You can read the autobiography of Mohandas Ghandi (a really wonderful book) and see the same patterns.
What people like Thoreau and Ghandi realized was
I heard this one time and I never forgot it. It is a saying of Ghandi's:
since you seem to be a fan, i'll request you to get his name right, else your quotes lose credibility. it's GANDHI, not GHANDI.
Slashdot article from June 2006: Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space Slashdot, August 2010: Abandon Earth Or Die, Warns Hawking Once, I would have written it off to deja vu and went on with my life. But the same article, 3 times? I might be human, but my memory is not that terrible, Slashdot!
Well, what can he do. He's been trying to warn us since 2006, but are we going? He'll keep repeating conscientiously every few years until we're gone.
He was a Pakistani man who was copying and selling those copied games and jailbreaking devices.
[...]
Slashdot at its best.
Your justification includes the fact that he is Pakistani?
Racism at its worst.
There does not exist on earth more carbon than the earth can process.
All the carbon came from the earth. It was "processed" into the earth in the past after the living material was "done" with it.
you're being disingenuous. our planet is not a uniform, homogeneous body. the physical state and the location of carbon matters as much as, or even more than, its quantity. you wouldn't enjoy eating faeces or drinking urine, would you? yet those came from you, this morning.
Some uncontacted tribes literally have had no idea that sex even causes pregnancy
So how do you know this?
They were hoping electrons were shaped like Pac-man. This would where the antimatter went.
But would it where your went?
While agriculture requires backbreaking labour, hunter-gatherer societies only worked a couple of days a week.
That's because hunters hunt only for themselves, while farmers grow food for whole communities.
If you are having a hard time with the way they handle the money, make a billion dollars, contribute half, then tell them what you think. 'Til then, shut up with the pedantry and nitpicking.
I can't criticise Bill Gates until I have a billion dollars? You realise that makes him answerable only to the handful of super-rich of the world?
Shameless cock-sucking, really.
My only regret is that he's not 30 years younger, so that he'd have the energy and lifespan needed to better advance his goals.
Assange was born in 1971. That makes him 39 now. Lifespan yes, but energy (etc.) to do what he's doing at 9 years of age?
Not the politics, certainly, and I hope you don't mean the sex!
Let me tell you this, as someone hailing from a not-so-free country: these kinds of leaks would have much less effect in non-free societies than they do now in the free West. For a very simple reason: in the West, the freedom of press may be imperfect, but by and large it still exists. You can disseminate that information far and wide. Just look at the list of newspapers which published the stories based on the leaks!
the freedom of speech and the press is a fiction that the western corporates/governments have to maintain, because that is an essential element of this whole democracy and free-country illusion that allows them to exploit their citizens largely with their complicity.
but when anyone is naive enough to take it for real, and exercise those freedoms without regard for the status quo, then they come out in their true colours.
russia and china do not need to maintain the illusion. they follow a different exploitation model.
Ideas do not belong to the first being to hold them in their mind. Art does not belong to the artist. I'm not going to say some hippie crap like art belongs to everyone, rather I say it doesn't belong to anyone, it just is. You can't own blue, righteous indignation, the smell of napalm, or the force (sorry Lucas).
You're confusing copyright with patents. Disembodied ideas can be patented, but not copyrighted. Copyright pertains only to specific implementations of artistic ideas. You can't have copyright over the colour blue, but you can have copyright over your painting that uses a certain shade of blue that you envisioned. You could have an idea to write a story about a lame sailor chasing a white whale, but to enjoy actual copyright, you'd have to write Moby Dick.
According to Michelin, there are more three star restaurants in New York than Rome. In any case it is pathetic that you think you can judge and an entire continent-spanning nation of hundreds of millions based on whatever handful of random restaurants you happened upon. Grow up.
Yes, don't you dare make a casual observation here without doing a scientific survey, crunching the numbers, quoting learned sources and including citations. This is slashdot, you know.
Well, here in the states you pretty much have to bite the bullet and pay Microsoft's ransom and get your netbook pre-loaded. Some manufacturers used to install a little application that asked you to agree to Microsoft's EULA before the starting the desktop, which you could then deny and have a chance at getting your license money back, but I've purchased three netbooks from various manufacturers in the last few years and none of them had the app. I just grit my teeth and blow Microsoft away. Anyone who says Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly is blind. A few years ago I stumbled upon a web site that sold ultra-light laptops that specialized in linux on their machines but were still much more expensive than I could afford, I think they were in the realm of $800-1000 so I never purchased and I've forgotten their url, some kind of letter-number combination, like pc2049.com or something. I wish I still had that url so I could see what they are charging for those machine today.
Here in India I bought two Athlon dual-core laptops in the past three years, both from the Acer Aspire series. Both came with Linpus linux preinstalled, which was really only good for checking the hdd capacity and amount of memory and doing an lspci, so I promptly replaced it with OpenSuSE, of course.
Really good performance for the price (sub-US$500). But maybe you're looking for something more powerful.
I'm not connected to Acer in any way.
The way it works in a western post-scarcity economy, [...] may not be the same for a country which still has a scarcity economy.
Post-scarcity economy: A contradiction in terms. Where there is no scarcity, no economic system is necessary. It's a utopian concept that hasn't been reached by any existing nation. There are degrees of scarcity, but no country has yet achieved zero scarcity. When Anthony Giddens used the term, he had something different in mind from what you're implying. Do not make artificial distinctions to bolster your ill-founded sense of western superiority.
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. -- Stanley Garn
