This is how the Borg got their start.

And just who is going to give money to the humans lounging at home with which they will pay for housing, food, clothing, transportation, goods and services? How much money will they be given? Or is this "home" you speak of just going to be a tent in Hooverville?

The economic system is one where all goods and services have to be paid for at some level. Even subsidized services like public transportation and health care require some level of payment. Are you suggesting that the long-term unemployed will be government subsidized sufficiently to have an apartment to live in, with Internet, streaming electronic entertainment, beer in the fridge ("free as in beer") and an endless supply of junk food?

Even if food, goods and housing are amazingly cheap, if you have no money to pay for them, then they are still too expensive for you.

Our economic system and extensive robotic automation of production are inherently incompatible. Machines can replace labor, but if humans aren't working, then they have no jobs and no money to spend, and then you have nobody for you to sell your goods and services to.

Back in the 1960's, there was a TV show called "The 21st Century", which was narrated by Walter Cronkite. He kept going on about how much more leisure time people would have in the 21st century. What the futurists of the day forgot to consider was that if you put everyone out of a job, nobody is going to have money to spend, and thus there would be no market to sell to.

...someone who listens to live music, and then using that as a reference, tries to reproduce that as well as he or she can reasonably afford at home. Most audiophiles are NOT people with too much money and not enough sense. They're just people who love listening to good music and revel in hearing voices really sound like voices.

You can have truly great sound for an affordable amount of money, but you can have great sound with pre-packaged junk like what you get from Cambridge Soundworks or most anything else you connect to your laptop or iPhone. Affordable great sound is had by purchasing speaker drivers from Madisound and building your own enclosures. It's had by building your own tube amps from tubes4hifi.com. It's had simply by caring about what you're hearing and using a little common sense.

I used to run full-range electrostatic loudspeakers, but have since moved on to the home brew designs of Siegfried Linkwitz. Very, very affordable major hi-end. You can't buy better sound than his home brew designs.

I'm both a musician and an engineer, and back in my college days some 40 years ago, we didn't have computers, cell phones, Raspberry Pi boxes and all the fun toys y'all have today. No video games. But we did have audio to play with and it's been fun.

Insanely great sound can be had for a reasonable amount of money if you're willing to DIY. Check out the loudspeaker designs of Siegfriend Linkwitz at

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/

It's not cheap, but it sounds every bit as good as gear costing 30 - 100 times as much depending on which design you build. The LXmini can be built for less than $1k and within it's limitations, sounds as wonderful as anything AT ANY PRICE.

There was a time when the experience of live musicians is what defined what the musical experience was, and so good audio was an attempt to recreate that experience at home. What's sad is that today music is consumed rather than seen as the product of live musicians, so good quality audio just isn't valued much anymore.

You're talking about Lucas, Prince of Darkness?

I'm in agreement with you. I have about 450G of flac formatted music files in my collection on an Ubuntu laptop that I play them off of. Your $1200 would be much better spent on quality audio gear. Actually, that $1200 would get you into a Linkwitz LXmini setup, which is some of the best sound money can buy, at any price. True absolute hi-end audiophile quality at a price human beings can afford.

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/LXm...

My most likely alien scenario is that part of natural evolution is that organic sentients, like humans, evolve technical civilizations that eventually create mechanical sentients. The mechanicals don't require air, water, etc to survive, and may well prefer "living" off-planet. They'd also have a much longer life-span, so to speak, and receive all the energy they require from the light-energy - photo-voltaics or such. Given this, there could well be whole mechanical civilizations existing between the stars or wherever. The Universe is a Big Place. The interests of organics like us would be of no interest to them. And of course mechanicals would rapidly evolve to become an intelligence we couldn't begin to fathom.

We haven't seen aliens because we're just the ants on this one little world.

To properly treat an Apple product, it's going to take more than 7 minutes to cook it. I'd set the over to 500 degrees F and cook it for at least 2 or 3 hours. Then I'd cut off its head, stuff garlic in its mouth and drive a steak through the CPU.

I was stationed at Eglin AFB from 1975 - 77. Of course the Florida panhandle really is just Southern Alabama. I was there just 6 weeks when we got hit by Hurricane Eloise. Major damage.

Being white and a military officer definitely had its advantages and enabled me to fly under the radar for the most part. Leaving in '77 was one of the happier days of my life.

Old Times there are not forgotten, look away, look away Dixieland.

The move to Florida will be a bit difficult for man Silicon Valley folks. Florida is a Red State. Most of you aren't old enough to remember the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Consitution, which Florida never ratified. Floridia also failed to ratify the 19th amendment to the US Constitution until 1969. Which amendment is that you ask? That's the one which gave women the right to vote. It was the Law of the Land back in the 1920's because 2/3rds of the states had ratified it, but Florida only accepted it more than 40 years after the fact.

Add in punishing heat, humidity and the fact that you're smack dab in Hurricane Alley with things only getting worse with climate change and you'll realize WHY Florida is a cheaper place to live. But if you don't care about any of that and like cheap seafood and good ol' boy values, then maybe Florida is the state for you!

Unhackable... Just as unhacakable as banks, on-line retaliers... sure...

If I'm a terrorist, what could be better than to have hundreds of thousands of networked moving vehicles I could take over from half-way around the planet? How much fun would it be to order it to make a car do a hard left turn as soon as it hits 70 mph, which would only happen on a freeway. And imagine being able to do that to many thousands of cars all across the USA and at random intervals?

Sorry. Autonomous, networked, driverless cars is waaaaaay beyond stupid.

I love Windowmaker. Fast and does everything I want. Easy to configure as well. Gnome is slow and bloated, as is KDE and Unity.

The problem with systemd is lack of competent documentation. There are plenty of good arguments for & against it, but if you want people to accept it, then they should put out docs that will enable people to readily do the things they did with good ol' init/chkconfig and so on.

Unless of course, if you're black, gay, or an undocumented immigrant...