Paraphrasing Tom Morello, "Freedom is the freedom to starve."

I will be impressed when you can show me a robot write an original, funny joke. But can you run an economy on jokes and poems and songs? Maybe.

Then again, how original is most anything? There was a story on slashdot a year or two ago about a guy who wrote a book describing the exact formula that 90% of Hollywood movies follow. Like, page for page. I wonder if one could train a neural network with scripts to every sitcom, every movie, identifying humor, tension, the range of emotions each scene is designed to inspire and then let it go. Could a computer write an entertaining movie? A sitcom? I wonder.

I heard that the human body produces more bio-electricity than a 120V battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Perhaps we could use that to power the machines. We might get bored, though, sitting around letting our bio-electricity and body heat be absorbed, so maybe we could hook in to some kind of simulated environment to keep us occupied.

For once that meme is actually on topic!

I think something like basic income is inevitable. We have it now, it's called Section 8 and food stamps. And as joblessness increases those programs will steadily expand until, well fuck it, just give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing and be done with it. There's no reason for anybody to go homeless or hungry in America. We pay farmers not to grow food and we have more empty foreclosed-on houses than we have homeless people. There's got to be a way to match that up.

"But teh socialisms!!11!one!1!!" Well, the alternative is teh riotz!!!1!!

The transition is going to be ugly but it's bound to happen. In the meantime, we computer programmer types will be fine until the singularity, and it'll still be quite awhile before robots can fix a busted water pipe so the trades can still provide a living. But transportation? Gone. Manufacturing? Gone. Knowledge work? Gone.

The future will be awesome or terrible.

I think the definition of trolling has also changed. I don't think those things really count as trolling. That's shitposting, but trolling is a art.

Fuel-air bomb maybe? Kill it with fire?

Part of the problem, though, is that the elites see this and think "Oh look, they're in this shit and still not rising up. Let's see what else we can get away with..." Eventually the camel's back will take no more straw.

But even at the end of the The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, you see the natural tendency of government power to grow and intrude. Right after they've thrown off the Authority, and the loonies' congress is meeting, some woman stands up and starts saying that "Oh yes, all this freedom is great...but we really should restrict X and Y because of the children..." And so it all begins again.

Loading webpages faster? Sure. Loading a video on youtube? Sure. But torrenting (and thereby also uploading) a 1.2GB Blu-ray rip? Come on, man. That's not what cellphone data plans are for and we all know that.

I can't necessarily disagree. I know, I know, the /. refrain is "if it's not unlimited they shouldn't have called it unlimited!" Fine. Maybe they should say "almost unlimited." What they're trying to say is that you don't need to watch a meter when you're checking your email and surfing the web on your phone. But come on, torrenting movies over your phone data plan? Really? You think the network can handle that?

Yeah, McDonald's says "free refills." But I'm pretty sure if you try to hook up a garden hose to the soda fountain and pump gallons of coke into a drum they're going to kindly ask you to leave.

How about instead of paying them to turn the exploits over to the CIA, we pay them to publish them publicly? Then the developers can see them and patch the vulnerability.

But he had every right to attach his computer to that network. MIT has (or had?) a free and open network. It was open to everyone, not just students, faculty and guests. So there was no problem with him connecting to their network, or stashing his computer there.

JSTOR's contract with MIT allowed access to their papers to anyone on MIT's network. Not limited to students and faculty. Just anyone coming from their network. So there was nothing illegal about him downloading papers from JSTOR.

However, JSTOR's terms of service limited the number of papers one could download in a given period of time. I think it was something like 25 a day. Aaron, however, wrote a script that would download all 4 million in rapid succession.

The only thing "wrong" that he did was violate JSTOR's terms of service. Yes, if everyone did that the system would collapse. What he did amounts to bad manners. For that he deserves to be threatened with up to 50 years in jail? That's the kind of abuse Aaron's Law is intended to stop.

So when cops shoot dogs for barking they're violating the canine's right to free speech?

1) Cool, he answered my question! And in a way that's vaguely disturbing.

2) In response another question he said:

I also find that people are far more forgiving of humans than computers. We expect machines to be perfect. When you're on the phone with a human operator and he misunderstands a word in your street address, he reads it back and you say "oh, no I said Canal Street, not Camel Street." When a computer answering system gets it wrong, we get angry at the stupid machine and press 0 for an operator.

I think one of the things that makes the human race "intelligent" is our ability to fill in gaps in incomplete information, take shortcuts, and accept close-enough answers. That means we will most certainly be wrong, and often. This tolerance for inexactness I think is something computers are not good at. People expect a computer AI to be both intelligent and never wrong, and I don't think that's possible. To be intelligent you have to guess at things, and that necessitates being wrong.

I agree that the lack of oversight, accountability, or common sense is disturbing. Since they track and record everything you look at on the internet, who you call, what you buy, where you go, my guess would be you get on the watchlist by doing vaguely terroristy things, like looking up bomb-making instructions on the internet, or posting on websites of known subversives, like slashdot. Enjoy the cavity search. You've earned it.