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The Riches of Open Source
Daniel Dvorkin writes "This BusinessWeek article argues convincingly that Linus Torvalds has more resources at his disposal than Bill Gates. Not only is it a nice overview of Why Open Source Really Matters pitched to a non-technical audience, but it makes a solid argument in favor of OSS in general and Linux in particular, from a solidly capitalist perspective."
And I am not afraid to stand by my words.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Utility industries have not been completely de-regulated. Let me explain how government regulation works. The government regulates something, trying to solve a problem it fabricated. Then it realizes that it just created another problem, so it regulates to get rid of that problem, while creating another problem anew. The process predictably goes on an on, until we have communism, or the government realizes that it's interventions have harmed things. The same applies to the utilities. Because the government only partially de-regulated, enormous problems caused by the regulation that's left over (which now isn't being counter-acted by other limiting regulation) are revealed. The solution is simply to completely deregulate all at once.
In regards to people who drink tainted water, and other pollution torts. Pollution is exactly that -- a tort. A violation of private property, analagous to tresspassing, and should be treated as such. If a company pollutes the air, and this causes damage to my trees or reduces the purity of water that I own, then the company should have to pay to either compensate me, retroactively fix [purify] the problem, or eliminate the problem.
To understand how the free market solves the problem of pollution, where government regulation is a failure, see Rothbard's For a New Liberty:
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty12.asp
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen