D'oh, meant to say "a firewall is a good solution to imperfect control over listening ports."

This. A firewall is a good substitute for imperfect control over listening ports. People tend to run them whether they're really needed or not, like putting armor plates over a vehicle which may or may not already be bulletproof. So a firewall may not actually improve anything, if all services with the capability of opening listening ports are configured absolutely correctly (which is only possible if they're all capable of this - which, I admit, would be unusual).

Didn't you read his last link? Reality must be kept off the table at all costs!

Mammon is our god now, and I guess the 1% are his representatives on earth. And if we didn't have a fanatical devotion to them, how could things have become like this?

Disgusting. This attitude will be one of the most baffling aspects of our culture to people in the future. We call our resource-starved overworked population "entitlted" every time we suggest that they deserve something (even if it's something they had in the past but can no longer afford, like their own living space as employed adults) but we never apply that to those reaping all the rewards, living obscenely pampered lifestyles for doing the same, or less, or NO work.

The global economic collapse can't come soon enough for me.

I wonder why they didn't sue earlier.

Also only a landlubber would use such a system, a savvy pirate would use something that plays the looted music he already has! Aarrrrr!

I can't have any kind of surgery that involves cutting a flap in the cornea since my eyeballs still need to be shockproof, there are types that don't require this though. Still a bit worried about the aura/halo effect. And the cost is not insignificant.

After I read TFS, I am become infinitely hilarity!

...They should make someone play FF7 and run this test at the point where Aerith(/Aeris) dies.

What if the aliens aren't a bunch of irresponsible, selfish shitbirds? A civilization as advanced as ours or better could go unnoticed because they have a clean atmosphere.

Came here to say this!

Who said I was advocating totalitarian communism or democratic socialism (which is just as doomed because it still runs on a contemporary capitalist economy) or perfect equality (which is impossible)?

Giving about as much of the planet's resources as possible (including the work of its population) to a few hundred people is completely unsustainable however.

People could still work if they want to for some extra money. It just wouldn't be mandatory for living beyond mere survival. And if there isn't much demand for human labor, what's the problem?

But but but, teh future is supposed to be full of infinitely growing tech jobs, this is unpossible!!1!

That probably would work, if not for automation now replacing far more jobs than it creates. To paraphrase a guy I don't like to quote, these jobs aren't coming back.

Besides, at this point I think we can do better than hacking more fixes onto this tarted-up barter system. Why not be more ambitious?

I don't like the "energy" euphemism, they're not searching for some tidy glowing yellow stuff like something from an RTS game. Let's call it what it is. OIL. Wildlife-gooping, coast-ruining, fossil-carbon-filled, toxic oil that needs to have more energy dumped into it to be refined into something we can use.