "the" source code is actually in charge of the voting machines. We've already seen electronic voting machines caught running non-certified software; they can get away with it again.
Here's your open source warehouse analogy: you give the people in the warehouse a set of instructions that have been carefully inspected to ensure that following them to the letter will result in an accurate count. So what? Even if there are no loopholes, how do you prove that everyone inside will obey your instructions?
"Open Source" is not a trademark or brand name. It's a philosophy that's free to be interpreted by anyone. Including the user.
If it was a philosophy free to be interpreted by the user, nobody would have a problem with companies mislabeling their licenses. I would simply interpret those licenses to let me exercise the freedoms that have been defined as requirements of "Free Software" and "Open Source" for decades, and I would be happy.
I don't think they would be happy, though. I think that they'd want to enforce *their* redefinition of "open source" in court, and prohibit me from exercising the rights granted by the common interpretations of the term. Otherwise they would have used a real open source license to begin with.
Apparently it's okay to attempt to monopolise a market,
If I tell you that this sentence isn't intelligent, it's not because I'm trying to monopolize the "market" for the word "intelligent", it's because the word "intelligent" has a meaning which does not apply here. It's similar with the phrase "open source". You are free to write software for any market you wish, publish it under any license you wish. You are not free to attempt to deceive your customers by describing your license inaccurately.
Hmm... Slashdot thinks that my description of a typical Diablo game violates their "lameness filter". I agree, but why should my post be punished for that? It's Blizzard's fault.
Too many repetitions of "carbon dating said some rock was a trillion years old!" have soured me on this tactic, so if you want to bring in "the last oil field we found" as evidence, you're going to have to recognize that oil fields are found all the time and identify yours a little more precisely.
Your own anecdotes are more amusingly distorted than most, too. Usually creationists at least try to get the Bible right. Seven versus ten plagues isn't as big an error as years versus millions of years, but whereas the latter error is just sad, the former is kinda funny.
I'm surprised nobody's figured it out yet - the whole character of "Jack Thompson" is a Penny Arcade publicity stunt. The "John Smith" style name and the bitingly satirical parody of "think of the children" paranoia should have been enough to make everyone suspicious, but even if that wasn't enough, the whole scam should have been obvious after they hired that ranting homeless guy to play "Jack" on TV. I guess all you have to do is dress a crazy guy up in a suit and the news media figures he must deserve a microphone too.
I like the Lord of the Rings as much as the next geek, but I also know a bit about literature and I understand that there is no hidden message.
The themes include the corrupting allure of power, the value of mercy and sacrifice, the natural but dangerous fear of death, the conflict between industry and nature, the development of maturity through struggle, the inevitability of loss and change... I'm sure there are others, but it's been years since I read the books. I don't know how many of those messages count as "hidden" (and in fact I'm pretty sure some were quite overt), but if they're standard fare in the modern "run of the mill adventure tale" that's probably because so many modern adventures (and "high fantasy" in general) borrow heavily from Tolkien.
It is NOT a mediation on power, and this is underscored by the fact that Frodo is so weak. Unlike Bilbo, Frodo rarely used the power of the ring, and when he did he just endangered himself.
Umm.. isn't that exactly what makes LotR partly a meditation on power? The heavy (although sometimes inconsistent) message that lust for power can be so powerful and so dangerous that only an innocent can be trusted with it for any length of time? Frodo was physically weak, but spiritually strong: he managed to resist completely giving in to the ring through nearly the whole journey, and when he was weak enough to succumb to power it kept creating more problems than it solved.
You say you're an English major? What do you write about classic fantasy stories? "Oedipus can't be a tragic hero; he was just some king who screwed up and got his family killed!" If you don't understand the messages that Tolkien blatantly spelled out for the readers, what makes you so confident that you're not missing any hidden themes?
The most powerful characters in the series were the antagonists, and like any run of the mill adventure tale, it's about the weaker good guys standing together to take on the more powerful evil nemesis.
Isn't that itself a moral message? That good can overcome even a more powerful evil because "good guys" are capable of uniting whereas evil characters have to constantly worry about their allies betraying them? This isn't exactly PhD-level sociology, I'll grant you, but it's more meaningful than the average World of Warcraft quest.
If you don't have a port open to the outside world, the Cylons are not getting into your network.
Didn't the miniseries plot hang on the fact that the Cylons had used social engineering (i.e. Baltar) to get their Trojan code into stand-alone computer systems? Not only is hacking a non-networked military system plausible enough for fiction, it's happened in real life too.
Oh, but pay no attention to the jerks telling you that internal consistency isn't important in soft science fiction. I don't care how many of the rules of the real universe you suspend; you still owe it to your audience to make your fantasy universe rational enough for the plot to make sense.
We probably wouldn't agree about the role of regulation in the telecom industry - you're right that this particular subsidy isn't exactly propping up every phone company, but most utilities depended on government intervention for their creation: you simply can't lay a wire, pipe, or road from point A to point Z without stepping on a lot of property rights at points B through Y.
I do think that in general most governments (in particular the US federal government) aren't nearly as concerned with property rights as they should be. So if you're going to fight that problem, would you please try to do so in the tone of your last message, rather than the tone of the previous few? Responding to perceived deception and injustice rudely is natural, but if you make the effort to be polite you're more likely to convince others to come around to your way of thinking. That doesn't mean ceasing your opposition; you'd be doing just the opposite by making that opposition more effective.
Thank you for the apology, by the way. I doubt Deagol is coming back to this aging thread to read it, but you've at least convinced me that pseudonymous message boards don't have to be corrosive of civility.:-) I sometimes have to fight (and often succumb to) the urge to be stubborn and combative in an argument, and it's encouraging to see that urge defeated so thoroughly.
Your attempted syllogism here (Deagol said something false; people who say false things are liars; therefore Deagol is a liar) relies on two assumptions, both of which are false. Deagol's statement was not false, and making incorrect statements without an intent to deceive is not lying.
If phone companies pay into a fund, and then that money goes directly out to other phone companies, how is that a government subsidy?
That's how every government subsidy works. A government gives some groups money, money which it gets by levying taxes on other groups.
It's not the best example of a subsidy to come up with in the context of Net Neutrality, though - perhaps in rural areas the limited telecommunications choices are due to federal government subsidies of a single provider, but I think in densely populated areas the most common causes of limited broadband choices are local government-granted monopolies on telecom services and/or on cabling right-of-way. In sparsely-populated areas I'd also suspect the natural monopoly created by high initial capital investment requirements is a big problem; it's hard to know just how the USF affects this without knowing how they decide to allocate money.
I'm not interested in trying to get along with people who lie or hate-monger to further their political aims.
Deagol gave an informative, objective answer to a reasonable question. He kept any nefarious "political aims" quiet, there have been no lies involved, and the only hate has come in your unwarranted insults.
"let's all hate xyz-group so we can have your support to oppress them and steal their money" is dehumanizing, morally despicable, and evil. Pardon me for seeming "rude" in opposing it.
You're currently trying to deny the existance of a seven billion dollar tax which is levied on consumers to subsidize telecom companies. Complaints about "stealing" in this context are quite ironic.
It is a tax paid by phone companies and passed on to their customers (like taxes paid by companies always are).
Where do you think that tax money goes next? It gets paid out to telecom companies who build lines in rural areas and who lower prices for low-income customers. See this Forbes article on the multibillion dollar program, for example. This was alluded to in the previous link, even in the part you quoted (but didn't boldface), so not only was your "Did you even read the thing you linked to?" question rude, it was also hypocritical. Your previous "You are a liar" statement wasn't hypocritical, but it was similarly ill-mannered. You might want to apologize to Deagol; antisocial behavior can be habit-forming if you aren't careful.
Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
We could try that, but since all the religions I've seen got lots of the Little Answers wrong, I'm reluctant to trust any of them on the Big ones.
How will this affect your behaviour today?
Ironically, in this very Slashdot story which you think shouldn't affect anyone's life, we find offhand references to objective evidence which contradicted the creation stories of most of those major religions. I know my day-to-day life would be much better if followers of those Religions realized that many of their scriptures are metaphors at best.
Slashdot Mirror
The files weren't transfered, but they were available, and that's supposed to be the same as distributing?
Of course it's not; it's just the same as broadcasting an open offer to distribute to anyone who asks.
And what's wrong with that? I mean, the police may be pissed by my "Murder-For-Hire" advertisements, but until they actually catch me in the act of killing someone there's nothing they can do about it, right?
Everybody may have seen Hubble's pictures of the Eagle Nebula a million times, but for the first time we'll get to see what it looks like *from the back*!
I just hope they make Google Warp Drive (beta) open source.
And there isn't a finite number of them, ready to "run out" if there are too many applicants. In science and engineering fields, in particular, where continued progress is always "standing on the shoulders of giants", each new discovery or new invention always seems to open up the opportunity to make several further discoveries or inventions.
Perhaps we ought to start subsidizing economics majors as well...
Of course, some of those economics majors will tell you that there are more efficient ways to accomplish such a subsidy. Instead of convoluted schemes to get a certain demographic of would-be science/math/engineering students to become teachers, why not just raise pay for teachers with those degrees? Would it be so horrible if our schools got applicants who have already graduated instead of having to wait for applicants who haven't entered college yet? Would college loans be too hard to get for would-be teachers who knew they had higher paying jobs to look forward to?
...a balance and due consideration of all sides...
Ironically, in the middle of your effort to point out what's wrong with political discussion in the USA, you're encouraging one of the more insidious flaws in mainstream media coverage: the idea that "due consideration" will always be "evenly balanced". Sometimes the right way to "Teach the Controversy" is just to point out the objective facts which make the fringe side of the controversy look stupid, not to fill 50% of your story with flat-earther quotes and title the whole thing "Shape of Earth: Views Differ".
Most online discussion is even worse, since people have ten thousand popular blogs to choose from and so naturally gravitate to the ones that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs - so instead of reading stories that don't challenge our objectively questionable views, we get to read stories that don't challenge any of our views. By this standard, Slashdot's political discussions are actually pretty good - the tech crowd skews more libertarian than average, but because Slashdot is not inherently a political site there's still enough liberals and conservatives and socialists and such in the crowd to make things interesting, most of whom aren't just trolls. The nested comments are lightyears ahead of most sites for encouraging constructive debate, and if you set your threshold to 4 or lower you'll even get to read the most well-written anti-groupthink side of that debate.
Your link says the atmosphere's heat capacity is equivalent to that of the top 3.2m of ocean. We have 361e12 square meters of ocean, so the top 3.2 meters at 1000 kg/m^3 would be about 1.16e18 kilograms of water, which at 4186 J/kg/K gives a total heat capacity of 4.84e21 J/K. So dissipating our hypothetical asteroid's 6e19 J into the whole atmosphere would raise the temperature by about 0.012 K, not 20 K.
Not only did tens of millions of protesters fail to stop the Iraq War, they didn't even stop its authors from being re-elected.
Weblogs and protests share the problem that they are only effective at communicating to people who are already receptive to your cause (and who therefore don't immediately close your webpage or dismiss your marchers as crazies). At least with weblogs you can give those people long, complex arguments linked to supporting evidence. With protests you'd better hope that your message can be effectively conveyed by 20 letters on a cardboard sign.
What if, to gain the benefits of a great person, you had to play that person and complete a short RPG style quest in the civilization you've created?
Yes, that would certainly fix my number one complaint about Civilization: it's not time-consuming enough.
The person you answered here said nothing about Orwell or Rand, but did make some very important and disturbing factual points about non-fictional events, none of which you responded to.
If you make no statement of copyright it's automatically "all rights reserved" (in the US). You can give copies of code you write to anyone you want with no explicit license.
I think the grandparent post meant, "If you want to distribute someone else's code, you need a license, or you are in violation of copyright law." Even that statement could be nitpicked, since there is software out there which was distributed with no statement of copyright decades ago when an explicit statement was necessary, and there are things like bare bones header files which may not be copyrightable, but it's basically correct.
Don't you think it's kind of funny that everyone calls aluminum foil "tin foil" and accepts aluminum foil as a substitute for tin foil, even though they're two completely different metals? It's all part of the brainwashing, my friend. THEY know that our protective helmets won't work unless made from real tin.
Bush just didn't explain that it was the same sort of "honor among thieves" that keeps mobsters from ratting each other out.
Someone explain to me again why impeachment is "off the table"? Why, when Republicans have clearly gone nuts, do the Democrats not have any?
I guess it's possible that most Democrats just aren't any more honorable than most Republicans - why take the political risk of punishing politicization of the bureaucracy and the destruction of checks and balances, when you'll be poised to exploit those new powers yourselves in a few years?
Before the big bang? That was back when God was in college.
So God is in grad school now? And He picked a research project that took ten billion years to start generating really interesting results? Man, I thought *my* thesis was taking too long...
Can a video/computer game jump the shark?
Yes: "modifying the next version for the console audience" is, in fact, the computer game equivalent of adding Ted McGinley to your cast. Brace yourselves for "Civilization: Invisible War"!
Someone almost left Adult Only material on the internet!
Like the other poster said, I think your warehouse analogy only works for closed source voting machines.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as an "open source voting machine", because there are no computers that execute only human-readable source code. Making it harder to slip trojans in the source code is better than nothing, but there's still no way to be sure that "the" source code is actually in charge of the voting machines. We've already seen electronic voting machines caught running non-certified software; they can get away with it again.
Here's your open source warehouse analogy: you give the people in the warehouse a set of instructions that have been carefully inspected to ensure that following them to the letter will result in an accurate count. So what? Even if there are no loopholes, how do you prove that everyone inside will obey your instructions?
"Open Source" is not a trademark or brand name. It's a philosophy that's free to be interpreted by anyone. Including the user.
If it was a philosophy free to be interpreted by the user, nobody would have a problem with companies mislabeling their licenses. I would simply interpret those licenses to let me exercise the freedoms that have been defined as requirements of "Free Software" and "Open Source" for decades, and I would be happy.
I don't think they would be happy, though. I think that they'd want to enforce *their* redefinition of "open source" in court, and prohibit me from exercising the rights granted by the common interpretations of the term. Otherwise they would have used a real open source license to begin with.
Apparently it's okay to attempt to monopolise a market,
If I tell you that this sentence isn't intelligent, it's not because I'm trying to monopolize the "market" for the word "intelligent", it's because the word "intelligent" has a meaning which does not apply here. It's similar with the phrase "open source". You are free to write software for any market you wish, publish it under any license you wish. You are not free to attempt to deceive your customers by describing your license inaccurately.
click click click click click click click click click click click click
Hmm... Slashdot thinks that my description of a typical Diablo game violates their "lameness filter". I agree, but why should my post be punished for that? It's Blizzard's fault.
Too many repetitions of "carbon dating said some rock was a trillion years old!" have soured me on this tactic, so if you want to bring in "the last oil field we found" as evidence, you're going to have to recognize that oil fields are found all the time and identify yours a little more precisely.
Your own anecdotes are more amusingly distorted than most, too. Usually creationists at least try to get the Bible right. Seven versus ten plagues isn't as big an error as years versus millions of years, but whereas the latter error is just sad, the former is kinda funny.
I'm surprised nobody's figured it out yet - the whole character of "Jack Thompson" is a Penny Arcade publicity stunt. The "John Smith" style name and the bitingly satirical parody of "think of the children" paranoia should have been enough to make everyone suspicious, but even if that wasn't enough, the whole scam should have been obvious after they hired that ranting homeless guy to play "Jack" on TV. I guess all you have to do is dress a crazy guy up in a suit and the news media figures he must deserve a microphone too.
I like the Lord of the Rings as much as the next geek, but I also know a bit about literature and I understand that there is no hidden message.
The themes include the corrupting allure of power, the value of mercy and sacrifice, the natural but dangerous fear of death, the conflict between industry and nature, the development of maturity through struggle, the inevitability of loss and change... I'm sure there are others, but it's been years since I read the books. I don't know how many of those messages count as "hidden" (and in fact I'm pretty sure some were quite overt), but if they're standard fare in the modern "run of the mill adventure tale" that's probably because so many modern adventures (and "high fantasy" in general) borrow heavily from Tolkien.
It is NOT a mediation on power, and this is underscored by the fact that Frodo is so weak. Unlike Bilbo, Frodo rarely used the power of the ring, and when he did he just endangered himself.
Umm.. isn't that exactly what makes LotR partly a meditation on power? The heavy (although sometimes inconsistent) message that lust for power can be so powerful and so dangerous that only an innocent can be trusted with it for any length of time? Frodo was physically weak, but spiritually strong: he managed to resist completely giving in to the ring through nearly the whole journey, and when he was weak enough to succumb to power it kept creating more problems than it solved.
You say you're an English major? What do you write about classic fantasy stories? "Oedipus can't be a tragic hero; he was just some king who screwed up and got his family killed!" If you don't understand the messages that Tolkien blatantly spelled out for the readers, what makes you so confident that you're not missing any hidden themes?
The most powerful characters in the series were the antagonists, and like any run of the mill adventure tale, it's about the weaker good guys standing together to take on the more powerful evil nemesis.
Isn't that itself a moral message? That good can overcome even a more powerful evil because "good guys" are capable of uniting whereas evil characters have to constantly worry about their allies betraying them? This isn't exactly PhD-level sociology, I'll grant you, but it's more meaningful than the average World of Warcraft quest.
If you don't have a port open to the outside world, the Cylons are not getting into your network.
Didn't the miniseries plot hang on the fact that the Cylons had used social engineering (i.e. Baltar) to get their Trojan code into stand-alone computer systems? Not only is hacking a non-networked military system plausible enough for fiction, it's happened in real life too.
Oh, but pay no attention to the jerks telling you that internal consistency isn't important in soft science fiction. I don't care how many of the rules of the real universe you suspend; you still owe it to your audience to make your fantasy universe rational enough for the plot to make sense.
We probably wouldn't agree about the role of regulation in the telecom industry - you're right that this particular subsidy isn't exactly propping up every phone company, but most utilities depended on government intervention for their creation: you simply can't lay a wire, pipe, or road from point A to point Z without stepping on a lot of property rights at points B through Y.
:-) I sometimes have to fight (and often succumb to) the urge to be stubborn and combative in an argument, and it's encouraging to see that urge defeated so thoroughly.
I do think that in general most governments (in particular the US federal government) aren't nearly as concerned with property rights as they should be. So if you're going to fight that problem, would you please try to do so in the tone of your last message, rather than the tone of the previous few? Responding to perceived deception and injustice rudely is natural, but if you make the effort to be polite you're more likely to convince others to come around to your way of thinking. That doesn't mean ceasing your opposition; you'd be doing just the opposite by making that opposition more effective.
Thank you for the apology, by the way. I doubt Deagol is coming back to this aging thread to read it, but you've at least convinced me that pseudonymous message boards don't have to be corrosive of civility.
He is a liar.
Your attempted syllogism here (Deagol said something false; people who say false things are liars; therefore Deagol is a liar) relies on two assumptions, both of which are false. Deagol's statement was not false, and making incorrect statements without an intent to deceive is not lying.
If phone companies pay into a fund, and then that money goes directly out to other phone companies, how is that a government subsidy?
That's how every government subsidy works. A government gives some groups money, money which it gets by levying taxes on other groups.
It's not the best example of a subsidy to come up with in the context of Net Neutrality, though - perhaps in rural areas the limited telecommunications choices are due to federal government subsidies of a single provider, but I think in densely populated areas the most common causes of limited broadband choices are local government-granted monopolies on telecom services and/or on cabling right-of-way. In sparsely-populated areas I'd also suspect the natural monopoly created by high initial capital investment requirements is a big problem; it's hard to know just how the USF affects this without knowing how they decide to allocate money.
I'm not interested in trying to get along with people who lie or hate-monger to further their political aims.
Deagol gave an informative, objective answer to a reasonable question. He kept any nefarious "political aims" quiet, there have been no lies involved, and the only hate has come in your unwarranted insults.
"let's all hate xyz-group so we can have your support to oppress them and steal their money" is dehumanizing, morally despicable, and evil. Pardon me for seeming "rude" in opposing it.
You're currently trying to deny the existance of a seven billion dollar tax which is levied on consumers to subsidize telecom companies. Complaints about "stealing" in this context are quite ironic.
It is a tax paid by phone companies and passed on to their customers (like taxes paid by companies always are).
Where do you think that tax money goes next? It gets paid out to telecom companies who build lines in rural areas and who lower prices for low-income customers. See this Forbes article on the multibillion dollar program, for example. This was alluded to in the previous link, even in the part you quoted (but didn't boldface), so not only was your "Did you even read the thing you linked to?" question rude, it was also hypocritical. Your previous "You are a liar" statement wasn't hypocritical, but it was similarly ill-mannered. You might want to apologize to Deagol; antisocial behavior can be habit-forming if you aren't careful.
Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
We could try that, but since all the religions I've seen got lots of the Little Answers wrong, I'm reluctant to trust any of them on the Big ones.
How will this affect your behaviour today?
Ironically, in this very Slashdot story which you think shouldn't affect anyone's life, we find offhand references to objective evidence which contradicted the creation stories of most of those major religions. I know my day-to-day life would be much better if followers of those Religions realized that many of their scriptures are metaphors at best.