My I kindly point out, Sir, that you are arriving at exactly the point some exiled journalist in London came to some 150 years ago?

His basic insight was that power within society stems from posessions and riches, and especially those riches that allow you to produce more riches, which, in a capitalist society, are companies. And that those fortunes have a significant effect on how society is shaped, run, and governed, i.e. they influence which laws are made, how they are made, and by whom. His proposed solution, however, prooved to be remarkably unworkable due to a couple of wrong assumptions regarding the nature of humans.

I do understand, though, that liberal slashdot posters are usually in opopsition to intellectual property and would not always give credit where credit is due.

Right. But there is a slight difference between how the muslim trolls treat you and the christian trolls treat you. I honestly cant remember the last time I head about christian or liberal (or "conservative") terrorists over here in Europe.

I doubt the number of bombs going off after someone publicly burned the books of Adam Smith or John Locke would remain rather miniscule. You do not have the right not to be offended.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ3VcbAfd4w

Sorry if this answer may sound not tech-savy enough or too simple.

I have mails from 1995 onward, by now roughly from 15+ different accounts, most of them defunct. Except for a couple of months of 1996 and 2005, which I wistfully deleted, I converted them all with a small tool (Aid4mail, i think) from PST, Eudora, or Pegasus format into thunderbirds UNIX-compatible format.

+ Open Source (Free + maintained + Supported)

+ Thunderbird searches and indexes just fine

+ plain text format - I can use all sorts of editors on them if necessary)

+ Always on my HDD (Encryption, no public mining, no external servers needed)

+ UNIX-Format guarantees I can convert them into something completely different in 20 years, should the need arise

+ no additional software needed

Am I overlooking some of GPs requirements here? Or is the slashdot crowd prone to a little overengineeering? :)

Regards!

Then please explain to me what exactly makes "a Turk" turkish, or an Eskimo "greenlandish"?

The US was built (to my understanding) on the idea that anyone could become an US citizen, if he accepted and supported the constitution and wanted to do so.

Unless you are advocating a return to Germanys racist "volksdeutsche"-laws ("German is who has German grandfathers"), your statement is wrong, because what defines nationality is not an unchangable subset of genetic and cultural traits, but first and foremost a conscious choice. You make it sound as if nationalities were not changable.

I got really good with the spoon. Can I haz PhD now?
(http://games.adultswim.com/amateur-surgeon-2-twitchy-online-game.html)

"You forced us to kill those hostages by not complying with our demands"
That is exactly what Mr Thiessen is spewing out here.
It is not the responsibility of Mr Assange if anyone gets killed.
It is the responsibility of the solider who joins the army of his own free will and pulls the trigger
It is the responsibility of the taliban who decided to join some holy war and plants a roadside bomb or beheads a civilian.

Pieces like the one in the WP are nothing else but FUD that are meant to deflect responsibilities from those who act. You do not have to be a soldier, you do not have to be a terrorist. All those who kill have a choice. Its the old, the young, the women who dont, and nothing Mr Thiessen writes or does or says is with their well-being in mind. It is sad that the WP posts such a propaganda piece.

Regards

What, Sir, is your fight with freedom of speech? That you mock the desire for liberty with threats of obscenity is surly a sign of your disability to grasp the importance of the matter at hands. Yours

Not Yurek Rutz?

All These Worlds Are Yours Except Europa. Attempt No Landing There.

Thats pretty much how I feel whenever I see one of my german compatriots around somewhere. As a German, I shouldbe grateful, Muslims successfully replaced "us" as the bogeyman in Hollywood :)

If your Windows were in its 50.000th edition (or how many generations are we homan now? ;)), it should at least be able to reply to your insult. As for only 8 Percent, I'm not so sure. But honestly, it seems pretty obvious that any system reaching a certain point of complexity will include "alien" parts that subsequently hang around cause they get useful one way or the other. I wonder how a complete rewrite of the human source code would look like. I mean, documented, clean code...

Thats exactly how every modern government in Europe came into existence. The British, the Dutch, and the Portuguese started out as pirates - Drake, the Ostindian Company, Spanish ... it was organized crime supported by the local powers in being (i.e. kings & queens), and it got formalized after a while. The alternative way for people to make a living is go and conquer the neighbourhood, which is what Russia, Germany, and some other countries did in lieu of some decent sea routes to plunder.

I wouldn't ridicule this too much, it is a good development - a stock exchanges *does* need the protection of property and lives, and will lead to people you can negotiate with and that know the value of trust. Those people currently have the choice between starvation and becoming criminal. You can talk to them - try bargaining with some well-fed, middle-class, well-educated jihadist who is convinced the universe owes him more and thats why he's going to blow up himself together with some civilians if they don't stop listening to Popsongs.

Although I would offhand agree with a lot of things you said, the US census bureau seems to dissagree with you and sees raising median real incomes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States, specifically
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Household_income_65_to_05.png

Maybe you're over 35 too, from here on, the world will always be a worse place than when we were young :D

But seriously, there was a lot of gloom and doom in the seventies and eighties, when everyone expected we'll die from pollution or simply exterminate ourselves in an atomic war (I have several dozen novels dealing with that possibility alone). Still there was lots of great SF.

I don't think there is less good SF around, its just that the future has become more complicated. I mean, these days William Gibson is not writing SF anymore, he's writing plain novels."At some point there, we left the present and entered the future" (http://xkcd.com/652). I'd say its the abundance of progress, which makes predictions so hard. Come one, compare the youth of someone in the 80ies to todays kids: always online? always being able to chat, mail, watch porn, play, flirt, and reserach for homework? Time is moving fast. Regards

towards the tits?