> Who do you trust more to create a building code outlining a minimum set of standards and practices for > construction? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of people who build apartment > buildings by trade?
It is not a matter of trust. It is a matter of being able to choose your own standards instead of having standards imposed on you. Yes, building contractors are more qualified to determine what is safe to build, but they are not qualified to choose what you want to build. If you are unsure what is safe and want what is safe, by all means, pay a contractor to tell you what is safe. Or, you might care more about "cheap" than about "safe", and that must be your personal choice. If you are willing to take risks, you must not be forbidden to do so because you must be the owner of your person. The free market is not going to protect you from yourself or from your own bad decisions because that would be immoral. It would be imposing choices upon you as if you were a child. Those who wish to live under a free market system want to be adults and to take responsibility for their own actions and to have the freedom to take that responsibity and to choose those actions.
> Tell you what, *you* move to a place where bridge and building standards don't exist, and the building > is designed and built by the "free market," I'll happily live in and drive on structures and works that > have some semblance of enforced quality standards.
The free market does not forbid building codes. It only forbids them being imposed on you by force. A community can get together and agree on a set of building codes, and as a member of this community you would have a say in it. When moving to a new town, you will be able to choose whether the community you are entering has acceptable codes. These days we call these "homeowner associations" and CC&Rs. The problem with the current system is that the standards are imposed on every community nationwide and nobody gets a say in what they are or to choose between more than one.
> And in case you forgot, the "free market" is what gave us the recent wave of lead-painted toys and melamine-contaminated milk.
The problem is once again the lack of a reputation system. A reputable company wants to keep customers happy because they would otherwise go elsewhere. A company wants to keep customers because it wants to stay in business for a long time. Once it makes melamine milk, nobody will buy its products any more and it will go bankrupt. Today there are government regulations on quality so you do not pay attention to brands and just buy whatever is cheapest, so if you happened to drink melamine milk, it is your own fault for buying from a disreputable source. You thought you could let other people make the decision about what is safe or good or worth the price, and you got exactly what you deserved. The free market requires you to think, because it is you, the consumer, who determines whether a product is any good. You do that because you are the only one qualified to do so. Central planners have long had the arrogance to think they know what is best for everybody, and failed every damn time, because they do not. You are the only one who knows what is good for you, and you are the only one who has the right to make choices for yourself. This is what we call economic freedom.
> the EMT pulls out a list of all the people who practice medicine in the area and says, "which doctor do you want to have care for you?"
The way this used to work, before the AMA put a stranglehold on doctor supply around 1910, was that you already had a family doctor you went to for your health problems. You would have seen him previously for simpler things since you were a baby and have had reasonable knowledge of his level of skill and areas of expertise. These days, of course, doctors are rare and therefore expensive, so people can't afford to have a family doctor and you no longer have any idea how well this system used to work. But even now, I would HIGHLY recommend you find a competent doctor BEFORE you have an emergency. When you are bleeding your life away, it is already too late to make a choice.
> The ambulance delivers you to Mr. McAllister's door. Mr. McAllister looks at your wounds, shrugs, and says, > "I just have no idea what to do here. I just deal in herbal remedies and acupuncture most of the time."
The EMTs in the ambulance should have a pretty good idea which doctors in the area are incapable of doing surgery. This specialization of doctors, incidentally, is also a recent phenomenon. Any doctor knew how to sew up a stab wound before all this licensing nonsense got started. These days, if you aren't licensed to practice in a certain area, you are legally forbidden to do it. So even if your Mr.McAllister knew how to treat your stab wound, the law prevented him from mentioning it, and so you died.
> Or is there some room for professional licensing that guarantees a minimum standard > of competency and training before someone can call themselves a "doctor" or an "engineer"?
Your minimum standard of competency is not my minimum standard of competence. You believe you can trust the AMA to set good standards. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you are just naturally gullible. Personally, I think all doctors around here are total quacks sold out to big pharma and are in business solely to push drugs on people. You can not escape having to make the decision about a doctor's competence. If you try to let other people make this decision for you, you will always get screwed because their interests are not your interests. The whole point of the free market system is to avoid having other people's opinions imposed on you. Personal freedom is about being free to make your own choices, whether in health care or any other area.
An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics, economics and ingenuity to develop solutions to meet economic and societal needs. Engineers design structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin root ingenium, meaning "cleverness" -Wikipedia
Nowhere does this mention licensing of any kind. Licenses and liability to lawsuits are a recent invention and are little more than unnecessary government intervention in the free market for the purpose of restricting the supply of engineers. This sort of guild mentality has always been detrimental to the economy by forcing people to pay for something they don't necessarily want. It would have been much better if all this licensing nonsense disappeared and we could rely on the traditional reputation system that the free market uses to maintain quality.
> How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole?
Stick your hand in it. If you can pull it out again, it's dark matter.
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
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· Score: 2
> The easy way to scratch your itch is to just use the GPL tool rather than patch the BSD tool.
That's not the problem. The BSD maintainers will not let you patch the BSD tool because the interface must be kept stable: just like it was back in 1970 or whatever. That's the whole point of using BSD in the first place. It does not change. Some people like that. Those must be the people who still use BSD make. The rest of us like our tools to improve over time, so we use Linux.
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
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· Score: 2
> there is a lot of Linux only stuff out there in the open source world > Where does the problem lie? Is it in the library developers or in the OS developers?
It lies in the BSD philosophy of stability, which the OS developers have translated into stagnation. The native BSD development environment is unusable until you install the GNU toolchain. The BSD desktop is unusable until you install a bunch of GPL software. Even the shell tools suck. And once you get that far, why bother keeping the BSD kernel? I can already get all that with a default install of Linux and without all the drama.
> Half of daters aren't pretty so instead of fishing in a small pool of prettiness and getting nowhere dive into an ocean of uglies and have more choice
If I wanted to lower my standards that much, I could visit the local bar. It is not hard to find single ugly women; no dating site is needed for that.
> Ugly people are a better calibre of human - pretty people generally aren't very nice and tend to be a bit shallow > Ugly people have had a tougher life and therefore tend to be more considerate and more loyal.
In my experience ugly people are much worse caliber of human. They've had a tougher life and ended up mean and bitter. And while there are a very few ugly women out there who turned to learning things, most just mope around the house and complain to their ugly friends about how shallow men are.
> A recent TUBB survey also proved that they try harder in bed.
Anybody who hasn't been laid in years would try hard in bed. At least the first time.
> Once with an ugly partner it is unlikely that anyone will try and take them from you meaning you can let yourself go completely once you're together.
That's true. If you have something nobody wants, you can easily keep it. And then yourself become something nobody wants.
> In these straightened times TUBB is cheaper as a) We don't charge much as the pretty sites and
All dating sites worth visiting are free.
> b) Ugly people have lower expectations - for a first date
Fair enough. If you're ugly and have low expectation, TUBB is the site for you. The rest of us still have some self-respect left.
To do function level linking you need to compile your sources with -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections and pass --gc-sections to ld. It might be scary to some people because the.o files produced this way are much larger. Also, it does not work on shared libraries, for the obvious reason that you can not tell what will be unused.
> The more flexibility you want, the more you'll sacrifice in efficiency/engineer-time or efficiency/computer-time.
Why is it, I wonder, that engineer-time is valued higher than computer-time? A good application, once written, will be run many, many times over many years, by many people. Even a second of execution saved in such a program should be worth months of engineer-time, since it will pay for itself in increased efficiency of its users. These days, of course, the mindset seems to be that the programmers write the app and then nobody uses it more than once. It must be because pretty much every recently written application is so bad that the latter is true.
> We have to change everything because you're all a bunch of idiots!
And you probably are. Here's my side of the story. Many years ago, on my second job, I've been in that very situtation; I saw that the existing design was crap and made a much better one. Except that nobody wanted it. We had a meeting and I got yelled at; I sulked for a day and apologized, because they were right. Even though my design was better, it was not realistic to implement due to the mountains of existing legacy code. The old garbage was dragging new code into the middens with it, and there was not a damn thing anybody could do about it. My previous job was at a small company where I could rewrite anything I didn't like, so this really hurt. I wanted to do my best, but could not, which is a really difficult thing to accept when you're proud of your skills.
> you are also free to disconnect from the internet and go live in a cave somewhere... if someone will rent you a cave
Yes, someone will, and for only $1200 a month. Of course, most of us would prefer to find cheaper and more comfortable rent somewhere. In a rural area you should easily be able to find something really cheap.
> and that someone will accept cash payment and snailmail correspondence.
That someone will if he is the owner of the place you are renting. As a former smalltime landlord myself, let me say that please please rent from a real person, not a giant apartment complex corporation. Your money will not be wasted on superfluous office staff, luxurious swimming pools, or fully equipped gyms, none of which you actually use. I also would be able to repair stuff as soon as it's broken instead of forcing you to wait for weeks until somebody upstairs approves a work order. And yes, I'd love to take cash for rent. You don't even need snailmail; just come by and give it to me. That's small town life for you. Much less stress than where you're living now.
> And you can get your employer or bank to accept cash payments as well.
If you're working for a small business, it might be possible to get paid in cash. But really, unless you really want to avoid the banking system, it is still very easy to get a bank account, if only for cashing checks. No internet connection required. Just go to your friendly neighborhood bank (or, preferably, a credit union) branch office and talk to a real person. They'll be happy to help you.
I have no idea how the whole country has become so oversocialized. Privacy is important to be an individual. How can you know who you are if you have never been alone? Without working alone, how can you realize that it is the individual that does the work, not the collective? How can you get any work done at all when you are constantly distracted (and spied on) by other people? Forcing "togetherness" was a great socialist tool back in the Soviet times, to ensure that you never imagine yourself as an individual, that you never have unapproved thoughts, and that if you do either of those things you can get ratted out and sent to Siberia.
Stallman should be more concerned about the trend that caused this one: the drastically decreasing numbers of people who actually create stuff on a computer. Twenty years ago there were lots of geeks out there and Stallman's desire to modify and study other people's work was understandable. It is even understandable that he thought everyone should have these freedoms he so enjoyed. Today such an attitude is unthinkable; computer users no longer create stuff, they merely consume it. The current trend toward the extinction of the desktop and its replacement by mobile devices or cloud computing is the natural consequence of this change. You can't create anything on your smartphone except raw pictures and video. You can, however, consume content that somebody used a desktop to create. And so, each year, there are more and more consumers, and less and less content worth consuming. What will be the point of having the freedom to modify and study code when nobody wants to DO anything?
The point of taxation is to get money from people in order to finance the operation of the government. That's why we have the income tax amendment. But that amendment does not authorize the government to collect "taxes" that directly benefit some private (insurance) company. If you really want to call it a tax to fund national health care, then the government should be getting the revenue, not the insurance companies.
IPv4 is not going anywhere, even if IPv6 is adopted by the ISPs. There is plenty of hardware around that does not support v6 addressing, like network printers and most current home broadband routers. Just like companies hoard IE6 because their stuff doesn't work without it, so will they keep intranets on IPv4 no matter how much IPv6 propaganda is flung at them. Personally, like most normal people, I have no interest in having any IPv6 on my home network. It is much easier for the ISP to provide a 6to4 gateway and let all the users keep pretending they have an IPv4 address even though it's really IPv6.
> Climate is going to shift; species are going to go extinct; agricultural and hydraulic "haves" are going to become "have-nots", and vice versa; nations will have new things to fight about
Gee, all these things have been naturally happening for thousands of years with the passage of time without any global warming. So nice try, but no cookie.
>> 4) When is that going to happen? > It's in progress now. Don't know when the shooting is going to start
According to even the most alarmist predictions the climate will not change all that much until 2100. As in, after I'm dead. Also, see above about the passage of time naturally causing various social changes. Heck, 90 years ago my neighborhood was a corn field, the US population was less than 100M, and the dollar was worth 20 times more than today. 90 years in the future will quite likely look equally different with or without global warming, so no, I don't see any reason to care about carbon emissions. By 2100 all the oil will be gone anyway, so our carbon output will naturally decrease.
> They will also want to charge content creators on the same bandwidth so they can profit more on the same bandwidth
Ok, so content creators will start not giving that ISP access to their content. If that content is desirable to the ISP's customers, they would switch to another provider that does not charge content creators and therefore has more content. The greedy ISP loses customers and goes out of business. The consumers win. Capitalism, ho!
If you're running Linux without a fancy UI framework like KDE, you don't have any "control panel". It would involve writing commands into your.xinitrc like: xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5 6". And sometimes that doesn't work if you happen to have a weird mouse like Logitech mx310 where you need to follow a HOWTO that takes an hour to execute.
Slashdot Mirror
> Who do you trust more to create a building code outlining a minimum set of standards and practices for
> construction? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of people who build apartment
> buildings by trade?
It is not a matter of trust. It is a matter of being able to choose your own standards instead of having standards imposed on you. Yes, building contractors are more qualified to determine what is safe to build, but they are not qualified to choose what you want to build. If you are unsure what is safe and want what is safe, by all means, pay a contractor to tell you what is safe. Or, you might care more about "cheap" than about "safe", and that must be your personal choice. If you are willing to take risks, you must not be forbidden to do so because you must be the owner of your person. The free market is not going to protect you from yourself or from your own bad decisions because that would be immoral. It would be imposing choices upon you as if you were a child. Those who wish to live under a free market system want to be adults and to take responsibility for their own actions and to have the freedom to take that responsibity and to choose those actions.
> Tell you what, *you* move to a place where bridge and building standards don't exist, and the building
> is designed and built by the "free market," I'll happily live in and drive on structures and works that
> have some semblance of enforced quality standards.
The free market does not forbid building codes. It only forbids them being imposed on you by force. A community can get together and agree on a set of building codes, and as a member of this community you would have a say in it. When moving to a new town, you will be able to choose whether the community you are entering has acceptable codes. These days we call these "homeowner associations" and CC&Rs. The problem with the current system is that the standards are imposed on every community nationwide and nobody gets a say in what they are or to choose between more than one.
> And in case you forgot, the "free market" is what gave us the recent wave of lead-painted toys and melamine-contaminated milk.
The problem is once again the lack of a reputation system. A reputable company wants to keep customers happy because they would otherwise go elsewhere. A company wants to keep customers because it wants to stay in business for a long time. Once it makes melamine milk, nobody will buy its products any more and it will go bankrupt. Today there are government regulations on quality so you do not pay attention to brands and just buy whatever is cheapest, so if you happened to drink melamine milk, it is your own fault for buying from a disreputable source. You thought you could let other people make the decision about what is safe or good or worth the price, and you got exactly what you deserved. The free market requires you to think, because it is you, the consumer, who determines whether a product is any good. You do that because you are the only one qualified to do so. Central planners have long had the arrogance to think they know what is best for everybody, and failed every damn time, because they do not. You are the only one who knows what is good for you, and you are the only one who has the right to make choices for yourself. This is what we call economic freedom.
> the EMT pulls out a list of all the people who practice medicine in the area and says, "which doctor do you want to have care for you?"
The way this used to work, before the AMA put a stranglehold on doctor supply around 1910, was that you already had a family doctor you went to for your health problems. You would have seen him previously for simpler things since you were a baby and have had reasonable knowledge of his level of skill and areas of expertise. These days, of course, doctors are rare and therefore expensive, so people can't afford to have a family doctor and you no longer have any idea how well this system used to work. But even now, I would HIGHLY recommend you find a competent doctor BEFORE you have an emergency. When you are bleeding your life away, it is already too late to make a choice.
> The ambulance delivers you to Mr. McAllister's door. Mr. McAllister looks at your wounds, shrugs, and says,
> "I just have no idea what to do here. I just deal in herbal remedies and acupuncture most of the time."
The EMTs in the ambulance should have a pretty good idea which doctors in the area are incapable of doing surgery. This specialization of doctors, incidentally, is also a recent phenomenon. Any doctor knew how to sew up a stab wound before all this licensing nonsense got started. These days, if you aren't licensed to practice in a certain area, you are legally forbidden to do it. So even if your Mr.McAllister knew how to treat your stab wound, the law prevented him from mentioning it, and so you died.
> Or is there some room for professional licensing that guarantees a minimum standard
> of competency and training before someone can call themselves a "doctor" or an "engineer"?
Your minimum standard of competency is not my minimum standard of competence. You believe you can trust the AMA to set good standards. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you are just naturally gullible. Personally, I think all doctors around here are total quacks sold out to big pharma and are in business solely to push drugs on people. You can not escape having to make the decision about a doctor's competence. If you try to let other people make this decision for you, you will always get screwed because their interests are not your interests. The whole point of the free market system is to avoid having other people's opinions imposed on you. Personal freedom is about being free to make your own choices, whether in health care or any other area.
Nowhere does this mention licensing of any kind. Licenses and liability to lawsuits are a recent invention and are little more than unnecessary government intervention in the free market for the purpose of restricting the supply of engineers. This sort of guild mentality has always been detrimental to the economy by forcing people to pay for something they don't necessarily want. It would have been much better if all this licensing nonsense disappeared and we could rely on the traditional reputation system that the free market uses to maintain quality.
> They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago.
Catholicism: the BSD of religion.
> How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole?
Stick your hand in it. If you can pull it out again, it's dark matter.
> The easy way to scratch your itch is to just use the GPL tool rather than patch the BSD tool.
That's not the problem. The BSD maintainers will not let you patch the BSD tool because the interface must be kept stable: just like it was back in 1970 or whatever. That's the whole point of using BSD in the first place. It does not change. Some people like that. Those must be the people who still use BSD make. The rest of us like our tools to improve over time, so we use Linux.
> there is a lot of Linux only stuff out there in the open source world
> Where does the problem lie? Is it in the library developers or in the OS developers?
It lies in the BSD philosophy of stability, which the OS developers have translated into stagnation. The native BSD development environment is unusable until you install the GNU toolchain. The BSD desktop is unusable until you install a bunch of GPL software. Even the shell tools suck. And once you get that far, why bother keeping the BSD kernel? I can already get all that with a default install of Linux and without all the drama.
> Half of daters aren't pretty so instead of fishing in a small pool of prettiness and getting nowhere dive into an ocean of uglies and have more choice
If I wanted to lower my standards that much, I could visit the local bar. It is not hard to find single ugly women; no dating site is needed for that.
> Ugly people are a better calibre of human - pretty people generally aren't very nice and tend to be a bit shallow
> Ugly people have had a tougher life and therefore tend to be more considerate and more loyal.
In my experience ugly people are much worse caliber of human. They've had a tougher life and ended up mean and bitter. And while there are a very few ugly women out there who turned to learning things, most just mope around the house and complain to their ugly friends about how shallow men are.
> A recent TUBB survey also proved that they try harder in bed.
Anybody who hasn't been laid in years would try hard in bed. At least the first time.
> Once with an ugly partner it is unlikely that anyone will try and take them from you meaning you can let yourself go completely once you're together.
That's true. If you have something nobody wants, you can easily keep it. And then yourself become something nobody wants.
> In these straightened times TUBB is cheaper as a) We don't charge much as the pretty sites and
All dating sites worth visiting are free.
> b) Ugly people have lower expectations - for a first date
Fair enough. If you're ugly and have low expectation, TUBB is the site for you. The rest of us still have some self-respect left.
To do function level linking you need to compile your sources with -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections and pass --gc-sections to ld. It might be scary to some people because the .o files produced this way are much larger. Also, it does not work on shared libraries, for the obvious reason that you can not tell what will be unused.
> The more flexibility you want, the more you'll sacrifice in efficiency/engineer-time or efficiency/computer-time.
Why is it, I wonder, that engineer-time is valued higher than computer-time? A good application, once written, will be run many, many times over many years, by many people. Even a second of execution saved in such a program should be worth months of engineer-time, since it will pay for itself in increased efficiency of its users. These days, of course, the mindset seems to be that the programmers write the app and then nobody uses it more than once. It must be because pretty much every recently written application is so bad that the latter is true.
> Think I'll wait until the ErgoSlider Plus# is released.
Is that because you pound on it or because it cuts your wrists?
> We have to change everything because you're all a bunch of idiots!
And you probably are. Here's my side of the story. Many years ago, on my second job, I've been in that very situtation; I saw that the existing design was crap and made a much better one. Except that nobody wanted it. We had a meeting and I got yelled at; I sulked for a day and apologized, because they were right. Even though my design was better, it was not realistic to implement due to the mountains of existing legacy code. The old garbage was dragging new code into the middens with it, and there was not a damn thing anybody could do about it. My previous job was at a small company where I could rewrite anything I didn't like, so this really hurt. I wanted to do my best, but could not, which is a really difficult thing to accept when you're proud of your skills.
> you are also free to disconnect from the internet and go live in a cave somewhere ... if someone will rent you a cave
Yes, someone will, and for only $1200 a month. Of course, most of us would prefer to find cheaper and more comfortable rent somewhere. In a rural area you should easily be able to find something really cheap.
> and that someone will accept cash payment and snailmail correspondence.
That someone will if he is the owner of the place you are renting. As a former smalltime landlord myself, let me say that please please rent from a real person, not a giant apartment complex corporation. Your money will not be wasted on superfluous office staff, luxurious swimming pools, or fully equipped gyms, none of which you actually use. I also would be able to repair stuff as soon as it's broken instead of forcing you to wait for weeks until somebody upstairs approves a work order. And yes, I'd love to take cash for rent. You don't even need snailmail; just come by and give it to me. That's small town life for you. Much less stress than where you're living now.
> And you can get your employer or bank to accept cash payments as well.
If you're working for a small business, it might be possible to get paid in cash. But really, unless you really want to avoid the banking system, it is still very easy to get a bank account, if only for cashing checks. No internet connection required. Just go to your friendly neighborhood bank (or, preferably, a credit union) branch office and talk to a real person. They'll be happy to help you.
I have no idea how the whole country has become so oversocialized. Privacy is important to be an individual. How can you know who you are if you have never been alone? Without working alone, how can you realize that it is the individual that does the work, not the collective? How can you get any work done at all when you are constantly distracted (and spied on) by other people? Forcing "togetherness" was a great socialist tool back in the Soviet times, to ensure that you never imagine yourself as an individual, that you never have unapproved thoughts, and that if you do either of those things you can get ratted out and sent to Siberia.
You heathens just keep screwing things up worse and worse. Everybody knows that there is only one true periodic table: Fire Earth Air Water
On the other hand, with Radeons I can have KMS and DRI, so nVidia is still definitely out.
For some reason I am reminded of that ISS living quarters tour.
Stallman should be more concerned about the trend that caused this one: the drastically decreasing numbers of people who actually create stuff on a computer. Twenty years ago there were lots of geeks out there and Stallman's desire to modify and study other people's work was understandable. It is even understandable that he thought everyone should have these freedoms he so enjoyed. Today such an attitude is unthinkable; computer users no longer create stuff, they merely consume it. The current trend toward the extinction of the desktop and its replacement by mobile devices or cloud computing is the natural consequence of this change. You can't create anything on your smartphone except raw pictures and video. You can, however, consume content that somebody used a desktop to create. And so, each year, there are more and more consumers, and less and less content worth consuming. What will be the point of having the freedom to modify and study code when nobody wants to DO anything?
The point of taxation is to get money from people in order to finance the operation of the government. That's why we have the income tax amendment. But that amendment does not authorize the government to collect "taxes" that directly benefit some private (insurance) company. If you really want to call it a tax to fund national health care, then the government should be getting the revenue, not the insurance companies.
IPv4 is not going anywhere, even if IPv6 is adopted by the ISPs. There is plenty of hardware around that does not support v6 addressing, like network printers and most current home broadband routers. Just like companies hoard IE6 because their stuff doesn't work without it, so will they keep intranets on IPv4 no matter how much IPv6 propaganda is flung at them. Personally, like most normal people, I have no interest in having any IPv6 on my home network. It is much easier for the ISP to provide a 6to4 gateway and let all the users keep pretending they have an IPv4 address even though it's really IPv6.
> Climate is going to shift; species are going to go extinct; agricultural and hydraulic "haves" are going to become "have-nots", and vice versa; nations will have new things to fight about
Gee, all these things have been naturally happening for thousands of years with the passage of time without any global warming. So nice try, but no cookie.
>> 4) When is that going to happen?
> It's in progress now. Don't know when the shooting is going to start
According to even the most alarmist predictions the climate will not change all that much until 2100. As in, after I'm dead. Also, see above about the passage of time naturally causing various social changes. Heck, 90 years ago my neighborhood was a corn field, the US population was less than 100M, and the dollar was worth 20 times more than today. 90 years in the future will quite likely look equally different with or without global warming, so no, I don't see any reason to care about carbon emissions. By 2100 all the oil will be gone anyway, so our carbon output will naturally decrease.
> They will also want to charge content creators on the same bandwidth so they can profit more on the same bandwidth
Ok, so content creators will start not giving that ISP access to their content. If that content is desirable to the ISP's customers, they would switch to another provider that does not charge content creators and therefore has more content. The greedy ISP loses customers and goes out of business. The consumers win. Capitalism, ho!
> Random generosity & hoping for the best isn't a good way to stabilize human society.
And forced redistribution of wealth is?
> But why should us lower classes have to go begging to some rich guy just to get what they need?
Yeah! Let's get some guns, kill all the rich guys, and take their stuff! As a russian, I can tell you exactly how well that's going to work out.
If you're running Linux without a fancy UI framework like KDE, you don't have any "control panel". It would involve writing commands into your .xinitrc like: xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5 6". And sometimes that doesn't work if you happen to have a weird mouse like Logitech mx310 where you need to follow a HOWTO that takes an hour to execute.