the GPL is free even for the arseholes. it just doesn't let them be arseholes WITH the GPL-ed code.

GPL = once free, always free. no special privileges for arseholes to make it non-free in future.

yeah, reform your country so that it not only has universal health care (incl. mental health) but also has universal unemployment benefits and disability pensions so that people who would be broke as well as homeless, unemployed and/or crazy in your current system would have a small income on which to feed, clothe, and house themselves and therefore wouldn't be so desperate they had no choice but to mug strangers for a living.

it sounds like it would be expensive but it's much cheaper than prison and much cheaper than the cost of theft-related murders, and the cost of street crime in general.

WTF do you think countries like australia or the UK or much of europe don't have rates of begging or mugging even a tiny fraction of that in the US? we have a tiny handful of real crazies doing it, you have the crazies and all the desperate poor doing it as well. you also have a gang culture because neighbourhood gangs take the place of a social safety net in a country without welfare entitlements for all.

also, you need to restrict gun ownership, especially hand-guns - start with the obvious things like serious background checks and require owners to demonstrate a *real* need to have a gun (not just "i'm scared of black/poor people").

fuck it, you also need a revolution. send all corporate fat-cats and lobbyists and corrupt politicians to the guillotine. that's about as likely as the US doing any of the other things above.

uh, no. the point of evolution is that it's not miraculous.

evolutionary changes occur as a species adapts to its environment, either because the environment has changed or simply because the species is becoming better adapted to an unchanged environment.

if a random variation (as occurs all the time due to sexual reproduction and mixing of genes) or even a mutation (e.g. due to radiation or exposure to mutagenic chemicals - but note that most such mutations are fatal, not beneficial) provides a greater chance of surviving and reproducing then that trait will, over time, become more common in the population. and, at the same time, if a trait reduces an individuals chance of surviving and reproducing then that trait will gradually disappear from the population.

evolution is the result. natural selection is the mechanism.

> You are an idiot, and your mother dresses you funny. There.
> Now that was an ad hominem attack.

not quite. you forgot to say "and because of those things, your argument is wrong"

without that, it's just a personal attack (or it could just be an observation of fact). an ad-hominem argument is when you use personal attacks or observations about irrelevant personal details to try to discredit an argument.

when nations or even non-state groups can put up swarms of, say, 1000 drones for $1M. or 10,000 drones for $10M.

aside from the economics (using $1M+ missiles to shoot down $1000 drones) can a jet fighter even cope with swarms of cheap drones ramming its jet intakes, with or without small explosive charges?

can jet fighters even shoot other targets if there's a huge swarm of drones in the way, programmed to intercept missiles and blow them up before they hit?

and as they get smaller, can a jet and/or its pilot even detect a single drone reliably if its disguised as a bird? a bird with a payload of quarter to half a kilo of C4 to be delivered to the jet engine?

watching e-sports is just as boring as watching other sports - i fast-forward over it when watching Good Game just as i fast-forward over sports during the news. fortunately, GG only wastes a minute or two on it every few weeks, while the news wastes 10-20 minutes on it every night.

playing sport and video games can be fun. watching other people play is fucking tedious.

why do you have to use just one browser for everything?

there's nothing stopping you from using chrome for most sites, and firefox (or whatever) for the handful of sites that require java.

in fact, IMO, you're better off using multiple browsers to minimise the tracking that can be done of you. e.g. i have one browser (midori) that i use ONLY for facebook and nothing else; my main general purpose browser is iceweasel with adblock plus and noscript and other privacy-enhancing plugins; i use chrome to view youtube and other videos; and iceape gets used solely for my online banking and nothing else (usually in a separate login session unless i'm being lazy or in a hurry - ctrl-alt-Fn to get to a new tty, login and startx, run the browser, do my banking, quit the browser and logout).

you really shouldn't complain about your false perception of other people's comprehension when you suffer enormous comprehension difficulties yourself.

i didn't say that's what Musk said.

my comment was a parody prediction of what the more retarded libertarian fuckwits were certain to say. and i know they're certain to say it because they've said the same moronic fucking thing every time there's an article about some rich prick setting up or supporting a charter school or similar for a handful of very lucky or very privileged kids.

the nature of my comment would have been obvious to anyone who wasn't a complete drooling cretin.

FOAD

that's amazing. we should scrap the public school system and rely on the whims of super-rich individuals to educate a handful of students.

this is the same argument that the tobacco industry used for years "we don't know that smoking causes cancer, there's no proof".

corporations lie to protect their profits, their power, their influence, their control.

corporations lie.

worse, they're a malevolent artificial life form (hostile to humanity, at times parasitic on us, or even predatary on humanity) running on the substrate of laws, altering those laws to make their environment better for themselves and worse for us.

bullshit. they deliberately didn't pay tax they owed in the UK by falsely claiming that profit earned in the UK was actually earned in Luxembourg. this is not only tax evasion, it's fraud.

you're absolutely right. and it doesn't stop there. corporations have other expenses as well as taxes and they also pass those expenses on to their customers so all those expenses are evil too.

nobody should ever charge a corporation for anything - not for goods, machinery, raw materials, rent, electricity, water, wages, or anything else at all because doing so is evil.

congratulations! your unsurpassed brilliance has solved the world's economic problems.

when advertisers pay ME actual cash for my bandwidth, my CPU usage, my battery, my time, and my attention then i may deign to consider their offer and agree to view their ad.

most likely not, though, because it would take a huge amount of money to compensate for the annoyance.

In related news, that crazy old man at the bus stop who claims to speak with god says "The End Is Nigh". The world's media went crazy reporting his words.

> Feminists (to be clear, the rather extreme ones that control much of the media

I thought it was the jews who controlled the media. or is it the space lizards?

Oh, right, yeah...now i remember. it's Rupert Murdoch. he's neither a feminist nor a jew. he's probably a space lizard, though.

> When politics control social equality, everyone loses

When the voices of lunatics are amplified by the internet, the world seems a lot fucking crazier than it really is.