Imagine what it would be like having things suddenly appear very different than they were previously.
Based on all tests, extra sensory input gets integrated in a matter of few weeks. There was an article on Slashdot just a while ago about an electric eye that transmits images into small electric shocks on the tongue (!), and the test subjects learned to use it to see just fine.
Color blindness ultimately has a much larger impact than on what people expect it to have. Curing it could very easily have unintended consequences that aren't so easy to handle.
Anything could have unexpected consequences, but there's overwhelming evidence that this won't.
The other option is to let the state dictate the parental decisions instead. Both systems would be abused but I believe the parents are less likely to screw things up.
The third option would be to simply refuse to make any such changes to anyone under the age of majority. That would prevent any chance of abuse by putting the choice where it belongs: the person in question.
The area I am worried about though is the social desire to alleviate hardship and make life nice for our children. While this is a laudable goal, nothing replaces the gains made by blood, sweat, and tears.
Bullshit. Lots of people accomplish great things without having shed bucketfulls of any of those. And those who suffered and then accomplished a lot did so despite, not because that suffering.
Our muscles require resistance to provide us with physical strength.
There is already a mutation in the wild that removes that need; it makes muscles grow to maximum strength whether they're used or not.
Our "spirits" (in the sense of mental and emotional composition) require resistance to provide us with strength of character and spirit.
Perhaps. I'm not convinced that that couldn't also be changed. It should also be noted that too much hardship will simply break your spirit and character.
I have a personal horse in this race. I have fairly severe ADD, and I can tell you the difficulties I went through as a child (being the one who was ALWAYS picked on, who had severe trouble with school work despite being obviously bright, etc) helped make me into a better (and even happier) person.
How curious. Because I know someone who was bullied, and as a result went from a bright, cheerful and confident kid to a complete ruin, unable to land a job, unalbe to form relationships, unable to even walk on the streets without meds, etc.
But hey, can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, eh?
I can still see colour just like you do but if someone writes on an orange piece of paper with a green pen, I cannot read it.
In other words, you don't see colour as I do. I see orange and green differently, which is why I can separate them, while you see them the same. It follows that you see at least one of them differently than I do.
I think that overall I am a winner and would laugh at the idea of a cure. Why would I want your inferior eyesight?
Given that this very article is about our growing ability to fix any inherited defects, there seems to be very little value in preventing someone with these defects from breeding, if there ever was. Consequently, we can safely allow even you to breed, despite your apparently inadequate logical abilities.
You seem to be assuming that the superior people will continue to believe that capitalism is the bee's knees and that genetic enhancement should cost a lot. What if instead they rejected capitalism and created a utopian society and extended genetic enhancement to anyone who wanted it?
Or what if they embrace capitalism, start selling enchantments cheaply enough that the masses can afford them - you know, like powerful personal computers are sold these days - and perhaps even offer to pay for enhancing their own workers for the productivity boost?
Capitalism has a lot of downsides, but keeping things that are cheap to produce out of the hands of the masses isn't amongst them.
You know, I recall there was one mutant who had four, instead of the usual three, different color sensing cells in his eyes. The result was that he had much better color vision than baseline human. It might be possible to induce that in baseline humans using this very same technique. So the question becomes:
At this point in time, if company after company didn't have numbers to validate DRM bolstered sales, and by a lot, they wouldn't be spending the large dollars, plus likely royalty payments, to obtain the various DRM kits and spend the manpower to develop/maintain the implementation.
The only halfway reliable way to obtain such numbers would be to release some big games without DRM and compare their profits to similar games with DRM. When was the last time any big game didn't come with DRM?
Companies are led by humans who are just as capable of acting like irrational lemmings as everyone else. They're also just as likely to be covering their back as the IT drone who figures that "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft products".
So at the end of the day, if you don't like DRM, find a couple of local pirates and kick them repeatedly in the nuts because they are the reason we all pay the DRM tax burden.
A game costs as much as it does because the company making it figures that price will maximize their sales. If the game didn't include DRM, it would still cost just as much, and the company would pocket the difference.
Period.
Saying "Period" doesn't make an untrue and, frankly, idiotic assertion any more true.
The sooner pirates are repeatedly kicked in the nuts at every opportunity, the sooner the world starts to become a better place.
My, what anger. Did you, perhaps, make a software product, failed to make any money on it, and decided to blame "pirates" for that, instead of your own incompetence?
For example you still cant download Assassins Creed II and it has been out for almost an month already.
Really? Isohunt search seems to disagree. In fact the torrent seems to be 3 weeks old. The "official" torrent for the crack has been up for 6 weeks. The crack's also up at GameFix.
Some things can pretty much be agreed upon as immoral: murder (note, not simply killing); rape; abuse of power etc. but everything else is entirely based upon circumstance. If you are brought up in a culture where personal possession is meaningless for example, then stealing cannot be considered immoral.
There has been - and still are - cultures where rape and murder (by today's standards; I'm assuming you didn't intend to invoke the tautology "unlawful killing is unlawful") were legal in some circumstances. For example, in all slave-owning cultures it was okay to force your slaves into sexual intercourse with you or someone else; and in many countries nowadays honor killing and revenge rape is common and approved by the populace. So no, these are not in any case universally considered immoral.
What can be agreed upon is that pretty much nobody wants to be murdered or raped. However, almost nobody also wants to have no power over his personal circumstances or the laws of the society he lives in. Very few wants to be judged by arbitrary whims of his feudal lord or a mob either. So, if you use the Golden Rule as a basis for morality, you end up with freedom, democracy and the rule of law being superior to authoritarianism; if you don't, you either accept that murder and rape are okay or arbitrarily declare them to not be for no good reason besides personal taste.
So, in short, either Western democratic culture is superior to Chinese dictatorship, or anything - including rape, murder and abuse of power - are just fine. Or, to put it even more bluntly: the only world where China is not morally inferior to West is one where hypocrisy - having different rules for different people - is not immoral.
I mean, suppose I got to be a dictator, would I become a monster?
Very likely yes.
What would be needed to make me nutjob, a coup attempt, an assassination attempt or what?
The realization that you can do anything without consequences will do it for some. For others, it's the fact that they could, which drives others away. Human beings are social animals and need peer pressure to act as corrective feedback. A dictator can, if he will, ignore that feedback, or tune it to more of his liking. The end of that road is living in your own fantasy world with no one daring to tell you the truth; the Emperor truly believes himself to be robed and kills anyone who dares to disagree.
And is now lightly sprinkled with a tasty cocktail of viruses and malware. It will serve you right when your thieving ways are rewarded with an empty bank account.
I've never once gotton a virus or malware from an unofficial version. I've gotten plentyofmalware from official versions.
Buying a software product (or even a CD nowadays) from a store is a much higher risk than downloading it from BitTorrent.
If you want free, do it the responsible way and go open source!
Gimp on Windows refuses to recognize my tablet every time I start it. I need to reset all settings and restart to get it working. Thanks, but no thanks.
Assuming you're one of the parties this is of interest to, let me ask this: of what significance is this find, outside of anthropological circles?
Nothing whatsoever. It's just an ancient finger-bone.
Unless it leads us to the missing link, what effect does this knowledge have on the world? What does it change?
Nothing. Even if it was a missing link, it wouldn't change anything outside anthropology, and even there it would only clarify a minor detail in hominid family tree.
As a side note, I find the whole term "missing link" weird. There's three generations of humans per century; since human evolution involves timeframes of millions of years, there's tens of thousands of links in the chain. Do you really expect to find them all? And in any case, the chain really extends back through 4 billion years of living organisms, and since "living organism" is simply an evolution of chemistry that became before that, to the beginning of the Universe; you're never going to run out of missing links.
I suspect that may have been more of what GP's point was.
Oh, I quite agree that this is only significant for those interested in anthropology. I simply assert that anthropology is one of the subjects covered by "news for nerds". Nerds existed before computers, and many of us have interests beyond them.
If, by some miracle, this technology actually works, it'll be used to monitor and track you, me and Joe Average. However, you, me or Joe might object to being constantly under surveillance, so the researchers instead say it'll be used to monitor pedophiles. Not only do they make acceptable targets for any kind of indignity and inhuman treatment, but there's also the bonus of being able to paint anyone opposing this kind of monitoring to be a pedophile sympathizer.
So no, it's not hysteria, it's extremely cynical manipulation of people by appealing to their instincts in order to bypass their intelligence. The Creator is rumored to be preparing a service pack for human psyche, but the press release is high on hype and low on hard facts and has a cult-like following of fanboys making discussion about it difficult; until and unless this update is released, expect to see exploits for these remote-access bugs to continue to be manufactured. Of course, there's also the faction that wants to reverse-engineer and open-source the whole thing; however, this far Project Singularity is even higher on hype and lower on actually released products than the competitor. I guess the catedhral model has some advantages after all:^).
Also, there's this thing called the Backspace key, I type faster with one hand than half the population with both.
So you must be pretty experienced with computers. Such a person could easily set up an anonymity network, such as Tor or Freenet. Those could be used by pedophiles to hide their identity online.
The evidence seem pretty damning. You'd better just confess; you can't fool statistical correlations, you know.
One more thing: the caption for the picture says "Fears: Ashleigh Hall, 17, was murdered by Peter Chapman after meeting him on Facebook. Her killing has sparked calls for more security to protect people online"
Can you tell me how anything portrayed in this sentence could possibly relate to typing habits?
Or, for that matter, what does it have to do with pedophiles?
This whole article is just standard fearmongering, and not even the entertaining kind.
Actually it seems to be a scam, based on this: "Mr Butler said: 'We're going to submit a proposal to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for a bid of probably about £1million so that we can develop the research further."
There's just no possible way you can spend the equivalent of 1.4 million dollars or 1.1 million euros making statistical correlations betweem "typing patterns, speeds and rhythms" and people's background, even if you a dumb enough to believe there is a correlation in the first place.
You can tell this story is going to lead the 5am ET local news tomorrow... what? Nobody cares? Okay... next story please, Mr. Editor.
This is news for nerds. Science, including anthropology, is of interest to some of the nerds. Therefore, this story belongs here, even if you personally don't happen to find it interesting.
Since you have an UID, you could simply hide science stories in your settings rather than complain.
Ever hear of Underwriters Laboratories? You don't need government regulation for product safety.
What happens when company starts its own UL which, just incidentally, has a stamp/seal/whatever that looks a lot like some respectable ones mark? Or, if we really assume "no regulation" and mean it, just plain claims its product is approved by a respected UL when that's not actually the case?
Besides, it's kinda nice to be able to walk into a store, buy a device, and plug it in without having to perform extensive research to find out if it's going to kill me. If I have to choose between that, and a shop's ability to peddle slow-acting poison as candy, the latter is always going to loose. That's why product safety regulations exist, and why they always will, barring catastrophic failure of society - a war, natural disaster, or a libertarian victory in elections.
Ok. So when these people show up at an Emergency Room with a bone hanging out of their arm, and do not have cash in hand, they should be turned away. It is their responsibility to have the foresight to have insurance. it is not mine to have higher rates because they are leeching off my insurance company making my rates higher.
Tell you what: you are freed from any and all obligations towards the rest of us, and we're freed from any and all towards you. You don't have to worry about a guy who's bleeding to death, and the police doesn't have to worry about your complains that you were mugged on your way to work, that your employer didn't pay you your dues, that your car went missing from the parking lot, and that your house was robbed empty and taken over by squatters who don't let you in while you were at work.
You libertarians want others to respect your rights, but are unwilling to accept any responsibilities towards them. That's not how life works, never has and never will. Accept that and try to reach some kind of compromise with other people, where you get some of what you want and give some of what they want, or keep on complaining that nobody listens to you.
Then again, as you demonstrated, many of you appear to be borderline if not outright psychopathic, so I'm not sure if it is possible for you to really function independently in society; total lack of empathy and severe disconnection with reality usually demand rather extensive external support structures. That isn't really compatible with trying to change that external world, since you'd only end up twisting those structures into an image of your illness, and thus making them unable to keep you from acting it out.
I truly hope that I'm feeding a troll here; then again, Poe's Law applies to libertarians just as much as any other ideological or religious extremists, and it's not like your view is really any different from any libertarian willing to abolish social security to get rid of taxes, even if most will not put it as bluntly, and many will commit amazing logical contortions to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion: that the poor will die like flies on the streets. That's assuming, of course, that they can get on those streets without paying whoever is maintaining them in the absence of taxes.
In short: Fuck you, you psychopathic libertarian scum.
I can't help noticing that the guy who's holding the eye surgery device he invented is wearing glasses. So I guess this is a either a clever troll or an incompetent scam.
Marginal tax rates can exceed 100%. It's not just the tax bracket, I lose the ability to take deductions, contribute to an IRA, etc. It's particularly bad for seniors, as Social Security becomes taxable when your income is above some low threshold, and so having a little income can really hurt you.
This is why income tax needs to be progressive, with no deductions or additions, so that every extra dollar you earn by whatever means means you're left with more money after taxes. A tax system that has deductions is almost inevitably going to have local optimums with added income leaving you with no more and possibly even less money, benefiting no one but shady accountants.
The above is why total productivity of the community (over time) is so important. 99% of Americans live better than 95% of people who have ever lived. Whether you're "rich" or "poor" in America is a small thing compared to being born into this community that has so valued improvements in technology and productivity.
The same was true of people of Soviet Russia, simply because they had sewers, electricity and running water and the majority of people to have ever lived didn't. Living better than people in the Dark Ages and earlier is not a great claim.
That said, of course productivity of community is important for the quality of the lives of their citizens - making the pie bigger makes everyone's share bigger too. However, if a larger and larger fraction of the pie is given to just a few people, then at some point the shares of others start to shrink, despite the pie still growing.
People need incentive to work hard (or better yet, think hard and then work); but at some point the cost of incentives becomes greater than the increased total productivity. Also, giving more and more incentives to a single person doesn't make him endlessly more productive; at some point you'd be better off taking away some incentive from him and distributing it among others, since their combined increase in production would outweight his loss of productivity.
Finding the sweet spot of optimal economy is not easy, and to make matters worse, people tend to hold positions based on ideology, often oversimplified to the point of absurdity and held with fanatical fervor. Nobody runs their personal finances or corporatations that way (or if they do they're quickly bankrupt), yet when it comes to national economy then suddenly it's a choice between completely unregulated free market with no social services and communism. That's why Soviet Union fell: when there was a difference between reality and theory, reality got ignored. That's why we got the current trouble: right wing deregulated markets, after which business geniuses made computer models, and both trusted their pet theories blindly. And yet the lesson still remains unlearned, and issues get decided on ideological, rather than practical, grounds.
I prefer a system where the poor get an increasing standard of living, even though the rich keep getting proportionally richer to a system where everyone gets a decreasing standard of living, but those Evil Bastards(TM) get the shaft.
The problem is that the poor - or, in fact, anyone below the rich - is not getting an increasing standard of living. The fact that people are getting into more and more debt to maintain the same lifestyle should be a clear indication of this. The rich are getting richer faster than the economy as a whole is growing, and that means that everyone else is getting poorer - not just proportionally but in absolute terms too. That is the problem.
I owe my succes and productivity to working harder than I have to, and spending less than I make.
You owe the fact that "success" amounts to more than a belly full of berries and moss for a bed to the society and the thousands of generations before you who figured out how to make hard work count.
If these things are penalized, I will work only the minimum I can get away with, and die as deep in debt as possible. My community benifits from my work and from my honesty. If you try to force me to "pay back" in other ways, you will fail (because I'll just stop working hard and living responsibly if such actions hurt me), and the community will benefit less, not more, from my work.
Is your tax percent 100 or over? If not, any increase in your income still means you get more, just not as much more as you would without taxation. And at no point in the progressive scale does the tax rate reach 100. In other words, even when you are forced to pay back the community that enables your hard work to bring you success, you're still better off financially working than not.
That you imply that this is not so means that you either aren't succesful enough to warrant learning how progressive taxation actually works, or know and are purposefully spreading misinformation. Either way, your "honesty" is called into question.
That's just a fundamental problem. If you want to advocate socialism, you have to provide an answer to this.
Ironically enough, the original concept of communism was that workers who actually produce stuff should be the ones who get to keep the fruits of their labours. You seem to agree with Marx on that. Why do you hate freedom so much?
Transfer of earnings does nothing to increase total productivity of the community, and often reduces it.
A community is not a corporation. It exists to benefit its members, not to maximize productivity. A society where its poorer members don't have to worry about starvation is preferable to a slightly more productive one where the richest members reap all the benefits of increased production, and the poor ones get the shaft.
Personally, I think the freedom to keep what one ears is quite valuable, but even if you don't, surely you want everyone to be better off, not everyone to be equally poor?
If you can think of a way to guarantee nobody starves and the infrastructure is taken care of without taxes, I'm all ears. It's not like I enjoy paying taxes, just the things they buy me: a civilization. We stopped living in a jungle a million years ago, and I for one don't want to go back.
If they have to jump through enough hoops to do so, and may not even be able to legally distribute what they've made, many will just switch to a more open platform.
Do such platforms exist? Is there a smartphone that allows you to download and install random staff from the Internet as a PC does? Or are all of them basically just mobile storefronts to the manufacturer's shop?
Many patents are there not for suing the ass off the competition but to protect yourself from getting attacked.
And since free software competing with yours is definitely an attack, why not attack? The very idea of patents, after all, is to encourage people to share their inventions by protecting them from competition in turn. That failed miserably, but can't be helped anymore, there's too many financial interests milking the current system for all its worth.
Anyway, the real defence is moving to a (software patent) free country.
Slashdot Mirror
Based on all tests, extra sensory input gets integrated in a matter of few weeks. There was an article on Slashdot just a while ago about an electric eye that transmits images into small electric shocks on the tongue (!), and the test subjects learned to use it to see just fine.
Anything could have unexpected consequences, but there's overwhelming evidence that this won't.
The third option would be to simply refuse to make any such changes to anyone under the age of majority. That would prevent any chance of abuse by putting the choice where it belongs: the person in question.
Bullshit. Lots of people accomplish great things without having shed bucketfulls of any of those. And those who suffered and then accomplished a lot did so despite, not because that suffering.
There is already a mutation in the wild that removes that need; it makes muscles grow to maximum strength whether they're used or not.
Perhaps. I'm not convinced that that couldn't also be changed. It should also be noted that too much hardship will simply break your spirit and character.
How curious. Because I know someone who was bullied, and as a result went from a bright, cheerful and confident kid to a complete ruin, unable to land a job, unalbe to form relationships, unable to even walk on the streets without meds, etc.
But hey, can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, eh?
In other words, you don't see colour as I do. I see orange and green differently, which is why I can separate them, while you see them the same. It follows that you see at least one of them differently than I do.
Whatever works for you.
Given that this very article is about our growing ability to fix any inherited defects, there seems to be very little value in preventing someone with these defects from breeding, if there ever was. Consequently, we can safely allow even you to breed, despite your apparently inadequate logical abilities.
So there.
Or what if they embrace capitalism, start selling enchantments cheaply enough that the masses can afford them - you know, like powerful personal computers are sold these days - and perhaps even offer to pay for enhancing their own workers for the productivity boost?
Capitalism has a lot of downsides, but keeping things that are cheap to produce out of the hands of the masses isn't amongst them.
You know, I recall there was one mutant who had four, instead of the usual three, different color sensing cells in his eyes. The result was that he had much better color vision than baseline human. It might be possible to induce that in baseline humans using this very same technique. So the question becomes:
"Would you like to improve your vision?"
I would.
The only halfway reliable way to obtain such numbers would be to release some big games without DRM and compare their profits to similar games with DRM. When was the last time any big game didn't come with DRM?
Companies are led by humans who are just as capable of acting like irrational lemmings as everyone else. They're also just as likely to be covering their back as the IT drone who figures that "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft products".
A game costs as much as it does because the company making it figures that price will maximize their sales. If the game didn't include DRM, it would still cost just as much, and the company would pocket the difference.
Saying "Period" doesn't make an untrue and, frankly, idiotic assertion any more true.
My, what anger. Did you, perhaps, make a software product, failed to make any money on it, and decided to blame "pirates" for that, instead of your own incompetence?
Really? Isohunt search seems to disagree. In fact the torrent seems to be 3 weeks old. The "official" torrent for the crack has been up for 6 weeks. The crack's also up at GameFix.
So... what are you talking about?
There has been - and still are - cultures where rape and murder (by today's standards; I'm assuming you didn't intend to invoke the tautology "unlawful killing is unlawful") were legal in some circumstances. For example, in all slave-owning cultures it was okay to force your slaves into sexual intercourse with you or someone else; and in many countries nowadays honor killing and revenge rape is common and approved by the populace. So no, these are not in any case universally considered immoral.
What can be agreed upon is that pretty much nobody wants to be murdered or raped. However, almost nobody also wants to have no power over his personal circumstances or the laws of the society he lives in. Very few wants to be judged by arbitrary whims of his feudal lord or a mob either. So, if you use the Golden Rule as a basis for morality, you end up with freedom, democracy and the rule of law being superior to authoritarianism; if you don't, you either accept that murder and rape are okay or arbitrarily declare them to not be for no good reason besides personal taste.
So, in short, either Western democratic culture is superior to Chinese dictatorship, or anything - including rape, murder and abuse of power - are just fine. Or, to put it even more bluntly: the only world where China is not morally inferior to West is one where hypocrisy - having different rules for different people - is not immoral.
Very likely yes.
The realization that you can do anything without consequences will do it for some. For others, it's the fact that they could, which drives others away. Human beings are social animals and need peer pressure to act as corrective feedback. A dictator can, if he will, ignore that feedback, or tune it to more of his liking. The end of that road is living in your own fantasy world with no one daring to tell you the truth; the Emperor truly believes himself to be robed and kills anyone who dares to disagree.
I've never once gotton a virus or malware from an unofficial version. I've gotten plenty of malware from official versions.
Buying a software product (or even a CD nowadays) from a store is a much higher risk than downloading it from BitTorrent.
Gimp on Windows refuses to recognize my tablet every time I start it. I need to reset all settings and restart to get it working. Thanks, but no thanks.
Nothing whatsoever. It's just an ancient finger-bone.
Nothing. Even if it was a missing link, it wouldn't change anything outside anthropology, and even there it would only clarify a minor detail in hominid family tree.
As a side note, I find the whole term "missing link" weird. There's three generations of humans per century; since human evolution involves timeframes of millions of years, there's tens of thousands of links in the chain. Do you really expect to find them all? And in any case, the chain really extends back through 4 billion years of living organisms, and since "living organism" is simply an evolution of chemistry that became before that, to the beginning of the Universe; you're never going to run out of missing links.
Oh, I quite agree that this is only significant for those interested in anthropology. I simply assert that anthropology is one of the subjects covered by "news for nerds". Nerds existed before computers, and many of us have interests beyond them.
If, by some miracle, this technology actually works, it'll be used to monitor and track you, me and Joe Average. However, you, me or Joe might object to being constantly under surveillance, so the researchers instead say it'll be used to monitor pedophiles. Not only do they make acceptable targets for any kind of indignity and inhuman treatment, but there's also the bonus of being able to paint anyone opposing this kind of monitoring to be a pedophile sympathizer.
So no, it's not hysteria, it's extremely cynical manipulation of people by appealing to their instincts in order to bypass their intelligence. The Creator is rumored to be preparing a service pack for human psyche, but the press release is high on hype and low on hard facts and has a cult-like following of fanboys making discussion about it difficult; until and unless this update is released, expect to see exploits for these remote-access bugs to continue to be manufactured. Of course, there's also the faction that wants to reverse-engineer and open-source the whole thing; however, this far Project Singularity is even higher on hype and lower on actually released products than the competitor. I guess the catedhral model has some advantages after all :^).
So you must be pretty experienced with computers. Such a person could easily set up an anonymity network, such as Tor or Freenet. Those could be used by pedophiles to hide their identity online.
The evidence seem pretty damning. You'd better just confess; you can't fool statistical correlations, you know.
Or, for that matter, what does it have to do with pedophiles?
Actually it seems to be a scam, based on this: "Mr Butler said: 'We're going to submit a proposal to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for a bid of probably about £1million so that we can develop the research further."
There's just no possible way you can spend the equivalent of 1.4 million dollars or 1.1 million euros making statistical correlations betweem "typing patterns, speeds and rhythms" and people's background, even if you a dumb enough to believe there is a correlation in the first place.
This is news for nerds. Science, including anthropology, is of interest to some of the nerds. Therefore, this story belongs here, even if you personally don't happen to find it interesting.
Since you have an UID, you could simply hide science stories in your settings rather than complain.
Then perhaps you should cut the middlemen out of the loop entirely and pay for healthcare from tax money directly.
What happens when company starts its own UL which, just incidentally, has a stamp/seal/whatever that looks a lot like some respectable ones mark? Or, if we really assume "no regulation" and mean it, just plain claims its product is approved by a respected UL when that's not actually the case?
Besides, it's kinda nice to be able to walk into a store, buy a device, and plug it in without having to perform extensive research to find out if it's going to kill me. If I have to choose between that, and a shop's ability to peddle slow-acting poison as candy, the latter is always going to loose. That's why product safety regulations exist, and why they always will, barring catastrophic failure of society - a war, natural disaster, or a libertarian victory in elections.
Tell you what: you are freed from any and all obligations towards the rest of us, and we're freed from any and all towards you. You don't have to worry about a guy who's bleeding to death, and the police doesn't have to worry about your complains that you were mugged on your way to work, that your employer didn't pay you your dues, that your car went missing from the parking lot, and that your house was robbed empty and taken over by squatters who don't let you in while you were at work.
You libertarians want others to respect your rights, but are unwilling to accept any responsibilities towards them. That's not how life works, never has and never will. Accept that and try to reach some kind of compromise with other people, where you get some of what you want and give some of what they want, or keep on complaining that nobody listens to you.
Then again, as you demonstrated, many of you appear to be borderline if not outright psychopathic, so I'm not sure if it is possible for you to really function independently in society; total lack of empathy and severe disconnection with reality usually demand rather extensive external support structures. That isn't really compatible with trying to change that external world, since you'd only end up twisting those structures into an image of your illness, and thus making them unable to keep you from acting it out.
I truly hope that I'm feeding a troll here; then again, Poe's Law applies to libertarians just as much as any other ideological or religious extremists, and it's not like your view is really any different from any libertarian willing to abolish social security to get rid of taxes, even if most will not put it as bluntly, and many will commit amazing logical contortions to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion: that the poor will die like flies on the streets. That's assuming, of course, that they can get on those streets without paying whoever is maintaining them in the absence of taxes.
In short: Fuck you, you psychopathic libertarian scum.
I can't help noticing that the guy who's holding the eye surgery device he invented is wearing glasses. So I guess this is a either a clever troll or an incompetent scam.
This is why income tax needs to be progressive, with no deductions or additions, so that every extra dollar you earn by whatever means means you're left with more money after taxes. A tax system that has deductions is almost inevitably going to have local optimums with added income leaving you with no more and possibly even less money, benefiting no one but shady accountants.
The same was true of people of Soviet Russia, simply because they had sewers, electricity and running water and the majority of people to have ever lived didn't. Living better than people in the Dark Ages and earlier is not a great claim.
That said, of course productivity of community is important for the quality of the lives of their citizens - making the pie bigger makes everyone's share bigger too. However, if a larger and larger fraction of the pie is given to just a few people, then at some point the shares of others start to shrink, despite the pie still growing.
People need incentive to work hard (or better yet, think hard and then work); but at some point the cost of incentives becomes greater than the increased total productivity. Also, giving more and more incentives to a single person doesn't make him endlessly more productive; at some point you'd be better off taking away some incentive from him and distributing it among others, since their combined increase in production would outweight his loss of productivity.
Finding the sweet spot of optimal economy is not easy, and to make matters worse, people tend to hold positions based on ideology, often oversimplified to the point of absurdity and held with fanatical fervor. Nobody runs their personal finances or corporatations that way (or if they do they're quickly bankrupt), yet when it comes to national economy then suddenly it's a choice between completely unregulated free market with no social services and communism. That's why Soviet Union fell: when there was a difference between reality and theory, reality got ignored. That's why we got the current trouble: right wing deregulated markets, after which business geniuses made computer models, and both trusted their pet theories blindly. And yet the lesson still remains unlearned, and issues get decided on ideological, rather than practical, grounds.
The problem is that the poor - or, in fact, anyone below the rich - is not getting an increasing standard of living. The fact that people are getting into more and more debt to maintain the same lifestyle should be a clear indication of this. The rich are getting richer faster than the economy as a whole is growing, and that means that everyone else is getting poorer - not just proportionally but in absolute terms too. That is the problem.
You owe the fact that "success" amounts to more than a belly full of berries and moss for a bed to the society and the thousands of generations before you who figured out how to make hard work count.
Is your tax percent 100 or over? If not, any increase in your income still means you get more, just not as much more as you would without taxation. And at no point in the progressive scale does the tax rate reach 100. In other words, even when you are forced to pay back the community that enables your hard work to bring you success, you're still better off financially working than not.
That you imply that this is not so means that you either aren't succesful enough to warrant learning how progressive taxation actually works, or know and are purposefully spreading misinformation. Either way, your "honesty" is called into question.
Ironically enough, the original concept of communism was that workers who actually produce stuff should be the ones who get to keep the fruits of their labours. You seem to agree with Marx on that. Why do you hate freedom so much?
A community is not a corporation. It exists to benefit its members, not to maximize productivity. A society where its poorer members don't have to worry about starvation is preferable to a slightly more productive one where the richest members reap all the benefits of increased production, and the poor ones get the shaft.
If you can think of a way to guarantee nobody starves and the infrastructure is taken care of without taxes, I'm all ears. It's not like I enjoy paying taxes, just the things they buy me: a civilization. We stopped living in a jungle a million years ago, and I for one don't want to go back.
Do such platforms exist? Is there a smartphone that allows you to download and install random staff from the Internet as a PC does? Or are all of them basically just mobile storefronts to the manufacturer's shop?
And since free software competing with yours is definitely an attack, why not attack? The very idea of patents, after all, is to encourage people to share their inventions by protecting them from competition in turn. That failed miserably, but can't be helped anymore, there's too many financial interests milking the current system for all its worth.
Anyway, the real defence is moving to a (software patent) free country.