I laughed out loud on this one. The entire planet runs on Greed my friend. To be greedy, is to be human.

Only if move than 1 other person wanted at least 1 apple, then yes.

Only if you were totally full and 4 others were starving.

I think it's on a situation basis.

Let's get the facts straight first.

I don't want to live like India or China. Is that greed? Maybe. But like I said, we all have greed.

We do have reasonable alternatives. If you are willing to listen to me, or other people, I can explain some ideas that can ... help.

No, I mean even more reasonable.
Our problems with inefficiencies aren't going to be fixed by a few new types of vehicles. I believe it's the mindset of the people involved with the structure of the countries that needs to be changed (for the good of the people, not for the good of the country).

...insane or from al-qaeda. You know better that everybody can be...

Did you read "1984" or see one part of "South Park" ?

STOP. THAT'S ENOUGH

WE ARE IN:

G A M E D E S I G N & C O N C E P T S ...

"Man is good, mankind is evil."
The key to understanding this is the "Problem of the Commons". In a nutshell, it goes like this: Imagine you have 10 farmers using a piece of common land together to keep their sheep, each of them with the freedom to keep as many sheep as they want. Of course, when the land gets overpopulated, the sheep will not have enough food and grow less quickly, so it's desirable that there be not too many of them. The part where it becomes a problem starts when you find the perfect profit algorithm for an individual farmer. It goes like this:
1) Adding a sheep to my flock will increase my personal profit by 1 sheep.
2) Overpopulation by 1 sheep will decrease my personal profit by 0.1 sheep.
3) If I add a sheep to my flock, my profit will be at least 1 - 0.1 = 0.9 sheep.
So regardless of the number of sheep already there, the best thing to do in all scenario's is to add one sheep (read: use more resources). More generally, the total profit is 1 - 1/n where n is the number of parties sharing the resource. This is why communism only works for very small groups: where n == 2, for example, the profit is only 0.5, while at n == 10^9, the profit is almost 1. Which comes down to "whoever takes the most resources wins". Which is exactly what happens in capitalist societies, as well as world trade, although the connection is less obvious. And this is also why I believe technology alone can never be the solution to our economic and social problems.

We have many of the same social structures and conflicts in the animal world (i.e. alpha males, leadership challenges internally and externally). So I'd say that our societies all will follow this model until we change our DNA.

Hrm. I thought all of the failed attempts at communism would lead people to realize that it's flawed in nature. Especially since communistic societies still need to trade with the world at large, and will need money to do so.

Life is a never ending battle between laziness and greed. They're the two fundamental human constants. No-one spends their life working for the good of their country, except for a few mentally ill people.

Back OT, a lot of these patents are very easy to get, but they're also not worth very much. There's a reason you don't get sued for using tab to select elements in a GUI, even though its patented. Not because they're being merciful, but because the patent is most likely unenforceable. Bringing it to court costs money, brings negative publicity, and gets you nowhere.

They're still useful though. You can threaten poor people with lawsuits, and use them to defend yourself against lawsuits from other companies. If you get enough junk patents together they start to form a critical mass. You can bet at least ONE of them will stand up in court if push comes to shove.

I'm not. But it is the main factor in capitalist and capitalistoid (that a word?) societies like ours. Everybody, however, no matter what kind of society they live in, relies on a basic supply of resources (food, shelter, your basic needs really), and most people try to make their lives as 'easy' and 'comfortable' as possible, which generally requires more resources. Capitalism takes this general observation and generalizes it to 'more goods == more happiness', which implies 'money == goods == happiness', which in turn leads to the assumption that anything can be expressed as a sum of money.
Back to the Commons Problem, let's assume there are two possible kinds of philosophies: the Social Thinker (S) and the Egoist Thinker (E). E pretty much lives by capitalist rules and therefor follows the 'perfect profit' algorithm, adding as many sheep to his flock as he possibly can. S, on the other hand, will only ever take as many sheep as his share of the commons can handle. Now if the whole group is of type S, then everything will be fine; each farmer has exactly the right amount of sheep (enough to survive), and the system remains stable (provided the commons offer enough resources to support all farmers).
But if there is only one single type E farmer, then the whole system is bound to collapse; there will be more sheep than the grounds can handle, therefor everybody's profit will decrease. At a certain point, the S-farmers' profit will drop below the minimum they need to survive, forcing them to act as E farmers as well. Of course, this will only make the problem worse, and at some point, there will be farmers who cannot survive on their flock. Those farmers will either starve, or leave the town or otherwise disappear from the scene (bankrupt). In effect, wealth is automatically spread unequally, up to the point that there are only one or two farmers left. Only then can the system regain stability, but the outcome is an absolute monopoly, and chances are resources are exhausted before this stadium is reached.
This is another reason why self-regulating communal or communist systems only work for small groups: the larger the group, the greater the chances are that there is at least one E-type member.
Which leads me to the following conclusions:
- Free market is not the answer, but the problem.
- We need sort of a limit to personal income / wealth, say, 500x the average salary (sic!)
- We need to find a balance of the good things in capitalism (innovation, general wealth) and the bad things (above problems). This is IMO closely intertwined with democracy in theory and practise.

Yeah, but my point is: Unlike most other entities, humans have the ability to evaluate their own behaviour (like we just did). Doing so, we can draw the conclusion that our "normal" behaviour is undesirable in the long run, and that in order to achieve a stable system, we must establish some sort of control mechanism to prevent the unstable scenario described above. Democracy has failed to do so, although I'm unsure whether this has happened because immanent flaws of the general idea of Democracy, or whether it's because of the bad implementations and / or practical problems.
Communism, in theory, is a beautiful solution. Unfortunately, it requires each and every member of such a society to be a true communist ("type S farmer"). In reality, so-called communist systems have found the need to establish rather harsh control mechanisms to ensure everybody is a "true communist". Ironically, this always results in a totalitarian system, the perfect opposite of communism (although this scenario is generally referred to as communism today; just look at Cuba or China).
A monarchy (or dictatorship) is a similar solution; if the sovereign is a social thinker and doesn't take more than he needs, yet carefully guards the equilibrum by spreading the resources evenly, the system works. The problem is that the sovereign is also human, and the whole monarchy system makes it especially easy (and therefor tempting) for the monarch to abuse his position, resulting in the same old dilemma - only that now the monarch is the E type farmer.
Then there's anarchy - but that's the per-definitionem starting point of the Commons Problem.
So there's no perfect solution, really.