queue the tumblrina's with "just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's not real"

Which is false, that's exactly what it means. A random internet meanie saying something that bothers you is kind of like letting a barking dog hurt your feelings. =/

A barking dog might not hurt anyone's feelings, but one that's growling and running at you is a legitimate cause to assume you are in danger and react accordingly. Lots of trolls aren't saying "your mom's fat", they're saying "I'm coming to kill you in your home at Hummingbird Line 1".

Another problem with your analogy is that a dog barking at you doesn't affect how any dogs you might meet in the future interact with you. On the other hand, humans take their cues about how to behave and even how to think from their environment. A random internet meanie saying something that bothers me makes the ideas they expressed seem more acceptable to anyone who hears him, thus shifting the culture into a direction I don't like. That's how propaganda (and brainwashing) works: if people hear something repeated often enough, they start accepting it as truth, or at the very least accept it as something the group believes and thus they must at least pretend to least they get excluded, no matter how absurd it might be.

So, whether the Internet is a magical wonderland outside of reality or not, and whether people using it have or should have the emotional sensitivity of rocks and the willingness to be virtual punching bags, it doesn't matter, since the crap you take on others there will stink up reality too. And that means its going to stop, the only question being whether it stops because people stop acting like crazy assholes, or because all the crazy assholes are busy making Bubba the Prison Rapist an insanely happy man.

Wealth is created by the production of goods and services, not by "keeping people busy". So if we can produce more, with less labor, that is a good thing.

It's good for those who get to fire workers and pocket their wages as profit, yes. It's bad for those workers who now have to make do with miserly unemployment benefits, and demonized for it by both their former employers and peers. It's bad for the remaining employees, who get worse pay and more crap due to fiercer competition for the remaining available jobs. And it's bad for everyone once there's enough people getting the short end of the stick that they'll just grab it and beat their masters to death with it.

Then you fix the imbalance.

You can't, because the culture won't allow that. Any attempt to either narrow the income gap or make it possible for the unemployed to live an independent middle-class life will be instantly declared "socialist", and rightly so. Automation is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism, or at least a version of capitalism where people are expected to "earn" their income by working. Just look at how much hate "welfare queens" get, despite that being the only alternative to busywork that doesn't result in social collapse.

Basically, a post-industrial society will either unconditionally pay its citizens their upkeep with no strings attached, be a more or less horrible dystopia where that upkeep comes with submitting to arbitrary rules like taking drug tests or doing pointless busywork, or collapse in a violent uprising. And I think we all know which one Americans will never, ever, under any circumstances allow their neighbours, even if that means denying it to themselves.

It's a pity, really. Once upon the time American Dream was a plot of land, since that's what it took to be independent. Then it became a pot of gold, because again that's what it takes to be free from having to bow to your local Count von Bastardessen to get food. And now, with everything getting automated, everyone could have their virtual plot of land - their share of the automated manufacturing resources, granted in the form of citizen pay - but that's not going to happen. But perhaps the developing countries will take note, and avoid the collapse ahead of us.

And we all know neither Abu Dhabi nor Dubai are in Canada. I don't know why it was necessary to point that out.

He didn't say they aren't in Canada, he said they aren't Canada. Basically, he thinks Canada is unlikely to sabotage or spy on the US but someone in Middle-East might get ideas. Which is a valid concern and deserves consideration.

But we're not there yet, not even close really. Maybe close in time until it's possible, but not close in capability now.

Sure it's possible, it just requires a larger percentage of vehicle weight to be made of batteries. But it's pointless to lug these extra batteries around day-to-day. So, put them into a battery trailer. You could make these rentable and swap them along the way, or perhaps use the batteries on the trailer first, leave it to charge as you continue with just the car, and pick it up on your way back.

You could also extend the idea to freight carriers, since trailers spend considerable time sitting at the depot waiting for a pickup. Why not use that time to fill onboard batteries? True, you lose some weight capacity, but you save on fuel, many cargoes are limited by size rather than weight, and logistics warehouses tend to be large, flat-rooted structures - ideal for solar panels, which become cost-effective when combined with large storage capacity.

Class action against the offenders, not those who defend their propriety IP.

So now corporate imaginary property rights trump my physical property rights. What's next? Biotech companies demanding anyone who's body contains patented genes pay them royalty to be allowed to continue living?

I truly hope you're a paid shill.

Queue up the "Somalia" thread here ...

Rather than being bitter that people keep bringing up the flaws of your favorite ideology, why don't you think up ways to fix those flaws? We all got a rather thorough lesson about what happens when ideological purity trumps reality with Soviet Union, and are currently getting a repeat lesson with neoconservatives. Surely you don't want your ideology moving from "questionable" to "inherently evil" category in the annals of history?

Then again, an untested ideology is perfect. It could solve all the world's problems if only people adopted it. Just like a lot of people dream of a perfect book (or game, or movie, or whatever) they'll write one day, but never will, because then it would be subject to actual criticism. So I wonder if libertarians actually want people to vote libertarian, at which point they could no longer dismiss criticism with comments like yours without it backfiring horribly, or if they'd rather just stay in the margins where they can build their utopia in the safety of castles in the sky?

Time and time again, posters on Slashdot talk about the 'fictitious' threat of terrorism that government uses as the excuse for encroachments on perceived liberties.

How many people died in terrorist attacks last year? How many died in the hands of various authoritarian regimes?

I think even the most cursory review of history shows which threat deserves more attention.

You, the posters are the reason why an actual coordinated attack within a 'safe' democratic country is news on Slashdot.

We're the reason why coordinated attacks are rare enough to be newsworthy and why rushing in with a gun now counts as a coordinated attack? I think you give us too much credit.

This is one time me and the FOSSies are actually on the same page, as just like windows 8 was forced from on high and gave the users a big fat greasy finger so too is systemd being pushed by corporate with exactly zero fucks given about what the end users want.

Most end users don't care about the init system one way or another, since most end users don't ever mess with it. On the other hand, every end user was forced to mess with Metro. That's the difference.

Anything left after that goes to the people.

And corporations are people. The difference between you and them is that they actually can keep an eye on everything the government does, and put and keep up the pressure to get the laws and decisions they want.

you're an idiot

I acknowledge your feelings of inadequacy. But it would be more effective to improve yourself than attack random strangers online, especially since your ad hominems are less than impressive, too. Might I suggest learning basic reading comprehension as a start?

just because some asshats are screening new hire's facebook page doesn't mean we should surrender all privacy rights

I didn't propose we do.

really, everything about your post is upside-down...

Try adjusting your system configuration.

Not in the free world. Maybe where you live.

I didn't know extraterrestials are posting on Slashdot. Where is this free world you're talking about?

One beer? You're an idiot. Who'd want to live in a society where job loss and de facto permanent unemployment occurs at the slightest infraction?

Driving drunk is not a slight infraction, and many (most?) companies screen their employees for off-hour drug use nowadays - heck, I've heard that having Facebook pics of yourself drinking beer can get you disqualified from a job. We already have all the worst sides of authoritarianism, so why not get what few good things there are, too?

Um, this law is wholly illiberal, why would liberals ever want this?

"But why would they want to kill their own customers?"
"Why do madmen do anything? They're bloody madmen, that's why!" -Arcanum

Political debate gets a lot easier when you pretend your opponents do not have any motives besides being card carrying villains. This also has the added benefits of not needing to think your own politics or their consequences, after all since your opponent is evil you are by definition good. Operation Barbarossa? What's that?

Basically, the OP was simply confirming their tribal identity as one of the Good Guys, and happened to belong to the tribe called "conservatives". Since the issue at hand is not one of the flag issues - issues used for defining the tribe's identity - they were free to acknowledge the proposal as evil and attribute it to the other tribe ("liberals"). Had this been one of those issues, for example gay rights, we'd been treated to a convoluted logic to "prove" that their tribe was correct and the other evil.

This kind of behaviour is typical for political fringes, where it serves to help the members keep their flame going, but since the US only has two parties it gets injected straight to the core of the nation's political life, the result being increasing instability.

Also, for the natural foods buffs, please note that honey is mostly fructose and glucose in almost the same concentration as HFCS, so if HFCS is bad for you, "natural" honey is probably not a solution to this problem.

Well, perhaps we could repurpose a rollercoaster to produce a less sugary alternative to insect vomit?

The base coding languages, which are abstractions of the machine language. Those are the only libraries that should be installed, in the first place.

I don't really see how an interpreter or a JIT compiler would help the problem, or even be a library for that matter. The issue isn't how to make the same code run on multiple architectures, after all, but how to make the program logic flexible enough to handle the absence of a service yet make full use of it when present.

Also, most languages are still stuck with only standard input and output without third-party libraries, which are typically an awful fit. This is not the 80's anymore, that hasn't cut it for the long time now, and not really even then. Most applications aren't headless servers, and require graphics and proper UI.