galadriel

The Mongols killed more people as fraction of living population that any government. The Mongols were also more close to your ideals of anarchy. May I suggest you to brush up your history?

Yes, ruled by reason. The same reason that forces them to withdraw from wars, same reason that checks military spending to less than 3% of human efforts, the same reason that maintains property rights for people to function, the same reason that can channel together forces to plant 200 million plants to stop the dust bowl .... and I can parrot on and on. Is the government perfect? Hardly, but it is in every way superior to lack of government, where my ability to maintain my rights depend on how big armies I can summon on my side.

Your tiny force of hundred cannot lead to change of any reasonable measure because there would be a person with an army of million. Always has been, always will be. I am not making stuff up just to argue with you. Feudalism is exactly the result of model you propose. When local security forces run by private party are supposed to enforce whatever any one pays them, it is just in their own benefit to merge together to form bigger force ... which goes on till the ultimate biggest force is run by a King at the center, and small forces run by local security guy. Now unlike trust busting which the government (ruled by citizens) can undertake, there is no one in your utopia who can stop security agencies from forming cartel. Again, brush up your English history (Or Russian history for that matter). When rules depends on who has more money in his pocket, ECON 101 rationale follows, forming ever larger security force accountable to no-one but itself ... enforcing not the rule of law, but whatever whims it wants to.

If only my country had functioning public schools, may be I would have learned that. And in any case, in what ways do you see consent of governed not mattering? Are you part of any local democratic organisation? Have you bitched about anything to your local alderman (assuming you live in a city)? How is that if my consent does not matter, the garbage picking became better when I bitched about it?

For sake of simplicity, lets talk about UK. If the consent of governed does not matter, why hasn't David Cameron taken all the land for himself, a la William the conquer? Was the history of past 1000 year just sham? Something people told themselves to drink the cool-aid? Did all the workers who rioted and all the people who fought and died on side of Parliament against the King stupid? Why exactly are these people living under lie? And how does that country, based on lies and shams, has a well functioning society where you can go from being born in poverty to governing the country in one life time?

And any ways, you still haven't answered the question. Why aren't there incredible large scale projects popping up in north Mali, where Caterpillar industry can go tomorrow and built awesome infrastructure? Surely we in democratic world have to face the tyranny of government in every step ... why haven't the more enlightened countries with little government shown us the way? And if everyone can be lied and manipulated, how is this perfect utopia of anarchy supposed to work?

It is easier to control one entity that has monopoly over force and can be ruled by reason, than to control gazzillion small forces which are accountable to no-one. We also have these local warlords that you speak of. They are called the police and the mayor.

Because they are following a wrong way of forming a government, one where the rule of men trumps the rule of law. Even then, you can see degree of their progress. NK, with almost mythical god like rule form single person is way worse off than Cuba, where the politburo rules, followed by Iran, where the power is shared by large amount of clergy and secular government.

A good government is quite different than absence of any government, which the anarchist claim would lead to utopia. History and current situation are littered with examples of weak rule of law with practically no government. Why doesn't this fabled anarchist utopia rises there? Why does every time there is a power vacuum, some local warlord arises to fill in the gap? Why don't these mythical "good humans" just learn to live without ruling other and being ruled .... just as proposed by anarchist/libertarians?

I have given you examples of good working government, and pointed out what I don't consider to be the proper idea of government. Provide me with evidence of your utopias.

The primary competitor, the government, has been set up by people explicitly to take benefit of the ultimate economy of scales, one where it is backed by the will and money of every single individual who believes in the Constitution which establishes and defines the role of the said government. These endless funds and the monopoly of force is given to it for explicit purposes of stepping in when the private group of individual are unable to get stuff done.

The interstate do not arise in vacuum, nor are they product of mere transportation concerns. They are product of very reasonable concern of quickly transporting war equipment and connecting parts of countries to one another, so as to facilitate quick movement of goods and people, adding their value to GDP. The rail industry is thriving well, doing its job as low cost goods carrier.

"It's conceivable" -- except no one has given good argument that thing which is so obvious has escaped human imagination for close to 10,000 years now, and all the places which are good approximation of said ideologies have people in utterly poor state.

Yes, if I can convince other, I can summon army of 100 million voters who can change the system overnight (well, once every 2 years) and make whoever they want their global warlord to be. The global warlord works for them, and not the other way round.

The fact is, people are happy enough with the system as it is, and they do vote out the "mafia thug" if he acts particularly bad. This global warlord requires money to maintain its strength and most people are more than happy to pay their share of taxes.

How? Where are these mythical people suffering under good governments? These people who are enslaved by theft of taxes? As a rule of thumb, people living in countries with strong social democracies, with strong rule of law (enforced by strong government) are the healthiest, the happiest, the most well fed, innovators of science who have launched humanity beyond earth and touched the stars.

On the other hand, we have places with weak rule of law, where the governments are corrupts, or cult of personality places men above law. These are the places where people suffer, have little hope or freedom to progress and have constant boot of power pressed on their face.

If strong government is what is stopping the utopia, why is there no such utopia in Somalia? I am finding it very hard to match reality with your claims.

In real world, your neighbor is the local warlord, and you cannot possibly summon enough amount of army to counter his army. The only guy who can stop him is the guy with bigger army somewhere in capital city, and he couldn't care less about you. Welcome to feudalism. History is rife with the system you are proposing, and it did not went well for humanity.

You can go right now to Liberia, hire enough mercenaries, and start killing bunch of people for fun if you want to. The entire society of Liberia wouldn't able to stop you from doing so. Let's see how willing they are in putting people behind jail. It is the ultimate paradise of weak government, one that cannot/will not protect its own people. On the plus side, you can avoid paying any tax.

It is a serious question. Until of now, no project of the scale of public works has been taken by any private cooperation anywhere in world. Although the incentive are clear (permanent cut on profit from all transportation), none of them have either the capital, the risk appetite or the power of taking land if so required.

Extraordinary claims require proof from the party making the claim. How do libertarian and/or anarchist propose that intercontinental freeways be built and maintained at the same cost as they are done by the US government?

So Telecom was very "unregulated" because you agree with all the regulations. That's some interesting play of words.

No monopoly in 3G? How do companies refrain from transmitting at each other's frequencies? No monopoly in telecom? How do they lay all the wire without permits and regulation? Or in good old days, can I dig up anywhere in Russia and lay wires directly to my customers?

The fact that courts can declare laws to be unconstitutional is a hack out of Supremacy clause, as decided by the SCOTUS itself in one of the early cases. All other rules still apply, such as proving your standing for harm, which you cannot, if the executive keeps everything secret.

A proper constitutional court (as implemented by many other countries) is much more suited to these kinds of cases, which concern the spirit of Constitution, rather than specifics of harm and injuries to one specific entity.

No they do not. I personally use T-Mobile $30 monthly prepaid plan with 100 minutes/5 GB/unlimited text. The service is no way inferior to any regular service that T-mobile provides.

Whether you buy Nexus 4 from T-mobile for 50 bucks and pay more monthly bill with contract, or choose one of their prepaid plan and pay less TCO, the phone and software is exactly the same. I thought you would know this, you work at Google.

The cell companies do what you have effectively said before, they price differentiate based on who can pay what. Don't have money to buy phone upfront, well we will sell you for cheap and make the difference in contract rate. Have more money? Well then BYOD and get our cheaper prepaid services.

I will concede on one point, the big 4 (except T-mobile) make it incredibly hard for you to find and compare their prepaid services, for obvious reason that contract customer bring in more money over years.

Well compare oranges to oranges then. Nexus 4 is $50 on contract on T-Mobile, and is definitely cheaper than iPhone 5 on any of the three networks.

Also, no law dictates that you have to sign a contract to get cell service in America. One can as well choose from few of the cheaper prepaid services.

The way Google apps behave now is way different than they were when ICS came out initially, especially things like swiping to show menu on the side. While Holo has been there for about a year, the details were never filled in by Google with a flagship first party app. Holo provided the polish, the usability in Google apps come from the way they attach functionality to gesture.

So I guess it is news-worthy for other people unfamiliar with how Google iterated their apps on Android to know that finally Google has nailed down pretty much all what it wanted to achieve.

You have got your thresholds wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation#IQ_below_70

Also, the distribution is by definition normal, and I have hard time believing 15% of population is retarded. That would mean about 1 in every 6 person I met is retarded, a number too big to believe. Now 3 genius/3 dumb out of 100 is more like what my experience has been.

Android is quite more attractive now than iOS, if you are willing to forgive consistency and quality of third party application. Most of Google's own app are absolutely fantastic in quality, and often are better or equal to iOS offering. Where Android actually shines is in how things get integrated to each other. There is no concept of preferred apps as such, and you can make any app default for any function. Share functionality is also awesome, and leads to interesting applications (Like sharing from a Reddit app to Read-it-later app, etc).

I would say if you are not too locked into iOS (having bought tons of iOS apps or something), you should try Android on a Nexus for sometime. Your only downside would be finding good, niche apps. In iOS store, even the smallest developers pay attention to be consistent with Apple's guideline and look good. It also helps that iOS design language has remained mostly the same throughout 5 years. Android finally got a design language last year, but not all developers have been keen to adopt it.

> As for those who say that there will be an increase in wealth inequality, you only need to look at the technological progress of the last 200 years to know that the reverse is most likely true.

While I agree with your post in general, in details, the technological advancement of past 200 years have produced great wealth disparity in world. By using their early gain in technologies, the West effectively exploited resources from other parts of world to gain huge income and lifestyle disparity over rest of the world. While in beginning of 1600s, Asia+N. Africa was as wealthy as Europe (which is to say quite poor), by end of 1970, huge part of Asia+Africa lived in utter poverty, while life in West couldn't be better.

All though, I finally think that technology (IT, shipment, containers, etc etc) has advanced far enough that it can overcome human nature and lead to betterment of all people in world rather a small number of them.

How did you get the 15% number? Assuming IQ of 70 is taken as margin of borderline intellectual functioning, and 15 points being the standard deviation, only people below two standard deviation lie below 70 IQ, or about 2.5% of population. (The other 2.5% being above 130 IQ)

There are usually region restricted DRM trying to stop this from happening. For example, a lot of digital distribution gaming companies (like Steam) have cheaper prices of games in Russia compared to US. So there are all kinds of websites that will sell a Russian key and Russian proxy service so that one can get game for cheap. OTOH, the distributors try to monitor and keep disabling accounts if they find that region restricted games are being played.

One is a federal felony, other is a fair use.

EDIT: Specifically, it is against the law to break DRM (unless for few cases outlined by library of Congress), and the law as written makes no exceptions for fair use. The courts have also held in positive that it was Congress intend to make breaking DRM a crime even if there is a fair use case.

Since HDCP has 'broken' (with master key leak), couldn't someone copy a blu-ray bitstream without having to crack any blu-ray protection format?

From my experience of college level instrumentation design, if one want to design parts and run CNC to its full potential, he/she should be decently proficient in curve drawing, understanding gear design, etc, and the math required for it can be quite involved. This is after you know the broad design detail. Some difficult things involve how to best approximate a curve on given CNC constraints, figuring out best fit for parts, etc; and then write appropriate programs for it. IMO, there are only a very few people who would have skill set like these, but not enough to move on to higher level engineering jobs.

Although, a lot of this thing is getting automated, and there is a huge push towards figuring out how you can feed a CAD design directly to CNC and let it figure out best way to implement it.

PS: I cannot expect that you can ever hire enough good people in this category for $10 an hour. They would probably be writing VB scripts and earning more money. Working in a fast food chain would be totally a waste of potential of decently skilled workers.

Just adding to what others said, you won't miss your music collection if you use Google Music and have good enough internet. In my use case, I have found that although I have GBs of music collected over years, at any particular movement, I am listening to only very small subset of it. So what I have uploaded all my music to Google Music, and then made offline all the music I frequently listen; essentially the new albums I purchase and the older, favorite songs.

It works well because T-mobile data speeds are fast enough, and only time I remember missing my music was when I was on a long 12 hour flight, and really wanted to listen to that one song, and taking out my laptop wasn't worth the effort.

I would just like to add, there is definitely economical benefits in buying your own device, even in the US. T-Mobile offers a discount on contract plans, if you buy your own phone. While AT&T/Verizon/Sprint don't give a discount on their contract plans, all three have various prepaid options that are cheaper than contract pricing.

For example, T-Mobile has a $60 flat price for unlimited text/voice and 2 GB data, which is far cheaper than their contract price. Similarly AT&T Go-phone has cheaper prices.

Next, there are various MVNOs that resell service from the big 4, and they also have much cheaper price on prepaid. However, I have noticed that US consumer are almost universally unaware that such cheap plans exist. Part of it is that prepaid is seen as something used by people with low credit-worthiness, and other reason being that the subsidized contracts make it possible for far more people to have high end phone than normal. I have met quite a few people with iPhone, who would never be able to purchase it if they had to pay $700 upfront in store.

Thanks! Good to know, and best of luck Jacob. I am not really a programmer, but I hope this leads to more accurate weather prediction.

Hey, I am one of those who have installed PressureNET. Where can I see analysis of data that you guys collect?

You have to just do that once to activate 2FA. Once activated, switch to mobile app. No one can turn it off without having code and password later. (apart from finding some flaw in system)

Heisenberg tells you that you cannot measure locations and speed, but Physicist have just accepted it and moved on. What you can measure, and what quantifies a state, are probabilities of things happening. That is all the information that nature gives you, and if you can recreate a set of probabilities from point A at point B, you have teleported the object. The laws of nature ensure that object at point A is destroyed, so you cannot clone states.

The way how you interpret is now philosophy. As far as nature goes, there is no way to distinguish one electron from other, or to differentiate a 'teleported' object from its 'original' object.