By this standard, the price of milk is part of your national defense strategy.
Yes, ensuring that your population gets food in wartime is an extremely important part of a defensive strategy. Failing at it means you've pretty much already lost.
The US isn't as bad as some, but US national debt is approaching $140,000 per taxpayer.
How much of that debt is owned by those very same taxpayers? Because owing money to yourself isn't going to make anyone bankrupt, it's just an accounting problem. Owing money to outsiders is real debt, but even there debts denominated in dollars can be paid by printing more - which will cause inflation to act as effective taxation, but of course only for the poor who don't make enough to invest and must keep their money as cash. So business as usual.
* So - Does this make "King Billy" (I call him that out of respect, NOT ridicule & I have for years) some 'evil guy'? No.
Most kings in history are parasites who contribute nothing but loot ever greater amounts of wealth for themselves, heedless of the carnage they cause in their quest for self-glorification. But go ahead and express your respect for brutal oppression and Bill Gates in the same sentence - I guess he can't expect much from minimum-wage astroturfers.
A company is a group of people who pool their money to start some sort of enterprise.
No, it isn't. Those people would be investors who'll own the resulting company, but the company itself is simply legal fiction.
Any organization made up of people have free speech rights.
An organization made of people is not a person, any more than a house made of planks is a forest. The whole notion is completely ridiculous.
Not that it really matters in this case, since Verizon's claims would be incorrect even if it was Joe Verizon. After all, the whole deal with Net Neutrality is that companies want to sell Internet access and then not hold their end of the deal, so NN tries to force them to.
The "corporations shouldn't have rights" is a load of horseshit that idiots like you perpetuate in one big circle jerk, demanding that those people who comprise corporations support your bitching.
You seem agitated. Do you have some kind of personal stake at this - money invested to Verizon, perhaps?
Water table shoots up, even if only 32cm, and you WILL lose houses nominally on dry land because they're not designed for that.
Relax, it won't do that. It's just the salt water that'll shoot up; the fresh water will keep receding as before, and probably faster due to the hotter climate and thus greater need.
By 2112, everything from Florida to the middle of North Carolina will be an uninhabited, uninhabitable lost land, barren of all life. Nothing will survive there.
On the contrary, I expect there to be several developing ecosystems there at that time. They simply won't include humans. Except that we are the most adaptabale things on this planet, and will figure out some way to over-exploit and fuck them up too. So again, relax.
Ask the Greeks how that is working out for them. Note that all of Europe, perhaps absent Germany and the Nordic countries, is on the same track.
There is a big difference between FEELING wealthy due to spending borrowed money and BEING wealthy due to production and hard work.
Dunno about Germany, but the Nordic countries put a huge emphasis on welfare, rather than "hard work". Of course welfare translates to healthy, educated and ambitious population that's happy to pay its taxes, which in turn translates to prosperity. So I guess the lesson is that a society that invests in itself, or where everyone is blowing to a single coal, is a succesful society, which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, seeing how it's true for all other entities.
Just the Mediterranean. The problem is the Euro: countries who's economy is based on exporting industrial products are helped by it because the other countries drag the value of their currency down, and those other countries - who's economy is typically based on tourism - are harmed because the industrial countries drag their currency up. The result is a trade imbalance within the EU, and those usually end up with someone bankrupt.
This could all be solved easily if all the countries got their own currencies back and let them float freely relative to each other, in which case the imbalances would tend to re-balance themselves. We could even retain the Euro as something all the central banks are guaranteed to buy at current market value in exchange of the country's own currency. As is, the solution we are doing now is simply moving money from the industrial north to the tourist south, which works somewhat but makes the northerners angry and demanding austerity from the south, which in turn makes the south suffer even more.
In any case, this is a completely different case from the US, which really is bankrupt as a whole as a result of decades of mismanagement and several extremely costly wars. Oh, and it's also plagued by a two-party system where one party is a bunch of spineless wimps, while the other is a bunch of crazy religiously zealous sodomites who worship Satan in all but name (pick an issue, any issue; the Republicans will always be on whatever side gets most people screwed over, and specifically thrown in prison, not to mention glorify greed and selfishness) while having a monomaniacal obsession with homosexuality even the most obsessive pervert would be jealous of. In short, it's a miracle it has taken this long for you to begin collapsing, and you won't be rising again anytime soon.
Which is unfortunate, since it leaves China as the next superpower.
An ad hominem at the very first line. We're on to a good start.
I can't think of any other reason you would react so violently to someone simply pointing some simple fiscal truths.
Violently? Please explain: what is violent in the parent post?
Also, the grandparent didn't point out any "fiscal truths", besides the obvious one that burying cables takes money - yet this is exactly what was done to water pipes and such, so obviously it's doable.
There is a shit ton of lines from 100s of years of infrastructure build out done way before deregulation.
There is unlikely to be 100s of years of wired infrastructure, seeing how the first large-scale (ninety customers!) electricity distribution network switched on in 1882, or 140 years ago.
Yet morons like you expect them to magically get all the lines buried in a matter of decades. Oh...and buy the way, not raising your rates while doing so.
What would be your time estimate, then, and what do you base it on? Besides your apparent confusion that the electric grid has been around for "100s" of years, I mean?
The rest of your pathetic post is merely warmed over OWS crap.
Insisting on long-term planning is "OWS crap"? Either you're a fan or have pretty weird priorities.
Why don't you just stick an M-80 in your mouth and save us from any more of your drivel.
Ah, I guess you were projecting when you claimed that the parent post was violent.
That doesn't make sense, why would anyone keep staff who work maybe only 3 weeks a year?
Why do you pay for a fire insurance, despite your office not burning down most of the time? It's the cost of doing business, that's why.
If anything, there should be contractors who can soak up random spikes in demand.
That only works if there's a random spike here and another one there at another time. It doesn't work if there's no spikes for a long time, then suddenly a spike everywhere at once. You'll still end up paying for staff all year round, you just do it by paying a huge lump sum when there's emergency, rather than a predictable sum each month. That's not good for business, since you'll need to keep that money at hand at all times rather than invest it, and hope that you've guessed correctly about the size of the next disaster.
Or you could just hire all the millions of unemployed people to dig and fill trenches and throw a power cable there inbetween these steps. It would solve this problem once and for all and kickstart the economy as a bonus, all without requiring people to buy ridiculously large, expensive and dangerous batteries.
Call shenanigans all you like, but Dell specifically changed from calling them laptops to notebooks after a German customer sued for the 3rd degree burns he sustained to his nether regions.
3rd degree burns would require the laptop to catch fire. While that's certainly possible, I'm pretty sure that simply renaming them notebooks would be insufficient to avoid liability in case one does.
As I understand it, this issue of control over property you own is the main difference between capitalism and fascism.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
In other words, in capitalism the people (or aristocracy or whatever) controls the government, which sets the conditions the corporations operate in, thus allowing the people (at least in theory) to set up incentives so that they'll further the public good. In fascism, the corporations and the government merge, and the entire state becomes in effect one giant corporation with no oversight whatsoever. A fascist state treats its citizens exactly like a corporation treats its employees: they're cogs in a machine, and if they get redundant or start causing trouble, it gets rid of them.
Obviously a fascist state is not going to respect the property rights of its citizens any more than their other rights, but that's a symptom, not the cause.
I seem to remember other search engine aggregators that even predated google.
I'm pretty sure using multiple sources and aggregating the results predates the Internet, the printing press, and possibly even civilization. In fact, given how bacteria exchange plasmids and are thus capable of aggregating genes from multiple sources, it might even predate multicellular life.
If you could use all the energy you wanted but have zero environmental impact, I'm pretty sure the greens would care less about how much you use.
But you can't. Energy production has an environmental impact, and the more you use the greater the impact is. So how is your claim relevant, even if it was true?
Most of the 'deadly sins' are wrong for reasons which should be deducable from similar basic axioms of morality by anyone willing to expend the effort. From that we can conclude that liberalism/progressivism/socialism/whatever it calls itself today is also wrong since it is based on declaring envy a virtue and murder goes hand in hand with it.
Socialism isn't based on declaring envy a virtue, it's based on a desire for liberation from economic oppression - it's selling point is "you have nothing to lose but your chains", not "kill the rich". Capitalism, on the other hand, does explicitly declare greed a virtue. Which, of course, was what caused said oppression and the birth of socialism in the first place. And now the right wing is desperately trying to convince the serfs to labour for the lords for table scraps in the hopes of one day becoming a lord living off of serf's labours themselves, rather than improving the position of the serfs, such as how much of the fruits of their labour they should get to keep.
Still, the Republicans making a big deal of sin when the entire party is made of sodomites does make for good but very dark comedy.
As usual Slashdot puts up any and all propaganda that makes anyone but radical leftists look like lunatics.
Nope, that would be the GOPs own platform, which the grandparent quoted. I'll emphasize the parts quoted in the summary: "Knowledge-Based Education â" We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the studentâ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
And here's the Slashdot summary which you claim misrepresents it: "Alarmingly, they openly state that they oppose schools teaching critical thinking, on the grounds that it may challenge 'student's fixed beliefs' and undermine 'parental authority.'"
If simply quoting a politician makes them look like a lunatic, that's their fault, not a conspiracy.
Now all of the sudden anyone who opposes the twisted and mangled brainwashing that is labeled "logic" or "critical thinking" is instantly a right-wing extremist Nazi who needs to be "volunteered" for a good liberal "reeducation sensitivity training course".
And here you're doing a pretty good job of making yourself look like a lunatic, again without any help from the "radical leftists" or anyone else.
However I'm also a realist and know for a fact that oil spills will eventually occur even with the most stringent regulations, so when people suggest drilling in the polar regions, or the coral sea, the great barrier reef, etc, no amount of "we will be careful" is enough to convince me that the risk is worth the gain.
That implies that either the arctic etc have infinite value, or that the increased supply of oil has zero or negative value. Neither is true, as far as most people are concerned. Consequently, your "nothing will convince me" tells them that your opinion should be simply ignored, since it's irrational from their point of view.
Having closed-caption movies is not a natural right. The rights referred to are rather more fundamental than that: life and liberty being the primary two. A disabled person has a natural right to be secure in their life; they do not have a natural right to have a wheelchair ramp leading into every business in town.
"Natural right" means a right some prominent philosopher really liked having. Nature itself doesn't respect your right to life, should it encounter you in the form of, say, a hungry bear. So saying that something is a natural right is not as impressive as you seem to think it is. Also, a natural right is not inalienable - you can lose your liberty, not just for infringing on someone else's rights but also for smoking pot. Finally, whether you are shot to death or starve to death you're not alive either way, so either your right to life puts obligations on other people beyond simply not murdering you, or we should rephrase it as the right to not be killed, and the same goes for the right to liberty; but as long as they stay as they are, arguing whether closed captions on videos should join social security and wheelchair ramps as manifestations of said obligations is arguing about details, not principles.
Real example: A third-floor restaurant in a historic old building that only has stairs, and has no place for an elevator. The ADA forced it to close. Just who is served by that? How did disabled folks benefit?
Perhaps you could provide a link, so that we may see for ourselves just what happened and what, if anything, the ADA has to say as an answer to your questions? Because "entity X did something bad somewhere" is not a useful form of argument for anyone except bullshit artists, and really needs to die.
In this case, Netflix may be required to stop distributing video content that does not have closed captions.
Or it could simply caption them. Which would be a simple and cheap operation even if the original source didn't include subtitles, which it almost certainly did, making it utterly trivial.
That is cold, hard reality.
Reality is neither cold and hard nor soft and warm. When you start adding such adjectives to it, you're confusing your own subjective interpretation of reality with reality itself. And these specific adjectives - "cold" and "hard" - are usually used simply as an excuse to justify having said qualities yourself. Which is pathetic.
so you do think the Louvre should be forced to provide a Mona Lisa in braille, then? As was said, a ramp is a minimal expense - very minimal expense, actually.
As it happens, providing Mona Lisa in the form of, say, an etched surface - it can't be provided in braille, since it's a painting and braille is an alphabet, assuming we don't repurpose AAlib or something - would likely be far cheaper than building a ramp.
It's not reasonable to expect a record store to make captioned versions of every LP they sell, however.
Don't most records come with printed lyrics? So record stores seem to consider it reasonable.
Eating is necessary. Watching a movie is not.
Partaking in culture is necessary. It doesn't necessarily need to come in the form of movies, but it does need to come in some form.
And as said - the audio is part of the experience. Not all art can be enjoyed by everyone, that's just how it is.
But audio is not all of the experience, so this is irrelevant. And besides, since DVDs and Blurays already include captioning, Netflix not doing so would require them to deliberately remove it, which crosses the boundary from lazy apathy into active malice.
But requiring the service to cache every movie twice is kinda not reasonable from an expense point since that, by definition, doubles the required resources.
Storage space is cheap, it's the network connection that costs - and that cost is dependent on the amount of usage, not on the amount of content. Besides, don't most (all?) video streaming formats support a separate subtext channel (or several), making the extra resources needed for providing them amount to a rounding error?
You can't lie about agreeing to a Eula - you can only click on a button without agreeing, in which case you usually have no rights to the software in question, which makes every single use of the software copyright infringement.
Wouldn't that make the original sale fraud? Imagine if I sold you a coffee maker, then when you opened the box you found another box and a note informing you that opening the inner box means you're bound to some extra terms - the very best I could hope for would be that you'd ignore the whole thing as a practical joke, rather than rise a stink. But somehow this kind of ridiculous shit is business as usual with software "sales".
I would surmise that someone would need to be legally insane to willingly go to a place without society, without parks, without schools, without culture, without even atmosphere, without children, without the elderly and without the prospect of seeing those things first hand again.
Obviously. And someone who couldn't see this objection being rised and used to halt the whole project would need to be dumb as a brick. So that leaves two possibilities:
This is a scam, so the trip will never happen.
Lansdorp really is this dumb, so the trip will never happen.
Personally, I lean towards the "scam" option. The very summary points out that you can rise money by creating controversy, while even the stupidest of people tend to keep their planned suicide missions secret until execution, rather than publish them.
Or it could just be a troll trying to make the "our ancestors ate death and shat success but now we're all pussies" -crowd to howl their defiance against the tyranny of the authority doing its job by stopping insane or depressed people from being exploited by ruthless sociopaths.
All you're making a case for is that the laws are too numerous and wide-reaching, making everyone a criminal, and it's only by the grace of our "benevolent" prosecutors and judges that they only go after those who trigger their ire or win them reelection via PR. I.e. it's not about justice.
The legal system has never been about justice, but about keeping the society functional. As for complexity, it's unavoidable - either you enumerate badness and get absurdly complex laws, or let judges excersize their personal judgement and get tyranny.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, ensuring that your population gets food in wartime is an extremely important part of a defensive strategy. Failing at it means you've pretty much already lost.
How much of that debt is owned by those very same taxpayers? Because owing money to yourself isn't going to make anyone bankrupt, it's just an accounting problem. Owing money to outsiders is real debt, but even there debts denominated in dollars can be paid by printing more - which will cause inflation to act as effective taxation, but of course only for the poor who don't make enough to invest and must keep their money as cash. So business as usual.
Most kings in history are parasites who contribute nothing but loot ever greater amounts of wealth for themselves, heedless of the carnage they cause in their quest for self-glorification. But go ahead and express your respect for brutal oppression and Bill Gates in the same sentence - I guess he can't expect much from minimum-wage astroturfers.
No, it isn't. Those people would be investors who'll own the resulting company, but the company itself is simply legal fiction.
An organization made of people is not a person, any more than a house made of planks is a forest. The whole notion is completely ridiculous.
Not that it really matters in this case, since Verizon's claims would be incorrect even if it was Joe Verizon. After all, the whole deal with Net Neutrality is that companies want to sell Internet access and then not hold their end of the deal, so NN tries to force them to.
You seem agitated. Do you have some kind of personal stake at this - money invested to Verizon, perhaps?
Relax, it won't do that. It's just the salt water that'll shoot up; the fresh water will keep receding as before, and probably faster due to the hotter climate and thus greater need.
On the contrary, I expect there to be several developing ecosystems there at that time. They simply won't include humans. Except that we are the most adaptabale things on this planet, and will figure out some way to over-exploit and fuck them up too. So again, relax.
Dunno about Germany, but the Nordic countries put a huge emphasis on welfare, rather than "hard work". Of course welfare translates to healthy, educated and ambitious population that's happy to pay its taxes, which in turn translates to prosperity. So I guess the lesson is that a society that invests in itself, or where everyone is blowing to a single coal, is a succesful society, which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, seeing how it's true for all other entities.
Just the Mediterranean. The problem is the Euro: countries who's economy is based on exporting industrial products are helped by it because the other countries drag the value of their currency down, and those other countries - who's economy is typically based on tourism - are harmed because the industrial countries drag their currency up. The result is a trade imbalance within the EU, and those usually end up with someone bankrupt.
This could all be solved easily if all the countries got their own currencies back and let them float freely relative to each other, in which case the imbalances would tend to re-balance themselves. We could even retain the Euro as something all the central banks are guaranteed to buy at current market value in exchange of the country's own currency. As is, the solution we are doing now is simply moving money from the industrial north to the tourist south, which works somewhat but makes the northerners angry and demanding austerity from the south, which in turn makes the south suffer even more.
In any case, this is a completely different case from the US, which really is bankrupt as a whole as a result of decades of mismanagement and several extremely costly wars. Oh, and it's also plagued by a two-party system where one party is a bunch of spineless wimps, while the other is a bunch of crazy religiously zealous sodomites who worship Satan in all but name (pick an issue, any issue; the Republicans will always be on whatever side gets most people screwed over, and specifically thrown in prison, not to mention glorify greed and selfishness) while having a monomaniacal obsession with homosexuality even the most obsessive pervert would be jealous of. In short, it's a miracle it has taken this long for you to begin collapsing, and you won't be rising again anytime soon.
Which is unfortunate, since it leaves China as the next superpower.
An ad hominem at the very first line. We're on to a good start.
Violently? Please explain: what is violent in the parent post?
Also, the grandparent didn't point out any "fiscal truths", besides the obvious one that burying cables takes money - yet this is exactly what was done to water pipes and such, so obviously it's doable.
There is unlikely to be 100s of years of wired infrastructure, seeing how the first large-scale (ninety customers!) electricity distribution network switched on in 1882, or 140 years ago.
What would be your time estimate, then, and what do you base it on? Besides your apparent confusion that the electric grid has been around for "100s" of years, I mean?
Insisting on long-term planning is "OWS crap"? Either you're a fan or have pretty weird priorities.
Ah, I guess you were projecting when you claimed that the parent post was violent.
Why do you pay for a fire insurance, despite your office not burning down most of the time? It's the cost of doing business, that's why.
That only works if there's a random spike here and another one there at another time. It doesn't work if there's no spikes for a long time, then suddenly a spike everywhere at once. You'll still end up paying for staff all year round, you just do it by paying a huge lump sum when there's emergency, rather than a predictable sum each month. That's not good for business, since you'll need to keep that money at hand at all times rather than invest it, and hope that you've guessed correctly about the size of the next disaster.
Or you could just hire all the millions of unemployed people to dig and fill trenches and throw a power cable there inbetween these steps. It would solve this problem once and for all and kickstart the economy as a bonus, all without requiring people to buy ridiculously large, expensive and dangerous batteries.
How do you calculate the power efficiency of a machine that doesn't output any work?
3rd degree burns would require the laptop to catch fire. While that's certainly possible, I'm pretty sure that simply renaming them notebooks would be insufficient to avoid liability in case one does.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
In other words, in capitalism the people (or aristocracy or whatever) controls the government, which sets the conditions the corporations operate in, thus allowing the people (at least in theory) to set up incentives so that they'll further the public good. In fascism, the corporations and the government merge, and the entire state becomes in effect one giant corporation with no oversight whatsoever. A fascist state treats its citizens exactly like a corporation treats its employees: they're cogs in a machine, and if they get redundant or start causing trouble, it gets rid of them.
Obviously a fascist state is not going to respect the property rights of its citizens any more than their other rights, but that's a symptom, not the cause.
Which would mean that the rules have changed quite a bit, now wouldn't it?
I'm pretty sure using multiple sources and aggregating the results predates the Internet, the printing press, and possibly even civilization. In fact, given how bacteria exchange plasmids and are thus capable of aggregating genes from multiple sources, it might even predate multicellular life.
But you can't. Energy production has an environmental impact, and the more you use the greater the impact is. So how is your claim relevant, even if it was true?
Socialism isn't based on declaring envy a virtue, it's based on a desire for liberation from economic oppression - it's selling point is "you have nothing to lose but your chains", not "kill the rich". Capitalism, on the other hand, does explicitly declare greed a virtue. Which, of course, was what caused said oppression and the birth of socialism in the first place. And now the right wing is desperately trying to convince the serfs to labour for the lords for table scraps in the hopes of one day becoming a lord living off of serf's labours themselves, rather than improving the position of the serfs, such as how much of the fruits of their labour they should get to keep.
Still, the Republicans making a big deal of sin when the entire party is made of sodomites does make for good but very dark comedy.
Nope, that would be the GOPs own platform, which the grandparent quoted. I'll emphasize the parts quoted in the summary: "Knowledge-Based Education â" We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the studentâ(TM)s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
And here's the Slashdot summary which you claim misrepresents it: "Alarmingly, they openly state that they oppose schools teaching critical thinking, on the grounds that it may challenge 'student's fixed beliefs' and undermine 'parental authority.'"
If simply quoting a politician makes them look like a lunatic, that's their fault, not a conspiracy.
And here you're doing a pretty good job of making yourself look like a lunatic, again without any help from the "radical leftists" or anyone else.
That implies that either the arctic etc have infinite value, or that the increased supply of oil has zero or negative value. Neither is true, as far as most people are concerned. Consequently, your "nothing will convince me" tells them that your opinion should be simply ignored, since it's irrational from their point of view.
"Natural right" means a right some prominent philosopher really liked having. Nature itself doesn't respect your right to life, should it encounter you in the form of, say, a hungry bear. So saying that something is a natural right is not as impressive as you seem to think it is. Also, a natural right is not inalienable - you can lose your liberty, not just for infringing on someone else's rights but also for smoking pot. Finally, whether you are shot to death or starve to death you're not alive either way, so either your right to life puts obligations on other people beyond simply not murdering you, or we should rephrase it as the right to not be killed, and the same goes for the right to liberty; but as long as they stay as they are, arguing whether closed captions on videos should join social security and wheelchair ramps as manifestations of said obligations is arguing about details, not principles.
Perhaps you could provide a link, so that we may see for ourselves just what happened and what, if anything, the ADA has to say as an answer to your questions? Because "entity X did something bad somewhere" is not a useful form of argument for anyone except bullshit artists, and really needs to die.
Or it could simply caption them. Which would be a simple and cheap operation even if the original source didn't include subtitles, which it almost certainly did, making it utterly trivial.
Reality is neither cold and hard nor soft and warm. When you start adding such adjectives to it, you're confusing your own subjective interpretation of reality with reality itself. And these specific adjectives - "cold" and "hard" - are usually used simply as an excuse to justify having said qualities yourself. Which is pathetic.
As it happens, providing Mona Lisa in the form of, say, an etched surface - it can't be provided in braille, since it's a painting and braille is an alphabet, assuming we don't repurpose AAlib or something - would likely be far cheaper than building a ramp.
Don't most records come with printed lyrics? So record stores seem to consider it reasonable.
Partaking in culture is necessary. It doesn't necessarily need to come in the form of movies, but it does need to come in some form.
But audio is not all of the experience, so this is irrelevant. And besides, since DVDs and Blurays already include captioning, Netflix not doing so would require them to deliberately remove it, which crosses the boundary from lazy apathy into active malice.
Storage space is cheap, it's the network connection that costs - and that cost is dependent on the amount of usage, not on the amount of content. Besides, don't most (all?) video streaming formats support a separate subtext channel (or several), making the extra resources needed for providing them amount to a rounding error?
Wouldn't that make the original sale fraud? Imagine if I sold you a coffee maker, then when you opened the box you found another box and a note informing you that opening the inner box means you're bound to some extra terms - the very best I could hope for would be that you'd ignore the whole thing as a practical joke, rather than rise a stink. But somehow this kind of ridiculous shit is business as usual with software "sales".
Obviously. And someone who couldn't see this objection being rised and used to halt the whole project would need to be dumb as a brick. So that leaves two possibilities:
Personally, I lean towards the "scam" option. The very summary points out that you can rise money by creating controversy, while even the stupidest of people tend to keep their planned suicide missions secret until execution, rather than publish them.
Or it could just be a troll trying to make the "our ancestors ate death and shat success but now we're all pussies" -crowd to howl their defiance against the tyranny of the authority doing its job by stopping insane or depressed people from being exploited by ruthless sociopaths.
The legal system has never been about justice, but about keeping the society functional. As for complexity, it's unavoidable - either you enumerate badness and get absurdly complex laws, or let judges excersize their personal judgement and get tyranny.