PhD in Mathematics.

So did you not have to take any basic biology courses along the way, or did you just ignore them because they conflict with your theological preferences or something?

All known organisms have DNA or RNA, evolution (including speciation) is an observed fact... the "proof" you're asking for is the evidence gathered from the past several hundred years of life sciences. You're in front of a PC, go Google some answers.

Unless you're playing some silly semantic game with the meaning of "proof" and "purpose", in which case you're merely really annoying, rather than extremely ignorant.

Land would still be pretty important, if you want to have any place to store all your snazzy printed items. And y'know, sleep.

How would they "pass the cost on" in any competitive market, since only some companies would be affected? Wouldn't the merchants' prices already be near the maximum/optimum? It would cut into their profit margins, not raise the prices.

I'm as concerned with the US slipping towards totalitarianism as the next guy, but for the love of god please shut the fuck up with the stupid FEMA meme.

Your car analogies are *idiotic*. The actual analogy would be a device that you can point at any car, which creates an exact copy(minus any personal items) back in your garage. It doesn't affect the original owner of the car, aside from resale value, which was never guaranteed. The device would obviously be a miraculous boon in many ways, and the car manufacturers would find themselves in the exact same position as the **AAs and be falling over themselves to push for ever-stronger penalties and more heavy-handed preventative measures against people copying their designs, and would call the scanning "stealing" (and it would still be a misnomer). And yes, their old business model would be rendered rather obsolete. Independant groups would undoubtably arise to design their own cars which could be freely copied, although without the money and expertise of the large manufacturers behind them, most people would probably still perfer copies of the big names, at least initially. Things like custom-designed cars for each person and susbcription services where you can go into a showroom to scan a new car each month, or have the car dealers' scanners deliver new cars automatically, would undoubtably become a larger part of the business of the car companies that survived the transition.

(I should note I'm ignoring negative exernalities [increased pollution, etc.] for the purposes of this analogy, as digital data transfers are a bit different from physical objects in that sense. You could actually make a decent connection between increased traffic congestion due to free cars and increased bandwidth usage due to piracy, though. Still a net positive on that front in my opinion, especially as things like legal streaming services are making more bandwidth necessary anyway)

Yes, that's perfectly practical. Are you high?

Passing laws that force people to treat others a certain way and punish them if they don't is going to have the opposite effect you're looking for

So, if we have punishments for murder, you're going to go on a killing spree just to teach us and our oppresive "rules" a lesson?

I smell a disconnected-from-reality libertarian. Sure is nice in that hypothetical utopia you've constructed in your head, along with the Marxists, and the Reactionary Monarchists, and everyone else who thinks all problems are nails and their one overly simplistic idea is a hammer. Too bad reality generally doesn't work that way, but why let that stop an excellent source of smugness?

Because it's ancient, and foreign, and therefore must contain mystic wisdom. That's pretty much it. No, I don't really get it either.

Yeah, man, understanding basic physical processes couldn't possible lead to better technologies/solutions down the road. We know everything we need to now, let's just stop all scientific inquiry, or maybe we should have done that in the 50's, or at the beginning of the industrial revolution, or hell, once we found out how to make fire, did we really need anything else?

If countries were spending like 50% of their GDP on projects like this, you might have a point, but you and I both know the expenditures are relatively miniscule on the level of nation/international budgets, and if you didn't know that and were actually serious about the "trillions of dollars" nonsense, you're woefully uninformed to be commenting on the issue (You wouldn't be alone, mind you- I remember seeing a US poll indicating a significant portion of the populace thinks NASA's share of the national budget is something like 20%, when it's closer to 0.5%*). The basic research into subatomic physics is what made possible the development of nuclear reactors, which are likely going to be increasingly important to our energy future once the cheap oil runs out. Similar for better solar panels, more efficient engines, etc. Basically, if you want to solve technological problems, you should be arguing for *more* fundamental, not-immediately-profitable/usable scientific research, not less. The amount of physics and math graduates being sucked into jobs in the financial industry because they pay so well in comparison to actual useful work is a far bigger drain on our ability to deal with the future than fundamental scientific research, in my opinion.

* Similarly, the National Science Foundation is about 0.2%, and the amount of the Dept. of Energy's budget devoted to research, while less trivial to work out, likely comes to a similar percentage of overall expenditures.

however I understand that you need a certain level of government for things like health, education, territorial protection (against harm, thief and invaders), roads, money and contract enforcement to raise above the middleageous swamp

I'm not sure how that makes you a libertarian, capitalization or no. Everyone wants to "maximize personal freedom", or at least says they do. By current American conservative standards, your views practically make you a commie socialist.

So, you're arguing in favor of compete sociopathy towards anyone not in your immediate family.

Why do I get the feeling you're a Libertarian?

Pretty much everything you said is either factually incorrect or misleading (and recognizable as silly right-wing memes). I don't think you really care though, you just want to badmouth "Der Libruls".

Hint: Climate scientists are aware of past environmental changes. This is not new information. You are not unusually well-informed. You are not the lone voice of sanity in the wilderness, you are just a loudmouth idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, repeating nonsense spewed by other, more cynical loudmouth idiots. Your post shows such fundamental misunderstandings of the data and issues involved that it would be best to leave /. and let the adults talk until you can be bothered to look up any iota of information on the subject that doesn't come from the members section of Rush Limbaugh's website. You are literally the equivalent of someone trying to disprove the theory of gravity by noting you can jump up several inches away from Earth, so those science eggheads must have it all wrong. That's the level of ignorance we're dealing with. Go away.

You appear to have mistaken the /. comments section for your personal blog.

Worse, it wasn't even interesting or funny. 10 lashes of the whip! Or just of Offtopic moderations, whichever comes first.

Government services have become a lot more expensive, SPECIFICALLY the welfare services which interestingly enough are usually required by those who have lesser incomes and therefore pay little or nothing in taxes.

Hey, look everybody, it's the "no taxes exist except income taxes, therefore poor people don't pay any tax" lie/meme! How ya doin' NTEEITTPPDPAT? Still discredited but being used by people trying to justify their hatred of anyone with less money than themselves? Great, I'm fine too. Be seeing you, ya wacky meme, you! Go die in a fire!

Dear god, am I sick of the conservative meme that the financial crash was all due to Fannie and Freddie and government policy. Because of course the free market could never shoot itself in the foot due to unchecked greed, collusion, and short-term profiteering, that would be unthinkable!

The main government policy problem was one of not regulating the banks and credit rating agencies enough to keep them from making a bunch of bad loans (no, they weren't forced to), chopping them up and recombining them, giving the results unwarrantedly high ratings, and massively overleveraging them to the point where a downturn in one sector (house values) turned into the collapse of 10's of trillions of dollars worth of funny-money commitments that never should have been made in the first place.

So yes, it was a failure of government, only in the sense that it's a failure of government if buying rope is legal and you use one to strangle a family to death before hanging yourself.