You misunderstand. It might not be free for you, but it's free for the fish...

You give the elites credit for way, way too much foresight, organization and discipline.

Unless they get employed doing something else.

Suppose you have 10 people and 10 jobs. One job is eliminated by technology. Now you have 10 people and 9 jobs. That 1 newly unemployed dude tries to get another job, but to do so he'll have to oucompete 1 of the remaining 9 employed people out of their job. So how will he compete? Why, he'll do the job for less money. So now we have 9 people with lower average wage, and 1 unemployed dude. This merry-go-round will then continue. Also, as wages fall so will the total buying power of the workforce, which creates further downward pressure.

Capitalism cannot handle a situation where labour is not the resource that limits production. It predates Industrial Revolution, almost collapsed as a result of it, and is heading back towards the cliffs now that true believers have managed to convince themselves that the fall of Soviet Russia means revolution is no longer possible and dismantled the compensating systems.

The only real question at this point is whether it'll collapse into a dystopia where the poor are kept down by brute force, or incorporate sufficient income redistribution to guarantee a middle-class minimum income. US is trapped to the former fate by the aftereffects of Cold War rhetoric, but Europe and Japan have hope. And China, of course, is a dystopia as is.

"Remaining jobs" need not decline and it's worth noting that they actually aren't declining at present.

According to the article they do. Also, when was the last time job market was good for the employees?

I don't think you know what ,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management">DRM means.

How can DRM be preserved if the there was loss of control?

Now it is not. You are aware that everyone including MS did exactly as Apple did; build their own system. And how many different OS did Dell sell on their PCs? Only Windows. Apple to oranges. Having market power != monopoly.

The standard for music still is MP3 and AAC, not Harmony, not FairPlay. Apple does not have to support another company's DRM. In cars there are standards for oil; although some cars and models use specialized blends. If Ford accepts 5W30 and their own blend for their cars, your point is that Ford must also accept GM's blend. That is ludicrous.

Assertion without fact or evidence. The vast majority of music was MP3. Even now most players default to this although AAC is starting to become more accepted. The fact that you could put any MP3 or AAC song onto an Apple device and play it defeats your silly anti-competitive argument.

You are aware that chicks have teeth right? It's how they break out of their eggs. They lose their tooth quickly after being hatched but they do have teeth for a short period. As for them not having teeth generally, this evidence shows they lost their teeth over millions and millions of years. I'm not sure where you get the idea of "temporary."

As for rants, keep stating that A must become B. That's not nature. A can still remain as A while a population of A becomes C. That's how most species evolve. You never did answer the question: Are whales half fish? Aren't they AB in your book? What about dogs? They are subspecies of wolves yet you never seen a wolf the size of a chihuahua. Yet dogs and wolves can still mate. This doesn't even encompass the many transitional forms found in fossils.

75MB symmetric, with all movie channels plus the junk that never gets watched but can't be declined, $230/month on Verizon FiOS in Dallas.

Plus still paying ~ 30% of income in taxes when income tax, property tax, sales tax, use fees, etc. are all considered.

Second thing, most examples given are low wages jobs, then the argument does not hold water if you pretend it is responsible for stagnation of the average wages, the average wages should go up if there is less people with minimum wages.

If you destroy a low-wage job, the workers who previously did it become unemployed, and their wage goes to zero. Also, there's more competition for the remaining jobs, thus even non-zero wages tend to fall.

It's not clear that Apple could survive in isolation. A lot of their components are only as cheap as they are because of other lower-margin companies paying a big chunk of the R&D costs. When Apple was using PowerPC processors and were the only customer for IBM or Motorola for a particular chip, they found it very difficult to compete. They're designing their own ARM cores now, but they're benefitting enormously from the thriving ARM software ecosystem.

I wonder how they will prove that, for the duration of the supposed criminal activity, it was me wearing it, and not someone I lent it to.

I am willing to bet most of the people reading /. are white, so that's not really an issue.

It's existence, size and importance. Any group, once it grows big enough, and no matter it's original motives, will be primarily concerned with its own existence once it grows past a handful of members. This is true in government, where the bureaucracy will, after a short while, be primarily interested in growing the bureaucracy. It is true in religious institutions who all eventually (quickly) lose sight of the religious aspects they are supposedly preaching and start concerning them selves primarily with growth, power and maintaining their own importance. It certainly happens in voluntary organizations like Greenpeace, which fast go on the same path as religious organizations.

Companies, to a degree, have some oversight. If they do not make enough money as they grow big, their growth will sooner or later be limited by stock holders demanding profit. Not at first, for sure, but over time. So companies will be allowed to stroke their own egos for a while but not indefinitely. Since a government bureaucracy caters to politicians, and the general electorate is retarded, there is no oversight over the bureaucracy. Since there is no God/Allah/Your favorite sky fairy there is no real oversight over religious institutions, and their membership is even more retarded than the average electorate. For organizations like Greenpeace the only oversight that exists is the internal oversight, and they are to busy in their own circle jerk to notice or care.

Your statement is self-contradictory. Accessing and co-opting the site was damaging the site, so damaging was not a mistake.

Yeah, you are right. BP set out to kill a bunch of its employees, then they wanted to wreck a platform, spill huge amounts of valuable product and finally pay for trying to clean it up. You are absolutely right, BP was malicious. Or perhaps you have no f*cking idea what the word "malicious" means.

This is not the motive of Greenpeace and it hasn't been for at least a decade, perhaps more. The motive of Greenpeace is to stroke the egos of the members of Greenpeace while they all sit in a huge circle jerking off to their own over-inflated images. Sadly they were not all inside the boat that the French sunk.

The problem is that the costs outweigh the revenue. Reducing costs in a way that also reduces revenue is probably not a good solution.