It's even weirder from my perspective. Back in the Bush years, I was an idiot Bush-worshipper. Now I'm firmly on your side on all of the above issues, but of course there isn't any traction to do anything about them.

I spent all day Thursday troubleshooting one of our all-Mac customers with six other people in the room, all shouting different ideas. Only at the end of the day did we discover the news. I was really shocked Slashdot hadn't reported it.

I went home and had nightmares about installing and reinstalling Java on Mac.

You just caused me to suddenly realize what somebody was trying to tell me about a school project twelve years ago!

If you have one, you can be fought without me needing to target innocent civilians.

Who should have the power to indiscriminately target civilians, noncombatants, children, everybody within a rival gang's given radius?

Noone. It should be destroyed in the fires of Mt. Doom.

I don't want my money wasted on this. People will figure this out for themselves. Or they won't. I won't care either way. I would think all the intelligent scientists at NASA would realize that curing superstition in four short days is an extremely unlikely proposition.

That analogy doesn't fit at all.

The problem is the government monopolized all the cards (spectrum) in the first place, then gave out the cards to its cronies (the businesses).

"Wasn't well liked" == "complaints had been received that they allowed their customers to send spam."

I agree with spamhaus. This puts pressure on ISPs to police their customers, or else their decent customers will leave. And everyone can choose whether they want to use providers that allow all contact through, or providers that filter out contact from ISPs that don't police their customers.

Well, there's some incentive in that if their customers truly want the mail and aren't receiving it, they'll have to pick a different provider. I purchased a product once to be emailed to me and had to acquire an alternative email address because the seller wouldn't do business with gmail, yahoo, or hotmail addresses. I didn't waste time arguing with him; I just got an email account that would get his mail through.

That's the price of offering a service. If enough people want it, they will more than make up for the cost of you going with an ISP they consider reputable. If not, the world has no obligation to keep your costs low enough to keep you in business. A much cheaper thing to do would've been to quit offering your service.

I worked for the phone company nine years and have had a cellphone for nearly fifteen, and I've never seen this.

Right, and if the deep fryer at your McDonald's were really profitable, the deep fryer manufacturers would never sell them. They would just keep them and use them to make money.

Under your logic, no manufacturer would ever sell a piece of capital equipment, because either it is profitable and they would keep it, or it is not profitable and the purchaser is being ripped off.

The manufacturers are experts in hardware and can create it cheaply than the miners could, but the miners are experts in mining and can be much more profitable with the chips than the hardware manufacturers could. It's a matter of division of labor. Because the miners understand much more about mining, changing the owner of the equipment very well could result in it making more money.

That's 11 children whose parents should've vaccinated them, rather than blaming other people for their failure or inability to prepare.

I don't class an emotional hurt as being a legally actionable injury. i.e., the law doesn't need to get involved in telling people to be nice or telling them to care about other people.

I'm going to disagree with this assertion about morality:

it would immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work

The first charge is that this would be an immoral risk to take because you might hurt yourself. In my understanding of morality, it is up to each individual to decide for themselves which risks and consequences and injuries to themselves are immoral. For example, I would not go skydiving, but other people choose to do so. They are taking a risk I choose not to take, but I do not think they are immoral for taking the risk, and I do not think an increase in the magnitude of risk alters the morality of the situation, because they are risking themselves. As another example of higher risk, some people choose to try to circumnavigate the globe on solo fights or boat trips. This is a huge risk; some people have perished in the attempt. But the fact that they were risking serious hurt to themselves does not render their decision immoral.

The second charge is that you are risking hurting another person. But again, this is their risk to take. They decide to travel on a road that includes other human drivers knowing that doing so incurs some risk of injury. Taking that risk is not immoral. As an analogous example, wrestlers or boxers choose to fight each other knowing that there is a risk of injury to each other, but doing so is not immoral because the risk is voluntarily accepted by each participant.

Ideally, travelers could choose between a variety of competing travel arrangements, including roads that might choose to exclude human drivers for the safety of travelers, or roads that choose to allow them for those who desire to take that risk. What would be truly immoral would be to forcibly monopolize some or all of the transportation options, so that people do not have the freedom to create differing transportation alternatives that compete with one another. This would limit the choices of travelers such that some might have to take risks they do not want (e.g., roads with both human and automated drivers, because pure-automated roads are not available), or cannot choose to take risks that they find rewarding, such as choosing to drive when automated drivers are available.

Dr. Walter Block has written an entire book on how the American highway system is currently subject to this kind of immoral forced monopolization, currently causing 40,000 needless traffic fatalities per year, and how the elimination of this immorality is entirely practical and beneficial.