"Real economics--economics that surpasses all currently published treatises--" In other words, professional economists don't understand real economics?

Well you shouldn't just re-define positive rights away then argue they never existed in the first place. As another example, children in the US under a certain age have a right to education, and it's certainly actionable in the sense that they can sue the government to provide it if necessary. Other countries have even more actionable positive rights.

If he won't fit in tesla, there are very few cars (not SUVs) he actually will fit easily into. I'm only 6' - 200# and most sedans are fairly cramped. SUVs, otoh, are generally roomy.

What kind of weird bodily proportions do you have that you can't fit into most cars? I could understand if you were 7' tall or something like that, but I'm 6'0" and a bit further past 200 lbs. than I'd like. :-P My daily driver up until about a year ago was an Oldsmobile Alero, which was their smallest model. I had no trouble at all with interior space, getting in/out, etc. Some subcompacts and compacts I've rented over the years have been a little bit cramped, but pretty much anything midsize or larger is comfy enough (took the Alero from Las Vegas to Denver in one day, and back in one day a few days later...that's about 12 hours behind the wheel each way).

"What written law backs up all this angst?"

That's the point. The written law has become unjust.

Here's how Communism would make sense in that instance: With replicators- true replicators- the only input to create physical goods of ANY type is energy.

Which means there are only two things any human being would need- time and energy. Everything else can be made on the spot.

Time, well, God is a socialist when it comes to time. We are each allocated exactly 24 hours a day, no more, no less. There is nothing we can do to change the length of a day by a single instant.

Centralized power production on a grid system by the Government, with the Government owning the power plants, is such a natural monopoly that we already do it in one form even in capitalist nations- the government grants the power company a complete monopoly in a given area, usually overseen by some sort of utility board. A thin veneer of billing for energy used pays for it (supposedly), but in reality, balancing the grid is a 24x7x365 job; and you are allocated your connection to the total energy in the system.

The alternative, once replicator technology is available, is distributism and this is also seen occasionally in Star Trek, usually anti-social types who find a nice deserted hunk of rock to settle on for whatever reason (research?) visited only by the occasional passing starship. Of course, one might say that they're a commune of one (one individual, one family) and are their own government; it falls on them to generate their own energy somehow. And that's so OK with the Federation Communists that they only bother such settlements when war approaches or if they're endangering some other native population. If you have an entire universe to expand into and the means to do so, land isn't scarce anymore either.

The only thing I can't figure out is how Jean Luc's brother Robert is able to find customers for more than one bottle of wine a vintage. Seems to me it would be drop dead simple to feed a bottle into a transporter to generate a replicator pattern and have an infinite number of bottles available.

I'm trying to establish a chain-of-trust to the replicant project's files.

You have signed their key fingerprint, so if I can get a reliable .

I have 6781 9B34 3B2A B70D ED93 2087 2C64 64AF 2A8E 4C02 as YOUR (new) key fingerprint.

But MITM attacks could, in principle, have corrupted my downloading of that and/or could corrupt any handshake process I'm familiar with that we could reasonably accomplish over a Q&A over slashdot.

I'm in the silicon valley area. Is there any easy way to get in touch with you to confirm that fingerprint or obtain the correct one? Will you be appearing in person some time in the near future? Has it been painted as graffiti or a sign in a known place (and check periodically to be sure it's not modified)? Is there someone you know who is in the Silicon Valley area who is a public enough person to identify and who has your fingerprint and is willing to confirm it? Etc.

Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?

US "paranoia" didn't "start" this at all. It's not paranoia when they really are out to steal your tech. Chinese domestic tech sucks, the Chinese know it, everyone in the world apparently knows it but you. Why else are they trying so hard to steal? Chinese are terrible at inventing things. From an early age their creativity is stifled and they are taught only the great masters could invent, the best that students can do is copy perfectly.

Where were all these people years ago? Apparently peanuts are so lethal that they are banned from public schools. When I was in school, students weren't dropping dead left and right from peanuts. So what happened?

You can become violently allergic to practically ANYTHING. (The immune system, in each individual, creates a large number of clones of cells making different antibodies by pseudo-randomly editing the genome making the antibody, kills off the ones that recognize the infant body, and amplifies the clones recognizing new stuff that appeared at the same time the body experiences damage.)

A few bad reactions to a few particular foods got a lot of attention - and overreaction. Which ones got the attention was mostly a matter of chance. So now the clueless bureaucrats are taking extreme measures against the handful of allergens that got the press, and the rest are completely off their radar.

They have zero tolerance for peanuts.
  - Do they have zero tolerance for shellfish? (Restaurants in Silicon Valley were very careful about allergies when I first moved here - because one had been informed that a customer had a shellfish allergy, fed her something containing shrimp, and she died.)
  - Do they have zero tolerance for milk? (Some milk reactions are an enzyme deficiency, but some are an allergy, which can be deadly. Also: a protein in cow's milk increases the risk of Multiple Sclerosis).
  - Do they have zero tolerance for tree nuts?
  - Do they have zero tolerance for wheat?
  - Do they have zero tolerance for honey?
  - Do they have zero tolerance for corn? (It would be convenient for ME if they did - my corn allergy isn't QUITE to full-blown anaphylactic shock level, yet, but it IS to the "projectile vomiting" and "three days of flu-like symptoms" level. But I won't try to stop others from enjoying corn.)
  - Do they have zero tolerance for eggs?
  - Do they have zero tolerance for fish?
And that's just the COMMON food allergies.

If they had zero tolerance for every food allergen that had caused anaphyliaxis, they'd have zero tolerance for FOOD.

I rand into this issue with windows 8.1 and my Q8400 on an Intel DP35DP motherboard

I had one of those motherboards a few years back...bought it with a Core 2 Quad Q6600, which I think would've been sometime in 2008. After maybe a couple of years or so, the motherboard started acting iffy. I kept the processor, but replaced the motherboard. It's been running on a Gigabyte EP43-UD3L ever since. It currently dual-boots Gentoo Linux and Windows 7 from an SSD, and I threw an old hard drive in it recently to try out Windows 10. It runs like a champ...probably about the same speed as Windows 7, when I had it on a hard drive. I'll most likely nuke Windows 7 off of the SSD and move Windows 10 into its place.

tl;dr: Your problem with Windows 10 most likely isn't with your processor. Try upgrading the motherboard's BIOS. If that doesn't fix it, you're most likely looking at replacing the motherboard. You can probably find something cheap on eBay that'll work. The EP43-UD3L seems decent enough; I've even had Mac OS X running on mine at one time (at least up through Snow Leopard).

What if you just don't connect it to any network, ever?

How do you stop it from connecting? These days most laptops, at least, have WiFi, Bluetooth, BLE (really distinct from classic buetooth), and maybe other radio-networking capabilities (GSM, LTE, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, 6LoWPAN-over-Bluettoth-4.2) built-in. Also infrared and ultrasonic-capable audio interfaces with microphones and speakers. Even with the ones that DO have a switch to turn the radios off the switch normally just tells the software not to talk on the radio - which the software is free to ignore.

(Not to mention that the remote-administration hardware/firmware built into the chips by the major manufacturers can, and does, listen on the radios these days for remote-administration commands, comes in UNDER the OS, and can't be disabled.)

Then there's the question of what good the computer is to you if it's NOT connected to a network?

Did you just assume with zero justification that everyone has a laptop? Seriously WTF.

Because your average user isn't a /. Reader or l33t hax0r... The idea of having settings and data synced across multiple PCs appeals to enough people to warrant it being in the box.

Well, he seems to be saying a lot here The myth of startup success is just that: a myth. Declining infrastructure, a confluence of events, absolutely requiring the Big Lie merely for Silicon Valley to function. His conclusion is devastating and disheartening. So, seeing that he has proven his point, why don't we just give up? Silicon Valley is a failure. We need to change to a sustainable, workable system that provides benefits to everyone over the long run, instead of enriching a few people. Let's start turning the lights off and winding things down, everyone. It's over.

You right-wing nutbags make me laugh, shaking your tiny fists in rage at your holy Constitution being violated like an altar boy after Mass. African-Americans had no voice in its creation, it's invalid by definition. The people who wrote it were slaveowners. It's time for your kind to fade into history. There, there, Grandpa, put down your gun, TEH COMMIEZ aren't going to get you, it's nap time now.