The industrial revolution allowed us to make things less expensively. What took 100 man-hours could be produced in 10, or 1. With it came the rise of unions and a power struggle between the robber barons and the working classes. The standard of living of most people in the industrialized world skyrocketed, with a good deal of the wealth trickling into the new "middle class". Industrialization made things, but required manpower to run them.

The rise of technology has made manpower obsolete. We're not making things with software but rather learning how to eliminate service people (technology in general, this is really all one wave and Y-C thinking software is somehow divorced from the IT revoultion that's been in progress for 40 years is bullshit). The end game isn't really "more stuff" but "automated services". We don't need more people to ramp up production - once the software is running it merely needs maintenance and a very small incremental staff to serve 100, 1000, 10000x it's original purpose.

That's where people are getting crunched. Now that the industrial revolution has spread to more of the world, there's international competition for those "factory" jobs, and so the Man can simple take operations to a cheaper location. But there's nowhere for the factory workers to go because all the service jobs are drying up too, thanks for software. The wages on the inside are good, but the inside is getting smaller and smaller as tech takes over more positions. That leaves a large, unemployable population.

There are some over 5000 years old and still work perfectly. Reproduction doesn't even require electricity. They are very low maintenance, but not very space efficient.

See what I did there? You've suggested a medium which may be somewhat practical for a very limited purpose, but wholly unworkable for the type or quantity of storage needed today. Unless you were going for humor, in which case I proffer a wry smile.

In reality, what is needed is not a static storage format but a dynamic one which regularly reads, verifies, updates, re-stores, and then re-verifies the files on a regular basis.

If someone patents in interface, it's gone from every other vendor. And since it's the "best" it's worth more, so a $5 item is now a $100 item (gotta pay back that engineering time). It's not expensive because it's mechanically robust or physically challenging to build the parts, it's because of the monopolistic lock in that each standard brings.

Plus, there are no (useful, universal) standards for home automation. Partly because it's just too wide open, partly because shit is changing all the time. How often has the primary power distribution in a home changed in your lifetime (0)? How many times has TV transmission (once, maybe twice)? How many times has network requirements changed (I've run out of fingers)? A simple, end-user programmable, extensible system available on a commodity basis from multiple vendors simply doesn't exist.

FWIW, 20 years is a blink of an eye for a house. I regularly run across basically the same dumb electrical components in 1950s buildings that are being installed in today's brand new homes. And multiple manufacturers offer interchangeable parts for houses built today and 60+ years ago. Until Smart stops meaning outrageously overpriced for the hardware provided, it's never going to be mainstream.

Even ignoring those in the house who don't always have a smartphone with them (young children, grandparents) and any visitor who isn't on your network, needing a smartphone to control most things is simply awkward in inefficient when compared to a dedicated remote control.

Seems ok. Cheaper than gear that's rated worse. The 5 isn't rated as good, which is weird. There comes a point where you have to spend a lot more before you hear a real improvement.

Which is why, if you're going to spend $10 on lottery tickets in a year, you may as well play when the payout is the highest.

I do agree that looking at the odds and the payout for anything where you can't get enough play to take advantage of the house odds is a fools game when it comes to making money on a regular basis. (And lotteries, with only 50% proceeds to the winners, is never in the players favor even if enough plays were possible to make the odds relevant)

The sibling post nailed it. It's not an investment and shouldn't be considered such. Here's why: at the beginning of the two years, if you put the money into the bank your chances of becoming independently wealthy are exactly zero. In fact, the chances of having enough money for a weekend getaway in something nicer than a Motel 8 in your home town are still zero. Compare that to the chance of your retiring in those two years on lottery winnings. Maybe 1 in 10,000 - about the same as you next long distance call you receive having the same last four digits. That's not much, but it's still undeniably higher than retiring on what's in that bank account.

You may as well put the same amount of money into a music streaming service and decide, at the end of two years, which version had produced the most money - because after two years the entertainment will be just a thing of the past.

Insurance is a losing bet. It's a $1 ticket with an 80-90% payback. The funniest part is that it's a bet you *do* hope to lose. Rather it's a business decision, a hedge, which does not always need to show a positive ROI.

In the case of a lottery ticket, it's not a business decision. It's a lark, an entertainment. It's also one of the only ways to become independently wealthy with almost zero work (12 minutes at minimum wage, less than 5 minutes of labor at average wage). For 99% of the people out there, it's the *only* chance they will have of becoming independently wealthy. And someone *will* win eventually.

While I can't argue that people are, as a whole, bad at math. In fact, they're even worse at probability than general math. But it's not necessarily a tax on people who are bad at math, it's a peek at a life they would never, ever encounter for themselves in the normal course of their lives.

The magic 8 ball could have told them that.

Whenever you relieve yourself of a responsibility by giving it to someone else, you accept that that person is not you and may not make the same decisions that you would make. If Stallman is to be blamed for anything, it should be in the form of Stallman blaming himself for choosing a maintainer who does not more closely share his views.

Now that persuasion has failed, I suppose he could fork it.

It seems like every time there is a discussion that remotely touches on the subject of freedom, someone in some form or another has to rehash this same discussion. The subject matter changes, the circumstances change, the exact pseudo-logic has a few variations, and it's articulated with varying degrees of skill, but at heart it's really the same discussion.

So he tries to persuade people to agree with him, perhaps passionately, perhaps vehemently, maybe even not so nicely ... but (to my knowledge) he has never used force or fraud to coerce people into behaving the way he thinks they should. That sounds perfectly freedom-loving to me. I'm really not seeing the problem here.

If your opinion of the guy is correct, then his methods will cause fewer people to listen to him and he will thereby undermine his own efforts. This means such a situation would be self-correcting. I've never heard of RMS using force or threat of force to make you call it "GNU/Linux". The degree of power he has over you is determined entirely by how much you decide to listen to him*. The ability to recognize this is generally called perspective.

It's as though some people have an entitlement mentality, a manner in which they are self-centered. It leads to them feeling like they've been wronged or mistreated somehow when they discover that someone doesn't agree with them, won't support or otherwise validate them (probably the part that really bothers you), and speaks against them.

* I started to add "and use his software", but then I realized that's not true - you could use Emacs with the LLVM debugger ... or not, whether anyone else likes it or not, because the GPL and LLDB's NCSA license are compatible. RMS deliberately chose a license allowing this to happen. Did you fail to recognize the significance of that? That freedom means people might do things with which he disagrees does not remove his right to disagree. Are you suggesting it should? If not, what exactly are you trying to say, if you are not in fact expressing another entitlement mentality?

Welcome to 2006: http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

Welcome to 2012: http://www.amazon.com/Actionte...

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure...

why would you even want to stay here, right?

FAA can do anything they fucking want; nobody else in the world will give a shit. Do you really think if the Russian, Indian, or Chinese equivalent of the FAA pulled this that the US would take it in stride? Of course not. We'd claim they still don't have any right to reserve property on the moon.

And it would come down to who had the guns and is willing to use them. Which, to be honest, is all property rights really is anyway.