You don't have to be insanely lucky, just lucky enough to be born in a country with unemployment benefits. You'll have 24 hours each day to tinker with whatever you want. It has its moments, but you're right, it really isn't that great. However, the option is there if you value free time over a lot of things (some of which aren't material, like respect).

Also there's the fact that one company has the power to expunge whatever they don't like.

What difference would that make? All the same changes, released on the same schedule but using smaller numbers. I don't see why it matters.

Another fine example of a /. meme :-)

It seems to me that unless one is very wealthy, it would be in their best interest not to further the research and construction of these robots. Which is a shame, because this stuff is pretty cool.

This isn't a new problem of course; I suppose similar issues were being discussed whenever significant productivity increasing machines were invented.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Shouldn't an offended* party be allowed the opportunity to settle their grievances in a court of law?


(* even if the offense seems really minor or imaginary to impartial observers)

I doubt anyone really cares how Blizzard does the merges as long as players don't have to rename their characters (which they accomplished by appending realm names) and performance doesn't suffer noticably. I sure don't, and I would probably be considered hardcore by many casual gamers.

Will switching to Macs solve the problem though? I was under the impression that Apple supports old OS X versions for a shorter period than Microsoft supports old versions of Windows. Snow Leopard was released in 2009, XP SP3 in 2008. According to Wikipedia Snow Leopard isn't supported anymore, let alone anything released in 2001 when XP first came out.

With a libre software solution you would have the option to pay someone to backport security fixes so you could run the current versions for a long time, but I guess this would be too expensive to do properly.

From the Fisher-Price Windows XP to the poker-machine-look-a-like Windows 8 :-)

If you can read this, posting works without Javascript.

Why would the deaths be any different than they currently are? Fewer and fewer babies born each year for whatever reasons would lead to our extinction. Violence isn't necessary nor desirable.

I apologize for being probably very unclear. My thoughts aren't very clear even to myself due to a high fever, but a nice, gentle pop out of existence is what I was thinking of last night when I felt I would be ok with it.

I've usually considered myself a caring person. Reading these discussions has made me reconsider that view, because many posters seem to express actual concern over the future of humans, and whether our species will still be around many thousands, even millions of years from now.

But me, I don't seem to care. I certainly don't wish to expedite the process by harming any fellow humans, but if our species was to go extinct in the relatively near future even (hundreds of years), I would be ok with it. Species go extinct all the time. If we don't get to spread all over the galaxy, that's fine too. We aren't any more or less important than other species. (Or maybe I feel that way merely because my sense of self-worth is very low.)

I admit I don't know almost anything on this subject, but would this non-amounting-to-anything necessarily lead to people being unhappy? If not, why does it matter if the society isn't going anywhere?

I recall it being ridiculed as a Fisher Price GUI when it was new. Windows 8 will probably also be remembered as the Best Windows GUI Ever one day. :-)

So people do still buy phones to make calls? I thought it was all about the "smart" stuff nowadays. Or was that the actual joke? :)