Quite! ^_^ And the difference is he had all of his financial assets frozen at the time of the raid by the U.S. government. Yes he HAD money, but that money was confiscated from him and cannot be used to fund his defence. That's why this is so important. Kim Dotcom, the magnificent bastard that he is, is our best hope for bringing a court case up that could establish sane copyright law.

It's not pretty, I wish he didn't have to do any of this. Yet, I see the necessity of it. How else is someone who just lost their entire set of assets and spare cash going to defend himself against the **AAs in court? The man needs funds to be able to get a crack team of lawyers. Yes, he absolutely is in it for himself, but in this case if he wins, we win. Because he might be able to finally set judicial precedent about what can and cannot be done in the name of "protecting copyrights." That, my friend, is a big f**king deal and why I'd say it's okay to root for him.

Make no mistake, he's a tool, but right now he is a more than useful one for us. We shouldn't be hoping he fails because that will only make things worse for everyone else.

[Tidus Dad]Son, let me tell you a story: Once upon a time an there was a fat, evil man, who scammed money from people. The fat, evil man had little success doing this; Deciding it only made sense to change careers the fat man decided to instead try and scam money from corporations. Suddenly, the fat man wasn't quite just plain evil anymore. Because now, whenever the fat man did good at his job a basket of stray kittens was spared the guillotine. Upon realizing this (hopefully) the fat man decided he'd rather be a jolly fat man and save kittens as well as his own hide. And so; the fat man assembled a crack team of lawyers and the evil corporations were defeated in court: The End.[/Tidus Dad] ;p

You "would" but you didn't. So what exactly ARE you saying? I even explained how this benefits us and all you've got is a cheap shot at his weight? Come on; I expected better. ;p

Eh, the situation isn't exactly as clear-cut as it appears though. Is he acting like a patent troll? Yes. But could he pay for his own legal defense? No.

He's as much a patent troll as someone who steals a loaf of bread to feed their starving child in the Calcutta slums is a thief. There's a degree off nuance to the whole thing. Although his past actions do make it clear he's doing this to get rich and doesn't care about the politics...if we all benefit from this fight (by having less draconian copyright laws) then why not root for him, for now at least?

It's not really the water you die of so much though but rather the lack of sodium in relation to the water.

How long until we finally have Intel and other CPU vendors create a unified memory model now that we have a GPU on die? I mean if anything I'd think the point would be to have your on-die GPU integrate with a discrete card so that both low and high-end setups gain something from this. PS4 will have a unified memory model; how long until the rest of us do on our desktops?

If only this applied to bankers too, I wouldn't mind. :-/

You make this sound like it's a BAD thing. Are you saying we should not attempt to prevent people from dying entirely because it's expensive? Do we need an actuary to calculate how much more expensive healthcare will be if we reverted to a "Let their bodies line the streets" style healthcare approach? Because something tells me that when we have a vast and impoverished underclass that predominantly handles our food and already has largely no legally mandated sick leave that we would end up paying far, far more for healthcare even if we only consider the life and health of the affluent as mattering.

You mean the Swiss Model? Yes, that MIGHT work, but it'd require far far more government regulation than I think anyone here could stomach. Currently the Swiss have the only viable alternative to single payer that still makes sure everyone gets coverage and they do it by meticulously watching the insurance companies as well as the hospitals.

Um, not all nationalization is a bad thing either; or do you not believe in Public goods?

There are a great many things that while they serve the entire nation, like roads, police and fire departments, are simply impossible to sufficiently fund through a model of voluntary contributions. At least not in a society where income and wealth inequality rivals some Banana Republics. We use taxes to fund these things because making them available to all the people too poor to pay use fees ends up netting our society vast cumulative benefits.

These things need to be nationalized, because otherwise they would cease to exist in any useful way and we'd end up seeing our economy slowly revert back to the Gilded Age. So while you're definitely free to argue whether or not something should be a public good, please don't be so disingenuous as to imply that these things are unilaterally good or bad. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.

Actually it's closer to thirty years now. Since about the Mid Carter administration real wages for all but the top 1% have either stagnated or gone lower. While the top 1% of the economy has increased its real income by about 247%. Tech work represents one of the few remaining high-paying fields that don't depend on your having a thousand wealthy social connections and doesn't force you to go into possibly inescapable debt to finance your education. If the software you write is good enough (and there are plenty of opportunities for you to learn to write good software on your own time) you don't need college, and that right there represents an existential threat to company bottom lines.

It's an avenue of productive work technically available to anyone that doesn't have the disposable nature of either menial labor or middle management in that anyone can be taught to do it well enough. Bad software means security risks, which could mean data breaches, lawsuits, etc. You simply can't afford to run your business on shoddily made software for any number of reasons, which means you have to invest in top grade talent and retain top grade talent. The only people who we currently treat like THAT are EXECUTIVES...The H1B program actually makes sense when you look at it that way; and that's why fighting H1Bs is important.

It highlights the glaring hypocrisy of our current society's economic system. We treat CEOs and executives like kings who must be paid deference each year through ever-rising salaries, fantastic not-linked-to-real-performance performance bonuses, etc. Yet for any other worker? Even if they ARE just as irreplaceably valuable to the company bottom line, we'd still rather deal with the problems of poor software than DARE to disrupt the ecosystem where only CEO pay and CEO bonuses are sacred, and all other workers must suffer to ensure the "Gods of finance" are placated.

That's the point, because it's subjective there's no guarantee people are going to share what you value, which means that while you can certainly persuade people to do things which hold subjective value to others, ethically I think coercion of any type is out of the question for anything that does not give objective value to the society.

This assumes everyone who is technically eligible would wants to become a Doctor, or that there were room for everyone to be doctors or other high-value service professionals. Obviously there are still going to be important service jobs even in a post scarcity society so long as we ourselves lack the capacity to understand and create intelligent agents with cognitive capabilities similar to our own. But in such a situation are we realistically going to say the entire population MUST hold a job that provides objective value? Isn't there such a thing as TOO MUCH redundancy?

If we require people to hold jobs that provide others with only subjective value how do we make that sort of a system equitable and accessible to all? If we're just rating people's ability to satisfy the meaningless but pleasing desires, how do we truly rate, measure or rank that? Because if we're going to coerce compliance from the greater society we owe it to them to guarantee that their compliance in this system will make each and every individual equally happier as fairly as possible. Right now I don't think humans know enough about themselves to truly do something like that.

Maybe it does for you, okay, bad example. My point was the value you get from slashdotting (outside of the occasional insightful/informative/funny posts which have slight chance of altering your perception by introducing new information into your mind) is still equally subjective. Yes, factors in your life influence your specific enjoyment from it. However the point is that no amount of these factors changes the fundamentally that the satisfaction you get is based on the unique configuration of your person and isn't actually tied to you doing anything substantially productive, at least no more or less productive than just spending an hour or so a day checking the news anywhere else.

And the point is that it's these myriad of factors which created psychologically the mechanism that gives you pleasure from reading slashdot or whatever other tech news sites you go to. This means that if you had not grown up as you, you wouldn't possibly like slashdot at all. This MATTERS when it comes to job assignments. This is what I meant about subjectivity, are we going to force people to post on slashdot because you and I enjoy it? Even if THEY hate it? How would we compensate those people to ensure the pain of their having to come post on slashdot was somehow reimbursed through their own equally subjective ways? How do you maintain that kind of an exchange?

Now, you can say that making games and making art has value to more people than just you and while this is tempting to use as a scale to measure desires against one another I am entirely unconvinced it is a fair way. If we are at the point where the bulk of the population cannot do productive work: Doctoring (and related medical professions), Lawyering (and related legal professions), Spying, Soldiering, Diplomacy, Research, and Engineering. and that this leaves them with a handicap where, for whatever reason, since we have to ensure they ALL GO DO SOME WORK EACH DAY we must put them to work doing things to enrich the happiness of the general population.

However, if we have to deal with forces of social jealousy so strong that we must force everyone to work, even if they hate it, every day, to keep our social cohesion going, then by creating a track of subjective work where everyone's aware that they're just doing busy-work to make other people happy then that's only going to transform that jealousy and make it so that the people whose desires were never fairly met by this system (remember, if you're optimizing for value to others that means you're not allowing a certain segment of the population to access to their possibly much more private, intimate desires, and leaving them out of the job rotation entirely. They'll always be workers and never be the one being satisfied by workers.) become the resentful, angry, disgruntled ones instead of the people who already work in productive jobs.

Of course, I question very much that we truly have enough people with a punitive/moralistic streak we'd have to force the entire civilization to work.

It really depends on who you talk to about education. At first I was sufficiently confused by the subject since the funding can sometimes be so hard to see past. There are a lot of studies however that have been done to figure out what creates the gap in education. And, while yes, school funding does play a level the single most important thing in predicting a child's educational success is their home life. If their parents come from good socioeconomic backgrounds, there's no abuse, and the parents are involved, the child will probably do pretty well. But if not? Well, the numbers for all those poor school districts bear that out.

But it's an interesting answer to what had seemed like a chicken-egg problem. Poor (usually minority) students do a lot worse in school, especially poorly funded schools that might not have the best teachers, because their home life is calamitous enough (food insecurity is a real hell of a problem.) they just don't have the time, energy or perhaps even the willpower (how would they have Internal motivation if no one teaches them why education is valuable? My own parents loved to get off on their own authority with "Because I said so!" style proclamations and I know that if they hadn't been so hard involved on doggedly keeping me in school I might never have even graduated myself because of everything else going on at the time. But for people on the lower end of the scale with less involved parents it's easy to see why a lot of kids don't value school...even moreso with all of the college grads flooding unemployment rolls.) necessary to change any of those things for long enough to make it up a rung or two.

But those are the exact problems a certain segment of society least wants fixed. At this point there's little question that a majority of our ills are being caused by the effects of our incredibly high economic inequality coupled with low social mobility. The pie is divided incredibly unevenly and many people are priced out of reach of the things they need. While yes in many cases there are help, the help varies region by region and many people aren't even taught how to properly apply for it, have to content with hostile environment when applying for benefits, and can often get caught in various coverage gaps if they do accept help that might prevent them from advancing further up the ladder either (such as with public housing.)

The reality is, the only solution long term is to fund a series of smart investments in public works (like an infrastructure bank) through a series of progressive tax reforms. If we did that then it's possible that we could resolve this issue given enough time (our present situation took 30 years to get this bad.) and political will. Of course, we never ever will, too much money invested in us doing otherwise and too many people who would rather we become the next Somalia than allow Uncle Sam to put $1.00 into the hands of a single poor person (they didn't earn that! They don't deserve it! To hell with the economy!)

Unfortunately "Something valuable" is meaninglessly subjective in most cases. Unless there's a crisis facing the present civilization then "something valuable" in a post scarcity society is synonymous with: "Something some arbitrary number of people arbitrarily consider not a waste of time." If your physical needs are all met and society only really has general "needs" for are either high-end knowledge workers, or potentially extremely dangerous physical service work, like soldiering/security; then you have only a minuscule chance of ever doing what might be considered "valuable, productive work" (producing public goods or performing essential services that keep society running.)

You spending all day reading/posting to slashdot contributes exactly as much as someone who spends their days making art, video games, designs cars, etc. At that point since all you'd be contributing would be aesthetics/luxuries, your work, while it might still be personally enriching, would still be practically useless towards advancing anyone towards achieving any practical goals. Only those who wanted to spend decades schooling themselves and doing the hard business of science would be societies "Producers." Well, unless we hadn't fully automated maintenance work, if we hadn't the maintenance workers would certainly be one of the only other "productive" (advancing goals of the greater society/civilization/species) class outside of soldiers, scientists, spies, and diplomats (though the last two are only separate jobs some of the time! ;p.)

And yet, when I even went so far as to specifically ASK for the full description...you did not provide it, and your attempt to rephrase the question again betrays this. So I shall restate myself: What was the lie? What was the premise, why was the premise false or misleading, and what evidence do you have that I was being intellectually dishonest or otherwise purposefully misrepresenting facts in the statement you claim I made which was a lie?

Either you can answer these questions and "describe" my lie, or you cannot, and you were just throwing mud at random to see what stuck. But please, enlighten me! ;)

And you obviously haven't even read any of them. As can be evidenced by the fact your post is devoid of any and all complimentary/supplementary details describing any of the specifics of what it was you read. You're just being intellectually lazy and trying to cover it up by making a blanket "Tehse sources r 4ll b4d! b3cUz!" accusations; After all if you were serious then you would've explained in full WHY each and every source I used was wrong or otherwise did not support what I was saying. Just like how earlier when you said I was lying, and I asked you what the lie was, why it was false, etc. and you ran away form that statement with your brain between your legs, pretending I didn't write it. Because, you knew you couldn't back that shit up.

You don't just get to slap random labels (like Liar!) down thar buddy, they don't work that way. Adjectives are meant to describe something that already exists, you don't just call something a name and suddenly change what it is. It has to already be what you call it (and you need to be able to explain in detail why it is) for that to work. ;p

And this is why I'm just laughing at you. You're not even a smart troll. Every single thing you've said is superficial nonsense that betrays either you're retarded and don't have the brains to comprehend what I write; or you're an intellectual coward who thinks they can practice selective reading while I'm around and have me take them at their word. Game. Set. Match. ;D

Says the guy who can't bother to make on Citation when I back up what I say with sources. You never even tried to seriously dispute them. No, it was you who insulted me first by refusing to abide by the burden of proof in a debate. You were the one who claimed all of these things were possible and yet you have refused to offer any proof. I'm only making it plainly obvious to everyone else what the actual sentiment contained behind your words is. ;p

Well gee thar buddy, if that's the way you want to play it, go right ahead. ;p
But you know like Mitt Romney, you could've cleared this one up really quickly, especially since you don't have such a good track record with how you've been dodging things I've been saying. Like how the Tax Calculator was supposedly off on payroll taxes...but no, please proceed.

Just because everyone gets to go to school does not mean everyone learns there. Both the quality of the school AND the quality of the home life of millions of Americans living at or near the poverty line can create calamitous conditions which make it very difficult for children to stay involved and want to learn. Poverty is often a generational trap with one generation after another spreading dysfunctional behavior that without intervention of some kind will just continue on and on.

SNAP is not always available to single individuals and the benefit is rarely enough to feed a family. The minimum benefit is around $200 a month, and not everyone has been personally taught or equipped with how to make that money last the most. Here's another example of the same principle at work with college.

When you grow up in those circumstances no one often tells you at all or makes all of the information available in the manner you might need to make sure you can even do things like get aid paperwork in on time. These situations breed people who are uniquely unaware of how to obtain the proper help even when it's available to them.

Which is of course Asinine because you're treating all regulation and all expenses as equal when they are inherently not. Simple Econ 101 tells us that different investments have different money multiplier effects on the economy. You generate more wealth when you invest smartly, and in many cases the biggest investments are poverty programs like Food Stamps ($1.83 generated for every $1 spent) and Unemployment Insurance.

Sadly, Science disagrees about the rational part. ;p

I'm just taking this space to laugh at you again. Because I was trying to show you the numbers and you just went and said all my numbers were wrong, because you said so. So much for Mr. Superior Rational Mind. ;p

Do you remember the Social Mobility stuff I pointed you to? This is largely the case today for EVERYONE regardless.

Which is like saying that the answer to Rape/Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence is to get government out of peoples domestic lives...despite the numbers going against that belief in just about every instance. Humans aren't machines and trauma causes the rational mind to break down or at the very least malfunction in some pretty horrendous ways.

Couldn't have said it better myself! ;p

And you can't even tell me what I got wrong or why. I posted numbers, you said they were wrong, and refused to elaborate. Do you care to correct this or shall we just end the discussion now? I think it's pretty obvious to anyone else where you stand. ;D