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You haven't been listening to http://www.freetalklive.com/. One of their most frequently discussed issues id the poor job the town government does maintaining the local roads.

As far as your intention to leave is concerned: good riddance.

(1) Read Hayek's Choice in Currency .

(2) Charles Koch (not "daddy" Fred C Koch) informed Hayek in a 1973 letter that, since he paid into the US Social Security program for over 10 years, he is technically entitled to benefits. Charles Koch is guilty of stating a fact, possibly as a joke. Hayek is guilty of receiving a letter. It takes very little to give the socialist spin blogosphere an orgasm... With all blogs linking to The Nation article, that has since been removed from their Web-site... Guess they sobered up...

(3) "Moving to US to take advantage"?! Hayek worked and paid taxes all his life. Specific to the US, Hayek taught at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1962, and later also taught at UCLA in late 60s / early 70s (before that aforementioned letter that you're trying to spin), and he intermittently worked on other things while residing in US and paying US taxes. He was by no means a moocher. He won the Nobel Prize a year later.

(4) There is absolutely zero logic to claims that libertarians are "hypocrites" if they don't reject anything and everything touched by the coercive monopolies of state. Hayek paid taxes / social security all his life - why can't he take back some of what was stolen from him?! Were slaves "hypocrites" for eating their masters' food?! (According to one theory (which presently I don't practice), libertarians should morally commit as much welfare fraud as possible! Was General Washington a "hypocrite" for using captured British cannons against them?!)

(5) "Until?" Neither of the two men you're slandering has significantly changed their positions (not that there's anything wrong with that if you're getting closer to truth).

(6) These "self-serving double-talking soulless punks" have saved millions of lives by intellectually confronting fascism and communism (among other forms of socialism). The Koch Family has saved millions more lives by being among of the world's greatest philanthropists (ex. cancer research).

--libman (old account)

Just in case you're not a troll, just really misinformed and confused: almost every point you make is either an argument against a straw man, makes no sense or is simply based on false assumptions. I'll just pick a few examples:

I've been fighting this battle for many years now, regularly presenting significant amounts of evidence in favor of copyfree software. Calling me a "troll" is akin to calling Copernicus a "witch" for presenting evidence that Earth orbits the sun!

And then you go off to say that that's worse than making income (what exactly any of this has to do with income is anyone's guess) through legitimate contracts. Which are enforced by government force. Can you see how that argument makes no sense whatsoever?

Here you are exhibiting total ignorance of the subject matter. You need to study philosophy of law, as well as basic economics.

Making income is an accomplishment - it means you are providing something so valuable to other people that they are willing to compensate you for it. If someone else could provide the same or better value at same or lower price, the buyers would go there instead. Giving away software / code / etc that other people find useful and use is an accomplishment as well, and under certain circumstances it provides more benefits (attention, patches, donations, etc) than selling the software would have. Developers have a Right to choose how they distribute their code (and it is their own, added code that constitutes the value in question).

Freedom of contract is a Natural Right - meaning that we observe its necessity independently of whether it is recognized by any state. Contracts have existed since the dawn of civilization (ex. public oaths), and civilization is impossible without some way of holding people accountable for their promises. Contracts will continue to exist (and be insured and enforced by non-monopolistic DRO's) long after governments as you know them will rot away on the ash-heap of history.

Copyright, on the other hand, is a relatively recent invention of very dubious necessity. It started in the 1600s largely as a censorship mechanism, to suppress dissident literature and reward the loyal propagandists of the state. In spite of its sustained legislative approval, economic evidence for benefits of copyright remain very scarce, and much can be said as to its harm.

"Implicit contract" based EULA's and software licenses are more dubious still. They are completely different from real (explicit consent) contracts, and don't stand the slightest test of logical scrutiny. If GPL is legally valid, then so is any "fine print" attached to anything you may come across! How would you feel if you were to find a dollar bill on the street, put it in your wallet, and then get sued by me for not following the terms of the "license" scribbled on that bill, stating that your wallet now belongs to me?!

You seem to think that the GPL equates copying with theft. Where did you get this idea?

The fact that it drags people to court (which can cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars) for mere copying. And:

"Microsoft and Apple can't steal parts of the code and use it in their OSes legally." -- RedHackTea

That would be a great argument against using the GPL. That is, if the GPL indeed had something to say about how software can and can't be used. Which it doesn't.

Modification is a form of

Azure has won cloud performance comparisons in the past, including a major 11-months test concluding two years ago. (via)

--libman

Many apparently-OK countries in Europe have been coasting on economic momentum of the past centuries. In recent years, they've also attained some economic growth from the integration of the European economy. France has also benefited from doing several things right, most notably their nuclear power sector, relatively low corporate tax rates, and of course their massive tourism revenue and highly-profitable exports of "fashionable" products. But this can only take them so far.

Their per-capita GDP numbers may appear to be almost as high as the United States, but you must understand how to analyze those numbers. GDP includes government spending, which is of questionable value. It is easier to have a high "per capita" anything when you've had a baby boom followed by very low fertility rates recently, so you have lots of workers at the peak of their earning potential, but relatively few children and stay-at-home moms. "Per hour worked" figures are artificially inflated by artificially reduced work hours. Etc.

--libman

Urban centers tend to support people in rural areas, and this is certainly true in New York where the city pays out more in taxes than it gets back in services. This also occurs at the national level.

That's a very intuitive thing to think, if you don't take a much closer look at the numbers - who in urban areas produces the wealth, and who votes for the welfare state. A lot of competent people support (or pretend to support) socialist causes in order to "fit in". The benefits of population density often outweigh the negative business climate (an effect that shrinks as telecommunications, transportation, and shipping technologies become more advanced). The economic momentum of the past, when the people in large cities had access to the best educational and cultural institutions, doesn't disappear overnight - but eventually it will. Brains and capital will flee socialist cities for greener pastures.

Of course I have nothing to gain from you agreeing my above paragraph. If you think NYC, with its 46.2% corporate + 45.5% personal income tax rates, will always be the best place to do business, then why not make it a state?

So you, libman, are a direct beneficiary of my tax dollars. Now I don't mind supporting your welfare benefits, but please don't pretend you aren't leeching off me while you're sponging off me.

I *am* sponging off you. That isn't a secret. I'm a healthy 31-year-old male living in NJ, formerly employed as a top-notch developer, former tax resister, and presently unemployed and on welfare. All of this is by choice.

I drink your milkshake!

--libman

I'm a big fan of insulation tech, especially in suburban / rural residential "domes". But everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, some of the energy savings of insulation would be lost in manufacturing / transportation / installation of insulation materials, in some cases added demands for ventilation, etc. Far more importantly, when planning insulation for an entire megacity, with thousands of large buildings as well as millions of single-family homes, it seems like there'll be a substantial "freedom trade-off" involved...

And ya gotta remember that heating / cooling is just a very small fraction of overall energy use !

As people become more affluent over time, they can afford not just more living space to be heated or cooled, but also more toys (ex. heated pools, yachts, basement BitCoin server farms), and more cars. Improvements in highway infrastructure could allow faster speeds, which would offset energy-efficiency benefits to some degree. Self-driving cars will likely result in people traveling more miles, faster, and with fewer passengers.

Industrial energy use has probably been declining in and around NYC, due to the flight of manufacturers to more competitive locations with cheaper labor, but robotics could change that by 2050. By then new plants would probably be built in locations with access to top-notch engineering talent, and, far more importantly, a large local consumer pool for just-in-time manufacturing and rapid delivery of ordered products.

Food production is another major source of greenhouse emissions - cow farts 'n all. Who's to say whether meat production will increase or decrease in the coming decades? Medical advances that make worries about fat / cholesterol / etc a thing of the past could come around faster than decent meat substitutes, which means more New Yorkers feasting on steak.

And then of course there are helicopters, which are starting to "take off" in some traffic-congested global capitals, and perhaps by 2050 we'll finally see viable flying cars. The local government might not like it, but the city will have to compete, as people who can afford a helicopter would take a lot of tax revenue with them if they move to Singapore, Moscow, or Seoul...

So there are many things that could reduce energy use / emissions by 2050, and many things that could increase them.

The only useful Crystal Ball would be one that is held by an Iron Fist!

--libman

How is that Position any Different than those adopted by such Parities as the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, or, forsooth, the Green Party?

Democrats are wrong about absolutely everything, or at least they would be if they actually believed what they are saying. They lust for power, which they wish to buy with stolen loot. With them fully in charge, USA would have the Economic Freedom level of France or Italy at best, but it could fall as low as Argentina. This would obviously result in massive economic decline, and flight of brains and capital.

Greens are wrong about absolutely everything, and usually are too stoned to walk. One theory is that they are "useful idiots" planted to make the Democrats look less insane in comparison. The less is said about them the better.

Libertarians are generally right about economics and civil liberties, but wrong about geopolitics (peace with North Korea?!) and demographics (i.e. a libertarian society would have the fertility rate very close to 0, which creates a lot of economic problems). Libertarians are a broad tent, and some understand the need for gradualism better than others. Some come to libertarianism through pure reason, and some simply have daddy-issues and don't like authority. The latter kind would be somewhat disappointed if they found themselves in a libertarian utopia, where most employers / neighborhood associations / private roads / etc will have strict contractual rules.

Republicans include the smartest 0.1%~ of the population, who ruthlessly apply the scientific method to all political questions, and have the best understanding of economics, geopolitics, technology, etc. Unfortunately USA devolved into a mobocracy (aka democracy), so, in order to gain any sizable vote, that rationalist elite had to stoop as low as to use religious and populist appeals. With Republicans firmly in charge, USA would be back in its original #3 spot on the list of countries by Economic Freedom, and more geopolitical problems (the hellholes on the bottom of that list) would be solved for good. The religious bullshit will be abandoned when it is no longer required, and Republicans will be understood to have been very similar to Libertarians, just better prioritized, more realistic, and more patient.

--libman

Time to get your meds adjusted and change the tinfoil in your hat, there, Sparky.

I will consider all medical advice on the basis of scientific merit. For the past ~15 years I required no significant medical intervention, only diet and exercise. My IT and physical security policies (if that's what you mean by "tinfoil hat") are both non-intrusive and effective, but I am always open to suggestions. I have a very long history of using my real name and even my contact information online, so you have absolutely no basis for implying that I'm paranoid, while you yourself are hiding behind an alias. (My posting as "AC" on /. is a result of politically biased mods.)

If you have anything constructive to add to this conversation, you should do so through reasonable arguments, not insults.

--libman

I'd rather do it without government intervention, but... who am I kidding...

THROW ALL PEOPLE WHO STILL USE THOSE STUPID IMPERIAL UNITS INTO CONCENTRATION CAMPS!!!

Yup, even this radical AnCap is on board.

--libman

Which is why Somalia and Afghanistan are the most prosperous nations in the world, while Norway and Canada are hopeless dystopian nightmares. Right?

Somalia is a big-government socialist dystopia, the only difference being that their government is fragmented. It is one kind of socialist state (Sharia law) built on the ruins of other socialist states (ex. the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party). The last time Somalia appeared on an Economic Freedom Index, it was ranked on the same level as Cuba! Afghanistan's situation was largely similar prior to the war.

Canada (#5) is ahead of the USA (#10) on the current Economic Freedom Index, while Norwaystan is #40. Norway has 40.2 percent of its economy directly controlled by government thugs, Canada 39.7%, and USA 38.9%.

Norway was one of the richest countries in the world before it added a welfare state, and since then it has mainly coasted on cultural and economic momentum (not to mention humongous per-capita gas reserves, marine extraction from the Norwegian Sea, which is twice the size of Texas, and other natural resources). Canada has many of the same capitalist virtues as the United States, with more per-capita resources, a more capitalist (open, merit-based) immigration policy, a more favorable economic history (no rural south), and much subsidy from USA in military defense, which allows it to afford a slightly bigger welfare state.

You have to study economics and look at the causal relationships of what makes countries rich or poor. You will find that countries stagnate in absence of economic freedom, although if they were rich to begin with their wealth will not disappear overnight. Greater free trade within the EU has satisfied the expectations for economic growth in those countries. Low fertility rates also help (in the short term) - much easier to make more money if one parent doesn't have to stay home with the kids. In spite of Norway being a hand-picked little representative for whole Europe, I doubt if many Americans would choose to live there - high prices, lower income, conformist culture, etc.

--libman

You realize America is trying to run a first-world state with taxes that are around half of what they are almost anywhere else in the developed world?

Except the most successful / fastest rising countries in the world (ex. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Luxembourg, etc) have lower gov spending than USA does. USA's corporate tax rate, which chases away the most mobile capital, is nearly the world's highest! Even Canada now ranks higher in overall Economic Freedom!

They can afford more "butter" for their tax dollars, because USA is paying for their "guns". Only a few European countries manage to combine high taxes with a decent standard of living, while coasting on the economic momentum of the past - their so-called "success" is thoroughly debunked.

This is the horrible thing about the current Republicans operate... Break program X, whatever X was going continues to coast on inertia in the short term, they brag about how we obviously didn't need X. Then of course the fallout lands, but by then it's too late, because X is Big Gubbermint Soc'lisms now.

When you get rid of a government program, you free those funds to be spent in the voluntary sector - where consumers actually have a choice, and the product / service providers are actually accountable. When you solve problems through reason and technology rather than through the guns of state, the results can be significantly more substantial and cost-effective.

You could make a conjectural argument that private charity would be insufficient to help the poor, which could justify direct redistribution of income, but not everything else that the government does. In the US, the government currently spends $61,000 per poor family - while they remain in poverty! Get the government middlemen out of the picture, and no poor people would remain!

Well, 30 years of "the wealth will trickle down" are now coming back to haunt us. 30 years of "if we only cut taxes enough we'll be more prosperous" is now coming back to haunt us. 30 years of blind faith in the Invisible Hand are haunting us. Starting two land wars, and then cutting taxes instead of passing a war tax (the first time in American history any administration has been so staggeringly foolish) are coming back to haunt us.

Socialists use the term "trickle down" without really understanding what is being discussed. The diffusional benefits are a non-controversial economic phenomenon, but that's not the point. You don't prevent Peter from robbing Paul because Peter too will be better off in the long run, you prevent it because theft is morally and pragmatically wrong - a system of systematized theft destroys all incentive to be productive in the first place! As brains and capital are no longer imprisoned by borders (unless you're willing to build a new Berlin Wall), they will simply go where they are stolen from the least. Why is this so hard to understand?!

It is the socialists who have blind faith in their policies - except the more cynical ones at the top, who see them as a means to power. The supremacy of free market capitalism is backed by every chapter of the entire econometric history of mankind!

We may not like it, but taxes are the price of civilization.

Civilization is not mo

The summary obviously meant to say "sixty thousand", but it used a non-English convention amidst English text (comma vs period for decimal mark vs thousands separator). The donation page itself says "60,000", with a comma.

The current national conventions are as follows:

Countries where a dot "." is used to mark the radix point [(called "decimal point" when dealing with base-10)] include: Australia, Botswana, British West Indies, Brunei, Canada (English-speaking), Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Korea (both North and South), Lebanon, Luxembourg (uses both marks officially), Macau (in Chinese and English text), Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, People's Republic of China, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States (including insular areas), Zimbabwe.

Countries where a comma "," is used to mark the radix point include: Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada (French-speaking), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia (comma used officially, but both forms are in use elsewhere), Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Faroes, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Greenland, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kirgistan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg (uses both marks officially), Macau (in Portuguese text), Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa (officially), Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam.

Although I was born in Russia, I think the English / USA'ian / majority-Asian way (period for decimal point) is better than the continental European way, and the whole world should get on the same page. Think of it as a victory prize for USA winning the Cold War... or a consolation prize for Englishmen (and someday USA'ians too) abandoning their "imperial system" for the much-superior metric system. ;-)

The world already uses periods as logical separators in dotted decimal notation of IP addresses, DNS (though sadly little-endian), member separators, etc.

As for the decorative thousands separation - any character except a period would do, with comma being the tradition, but I think the underscore is best. Commas only cause grammatical confusion. Sixty thousand is 60_000. Seems perfectly natural to someone with experience in a programming language like perl, ruby, or nimrod.

--libman

You are right about Stallman's extreme Leftist views

I try to avoid the irrational left-vs-right "wing" terminology. It originated as a schism within the socialist movement, with those seated on the "right" of some historical deliberative body being "nationalist socialists", and those on the "left" being "internationalist socialists". I reject them both.

One possible exception may be when I'm highlighting the distinction between copyLEFT and copyFREE with upper casing, just as a reading aid (unless I forget). The former is an application of copyright that stands for a particular political special-interest group, while the latter stands for freedom.

and being familiar w/ your link,

By this do you mean the the thread on the Free State Project forum?

I'm not sure why you say that he attacks bad people.

I think you've misunderstood me. I was saying that Stallman is often attacked by other people for all the wrong reasons - and not for the right reasons to be severely critical of him.

Personal attacks against Stallman are often focused on his lifestyle choices, and I think those attacks are often irrational. Hippies are a-OK, as long as they don't initiate aggression (i.e. socialist politics) against others. Even voluntary communists are OK (even though their philosophy is so dysfunctional it is almost never practiced voluntarily). I can respect lispy emacs users, even though I reject GNU Emacs and its license. I can agree with some of Stallman's software design ideas, while disagreeing with others.

What is irreconcilable between me and Stallman is that he believes in using government-veiled violence to get his way, and I refuse to recognize that violence as legitimate.

In the Mid East, w/o saying so in so many words, he backs Jihad terror groups against Israel.

I am rather critical of Israel myself (although I do recognize its accomplishments as warranted). Israel could have been established without violating the Property Rights of the Palestinians... But that's a whole nother debate...

And his views on pedophilia and necrophilia - how on earth can anyone consider that mainstream?

Actually those are some of the issues where Stallman is mostly right (except he'd probably fail to fully recognize Parents' Rights in regard to the former). Pedophilia is clearly an illness, and its indulgence is clearly unethical, but it doesn't constitute rape in every single case. The hysteria over "kiddy porn" is probably the #1 threat to Internet freedom that exists today!

The choice of whether to program in C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, C#, Java or whatever should be a decision of individual programmers, since the FSF is not a company. [...]

A group doesn't need to be "a company" (presumably you mean like with salaried employees) in order to have working standards. There's great usefulness to organizations that set policies for the projects that they accept under their umbrella, as long as people are free to fork off on their own if they so choose. We can have the best of both worlds - rational order as well as freedom. There's nothing wrong with having large "cathedrals", as long as there's a "bazaar" of competition between them.

I myself firmly believe that having every component written in a different language is horrendously ugly! I'm a big fan of all UNIX systems programming taking place in C, and brand new future-oriented "post-POSIX" OS projects starti

When am I going to publish a commercial OS containing those desktop environments? Never. That's when.

That thought doesn't even cross my mind - if I publish anything it is always as open source and "public domain".

Seriously - when I publish open source software, I prefer to use BSD style licenses, but I don't shy away from GPL except when I might need to violate said GPL in order to get value from it. I just don't see that being an issue with desktop environments for Linux... at least not anymore.

It's good that you prefer "BSD-style" (copyFREE) licenses. We need to explain to more people the drawbacks and dangers of copyLEFT. Then, how far they would go in the name of software freedom, is obviously up to them.

Using restrictively-licensed software won't kill you, but it is a step in the wrong direction. It matters more than you'd think, because use of open source software is a relationship - the more familiar you are with a project, the more likely you are to contribute code someday, or to be helpful on its mailing list / bug-tracker / forum / IRC channel, or promote it to friends who see you use it, or leverage it in another (hopefully copyFREE) project, etc. The software you use today is the software you may contribute to years from now, even if you currently don't plan on contributing.

                Watch your thoughts; they become words.
                Watch your words; they become actions.
                Watch your actions; they become habit.
                Watch your habits; they become character.
                Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
                                            -- Lao Tzu

Experience with freer software makes you more free.

--libman

Makes perfect sense - he must've just made a typo. I don't know what kind of connection they have up in heaven to servers here on Earth, but I used to have satellite Internet for a while, and latency was terrible! He should at least throttle Joshua's bandwidth when he [NSFW] BitTorrents Glee...

8-P

--libman

No, posted as "libman". (This crude mechanism of identification does not prove authenticity, but that is a separate issue. I have seen no fake "libman"s here so far... I'll fix that problem later by publishing a list of all my posts from an authenticated source.)

I'm pretty much the polar opposite of an "Anonymous Coward". I always use my real name on the Internet, and even my real address can be known most of the time from things like political donations (ex), domain name records, etc. I also take no steps to hide my IP / hostname (ex. on IRC). My career has taken a huge hit from clients Googling my name and finding much controversy and reactionary commie slander, but that's a price that I'm willing to pay. My reluctantly-AC-like activity on Slashdot is explained entirely by moderator bias, which limits my AlexLibman account to 2 posts per day.

The bad guys know where to find me.

--libman

No, posted as "libman". (This crude mechanism of identification does not prove authenticity, but that is a separate issue. I have seen no fake "libman"s here so far... I'll fix that problem later by publishing a list of all my posts from an authenticated source.)

I'm pretty much the polar opposite of an "Anonymous Coward". I always use my real name on the Internet, and even my real address can be known most of the time from things like political donations (ex), domain name records, etc. I also take no steps to hide my IP / hostname (ex. on IRC). My career has taken a huge hit from clients Googling my name and finding much controversy and reactionary commie slander, but that's a price that I'm willing to pay. My reluctantly-AC-like activity on Slashdot is explained entirely by moderator bias, which limits my AlexLibman account to 2 posts per day.

The bad guys know where to find me.

--libman

now finally I can run a complete UNIX system without any GNU!

Tipped your hand here: UNIX predates GNU, moron. Any # of the commercial BSDs are GNU-clean. Here's another option: write your own fucking software.

In context it is obvious that I meant a complete copyFREE UNIX system, but my statement remains logically correct even if you allow proprietary systems, predicated on the words "I can". I cannot live with a costly or ancient system, as GNU components have penetrated all UNIX flavors that I know of by mid-1990s. (And if "I" don't know about it, then how "can" I run it?) And if I have to write my own software or Frankenstein together pieces of separate OS'es to avoid GPL, then how is the UNIX system "complete"?

Looking through a list of "commercial BSDs", all of them are either "historical" and/or require vendor-specific hardware. (The fact that all of them went out of business instead of endlessly "stealing" copyFREE *BSD code is further evidence in my favor.) Tru64 now even has a GPL filesystem! Even Microsoft's Interix includes GCC! FreeBSD 10 is indeed the closest thing to usable gnushit-free UNIX, with no second place contender in sight.

The only people that have a problem with GPL are those trying to profit off the work or others or trying to cater to those that are trying to profit off the work of others.

... or agree with the philosophical points I've made throughout this thread. Such people exist (you're welcome to stop by on ##copyfree on FreeNode and meet a few), therefore your claim is false.

If you don't want other people (who might, "OH NOES", make a profit from their own innovations downstream from you) to use your software, then keep your own secrets (without Mommy Government's help) and don't call it "free".

Not all people who are opposed to slavery are slaves!

I know you guys like to post this stuff to get the sdot neckbeards frothing, but it's sad because I think you partially believe it.

It is impossible to prove or disprove someone's intentions, but one piece of anecdotal evidence you'll find after enough Googling is that I've spent no less time promoting copyFREE software in libertarian circles than I have criticizing GPL among Linux users.

Of course I entirely believe everything I say, and have been consistently saying for many years (excluding obvious satire, and the few things I have explicitly retracted in light of new information and personal growth). What reason do you have to claim otherwise?

You're afraid of the GPL because it creates a free ecosystem and a stream of paid bugfixes from corporations that need to ship the code. The copyfree movement's only arguments against copyleft is that it confuses merged works (they erroneously imply that they are derived works) and that, OH NOES, the company must distribute the source if they distribute binaries.

You will find many other arguments here throughout.

Prepending a comical "OH NOES" to describing an illegitimate act of government force does not negate its illegitimacy.

It's pathetic and intellectually dishonest;

Pathetic - maybe. I'm here to promote ideas that I believe are crucial to preserving and promoting freedom in the "digital millennium", to the best of my ability, with reason as well as passion. Looking "cool" is a much lesser value for me than fighting for the Truth!

As for the accusation of intellectual dishonesty - I would be very concerned if I saw any evidence behind it.

grow the fuck up and write your own software if you want to 'do with it what yo

The underlining concepts of the Internet are very anarchic and resilient against censorship. What weaknesses do exist are generally the result of government intervention. Regulations (including the DNS root zone) have created centralization - a single point of failure, which potentially is also a single point of censorship. Government-granted monopolies in things like phone and cable have led to the stifling of competition, reduction of consumer choices, and underinvestment in decentralized technologies like: wireless broadband, satellite Internet, local ownership of wired "last mile" infrastructure, local cache proxies, etc. There are ongoing efforts to introduce ever-more destructive regulations (ex. "Net Neutrality"), which need to be opposed at all cost.

Of course part of the blame rests on the consumers themselves, who choose sites like YouTube over P2P protocols, or Facebook over a mesh of smaller less government-entangled sites. It initially makes some sense to do so, since mega-sites can afford far more computer and bandwidth resources, but, as technology progresses and becomes more affordable, their advantages decline. What we need is a more prepper-like Internet user culture - people who mirror all their favorite sites (as well as the sites that are most likely to be censored) in case those sites (or their own global connectivity) disappear! Back in the 80s and early 90s, pretty much every town had a few local dial-up BBS'es, with the most important files of the day available for download. Information was copied, organized, stored, and shared thousands of times - BitTorrent users do the same thing today, but bit-for-bit there's a lot less data-hoarding vigilance than in the olden days... Today most content just sits on a single Web server - and if someone's search engine or Web browser caches it to disk then it does little reliable good without some special effort. (Search engine cache is difficult to scrape and disappears rather quickly, and, even with limitless storage, browser cache is personal, not organized, and incomplete.) Some BBS'es had cost tens of thousands of dollars to operate, and most didn't really make money (many were free, or had limited free accounts) - people did it for the love of technology and access to information. Given one such "prepper" SysOP in a neighborhood with today's technology (a powerful wifi device on his roof wired to some epic storage servers in his basement), and the whole neighborhood would have access to the most vital and the most endangered information even if the government pulls the switch on the Internet at large - which, given this deterrent, would be a lot less likely to happen!

And a part of the blame also goes to Web browser developers, the standards-issuing authorities, and certain Web archiving orgs for not emphasizing resilience and not making decentralization easier. For example, to help prevent link rot, why doesn't every browser support metalink / multi-mirror links as an alternative to a single HREF? Given that there is a great copyfree BT library, why isn't there Web browser support for links inside torrents (and even inside compressed multifile archives)? Why is there no standard for "download this site" - easy bandwidth-efficient mirroring and preemptive local cache? Why doesn't

Nothing could be further from the truth. I prefer copyfree software for philosophical reasons. Copyleft is not really free software - it is open source software with legal threats and anti-capitalist propaganda attached.

Notice how anyone critical of GPL gets "(Score: -1)", regardless of the substance of their arguments... This is making Slashdot look like a commie cult! Having a freer license is one of Haiku OS's greatest accomplishment, which needs to be recognized. They could have gone the easier route and borrowed code from Linux and other GPL projects, but they didn't.

So big kudos to the Haiku OS team for trying to create a Linux competitor in the market segment where the pure copyfree stack is rather weak: user-friendly desktop clients, netbooks, tablets, etc (although FreeBSD + E17 might be gaining ground as well).

--libman

How many pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-religion in government, anti-war Republicans do you know?

A lot of Republicans are only motivated by fiscal issues, and merely "go with the flow" on all other issues to get elected. Democracy is a shitty system - you have to compromise your principles and appeal to a common denominator in order to get anything done. Rational votes who understand economics are less than 10% of the electorate - they already vote for Republicans (or a few for Libertarians, if they vote at all), but obviously that's not enough. If they want to win elections, the Republicans must appeal to the more functional of the remaining idiots - the people who might be religious nuts, but can keep their religious nuttery in their own families and not bother others too much. The dysfunctional idiots who vote for Dems and Greens, on the other hand, want much more massive amounts of violence and theft for their benefit.

Furthermore, not all libertarians are "pro-choice", one example being Ron Paul - abortion is a very complicated issue. From the pragmatic political point of view, however, it's great emotional bait for the aforementioned idiots that Republicans must appeal to. A prohibition is very unlikely to happen even under massive GOP domination, and if it does it would only be on state level, in only a handful of small states where it would be a possibility, so at worst women would have to cross the state lines for a while...

Libertarians most certainly shouldn't be "pro-gay marriage". The rational libertarian position is to get the government out of the business of licensing marriage altogether, turning it into a private contract between individuals - any number of adults of any possible gender. Individual institutions (medical service providers, insurance companies, neighborhood associations, schools, churches, etc) would then be free to choose their own policies, if any of their policies should touch upon the issue of marriage. Many would choose not to recognize "gay marriage", "plural marriage", etc - as is their Right to do so.

And rational gradualist libertarians (like myself) are not universally "anti-war", just anti- stupid overpriced poorly-managed wars like Iraq. (The right way to do it is to build up a Pinochet or a Syngman Rhee, and then help him grab power.) Ending the draft was a very libertarian idea, as is privatization (partial demonopolization) of the military, and future ideas regarding making specific interest groups bare the cost burden of war. Wars that overthrow commie dictators (nations on the very bottom of the Economic Freedom Index list) are morally justified, based on the self-defense Rights of people under those oppressive regimes - it's just a question of who's going to pay for it. One idea is that the multinational corporations dealing with potentially-tyrannical governments could get something like "nationalization insurance", which in case of a government power-grab would hire a private defense agency to defend the Property Rights of the insured, naturally with plenty of free diffusional ("trickle down") benefits for others involved.

Libertarians may be to the right of Republicans on fiscal issues, but they are to the left of Democrats on social issues. [...]

Those are not two sides of the same coin. Social issues are solvable through local or ideally purely contractual restrictions, while fiscal issues are not. People on all sides of a socially-contentious issue would get their way by voting Libertarian, and then voting with their f

The Tea Partiers hate the Libertarians because Libertarians believe in a small government that lets people do things that make them feel funny; while the Tea Partiers believe in a big government morality police, as long as they don't have to pay for it.

You're talking out of your ass.

Both the "Tea Parties" and the "Libertarians" (especially if you mean small-l libertarians, who are not necessarily big-L Libertarians, that is supporters of the U.S. Libertarian Party) are diverse and amorphous groups of people, who overlap to some degree. There are very few accurate generalizations that you can make about either group. If you want to provide constructive criticism, then you should avoid vague labels and criticize specific philosophies and view-points instead.

Plenty of people at Tea Party rallies are as much against "right-wing social engineering" and warfare statism as they are against welfare statism. And plenty of perfectly principled libertarians would support reasonable contractual restrictions on drugs, alcohol, guns, lewd behavior, etc in their neighborhood associations, private schools, businesses, churches / secular voluntary cultural institutions, etc.

Also, Ayn Rand thought abortions were awesome. How else are you going to keep the untermensch from breeding, preach at them?

Unless you can reference a quote that I don't know about, then I must assume that you, again, are talking out of your ass...

There is a big difference between being pro-choice, as she was, and supporting any sort of anti-natalist eugenic bullshit, which she most certainly didn't. We live in a very large and resource-rich solar system (to say nothing of the things beyond), and there's plenty of room in it for everyone, even idiots, just as long as they can agree to follow the rules of capitalism and respect the Rights of others.

I am an atheist, a big Ayn Rand fan, and I am opposed to a prohibition on abortion, but I must say that her view that a fetus has no rights is flawed. Scientifically a fetus is a helpless human being, only circumstantially different from a born baby. What is clear is that it doesn't have any "positive right" to "occupy" the mother's body against her will, but the mother having the right to evict the fetus doesn't equate with the fetus not having a negative Right to life. Since at present levels of technology such an eviction is guaranteed death, then abortion should be legal.

I am a pro-natalist (I see people (who can afford them) having more babies as a good thing), and I don't see how any rational person who studies the current demographic trends and their economic consequences could possibly come to a different conclusion. If (or, rather, "when") in the future we'll have the technology to safely transplant fetuses and/or grow them in an artificial environment, then killing a fetus would be a truly pointless and sadistic thing to do! Even without laws mandating live extraction of the fetus, I think that in the future there'll be a super-abundance of Pro-Life charities willing to pay the mother for the fetus to be extracted unharmed, and to pay for it to be grown to maturity and adopted. (This would be especially true in a rational society that recognizes stronger Parents' Rights (which transfer in case of adoption), and stronger moral responsibilities of grown offspring to take care of their (adoptive) parents, thereby giving people more of an incentive to have and adopt children.)

The need for abortion is yet another "political problem" that science and technolog

Yup, I'm taking my vitamin, omega-3, and acidophilus supplements right on schedule. I have a long history of being publicly open about my medical history, and I have no need of psychiatric meds. (I don't have much use for fruit or cake either - that's what I call junk carbs. I'd rather eat more kale.)

Now, if you want to call me an "idiot", why can't you do so with a rational fact-based argument? If you want to pretend you have testicles, why don't you insult me like a man - with a return address? You wouldn't be the first anonymous coward kiddie I've confronted, unmasked, and make accountable for his words, and you wouldn't be the last...

--libman

Strawmen say the darnest things...

(((Deep breath...)))

OK, um... No one is claiming that domain names or bananas become independent life-forms. Nor voluntarily associated groups of people, like corporations. See elsewhere in this discussion. (Also related, elsewhere in this discussion: "Corporations 101".)

(((And theoretically consensual cannibalism should be legal, but so few people would consent it's largely a non-issue. With so many abuses of government power to rant about, us libertarians ought to have priorities... (Or not!))))

(Signed: AlexLibman's sockpuppet.)

As an anarchist, elected official, and member of a vaguely anti-government group, I've often wondered how big the dossier is on me. Either it's large, in which case it documents a whole lot of perfectly legal stuff I'm doing and is just a waste of bureaucrats' time, or it's small or nonexistent, in which case the bureaucrats are fail for missing a guy who you'd think would be on the list.

My favorite 404 has to be Free Talk Live's:

http://www.freetalklive.com/slashdot

Mark reads a poem based on Poe.

No one said anything about any "utopia"! I'm talking about the pure hard science of economics. (Not to be confused with the socialist corruption of economics that is based on political cronyism and not empirical reality.)

This is the creationism vs evolution debate applied to economics. Human ignorance and failure to understand complex emergence-based systems leads to perceived need for top-down order, whether from the church or from the state. Blind faith in coercive monopolies (governments) cannot reliably produce objectively valid results compared to a scientific process of open inquiry, open experimentation, and individual responsibility for the results (free market capitalism).

The Nordic Potemkin Villages are moderately wealthy (though still much poorer than comparable U.S. states), because they have been the most capitalist countries in the world for centuries, and it takes more than a few decades of welfare statism to destroy it, but their days are numbered. Every time those countries move to the left their economy nears collapse, so they move back to the right, and in spite of high government spending they have some of the highest levels of economic freedom anywhere in the world, which, along with cultural momentum, is what's keeping them afloat.

Private charity is an order of magnitude more efficient at providing for poor people than a government monopoly, because private institutions exist in a competitive environment and are directly accountable to their donors for providing cost-effective results. Government bureaucrats only care about their job security - the more they screw up, the better off they are.

Here's an interesting deconstruction of the idea:

I have this awesome, totally moral idea peeps.

I think that a bunch of friends of mine and I should gather up a bunch of guns, steal a large parcel of land by slaughtering the people who live there until they give us the deed, and build a town. Anyone who doesn't agree with our rules should be shot or locked in a steel cage with other people of the same sex who will inevitably start raping them. Rules are subject to change any time we feel like it. Everyone who lives in our town has to chip in money or they are shot/put into the rape cage. No one can come into our town unless we say, so rape cages or death for outside intruders who aren't like us. We also don't like that plant you have, so rape cages for people who grow or possess that plant. No one is allowed to own their house in our town. Everyone pays rent. Don't pay? Rape cage or death. If you wanna open a business? Gotta pay an extra special rent. Don't pay? Rape cage. Everyone in our town has to accept the money we print, just an FYI. If you use some other money we can't keep track of how you chip in for everything. No using other money. Do it? Rape cage up in this shit.

Here's what we give you in return -

1. If someone rapes you who we didn't permit, give us a call and we'll check it out. If we find them, we'll throw them into a rape cage for a couple years, maybe.

2. If someone murders you, we'll show up after the fact and look around and have someone look at your corpse and maybe see who did it. If we find them, rape cage or death.

3. If someone steals your shit. we'll take a report.

4. We'll make sure the roads are usable. We will of course rent you a piece of plastic that allows you to use them. If we catch you without your special piece of plastic, snap! You go into the cage.

5. We'll let you call yourself "Free"

I think that this idea is totally awesome and it's how everyone else should live. If some other town does things differently, we round up a bunch of folks from our town and send them over to this other town and have them put to death or put into rape cages. Of course you'll have to pay to get our guys over to the other town, and pay for when they get hurt, and pay for them to eat. Everybody has to chip in. Don't chip in? Rape cage or death.

So who else wants to join in with my awesome plan? (Mind you, if you don't... RAPE CAGE OR DEATH)

16 years in the "pound me in the ass" real prison

The popular parlance is now "rape cages".

It's all well and fine for you to type this while sitting comfortably at your computer sipping a hot beverage

It's OK to realize you're one kind of person or another. If you're not the brave and disobedient type, you can sit behind your computer and donate to those who are doing the field work:

http://cdevolution.org/

It takes both kinds.

If you're ordering gear from NewEgg, just use:

http://newegg.freetalklive.com/

to automatically donate ~1% of your purchase to the fund.

You'd just blow it on hookers and credit-default swaps.

That's a good argument for 100% taxation, with everything one could need provided by the government for free... That the government's managerial overhead is staggering, is the cost we ought to be prepared to pay.

Decades after the takeover of retirement, the Universal Healthcare is, finally, taken care of — that's a giant wedge, that will soon allow the government to also take over:

• food:
  • you can't be healthy without good nutrition, can you?
  • it is cheaper to feed you than to treat hunger-caused deceases, is not it?
• housing — much the same reasons as above — housing projects for everyone!
• College curriculum — by making the Federal government the sole source of tuition loans, it was placed into position to set rules for both would-be students ("volunteer" or else ...) and the colleges (teach this and that, or else ...) — the colleges will soon be as terrific as the public schools already are

Soon, the ideal of the all-knowing government staffed with benevolent well-meaning bureaucrats (as opposite to the evil private corporate CEOs) will be achieved. We will have no money (the root of all evil), nor need for any, as everything we truly need will be provided by the more equal ones in power. Slaves on plantations had a similar deal — the fools disliked it for some reason...

It is a person's individual responsibility to decide which social interactions are permissible in his/her life or not, and in the case of a child that responsibility falls onto parents / guardians. Actual acts of aggression obviously need to be punished, but "cyber-bullying" falls within the margins of normal human interaction (i.e. free speech) that the "victim" could have walked away from at any time. So the sociological question to ask is - why didn't she?

The vast majority of the social problems children face today come from government-enforced non-consensual over-socialization with randomly chosen "peers" in dumbed-down part-time political brainwashing prisons called "schools", which gives infinite power to the state and dis-empowers the parents from having any actual influence on their children's lives. The motivations and incentives that power-hungry government bureaucrats have toward children are very different from those of the family / voluntarily chosen peer group that the human psyche has evolved to deal with, with depression and violence being the obvious result. The government treats children as cattle to be herded around at the pace of the lowest degenerate, and it matters not what goes on inside their heads as long as they can be milked (taxed) for the government's benefit! You'd have to be a psychopath not to be driven close to suicide by a system like that!

From the long-term evolutionary point of view, this one suicide is a perfect example of this horrible socialist system leading to extinction: outright suicides are still rare, but billions of children world-wide are simply not being born as fertility rates in socialist countries drop toward zero. What kind of parents would want to spend that much time, emotion, and money raising little snitcher drones to be brainwashed and controlled by the state?! Billions of children don't kill themselves biologically but experience a similar psychological suicide: the death of hope, of spirit, of their individual sense of life... Your whole socialist society is doomed to gradual suicide over the coming centuries, and the sooner the better! A freer society (the logical ideal being Anarcho-Capitalism) would empower the parents by recognizing their Natural Rights, thus resulting in greater cultural freedom, greater intellectual diversity, incentives for more results-driven career-oriented education, better mental health within the family, healthier children, higher fertility rates, and far better economic and thus scientific growth.

Looks like all the e-mails I've recently sent Theo went straight to his head...

lulz

Yet another bullshit statistic Euro-socialists like to throw in our faces bites the dust! ( Click here for some others ...) USA isn't perfect, but it's still one of the freest economies in the world.

Socialism / liberal democracy in Europe is a failure, as it is all over the world. Any European countries that are doing OK are wealthy not because of socialism, but in spite of it, and at the cost of a massive demographic collapse. You can't reject the immutable laws of economics, which all point to free market capitalism as the ideal, any more than you can reject the laws of physics!

The FCC is unconstitutional -- the legislature gave wide-ranging power to an unelected bureaucracy, which it is not authorized to do (not that the US Constitution matters a damn nowadays)

The FCC does nothing to protect my life, liberty, or property. In 99% of the USA, there is so much wide-open bandwidth, there will never be a serious problem with conflicting signals in the electromagnetic spectrum.

If it were not a Federal crime, I'd probably throw up an antenna and broadcast community radio in my town. But for the tens of thousands of dollars in license applications and hours of paperwork, it's not worth my while. Sure, there's Part-15 radio, so weak you're lucky if you can hear it 3 blocks down the street -- not worth it either.

Government does what it does best -- squashing the little guy, protecting the larger moneyed interests, all in the name of keeping us safe.

RMS is a skilled manipulator. I guess you've read the same gnu.org page that I have read, but failed to see through the nuanced BS and recognize it for what it is: a defense "intellectual property" laws!

This isn't really about GPL vs BSD (I actually prefer public domain), this is about government force.

You do have the right to do whatever you want with reflections of other people's work in your own mind, or on your computer. Quoting my recent post from another forum:

You get to own yourself and the consequences of your actions (i.e. capital), but not their immaterial reflections in the minds of other people. By immaterial I mean absence of scarcity: you own your body, because it can only serve one owner at a time, but not a copy of your DNA on someone else's computer, which once acquired can be copied without limit. You own your face, but you cannot put a post-it note on your forehead that says "by seeing my face you agree to the following contract" and expect that to be enforceable.

You can own explicit contractual privileges, land, plants, animals, robots, and even entire planets, but there's just no such thing as a right to enslave other people (or "rational economic actors" - possibly including AI entities and extraterrestrials)!

Consider parents' rights for example: parents should rightfully get power over their children (to fill the initial gap in a child's ability to handle the rights to liberty and property), but parents' rights are limited by the rights of the children themselves, up to a point where (unless they have a mental disability) they can come to own themselves outright. The same thing applies to author's rights as well: when their ideas move out of their mind and onto the minds of others, the second-hander minds have rights as well.

You can always prove whose parent you are, and if you take certain steps you can prove that you thought of something first, and I strongly believe that a society should value those accomplishments by ostracizing plagiarists and children who don't take care of their parents, but that should all be done in absence of blunt government force.

Now, once again, this socialist-leaning forum is not a good place to have this debate, especially when outspoken points of view like mine are restricted to only 2 posts a day. If you want to debate this further then please go to a more libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist forum instead, where dissenting views are likely to be treated more substantively, and not stifled as they are here.

This thread really demonstrates how narrowly most /.'ers view libertarianism, which isn't surprising considering the recent antics of the national LP like nominating that fraud Bob Barr and the ridiculous wikipedia article. As a voluntaryist/anarchist/"little l" libertarian, I'd like to point out that the philosophy of individual liberty requires as an absolute, the respect of everyone else's liberty first and foremost, provided they are not harming anyone or anyone's property (generally speaking. discussions on property rights abound. libertarians would never oppose voluntary communes, etc. as long as violence is not used to force others to participate). This boils down to the non-aggression principle. Because of this ultimately respectfully pacifist ethos, most libertarians do not actively seek to suppress fringe speech or otherwise interfere with the nonviolent activities of other individuals. This does not mean that they agree with said (often crazy) speech. For instance, I've never even heard of the Heartland Institute, nor any of the other allegedly-libertarian organizations or individuals referenced in TFA for attacking free software. Free software is incredibly libertarian, though telling me how I can or cannot prioritize traffic on my network is not. My customers are not forced to remain so.

People interested in individual liberty should check out The Free State Project and Reason Magazine. For fun, check out Free Talk Live, a liberty-oriented radio show that takes calls on absolutely any subject and reports regularly on the FSP.

I still think the op meant godwin's (the context implies such anyway), there is in fact a "goddard's law" internet meme. http://wiki.freetalklive.com/Goddard's_Law

I hadn't heard of it before today either.

I regularly listen to a podcast that calls for the end of the United States Federal government. Am I a terrorist? Or is the host of the show a terrorist? Were the anti-federalists terrorists?

I see a lot of Slashdoters, claim the Libertarian mantle or attack it, without a clear definition of what "Libertarianism" is. Many seem to think it is a mix of the two prominent American political parties (social liberals and economic conservatives). Others seem to think it's just about individualism and so they embrace it out of love for individual rights or condemn it a "social Darwinism." In reality, it is much more fundamental and philosophical.

Here is a basic definition:
Libertarianism is the belief that it is immoral to use force or the threat of force on other people if they are not using force on you.

The application of this results in conclusions such as:

Drugs may have negative effects on the user, but as long as someone can smoke pot without endangering others, it is wrong to initiate force on him by arresting or punishing him.

Poverty and social ills should be solved with voluntary compassion rather than threatening others with government force if they do not pay taxes.

People should be able to interact in the market place freely without using force to institute monopolies (regulating competitors out of the market, using the military to prop up the oil industry, or using the government to protect so called "intellectual property") and without using force to demand products and services.

More detailed definitions can be gathered from:
Wikipedia
Internet Radio
Books

All this proposed law would do, is shut out the small-time criminals, and ensure that only large operations with (say) $50,000 to spend and a front organization can do the phishing.

The hard fact is, the free market is the only long-term way to ensure that criminals are outed efficiently.

This is old news to 'net heads, anarcocapitalists, and Free Talk Live listeners.

Mr. Gannon, the gentleman in question that the cops did such a disservice to, is currently on the air. You can listen to what he had to say at the Free Talk Live website (all their shows are archived & available for download... you'll be wanting FTL2006-06-29)

We've left messages for the guy who made the videos (he wasn't home). We've also asked him to call in to Free Talk Live tonight (7-10 PM EST). I hope he does.

Mr. Thompson comes across as a deluded, selfimportant, lawerish, jack-ass of an individual. Granted, the host was intentionally pushing his buttons ("I think it should be legal for convenience stores to sell beer to 10-year olds! Parents will boycott the place and it'll go out of business... let the market sort it out!") but surly Mr. Thompson knew this was going to be an interview with someone whose views were diametrically opposed to his own. Surely he could have at least engaged in a real, 2-way debate?

Thompson got so irked by the free-market ideas, he wouldn't even discuss the concept. He hung up on the interview! What an infantile, childish little busybody! These are the kind of asses that make this kind of law to "protect the children!"

Here's the clip:
http://freetalklive.com/files/thompson.mp3

Mr. Thompson comes across as a deluded, selfimportant, lawerish, jack-ass of an individual. Granted, the host was intentionally pushing his buttons ("I think it should be legal for convenience stores to sell beer to 10-year olds! Parents will boycott the place and it'll go out of business... let the market sort it out!") but surly Mr. Thompson knew this was going to be an interview with someone whose views were diametrically opposed to his own. Surely he could have at least engaged in a real, 2-way debate?

Thompson got so irked by the free-market ideas, he wouldn't even discuss the concept. He hung up on the interview! What an infantile, childish little busybody! These are the kind of asses that make this kind of law to "protect the children!"

Here's the clip:
http://freetalklive.com/files/thompson.mp3

It's an Anarchocapitalist/Libertarian podcast. I hang out on their forum a lot, it's pretty good as far as forums go, which means it's only 80% drivel (instead of 95%+)

FTL is also on the radio; on Saturday nights they have about a dozen affiliates. It's pretty cool to call in to a podcast with essentially zero phone screening and find yourself on the airwave in a dozen cities across the US. And yes, they will talk about literally anything. New Years' eve they always ask for extremely wasted people to call; that's always funny. They usually also ask for people who vehemently disagree with the hosts. The arguments get pretty heated, which can be fun.

It's an Anarchocapitalist/Libertarian podcast. I hang out on their forum a lot, it's pretty good as far as forums go, which means it's only 80% drivel (instead of 95%+)

FTL is also on the radio; on Saturday nights they have about a dozen affiliates. It's pretty cool to call in to a podcast with essentially zero phone screening and find yourself on the airwave in a dozen cities across the US. And yes, they will talk about literally anything. New Years' eve they always ask for extremely wasted people to call; that's always funny. They usually also ask for people who vehemently disagree with the hosts. The arguments get pretty heated, which can be fun.

It's an Anarchocapitalist/Libertarian podcast. I hang out on their forum a lot, it's pretty good as far as forums go, which means it's only 80% drivel (instead of 95%+)

FTL is also on the radio; on Saturday nights they have about a dozen affiliates. It's pretty cool to call in to a podcast with essentially zero phone screening and find yourself on the airwave in a dozen cities across the US. And yes, they will talk about literally anything. New Years' eve they always ask for extremely wasted people to call; that's always funny. They usually also ask for people who vehemently disagree with the hosts. The arguments get pretty heated, which can be fun.

Endless fun at the TSA checkout line!