Contract manufacturers are not "rentiers".

You should read up on Comparative Advantage. Here is a simple example: Annie makes apple pies. Bill makes baskets. Each day Annie makes two pies, and Bill makes two baskets. Then they trade one pie for one basket, so they each have one of each. Then Mike, a manufacturer comes along. He can make ten pies as cheaply as Annie makes one. So Bill trades a basket to Mike for ten pies. So is Annie unemployed? Of course not. She switches to making baskets. The result is that now, each day, both Bill and Annie get one basket and ten pies. They are both better off.

Ah! But then Mike starts manufacturing baskets too! At a tenth the cost that Bill can make them. Now Bill and Annie will both be unemployed, right? Wrong. A pie is still worth one basket. So Annie can go back to making two pies a day, and trade one for a pie, and Bill can make two baskets a day and trade one for a pie. They are no worse off then at the beginning.

So automation may cause short term unemployment, as workers retrain, but it should not cause long term unemployment. If automation is comparatively better than humans at some tasks (as it certainly will be), people will be better off. If it improves productivity evenly, then people will be no worse off. This is not just theory, but also corresponds to reality. Economies with rising productivity do NOT have mass unemployment and poverty. Productivity improvements result in rising living standards. In fact, they are the ONLY thing that can raise living standards.

What is happening at Foxconn is a predictable result of China's economy maturing. The service sector is expanding. Manufacturing will also expand, but manufacturing employment will fall. Internal demand will rise, and exports will be less important. This is the same thing that happened a generation ago in developed countries.

No, you would be going through the processor on the HDD, that is running the supposedly compromised firmware. There would be nothing to stop it from lying to you about updating itself. Firmware malware would most likely be implemented as a stub that checks for a special key like "NSA_1234", and otherwise jumps to the "real" firmware, so there would be no way to test for its presence without knowing the key. They only way to be sure, would be to write directly to the flash via the JTAG port.

Moving the HDD to a different computer would make no difference, since the firmware is in the drive.

That is unlikely. There is rarely a ground swell of support for anti-monopoly actions, such as NN and this ban on bans, because the public is not aware of how much they are harmed by rigged markets. But once the monopoly is broken, people will be much more opposed to reinstating it.

There should be an investigation into why Oracle was ever tendered the contract in the first place. It couldn't have been on merit. I have never met, or heard of, anyone who outsourced to Oracle and was pleased with the result. They have the worst reputation in the business. I trust Microsoft more than I trust Oracle.

But how do you know which is the real site? If I am looking for Foobar Inc's website, and I see www.foobar.com, I can be pretty sure that is legitimate. But if I see foobar.info, foobar.dev, foobar.sucks, I don't know if they are legitimate or not. The proliferation of TLD's just pollutes the namespace and sows confusion. They can be used for fraud, or they can be used to extort money from businesses that feel they have to lock down more and more domains. The drawbacks outweigh the benefits, especially as more and more are added.

It also depends on the cost of the alternatives. The California Highspeed Rail from SF to LA, currently under construction, is projected to cost $500,000 per seat to build. Even if the ticket prices are heavily subsidized (and they will be) they will have to be very high to recover that expense.

This is the Lump of Labor Fallacy. There is not a fixed amount of programming to be done. Companies will start or expand based on the labor and skills available. If plenty of programmers drove down prices, then programming salaries would be lowest were programmer were common, such as Silicon Valley, and highest where programmers were rare, such as rural areas and third world countries. This is the exact opposite of reality.

Yes, it is pretty silly for them to expect the government to educate people. It is not like an educated population is some kind of public good.

Neither Comcast nor Verizon has opened fire on their opponents with live ammunition, so I don't think so.

Let's not get carried away with false nostalgia. 150 years ago was the era of robber barons that make Verizon and Comcast look like pussycats.

No they aren't.

Wrong question. Ask "Does John believe there is no god?" and in the 2nd instance the answer is "Yes". In the first instance, you aren't provided with enough information to answer the question.

As a general rule, "yes" and "I don't know" aren't equivalent just because neither means "no".

It may be suspect, but almost any access is better than no access. If the access to the Internet includes access to Facebook (which is usually among the first things blocked by oppressive regimes), and other sites that allow peer-to-peer communication, then that is even better. So I have a hard time seeing why any increase in access is not "inherently good".

Let me get this straight: You believe that atheists asserting that faith based beliefs are silly is evidence that they have ... faith based beliefs. I don't follow your logic.

Then either the atheists you have met are very atypical, or you misunderstand them. Richard Dawkins, an advocate of atheism and the creator of The Spectrum of Theistic Probability has stated that he has met no one with such an affirmative belief (a 7 on his scale), and does not hold such a belief himself, labelling himself a 6. I have never met anyone with an affirmative faith in the absence of a deity. Claims of such a faith seem to always originate from theists looking for a strawman to attack. Atheism is not based on faith. It is based on an absence of faith.

Atheism is an absence of belief, not a belief in absence. Few people who self-identify as "atheist" have an affirmative belief/faith in the non-existence of a deities. Atheism is just the default position of an absence of belief through faith. It doesn't require "proof" of anything.