I'm not saying that things that can sometimes be described as being worse than death aren't really all that bad, but I *am* saying that anything where you are still alive, regardless of how you end up or how rotten your position, is better than not coming alive out of it at all, without somehow quantifying the value of a human life.

Last time I checked, there wasn't any coming back from death. A fascist dictatorship, however, can at least be eventually overthrown.

Of course, overthrowing said regime requires that you actually be alive.

The obvious extrapolation to the machines doing everything is no need for money

Except for the fact that people are greedy and are always wanting more.... any proposed no-money model usually fails to account for a disturbingly large percentage of people who will *ALWAYS* try to exploit those with less power.

.... is that it will no longer make sense to pay people to do work when you can get machines to do the same job for free. With *FAR* more people than jobs available, we'd be looking at record numbers of people who are unemployable who have skills that even today, it's almost impossible to imagine someday being replaced by a machine. Without jobs, many people will have to either resort to crime, or starve, because it is unlikely that a social infrastsructure can exist to support them (it can't even support the number of unemployed and homeless that exist today, how does anyone think that it would be better in a future with prevalent AI, with fewer people actually working and therefore paying taxes, and so less money available overall to even implement such programs?)

And as AI gets sufficiently advanced, I expect that there will eventually be virtually no thought process that humans are capable of which cannot be performed equally or better by an artificial intelligence, and I expect that the number of jobs available a century from now that are practical for human employment will be less than a fifth of what we have today.

Of course, automation has happened plenty of times before and it's always brought about new career opportunities in the past, but we've never automated the process of creative and independent thought before, and automation has never been historically possible on scales that practical AI could really accomplish, so I'm not entirely sure that past experience would apply to AI's.

FTS:

Last year, Tesla delivered about 33,000 Model S sedans and said the current wait for delivery is one to four months. Tesla has already presold every Model S that it plans to build in 2015. "If you ordered a car today, you wouldn't get it until 2016."

There's no contradiction at all... last year, they said that the wait was one to four months. At the time that they said this, that is actually what it was at the time, hence their use of the word "currently". Now the waitlist is more like a year.

I don't think a dealership actually have any cars to function.

You're wrong, at least in terms of selling new cars at retail. I think dealerships without car lots can exist if they are a wholesaler, but it's my understanding that if they are selling new cars to the general public, they need to maintain a stock of vehicles that they can actually sell. I'm not saying they need to stock every car that they sell, but they still have to have at least some stock of unsold cars. As every Tesla that is currently made is already sold before it even gets out of the factory, there are zero unsold Telsas to put in car lot. Tesla showrooms exist, but the car they have on display is privately owned, and you can only test drive it by appointment, or on scheduled days when the vehicle owner will be there and they can let a bunch of people test drive it. the Tesla showroom near my place has only had a couple such days in all of 2014. I've met the owner of the vehicle, and he doesn't even work for Tesla. I imagine he is compensated by Tesla for showing his vehicle, although I don't know how much.

You don't seem to be understanding what I'm saying. Let me give you a hypothetical scenario that might make it clearer for you to understand. Let's say that you had an unlimited amount of money to spend, and you walked into a dealership and bought every car they had, they'd be delighted, but the dealership would have to close down until they got some replacement stock. A dealership needs at least *ONE* unsold car to function... but the problem with a Tesla dealership is that there are no unsold Teslas. They simply don't exist, anywhere, because Tesla can't manufacture them fast enough to meet the demand.

Did you read what I wrote?

There is no such thing as an unsold Tesla. Supply doesn't exceed demand even by ONE car, let alone fifty.

Tesla sells every single car it makes...

Agreed.... and that is why it is completely infeasible to expect Tesla to work through a dealer.

A dealership needs to maintain a stock of unsold vehicles that it can sell to the public. Except, of course, for the fact that there's no such thing as an unsold Tesla. They simply do not exist.

Dealerships only start to make sense once it is at least *POSSIBLE* for the supply supply capability to exceed the demand. This is not currently possible with Tesla, so dealerships are unworkable.

Please.

The Tesla Model S is an all-electric car where drag makes a lot of difference as well.... and that car is downright sexy in appearance.

It's not impossible to design something aesthetically pleasing that doesn't have a lot of wind drag.

Presumably, a sysadmin in a corporate environment would get a premier account so that they *can* make such necessary plans.

No news here, really. All this is a story about is a company that's decided to charge for something they had previously been giving away for free with the expectation that they can generate more revenue.

What.... like cyber criminals aren't capable of getting a premier account themselves?

People have posited plenty of plausible reasons why MS might be doing this here, but this is most certainly not one of them.

If your 2-year college actually guarantees (that is, they explicitly state it as a guarantee or promise) that their program transfers 2 years of credits into such and such a program at such and such university, and you go and complete that program satisfactorily (that is, to whatever gpa requirements the college claimed would be required to fully transfer their credits to the university), and only then discover that the university will not give you the full two years of credits, you could probably have a proportional amount of your tuition refunded. Because, you know... the point of calling it a guarantee in the first place is so that you can get your money back if they can't live up to what they promise.

That said... you should still probably read the fine print of any such guarantee to be sure that the program you are intending to take actually transfers to the degree that they appear to claim.

Perhaps you were unaware that men can get breast cancer.

Granted, it accounts for about 1% of breast cancer patients, but it is usually many times more serious, since where many women will often have a routine mamogram screening every year, and any cancer development will have had little time to spread, often being entirely curable with a relatively simple surgery, men do not typically bother checking their breasts for cancer until they actually notice something is wrong, and by that time, it can easily be far too late for what would have otherwise been a very straightforward corrective measure.

Then I suggest you read the BSD license and discover what's in it. It's tantamount to the public domain while protecting the author through indemnification. I assert that this type of protection should not be necessary under the law...

And yet it remains true that a relatively small amount of content is explicitly released in public domain.... if the difference were really so inconsequential, why do people bother with the BSD license at all? Just talking about freely distributable works here, the mere fact that greater numbers of works and what appears to also be a higher caliber of works are available that are copyrighted under such terms than released via public domain suggests that if copyright did not exist, whatever benefit that copyright holds for people who would otherwise use a license such as BSD would be lost, and in turn, some measure of incentive to publish the content in the first place (because if that were not so, then it would seem to follow that a much greater amount of content, and a generally higher caliber of content than what seems to be out there, should be regularly put into public domain already. I know intellectually that there exists a possibility that I am wrong about this supposition, but when one's sensibilities convince them of the veracity of a position, then only way to convince them of an opposing position is to also not only suggest, but also convince them that they have previously had some misconception about reality. I do not think that anyone on slashdot is in an appropriate position to make such a diagnosis about my mental state, so we will leave that point alone.

I would further allege that the benefits that copyright offers to society (that is, via the assurance that it attempts to offer content creators that their works will not be copied without authorization, it creates at least some intent to publish, and that continually newly published works somehow enrich society) far routweigh any so-called stranglehold that copyright places on the works, since in actuality, the only thing that even drives people to pirate copyrighted works in the first place is a sense of entitlement to such works, and the possession of such works cannot reasonably be compared to fundamental and inalienable rights, such as life, or liberty. Attempting to do so either over inflates the importance of such works to absurd levels, or else reduces the importance of actual human rights to little more than an issue of property dispute. Either way, it's wrong....

Morally.

Of course, at this juncture, given what I have already said and your responses to them, I don't expect to change your mind about whatever you want to do.... but I do at least hope that I've offered some insight into exactly why I have the values that I do that you perhaps may not have initially expected, and why I still believe that there is moral weight to the choices that are involved with them. I'm evidently not going to convince you of this point, but you are no less unlikely to convince me otherwise.