>If everyone took that as an example and behaved that way, the whole mess would collapse. It's like the random jerks who use the HOV lane when driving alone...

The problem with this analogy is that the random jerks who use the HOV lanes alone aren't the ones in charge of running and policing the highways. What's more, the policitians are the ones preaching to us about how to live, when they themselves don't live by these words.

Maybe it'd be better if the whole mess did collapse. If we're so stupid we put people in charge who are like this, then why do we deserve a functioning society rather than starvation and anarchy?

>I do not grow my own vegetables, butcher my own meat, make my own circuit boards, generate my own electricity.

You don't need personal relationships for any of that, you only need money. You can get money from being employed, among other means.

>I require relationships with other people in my household, neighborhood and world to stay alive and thrive.

I can name dozens of politicians and CEOs who happily survive and thrive while not giving two shits about anyone else on the planet.

>We evolved in communities and had to be able to work together to thrive. It is "bad" for me to harm others because it upsets relationships necessary for my survival.

Somehow, this evolution totally failed since our entire society is run by people who have zero empathy for others.

This is a good point. The Koran also instructs people to murder each other many times, and these verses are the very basis of the Islamic religion.

Wouldn't an indoctrination by society of an expectation for others to follow the rules be a suitable enough reason for one to follow that same rule?

No, because what's good for society isn't necessarily good for you, the individual. Just look at all our politicians and business leaders; they don't work for the good of society at all, they work purely for their own personal gain. So why should the rest of us work for the good of society?

Other unrelated people are not your young, they could actually be competitors. There's a reason we humans are so warlike.

Approach #1 obviously makes a lot of sense in small, tribal societies. If you don't work for the good of the group, they'll kick you out and survival on your own in pre-civilization days is very difficult if not impossible. However, #2 is quite doable these days. All you have to do is work a job for money, and use that money to pay for your living expenses. Then, for personal relationships, you can treat people poorly and take advantage of them for your own personal gain. There's countless sociopaths who do just that every day, and it seems to work well for them. They're even running all our large companies and our government.

I have a sense of rightness that derives from empathy. It doesn't take any notion of the supernatural or any deity to understand that if I can feel pain, then I can expect that my fellow humans can as well. If I feel that someone causing me pain is "bad" then it follows that causing others' pain is bad.

Why is causing pain to others bad? Why do you care about what other people feel? Yes, most of us agree that it's wrong to willfully hurt others, but why? If you think that we're just collections of cells, then the only thing you should care about is your own personal survival and comfort, and nothing else.

Surely you've heard of the Golden Rule? This requires zero belief in the supernatural or any sort of sacredness.

Except that it doesn't explain why you should follow it. Most people seem to use "karma" (or "what comes around goes around") as a not-quite-as-supernatural-as-an-omnipotent-God reason for following the Golden Rule.

With TPB mainly running on magnet links, it's not even that it's a hash of pointers to content these days. Even the actual pointers have gone off-site, which reduces the bandwidth by 99%. My guess is TPB actually serves up more ads than content, if you count bytes.

So? It's still inconvenient because now you're stuck in a manual process that they will eventually get around to when you want to play right now. I've done something similar when a game without warning refused to activate - granted, I'd been playing with WINE settings and uninstalled/reinstalled quite a few times but this was Friday afternoon. A few hours later and no reply, I said fuck it and downloaded a cracked version off TPB. Support came back to me on Monday and started asking questions about why I'd used so many activations, I just sent back a reply basically saying I've found a permanent solution so go fish. Okay so fraud prevention is a bit more valid reason but it still doesn't fix the immediate problem.

We've had this discussion many times before here on /. with regards to Linux, no matter how many valid reasons there is for "CANTFIX" problems ranging from crap Linux support, undocumented formats and hardware, "embrace extend extinguish" incompatibility and lockout users don't care. This doesn't work, give me something that works. I must admit my tolerance has grown extremely slim, when you know that there's a not-so-legal alternative that always works flawlessly it really doesn't take much before I say "screw this, I'll get it from TPB. Heck, I still download GoT even though I pay for HBO Nordic.

Good for you, but the average person on the street doesn't give two shits about the opinion of some anonymous poster on Slashdot. They do care about the opinion of Dr. Dre, at least for musical stuff, which is why his headphone company was worth billions when Apple bought it. Personally, I don't give two shits about Dr. Dre's opinion on headphones either, but I'm not the average person on the street either. Obviously, there's lots of people out there who do care about Dre's opinion, or else Beats wouldn't have sold for billions.

Personally, I like my Sennheiser HD-280s.