blue collar labor in america by and large has no future. The government needs to change the economic model to start developing our children's mind from a young age
The problem goes deeper than that: it's not only blue collar workers that have no future (and not only in America). White collar workers are also being replaced by machines; the process has just started, but I believe will accelerate. Assuming scientific progress continues at more or less the current pace, I can't think of any existing job humans do now that couldn't in the future be done cheaper by a machine (at least theoretically).
There are two typical answers: one is that new technologies will replace some jobs, but create enough other jobs to compensate. However, that is not proven, and may not be the case; when a factory is automated, thousands of workers are replaced with a few dozen highly qualified engineers that command and maintain the machines. And when the machine maintenance is itself automated, the few dozen may be replaced by just a few people that can manage the whole thing. What happens to the thousands of workers that got replaced?
The second usual answer is that people can study and qualify for more technical jobs, which can not be automated. This is the solution governments usually try to push, by creating job training programs, providing student loans, and so on. While this works on the short term, I don't think it will forever: first, some people simply don't have the time/resources/innate capability to qualify for too complex jobs; as technology and science advances, more and more people will not be able to keep pace. The other issue is that even highly technical jobs will probably be automated sooner or later, as technology advances. Where then will everybody work? I think this process will sooner or later clash with the current basic society structure (in particular with the ownership and property rules), and cause radical changes. Should be interesting!
If you quit, you can't collect unemployment. If you refuse, then they have to decide to fire you... and either way, you've still go the shares.
Not necessarily. The options may require the employee stay with the company for a certain time before they vest. Many companies offer shares or options that vest over a few years (maybe 25% per year, or so), and, if you leave the company you lose the ones not yet vested. It depends on the original contract (which I haven't seen), but it's possible Zynga could win either way
Millions to weed out counterfeit parts, BILLIONS to build a fab
But the factory wouldn't be destroyed after making the set of parts. It will continue producing and making money, thus recouping the initial investment.
While it's stupid to buy parts from a foreign power that wishes to subjugate us, its still cheaper to do so the build it all here.
I don't really understand why it would be so much cheaper. What are the big advantages China or Taiwan offer that makes semiconductor fabs move there? The ones I can think of are the cost of labor, weak enforcement of environmental regulations and government support (via direct subsidization, laxity in enforcing IP or laws/vamal regulations that hurt the international competition). Cheap labor shouldn't be a big percentage of the total - the greatest cost for a semiconductor fab should be in tools, clean room equipment, and all the high precision machinery; this cost should be pretty much similar for the USA and China. Is then government intervention the major factor?
You are contradicting yourself: "although long-term increases are difficult to quantify".
You should read the things you're replying to more carefully. I'm not contradicting myself - the text is quoted from the WHO document in the link; if you have a problem, it should be with the WHO.
Neither I nor the GP said anything about the lethality of cancers, or about coal. We talked about the increase in the incidence of cancers in the Ukraine and Belarus, which is documented, and I posted links to this effect. You jumped in with a silly tautological argument: "there was no increased incidence in the number of cancers if you ignore the cases where there was increased incidence, (i.e., thyroid cancers)". I pointed out that your logic is faulty; now you're going on about lethality and the coal industry. Nobody denied the fact that thyroid cancers are treatable, end neither I nor the GP even mentioned coal in this thread. That's because neither of those issues have anything to do with the initial statement, and you're just trying to confuse the issue. Naughty!
Apart from thyroid cancer (which is non fatal and treatable, unlike coal mining accidents), there was no statistically significant increase
Well, of course, if we don't count the cancers for which there was an increase, there was no increase. But the point is that there *was* a major spike of thyroid cancers in the Ukraine and Belarus. Fortunately, as you say, those cancers are rarely lethal - doesn't mean they don't exist though. Here is what the WHO estimates. That's a quote, if you're in a hurry:
In the first few months after the accident, radiation dose exposures to the thyroid received were particularly high in children and adolescents living in Belarus, Ukraine and the most affected regions of the Russian Federation, and in those who drank milk with high levels of radioactive iodine. By 2005, more than 6,000 thyroid cancer cases had been diagnosed in this group. It is most likely that a large fraction of these thyroid cancers are attributable to radioiodine intake. Furthermore, it is expected that increases in thyroid cancer incidence due to the Chernobyl accident will continue for many more years, although long-term increases are difficult to quantify.
If your talking about "older" authors the biggest omission by far, IMHO, has to be Alfred Bester.
Oh, yes! Don't know how I missed Bester. As to Vance, I'm conflicted - I absolutely loved some of his short stories, and I think "The Moon Moth" is one of the best SF stories ever written, but I'm not really impressed by a lot of his other stuff. Maybe I just don't "get" him (as I never managed to really "get" Silverberg or Wolfe, even though they're both considered among the greats). Still, the only place where Goodkind ought to be listed before Vance is a dictionary. Also missing is an author who should be dear to the Slashdot crowd - I mean, of course, Charles Stross. While no Clarke, he's certainly better than Eddings.
I'm also a bit confused by the choice of "The Codex Alera". I don't really see anything special about "The Codex Alera" - it's what used to be called An Extruded Trilogy back on rec.arts.sf.written (this is NOT a good thing), and not deserving in any way to be on in any top 100 list (not even on length). Jim Butcher's Dresden series would have been a much more convincing choice (or Steven Brust's Vlad books).
This is a personal opinion, but I'd have liked to see some more non-English language writers on the list; I think somebody else mentioned Stanislaw Lem. The Strugatski brothers ought to be there too, and maybe so should Gerard Klein and Italo Calvino. Any of them are easily better than many of the ones on the list
Also, no Ellison? No Delany? No Fredric Brown? Not to mention del Rey, Simak, Sprague de Camp , any of which should have been there instead of Brooks or Eddings.
Also 4 Gaimans, but only 2 Pratchetts? Come on, I like Gaiman, but he can't hold a candle to Pratchett, especially if you consider the whole oeuvre.
For some wines fresh is the way to go - they're called vins de primeur. The best known is the Beaujolais nouveau, which doesn't normally keep over one year.
I wish you damn whippersnappers would stop using WP7 for Windows Phone 7... I keep having to wonder what the hell Word Perfect has to do with a discussion on cell phones...
It's easy to understand which is which once you realize that Word Perfect ends at WP5.1. Just like "The Matrix" ended after the first movie, and "Star Wars" after the first three. La, la, la, can't hear you, la, la, la...
it doesn't have to generate every distinct string.
Sorry, I don't understand you - I may have been unclear in my post; let me explain: it doesn't have to generate anything. All I need to know is the number of characters he takes into consideration (say 80, for a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and maybe some extra colons or stuff) and the number of strings he wants to generate (for example the 100000 (or however many there are) different substrings of length 9 in the Shakespeare oeuvre). I can then compute the probability of a random generated substring falling into this particular subset (something like 100000/80^9, for the values pulled out of thin air above). At this point all I need to do is apply a formula to get the number of samples (monkey generated strings) I need to cover all the space (the 100000 substrings) with a given probability. It'll be something like "with 100,000,000 samples, you have a 20% chance of hitting all the target substrings, with 1,000,000,000 you have a 70% chance", and so on). Given this number and assuming a robo-monkey generates a string every X milliseconds, I can plot the graphs showing me the distribution of results I'd get in different tries, and I'd be able to say "if you wait a week, there's a 20% chance for your monkeys to finish the task, but if you wait a month it's 80% and if you wait a year it's 99.9999, so if you don't get your results in a year better check your monkeys, you've been sold a bad lot or something". All that without generating a single substring!
But then I wouldn't get to play with the monkeys, would I?
The name of this project is completely wrong compared to what anyone who knows of the Million monkeys can recreate Shakespeares works' concept.
Yeah, I don't get the point of this exercise at all. Writing a trivial program to count the distinct strings of length "n" from the Shakespeare text file, and applying a bit of really elementary calculus of probabilities will get you the same results in about a hour altogether, and should be doable by a medium bright high schooler.
Has basic mathematics literacy gone so low? What's next, first page articles on a big program that computes the square root of two via brute force by generating random numbers and squaring them?
Trouble is, humans come in a very small range of models, all of them with lots of built-in limitations. As technology progresses, the machines can duplicate human capabilities better and better. Humans will sooner or later run against the built in limitations; machines don't have to. In some areas, for example physical strength, men haven't been able to compete against machines for quite some time now - and that's why what we consider unskilled jobs are so low paid. In other areas, like intellectual skills, the process is still ongoing. Machines have taken over the relatively low skilled range (see the fine article), but humans can still do better then existing machines at the top of the skill ladder. Sooner or later humans will run against the built in intellectual limitations too. Note that many people already have (not everybody can become a doctor, or a lawyer), and that in some limited areas, like chess, machines have already pushed beyond the human race's capabilities.
What will happen when machines become good enough that they can replace almost all humans in almost all intellectual jobs is an interesting problem. Maybe machine driven production will reduce the cost of things so much that most humans will not need to be gainfully employed to get a reasonable standard of living. Or new jobs will appear, requiring a different set of skills, not easily duplicated by a machine; I don't know however what those skills and jobs would be. Art? Pattern matching? Social skills (maybe in jobs such as paid companion, or paid party pal)?. Biology-based stuff, like participating to drug tests? Either way, the next fifty years should be quite interesting, and that's without even counting the new iPhone version;)
A simple test is: take a male and female of the two different groups, and stick them on a deserted island for a few months or years together. (with supplies of course) If they're the same species, they'll hit it eventually and she'll get pregnant. If they're not the same species, they'll stay apart. This eliminates the social factors
Eh, things are a bit more complex than that - as we know more the old "species" concept becomes fuzzier. Look up "ring species" sometime, for a laugh.
if real speciation happened there, how would we have handled it? Would make for a great SF story. If only I could write..
It's been done to death; just a few examples, off the top of my head: van Vogt's "Slan"; Sturgeon's "More Than Human"; more recently, Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain". Not to mention the whole X-Men thing...
Set up a neutrino beam on the Earth firing at the moon, and another firing back, and hook it into the stock markets and you'd get reports of market changes before they happened.
Or set up a cascade of neutrino emitter/detector pairs (or, if you can find a good neutrino reflector, set up a resonating chamber, kind of like a laser), so that the particles travel a long way before hitting the detector; if you gain 60 ns every time, with 1000000 passes you get 60 ms, enough for an electronic trade:)
If it takes time for light to travel from point "A" to Point "B". How can the signal ever arrive before it was sent? It takes ~4 years for light to get from Proxima Centrauri to Earth. If I send a signal at 2x the speed of light, it should take ~2 years to get there. At 4x it should take ~1 year. Wouldn't that imply that even at an infinite times the speed of light, the signal should still arrive a fraction of a second after you sent it? Or am I missing something?
You're missing this. Basically, you're using Proxima Centauri time as if it were an absolute time, while in relativity "time" is dependent on the frame of reference. An observer on Earth would see your signal arrive, and two years later (using a powerful telescope) he'd see it being transmitted from Proxima. That violates causality for the observer on Earth, and means his frame of reference and the one on Proxima aren't equivalent. That in its turn violates the principle of relativity.
If the labour is free, products are also free (or almost free). You keep all the non gifted on social providing them with bare essentials. If you are gifted and can contribute you get special treatment.
In other words, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Not to speak for the GP, but in both the religious and Linux supporter communities there are very vocal minorities who have an unfortunate tendency to disregard facts when they contradict their respective dogmas; this may mean insulting anybody who contradicts them (for example, by labeling them as "shills"), down-modding stories or comments that may be either critical of Linux or pro-MS (whatever the factual contents), going on extended rants, and so on (as we can see in the comments for this very story). In either case, I don't think they represent the majorities, but they *are* quite visible. This similarity does make Linux supporters sometimes look to outsiders like a cult.
Vote. Educate people. Volunteer for Obama's campaign. Did I say vote?
While I agree with the sentiment (maybe not so much about the Obama part, given his apparent lack of a spine, but that's another discussion), I doubt education will work anymore. You see, I think Americans are at this point the best managed people on Earth. They're intentionally misinformed, fed lies after lies and mentally forced on a junk diet of nationalism, hate, suspicion and ignorance.
Note how often ridiculous red herrings are raised, just in time to distract from the real issues (for example, the gay marriage scare of a few years ago, or the swift boat people, or today's deficit cap crap). And note that *it works!*. It works because Americans are managed into believing this kind of thing. There isn't another place I know of where so many people are suspicious of education (see how Michelle Bachman wants to dismantle the Dept. of Education, or how all Republican candidates had to pledge their disbelief in evolution). Those people consider the word "liberal" an insult, and I don't believe your attempts to educate them have a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
blue collar labor in america by and large has no future. The government needs to change the economic model to start developing our children's mind from a young age
The problem goes deeper than that: it's not only blue collar workers that have no future (and not only in America). White collar workers are also being replaced by machines; the process has just started, but I believe will accelerate. Assuming scientific progress continues at more or less the current pace, I can't think of any existing job humans do now that couldn't in the future be done cheaper by a machine (at least theoretically).
There are two typical answers: one is that new technologies will replace some jobs, but create enough other jobs to compensate. However, that is not proven, and may not be the case; when a factory is automated, thousands of workers are replaced with a few dozen highly qualified engineers that command and maintain the machines. And when the machine maintenance is itself automated, the few dozen may be replaced by just a few people that can manage the whole thing. What happens to the thousands of workers that got replaced?
The second usual answer is that people can study and qualify for more technical jobs, which can not be automated. This is the solution governments usually try to push, by creating job training programs, providing student loans, and so on. While this works on the short term, I don't think it will forever: first, some people simply don't have the time/resources/innate capability to qualify for too complex jobs; as technology and science advances, more and more people will not be able to keep pace. The other issue is that even highly technical jobs will probably be automated sooner or later, as technology advances. Where then will everybody work? I think this process will sooner or later clash with the current basic society structure (in particular with the ownership and property rules), and cause radical changes. Should be interesting!
If you quit, you can't collect unemployment. If you refuse, then they have to decide to fire you ... and either way, you've still go the shares.
Not necessarily. The options may require the employee stay with the company for a certain time before they vest. Many companies offer shares or options that vest over a few years (maybe 25% per year, or so), and, if you leave the company you lose the ones not yet vested. It depends on the original contract (which I haven't seen), but it's possible Zynga could win either way
Millions to weed out counterfeit parts, BILLIONS to build a fab
But the factory wouldn't be destroyed after making the set of parts. It will continue producing and making money, thus recouping the initial investment.
While it's stupid to buy parts from a foreign power that wishes to subjugate us, its still cheaper to do so the build it all here.
I don't really understand why it would be so much cheaper. What are the big advantages China or Taiwan offer that makes semiconductor fabs move there? The ones I can think of are the cost of labor, weak enforcement of environmental regulations and government support (via direct subsidization, laxity in enforcing IP or laws/vamal regulations that hurt the international competition). Cheap labor shouldn't be a big percentage of the total - the greatest cost for a semiconductor fab should be in tools, clean room equipment, and all the high precision machinery; this cost should be pretty much similar for the USA and China. Is then government intervention the major factor?
You are contradicting yourself: "although long-term increases are difficult to quantify".
You should read the things you're replying to more carefully. I'm not contradicting myself - the text is quoted from the WHO document in the link; if you have a problem, it should be with the WHO.
Neither I nor the GP said anything about the lethality of cancers, or about coal. We talked about the increase in the incidence of cancers in the Ukraine and Belarus, which is documented, and I posted links to this effect. You jumped in with a silly tautological argument: "there was no increased incidence in the number of cancers if you ignore the cases where there was increased incidence, (i.e., thyroid cancers)". I pointed out that your logic is faulty; now you're going on about lethality and the coal industry. Nobody denied the fact that thyroid cancers are treatable, end neither I nor the GP even mentioned coal in this thread. That's because neither of those issues have anything to do with the initial statement, and you're just trying to confuse the issue. Naughty!
Apart from thyroid cancer (which is non fatal and treatable, unlike coal mining accidents), there was no statistically significant increase
Well, of course, if we don't count the cancers for which there was an increase, there was no increase. But the point is that there *was* a major spike of thyroid cancers in the Ukraine and Belarus. Fortunately, as you say, those cancers are rarely lethal - doesn't mean they don't exist though. Here is what the WHO estimates. That's a quote, if you're in a hurry:
In the first few months after the accident, radiation dose exposures to the thyroid received were particularly high in children and adolescents living in Belarus, Ukraine and the most affected regions of the Russian Federation, and in those who drank milk with high levels of radioactive iodine. By 2005, more than 6,000 thyroid cancer cases had been diagnosed in this group. It is most likely that a large fraction of these thyroid cancers are attributable to radioiodine intake. Furthermore, it is expected that increases in thyroid cancer incidence due to the Chernobyl accident will continue for many more years, although long-term increases are difficult to quantify.
The dramatically higher rates where?
Rather early to see them in Japan - the poster probably meant the Ukraine and Belarus, after Chernobyl.
This one seems custom-made for Hallowe'en
If your talking about "older" authors the biggest omission by far, IMHO, has to be Alfred Bester.
Oh, yes! Don't know how I missed Bester. As to Vance, I'm conflicted - I absolutely loved some of his short stories, and I think "The Moon Moth" is one of the best SF stories ever written, but I'm not really impressed by a lot of his other stuff. Maybe I just don't "get" him (as I never managed to really "get" Silverberg or Wolfe, even though they're both considered among the greats). Still, the only place where Goodkind ought to be listed before Vance is a dictionary. Also missing is an author who should be dear to the Slashdot crowd - I mean, of course, Charles Stross. While no Clarke, he's certainly better than Eddings.
I'm also a bit confused by the choice of "The Codex Alera". I don't really see anything special about "The Codex Alera" - it's what used to be called An Extruded Trilogy back on rec.arts.sf.written (this is NOT a good thing), and not deserving in any way to be on in any top 100 list (not even on length). Jim Butcher's Dresden series would have been a much more convincing choice (or Steven Brust's Vlad books).
This is a personal opinion, but I'd have liked to see some more non-English language writers on the list; I think somebody else mentioned Stanislaw Lem. The Strugatski brothers ought to be there too, and maybe so should Gerard Klein and Italo Calvino. Any of them are easily better than many of the ones on the list
No Lovecraft, Dunsany or Olaf Stapleton?
Also, no Ellison? No Delany? No Fredric Brown? Not to mention del Rey, Simak, Sprague de Camp , any of which should have been there instead of Brooks or Eddings.
Also 4 Gaimans, but only 2 Pratchetts? Come on, I like Gaiman, but he can't hold a candle to Pratchett, especially if you consider the whole oeuvre.
Stephen King is popular because he knows how to tell a good yarn
He used to, long time ago, but he lost the knack - now he mostly just tells a long yarn
I actually like "fresh" wine.
For some wines fresh is the way to go - they're called vins de primeur. The best known is the Beaujolais nouveau, which doesn't normally keep over one year.
I wish you damn whippersnappers would stop using WP7 for Windows Phone 7... I keep having to wonder what the hell Word Perfect has to do with a discussion on cell phones...
It's easy to understand which is which once you realize that Word Perfect ends at WP5.1. Just like "The Matrix" ended after the first movie, and "Star Wars" after the first three. La, la, la, can't hear you, la, la, la...
Those who vote based upon a theoretical party platform are a big part of the problem.
A particularly noisome subgroup are "single-issue" voters. They'll accept anything as long as their particular idée fixe is satisfied. That precludes reasonable discussion and makes reaching acceptable compromises with them practically impossible. That was ok as long as their number was low - but lately more and more voters (especially on the right) seem to reduce their criteria to single issues.
it doesn't have to generate every distinct string.
Sorry, I don't understand you - I may have been unclear in my post; let me explain: it doesn't have to generate anything. All I need to know is the number of characters he takes into consideration (say 80, for a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and maybe some extra colons or stuff) and the number of strings he wants to generate (for example the 100000 (or however many there are) different substrings of length 9 in the Shakespeare oeuvre). I can then compute the probability of a random generated substring falling into this particular subset (something like 100000/80^9, for the values pulled out of thin air above). At this point all I need to do is apply a formula to get the number of samples (monkey generated strings) I need to cover all the space (the 100000 substrings) with a given probability. It'll be something like "with 100,000,000 samples, you have a 20% chance of hitting all the target substrings, with 1,000,000,000 you have a 70% chance", and so on). Given this number and assuming a robo-monkey generates a string every X milliseconds, I can plot the graphs showing me the distribution of results I'd get in different tries, and I'd be able to say "if you wait a week, there's a 20% chance for your monkeys to finish the task, but if you wait a month it's 80% and if you wait a year it's 99.9999, so if you don't get your results in a year better check your monkeys, you've been sold a bad lot or something". All that without generating a single substring!
But then I wouldn't get to play with the monkeys, would I?
The name of this project is completely wrong compared to what anyone who knows of the Million monkeys can recreate Shakespeares works' concept.
Yeah, I don't get the point of this exercise at all. Writing a trivial program to count the distinct strings of length "n" from the Shakespeare text file, and applying a bit of really elementary calculus of probabilities will get you the same results in about a hour altogether, and should be doable by a medium bright high schooler.
Has basic mathematics literacy gone so low? What's next, first page articles on a big program that computes the square root of two via brute force by generating random numbers and squaring them?
Or just learn to be better than the machines.
Trouble is, humans come in a very small range of models, all of them with lots of built-in limitations. As technology progresses, the machines can duplicate human capabilities better and better. Humans will sooner or later run against the built in limitations; machines don't have to. In some areas, for example physical strength, men haven't been able to compete against machines for quite some time now - and that's why what we consider unskilled jobs are so low paid. In other areas, like intellectual skills, the process is still ongoing. Machines have taken over the relatively low skilled range (see the fine article), but humans can still do better then existing machines at the top of the skill ladder. Sooner or later humans will run against the built in intellectual limitations too. Note that many people already have (not everybody can become a doctor, or a lawyer), and that in some limited areas, like chess, machines have already pushed beyond the human race's capabilities.
What will happen when machines become good enough that they can replace almost all humans in almost all intellectual jobs is an interesting problem. Maybe machine driven production will reduce the cost of things so much that most humans will not need to be gainfully employed to get a reasonable standard of living. Or new jobs will appear, requiring a different set of skills, not easily duplicated by a machine; I don't know however what those skills and jobs would be. Art? Pattern matching? Social skills (maybe in jobs such as paid companion, or paid party pal)?. Biology-based stuff, like participating to drug tests? Either way, the next fifty years should be quite interesting, and that's without even counting the new iPhone version ;)
A simple test is: take a male and female of the two different groups, and stick them on a deserted island for a few months or years together. (with supplies of course) If they're the same species, they'll hit it eventually and she'll get pregnant. If they're not the same species, they'll stay apart. This eliminates the social factors
Eh, things are a bit more complex than that - as we know more the old "species" concept becomes fuzzier. Look up "ring species" sometime, for a laugh.
if real speciation happened there, how would we have handled it? Would make for a great SF story. If only I could write..
It's been done to death; just a few examples, off the top of my head: van Vogt's "Slan"; Sturgeon's "More Than Human"; more recently, Nancy Kress's "Beggars in Spain". Not to mention the whole X-Men thing...
In my opinion... kill it! Kill it with fire!
I'm sure reasonable people can reach a compromise that would satisfy everyone. Improve it, and then kill it.
Set up a neutrino beam on the Earth firing at the moon, and another firing back, and hook it into the stock markets and you'd get reports of market changes before they happened.
Or set up a cascade of neutrino emitter/detector pairs (or, if you can find a good neutrino reflector, set up a resonating chamber, kind of like a laser), so that the particles travel a long way before hitting the detector; if you gain 60 ns every time, with 1000000 passes you get 60 ms, enough for an electronic trade :)
Ob. SF: "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline"
If it takes time for light to travel from point "A" to Point "B". How can the signal ever arrive before it was sent? It takes ~4 years for light to get from Proxima Centrauri to Earth. If I send a signal at 2x the speed of light, it should take ~2 years to get there. At 4x it should take ~1 year. Wouldn't that imply that even at an infinite times the speed of light, the signal should still arrive a fraction of a second after you sent it? Or am I missing something?
You're missing this. Basically, you're using Proxima Centauri time as if it were an absolute time, while in relativity "time" is dependent on the frame of reference. An observer on Earth would see your signal arrive, and two years later (using a powerful telescope) he'd see it being transmitted from Proxima. That violates causality for the observer on Earth, and means his frame of reference and the one on Proxima aren't equivalent. That in its turn violates the principle of relativity.
I was posting on Usenet in the days of Archimedes Plutonium
Hoo, yes, Archimedes Plutonium; that takes me back. Also, Kibo; also, Serdar Argic. Those were the days, when kooks were real kooks!
If the labour is free, products are also free (or almost free). You keep all the non gifted on social providing them with bare essentials. If you are gifted and can contribute you get special treatment.
In other words, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
So a "religion" is anything you don't like, then?
Not to speak for the GP, but in both the religious and Linux supporter communities there are very vocal minorities who have an unfortunate tendency to disregard facts when they contradict their respective dogmas; this may mean insulting anybody who contradicts them (for example, by labeling them as "shills"), down-modding stories or comments that may be either critical of Linux or pro-MS (whatever the factual contents), going on extended rants, and so on (as we can see in the comments for this very story). In either case, I don't think they represent the majorities, but they *are* quite visible. This similarity does make Linux supporters sometimes look to outsiders like a cult.
Vote. Educate people. Volunteer for Obama's campaign. Did I say vote?
While I agree with the sentiment (maybe not so much about the Obama part, given his apparent lack of a spine, but that's another discussion), I doubt education will work anymore. You see, I think Americans are at this point the best managed people on Earth. They're intentionally misinformed, fed lies after lies and mentally forced on a junk diet of nationalism, hate, suspicion and ignorance.
Note how often ridiculous red herrings are raised, just in time to distract from the real issues (for example, the gay marriage scare of a few years ago, or the swift boat people, or today's deficit cap crap). And note that *it works!*. It works because Americans are managed into believing this kind of thing. There isn't another place I know of where so many people are suspicious of education (see how Michelle Bachman wants to dismantle the Dept. of Education, or how all Republican candidates had to pledge their disbelief in evolution). Those people consider the word "liberal" an insult, and I don't believe your attempts to educate them have a chance.