So funny, you cared so little that you read the summary and posted a comment. Imagine how the people who care feel.

I operate this way for the most part, and I'm sure much of Slashdot does to varying degrees. But slashdot is tiny in the grand scheme of things. I'm curious though, what would happen to a national economy if most people did this? Less consumer spending means we're down several thousand companies and even more jobs, which also means less tax revenue. Since we also have more unemployed, it also means an increased spending on social welfare programs. I'm not a fan of keeping shitty companies around, but assuming less consumer spending plays out like that, shitty companies (and the spending on them) are the less of two evils. In a capitalist economy anyway.....

I'm not sure what a different kind of economy would look like. Maybe it would be enough to do away with stock markets and traditional corporate ownership. Co-op's only, every organization is owned by those who work for it. That way there's no worrying about if an economy is doing well or not, we just have self sustaining businesses and those that aren't. No one really tracks economic performance other than how many co-ops a country has and how much they make. There's just no such thing as poor economic performance since this system doesn't have anything rely on growth. Want to start a co-op? Find others who will work with you, take out a (I suppose banks would have to be made co-ops as well - though without business stocks/ dividends to profit from, would there really be a point in central money repositories other than the government issuing currency?) loan, and get to work.

You're right that it requires flash : This is the only reason I keep Google Chrome around, the big upside being that I don't have to install an outdated Flash Player package. Not much better, but Google Hangouts we wouldn't *need* flash... but one would think the frekin Linux Foundation would be into FOSS codecs. At least they're *finally* streaming talks!

67 posts and no one has mentioned TOR yet? Everyone above has geek credentials suspended for a week.

On top of doing this, I suggest creating a TOR site mirroring all this material. The USB sticks can include the Tor Browser Bundle for all platforms and a txt file (or better yet, bookmarks) with the urls. Maybe also a note saying "Be patient, anonymous browsing is *slower*"

You're clearly not a geek or nerd.... well maybe on the lower end of the spectrum. However, you've probably never explored an alternative OS and no, Windows XP doesn't count. Neither does Max OS X. Do you even care to compile the kernel you're using?

Newsblur has a limit of 64 sites for a free account :( If they were smart enough to let me try out unlimited sites for a month, I would've given it a shot. If I can't take all my feeds with me, I'll just find some other way like local RSS clients for all my devices and manual updating each one with new feeds :(

Also when they say site updates 1x, I assume once a day. What's the point of RSS?

And a new software was born. We shall call it, CPRSO.

in 2006, Nintendo would've had their execs blow them daily for this. Still though, it would make sword play and shooters even better. Imagine knifing someone and getting resistence....

Star Citizen is going to be written in Direct X and the FAQ claims to possibly support Linux (and macs). But according to the dev, since CryEngine doesn't support openGL they can't; should this change they can do a Linux port. I'm not holding my breath :(

perhaps. Or people with power don't like sharing it. Universal suffrage was an ideal that had failed until it was implemented successfully. Having no slaves was an ideal until it was implemented properly. Come to think of it, all theories are just ideals that don't come to fruition in national politics until well, they do.

Don't give up just because it is hard and hasn't been done right in the past! If people did this, our society would still involve flinging shit at whoever is in the next tree. I bet the concept of a city was just an ideal that failed many many many times until the right conditions let it succeed.

heh, you think The Wealth of Nations is bad? Try The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Umm, he published more than one work. You're probably thinking of The Communist Manifesto which was written to inspire the working class to rise up. His economic theories are laid out in a work called "Das Capital" (IIRC).

You're right that it was abused, but I would argue that no country has ever implemented communism as Marx talked about it. IE it has never been tried.

Further, there is nothing about Marx's communism that necessarily requires keeping people in the dark in an authoritarian system. IIRC, he called for 'workers to own the means of production.' Kinda hard to be kept in the dark, when you own the damn the thing. It's also not authoritarian when you are the boss, albeit with others.

Now it has been a while since I read both works, but I don't recall anything that would conflict with open/transparent government and democracy. He did want a centrally planned economy, I guess it would have to be authoritarian in the sense that some group makes decisions on what happens; in his time period, I suppose you couldn't query the masses. I think it would be very interesting to see communism implemented again, ie a centrally planned economy, but instead of a small group/department of planners, poll the citizens?

And heck, if we still want to allow entrepreneurship, just make a law that says 51% of shares of any company are divided amongst all employees.

That's a good point, however drugs are very different in one way, no one has to get hurt. The OP didn't make this point but it holds true for the discussion.

Also legal drug production also means safer drug usage. However I suppose you can argue that this point applies to organs and sex trading as well. If it's going to happen anyway, why not legalize and regulate it so we can make sure it's as safe as possible? If you don't like what's going on, let's spend part of the tax revenue on educating about the problems associated with the behaviour. Eventually it can become taboo. Smoking is legal, but it has become socially unacceptable.

Shitty for the executives, but during the slaughter, the word "Google" will be making headlines on every kind of news media. Now that's a level of dedication only engineers can provide ;)

I hate to say this, but not *any* other device. The Openmoko Neo Freerunner has all drivers open source (including GPU) and http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/ as well. The only things not free are the GSM firmware and the wifi firmware. The Freerunner original already has working (but not user friendly) FOSS GSM firmware with OsmocomBB http://bb.osmocom.org/
Oh but these aren't Android phones &_&