If I say no to my boss, I get fired. That's not slavery.

So you admit that just because there are REPERCUSSIONS it is NOT the same as slavery.

If saying "no" pits me against the government, I get fined or jailed, and anyone who resists is thrown in prison. That is slavery.

No. Slavery is NOT defined as whether or not you will end up in prison.

Slavery is when one person is owned by another person.

Slavery has nothing to do with being fined for refusing to return a library book on time.

Any purchase or sale of goods or labor by an individual is a sole proprietorship.

No.

The sole proprietorship is the simplest business form under which one can operate a business. The sole proprietorship is not a legal entity. It simply refers to a person who owns the business and is personally responsible for its debts.

You really have no idea what you are talking about.

Purchasing food from my grocery store, hiring lawn care, and selling baked goods are all the same kind of business conduct.

No.

Once you get out of high school (and maybe leave high school libertarianism behind) you will learn the difference. Maybe.

Simply put, if you are selling a service, you pay different taxes than in you are purchasing groceries for your personal consumption.

You really have no idea what you're talking about.

If you do not have the right to say "yes" or "no" that is not freedom, that is slavery.

No.

Slavery is when one person is owned by another.

You are not a slave when your pizza boss tells you to take the trash out. You can refuse and be fired. A real slave does not have the option of being fired. Learn what slavery really is.

Are you done with the emo, now?

It is the threat of someone going to a court, ordering me to serve them, under threat of police action. That is wrong, we abolished that over a century ago.

Look up the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Not to mention your assertion is very dangerous; a sole proprietorship is a type of business. If a "business" can be required to serve a person, any individual can be required to serve a person.

You have no idea what you are talking about, do you?

No. Not "any individual".

Only those individuals who are operating a business and only in the operation of that business.

But you can't walk into a bakery and say "I want you to quote me a price on a cake! And it needs to be a similar price to $member_of_some_other_group! And..."

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Suppose you owned a business, would you serve a white-hooded KKK Grand Wizard who came in for supplies for his next hate rally?

He would be asked to remove his hood upon entering the store.

If he did not remove it, he would be asked to leave. At which point he is trespassing if he stays.

If he did remove his hood then you'd have a funny story to tell all your friends about who the Grand Wizard is. Want to see it on CCTV?

So, as a business, you are being forced to associate with people.

I'm sure that, maybe, YOU would be able to think of a business (profitable) that did not have customers that could be referred to as "people" but as for me ... I have no idea what you're talking about.

But I don't think anyone has the right to dictate who they can or cannot refuse service to.

Then think about taxes.

Black people pay taxes. Those taxes are used to pay for the road in front of your business. And the cops who keep your business safe. And so on.

And you are going to take the services provided by the black taxes and then REFUSE TO SERVE THE PEOPLE PAYING THOSE TAXES BECAUSE YOU DO NOT LIKE THEIR SKIN TONE.

Fuck you and your fucked up ideas about YOUR "rights".

Read a history book.

When you say freedom and liberty, you mean certain people have a license to force people to participate in activities they find repulsive.

How is selling a CAKE "repulsive"?

The point is that the baker sells cakes ALL THE TIME. That is what the baker's business is about. Selling cakes.

But he refuses to sell a cake to person X because he does not like person X's race/creed/religion/etc. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Doing business with whomever one wants, while denying to do so to others on whatever whim, is a fundamental tenet of freedom

Only in YOUR definition of "freedom".

In the USofA, your BUSINESS has to treat everyone the same. Regardless of race/creed/etc.

You can CLAIM that it is an infringement upon your "freedom" to have to serve black people in your business.

You can CLAIM that you should be "free" to only serve white people in your business.

But you would be wrong. And a bigot.

You do not have to invite a black person into your home. But you do have to serve him in your restaurant.

A Christian baker should not have to bake a wedding cake for a gay "marriage".

And a white baker should not have to serve a black customer, right?

WRONG!

Freedom of association. It's in the Constitution.

No one is forcing you to associate with anyone.

But as a BUSINESS, you will provide the same service to everyone regardless of race/creed/religion/etc.

You may not like being "forced" to serve black people.

You may believe that it is an infringement of your "freedom" to be forced to serve black people.

Fuck you.

I think I've read that the Israelis have communicated back-channel to key actors that they will respond to a nuclear or chemical attack against Israeli with a response that will hit *all* major Arab capitals and Mecca.

To your larger point, I think only desperate, religiously motivated non-state actors reasonably believe that they can "get away" with use of a nuclear weapon. Either via subterfuge or because they believe in some kind of metaphysical redemption that transcends any material consequences.

I think even the worst bad state actors understand that state use of a nuclear weapon has a significant possibility of devastating retaliation which would end their state as they know it and possibly lead to the disintegration of the civilization it represents.

Think of the domestic political situation in the United States relative to being attacked with a nuclear weapon. For one, I would imagine that there would be significant demands within the military for a retaliatory nuclear strike as a preemption against a further strike. The American public would DEMAND a retaliatory strike and political pressure would very likely lead to one on its own.

In what fucking world do you think it would have ever been politically acceptable to allow the Japanese a negotiated surrender after 4 years of war and after Pearl Harbor Especially when that would have been approved by an unelected President like Truman?

I would imagine that the converse was true, that there were elements who wanted to *continue* nuking Japan after the second strike as retaliation for starting the war.

Robots don't work this way. Could slashdot please stop accepting writeups about how robots should be made by people who have no idea about how robots work, how programming works and the ethics that robot programmers already consider?

Seconded!

"AI/Robot ethics" is the new "zombie plan" and it is old already.

"Parallels" could have been a Sliders type show if it had been picked up as a series and not released as an edited-into-a-movie pilot only on Netflix.

It was done by the guy who did "The Lost Room" which is probably one of the best things ever to appear on SciFi.

Heat is heat, it's maybe less efficient to redistribute it throughout a house than in a single room, but a rack of servers puts out a lot of heat.

You would want a thermostat that controls an input damper and an output damper, so that when it called for heat the servers recirculated the indoor air and when it didn't, the severs drew air from outside and output it outside. An existing furnace could provide supplementary heat if the rack's heat output wasn't sufficient.

I think the bigger idea has a lot of drawbacks.

Data connectivity? Maybe in the Netherlands everyone has access to gig fiber at residential addresses, but that wouldn't work in the US.

Regular server maintenance? Parts like disk drives break often enough that I wouldn't want to have to deal with the technician all the time, especially not off hours.

Power? At a residential address you would need some significant wiring done and a separate meter for the server rack. What about power outages?

But it does provide an esoteric data center model. With the right site selection, you could have a very distributed compute facility that would be insulated from single-site failures. But it would only work for the kinds of distributed workloads that don't care about a bunch of nodes dropping off.

Of course, initially everyone has a natural response -- rally 'round the flag. Kill the invaders.

Now, what happens when people hear about the invasions continued advance? Cities in ruins, millions killed? Resisting military units wiped out, irregular paramilitary units crushed, cities and towns harboring resistance razed, their inhabitants summarily executed. Oh, and your town has been bombed, food supplies are sketchy, no electricity, etc.

Eventually the idea of anything but total surrender becomes impossible.

That's where I both am, and am not, driving to work, right?

Our appetite for foreign militarism is entirely the result of our politicians selling the idea that our enemy is the leadership and their military forces, but the populace is our friend. With our advanced military weapons, we can defeat the defined "enemy" and then the populace will embrace us as liberators.

What I don't know is where this idea originated. My only guess was that it grew out of the reconstruction era in postwar Germany where civilian resistance was minimal and largely theoretical understandings of the Soviet domestic political climate.

Both of these seem naive. The Allies let the Germans starve for a couple of years after the war and most felt this was a better alternative than their experience with the Soviets. Despite Stalin and his repression, the Russians took massive losses and fought for the Soviet state. Much of this was compelled, but at the same time the populace did it.

Yet somehow, it's become a cornerstone of US military policy that the civilian population is at worst neutral and most likely supports US goals, not to mention US belief systems and values. Which is ironic if you look at most of the American and British propaganda from WWII, which sold the idea that the enemy nations were subhuman races which deserved to be wiped off the map.