It's absolutely disgusting. A total affront to the democratic process. People that pull this should be tried as traitors to their country.

Capitalism has no country, kin nor master. It has only slaves, some pampered and some abused. It has redefined the perceived reality of the entire world in terms of profits and ownership. That has been enough to rule the last quarter millenia and triumph over the old order as well as attempts at rebellion. It is, as the term has been understood for most of human history, a god, and the chief one of the modern world. Any ancient Greek would instantly recognize economic forecasts as exactly similar to the ramblings of the Oracle of Delphi, though less accurate, banks and stock exchanges as the temples they really are, the Cold War as religious warfare between two competing pantheons, and so on.

So no, people like Harper are not traitors. They're simply possessed. They do not deserve to be punished; they should be simply removed from power, both for their countries sake and their own. It's the constant cultlike repetition of their idol's message that leaves them unable to see any option or outcome besides the ones compatible with that message. But of course the average voter is bombarded by that same message as well, which is why they elect people like Harper in the first place.

All that said, Capitalism precedes Industrial Revolution and in fact started it. It is the reason for the relative abundance of modern world, even if the price of getting here was terrible. But it's becoming clear it can't handle that very abundance. Some work themselves to death while armies of unemployed fall to destitution, leading to the enfeebling of the very markets Capitalism depends on. Euro and the apparently endless sacrifices it demands from people threaten to rip apart the EU and thus start again the cycle of European wars. China seems hellbent on developing their very own branch of authoritarian Capitalism while Russia is turning towards a cult of personality to distract its people from its miserable performance. US is quickly degenerating into a third world country, caught between increasingly militant fundamentalist factions of various bents. All in all, it seems like the system is in dire need of a major upgrade.

So what next? Does situation continue to detoriate until people lose faith, thus rendering Capitalism unable to function as a model for organizing the society, like what happened to Communism? Even if something emerged to replace it, we would lose its admittedly impressive benefits, the material abundance and ability to quickly and efficiently put scientific and technological innovations into use. Could it be upgraded, to keep the benefits while mitigating the problems? Mybe, but the very power it wields over its worshippers makes that extremely difficult; the last time required two depressions, two world wars, a wave of Communist revolutions and finally Hitler and the Nazis to force the issue, and even then fundamentalists set to reverting the changes as soon as possible.

We live in the treshold of two ages. Some people get disillusioned, others become ever more rigidly orthodoxic in their beliefs. Cracks in the foundations of Capitalism could be mended with new ideas, or they could grow until people can see through them and the whole structure falls down. We could reach a new Golden Age or another Ragnarok. Perhaps it's time we stop leaving such matters to chance and extend our control from our physical environment to our cultural one, from the realm of matter to the realm of gods.

Why does anyone trust them?

No reason, but also no need - they're simply publishing documents.

This stunt should not be a surprise.

This "stunt" is what the press is supposed to be doing. Judge actions by themselves, not by whether you happen to like whoever's doing them.

What I don't get is why I, as one of the millions of taxpayers that funded this research, don't have free access to the paper.

Costs are public, profits are private.

That's a compromise reached after raw capitalism's "costs are someone else's problem" resulted in near-collapse of the entire system. The problem is, it's impossible to calculate the ultimate costs of any action (install automation? That causes layoffs, which causes poverty, which causes crime, which caused the hit-and-run that killed your cousin) so we maintain a public fund - state budget - which pays for them, and which everyone is forced to pay to according to their ability, which we call taxes.

This system has obvious problems with incentivizing destructive behaviour. It's also opposed by many people who apparently think communism and fascism can't happen again, should enough people fare badly enough for long enough. We're currently seeing a crisis caused by these twin factors: financial geniuses had little reason to care if their actions destabilized the entire world economy, and austerity hawks concentrate on cutting support for the poorest, which is screwing over both those poor and everyone who sells consumer goods. Time will tell if what emerges on the other side is still some form of capitalism, or if all the accumulating changes have finally reached the point of phase transition, similar to what caused capitalism to emerge from feudalism in the first place.

I suspect, based upon their previous legal challenges that the management of iiNet actually think that what is occurring here is wrong and they're putting their money into what they believe which isn't something that you often see in the corporate world.

It also makes them a more attractive choice for an ISP to potential customers. Copyright industry is pretty much an extortion racket at this point, extracting "settlements" from random people.

However, "Thou shall not kill" is definitely wrong. The Hebrew word is "murder", not "kill". There isn't any ambiguity on that one.

I wonder if religious memes are selected for because a religion forces its followers to excersize their mind thinking up ways to get around the religion's commandments?

I think it's a trend that will grow as more and more people realize that both Republicans and Democrats have utter contempt for civil rights and personal choice.

Democrats believe in personal choice, and that the state should decide what options are made available.
Republicans believe in personal choice, and that businessmen and corporations should decide what options are made available.
Libertarians believe in personal choice, and that good options will be available for free.

Frankly, these are all rather unrealistic. Does anyone have better ideas?

How much more would you like them to pay?

The rich need to pay whatever it takes to stop the national debt from growing, both budgetary and in the form of infrastructure maintenance and investment deficit, because nobody else can. If they won't, then the nation will deteriorate and ultimately collapse, clearing the way for another nation to try its luck with history in turn. Perhaps it can inspire some actual loyalty outside of speeches.

Also, the 1% paying 39% of all income taxes when you're getting 34% of all income isn't exactly oppressive, at least not towards them.

I've always been curious why there haven't been battlefield "disposable" drones that could be launched from a high altitude bomber, controlled by units in the field, fire a couple of guided missiles and then be delivered as a weapon itself on a target.

Because that's basically a missile that launches missiles. You'd just use waste payload capacity for duplicate launch mechanism (one of the bomber, another on the missile). Just launch/drop the missiles/bombs directly from the bomber.

True, but for a large scale operation you are going to want to have a bioreactor for both efficiency and scale, not to mention reducing the dead giveaway large quantity of people to tend the more manual methods.

No, you don't.

I never applied for any aid, and never receive any either

That is an obvious lie, unless you're asserting that you hunted your own food as a newborn baby. The problems start when people forget such ego-inflating bullshit is a lie and start voting like it was true.

We all know Western Civilization has fallen to Fascism, so why not just come out and announce it?

Because compulsive lying is one of the classic symptoms of sociopathy. Every oppressive regime lies. They don't believe their own lies, and they know nobody else does either. They do so anyway, because getting people to repeat lies makes them their own jailers. The system can't jail or kill everyone, and in fact can't do anything on its own; it must convince someone else - a police, a soldier, whatevever - to deal with threats on its behalf. As soon as those agents lose their loyalty - as soon as they admit to themselves they're only putting up a show to keep from getting killed themselves - the system has already fallen. It has no power anymore, just an empty shell of it.

The scond reason is that fascism is basically reactionary. It originated as an attempt to stop the spread of communism at a time when liberal capitalism seemed to have failed. For any Western nation to openly embrace fascism again would mean admitting the economic policy of the last few decades has been an utter failure. But that policy was not just a pragmatic project but a matter of ideology to a lot of people. And ideology is just secularized religion for the materialistic era. To admit its failure would be apostacy. Just look at McCarthy's witch hunts; anyone can see they're exactly that, even if conducted in the name of a secular ideology and state.

And of course the third is that Western Civilization is not currently fascist. We wouldn't be talking about this openly on a public forum if it was. Increased surveillance by various intelligence agencies is worrisome and could potentially lead us to an unpleasant place once again, but we're nowhere near it yet. Not every political decision you don't like is a sign of fascism any more than every shoulder ache is a sign of a heart attack.

Modern materials like carbon fiber should be able to handle the motion.

As do trees and flagpoles. I think AC's engineering credits might be a bit suspect.

If we believe in survival of the fit over the weak then what we are seeing is that socialism is fit to survive under conditions that capitalism can not.

We've already seen it. The age of crisis lasting from the start of first to the end of second world war basically brought an end to laissez-faire capitalism. Things we have now - from social security to 40-hour workweek - were all reforms demanded by the labour movement. And attempts to return to the good old Gilded Age are backfiring quite spectacularly upon the economy right now. As they deserve to, since even in the best case they would make most people glorified indentured servants.

All of these problems could be solved quite easily by unconditional citizen pay, since that would guarantee a certain demand and stop the economic downward spiral, as well as kill industries that can't survive without de facto slave labour, but ideology prevents it. I suspect reforms will be impossible until the situation deteriorates to another wave of revolutions. But who knows, maybe our leaders will surprise me and acknowledge reality before it drags them to the guillotine. But, probably not.

Somebody will have to drive it in city traffic and park it at the freight terminal, and take over when the autonomous system doesn't know how to handle a situation. The difference is that in a plane you usually have seconds or minutes to take over the system, whereas on a road with cars mere feet away, a trucker will have fractions of a second to respond and take over to a situation.

Which is why it's an absurd notion. Human beings can't "take over" in a fraction of a second, especially since they're out of practice from not driving the car and daydreaming (at best). An automated car has to handle every situation it encounters on its own, otherwise it's worse than useless.

What makes you think that the autonomous truck will hit the car just like a manned truck? I'd think that with the sensors on the truck tied directly into the autonomous control systems the autotruck could react thousands of times faster and more effectively than a human being truck driver.

That won't help. The problem with trucks isn't human reaction speed, it's the sheer amount of kinetic energy that needs to be dissipated for one to stop. A 60-ton truck going at 50 mph has 29 MJ of kinetic energy. For it to stop, every single joule needs to go somewhere, and with current technology that means they'll turn to heat. And that means it's going to take a while as that heat dissipates - the brakes will literally melt if you try to brute-force a shorter braking distance, for example by increasing braking system pressure.

Alternatively, just consider how much damage is caused by a truck crash. Physics don't care if it's another car's rear or the truck's own brakes it's pushing against; any object that tries to stop its motion in a hurry is going to be hit by those same forces.