It doesn't work like that most of the times in practice. Take for instance what is happening in the seed sector. Companies that identify a useful trait in a traditional crop and use it in a genetically modified version, are supposed to share their benefits (for example through the ITPGRFA Treaty) with the communities that have evolved this trait in a species through hundreds of years of breeding by farmers. Otherwise it would be unfair to use "our" collective research and patent the outcome of yours without giving back anything. But, once identified, the DNA sequences of the trait can be copied from all sorts of other species - even non-plant ones- so they evade the whole process by taking it from somewhere else, it is virtually untraceable. In the USPTO doc you linked, it just says you can't patent a human organism. But they don't need to or want to patent the entire organism. They have patented the trait, the HIV-resistance gene sequence. If you want your child to be HIV-resistant and you can pay for it, they will happily take your money. But what happens when your children have children of their own? Logic dictates that they wouldn't have to pay, but logic indicated that in the Monsanto case and we saw what happened there.

It is not usually that tech-bros or tech companies are inspired by sci-fi dystopias, but mostly that sci-fi dystopian novels act as a warning for pre-existing societal tendencies. Take cyberpunk in the 70s. It commonly involves the theme of giant multinational corporations that have taken over by states and act as their own countries in a free-market jungle. It's height coincides with government deregulation, and increased public scrutiny stemming from the huge expansion of US-based multinational corporations to new territories. It is not like a CEO read the Neuromancer and thought oh, I will implement global multinational hegemony. It is more like sci-fi authors imagining a likely outcome of their contemporary political and socio-economic changes. And as the deregulation and megacorporations' domination has accelerated, we see dystopias imagined less than 10 years ago (e.g. Black Mirror) coming to life by tech startups.

We can control everything like we controlled microplastics in packaging, CO2 emissions, etc? Where is the long term research on the impacts of spraying volcanic dust on our crop fields? How many years will it take to find out and how many companies will have evaded their responsibilities in cutting emissions by buying nonsense carbon credits with unpredictable results? Who is going to stop this when it has become a billion dollar moneymaking scheme that lobbies? It has worked great with plastics, cars, etc, I am sure we have nothing to be afraid of.

The study briefly admits that, but then they go out of their way and use language that for most people reading it would have the opposite meaning: "For the first generation that was exposed to digital tools, their use is associated with better cognitive functioning" and "This is a more hopeful message than one might expect given concerns about brain rot, brain drain, and digital dementia" and "they found that using a computer, smartphone, the internet or some combination of these was associated with a lower risk of cognitive impairment"

The problem is, none of these statements are true. They did not check groups that have never used smartphones against group that have. They only proved some correlation that is pretty obviously not causation. Claiming "lower risk" is flawed. FWIW, instinctively I am not a fan of the digital dementia hypothesis, but this meta-analysis claims to prove things that it doesn't.

So, we can now work less hours per day with the same pay or see a 20-33% pay rise, right? RIGHT?

I am no expert in US law, but I see that the 1st Amendment was adopted in 1791, while women earned the right to vote with the 19th amendment which was ratified in 1920, after 70 years of protest by women. Equal rights for gays were an even more recent development. One can argue, that the 1st Amendment has less to do with those rights than the sociopolitical context in which they were earned. Additionally, there was an entire war (partly) to abolish slavery, so one can also assume that it was not just the 1st Amendment at work there. I really don't see the logic in your argument that gay rights, women voting, and the end of slavery are a direct result of the 1st Amendment.

Improvements in technology don't automatically make our lives better, unless they are accompanied by improvements in society. We're in the doorstep of another major breakthrough regarding work automation. In theory, that should mean that we should be working less for (at least) the same wealth. In practice, inequality will increase, a few people will become wealthier and more people will loose their jobs and become poorer. So, Betteridge's law of headlines.

No it wasn't. Greece's public sector is at 22%. Which is not small, but it is not the thing that got the country into trouble. Even the UK has more public sector employees let alone the northern european countries like Denmark and Norway that go up to 35%. [1] Anyway, the word universal on UBI does not mean "half the population" nor 22% of them, and that distinction is quite important.

Greece's main issues where the same issues that most countries face, only a bit bigger. Corruption was rampaging. The local (and european) elite were bathing themselves with public money. They owned the media and the governement for the last 20 years. The public insurance institutions' assets have been handed away again and again on pyramid schemes like the stockmarket bubble in the late 90's (Greece's stockmarket soared to 7000, only to return to 1000 a few months later). Public money were been wasted on a huge military budget as a result of under the table agreements between Greece and the US, Germany, France and sometimes Russia. At some point they even legitimized corruption and getting a cut for every agreement. Sure, there are many issues on public spending and efficiency that should've been improved, but that was only a small part of the problem.

Claiming that Greece has a UBI of a sorts is not backed up with data unfortunately. Greece has had issues with income inequality before the crisis struck, but with the austerity measures and the economy taking a dive, this has only gotten worse [2]

The problem with taxing the rich folks is not that they will move their money away. They are already doing that. You can not compete with tax havens. But what is evident from the recent Panama leak (and the swiss and Lux before it) is that governments are not only unwilling to tax them, but they are part of the scheme. You can not honestly believe that the US can not force Panama, the UK the Cayman or the EU Luxembourg to play nice and hand over the data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector
[2] http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2015/04/how-greek-austerity-has-stoked-inequality/

How is it an absolute success? The U.S. citizens have the fewer and some of the most expensive options when it comes to fast internet through the phone lines. Same goes for mobile phones. If you're referring to the good old ground phones, then sure, there are options. But that's because the barrier to entry was very low and the cost pretty much the same, since everybody used Big Bell's infrastructure. The phone and internet market in the US has been exactly where the market has failed. Don't compare what you have now, with what you had 30 years ago. See what the US citizens have now in terms of broadband and phone value and what the rest of the developed world has.

And its not just the telcos. Health? Banking? Transportation? Prisons? All examples of failure. Unfortunately, Europe has been moving the free market way the past decade so we're going to see the same overseas.

Of course the market is failing. The market-driven model always fails on big markets (oil, telcos, banks, etc). Free-market economists quickly realized that there is a tendency for monopolies and oligopolies. They will eventually create trusts or use tactics like selling below cost to drive new companies out of their field. Enter the state-regulator: A small government with a singular goal; to regulate the market and ensure competition. The problem is that on big markets, the dominating companies are so powerful that they end up controlling a big chunk of the government. Or at least enough of it, so they can use it to ensure continuation of the mono/oligopoly.

It is a pretty nasty situation and hard to get out of it, since the only one with the power to break the cycle is the government which is already corrupted. That leaves us with "the people". Well, that is why most of the ppl that own banks and oil companies, also own a lot of media.

But TFA is not talking about whether space tourism is dirty. It is talking about the eulogies given by the CEO's. If the flight was just a regular air flight going to Maldives, nobody would be talking about heroes moving frontiers. We would be discussing whether the planes are properly maintained, the pilots having enough rest, etc. Now, we are willing to ignore those questions because it involves "space". The pilots may or may not be aware about the severity of the risk they were taking. The CEO may or may not have cut safety costs to turn a profit. But all those questions should be asked as we would have done if it was an airline company.

Having the guy that stands to make billions, talking about the heroic deaths of two of his employees that were doing their jobs (which is more or less trying to make him richer) is just disgusting. Yes, these are hard, risky (and comparatively well payed) jobs. But there is nothing heroic in being a pilot transporting rich tourists.

If we sentence someone to 1000 years in prison for beating and starving his child, I wonder how many thousands of years should the people that decided that this is just, should be condemned to.

Quoting "The black book of communism"? Really? That books is considered a joke by many scholars, lets say that it is at least controversial. Even if you argue 100mil victims of communist regimes, you can hardly say that it is a "unique distinction". Capitalism has killed much more, fasism has had its share too. It is a mute arguement. If you want to argue against communism/capitalism/fasism, etc, at least do it with some serious arguments like the economics, liberties, their feasibility, which system is more just, etc.

"Is the open source community boycotting ebook formats?"

Hardly. Calibre is an excelent converter, library manager and it's compatible with most of the readers out there for syncing. You could try converting from pdf to e-pub with it, although PDF is a lousy input format.