5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.

[AnimeFan188]

"Picture your ideal future. OK, not your ideal future, where you're the last man on
earth fighting the zombie horde, but society's ideal future: Energy is clean and
limitless, goods are plentiful and machines take care of all the dirty work. So
everybody's happy, right?

But in many ways, that future is already here, and it can be described in five
letters:

FARTS.

I should probably explain."

See:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817...d-by-b.s..html

Agree/Disagree?

[Lost Cause]

More truth than fiction there!
It's like when the newest, latest, greatest Playststion, or computer comes out, that there are people actually CAMPING OUTSIDE THE FRICKIN STORE just to get the first ones! And then it turns out that the first version was flawed, so you have to get the "2.0" version to make it work!
It begs the question; Just how gullible are we? The answer; Pretty damn much!

[Vexx]

"moo" (or "baa" if you're bilingual).

[Master_Yoma]

Ya I like number 5 with the Mad Max future that will be a future to live in not the B.S. one I what a car that runs on pig shit and wonder the wasteland

[RadiantBeam]

Ah, Cracked, how we love thee.

[SaintessHeart]

There will always be a scarcity. The scarcity of inventors who create things - it is not often that you walk in the street and see someone with an idea (or able to think).

What the internet does is create a new marketplace for these thinkers to sell and promote their ideas without the cockblocking of opportunists and capitalists, and the ones who are complaining are the Os & Cs, if they are not the inventors themselves.

So what would be the next great sale? Ideas and service - the real merit comes from the courage to dream and the persistence to turn that dream into a reality : it is called an idea.

[Tsuyoshi]

An interesting read, to be sure. Some of it does make sense but I get the feeling that a lot of it is overdramatized for effect. Even with the existence of ebooks, for instance, there will always be such a thing as print. Writers wouldn't write anything if they didn't get any kind of compensation, unless they could get everything else they need to live and to write for free, but writing in and of itself does involve a certain cost. You need at the very least a pen and paper if you don't have a computer. They wouldn't just hand out their work for free over the inet like that. The same goes for porn and various other things listed on there. If you wanted free porn, just get a girl and bed her. Nothing better than that

[Kafriel]

An interesting read, to be sure. Some of it does make sense but I get the feeling that a lot of it is overdramatized for effect.

Seconded...oh, and I printed sixty pages of philosophy because I don't want to rape my eyes reading them off my laptop. E-books may be handy, but they're not a perfect solution either. Likewise, if porn was sex then we'd watch cooking shows instead of eating...

[synaesthetic]

Yeeeaaahhh... no.

The article is satire, and it does contain some measure of truth, but... like most pirate types, the Cracked writer doesn't understand that while electronic media has virtually no production overhead, it still requires the effort, the blood and sweat and pain of the artist who produced it.

When you buy an album or a video game or a series of anime, you aren't buying the media. You're buying the right to use it. Compensating the person who created it for their hard work (AT LEAST IN THEORY).

Now this may sound strange coming from me, a very vocal proponent of open and free sharing of information. But like most anti-copyright folks, I pirate to damage the content gatekeepers and buy whatever I can directly from the actual creators.

Edit: The unfortunate reality, and the reason why a lot of nerdy types pirate the shit out of everything, is that almost none of the money paid for media actually goes to the person or persons who created it. Most of it goes to the middlemen, and as someone who knows a lot of indie software developers and underground musicians, I say very loudly: FUCK the middlemen.

Edit #2: The thing with Intel selling CPUs with disabled features that can be re-enabled with an unlock code is bullshit, though. This sort of thing has gone on for years due to the nature of semiconductor fabrication, but never have they been so blatant about it. Usually they just take the dies that don't bin high enough and give them a different name and sell them for a cheaper price. But $50 to re-enable SMT is just stupid, especially since Intel's vaunted Hyperthreading isn't even all that useful in most applications and can break or slow down others.

I mean, the AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition? It's a die-harvested Phenom II X4 955, and back when yields weren't so good, two of the cores had a pretty high chance of not working at all, so they relabeled the shit and sold it as a dual-core CPU. But the process for that chip has gotten so good, AMD found that they weren't having too many dead cores, so they were taking a loss on what could have easily been sold as a quad-core (which, of course, the nerds picked up on and hell, Asus even made a motherboard specifically designed to unlock the disabled cores)!

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

Edit: The unfortunate reality, and the reason why a lot of nerdy types pirate the shit out of everything, is that almost none of the money paid for media actually goes to the person or persons who created it. Most of it goes to the middlemen, and as someone who knows a lot of indie software developers and underground musicians, I say very loudly: FUCK the middlemen.

Being a virtual middleman myself to my friends (I have this seemingly uncanny ability to get out-of-place things with some googling, I even once get a Trijicon scope shipped to a military nerd friend of mine.), I would say that the reason why middlemen earn money are basically two things :

1. Their skill to sweettalk.
2. Their ability to capitalise on what little resourcefulness they have
3. Their lack of ethics.

The problem with me is that I tend not to charge anything to help my friends get the stuff their want out of their whim because I feel it isn't right. Basically the reason why we exist is to help connect people, but apparently some assholes thought that it is the easy way to earn money that it blossomed into a giant industry called "public relations".

[dredmorte]

This article and the above responses all deal with copyrights and in my opinion, one must first question the very notion that we need those. Following my philosophy of freedom, I have come to the conclusion we don't.

I'll forward you all to this page in order to enrich this discussion:
http://mises.org/daily/3863

It's a very good argument against both patents and copyrights - intellectual property.

[synaesthetic]

That guy is a loon. He thinks that intellectual property isn't real and isn't worth anything. I don't know what fucked up planet he comes from, but just because something is intangible doesn't make it worthless. In fact, in this world of global communication, the right information can be the most valuable commodity of all. After all, what's worth more--a finished product, or the plans and schematics with which to construct a finished product? It's the "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" argument brought into the 21st century.

In any case, a writer, an artist, a computer programmer doesn't sell what that guy calls "nothing." They sell their effort. They sell their time, their knowledge and their skill.

When you buy a book, a CD or a computer application, only a very small part of the money spent is actually spent on the physical object. The rest goes to make sure the writer, the singer or the application developer can keep churning out prose, music or code--or at least it should.

Where the bulk of the money actually goes is to the publisher, and that is what needs to change. It's already happening; a paradigm shift that the content gatekeepers are desperate to stop (hence the looming threat of draconian, First Amendment-threatening laws such as COICA and ACTA).

[Kotohono]

Thank you, crack for reminding me that we have english sites that are just as hilariously crazy as sankakucomplex .

[LMF]

So, you think that the world is going to be rule by B.S.? I hope you meant Bill Simmons.

Anyway, where's the futuristic utopia or the flying car?

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Konakaga

Thank you, crack for reminding me that we have english sites that are just as hilariously crazy as sankakucomplex .

With regards to property, I believe Azunyan is MY WAIFU and you need my permission to use her in your sig.

Seriously though, Crack is more technically correct than sankaku since it does take into account technicalities. Sankaku usually speaks about political and social issues, which can never be technically correct since humans, by nature, are driven by their emotions and more random than deterministic.

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

That guy is a loon. He thinks that intellectual property isn't real and isn't worth anything. I don't know what fucked up planet he comes from, but just because something is intangible doesn't make it worthless. In fact, in this world of global communication, the right information can be the most valuable commodity of all. After all, what's worth more--a finished product, or the plans and schematics with which to construct a finished product? It's the "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" argument brought into the 21st century.

In any case, a writer, an artist, a computer programmer doesn't sell what that guy calls "nothing." They sell their effort. They sell their time, their knowledge and their skill.

When you buy a book, a CD or a computer application, only a very small part of the money spent is actually spent on the physical object. The rest goes to make sure the writer, the singer or the application developer can keep churning out prose, music or code--or at least it should.

Where the bulk of the money actually goes is to the publisher, and that is what needs to change. It's already happening; a paradigm shift that the content gatekeepers are desperate to stop (hence the looming threat of draconian, First Amendment-threatening laws such as COICA and ACTA).

I would generally agree with your argument as it has some merit, however, from another perspective, there are some times, no matter how creative, have little or zero value.

Take for example the dotcom burst in 1999. Most of the companies simply added a prefix to their URLs and gain market value - the value of e-commerce. It is an oversimplified insinuation of a company's liquidity at that time, and companies able to conduct business over the net at that time has an image of being "successful".

A company's image is required to draw investors and help gain credit easily from banks through their namesake, however most of them are just flunkies with not even a concrete business plan. So when the bubble burst, taxpayers ended up picking up the pieces.

The bottomline is that it is difficult to give a value, monetary or otherwise, to an idea just by itself. The disgusting part is that value is only given to the idea when it sells rather than it works, it furthers dilute creativity throughout the world when people are more interested in "what sells" than "what works."

[dredmorte]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

That guy is a loon. He thinks that intellectual property isn't real and isn't worth anything. I don't know what fucked up planet he comes from, but just because something is intangible doesn't make it worthless. In fact, in this world of global communication, the right information can be the most valuable commodity of all. After all, what's worth more--a finished product, or the plans and schematics with which to construct a finished product? It's the "give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" argument brought into the 21st century.

In any case, a writer, an artist, a computer programmer doesn't sell what that guy calls "nothing." They sell their effort. They sell their time, their knowledge and their skill.

When you buy a book, a CD or a computer application, only a very small part of the money spent is actually spent on the physical object. The rest goes to make sure the writer, the singer or the application developer can keep churning out prose, music or code--or at least it should.

Where the bulk of the money actually goes is to the publisher, and that is what needs to change. It's already happening; a paradigm shift that the content gatekeepers are desperate to stop (hence the looming threat of draconian, First Amendment-threatening laws such as COICA and ACTA).

How do you think you look in the eyes of others when you call an educated successfully individual who writes a long article, using logic, reason and factual data to support his argument.... a loon?

If I am a musician, I can make concerts to make money and participation in events to make money. Many games today, particulary those that make use of internet, either trough selling a unique cd-key to play in multiplayer, or trough an online subscrition, don't need intellectual property. Programmers are called in and paid to create a program for a certain corporation (or group of) needs. Film-makers create films for television which profit from adds. Engineers develop new technologies so that the manufacturers they work for can keep an edge of the competition. These are just a few examples.

Furthermore, people actually get together - and sometimes alone - and make things for free. Music, games, films, computer programs (freeware). In some cases, you have thousands and thousands of people each contributing one or a few hours of their life towards a goal - combined creating something truly useful and disired, for free.

Is the "government sponsored monopoly" called intellectual property really necessary? Can a society not adapt and prosper to one where there isn't? Is it worth ever increasing draconian legislation, loss of freedom and conflict between the users of the internet and elite entrepreneurs?

I do not fully disagree with your whole reply, but your first sentence is, in my opinion, overly rude and arrogant.

[DragoZERO]

That was hilarious. So much of it is true but so much of it is just humor. But the true parts is really what makes the world sad. I really like the eBook part.

[Kafriel]

Programmers are called in and paid to create a program for a certain corporation (or group of) needs. Film-makers create films for television which profit from adds. Engineers develop new technologies so that the manufacturers they work for can keep an edge of the competition.

Suppose I write program X, some 4000 pages of code that took me 7 years to create. Then you find it on the net, add 4 lines in half an hour and sell it as your own patent. Do you honestly think you can call it your own program?
Engineers don't develop squat, researchers do after they get funds. Same patent story applies here too, and companies engage in all kinds of war to keep information secret. I'd say that instead of sleeping with your soul under your pillow worrying about your whatever project falling into another's hands and being used against you, it would be much better to just sue their ass with astronomical amounts and end it there.
Films usually go to the cinemas, where people pay 5-6 different kinds of taxes per ticket, give work to the people at the cinema (since many are only hired for peak months and then fired till next season) and are well paid by said cinema to give the film that brings all the customers. Downloading and streaming a single movie kills its ratings more than a bad review, because who's gonna pay for something they can get for free?

writes a long article, using logic, reason

Long article, sure...wouldn't be so certain about the proper use of logic though.

[qwertyuiopz]

what a coincidence i read this just yesterday

[synaesthetic]

I can't take anarchists seriously, and it's really sad. They're usually well educated and intelligent people, but they miss the glaringly obvious flaw that makes anarchy and anarcho-capitalism fail and fail utterly. The flaw is so obvious that any dumbass can point it out, but as one of my friends used to say, there's a hell of a lot of crazy shit a smart person will do that no self-respecting idiot would be caught dead doing.

If you create a power vacuum, something will fill it. You may not like that something in a world without government, because in such a world, the power vacuum will be filled with whoever has the biggest guns.

Anarchy is not a "state." It's more like a phase change. You take out the power structure from the top down, something is going to fill that empty space, and without an organized form of governing... fill in the blanks yourself. Just think about it. How do you take over an enemy nation? You take out their central governing body and replace it with your own.

What would happen if America's populace took out its central government and (extremely unlikely, but just for the sake of argument) didn't replace it with anything, preferring an anarchist "state?"

What would happen?