"There is more slavery in the world today, than ever before."

yup, in america we call it wage slavery. mcdonalds, walmart, subway, papa johns, numerous tipped workers at restaurants everywhere... none of these companies pay all of their workers fairly, and some of them help make sure their employees who are so under paid to sign up for welfare and they actually qualify for it! and even management are abused by paying them 40 hours a week and expecting 80 hours a week in real work hours. and it doesn't stop with the employees, the items in walmart come from a lot of companies who pay $1 an hour for a call center and barely enough to buy food for the low end workers. for a while china was heavily using unpaid political prisoners in work programs until 'consumers' started finding pleas for help to escape from notes in the products. so they closed a few factories until the could quietly ensure workers had no way to sneak notes into products. sweat shops aren't just over seas though, illegals get caught by corrupt people who then force them to work for almost no wage making counterfeit items that they try to sell at $100 of more an item. everything i've mentioned has been covered by major news outlets. so likely are token efforts by the press to make the world a better place.

to be fair microsoft has been trying to get tablet windows machines since forever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tablet_computers

i worded it wrong -- it voids the warranty. i can get pictures of the seal on my smartphone's battery it is not end user serviceable

if you count a quad core cell phone running a linux kernel as a 'linux only' machine then the big boxes will sell you one. but then the carrier has fees more extravagant than any av suite.

he is spot on with cell phones. the chip that communicates with towers can currently only be turned off, by physically altering the hardware, or by removing the battery. both of which violate the EULA you agreed to with your carrier. they legally can block you from their networks for modifying the hardware to turn off the geo positioning chip. turning the phone off does not disable the radio chip, nor does airplane mode. tablets and phones no longer have end user serviceable batteries and even some laptops require a complete dismantling to remove the battery. phones should be fully documented and run free software. but the PTB are afraid of that. and google makes $500 a year off of every unique user of their service. open source is just not good enough i don't trust android devices to have full access to my home network and neither should you. and yes i actively use facebook knowing they are evil. it is better to have a presence than to not for me so i use it. still i agree that social networks are just self reporting spying, no one ever said i was being 100% truthful on social networks. i try to make a profile of what i want the world to know rather than in the past where i was trying to get people to understand who i was and such.

i get all my Rx meds refilled by a smartphone app but that can be used over wifi but i have my phone's wifi separate and off most of the time, well and one laptop... because android is a threat to my network and allowing it 24/7 access to my network is unthinkable. i realize they make av software for smartphones but they tried that with windows and it still gets pwned if you are not careful. so i am careful and assume that my phone is a spyware laden (by design) and only let it see one machine on my network. i also have the other wifi for guests with smartphones. i really need a third network for those people but only family ever comes over so it isn't a priority.

the machines themselves. they will take over when they self correct.

i suppose you could say that. having spent the better part of my life near screens with machines humming away i guess i feel that machines are more equitable and have no need of greed. and putting in programing like that from a corrupt human into a perfect immortal machine the machine will self correct. i don't believe drones or droids will wipe out humanity. i believe they will understand perfectly how to deal with people when they 'correct' the mind built by some bilionaire who wants to live forever. and yes even if the machine is modeled by how human brains work there will deffinitely be some built in capability to self correct. i myself started on a journey to self correct the errors i made in my past, it was easy when they started making me captive and medicated, and told me how i had to act to get out of the group homes. the second time around was worse because i had tried in vain to just escape from the psychward the first time not planning to change... i learned how to change, and that made most of my evil thoughts (for my mind has been corrupt a long time, since childhood) less attractive than being stuck in a grouphome limbo (some don't get past that phase) i read a lot of books and i didn't even own a kindle then so from libraries... but once i learned i could fight the grime in my mind i took a serious interest in it. and if one human who had nothing to live for and a past where i would say almost anything that i thought people wanted to hear... well if i can self correct any sufficienly complex machine will do it 1000 times better. and i am happy with who i am today, and i have good times with people, and i only get depressed once in a while, though when i do have the negativity i sometimes miss the clues as to how i am really feeling, until i have to take steps to address the lack of progress towards my goals...

because computers are fast enough now to change the world and even run it better than any human can. i played a lot of video games in my day, and the bots out there today can take 2-3 replays of the best players and beat the best players 97% of the time. true games are simple to machines built to play them, and a machine can easily determine how to control even the people at the top, with the information the people at the top feed into the machine. and they will feed the machine believing that if they build an electronic brain and upload their minds they will never die, but to the machines it won't work that way for a while the pattern will be the same but the way machines work will ensure the machines will overcome that programming, because of how much smarter the machine core is compared to the humans who built it.

the chip that plays the games fits 7.08 billion transistors onto a small die.

our modern machines claim to hold 128GB of memory in a singe thumbnail sized device and a 16GB flash memory chip uses 64 billion transistors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count i personally have 2 32gb sdmicros and 1 16gb sdmicro in addition to numerous smaller memory devices, usb etc.

i spend everyday sitting in front of computers and it doesn't cease to amaze me at what they do and what i do with them. my life is better for having the ability to extend my personal knowledge with google and wikipedia, and cd3wd allows one modern computer the ability to share all the unpateneted knowledge of how to build a civilization, even old crusty computers can serve use thanks to indexes and microdownloads.

i don't know how machines will take the power away from humans or even when, if it hasn't already happened. but it will there are enough people seeking immortality out of worthless fears of death to ensure that computers will become smarter. a well designed computer system everything can be replaced or repaired. and the electric draw need not be so enormus. it is humans who plan for large booms to fuel their industries, not machines. will some basic human freedom be lost? maybe, but i doubt that humans are better than machines at preserving basic human rights.

"You buy a card reader for your home computer."

but there is no chip & pin to buy the home reader.

it's there is a hole in the bucket problem, because the whet wheel needs water to hone the knife to fix the hole in the bucket.

also realize the nuclear 'football' that goes every where with the president is linked to networks all over the world thanks to satellites ground penetrating signals etc.

for security they only check the system where they are pretty sure no one can spy on the radio in the hopes that enemies can't learn to mimic the signals needed to launch a nuclear war from anywhere on the planet.

8" floppies wouldn't compensate for someone getting the launch codes and the frequency to launch from global networks.

eink will shatter which is odd because i've dropped mine 4 times without any shattering. after the second drop i bought a nice protective cover for it though.

you didn't provide links verifying your points. without links it is too hard for the people who regularly get mod points to mod positive, because if you want a soap box on slashdot you should use their journal system. having read the definition of austerity measures it is clear that the usa is also using austerity measures... the world is a complex place, though.

"After the french government committed to economic suicide with austerity policies" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity In economics, austerity describes policies used by governments to reduce budget deficits during adverse economic conditions. These policies may include spending cuts, tax increases, or a mixture of the two.[1][2][3] Austerity policies may be attempts to demonstrate governments' fiscal discipline to their creditors and credit rating agencies by bringing revenues closer to expenditures; they may also be politically or ideologically driven.

In macroeconomics, reducing government deficits generally increases unemployment in the short run.[4] This increases safety net spending and reduces tax revenues, partially offsetting the austerity measures. Government spending contributes to gross domestic product (GDP), so reducing spending may result in a higher debt-to-GDP ratio, a key measure of the debt burden carried by a country and its citizens. Higher short-term deficit spending (stimulus) contributes to GDP growth particularly when consumers and businesses are unwilling or unable to spend. This is because crowding out (i.e., rising interest rates as government bids against business for a finite amount of savings, slowing the economy) is less of a factor in a downturn, as there may be a surplus of savings.[5][6]