Your short-sighted analysis ignores everything else, aside from this one program that you want to work. Certainly, that figures into it. However, there are other things -- like the problems with RedHat's non-standards compliant Linux, stability, security, etc. Maybe it happens that Debian is a better choice, all things considered, maybe it's RedHat. It probably varies with the size of the company (smaller companies often get more benefits from stepping outside of the "mainstream" distribution). You are cherry-picking the facts to arrive at a pre-destined conclusion that you want to arrive at. No, actually, you are describing a situation in which any intelligent person would choose RedHat over any other distribution. There are other situations in which RedHat wouldn't be chosen, such as when the the benefits of the overall system is deemed of more importance than any one application.
"If you're going to whine about bias, you better be willing to whine about everyone. Otherwise you're nothing more than a biased shill yourself."
I never said that I like G.W. Bush, or Kerry, or anyone else. The only person in politics who you'll ever hear me give unconditional praise to is Ron Paul.
All that your statement shows is your own bias and assumptions, such as the apparent assumption that if I don't like Moore and criticize him, I'm probably a fan of G.W. Bush. Bush is a liar, Kerry is a liar: they're both liars, crooks, and socialists (small s). It's usually not worth my time to completely deconstruct either. Between the two of them, it's just a question of who's dick you're going to get fucked with. I'll vote for Badnarik.
Pointing to others and saying "they do it too" isn't a justification. If I came to your house and demanded that you pay me 30% of your income (at gunpoint), you would rightly call me a crook and a robber. If I point my finger and say "well, the State does the same thing!" that doesn't justify my actions, but only shows that the State is also composed of crooks and robbers.
It is one thing to have a bias. I'm an anarcho-capitalist, libertarian, and Misean (Austrian), for example, and have no regrets about stating that. Someone else might be a Statist socialist in line with Marx and Engels. It is quite another thing to lie about facts or to purposefully deceive people, putting together information in a blatantly misleading manner. Thus, while I can say that all of Marx' theories were wrong, I can't accuse him of lying and deceitfulness (as I can accuse Moore of), because Marx was an accurate historian (Austrian's analyze the same history as him, with different conclusions, for example).
Saying that someone works at the Independent Instittue, and thus is lying, is bullshit. Likewise, saying that their institute is "market-oriented" doesn't discredit them. Just briefly looking over that article, it seems like it's largely saying "well, you have to understand the movie from this perspective (namely, that it's designed to cater to leftie-commies), and then most of the 'deceits' aren't relevant". It seems like people are saying "well, this is a documentary, so of course he can do all of these shady things, like cut'n'paste audio clips and take information vastly out of context". That's not a justification to me; to the extent that the argument works, all that I can conclude from it is that all documentaries, insofar as they are like Moore's, are deceitful and worthless crap.
See Fahrenheit 9/11: 59 Deceits. Documentaries are worthless crap. On many occasions, in Moore's film, he is misleading and deceiving, even cut-'n-pasting audio clips, or leaving out important conext.
David Kopel has been called into question by many, but his article illustrates there are problems with F/911.
Well, in that case, RedHat should get with the fucking program. FHS is very well-designed, and is the standard for GNU/Linux. The reason for said testing problems (software that works on RedHat possibly not working other distributions) is due to RedHat's idiotic decision to deviate from a perfectly good standard.
In that case, it is not correct to say that Debian is a "non-standard distribution". It simply isn't supported by Oracle and IBM. This really shouldn't be much of a problem if the distros supported by Oracle and IBM and Debian adhere strongly to standards (like FHS).
As noted in the above message, I don't use Debian, but Gentoo (and I probably wouldn't recommend Gentoo to a corporation, due to lack of big-company support, unless there were special circumstances that hyperbolized the benefits of Gentoo).
I'm not "defensive about my operating system". I'm just curious by what the person meant when they were talking about "non-standard". RedHat is not a "standard", nor is Gentoo, or any other distribution. They are simply implementations. It is simply one among many distributions of GNU/Linux. FHS, on the other hand, is a standard. Thus, any Linux that doesn't adhere to FHS (such as GoboLinux) is non-standard.
What do you mean by "doing everything the Debian way"? Are you saying Debian doesn't adhere to the FHS? Or are you just saying that -- while complying with standards relevant to a *nix -- it does things differently than RedHat or SuSe?
If you're simply saying that it does things differently from RedHat, then who says that the way RedHat does things is "the standard"? As for "special config tools", etc, why are Debian's config tools "special Debian config tools", and RedHat's config tools not "special RedHat config tools"?
It seems to me that your either saying that Debian doesn't adhere to standards (such as FHS), which would be a good criticism (even though sometimes standards are wrong), but in which case I'd want some examples; or you're saying that it doesn't do things the "RedHat" way, which is like complaining about it because all of its programs aren't in C:\Program Files.
Since when has Debian ever had the "latest greatest" anything? (responding to another post)
There are advantages of Debian, but being up to date on the latest software isn't one of them.
Debian offers easy upgrades with few problems, and great stability. If the company can get IBM or another company support Debian, then they should switch, if the switch-over costs aren't larger than the gains, compensating for time-preference (the present value of the future benefits of switching to Debian, compared to the present cost of switching over to Debian).
Whatever money the company has sunken into support for RedHat is irrelevant. People here saying that the company should make a decision based on that don't understand economics. Past costs are already sunken, and are a given. The only relevant thing is which course of action is going to be the most beneficial into the future.
If the benefits of switching over to Debian -- minus the costs of switching over, and the cost of getting support for Debian -- exceed the benefits of staying with RedHat (for which we must consider the support to be a "part of it"), then the switch should be made. Otherwise, it shouldn't.
If the switch shouldn't be made now, then it will probably be something that will be worth pursuing when the support contract runs out, if there are reputable companies offering good support for Debian.
That from the beginning, I was referring to taking the ideas and facts in another Encylopedia, and writing them in your own work, while (if appropriate) omitting ones you deemed to be wrong, and adding other relevant facts (if the article was incomplete).
Hey, moron, copyright doesn't cover facts. Period. End of discussion. Facts cannot be copyrighted. You can't copyright some historical data, or fact, such as the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a mercantalist, in the footsteps of Clay and Hamilton; or any other facts for that matter. I thought I was very clear on this. Maybe you should Google "copyright" to see what it covers. Only the expression of an idea can be copyrighted, not the idea itself. I'm sorry that you're so stupid. You've plainly invalidated your claims to be a lawyer.
Facts cannot be the basis for "derivative works". End of discussion. Going back to the original discussion of encyclopedias, reading one encylopedia entry on a topic, listing the facts, and writing them in your own words is not a "derivative work", you moron. Perhaps you are too stupid to understand this, but those "facts" werent' created by the person who wrote the encylopedia article. That person had to find them from somewhere else. If they can put those facts in an article, then so can anyone else. Your idiotic idea of what a "derivative work" is would make the original encylopedia articles impossible in the first place. Stupid fuck.
To be clear, the sequel to Gone with the Wind is a derivative work. Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State was not a derivative work of Human Action. Rothbard restated and reviewed many of the same economic facts. However, MES is not a derivative work of HA, as facts (nor ideas) cannot be copyrighted.
What a fucking moron. Next time, think before you talk, or shut the fuck up.
All I want to know is "Will my X.org actually use my GRAPHICS CARD to render the desktop, not the CPU?" In other words, I don't want it to look prettier -- I want it to be faster. Pretty does not mean functional.
The only strongly free-market economists are the Austrians, who are not well-represented in the journals. Moderate interventionists, who favor a "little bit" of the free market, like Friedman and the Chicagoeans, have more representation. However, most economists are flat-out interventionists, who think that the State needs to intervene in the free market in all sorts of manners to "correct" it (in reality, the problems are always created by the State, and more interventionism only leads to more problems, which leads to more interventionism, in cyclical causlity). The free market is not perfect. It is not nirvana. However, any intervention in the free market is firstly immoral (as it necessarily involves violent force), and secondly harmful.
Someone who thinks that free-market economics is dominant among econimists is completely ignorant of reality. Free-market economics dominated more than a hundred years ago, when there was Carl Menger. Today, the Keynesians and supply-siders -- both serious interventionist schools -- dominate.
States encourage the tragedy of the commons. Because nobody owns the resource -- whatever it may be -- over-use is encouraged. The only way in which States can use prices is because there is a partial free-market elsewhere (this is what the USSR did). It is rather like "playing house". You clearly don't understand our current mess of a medical system, which is no-longer insurance but rather pre-payment, which encourages constantly escalating prices. I'd suggest you search Mises.org for "medicare". For a solution, to the current mess, see A Four-Step Health-Care Solution by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. As for your hogwash about the State being more far-sighted than the free-market, see what the USSR and other States with lots of intervention did to their environment. When resources are not privately owned, they are not preserved and are not put to their best use. Regarding your confusion on economic calculation, I would suggest you read THE SPHERE OF ECONOMIC CALCULATION by Ludwig von Mises, and the chapter after it (page-by-page viewing of each chapter-section).
Economizing behaviour is always rational. If we only have 1 liter of water, we don't use it to wash ourselfs -- we use it for drinking. In a complex economy, money-prices allow for economic calculation and the efficient allocation of resources. Eliminating money-prices -- as was done in the USSR -- makes this impossible. That is, eliminating the profits-losses test makes this impossible. All action is necessarily rational (because all actors, in order to act, have to presume causality and understand it).
Obviously, what is researched is heavily influenced by State (as opposed to voluntary free-market) funding. State-funding cannot rationally allocate resources, due to the inability to perform economic calculation.
Copyright does not cover facts and ideas. Historical data on Lincoln's presidency is simply a bunch of facts, which cannot be covered by copyright. What libertarianism is is an idea, which is also a bunch of facts. You cannot copyright facts.
If I take an article from Britannica on Lincoln and list the ideas and facts that it's communicating, then write them in my own words, it is not in any way copyright violation (hence, re-writing what someone else wrote isn't copyright violation). Any assertion to the contrary is simply bullshit, made by someone who doesn't know wtf he is talking about. How you could assert the contrary is beyond me. It would make all research, books, and such impossible, as all works rely on previous works.
Typical idiotic lawyers, wanting to make a process wasteful and inefficient.
Here's the Britannica Online's discussion of libertarianism. Here's the Wikipedia discussion of libertarianism. Both encylopedia's mention Ayn Rand -- which is appropriate, given that her ideas overlap very much with libertarianism -- but do not mention that Rand was not and did not consider herself a libertarian. Wikipedia has a lengthy discussion of the topic, which I would consider a good introduction for a college-student; Britannica's introduction to the topic might suffice for a five-year old. In fact, Britannica's "discussion" of libertarianism is barely more informative than a dictionary-definition of libertarianism.
I have an old collection of Britannica's in my closet, collecting dust. I consider them a depricated tool that are only of use to children. To adults, they are barely more useful than dictionary-definitions, and one will find more comprehensive information from Wikipedia, or simply a well-informed web-search.
One individual, in a debate with me online, even claimed that since an economist (Murray Rothbard) wasn't mentioned in the Britannica, his work wasn't worth reading. This is the kind of idiocy that these biased depricated encylopedia's furnish. Childish thinking among adults. Encylopedia's, including Wikipedia, are a useful introduction to ideas. They do not cover all important ideas, and -- even Wikipedia, certainly Britannica -- offer depricated and flawed overviews of ideas, masking the complexity in a field.
Take exactly the same article from Britannica and reword it. There's no violation of copyright there. Copyright only covers the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
PS: Copyright, patents, trademarks, tradesecrets are bullshit; costs of protecting some companies business models are socialized.
Particularly in the social sciences -- such as economics -- peer review has been a poor maintainer of quality. In the social sciences, pro-Statist ideas dominate, while free-market ideas are systematically selected against (this is not a conspiracy, but it is simply a natural outcome of the way the system is set up, with State-funding etc). However, the problem isn't so severe in the natural sciences, where the issue of pro-State vs. free-market is marginal.
I agree, however, that Wikipedia has a better model.
We can't precisely determine who stole what, and it's likely that if you go back far enough, everyone's ancestor's stole from or killed everyone else' ancestors, etc etc. Why should we go through the legal nightmare of trying to unwind the long tangled history of thievery, rape, murder?
Look, if someone has a proveable claim -- e.g., my great-grandfather stole land from their great-grandfather, so therefore the land which I inherited really doesn't belong to me -- then I'm all for courts returning the land to it's rightful owners. You can only legitimately pass on, give away, or trade away that which you have rightfully acquired.
Your argument about the rich stealing from the poor is flatly wrong. Quite frankly, sounds like Marxist crap. Oftentime it is the other way around. There is no systematic relationship of thievery between the rich and the poor. There is a systematic relationship of thievery between those who are part of the State-apparatus and those who are not: the State-sector is everywhere and always parasitic.
We need to use empirical evidence to determine when a priori true axioms apply. One of the postulates of Austrianism is that there is a diversity of resources, both human and natural. Obviously, this applies in this world. However, if we were magically transported to a completely homogenous world, that would not be true. The action axiom would not apply in a universe without people, for example (indeed, in such a universe, there'd be no-one to formulate that axiom [by people, I mean any entities of higher intelligence]).
Whether or not "free will" is an illusion, there's still a distinction between action and reaction; it is just not that "comforting" distinction that we'd like to think of it as (namely, that we have free choice).
It is true that an individual is a collective of cells. However, unlike a person, a society does not have a consciousness and a life. It is simply short-hand for the interactions among many individuals. Furthermore, cells and organs are not individually "self-conscious", but only the whole person is.
You will know that fiat-currency was not "chosen" by the free market, but imposed by top-down State-interventions. For a long period of time, the private holding of gold for monetary purposes was outlawed -- that is, our gold was confiscated -- stolen -- by the State, and replaced with unredeemable pieces of paper.
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Your short-sighted analysis ignores everything else, aside from this one program that you want to work. Certainly, that figures into it. However, there are other things -- like the problems with RedHat's non-standards compliant Linux, stability, security, etc. Maybe it happens that Debian is a better choice, all things considered, maybe it's RedHat. It probably varies with the size of the company (smaller companies often get more benefits from stepping outside of the "mainstream" distribution). You are cherry-picking the facts to arrive at a pre-destined conclusion that you want to arrive at. No, actually, you are describing a situation in which any intelligent person would choose RedHat over any other distribution. There are other situations in which RedHat wouldn't be chosen, such as when the the benefits of the overall system is deemed of more importance than any one application.
"If you're going to whine about bias, you better be willing to whine about everyone. Otherwise you're nothing more than a biased shill yourself."
I never said that I like G.W. Bush, or Kerry, or anyone else. The only person in politics who you'll ever hear me give unconditional praise to is Ron Paul.
All that your statement shows is your own bias and assumptions, such as the apparent assumption that if I don't like Moore and criticize him, I'm probably a fan of G.W. Bush. Bush is a liar, Kerry is a liar: they're both liars, crooks, and socialists (small s). It's usually not worth my time to completely deconstruct either. Between the two of them, it's just a question of who's dick you're going to get fucked with. I'll vote for Badnarik.
Pointing to others and saying "they do it too" isn't a justification. If I came to your house and demanded that you pay me 30% of your income (at gunpoint), you would rightly call me a crook and a robber. If I point my finger and say "well, the State does the same thing!" that doesn't justify my actions, but only shows that the State is also composed of crooks and robbers.
It is one thing to have a bias. I'm an anarcho-capitalist, libertarian, and Misean (Austrian), for example, and have no regrets about stating that. Someone else might be a Statist socialist in line with Marx and Engels. It is quite another thing to lie about facts or to purposefully deceive people, putting together information in a blatantly misleading manner. Thus, while I can say that all of Marx' theories were wrong, I can't accuse him of lying and deceitfulness (as I can accuse Moore of), because Marx was an accurate historian (Austrian's analyze the same history as him, with different conclusions, for example).
Saying that someone works at the Independent Instittue, and thus is lying, is bullshit. Likewise, saying that their institute is "market-oriented" doesn't discredit them. Just briefly looking over that article, it seems like it's largely saying "well, you have to understand the movie from this perspective (namely, that it's designed to cater to leftie-commies), and then most of the 'deceits' aren't relevant". It seems like people are saying "well, this is a documentary, so of course he can do all of these shady things, like cut'n'paste audio clips and take information vastly out of context". That's not a justification to me; to the extent that the argument works, all that I can conclude from it is that all documentaries, insofar as they are like Moore's, are deceitful and worthless crap.
David Kopel has been called into question by many, but his article illustrates there are problems with F/911.
Analysis from libertarians -- people who think Bush is a terrible President, and hate war -- has been critical of Moore. Search Lewrockwell.com for Michael Moore and Mises.og for Michael Moore.
Well, in that case, RedHat should get with the fucking program. FHS is very well-designed, and is the standard for GNU/Linux. The reason for said testing problems (software that works on RedHat possibly not working other distributions) is due to RedHat's idiotic decision to deviate from a perfectly good standard.
In that case, it is not correct to say that Debian is a "non-standard distribution". It simply isn't supported by Oracle and IBM. This really shouldn't be much of a problem if the distros supported by Oracle and IBM and Debian adhere strongly to standards (like FHS).
As noted in the above message, I don't use Debian, but Gentoo (and I probably wouldn't recommend Gentoo to a corporation, due to lack of big-company support, unless there were special circumstances that hyperbolized the benefits of Gentoo).
I'm not "defensive about my operating system". I'm just curious by what the person meant when they were talking about "non-standard". RedHat is not a "standard", nor is Gentoo, or any other distribution. They are simply implementations. It is simply one among many distributions of GNU/Linux. FHS, on the other hand, is a standard. Thus, any Linux that doesn't adhere to FHS (such as GoboLinux) is non-standard.
Maybe not as big a problem as it seems, if both the test Linux distribution and the untested Linux distribution adhere to standards (such as FHS).
What do you mean by "doing everything the Debian way"? Are you saying Debian doesn't adhere to the FHS? Or are you just saying that -- while complying with standards relevant to a *nix -- it does things differently than RedHat or SuSe?
If you're simply saying that it does things differently from RedHat, then who says that the way RedHat does things is "the standard"? As for "special config tools", etc, why are Debian's config tools "special Debian config tools", and RedHat's config tools not "special RedHat config tools"?
It seems to me that your either saying that Debian doesn't adhere to standards (such as FHS), which would be a good criticism (even though sometimes standards are wrong), but in which case I'd want some examples; or you're saying that it doesn't do things the "RedHat" way, which is like complaining about it because all of its programs aren't in C:\Program Files.
PS: Personally, I use Gentoo.
"The latest greatest software via apt-get"
Since when has Debian ever had the "latest greatest" anything? (responding to another post)
There are advantages of Debian, but being up to date on the latest software isn't one of them.
Debian offers easy upgrades with few problems, and great stability. If the company can get IBM or another company support Debian, then they should switch, if the switch-over costs aren't larger than the gains, compensating for time-preference (the present value of the future benefits of switching to Debian, compared to the present cost of switching over to Debian).
Whatever money the company has sunken into support for RedHat is irrelevant. People here saying that the company should make a decision based on that don't understand economics. Past costs are already sunken, and are a given. The only relevant thing is which course of action is going to be the most beneficial into the future.
If the benefits of switching over to Debian -- minus the costs of switching over, and the cost of getting support for Debian -- exceed the benefits of staying with RedHat (for which we must consider the support to be a "part of it"), then the switch should be made. Otherwise, it shouldn't.
If the switch shouldn't be made now, then it will probably be something that will be worth pursuing when the support contract runs out, if there are reputable companies offering good support for Debian.
That from the beginning, I was referring to taking the ideas and facts in another Encylopedia, and writing them in your own work, while (if appropriate) omitting ones you deemed to be wrong, and adding other relevant facts (if the article was incomplete).
Hey, moron, copyright doesn't cover facts. Period. End of discussion. Facts cannot be copyrighted. You can't copyright some historical data, or fact, such as the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a mercantalist, in the footsteps of Clay and Hamilton; or any other facts for that matter. I thought I was very clear on this. Maybe you should Google "copyright" to see what it covers. Only the expression of an idea can be copyrighted, not the idea itself. I'm sorry that you're so stupid. You've plainly invalidated your claims to be a lawyer.
The actual intangible idea may not be copyrighted.
Facts cannot be the basis for "derivative works". End of discussion. Going back to the original discussion of encyclopedias, reading one encylopedia entry on a topic, listing the facts, and writing them in your own words is not a "derivative work", you moron. Perhaps you are too stupid to understand this, but those "facts" werent' created by the person who wrote the encylopedia article. That person had to find them from somewhere else. If they can put those facts in an article, then so can anyone else. Your idiotic idea of what a "derivative work" is would make the original encylopedia articles impossible in the first place. Stupid fuck.
To be clear, the sequel to Gone with the Wind is a derivative work. Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State was not a derivative work of Human Action. Rothbard restated and reviewed many of the same economic facts. However, MES is not a derivative work of HA, as facts (nor ideas) cannot be copyrighted.
What a fucking moron. Next time, think before you talk, or shut the fuck up.
on my desktop, Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS w/ 64MB RAM. On my laptop, ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 w/ 32MB DDR video memory.
All I want to know is "Will my X.org actually use my GRAPHICS CARD to render the desktop, not the CPU?" In other words, I don't want it to look prettier -- I want it to be faster. Pretty does not mean functional.
Someone who thinks that free-market economics is dominant among econimists is completely ignorant of reality. Free-market economics dominated more than a hundred years ago, when there was Carl Menger. Today, the Keynesians and supply-siders -- both serious interventionist schools -- dominate.
States encourage the tragedy of the commons. Because nobody owns the resource -- whatever it may be -- over-use is encouraged. The only way in which States can use prices is because there is a partial free-market elsewhere (this is what the USSR did). It is rather like "playing house". You clearly don't understand our current mess of a medical system, which is no-longer insurance but rather pre-payment, which encourages constantly escalating prices. I'd suggest you search Mises.org for "medicare". For a solution, to the current mess, see A Four-Step Health-Care Solution by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. As for your hogwash about the State being more far-sighted than the free-market, see what the USSR and other States with lots of intervention did to their environment. When resources are not privately owned, they are not preserved and are not put to their best use. Regarding your confusion on economic calculation, I would suggest you read THE SPHERE OF ECONOMIC CALCULATION by Ludwig von Mises, and the chapter after it (page-by-page viewing of each chapter-section).
Economizing behaviour is always rational. If we only have 1 liter of water, we don't use it to wash ourselfs -- we use it for drinking. In a complex economy, money-prices allow for economic calculation and the efficient allocation of resources. Eliminating money-prices -- as was done in the USSR -- makes this impossible. That is, eliminating the profits-losses test makes this impossible. All action is necessarily rational (because all actors, in order to act, have to presume causality and understand it).
Obviously, what is researched is heavily influenced by State (as opposed to voluntary free-market) funding. State-funding cannot rationally allocate resources, due to the inability to perform economic calculation.
Copyright does not cover facts and ideas. Historical data on Lincoln's presidency is simply a bunch of facts, which cannot be covered by copyright. What libertarianism is is an idea, which is also a bunch of facts. You cannot copyright facts.
If I take an article from Britannica on Lincoln and list the ideas and facts that it's communicating, then write them in my own words, it is not in any way copyright violation (hence, re-writing what someone else wrote isn't copyright violation). Any assertion to the contrary is simply bullshit, made by someone who doesn't know wtf he is talking about. How you could assert the contrary is beyond me. It would make all research, books, and such impossible, as all works rely on previous works.
Typical idiotic lawyers, wanting to make a process wasteful and inefficient.
Then you provide a reference and due credit, and it isn't plaguarism.
Here's the Britannica Online's discussion of libertarianism. Here's the Wikipedia discussion of libertarianism. Both encylopedia's mention Ayn Rand -- which is appropriate, given that her ideas overlap very much with libertarianism -- but do not mention that Rand was not and did not consider herself a libertarian. Wikipedia has a lengthy discussion of the topic, which I would consider a good introduction for a college-student; Britannica's introduction to the topic might suffice for a five-year old. In fact, Britannica's "discussion" of libertarianism is barely more informative than a dictionary-definition of libertarianism.
I have an old collection of Britannica's in my closet, collecting dust. I consider them a depricated tool that are only of use to children. To adults, they are barely more useful than dictionary-definitions, and one will find more comprehensive information from Wikipedia, or simply a well-informed web-search.
One individual, in a debate with me online, even claimed that since an economist (Murray Rothbard) wasn't mentioned in the Britannica, his work wasn't worth reading. This is the kind of idiocy that these biased depricated encylopedia's furnish. Childish thinking among adults. Encylopedia's, including Wikipedia, are a useful introduction to ideas. They do not cover all important ideas, and -- even Wikipedia, certainly Britannica -- offer depricated and flawed overviews of ideas, masking the complexity in a field.
Take exactly the same article from Britannica and reword it. There's no violation of copyright there. Copyright only covers the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
PS: Copyright, patents, trademarks, tradesecrets are bullshit; costs of protecting some companies business models are socialized.
Particularly in the social sciences -- such as economics -- peer review has been a poor maintainer of quality. In the social sciences, pro-Statist ideas dominate, while free-market ideas are systematically selected against (this is not a conspiracy, but it is simply a natural outcome of the way the system is set up, with State-funding etc). However, the problem isn't so severe in the natural sciences, where the issue of pro-State vs. free-market is marginal.
I agree, however, that Wikipedia has a better model.
Look, if someone has a proveable claim -- e.g., my great-grandfather stole land from their great-grandfather, so therefore the land which I inherited really doesn't belong to me -- then I'm all for courts returning the land to it's rightful owners. You can only legitimately pass on, give away, or trade away that which you have rightfully acquired.
Your argument about the rich stealing from the poor is flatly wrong. Quite frankly, sounds like Marxist crap. Oftentime it is the other way around. There is no systematic relationship of thievery between the rich and the poor. There is a systematic relationship of thievery between those who are part of the State-apparatus and those who are not: the State-sector is everywhere and always parasitic.
Whether or not "free will" is an illusion, there's still a distinction between action and reaction; it is just not that "comforting" distinction that we'd like to think of it as (namely, that we have free choice).
It is true that an individual is a collective of cells. However, unlike a person, a society does not have a consciousness and a life. It is simply short-hand for the interactions among many individuals. Furthermore, cells and organs are not individually "self-conscious", but only the whole person is.
You will know that fiat-currency was not "chosen" by the free market, but imposed by top-down State-interventions. For a long period of time, the private holding of gold for monetary purposes was outlawed -- that is, our gold was confiscated -- stolen -- by the State, and replaced with unredeemable pieces of paper.