I don't dispute that. What I contend is that, while doing so, one should recognize that it amounts to viewing the world through the lens of one's own interests. Any decisions made are tempered by that knowledge.

It's a self-awareness beyond standard ego consciousness. It tends to make you truly ashamed of and prepared to abandon any sort of self-centered, exploitative motive.

It's one of those things that anyone is capable of doing, provided they really want to.

I don't know. There is something romantic about choosing to be a geek, against the grain, up the hill, against all odds and disincentives, doing it because you really want to and not because you were bribed into it. It shows great courage and spirit, which I believe is closer to what life is all about. The ones who "go with the flow" and do whatever is the path of least resistance are cowardly and hedonistic by comparison.

I would go so far as to say that you never truly reached adulthood until you can clearly and effortlessly distinguish objective, evidence-based reality from your own subjective feelings and opinions and wishes. Objectivity is when your own tastes and preferences do not influence your decision-making about anything important.

Until you can do that, life is a chaotic mess with no solutions except those that create more and more problems.

It's also the problem with alienation and dehumanization, not merely depression. Go out sometime and see for yourself, how rarely people talk to one another like fellow human beings. Usually they would rather talk at someone, listen poorly and keep interrupting (because they have no patience) even when they are listening to an answer to their own question, and generally can't relax and slow down and "take in" much of anything. The irony is, this rushed and hurried approach to life is so error-prone that they accomplish fewer of their goals than they would otherwise.

Compared to that, depression is just a particular special case, an instance of a much more widespread problem with the way we live.

Have you ever tried to raise capital in a socialist system? Capitalism makes capital common and available.

Capitalism keeps capital in the hands of the capitalist class, that's it's whole reason for being. The idea behind socialism is to make capital -- not to be confused with money, but the actual "means of production", and so not something that has to be "raised" -- available to workers without having to get some parasitic aristocrats involved. Unfortunately, Marx was not an empiricist and his version of socialism lends itself to abuse by authoritarians; but even his fscked-up version took an agrarian nation barely out of feudalism (Russia still had legal serfdom until 1861!) and turned it into a space-faring nuclear superpower -- and that in spite of bearing the brunt of the cost of stopping the Nazis. Stalin sucked and Marxism has serious flaws, but the whole "OMG socialism failed!!1!" meme doesn't hold up to serious examination.

According to the latest market statistics 66% of PCs overall use embedded graphics. Even Steam has a 16% Intel share and probably some AMD APUs that aren't separated out. I don't know about you but anything "serious" I do like work doesn't push the GPU one bit, the only thing that does is gaming. And not everybody is a gamer or their idea of gaming is more like Candy Crush. On that note, I loved The Walking Dead, here's the system requirements:

Windows Operating system: Windows XP / Vista / Windows 7
Processor: 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Video Card: ATI or NVidia card w/ 512 MB RAM
Direct X 9.0c
Audio card required

Oh so that's like any CPU and graphics card made in the last 10 years or so. What about something like Civilization V (okay it's a bit old but there's no Civ6 yet)

Operating System: Windows XP SP3/ Windows Vista SP2/ Windows 7
Processor: Dual Core CPU
Memory: 2GB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 8 GB Free
DVD-ROM Drive: Required for disc-based installation
Video: 256 MB ATI HD2600 XT or better, 256 MB nVidia 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics
Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
DirectX: DirectX version 9.0c

Scary requirements yeah? What about World of Warcraft, that's some million gamers:

Windows XP / Windows Vista / Windows® 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 with the latest service pack
Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or
ATI Radeon X1600 Pro (256 MB)
2 GB RAM (1 GB Windows XP)

I could go on, but long story short unless you're into the latest and greatest 3D games no it's not really required. Sure I need a discrete graphics card, but I know I'm in the minority. And I just need it to run Skyrim and stuff like that, I don't need the worst SLI/CF setup for twitcher FPS games either.

I'd think that $50B would go a long way to making something more sensible than wind/solar (Which are still and will be a boondoggle with $50B poured into it (Where in the heck do you store energy so that it's sustained instead of feast/famine? Right now, you can't realistically replace coal with either- and without the storage tech to MAKE it so...it's a waste of time and money, bluntly put...)- which would be Thorium reactors.

I think that says more about their politics than their broadband...

1. Start your own cryptocurrency
2. Make the world use it (Implementation: ???)
3. Profit!

Granted, it was much the same with Bitcoin but there everybody was pooling their work and pulling in the same direction, so either Bitcoins would fly or cryptocurrencies would crash and burn. What does 100 copycat currencies run by people who figured the best way to get in early is to start a new currency get you? It reminds me of the guy who in the dotcom boom made a 1000x1000 pixel page of pure ads and sold space at $1/pixel. He made almost a million dollars because it became a "thing" to see, creating money out of thin air. Of course afterwards there were tons of DIY kits and whatever to set up your own page, naturally they all bombed. Who'd really watch a copycat page with nothing but ads? These "altcoins" are the same kind of halo hype, my guess is most if not all of these will be worth $0 in five years.

Exactly. I very much doubt he has 20TB of data that changes very often, plug in a 4TB external drive, fill it to the brim, take note of what you've backed up. This is how I used to do it with CD-R/DVD-Rs back in the day, I had one "incoming" directory and one "archived" directory. When I had enough to burn a full disc I'd burn it and move it. Keep a text file saying what's on the different discs. It's very very low tech but it's simple and it works. Unless he's for some reason keeping a 20TB database at home with random changes everywhere.

While it eventually only had one unreadable file on one unreadable disc, what I found was that with old discs the drive would spin up and down and finally read it very, very slowly like 30-60 minutes to read a single CD/DVD. So in practice what should have been a one night's job turned into a couple weeks. Never again, now I'm backing up to HDDs and if it spins up at least it'll probably finish in reasonable time. Oh, and you don't have to swap TB drives that often...

I'm on Comcast and 8.8.8.8 works just fine for me.

And assuming the plane has more or less disintegrated mid-air or in a catastrophic ocean impact, probably not even that. Here's the final statistics from Air France Flight 447:

That doesn't make any sense at all, patents licensed under FRAND terms need to be non-discriminatory as that's what the ND stands for. Typically that means that if you sign an agreement and pay $0.20/unit, anybody can make something with a HDMI port or something like that. Cross licensing agreements are the opposite of that, you get to use my patents if I get to use yours. If you don't have any interesting patents, no agreement for you so they're discriminatory and because the patents involved are unique the cost is not uniform either. In short, you don't have any clue what you're talking about and apparently neither do the mods.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if Apple can significantly reduce the profit margin of other vendors the boost to its own profit margin should be significant too despite the overhead of lawyers.