You beat to it, posting that. I miss my old CoCo

Folks, I don't have much more to say on the subject, except look around you. People gravitate towards hedonism. Hedonsim is the natural eventual outcome of all human governmental and/or economic systems-- It's the goal: A system where everyone is free to be what they want to be, unfettered by such trivial things as lack of resources... Ask yourselves, seriously, in the real world. If a child was presented with all he wanted, what would he do? He'd want to kill his parents, of course, those mean old people who wish to place restrictions on his behavior... But it doesn't matter. Resources and energy are in infinite supply. The kid can ignore all restrictions placed on his behavior. If he wants to disappear into the holosim, who are YOU to question his decision? So in a world where pure unfettered hedonism is possible, what would happen? I rest my case.

They worked because they had incentives to, whether personal or practical. Free everything would disincentivize work. I understand what you're saying about creativity, and agree there will always be a core group of exceptional people, but then that flies in the face of the socialist goal of equal outcomes, and those exceptional folks will be hated by everyone else, just like today. No matter how you slice it, 50% of the population will always be below average. The writers of Trek created a happy future where everyone has all they need and want and everyone loves each other, but they didn't really think things through. Read Dayworld. Or Harrison Bergeron.

ST's vision of the future economy (at least from TNG on; TOS wisely avoided touching on it but implied it was a form of Capitalism) is a pipe-dream Utopia. If food, shelter, and energy were in virtually unlimited supply no one would need to work, yes, but more importantly, no one would *want* to. Where would the goodies come from then? Automation? Okay then, the Machines rule the Federation. And no one would ever emerge out of their self-created kingdoms inside holodecks. The future would be more like Wall-E. There'd be no more invention, no more innovation, no more anything..... Just everyone plugged into their fantasies in their holo-simulators, a civilization of lotus-eaters. This is the sort of shit that would cause Captain Kirk to charge phasers. Rewatch "The Apple".

It worked for teaching chimps to fly

Bravo! http://youtu.be/TAryFIuRxmQ

When I just wake up and read something that provokes me I really should get more awake before I post something snarky, but here goes... As far as my own experience on FB goes, if the kids leave, then fine. They don't have anything to say that interests me and in many cases they outright offend. It really makes me scared for the future of the human race sometimes. And as for FB itself and their revenues, what is the buying power of teenagers versus the buying power of their parents? That's right, not much (though they do spend what they have more freely). Now get off my lawn.

You mean Microsoft?

I know of NO businesses that are just hankering with bated breath to use Windows 8. They would rather upgrade to 7. Home users are having it shoved down their throats with every new PC they buy and they hate it too. You can argue about all the new wonderful things it has under the hood, but the interface is shit. Don't say "It's fine once you get used to it," because it's a step backward in usability. Even after installing something like Classic Shell or Start8 the 'Modern' apps still run fullscreen. "But you can learn your way around that!" you cry. That's some helluvan arrogant attitude to have. The only reason M$ dumped the old menu/window-based interface is because they it would benefit THEM in some imagined convergence of the desktop and tablet, **not** to benefit users or create something more efficient. They were wrong.

You need to make it more plain when you joke around like that

Defender *is* bundled in later versions of Windows. Look, far be it from me to defend M$, but as far as the free AVs go, I've recommended MSSE to a lot of my clients. It runs quietly and unobtrusively and doesn't constantly ask the user to make decisions he may not have a clue about, and it doesn't nag you to ***BUY OUR PAID VERSION ZOMFG*** every five minutes. It does its job reasonably well, albeit not perfectly, and like others I'm a little skeptical of this outfit's testing methodology and results. FWIW, out in the field servicing customers' machine I'm seeing fewer virus infections lately and more adware/crapware infections on W7+. XP is another matter. It's always been a Petri dish.

Pretty much every note, every inch of tape that the Beatles ever produced has been bootlegged. Collectors like me already have all this stuff, though maybe the new releases might have better sound quality. The Beatles themselves would be first to admit that some of this was substandard work though, which is why it wasn't released back then in the first place

About a year I was part of a team of contractors that rolled out new hardware at an aviation/pilot training school. The new boxes were top of the line Xeons with 16GB of RAM and W7/64 preinstalled. Part of our job was to *install 32-bit XP on the machines* because the old training software hadn't been sufficiently tested to the satisfaction of the company on W7, even though the head IT manager had tested it and it worked fine. Since then I've wondered what they'll do come April.

Please help me out here. I'm asking seriously. If all you need to do to succeed at bitcoin mining is throw computer resources at it, and they are $1000 apiece, then why aren't all the world's supercomputers on the job making a thousand bucks a minute? The answer is of course, they have more important things to do. But even if they don't, they have the capacity to. It doesn't make sense to me. The whole currency could be deflated to nothing in one swell foop. If it could be so easily destroyed, then is its foundation really a solid one. I await enlightenment.