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.

Umm. I'm pretty sure it's open source.

Or Congress, which has oversight authority.

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.

Just like 2013,...,1995 (when I first installed RedHat 2 from a CD)