If I can move my business out of the state using the dd(1) command, I don't have a presence there.
If you have something you can move out of the state, how can you claim you had no presence there?
If I build a shop or an office in a truck trailer, I can move it very easily; does that mean I don't have a presence where ever the trailer currently is?
As jobs get completely slaughtered something has to give. Shorter work weeks or civil unrest.
Or more likely longer workdays with less pay - after all, your negotiating position becomes worse and worse - after which you'll get taxed more to hire more police to deal with security problems. Any attempt to unionize and deal with the problem will fail because then someone else might get more than they deserve, and in any case you are better than average and get to dictate your own pay any day now. And besides, it would send all the jobs to India, right?
If I ever saw someone performing sexual intercourse on a young adolescent, I swear to God, I will fucking kill the predator with my bare hands, and stand trial by jury knowing I did the right thing.
I think this nicely demonstrates why child porn remains such a popular subject despite being very nearly nonexistent: it gives people an excuse to RRRAAAGGGE!!!!! and make death threats and feel proud of such behaviour.
Windows 7 provides a solid and reliable framework for handling XP-era software and concepts, along with a level of polish and slickness that made low-confidence home users feel comfortable with the changes.
No, it doesn't. It provides a downright horrible framework for dealing with "XP-era" software; in fact, running any software in "combatibility mode" requires admin privileges (Why?!?) and is likely not to work.
Windows 7 is a good system; it hasn't bluescreened on me more than a few times, and even then most likely because of drivers. And even then it shutdown nicely (as in, the filesystem was okay the next time I rebooted (as opposed to Win98 which lost every fucking file in the whole drive once)). But please don't try to pretend it's "compatible" with software that's not at least Vista-aware, okay?
The entire point of patents is to secure a monopoly on the idea or concept that has been patented.
And that's the whole problem, really. How can you claim a monopoly on an "idea" or a "concept"? I can understand patenting actual physical devices, and perhaps even software programs, but an "idea"? A "concecpt"? That's absurd.
Think about it: by patenting a concept, I not only get a patent on that concept, but for all devices implementing it. Suppose I patent the concept of "a phone that has more processing power than the average phone in the market"; should I get a fee for every smartphone sold?
The patent system has gone completely absurd, and is more a hindrance than a help to innovation nowadays. It doesn't help the small-time innovator, because now matter what you invent, it's sure to violate several "concepts" already patented, for everything is built on that invented before, and besides, a small-time inventor doesn't have money for a patent dispute. It only helps large corporations to squash all upstart would-be competition (who are guaranteed to be in violation of several "concept" and "idea" patents, because everything imaginable is). Let's just get rid of it completely.
they all scream for freedom when it's their neck in the noose while happily lobbying for protectionism when the roles are reversed.
As well as they should. How many times has it been repeated here that corporations only exist to turn a profit? Having a spine is for actual human beings, and frankly, a lot of us also fail at that.
The problem is that we've had a subsystem of society - corporations - get a position of being able to do pretty much anything they want. We need to shake of Reagonomics and Rayndism and put these corporations back to the place they belong: as the strong horse that pulls the plowshare of economicswhere the rider (us) demands, not as the wild horse who does whatever its animal instincts desire, as we have now.
Seriously, we have to wake up and realize there's more to economics than just getting the government out of the way while there's still time. We can't continue treating it as an issue of religion or ideology. Otherwise, we'll all wake up one morning as subjects of the glorious Chinese Empire.
What I find "bad" is that takes 238 seconds for a custom-built supercomputer to determine JPMorgan's risk. For me, that's a very clear "no human can possibly understand what they're up to", which in turn is TL;DR for "get out NOW!".
Seriously, just what the heck are they doing that takes this kind of computing power to figure out?
Germany also has a thriving capitalist economy which supports their socialist programs. In fact, they're not really any more socialist than the United States.
Let's examine this claim in detail in the light of your own arguments, shall we?
Germans are generally hard working and motivated. They're efficient. They enforce regulations across the board, the average individual is no more spared from them than a big corporation.
The very existence of regulations, which are government intervention in the free market, is socialist. Pretty much every government considered capitalistic has repeatedly removed regulations, usually with disastrous results.
As for enforcing regulations, it implies that neither the makers or enforcers of law are for sale. This means they're willing to forgo their personal interest of getting more money for the sake of common good. That's not capitalist.
The people haven't been conditioned to make unreasonably expectations of their government. Unlike a lot of European nations, and some in the US, there isn't this massive class of citizens employed by the government who's sole responsibility is to enjoy a nice salary and excessively generous benefits.
Again, not demanding all you can because it would be bad for society is socialistic. Remember, the whole "Invisible Hand" argument capitalism is based on is that greed makes people behave in ways that are good for everyone. Well, a bureaucrat who gets paid for nothing is certainly following his self-interest, but it seems you agree that he's not doing much good to the society.
The fact that Germany still does a ton of it's own manufacturing also is an immense help.
Obviously. Now the question is: Why is Germany doing its own manufacturing, while the US isn't? Could it perhaps be that Germans are taking into account the social effects of offshoring, rather than just the lower labour costs? And guess what that is?
There are a ton of reasons why Germany has generally thrived where others have not but being socialist is not one of them. All those other factors have enabled them to successfully apply socialist ideals.
Your own message claims Germany has thrived because Germans take into account the results of their actions to the whole society, not just personal benefit. That's pretty much the core and central idea of socialism: caring about your society, rather than just yourself.
And even for them, it's far from being perfect.
No country on Earth is perfect, nor can ever be. There's always room for improvement.
I don't see any reason a private university would give their research papers for free,
Then I don't see any reason why it should be called "university" and thus share in the prestige it had no part in building, nor any intention to do so in the future.
Give me an example of an unrestricted socialist economy that has thrived. Go ahead, I can wait.
Well, Germany doesn't restrict the benefits of socialism to just the top dogs as USA does, and is doing far better economically. The Soviet Union practiced (authoritarian) communism, and went from a failed agrarian state to the second-most powerful country in the world in a few decades. China has a semi-command economy, and is on its way to becoming the next hyperpower.
I'm a bit uncertain about what you mean by "unrestricted" socialist economy, so perhaps you could give some examples of countries that have or have had it?
What's with everything being "military grade" nowadays, from motherboards to video projectors? Is it some kind of fashion, or did US army have a huge sale?
Or do these components actually refer to North Korea's high standards?
If Israel decide one day to be the nicest neighbor possible, allow palestinians to return, go back to 1967 borders and disband its military, would you accept military intervention to protect it should the neighboring countries decide to use that opportunity to finish it ?
The "nicest neighbor possible" will keep their military functional, so I don't have to worry about being attacked through their territory.
"Nice" is not the same as "weak". I have no idea why people keep thinking it is.
We're in Afghanistan, fighting side by side with the bigger "liberators" and when our young die there, headlines proclaim "HEROES".
To be fair, the Taliban are not nice people. Whether this justifies overthrowing them or not is a messy and complex moral problem, but you certainly can't overthrow them and then abandon the country you just stripped of its rulers. Once you're in, you're in, and must see it through until order is restored.
But no, I don't think us Nordic countries should ever have gotten involved in Afghanistan. We are not Great Powers anymore, if we ever were; we should concentrate on solving our economic and social issues, as well as advancing high-tech. It's better for us, and it's likely better for the world as well - I mean, if Sweden can be rehabilitated and turned into a peaceful left-wing social-democratic semi-utopia, any country can, right?
We are buying in to the terrorism scare and we are latching onto one side of the sides that one must be for or against, inviting zealots to blow shit up here too.
Isn't it ironic that what finally brought an end to Bin Laden was not war but careful and patient detective work and a small surgical strike team, just like we all knew from the beginning?
If you think any American based company would move their home base to China (a communist country) you're nuts.
It's not the communism that's the problem, it's that Chinese are smart enough to protect themselves and their economy, so they'll always prefer their domestic companies and keep even them under government control rather than the other way around.
Draw your own conclusions from the fact that a communist economy is beating our neoliberalist ones.
Except that whole Old Testament part, right? You know, when God constantly got pissed off and demonstrated his wrath with plagues, fire and brimstone, and floods?
The part that I really don't understand is how Christians reconcile the merciful God shown in the New Testament with the God shown in the Old Testament. I'd buy it if they were different Gods (and some early Christian sects believed exactly that. The Gnostics believed Jesus came to save the people from the evil Old Testament guy. They just didn't win out.)
Well, one obvious answer is that the Old Testament is not a history book. Rather, it's a collection of myths and religious essays written in the form of stories. Myths might have a connection to the actual history, but their main purpose is to encode the cultural identity of a people - in other words, they're a meme storage and transfer mechanism. And because the books of Old Testament were written in different times and context by different people for different purposes, and sometimes specifically to debate a theological point, and weren't compiled into a single volume until centuries later, you of course end up with either seeming or real conflicts; that's cultural evolution for you.
So, the point of, for example, the story of the plagues of Egypt - which may or may not have actually happened - isn't that God kills people indiscriminately, it's that God really, really, really dislikes it when people use their positions of power to abuse other people. This is put in terms a 13-year old (which was the age Jews were supposed to become functioning members of society) can understand: namely, it's shown how a ruthless tyrant gets hit with 7 plagues and then drowned in sea for good measure. The story also demonstrates where God's authority over Israel comes from: it's not based on Him being able to crush them like bugs, it's based on Him freeing them from slavery. Which, of course, further reinforces the point about oppression being a big no-no.
All of which leads to a huge amounts of trouble when people take something meant as a teaching tool and start treating it as a history book instead. Not only does this miss the point, but it also ends up making God look like a murderous lunatic - which is a problem because, like it or not, people worship Him. And how could you possibly worship a God of Hell Fire without starting to think that murderous rampages are, in fact, perfectly acceptable? You can't. And historically, people haven't. Which gets us to witch-burning, Inquisition, Fred Phelps, gay bashing, general obsession with power to the point of actually thinking reality itself is secondary to you not losing face - which is what religion's infamous anti-science stance is about - and other lovely phenomenom.
TL;DR: Most vocal "Christians" typically have a worse working knowledge of their religion than can be expected of someone just hitting their teens, for reasons I'm too charitable to speculate about, and the end result combining zealotry with ignorance is just as bad as can be expected. I suspect this is true of zealous loudmouths of every stripe; can anyone verify?
His point was that this stuff was believed before it was proven to be true.
And that's not true. Heliocentric model won because it was far simpler than the geocentric one; all you needed were Newtons universal laws on motion and gravitation, as opposed to spheres and sub-spheres centered on them, spinning at different rates, all for no apparent reason.
Similarly, Einstein's General Relativity began gaining popularity only after it correctly predicted that stars who's light passed near the Sun would appear shifted during a solar eclipse (and by how much) due to light bending in Sun's gravitational field. It has been tested again and again since then, both with thought experiments and real ones. Heck, we still keep testing it.
if you want to tell me about this jesus character, I'll tell you and equally bizzarre story.
Okay.
God, despite being all-powerful, is not a slave to power. Humans, however, are, with all that implies - namely an obsession with vengeance and hatred. So God, in order to change that, incarnated himself as a human being (Jesus), and despite still having all his omnipotence stayed out of human conflicts, besides healing a few sick people and rising some dead. Then humans got really angry over nothing, and killed him. He, being God, refused to become a slave to power, and allowed himself to be killed, forgiving his murderers along the way. Then he, being God, rose from the dead, went back to Heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit to look after his disciples who were supposed to wean the world from its addiction to hatred.
Then the Devil got involved, and somehow managed to turn this story of a merciful God being killed by wrathful human beings yet forgiving them into a story about wrathful God eternally torturing human beings for evulz. That's the story we nowadays hear, and believe because it doesn't require any actual changes on our part (like giving up the mad pursuit of power), despite it contradicting pretty much everything in the Bible.
the world would be far better off with no religion at all.
A world with no religion would not be a world populated by humans, since every single culture has come up with some form of it. While a world populated by non-religious non-humans might be better than the current one, it's not a change that can be done in isolation: you need to change human nature to get a world without religion, which will result in any number of other changes as well, the end result of which is impossible to even guesstimate.
There is certain trend in the media industry to move away from products to per licensed use. This is an absolute assult on capitalist principals which generates wealth through property.
I'm sorry to inform you, but there is no such thing as a self-consistent "capitalist principal", unless you count "make money any way you can" as a principle.
To elaborate a bit: the idea of capitalism is that people following their own best interests end up working for the benefit of all (such as a farm hand helping feed lots of people because he wants wages). Some people are more succesful in following their best interests than others, and accumulate more wealth. Since wealth is simply another form of power, having wealth makes it easier to acquire more, so you end up with a few rich people and lots of not-so-rich. And it's in the best interests of those rich people - or corporations - to use their wealth to buy laws that prevent competition.
Capitalist principles are self-refuting, because a succesful capitalist will either use his capital to make himself a dictator, thus abolishing them, or give up the pursuit of more power, thus giving them up.
Instead of selling products that may gain value over time (I by old pc games as collector items) and allowing new markets to grow (gamestop resell,emulators) these unscrupulous corporations want to charge each individual use of a product over your entire lifetime! It is hypocritical for these corporations to lobby for intelectual property protection when they don't even want to generate property.
No, it isn't hypocritical. These companies exist for one purpose, and one purpose only: to make money for their owners. If that means perverting laws and the very concept of property, then so be it.
You are thinking of a system where people compete, but also play fair. That's not capitalism.
They're just games, so don't buy them. There are far, far better ways to spend your time.
They're just games, so don't buy them. There are far, far better ways to get them.
Well, it's only been 170 years. I'm sure game developers get the memo any day now. Not that it matters to me, since I nowadays get most of my games from Steam, it being convenient and having a lot of cheap ones - however, a "third-party DRM" is a deal-breaker.
POTS/PSTN is fading out of the mainstream, when that happens keeping it going for the few rural/paranoid/luddite users would be a huge drain on the public purse. POTS/PSTN is only cheap now because it was mostly paid for by taxpayers in the 60's - 80's. Likely the "last mile" PTSN stuff will still be there in some areas for another hundred years, but the local exchange will be hooked into a link like the Australian NBN.
So what's the problem? Do the end users actually care how the phone network sends their signals onward, as long as they can just hook their phone into it? And what does it really cost to support the option of an analog phone - it's nothing but a remote loudspeaker and microphone, after all?
Complaining about the demise of PTSN is like complaining about the demise of the telegraph.
Telegraphy is not dead. And why would it be? It's simple enough that pretty much anyone could hack together a sender or receiver. Heck, you can send telegraphs by banging together two exposed wires, and receive them through any means of detecting current. It's a perfect fit for developing areas.
It may be inefficient, but by God it works. I'd hate to see it go away in favor of something as dodgy as the internet. Imagine an internet storm that hits DDOS on key components, and suddenly grandma can't call 911 anymore.
True enough. However, it's nothing that can't be solved through reserved capacity (if 911 calls or something else compete for bandwidth, 911 wins) - which is what switched lines are basically doing, the difference being that a packet-switched network can use the capacity for something else when it's not required by 911.
The other problem - DDOS of 911 call centers - can't be solved easily. If enough people call 911 centers simultaneously, they get jammed. That's already a problem with current centers, and it's going to be worse if they can be reached from the Internet. I don't think we can do much but hope that the various shady online groups aren't willing to expand their activities to outright murder.
In the future, however, it might be possible to man a virtual 911 center with an artificial intelligence, switching to an actual human only if required. Combine that with the oh-so-popular cloud service model, and especially its ability to bring more gear online very fast, and you could potentially have an extremely efficient and reliable service.
Thing is, I've yet to hear a compelling solution to the problem of automation that doesn't just boil down to 1) Anyone w/o jobs dies of starvation or 2) Some form of socialism.
That's because there isn't any. Either the society takes care of the weak, which is socialism, or it doesn't, in which case they die. And since power tends to accumulate - the more you have the easier it is to get yet more - almost all are weak.
Also, I find it interesting that a society that's so big on democracy - distribution of political power to everyone - is nonetheless perfectly okay with the concentration of economic power into just a few hands. It seems your local robber barons certainly used Cold War effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have something you can move out of the state, how can you claim you had no presence there?
If I build a shop or an office in a truck trailer, I can move it very easily; does that mean I don't have a presence where ever the trailer currently is?
Or more likely longer workdays with less pay - after all, your negotiating position becomes worse and worse - after which you'll get taxed more to hire more police to deal with security problems. Any attempt to unionize and deal with the problem will fail because then someone else might get more than they deserve, and in any case you are better than average and get to dictate your own pay any day now. And besides, it would send all the jobs to India, right?
I think this nicely demonstrates why child porn remains such a popular subject despite being very nearly nonexistent: it gives people an excuse to RRRAAAGGGE!!!!! and make death threats and feel proud of such behaviour.
Same here, but I still replaced them simply to get more light out of my reading light. My eyes are not what they used to be...
Don't judge based on that. After all, "Dell" rhymes with "Hell" for a reason.
No, it doesn't. It provides a downright horrible framework for dealing with "XP-era" software; in fact, running any software in "combatibility mode" requires admin privileges (Why?!?) and is likely not to work.
Windows 7 is a good system; it hasn't bluescreened on me more than a few times, and even then most likely because of drivers. And even then it shutdown nicely (as in, the filesystem was okay the next time I rebooted (as opposed to Win98 which lost every fucking file in the whole drive once)). But please don't try to pretend it's "compatible" with software that's not at least Vista-aware, okay?
And that's the whole problem, really. How can you claim a monopoly on an "idea" or a "concept"? I can understand patenting actual physical devices, and perhaps even software programs, but an "idea"? A "concecpt"? That's absurd.
Think about it: by patenting a concept, I not only get a patent on that concept, but for all devices implementing it. Suppose I patent the concept of "a phone that has more processing power than the average phone in the market"; should I get a fee for every smartphone sold?
The patent system has gone completely absurd, and is more a hindrance than a help to innovation nowadays. It doesn't help the small-time innovator, because now matter what you invent, it's sure to violate several "concepts" already patented, for everything is built on that invented before, and besides, a small-time inventor doesn't have money for a patent dispute. It only helps large corporations to squash all upstart would-be competition (who are guaranteed to be in violation of several "concept" and "idea" patents, because everything imaginable is). Let's just get rid of it completely.
As well as they should. How many times has it been repeated here that corporations only exist to turn a profit? Having a spine is for actual human beings, and frankly, a lot of us also fail at that.
The problem is that we've had a subsystem of society - corporations - get a position of being able to do pretty much anything they want. We need to shake of Reagonomics and Rayndism and put these corporations back to the place they belong: as the strong horse that pulls the plowshare of economicswhere the rider (us) demands, not as the wild horse who does whatever its animal instincts desire, as we have now.
Seriously, we have to wake up and realize there's more to economics than just getting the government out of the way while there's still time. We can't continue treating it as an issue of religion or ideology. Otherwise, we'll all wake up one morning as subjects of the glorious Chinese Empire.
What I find "bad" is that takes 238 seconds for a custom-built supercomputer to determine JPMorgan's risk. For me, that's a very clear "no human can possibly understand what they're up to", which in turn is TL;DR for "get out NOW!".
Seriously, just what the heck are they doing that takes this kind of computing power to figure out?
Let's examine this claim in detail in the light of your own arguments, shall we?
The very existence of regulations, which are government intervention in the free market, is socialist. Pretty much every government considered capitalistic has repeatedly removed regulations, usually with disastrous results.
As for enforcing regulations, it implies that neither the makers or enforcers of law are for sale. This means they're willing to forgo their personal interest of getting more money for the sake of common good. That's not capitalist.
Again, not demanding all you can because it would be bad for society is socialistic. Remember, the whole "Invisible Hand" argument capitalism is based on is that greed makes people behave in ways that are good for everyone. Well, a bureaucrat who gets paid for nothing is certainly following his self-interest, but it seems you agree that he's not doing much good to the society.
Obviously. Now the question is: Why is Germany doing its own manufacturing, while the US isn't? Could it perhaps be that Germans are taking into account the social effects of offshoring, rather than just the lower labour costs? And guess what that is?
Your own message claims Germany has thrived because Germans take into account the results of their actions to the whole society, not just personal benefit. That's pretty much the core and central idea of socialism: caring about your society, rather than just yourself.
No country on Earth is perfect, nor can ever be. There's always room for improvement.
Then I don't see any reason why it should be called "university" and thus share in the prestige it had no part in building, nor any intention to do so in the future.
Well, Germany doesn't restrict the benefits of socialism to just the top dogs as USA does, and is doing far better economically. The Soviet Union practiced (authoritarian) communism, and went from a failed agrarian state to the second-most powerful country in the world in a few decades. China has a semi-command economy, and is on its way to becoming the next hyperpower.
I'm a bit uncertain about what you mean by "unrestricted" socialist economy, so perhaps you could give some examples of countries that have or have had it?
What's with everything being "military grade" nowadays, from motherboards to video projectors? Is it some kind of fashion, or did US army have a huge sale?
Or do these components actually refer to North Korea's high standards?
The "nicest neighbor possible" will keep their military functional, so I don't have to worry about being attacked through their territory.
"Nice" is not the same as "weak". I have no idea why people keep thinking it is.
To be fair, the Taliban are not nice people. Whether this justifies overthrowing them or not is a messy and complex moral problem, but you certainly can't overthrow them and then abandon the country you just stripped of its rulers. Once you're in, you're in, and must see it through until order is restored.
But no, I don't think us Nordic countries should ever have gotten involved in Afghanistan. We are not Great Powers anymore, if we ever were; we should concentrate on solving our economic and social issues, as well as advancing high-tech. It's better for us, and it's likely better for the world as well - I mean, if Sweden can be rehabilitated and turned into a peaceful left-wing social-democratic semi-utopia, any country can, right?
Isn't it ironic that what finally brought an end to Bin Laden was not war but careful and patient detective work and a small surgical strike team, just like we all knew from the beginning?
It's not the communism that's the problem, it's that Chinese are smart enough to protect themselves and their economy, so they'll always prefer their domestic companies and keep even them under government control rather than the other way around.
Draw your own conclusions from the fact that a communist economy is beating our neoliberalist ones.
The part that I really don't understand is how Christians reconcile the merciful God shown in the New Testament with the God shown in the Old Testament. I'd buy it if they were different Gods (and some early Christian sects believed exactly that. The Gnostics believed Jesus came to save the people from the evil Old Testament guy. They just didn't win out.)
Well, one obvious answer is that the Old Testament is not a history book. Rather, it's a collection of myths and religious essays written in the form of stories. Myths might have a connection to the actual history, but their main purpose is to encode the cultural identity of a people - in other words, they're a meme storage and transfer mechanism. And because the books of Old Testament were written in different times and context by different people for different purposes, and sometimes specifically to debate a theological point, and weren't compiled into a single volume until centuries later, you of course end up with either seeming or real conflicts; that's cultural evolution for you.
So, the point of, for example, the story of the plagues of Egypt - which may or may not have actually happened - isn't that God kills people indiscriminately, it's that God really, really, really dislikes it when people use their positions of power to abuse other people. This is put in terms a 13-year old (which was the age Jews were supposed to become functioning members of society) can understand: namely, it's shown how a ruthless tyrant gets hit with 7 plagues and then drowned in sea for good measure. The story also demonstrates where God's authority over Israel comes from: it's not based on Him being able to crush them like bugs, it's based on Him freeing them from slavery. Which, of course, further reinforces the point about oppression being a big no-no.
All of which leads to a huge amounts of trouble when people take something meant as a teaching tool and start treating it as a history book instead. Not only does this miss the point, but it also ends up making God look like a murderous lunatic - which is a problem because, like it or not, people worship Him. And how could you possibly worship a God of Hell Fire without starting to think that murderous rampages are, in fact, perfectly acceptable? You can't. And historically, people haven't. Which gets us to witch-burning, Inquisition, Fred Phelps, gay bashing, general obsession with power to the point of actually thinking reality itself is secondary to you not losing face - which is what religion's infamous anti-science stance is about - and other lovely phenomenom.
TL;DR: Most vocal "Christians" typically have a worse working knowledge of their religion than can be expected of someone just hitting their teens, for reasons I'm too charitable to speculate about, and the end result combining zealotry with ignorance is just as bad as can be expected. I suspect this is true of zealous loudmouths of every stripe; can anyone verify?
And that's not true. Heliocentric model won because it was far simpler than the geocentric one; all you needed were Newtons universal laws on motion and gravitation, as opposed to spheres and sub-spheres centered on them, spinning at different rates, all for no apparent reason.
Similarly, Einstein's General Relativity began gaining popularity only after it correctly predicted that stars who's light passed near the Sun would appear shifted during a solar eclipse (and by how much) due to light bending in Sun's gravitational field. It has been tested again and again since then, both with thought experiments and real ones. Heck, we still keep testing it.
Okay.
God, despite being all-powerful, is not a slave to power. Humans, however, are, with all that implies - namely an obsession with vengeance and hatred. So God, in order to change that, incarnated himself as a human being (Jesus), and despite still having all his omnipotence stayed out of human conflicts, besides healing a few sick people and rising some dead. Then humans got really angry over nothing, and killed him. He, being God, refused to become a slave to power, and allowed himself to be killed, forgiving his murderers along the way. Then he, being God, rose from the dead, went back to Heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit to look after his disciples who were supposed to wean the world from its addiction to hatred.
Then the Devil got involved, and somehow managed to turn this story of a merciful God being killed by wrathful human beings yet forgiving them into a story about wrathful God eternally torturing human beings for evulz. That's the story we nowadays hear, and believe because it doesn't require any actual changes on our part (like giving up the mad pursuit of power), despite it contradicting pretty much everything in the Bible.
Your turn.
A world with no religion would not be a world populated by humans, since every single culture has come up with some form of it. While a world populated by non-religious non-humans might be better than the current one, it's not a change that can be done in isolation: you need to change human nature to get a world without religion, which will result in any number of other changes as well, the end result of which is impossible to even guesstimate.
I'm sorry to inform you, but there is no such thing as a self-consistent "capitalist principal", unless you count "make money any way you can" as a principle.
To elaborate a bit: the idea of capitalism is that people following their own best interests end up working for the benefit of all (such as a farm hand helping feed lots of people because he wants wages). Some people are more succesful in following their best interests than others, and accumulate more wealth. Since wealth is simply another form of power, having wealth makes it easier to acquire more, so you end up with a few rich people and lots of not-so-rich. And it's in the best interests of those rich people - or corporations - to use their wealth to buy laws that prevent competition.
Capitalist principles are self-refuting, because a succesful capitalist will either use his capital to make himself a dictator, thus abolishing them, or give up the pursuit of more power, thus giving them up.
No, it isn't hypocritical. These companies exist for one purpose, and one purpose only: to make money for their owners. If that means perverting laws and the very concept of property, then so be it.
You are thinking of a system where people compete, but also play fair. That's not capitalism.
They're just games, so don't buy them. There are far, far better ways to get them.
Well, it's only been 170 years. I'm sure game developers get the memo any day now. Not that it matters to me, since I nowadays get most of my games from Steam, it being convenient and having a lot of cheap ones - however, a "third-party DRM" is a deal-breaker.
So what's the problem? Do the end users actually care how the phone network sends their signals onward, as long as they can just hook their phone into it? And what does it really cost to support the option of an analog phone - it's nothing but a remote loudspeaker and microphone, after all?
Telegraphy is not dead. And why would it be? It's simple enough that pretty much anyone could hack together a sender or receiver. Heck, you can send telegraphs by banging together two exposed wires, and receive them through any means of detecting current. It's a perfect fit for developing areas.
True enough. However, it's nothing that can't be solved through reserved capacity (if 911 calls or something else compete for bandwidth, 911 wins) - which is what switched lines are basically doing, the difference being that a packet-switched network can use the capacity for something else when it's not required by 911.
The other problem - DDOS of 911 call centers - can't be solved easily. If enough people call 911 centers simultaneously, they get jammed. That's already a problem with current centers, and it's going to be worse if they can be reached from the Internet. I don't think we can do much but hope that the various shady online groups aren't willing to expand their activities to outright murder.
In the future, however, it might be possible to man a virtual 911 center with an artificial intelligence, switching to an actual human only if required. Combine that with the oh-so-popular cloud service model, and especially its ability to bring more gear online very fast, and you could potentially have an extremely efficient and reliable service.
That's because there isn't any. Either the society takes care of the weak, which is socialism, or it doesn't, in which case they die. And since power tends to accumulate - the more you have the easier it is to get yet more - almost all are weak.
Also, I find it interesting that a society that's so big on democracy - distribution of political power to everyone - is nonetheless perfectly okay with the concentration of economic power into just a few hands. It seems your local robber barons certainly used Cold War effectively.