And the ancient Romans figured this out, and solved it.

It does not require the massive infrastructure that starts with Western toilets to solve this problem. It can be done with wood and stone and gravity, assembled using nothing more than muscle power. The fact that 2 billion people (with far more muscle power at their disposal than the ancient Romans ever had) haven't speaks volumes about the 2 billion people.

If the "things" in question have an operating system, they're both too expensive and too vulnerable to being hijacked. Most of the "things" in an internet of things (the Smart Home from 2 decades ago, go X10!) need to be as simple and dumb and therefore cheap as possible. Most are the functional equivalent of a single sensor or a single switch. They had better not have an operating system. They need to be as dirt simple as possible, so they're cheap to acquire, cheap to install, cheap to replace if they fail or get struck by lightning, and most of all, do my bidding and not someone else's.

So no OS. It can run a micro IP stack like IPic (all 256 bytes of machine code) and the barest of bare bones beyond that, and that'll do just fine.

There's a reason for that.

Hollywood has too much money.

Seriously. If you want art, you practically have to have starving artists. Fat and happy artists get lazy. Worse, in the case of Hollywood, there's so much money the art is buried in parasites. It's gotten so the bloated bloodsuckers are bigger than the host, and because they control the money, they think they deserve to have a say in the art. When that's about the worst possible outcome.

Abolish copyright. For the good of art and the subsequent benefit of humanity.

The first preaching tools were mouthpieces of Comcast, and only using the "free market" phrase as a cloak, an insta-pass to get into the consciousness of the 36% of the population that has successfully been conditioned to respond to it like Pavlov's dogs. Including that part of the media that barks on command when those words are uttered. The barking will continue precisely as before. They can't hear anything else. They certainly can't hear this filing. It doesn't fit in their worldview, therefore it doesn't exist.

Why would it, when people in rural Idaho think it's a moral imperative to shoot at people from the California Bay Area? They're afraid "teh gey" will get on them and make them all sticky.

Telling a tiny minority of people to stop being asshats to the vast majority of us is not tyranny. It's what democratic government is FOR. If you don't like it, go on and keep pushing your oligarchy's interest. It will end in blood, like it has plenty of times before. Or have you not noticed history?

A thousand years ago people tolerated oligarchies for generations, because they were the anointed of God. These days, not so much. Comcast is run by oligarchs. A lot of us are getting really tired of it.

No, it's not.

This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.

Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).

Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.

So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.

People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?

The GP phrased it a little funny. What was meant is that developed nations have a declining population growth rate, except for the US, where the population growth rate hasn't fallen because of ongoing immigration, despite the decline in birth rates. Sloppy phrasing.

Also, first generation immigrants continue having larger families, which keeps the birth rate up higher than it might otherwise have been. Japan is an example of what a developed nation with essentially no immigration looks like: Average children per woman of 1.4, a long way below the 1.88 of the US.

Failed attempts, eh. The Friends line of LEGO is the best selling LEGO theme, and has been all year. It's beating Star Wars, for the love of Mike. The LEGO Group has made failed attempts in the past to make sets appealing to young girls, it is true. That streak is broken, and LEGO is selling a phenomenal number of Friends sets to girls. If that's subjugation, I wish I could be subjugated like that. Please, bury me in money.

Which just goes to show she knows nothing about what she rants about.

If that actually was his agenda, then I am doubly pleased with him and nominate him for two Beanies and a Nobel (category doesn't seem to matter much to that committee).

The NSA must be burned to the ground and the ground salted. It can not be repaired, it can not be cured, it can not fulfill any part of its nominal mission. It is corrupt to the core, and so secretive and so well-funded that it can not be fixed. An organization whose representatives routinely lie to Congress and get away with it is completely and totally out of control. It must be ended. It must be hunted down. It must be extinguished. Its installations must be destroyed, its cash accounts must be seized, its assets must be auctioned off. It is a plague upon the Earth, and the sooner it is gone, the sooner the dignity of humanity can be repaired, even a little.

If Edward Snowden helped even a little with that task, he is a hero worthy of awards far more notable than Slashdot's editors can bestow.

Who'd have thought. The gamepolitics.com link is Slashdotted.

I clicked on it because I'm a suspicious bastard. I want to read it and see if it's a real apology. Hopefully somebody who makes it through the press of bodies will quote from it.

The original spelling describes what the airlines do...

It's a good thing I don't have mod points right now. I would have to hold my nose... and mod you up. Instead, I will just hold my nose.

Heretic! You shall be touched by his noodly appendages! And you won't like it!

Reciting unvarnished facts without a single loaded adjective is offensive to Christians? That says much more about Christians than it does about astrophysicists.