Too soon.

And how many countries with real universal health care also have a soda ban? Perhaps instead they have a working education system which successfully teaches kids to self-regulate from an early age, unlike Americans who can't seem to wrap their heads around the notion that they are not invincible junk consumers. Maybe the lack of such an education is partly why we can't seem to afford to provide our people with what every other industrialized nation can provide, even without draconian bans which you seem to think are an inevitable consequence of such.

It's only inevitable in a nation full of dumb asses whose primary mode of existence is that of consumer.

"You call bullshit, then you go on to freely state that you simply don't know."

I called bullshit on the idea that only middle- to upper-class white males are able to succeed, and then I presented evidence to back it up. Then I said that I can't possibly know what it's like to have disadvantages which are not the same as my own disadvantages. There is no contradiction between these two assertions. Yet somehow you got modded up for a response leading from the very start with a bald-faced false equivalency.

"Because, most people aren't like you."

Exactly. It doesn't matter what societal disadvantages one is born with so much as one's drive and perseverance. Maybe some are more driven than others, but don't just naively chalk it up to mere intelligence; on the contrary, intelligent people tend to be more easily discouraged in my experience.

The real factor has nothing to do with economic class, color of skin, gender, religion, etc. I don't know where it comes from, but I do know that a good drive can overcome any unfairness life throws its way, and that such a drive can be found amongst people whom some would thoughtlessly label as hopelessly victimized or ill-equipped. And how wrong they are.

Everyone is disadvantaged in some way, and some more so than others. But some people turn their disadvantages into their identities, while others accept life's unfairness and refuse to cage themselves within the limits placed on them by others.

Bullshit. I grew up in a single-wide trailer in Kansas. When the season came around, everyone in the trailer park and their dogs and babies had to huddle up in an underground tornado shelter which lacked drainage and would steadily fill with water under the torrential rain. Last time I was in there, the water was damn near my waist by the time we were cleared to go home. I'm not saying it wasn't nice to at least have that shelter, but the fact is, I'd seen enough to know without a doubt that my family was living in poverty.

Now I have an office in SOMA in San Francisco as the co-founder of a bootstrapped startup. It wasn't entirely easy getting here, but I can't say it was all that hard either. It just felt natural the whole time. All I did was work on my interests until I could build something I could be proud of; doing that helped me to build an impressive resumé without so much as a 2-year college degree.

Would it have been easier had I been born into a middle- or upper-class family? Honestly it's hard to say. I think being poor taught me to be resourceful with what I have, which could actually be a great advantage. Would it have been harder had I been born black or a woman (or a black lesbian woman)? Well that's just impossible for me to answer.

What I will say is this: Whatever the magnitude of discrimination there actually is out there, for every person putting their energy into shouting loudly about how their attributes make their life harder, there's someone else out there with the exact same attributes furthering their education, skills, and careers, working steadily toward a position where they can have an infinitely greater impact on the condition of their group within society.

Good point, but ubiquitous services become just that: ubiquitous. There was a time when electricity was optional. It still is, but good luck participating in society without it. If Google starts offering personal chips and they make it cheap and useful enough for anyone to do it, everyone will eventually do it, and Google will become Big Brother in much the same way as government would have. Sure, it's "optional", but your choice is to either get chipped or be marginalized, which is damn close to having no choice at all.

Someone made an intriguing animation:
http://vimeo.com/37751380

I've seen this comparison with code being made before, and someone had an excellent response. The gist was, as a programmer, I don't get compensated with royalties for decades after I've written my code. Rather, I get a bi-weekly paycheck to keep writing code. That's a pretty big difference between the typical programmer and the content industry.

At its core, copyright infringement may be a crime carrying some sort of liability, but it is not theft in the any sense, and should not be treated as such. The industry has earned the animosity against it by asking for insane damages for a crime which even many smart people can't wrap their heads around, and now they want to give the Federal government the power to censor websites at their bequest. Meanwhile, last time I was in LA, it seemed to me that Beverly Hills was as bloated with riches as its ever been. If you ask me, the mass production of junk music and junk movies is killing our culture far more quickly than some perceived lack of financial incentive to produce content.

All the while, we don't even have a reliable way to calculate the actual damages caused by copyright infringement. What are the actual damages of a lostpotential sale? Does an unauthorized copy of a song or movie necessarily constitute a lost potential sale? These are important questions that Big Content has zero incentive to actually ask, because they already wield immense power over the issue and have shown their willingness to use it.

Anyways, here, download some of my music, which I have produced and released despite no real means nor motivation to profit from it:
http://soundcloud.com/dris

It seems to me that this would be a great way for Google to appear innocent of cooking their search results to favor their own products and services, as implicated by Senators calling for an anti-trust investigation of the company. By making this "mistake", they appear as though they are neutral to their own algorithms and must employ the same efforts as any other company to optimize their placement in their own search results, whether this is genuinely true or not. It seems to me that this self-imposed punishment will cost them a whole lot less than an anti-trust battle or any court orders resulting from one.

"Oh yeah? So now there's an official website of this leaderless organization, eh? Who put THEM in charge?"

My understanding is that a democratically elected and audited committee formed within Occupy is in charge of the website. It's been around for quite a while. There isn't a single "leader of the website", but the members of the committee in charge of it can be voted out and replaced.

"I said I haven't heard anyone talking about the disparity of opportunity."

I hear it all the time. Just for one example, one of the biggest issues of disparity is the steadily rising cost of tuition for higher education, both private and state-funded, throughout the country. If you want a higher education and like the vast majority of Americans can't pay the insane tuition yourself, you have to go into substantial debt and then possibly face a dismal job market after you graduate, leaving you with no hope of paying off said debt. If you haven't heard people talking about that then I really can't help you from here, except perhaps to recommend meeting people outside your own socioeconomic bubble.

And how's this for disparity of opportunity? If you're a multinational corporation influencing our national elections with billions of dollars of campaign donations, well that's freedom of speech. But if you peacefully assemble in a park to denounce the takeover of our democracy by such monied interests, well that's terrorism (already in the UK, and I'm sure it won't be long here in the US too).

These are just two issues I've seen repeatedly taken up by the Occupy protestors, both online and on the streets, and they share the common thread: 99% of us are getting a sour deal. The few wealthiest people and corporations at the top of America's economic pyramid more and more have free reign over our government and our daily lives, which they are using to get richer while everyone else gets poorer. And this is allowed to happen because our politicians are bought out; they either fail to enact needed regulations or enact regulations written by the very companies being regulated (often with the aim of further securing the status quo of the industry while making smaller competitors easier to weed out).

I would argue that Occupy has brought these and similar issues into the forefront, whereas before, most people, especially younger people now recovering from the plague of apathy, just complacently accepted the situation as unchangeable. Not anymore. I can name a handful of my own friends who never cared about politics before suddenly forming opinions and joining the dialogue, sparked by Occupy's presence in the news. This is a good thing.

Here's a link on Occupy's official website explicitly endorsing bringing back Glass Steagall:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/break-up-the-banks-the-glass-steagall-act/

Meanwhile, I can't find anything on their website explicitly asking for handouts or an even distribution of wealth. I've also been to an Occupy protest, and I didn't run into a single Communist. So tell me again, who is projecting on the protestors, you or me? Who is falling into what trap?

The real trap is participating in the campaign of intentionally misleading others about the message. First you claimed that they just want handouts and wealth redistribution, and now you're claiming that they don't know what they want at all. Obviously it can't be both, so which is it?

One of the oft-repeated falsities used to discredit Occupy is that they're just a bunch of socialists looking for handouts and an even distribution of wealth. That's simply untrue; 99% of the protesters are capitalists who never want to see another bailout (socialism for "Too Big to Fail" banks) and want the Glass Steagall act reimplemented. That act, by the way, was an opportunity we did /not/ miss in 1932, but which had its teeth taken out in 1999.

There are valid arguments to be made against Occupy. The argument that they just want Communism or an even distribution of wealth is not one of them.

"1. It isn't working."

The national dialogue has shifted considerably since the protests started. I haven't heard so many regular people talking about the processes of the financial system in /ever/. It put the spotlight on the biggest profiteers of the last decade of war and declining middle class. I've seen people on the left and the right start to express the cynicism toward their elected representatives that is rightly deserved.

"2. People are getting bored."

People were already bored. On the contrary, I've seen people who have never had an iota of interest in politics suddenly start to form opinions. It's a populist movement, and even your friend who has never cared about politics outside football at least has /something/ to say about Occupy and its issues. In this age of apathy, I see that as progress.

"3. With California using tear gas to dispel the protests, and the police in London declaring Occupy protesters a terrorist movement, it looks like the authorities are starting to tire of the embarassment and will put an end to things by force as soon as the media interest has faded sufficiently."

The arguable excessive use of police force against the protests have only amplified valid concerns about our government's protection of the Bill of Rights. The UN itself has called into question the defense of human rights in the United States, largely due to the excess use of police force against protesters in this country. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/occupy-wall-street-un-envoy_n_1125860.html]

I seriously doubt that Occupy is going to bring real change...on its own. I see it more as a beginning spark. The conversations happening now rightly focus around the disparity of opportunity in this country, to an extent that we haven't seen in decades, maybe even this century. The impact has already taken place and the shockwave will be lasting. No matter who gets elected President and fails us yet again, the message of Occupy (and yes, the Tea Party) will continue to reverberate in the minds of conservatives and liberals alike, until we see real change.

Occupy isn't the end, nor is it the means; it's a warning.

In a marketplace with thousands of books selling for $0.99, the book which sells for $4.99 or more stands out. If I was looking at two books on the same topic, and one was dirt cheap while the other was priced higher but still reasonable, my immediate impression is that the more expensive book is of higher quality. And if the book is good, if the content is valuable, then I will gladly pay for what it's worth.

The race to the bottom in prices is sad on all levels. I refuse to believe "people refuse to pay more than $0.99 for an app/book/song/whatever"; I've done it many times and did not regret it, and the creator was compensated more fairly in my opinion. Creators just need to grow some balls about their work and sell it for what they really think it's worth and not be afraid they need to give it away to get people to notice it. Nobody will buy it just for being cheap when everything is already cheap.

Even if I'm wrong, even if you decide to sell your work for a higher price and therefore suffer lower profit as a result, the alternative looks a lot worse. In the long run, you devalue your entire medium until you won't be able to make a dime no matter how low you price it.

Just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Gibberish? You mean like all those old "Web 2.0" company names? Weebly, Twitter, Etsy, etc, etc...

This graphical turn-based strategy game, created by myself *cough*, is one of the better, more handsome examples of in-browser games without Flash:
http://elitecommand.net/