We call those "drone strikes" now.

Far over the Endor forest green
To Yavin IV and Tattooine
We must arrive by hyperdrive
And stick a fork in Palpatine...

Yeah...now that I think about it, that's really---
---ut it, that's reall---
---'s really---
odd. Whoa. I just saw a black cat walk past my doorway twice

Now, what were we talking about? I can't quite put my finger on it, but something tells me I'll be much happier not remembering...

You might very well think that, but then you encounter the non-Euclidean badness that is Unity/Gnome3 and all sanity goes out the window.

A million distributions, all simultaneously worse than each other is entirely possible with the way that Linux desktop development is trending at the moment.

And I'm repulsed by those repulsed by those repulsed by the profit motive. It's repulsors all the way down.

Hear, hear! Good clean social Darwinism. There shouldn't be any kind of "social contract" at all. Our corporations should be sleek, vicious, beautiful monsters, utterly amoral, streamlined of every impulse except a ravening urge to destroy the competition and feast on the juices of sweet, sweet captive markets, the blood and ichor of consumer franchises trickling down their fangs.

We don't need none of this Commie socialist "empathy" or "compassion" or "rational planning" or "thinking about the issues". That's for sissies.

All forms? Even partial central planning?

Seems like that would be partialitarian.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that end users pay the cost of both sending and receiving data. It's just that home users tend to receive more data than they send (and vice versa for server owners).

You'd know this if you were on a data-capped home Internet service and ever ran BitTorrent. You can chew through gigabytes of cap pretty fast if you live a torrent uploading.

And yet that's exactly how it works here in New Zealand - the customer pays for as much data as they download via data caps - and the telcos are doing just fine.

It's a radical notion, I know, for a customer to pay the cost of a commodity that they use, and for the supplier to charge the customer the cost of that service.

And that's hopefully where the Kickstarter model can help.

1. Crowd-source the funds needed to make a bunch of content.
2. Release the content to the Intertubez with an open licence that allows copying but preserves attribution.
3. Let the tubez do all the work of distribution and the social media do all the work of publicity.
4. Sit back and accumulate fame (but not money) for your work
5. Go back to 1 and leverage your newly increased fame to crowd-source more money for more content. Repeat until rich, dead, or you start charging too much for too low quality product and your audience hates you.

I don't see why this wouldn't work, and it would completely invert the piracy "problem" into a solution.

It's as legit as everything in .co.nz, and we're generally a law-abiding bunch here of hobbits here in New Zealand.

  Australia is the country you're probably thinking of that's entirely populated by criminals.

Spherical cows, obviously.

I'm an xkcd fan, but this chart is just really, really bad science and abysmal health physics. It pervasively confuses the crucial difference between one-time external exposure ("radiation"), and ongoing internal exposure from ingestion of bioaccumulating radioactive isotopes (such as iodine-131, strontium-90, cesium-137). They're completely different exposure mechanisms and you simply can't compare them directly - except to say that eating or breathing in a radioactive particle is orders of magnitude worse than standing next to that particle and absorbing the radiation through the skin. Inverse square law for the win (or lose, in the human's case).

http://www.orcbs.msu.edu/radiation/programs_guidelines/radmanual/16rm_exposure.htm

Can you explain this maths for those of us who didn't learn in college that 2=3?

Sure, but the military kills people, creates terrorists, and threatens the destruction of all life on earth. That's so much more important and worthwhile than just taking care of our elders and and allowing poor people to have dignity. So we should axe all social programs and put the money into a giant death laser on the Moon; that would ensure Freedom forever.

Arguably, if the entire universe is a market, the "market" does sort everything out, in that everything that exists, exists because the universe allows it to exist.

This of course makes "the market will provide X" indistinguishable from a null statement. Of course the market will provide X; the market is everything that's possible. But at what price will it choose to provide X? "Zero quantity of X for infinity dollars after infinite years" is a perfectly valid solution of the supply/demand equation. And "the market will provide War, Terror, Starvation and Death for 1000 years for 99% of the population, and Bohemian Luxury for a tiny elite" is also a perfectly valid solution.

To subvert a common libertarian example - if someone points a gun at me and says "dig your own grave or die right now", they're not actually taking me out of the market mechanism to do that. They're simply providing a rational choice (dig or die), a service (not immediately shooting me), and a charge (my digging). It's a valid contract, and I have the choice to accept or reject. Obviously if I reject the contract I may die, but - Atlas shrugs - that's life, isn't it? The market as a whole sees no self-interest in my continuing to live unless I provide it with services, and if we get really technical and precise about decoupling every private action from empathy, just *because* someone pulls the trigger on the gun they privately own and control, doesn't mean I'm *necessarily* going to die - I do also have the choice to dodge out of the way, etc, etc. There really is no there there in libertarianism; we can keep playing the "I'm not responsible for your happiness, even though I can logically foresee that the result of my actions will hurt you" game forever.

The problem is that as humans we have actual concrete needs which we would like actual concrete solutions for inside a feasible timeframe, and not just an abstract "well, you'll get that if/when it's possible for whatever price you're willing to pay". And sometimes those solutions require more than just shrugging and assuming someone else will solve them, which is what free market theory boils down to in the end.