If there were a real-names policy (an actual, checked, real-names policy, not bullshit like what Google tried to pull), one would surely see less trolling.
One would also see less insightful posts, since any kind of insight typically steps on the toes of some entrenched interest. And even on Slashdot posts expressing unpopular opinions typically end up downmodded because, after all, if it provokes you, it's a troll.
A forum with real-names policy is basically worthless, which is precisely why the Powers that Be try to push them. Stripping people of the shield of anonymity makes dissenting opinions easier to silence through chilling effects. And of course this is marketed for our own good, after all we all know that having someone get away with posting something offensive on the Internet is the worst thing ever.
But now let's totally eliminate the barrier between graphics, sound and all other processors. Instead of limited communications channels and local memory, have distributed shared memory (DSM) and totally free communication between everything.
This sounds a lot like NUMA. Which, I might add, absolutely requires differentiating between local and non-local memory, since the latter is much slower.
Thus, memory can open a connection to the GPU,
Like GPUs have done since the time of AGP? Or did you mean memory will simply send some random data for no particular reason?
the GPU can talk to the disk,
For what purpose? Do you plan to write a file system driver that runs on the GPU? To accomplish... what, exactly speaking?
Ethernet cards can write direct to buffers rather than going via software (RDMA and OpenSockets concepts, just generalized).
Haven't they done this a long time now? In fact, don't all devices that do significant IO use direct memory access?
What room, in such a design, for a CPU? Everything can be outsourced.
And the part that keeps track of the overall program execution state and issues these outsources tasks to other components is, for all intents and purposes, a CPU.
Have the router elements take care of heat and congestion issues, rather than compilers.
...What the heck are you talking about?
And this is marketspeak? Marketspeak for what? Name me a market that wants to eliminate complexity and abandon planned obsolescence in favour of a schizophrenic cross between a parallel Turing machine, a vector computer and a Beowulf cluster.
None does. It's the "schizophrenic" part that's the killer. Which is why, if you need to sell garbage anyway, you litter your product description with enough trendy buzzwords to convince technologically illiterate that it's cutting edge high tech. Which, if you are trying to polish a particularly smelly turd for a sale, can end up using almost all of them. And that can have great synergy with illusion-challenged human resources seeking a solution for cynicism management.
That right there is economist talk, and do not hold up to a reality check what so ever.
You have a very odd view of reality.
Idle production equipment is not wasted.
By definition that which is not used is wasted.
Idle workers are not wasted (unless they happens to still get paid).
Idle workers still need to eat, so either the factory pays them or the taxpayer will. But unfortunately, with all economic activity crippled by lack of energy, just like the factory was, there are no taxpayers any more, so there seems to be a small problem.
Sure, there is a "loss" of potential profits if the market is screaming for the widgets the factory is providing.
That, and people aren't getting the widgets. That's too bad if it's an iPhone factory, and worsel if it makes heart medicine.
But unless some book worm economist set up the whole gig, every damn widget produced, be at 0.01% production capacity or 100% capacity, is a profit earner once sold.
This might surprise you, but both buildings and machinery require maintenance. Furthermore, neither raw materials nor products simply teleport around, and the overhead of moving them is the greater the less you have. And finally, as I already noted, a lot of production processes can't simply be arbitrarily slowed - apart from chemical factories, how about things like casting molten stuff?
Your fridge can stand to shut down for five minutes to ride out a sudden but brief peak in demand. Those do happen.
My fridge can't shut down for days or weeks to ride out a period of calm and cloudy weather. Those also happen.
Also, are you suggesting the electric company gets an itemized list of every gadget I run? Because unless the fridge reports itself as such, I have a hard time imagining how you plan on cutting power to it without leaving me sitting in the dark.
The 'Corrie Break' is a very well-known example, occuring predictably during the mid-episode break of Coronation Street in the UK - it's caused by millions of people simutainously going to put the kettle on.
Indeed. So how do you suggest handling lunchtime? Should we just get used to treating warm food as a rare luxury in the green future?
If you're in an area that uses a water tower or top-of-building tank for pressure though, then the pump can be shut down during a deman peak.
I'm not, and if I was, I'd need to heat the tank to keep it from freezing. And of course pumping water needlessly high first and letting it down again means wasting power on friction.
The problem, of course, is that they're your chickens and land only because people agree so. Property rights are no less imaginary than currency.
The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination. Which is of course what allows people to value things differently, thus making trade possible. So it's only appropriate that we use a made-up concept of currency as an abstract representation for the made-up concept of value - or economic value, to precise.
In other words, there is not - and cannot even in theory be - non-funny money. Value being subjective is the very heart of the concept of economy. And that means any imaginable way of measuring it is ultimately just make-believe.
Well, no, because I have no convenient way of checking either the purity nor mass of any gold I might get, and a metal-backed currency can stop being so at any time. On top of that, gold is soft enough for wear being a problem, but still too hard to cut pieces off as needed, so we'd be stuck with precut gold pieces (coins) which can't be actually trusted to carry their nominal value due to wear and theft.
On a purely technical level, without getting into any economics or ideology, gold makes for a horrible currency.
No, it isn't. I need power for food storage, food preparation, Internet access and light. I also consume water, which takes power to prepare and pump. Trying to make any of these too expensive for me to afford - which is the reality behind talk of "incentives" - means it's time for torches & pitchforks.
Turn a factory on full power when the wind is blowing and slow it down when the wind isn't.
This means the factory is running at less than full speed on average, making it less profitable and thus more prone to be shut down. That's bad news for the employees and owners both. And that's assuming the factory can simply "slow down". Try reducing power to a chemical plant and it'll enter an emergency shutdown mode, hopefully only losing the raw materials under processing at the time (as opposed to, say, having them solidify in pipes or reactor vessels, or even outright exploding) but coincidentally creating work for hazardous waste disposal companies.
OpenCL is highly specific in application. Likewise, RDMA and Ethernet Offloading are highly specific for networking, SCSI is highly specific for disks, and so on.
Well, since the CPU already specializes in general-purpose serial computation, other nodes in a heterogenous environment must logically specialize for either generic parallel computation or specific applications, otherwise you have just plain old SMP.
But it's all utterly absurd. As soon as you stop thinking in terms of hierarchies and start thinking in terms of heterogeneous networks of specialized nodes, you soon realize that each node probably wants a highly specialized environment tailored to what it does best, but that for the rest, it's just message passing. You don't need masters, you don't need slaves. You need bus switches with a bit more oomph (they'd need to be bidirectional, support windowing and handle multipath routing where shortest route may be congested).
That describes neither how this heterogenous network of equal nodes would function (how do you dispatch tasks to nodes without the dispatching node becoming de facto master) nor what advantage it would have over current model (heterogenous network of nodes with some specializing in overall control). In fact it sounds a lot like buzzword bingo.
Above all, you need message passing that is wholly target-independent since you've no friggin' clue what the target will actually be in a heterogeneous environment.
You mean like the extension card mechanism PCs have had from the very beginning? Also, SATA seems to be remarkably uncaring of whether the device on the other end stores information on spinning disks or in electric capacitors.
Fuck the muslims! Seriously. FUCK THE MUSLIMS! They want global domination, from the Middle East, to Europe, the Americas, Russia and yes, China too.
How is that any different from, say, evangelical christians? Stop exporting your own brand of religious evil before you start casting stones on other people.
Anti-american muslims? That sir is a badge of honor!
Depends. Is it because they "hate your freedom"? Or is it because you keep propping up dictatorships and meddling in bloody wars in Middle-East? Which one do you think is more likely?
If we have this much surplus, clearly we're buying too much.
Not really. US's tactic is limiting casualties through high-tech warfare, and technology marches on. If you want to stay on the cutting edge, you'll constantly be replacing still-functional hardware with newer. This isn't limited to the military, of course, but is something all too familiar from the PC world.
A bigger problem is that giving military hardware to the police will eventually make the police into a domestic army. Is this desirable?
Finally, if we dump the cpu-centric view of computers that became obsolete the day the 8087 arrived (if not before), we can restructure the entire PC architecture to something rational. That will redistribute demand for capacity, to the point where we can actually beat Moore's Law on aggregate for maybe another 20 years.
Please explain how your vision is different from, say, OpenCL?
He also showed that one particular thing was absolute, if you recall.
Nope. Einstein showed consequences of the speed of light being a constant of nature. He didn't show or even predict that it was one, that was done by Maxwell's equations and various attempts to measure Earth's velocity relative to luminous aether (which turned out to be "zero").
And as it happens, one of those consequences is that timewise and spacewise distance are relative.
You never have 50,000 death per year in the US to coal.
Perhaps 5 to 10 in the long time average due to mining accidents. I really doubt the total number of workers mining coal is close to that number.
As you surely know, coal plants are huge polluters and pollution causes health issues, which in turn add up to early deaths, even if we ignore damage done to environment.
But then again, opposing nuclear power is not really about protecting humans or nature, now is it? It has long since turned into politics, where opposition is based more on identity than rational calculation of risks and rewards of various options. And who knows, perhaps being hit by the double-whammy of full-power climate change and energy crisis simultaneously will finally teach humanity to not treat important decisions as tribal identifiers. It's something we must learn before we venture beyond this planet, since the cost of irrational stupidity will continue getting higher. But I fear the lesson will be exremely painful, even by the scale of these things.
And: fix your damn mining safety issues instead of blaming it to 'coal', mining of uranium is only marginally more safe.
Thousandfold decrease in mining causes a thousandfold decrease in mining-related deaths, even before factoring in such details as coal being highly flammable and uranium being not. Also, unlike coal, uranium can be extracted from seawater, so with it we could theoretically eliminate mining altogether.
When's the last time you went out to eat at a sit-down restaurant? Just how many of the staff there had been replaced by technology?
The staff of restaurant A eats at restaurant B, and the other way around. At every iteration, each restaurant's income shrinks, because it's a fraction of what the other restaurant earned at last round, since even if these are nonprofits that don't need to pay shareholders, they still need supplies. Bankruptcy is inevitable unless the restaurants can lure some customers working at the manufacturers of said supplies and close the cycle of money. Too bad such customers get ever harder to find as industry gets automated.
Services have a supportive role and can't carry the economy. A wealth of society is roughly how much stuff it produces per citizen. As industrial workforce shrinks, a smaller and smaller proportion of that enters economy through Joe Average and higher and higher proportion enters through Joe Shareholder. But no matter how gluttonous Joe S is, there's physical limits to how much he can eat, so the restaurant is screwed, regardless of how many other people might like it - they simply don't have the buying power to keep it afloat. And as wealth concentration advances, economy gets ever more twisted into providing for Joe S, at the expense of Joe A being worse and worse off.
At upper Minnesota temps, all vehicles need some thermal considerations.
To start, yes. And badly designed ones might need engine compartment airflow to be altered. However, if Tesla can be damaged by merely standing in the cold for too long, it might be a problem.
Also, let's not forget that IC engines get heating for free from their waste heat. An electric car needs to use its precious battery charge to keep the windows clear. So colder locations might need their own specialized model.
Yes, as an adult, you realize that. But would you have realized it as a child? Probably not, if the only experience you had with guns and death was video-game based.
As a child, I also had no experience with bashing tile walls to pieces with my head, yet I somehow managed to comprehend that emulating Super Mario would be a bad idea.
Children aren't idiots, just impulsive and inexperienced.
The video would have been served well by spending a few minutes at the end of it making practical suggestions about what people might do in the changing world to keep themselves relevant, but the way the video stands right now, it just seems like needless fear-mongering about the future. Maybe he's entirely right, but even if he is, what good will it do us today to worry about it, since there doesn't seem to be a damn thing that actually *can* be done?
"The world" - actually our socioeconomic system, to be precise - exists to see to the needs of the people, not the other way around. If it fails at that bad enough, it'll be torn down and replaced with another one. Since it's doubtful the Powers that Be will be any wiser about this this time around than in the past, what you can do is to learn to build and operate a guillotine, so that when they've wasted their last chance to survive the inevitable consequences go as smoothly and painlessly as possible.
Powers live or die by their legitimacy or lack of it. Capitalism got a boost from fall of Communism, but this very thread shows that it's almost gone. When the tone of the discussion is whether we'll be servants or dead, the obvious question - "why should we settle for either?" - won't be far behind. And since Capitalism seems unable to provide a non-dystopian future, and it's questionable whether it can provide any future, it seems unlikely its mythos can continue asserting loyalty much longer. Which, ironically enough, is perfectly consistent with the spirit of Capitalism itself: it fails to deliver, so it gets the boot.
So yes, there will still be some sort of economy, but it produces a horrible life for most people.
I'm beginning to suspect this is actually seen as desirable by a certain type of people, a just punishment for being less competitive in a meritocratic society. Some people are so taken by the Heaven/Hell mythology they want to create both on Earth. That this also lets them play the role of God and decide who goes where is surely just a coincidence.
We see all the time arguments that prisons should be as nasty as possible, to make them better punishments, and that poor deserve to be so, so why should someone putting 1 and 1 together and getting 666 be so surprising?
I understand charity for the poor, but demanding that poor people pay less for everything simply because they are poor defeats the point of a market economy. If you are going to do that, why not go all the way to a state planned economy?
The ultimate purpose of economy is to provide goods and services to people. If people can't afford them, the economy fails at its primary task, and will soon fail, period. Since US - and increasingly other Western countries - seems hell-bent on making almost everyone poor for the sake of a few ultra-rich, it's quickly approaching the point where it must indeed switch to planned economy, since a capitalist one is inherently controlled by demand, yet people who can't afford what they need can't send signals to control production.
Viewed alternatively, US already is a planned economy, since that's what a "supply-side" economy is. It's just that the planners are laboring under the delusion that they're capitalists, and thus doing piss-poor job.
Capitalism, even with all its problems, is the best way to distribute limited resources in a world with unlimited demand.
Demand is not unlimited. You only generate demand for things you actually (try to) buy, and you only buy things you can afford. Just because some kid wants a pony doesn't mean he's generating demand unless he or his parents go shopping for one. And since wages have long since stagnated, employment has become a precarious prospect, and keeping consumption up with debt has finally hit a wall, the economy is now collapsing since the demand needed to keep it going simply isn't there.
You mean other than the license agreement which specifically indemnifies them against things like that?
The one that tries to unilaterally alter a deal after the fact? Why would that make Microsoft not subject to consumer protection laws simply because they said they aren't?
I'm amazed at the noise that doesn't get buried. If you don't browse at 2+ or even 3+, there's an awful lot of juvenile trolling.
Really? Because while there's certainly a lot of views I don't agree with, I see little if any trolling at +2.
But if I go to a nice restaurant, or hell even McDonalds, at the very least I don't want some nutjob banging on the windows flashing his junk at everyone.
Nor do you, nor the restaurant, want PETA to hold a "meat is murder" demonstration outside. And it's all too easy to use anti-flasher policies to squash a protest that, whether you agree or disagree with it, is legitimate. And while a privately run website certainly has the right to disable comments, we should not forget that this results in it turning into an echo chamber where no dissenting voices are heard. People love to spend their time in such echo chambers, getting endless reinforcement for their identities and no challenges. The problem is that they get to vote in the real world, and will likely do so according to the fantasy world.
A website without comment section is basically a propaganda machine, telling people what to see and think. A website that's all comments - like Slashdot and yes, even 4chan - is a community discussing matters. Newssites with comment section are somewhere in the middle, and no, blogs are not sufficient replacement, because people only read blogs they agree with. On the other hand, a comment challenging your most dearly held beliefs can pop up anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
You see no value in a chance to promote your viewpoint? Or hear others?
One would also see less insightful posts, since any kind of insight typically steps on the toes of some entrenched interest. And even on Slashdot posts expressing unpopular opinions typically end up downmodded because, after all, if it provokes you, it's a troll.
A forum with real-names policy is basically worthless, which is precisely why the Powers that Be try to push them. Stripping people of the shield of anonymity makes dissenting opinions easier to silence through chilling effects. And of course this is marketed for our own good, after all we all know that having someone get away with posting something offensive on the Internet is the worst thing ever.
This sounds a lot like NUMA. Which, I might add, absolutely requires differentiating between local and non-local memory, since the latter is much slower.
Like GPUs have done since the time of AGP? Or did you mean memory will simply send some random data for no particular reason?
For what purpose? Do you plan to write a file system driver that runs on the GPU? To accomplish... what, exactly speaking?
Haven't they done this a long time now? In fact, don't all devices that do significant IO use direct memory access?
And the part that keeps track of the overall program execution state and issues these outsources tasks to other components is, for all intents and purposes, a CPU.
...What the heck are you talking about?
None does. It's the "schizophrenic" part that's the killer. Which is why, if you need to sell garbage anyway, you litter your product description with enough trendy buzzwords to convince technologically illiterate that it's cutting edge high tech. Which, if you are trying to polish a particularly smelly turd for a sale, can end up using almost all of them. And that can have great synergy with illusion-challenged human resources seeking a solution for cynicism management.
You have a very odd view of reality.
By definition that which is not used is wasted.
Idle workers still need to eat, so either the factory pays them or the taxpayer will. But unfortunately, with all economic activity crippled by lack of energy, just like the factory was, there are no taxpayers any more, so there seems to be a small problem.
That, and people aren't getting the widgets. That's too bad if it's an iPhone factory, and worsel if it makes heart medicine.
This might surprise you, but both buildings and machinery require maintenance. Furthermore, neither raw materials nor products simply teleport around, and the overhead of moving them is the greater the less you have. And finally, as I already noted, a lot of production processes can't simply be arbitrarily slowed - apart from chemical factories, how about things like casting molten stuff?
My fridge can't shut down for days or weeks to ride out a period of calm and cloudy weather. Those also happen.
Also, are you suggesting the electric company gets an itemized list of every gadget I run? Because unless the fridge reports itself as such, I have a hard time imagining how you plan on cutting power to it without leaving me sitting in the dark.
Indeed. So how do you suggest handling lunchtime? Should we just get used to treating warm food as a rare luxury in the green future?
I'm not, and if I was, I'd need to heat the tank to keep it from freezing. And of course pumping water needlessly high first and letting it down again means wasting power on friction.
The problem, of course, is that they're your chickens and land only because people agree so. Property rights are no less imaginary than currency.
The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination. Which is of course what allows people to value things differently, thus making trade possible. So it's only appropriate that we use a made-up concept of currency as an abstract representation for the made-up concept of value - or economic value, to precise.
In other words, there is not - and cannot even in theory be - non-funny money. Value being subjective is the very heart of the concept of economy. And that means any imaginable way of measuring it is ultimately just make-believe.
Well, no, because I have no convenient way of checking either the purity nor mass of any gold I might get, and a metal-backed currency can stop being so at any time. On top of that, gold is soft enough for wear being a problem, but still too hard to cut pieces off as needed, so we'd be stuck with precut gold pieces (coins) which can't be actually trusted to carry their nominal value due to wear and theft.
On a purely technical level, without getting into any economics or ideology, gold makes for a horrible currency.
No, it isn't. I need power for food storage, food preparation, Internet access and light. I also consume water, which takes power to prepare and pump. Trying to make any of these too expensive for me to afford - which is the reality behind talk of "incentives" - means it's time for torches & pitchforks.
This means the factory is running at less than full speed on average, making it less profitable and thus more prone to be shut down. That's bad news for the employees and owners both. And that's assuming the factory can simply "slow down". Try reducing power to a chemical plant and it'll enter an emergency shutdown mode, hopefully only losing the raw materials under processing at the time (as opposed to, say, having them solidify in pipes or reactor vessels, or even outright exploding) but coincidentally creating work for hazardous waste disposal companies.
Well, since the CPU already specializes in general-purpose serial computation, other nodes in a heterogenous environment must logically specialize for either generic parallel computation or specific applications, otherwise you have just plain old SMP.
That describes neither how this heterogenous network of equal nodes would function (how do you dispatch tasks to nodes without the dispatching node becoming de facto master) nor what advantage it would have over current model (heterogenous network of nodes with some specializing in overall control). In fact it sounds a lot like buzzword bingo.
You mean like the extension card mechanism PCs have had from the very beginning? Also, SATA seems to be remarkably uncaring of whether the device on the other end stores information on spinning disks or in electric capacitors.
How is that any different from, say, evangelical christians? Stop exporting your own brand of religious evil before you start casting stones on other people.
Depends. Is it because they "hate your freedom"? Or is it because you keep propping up dictatorships and meddling in bloody wars in Middle-East? Which one do you think is more likely?
Not really. US's tactic is limiting casualties through high-tech warfare, and technology marches on. If you want to stay on the cutting edge, you'll constantly be replacing still-functional hardware with newer. This isn't limited to the military, of course, but is something all too familiar from the PC world.
A bigger problem is that giving military hardware to the police will eventually make the police into a domestic army. Is this desirable?
Please explain how your vision is different from, say, OpenCL?
Nope. Einstein showed consequences of the speed of light being a constant of nature. He didn't show or even predict that it was one, that was done by Maxwell's equations and various attempts to measure Earth's velocity relative to luminous aether (which turned out to be "zero").
And as it happens, one of those consequences is that timewise and spacewise distance are relative.
As you surely know, coal plants are huge polluters and pollution causes health issues, which in turn add up to early deaths, even if we ignore damage done to environment.
But then again, opposing nuclear power is not really about protecting humans or nature, now is it? It has long since turned into politics, where opposition is based more on identity than rational calculation of risks and rewards of various options. And who knows, perhaps being hit by the double-whammy of full-power climate change and energy crisis simultaneously will finally teach humanity to not treat important decisions as tribal identifiers. It's something we must learn before we venture beyond this planet, since the cost of irrational stupidity will continue getting higher. But I fear the lesson will be exremely painful, even by the scale of these things.
Thousandfold decrease in mining causes a thousandfold decrease in mining-related deaths, even before factoring in such details as coal being highly flammable and uranium being not. Also, unlike coal, uranium can be extracted from seawater, so with it we could theoretically eliminate mining altogether.
The staff of restaurant A eats at restaurant B, and the other way around. At every iteration, each restaurant's income shrinks, because it's a fraction of what the other restaurant earned at last round, since even if these are nonprofits that don't need to pay shareholders, they still need supplies. Bankruptcy is inevitable unless the restaurants can lure some customers working at the manufacturers of said supplies and close the cycle of money. Too bad such customers get ever harder to find as industry gets automated.
Services have a supportive role and can't carry the economy. A wealth of society is roughly how much stuff it produces per citizen. As industrial workforce shrinks, a smaller and smaller proportion of that enters economy through Joe Average and higher and higher proportion enters through Joe Shareholder. But no matter how gluttonous Joe S is, there's physical limits to how much he can eat, so the restaurant is screwed, regardless of how many other people might like it - they simply don't have the buying power to keep it afloat. And as wealth concentration advances, economy gets ever more twisted into providing for Joe S, at the expense of Joe A being worse and worse off.
I see what you did here.
To start, yes. And badly designed ones might need engine compartment airflow to be altered. However, if Tesla can be damaged by merely standing in the cold for too long, it might be a problem.
Also, let's not forget that IC engines get heating for free from their waste heat. An electric car needs to use its precious battery charge to keep the windows clear. So colder locations might need their own specialized model.
As a child, I also had no experience with bashing tile walls to pieces with my head, yet I somehow managed to comprehend that emulating Super Mario would be a bad idea.
Children aren't idiots, just impulsive and inexperienced.
"The world" - actually our socioeconomic system, to be precise - exists to see to the needs of the people, not the other way around. If it fails at that bad enough, it'll be torn down and replaced with another one. Since it's doubtful the Powers that Be will be any wiser about this this time around than in the past, what you can do is to learn to build and operate a guillotine, so that when they've wasted their last chance to survive the inevitable consequences go as smoothly and painlessly as possible.
Powers live or die by their legitimacy or lack of it. Capitalism got a boost from fall of Communism, but this very thread shows that it's almost gone. When the tone of the discussion is whether we'll be servants or dead, the obvious question - "why should we settle for either?" - won't be far behind. And since Capitalism seems unable to provide a non-dystopian future, and it's questionable whether it can provide any future, it seems unlikely its mythos can continue asserting loyalty much longer. Which, ironically enough, is perfectly consistent with the spirit of Capitalism itself: it fails to deliver, so it gets the boot.
I'm beginning to suspect this is actually seen as desirable by a certain type of people, a just punishment for being less competitive in a meritocratic society. Some people are so taken by the Heaven/Hell mythology they want to create both on Earth. That this also lets them play the role of God and decide who goes where is surely just a coincidence.
We see all the time arguments that prisons should be as nasty as possible, to make them better punishments, and that poor deserve to be so, so why should someone putting 1 and 1 together and getting 666 be so surprising?
That you don't have a choice, obviously. Stupid.
The ultimate purpose of economy is to provide goods and services to people. If people can't afford them, the economy fails at its primary task, and will soon fail, period. Since US - and increasingly other Western countries - seems hell-bent on making almost everyone poor for the sake of a few ultra-rich, it's quickly approaching the point where it must indeed switch to planned economy, since a capitalist one is inherently controlled by demand, yet people who can't afford what they need can't send signals to control production.
Viewed alternatively, US already is a planned economy, since that's what a "supply-side" economy is. It's just that the planners are laboring under the delusion that they're capitalists, and thus doing piss-poor job.
Demand is not unlimited. You only generate demand for things you actually (try to) buy, and you only buy things you can afford. Just because some kid wants a pony doesn't mean he's generating demand unless he or his parents go shopping for one. And since wages have long since stagnated, employment has become a precarious prospect, and keeping consumption up with debt has finally hit a wall, the economy is now collapsing since the demand needed to keep it going simply isn't there.
The one that tries to unilaterally alter a deal after the fact? Why would that make Microsoft not subject to consumer protection laws simply because they said they aren't?
If this was true, then totalitarian nations would have no need for propaganda or censorship, now would they?
Holy shit! Sun used to be hardcore!
Really? Because while there's certainly a lot of views I don't agree with, I see little if any trolling at +2.
Nor do you, nor the restaurant, want PETA to hold a "meat is murder" demonstration outside. And it's all too easy to use anti-flasher policies to squash a protest that, whether you agree or disagree with it, is legitimate. And while a privately run website certainly has the right to disable comments, we should not forget that this results in it turning into an echo chamber where no dissenting voices are heard. People love to spend their time in such echo chambers, getting endless reinforcement for their identities and no challenges. The problem is that they get to vote in the real world, and will likely do so according to the fantasy world.
A website without comment section is basically a propaganda machine, telling people what to see and think. A website that's all comments - like Slashdot and yes, even 4chan - is a community discussing matters. Newssites with comment section are somewhere in the middle, and no, blogs are not sufficient replacement, because people only read blogs they agree with. On the other hand, a comment challenging your most dearly held beliefs can pop up anywhere.