I believe animals have at least nearly as much soul as I do, and I eat them in good conscience because that's the ecological niche that evolution has bequeathed me. Death is part of the natural order of things - where monsterdom creeps in is when you begin inflicting gratuitous pain and suffering - factory farmed meat for example where you commission the birth, lifelong restraint, and brutal murder of another being for your culinary pleasure.

And no, modern robots are *not* enslaved, they are tools. A slave is a being whose exercise of free will has been forcibly curtailed. If/when robots are endowed with minds and free will such that they can be called beings *then* they will be capable of being enslaved. Until then we can only enslave ourselves and other organic beings.

I'll believe in fairies when I see one, same thing with non-metaphorical souls. And I should think that it's obvious that we're speaking within the context of the fictional universe here - otherwise it's easy to assert that Obi-wan et. al. don't have souls either - they likewise don't actually exist.

Machines, to date, don't have minds. And so yes, I would agree they don't have souls much beyond what an animist might claim for a rock. But that has no bearing whatsoever on whether a machine with a mind, that acts in a manner consistent with possessing emotions, individuality, etc. has one. In the realm of souls if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck the moral imperative is to say it's a duck until proven otherwise.

Not that I'm disagreeing but there's a difference between "Greek philosophers" and "most people" which renders your statement non-conflicting with the previous post.

They have no soul? Can you prove that? For that matter can you prove that you do? You are arguably simply an extremely sophisticated bio-chemical machine after all.

The point being that if you classify a group of apparently thinking, feeling beings as subhuman based purely on their lack of something completely immeasurable, then your classification is wide open to atrocious abuse. I mean obviously people don't ave souls, right? If they did they'd be just like you instead of looking/acting/believing differently.

"Less energy released into atmosphere". Hurricanes' source of energy is water vapor which is evaporated from the ocean surface. If you said "less global warming means less hurricanes", you'd be on firmer ground. I actually do environmentalism that makes sense, because I spent time in former Soviet countries and saw what communism did to the land over there. Most Westerns have virtually no idea what real pollution is. Not trying to pick on you specifically, but people that take a pseudo religious approach to "making stuff better" make me twitch. One is not going to make Gaia happy by offering her symbolic green sacrifices. I do most of those for economic reasons. Not to appease Gaia. Normally I'm a salad guy, but today, I'll find the biggest juiciest burger with cheddar and bacon.

I keep a car starter battery in my trunk. Bit more expensive, but that'll charge a cell phone for several weeks.

Er. Not every emergency is doomsday. An emergency could be a very nasty water leak in your apartment. Or a winter storm knocking out power in your neighborhood. Or an idiot with a backhoe.

Life doesn't have to be either/or. Nothing wrong with being mildly prepared, or moderately. I'm not really a "prepper". I hike/camp. I carry slightly more medical equipment than most, partly because I have a background in it. Mostly just because I feel like doing so. It has come in handy.

Those external batteries are fairly awesome. On longer hikes, I strap a small solar panel to the top of my ruck, and charge a battery as I go. I use my phone for music, camera, GPS/mapping, etc. I keep have a compass handy, which seems to qualify me as a lunatic survivalist these days.

Yes, and if they were distributing compiled software you'd be fine using said binary. But they're not. They're posting source code somewhere so you can look at it. Now the multiple incidental copies made in order to actually view it in your browser are probably okay, but did they give you rights to actually make a permanet copy on your PC? To compile it? (i.e. automatically create a closely derivative work)

Maybe you could argue that such rights are implied by distributing it at all, but all that is incidental to what most people mean by *using* source code, which involves modifyng it to suit your purpose and/or incorporating it into another work. And such things are *clearly* outside the domain of the "reading it on a website" license you arguably recieved. You're no longer reading the book, you're transforming it into a new one.

Since motion sickness pre-exists VR there are also pre-existing solutions. If it's cool enough I predict a sharp spike in the sale of motion sickness pills, shortly to be followed with a surge in our understanding of the health effects of prolonged acute usage.

No Verizon chooses not to because they can't charge $100 a month for cable video in a free market with actual competition. Thus they stop delivering other video service over the internet eliminating the competition.

No. You're wrong. Verizon is getting paid by all their customers who are the ones requesting the Netflix traffic. By your logic Cogent should be getting paid by Verizon for delivering Netflix traffic to all those Verizon customers. This is the whole point of peering agreements.

The reason Verizon wants to throttle video traffic to their internet customers is because it's forcing competition in their market for cable video. Verizon can only charge $100 a month for cable video if there is no competition.

And there is a whole lot of individuals who pay Verizon for internet access including access to Netflix. That traffic is going over Verizon's network because Verizon customers who are paying Verizon for that network traffic are requesting it.

The part you seem to be missing here is that Netflix is eating into Verizon's ability to charge obscene rates of $100 a month just to watch movies. Cause, you see, it use to be paying customers had very limited options for accessing video therefore allowing cable TV companies to charge those obscene rates due to a lack of a competitive market. So now that Verizon is facing some competition for their cash cow video market they're going to dictate what they allow their customers to access on the internet to eliminate that competition.

So lets sum up. Verizon is getting paid for that bandwidth from the other direction. They want to restrict certain uses uses of that bandwidth to maintain their monopoly control over another market.

About even. Not every urban dweller is living the dream. For every Bel Air, you have an Oakland. For every ueber expensive neighborhood in northern Virginia, you have Detroit, Flint, Camden, St Louis or Baltimore. It really just is more people shoved into a smaller space.

Lower average pay often (not always) balances against lower cost of living.

Yeah. I certainly voted for the allow the government violate the constitution and secretly interpret the law however they want and lie to congress about it provision. And of course the rest of my patriotic American comrades voted for too. It had that rider on it that allowed the executive branch to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process and even murder them if the president thought it was important. I check that part twice.

How do you vote against it?

You wouldn't necessarily have to charge a toll for the roads themselves - just charge a premium on the power sold to the drivers using the power rail. An extra cent or two per kWh would likely make them profitable once they catch on. Effectively it would be the same thing once most people tapped into road power, but it leaves you free to haul around big batteries instead if you so desire.