It should be noted that the position of not making any editorial judgement is not incompatible with a desire to protect journalism. Using the metaphor of a book store, Google is acting like a book store, who does not make any editorial judgement on the books being sold. However, if the book store is disallowed to sell certain books, then the journalism produced by the authors of these books are certainly harmed, since it would be impossible to access these books via this book store.
Saying that Firefox is faster without extensions architecture, is like saying that a wifi access point can be made faster by reducing the number of users from 10 to 1. It is true that the wifi access point is made faster for the remaining 1 user, but for the other 9 previous users who are disallowed from using wifi, they would find that the wifi access point has become useless to them. Your statement exactly highlight the problem of Firefox. In the name of making Firefox better in a few aspects, it was made useless for a lot of people who have more different needs. Moreover, the extensions architecture used to work fine, it didn't work fine only after Mozilla has make a decision to not to support it.
The danger of vote buying is real, and you failed to understanding that a big part of the danger come from people who normally choose not to vote. It is a fact that in every election, many people choose not to vote. Maybe they think all the candidates are the same, or are simply not interested in voting. If some of these people, who normally do not vote, know that taking ballot selfies would allow them to get some money, they will simply vote the candidate who give them money, and they would not request any replacement ballot. In fact, vote buying is most likely to change the action of voters who do not have strong preference on any candidates in the first place.
And, No, banning ballot selfies is not about preventing people from expressing their political views on social media, it is about keeping election fair. There are countless way people can express their political views on social media, for example, using words to write which candidate they voted for, or post a picture of the candidate they voted for. Unless you want to claim that most people posting in the social media are liars, and their words cannot be trusted without showing a photo at the ballot.
When news about an oppressive and unfair practice in a far away country is shown in Slashdot, it seems that there are a number of posters who would rush to claim that US is also oppressive and unfair in some way. While maybe their purpose is to bash and criticize the US, their words also has the effect of trivializing the oppression and unfairness in the far away country, and thus defending the continuation of the oppression and unfairness in the far away country. If you honestly do not know the difference between Iran and US in this case, in Iran women cannot decide not to wear headscarves and cannot decide to be topless, while in US women can decide not to wear headscarves.
If Mr. Snowden had studied history in addition to studying technologies, he should have known that governments who wanted to "reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals" is not something new. In fact, in the country where he is staying now, namely Russia, the government of Joseph Stalin was one of the most oppressive government who worked hard to reduce the dignity of its people. Joseph Stalin did all these things before the invention of telecommunication technologies. Perhaps if Mr. Snowden would learn more about the country he is staying, he would learn the difference between governments who wanted to "reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals", and governments who are just doing their jobs in providing security to its people. While some of the things done by the more democratic governments deserve debates and perhaps reviews in courts, it should be noted that in world war 2, the oppressive governments' plan for world domination are stopped by organized efforts of the more democratic governments, not by anarchists who say governments can do no good.
I have seen the theory that all taxes are paid by individuals, either directly or indirectly, several times before. But an example would show the fault of such theory. Imagine a corporation which is run poorly so it has zero profit. In this case, the corporation would not have to pay any profit tax, so none of money paid by individuals to obtain goods or services from this company would become tax paid to the government. On the other hand, if the money is paid to a corporation run with good profit, then some of the money paid by individuals do become tax paid. This situation can be explained by the realization that profit tax is a tax on wealth creation. A profit tax has to be paid only if a corporation is able to create wealth or add value.
If one feel the need to ask why someone creating wealth should be taxed, the simple answer is that someone not creating wealth would have no money, thus unable to pay tax.
Highly recommend UrBackup. It can do both files backup and system image backup. The backup server can run in either Linux or Windows. Clients softwares for PC to be backup are also available for both Linux and Windows. For Windows clients, system image backup is made using Volume Shadow Copy function of Windows. Not sure if system image backup is available for Linux client or not. Overall it is a very powerful, yet easy to use, backup system, avaialble at http://www.urbackup.org/
Fire is something to be feared, and some people may have a valid reason to hate fire. But while fire can be very destructive, it can also be very useful if used correctly. In some way, a government is also like fire. It can be highly useful if run correctly, but can be destructive if run incorrectly. People should spend their effort to make the government works for the interests of the public, not to fear or hate a government.
Many government projects are done to satisify real need of society, and resources allocated in these projects are not result of politically based decision. On the other hand, in private business it is also not uncommon to have resources allocated politically, for example, to hire a subcontractor who is a good friend of the CEO. Hence, snch wastes can be found in both government and private businesses.
If you really believe that all government projects are unproductive activity, perhaps you can migrate to places like Somalia, where the government is very weak and doing very little. However, so far history suggests that places without a functioning government always fall into chaos and have very poor economics development.
In other news, it is reported that Secret Service is allowed to use guns and rifles. The fact that one does not see agents firing their guns everyday is simply because unless in "exceptional circumstances" there is no need, not because they are not allowed to.
To claim that well established economics theory is bullshit require strong evidence, but your example failed to supply the evidence for disproving the theory. If you have studied economics, you must have known the concept of elasticity of demand. To highlight the fault
in your example, replace the word "electronics" with the word "food ". Certainly, even if everyone know the price of food would become lower one month later, no one can refuse to buy food for one month, since no one can stop eating for one month. This example only shows that the demand of food is mostly inelastic, and your original example only shows that demand of electronics is relatively inelastic. Very few people in developed nations can accept not carrying a mobile phone or not watching TV for a month or longer. But many goods and services in the economy have higher demand elasticity, so the effect of delaying purchase and holding on to the money is very real if there is an expectation of decrease in price.
Your opinion about who can benefit from inflation and who can benefit from deflation is also highly inaccurate. The use of the word "profligate" is especially misleading. The fact is, inflation benefits all borrowers, regardless of whether they borrow the money for building roads or for buying luxury. On the other hand, savers are not the group of people most benefited by deflation. Deflation is most beneficial to people who already have a lot of money, that is, the rich and the wealthy.
Your belief that central bankers want to "rob" people by diluting money is completely groundless, and this view sound like those flavoured by conspiracy theorists. History has shown that no central bank in modern industrial nations want to have high rate of inflation, and policies are enacted to control inflation rate if it becomes too high. Central banks prefer a small inflation rate because according to mainsteam economics theory, a small inflation rate facilitate lending and borrowing, which in turns encourage economics development. In rare histroical cases where there was a very high rate or hyperinflation, for example in Germany during early 1930s, the hyperinflation were always
caused by failure of political leadership, not by central bankers.
By itself, fiscal responsibility is certainly not "nutty". However, those who oppose any tax increase are. Any sane person running a business would realize that both decreasing expenditure and increasing income are essential for financial health, and using only one method would only lead to ruin. Nevertheless, there are merits to the view that the tax rate is already high enough, but the problem is that the multinational corporations and the wealthy, with the help of politicians, devised various nefarious schemes to decrease the tax they paid, thereby shifting the burden of taxation to the working class.
The vendors may need to move operations outside of five-eyes to remain commercially viable.
Do you really believe that only the "five-eyes" countries are capable of doing this? Countries like Russia certainly have the technology and money to do something similar. Countries like Somalia would not be capable of doing this, but then you would have great difficulties in actually building a factory, or developing any technology there.
You have strong faith in an ideal free market. As one can see from the "Perfect Competition" entry in wikipedia, an imporant assumption of ideal free market is perfect information - All consumers and producers are assumed to have perfect knowledge of price, utility, quality and production methods of products. However, perfect information is never possible in the real world. While improvement in consumers' ability to share information would improve spreading of some information, many kind of information remain asymmetric. Some information are asymmetric because a producer or supplier always has more information than a consumer. For relatively simple jobs like taxi driving, the information advantage of the supplier is not very big. But for more specialize job that requires years of training, a supplier have much more information than a customer. Without certification from a professional body, it would be very difficult for consumers to judge if a supplier is competent or not, unless the consumers themselves undergo years of training to become experts themselves.
I would like to add that this example was especially shady, as the number of CPU "sold" by Intel to Dell at price zero, was basically the same as the number of CPU Dell originally planned to buy from AMD.
Sure it can, but it cannot corner any market for long without the power of coercion government adds. I defy you to find monopolies that resisted for more than a few years without government protection, in the form of barriers, subsidies or regulations.
Since this is Slashdot, it is surprising that you does not seem to aware of the monopoly position held by Microsoft on PC operating system. Microsoft's monopoly is certainly not a result of government regulation or control. There are a number of causes of monopoly besides government interference, for example, high barrier to entry, network effect, predatory business practices, etc. Actually, good government regulation is supposed to suppress predatory business practices. A few years ago, an antitrust investigation against Intel (the CPU maker) revealed that, in the past they were giving a number of CPU to Dell effectively free of charge (price zero) if Dell would not buy CPU from AMD. Do you think anyone can stay in or enter the CPU business if such practices is not prohibited by the government?
A cynic might point out that the only three things you think the government should do could be easily turned against you. The Coyote said "A libertarian is an anarchist who wants the government to police his slaves". I wonder if you understand what that means.
Anything, if it is useful, can either be used for a good cause, or be used for an evil cause. For example, a knife can be used for you for cooking, or it can be used against you for causing bodily harm. The important thing to do is not to view knife as evil, but to make sure that knife are only used for good purpose as much as possible.
Rich people are not "harming" anybody. Much on the contrary. Someone with employees is providing the employees jobs that otherwise wouldn't exist. He can "screw them over" and they can decide to go elsewhere. That is how a free society works.
The Rich may cause harm to people in the same way a corrupted government do. By abuse and mis-use of their power. The Rich are not interested at providing employee jobs. They are only interested at making profits, any jobs provided are a side effect. While in theory, employees can go to another company if their employer treat them badly, nowadays coporate merger and monopoly means there are only a very small number of companies in a given industry, making it difficult for employees to change company, unless they abandon their accumulated skills and swtich to work in a different industry. A "free" society cannot be really free if the Rich has vastly more power than the average people.
On the other hand if you increase government powers, those same employees can be "screwed over" without any chance to defend themselves under the threat of force. And even worse this force can be bought by those rich guys.
Without the laws and regulation imposed by a government, the Rich will have no problems finding ways to "screw over" employees. In this case, the Rich does not even have to buy any favour or power from the government, since the government will not be able to stop them when they use their financial power for corecion of the employees. Your own worry that some of the government power can be bought by the Rich, actually shows the danger of not having sufficient checks against the great financial power of the Rich.
So if you want to prevent damage from being done you should defend that governments should be as small as possible and that violence and coercion, which are the tools of any government, should be kept at a minimum.
It is best to keep a balance of power between the Rich and the government. If any one side become too powerful than the others, it would be bad news for the people. Actually, what is needed is a balance of power between the Rich and the average people, but the latter is not sufficient organized or powerful enough to face the Rich alone, so the use of the institution of government is necessary. While a corrupted government is certainly more harmful than the Rich, the democratic form of government is so far the best form of government to prevent corruption, as it allow the public to keep a check on the power of the government.
If your company do not want to share the custom software produced by you or your company, it is fine and there is nothing wrong with it. On the other hand, as a result of the choice of your company, people writing GPL software also do not want to share with your company the software produced by them. I noted that in your post, you used the phrase "competitive advantage". People produce GPL software because they want to make sure that their software and any further improvement can be freely shared by users of the software. They do not write the software to provide your company "competitive advantage". Since your company enjoy profits from the custom software, it is completely fair that your company should pay the cost to rewrite any part of the software when necessary.
Your claims that Jobs followed Dell's advice is the most ridiculous claim I have ever heard. Not only is the logic twisted and distorted, but what you stated as facts are actally all wrong.
Firstly, Apple did not abandon its personal computer business, and Macintosh computers remains an important part of Apple's business. While you claim that Apple was clearly losing in the computer business, the fact was that after Jobs's return, he was able to make the Macintosh business profitable. In fact, Apple's profit margin on Macs sales alone is much higher than those of makers of windows boxes.
More importantly, Apple did not pull R&D effort away from computers. Here, your claims that Jobs shit-canned his own operating system is not only factually wrong, but reveals that you know very little about Apple's history. At that time, the operating system used by Macs, known as Macs OS 9, is the one that everyone know was obsolete. The new operating system to replace it, Macs OS X, is based on the operating system developed by the NeXT computer company, which is founded and owned by Jobs. In fact, Apple purchased the NeXT computer company from Jobs in order to get its operating system. Since then, Apple continued to make significant R&D investments in Macs OS X. If simply grabbing FreeBSD, Konqueror and Cups would allow one to make a decent desktop computer experience, then Linux or FreeBSD should have a higher market share of desktop operating system than Macs OS X.
And by calling the shift of focus to iPad/iPhones as "moving to gadgets", you have failed to realize that these gadgets are actually computers themselves, although in a form factor different from the traditional desktop. What most people used to do using a desktop computer, can now be done using an iPhone without having to sit by a desk. The operating system of iPhones is an adaption of Macs OS X, which is the technical foundation which enable an iPhone to do the same things that were used to be done by desktop computer. To say that Apple's computer line has failed and need to be killed off is like saying that Intel microprocessor business has failed and need to be killed off because the old Pentium 4 CPU are obsolete, while in fact Intel is making heaps of profits producing newer core i3/i5/i7 CPU.
This blogger has a very narrow point of view, seeing only the technology issues, but failed to take into account the social and moral issues. As stated in the summary, from a purely technological standpoint, giving the information to a court or giving the information to a drug cartel may be the same. However, motivation and other social issues often play a key role in determining whether something is good or not. For example, from a purely technogloical standpoint, an explosive detonating in an underground tunnel may be the same as an explosive detonating in an underground railways. The chemistry and physics are the same. However, if it is known that in the former the explosion is for the purpose of mining of materials, while in the latter the explosion is a terrorist act designed to cause harm and injuries, then the two explosions are completely different. In order to make a sound judgment of whether something is good or bad, it is not enough to consider only the technological issues, but factors like motivation must also be given important consideration.
People use computer networks for many different purposes, and decentralized network is not necessary always better. The fact that mainframe computers are still used by many enterprises and show no sign of declining suggests that some tasks are better done in a centralized environment. Replacing a mainframe computer with multiple computers spaced many miles apart may not be necessary cost effective or even practical. "Local is better" may make a nice theory, but blindly claiming that a theory is a cure-all solution for all problems without checking that the prerequisite conditions has been met, could result in wastes and failures.
There is no evidence that Linus Torvalds is responsible for any bad decisions or mistakes made by Nokia. If you have any information that can support your speculation in your previous comments, please post them. I have read the theregister.co.uk article you linked, the only thing it said about Linus Torvalds was that he convinced Nokia to create a Linux unit. The article never said he advised Nokia to go for WiMAX or partner with Intel. Many other companies have successes in adopting Linux in their products or technology. In fact, company like Google are able to make good use of Linux in their development of Android, and Android become highly successful. The failures faced by Nokia are squarely Nokia's own responsibility, and Nokia's own poor executions are to be blamed. It is crazy to try to blame Linux or Linus Torvalds for mistakes made by Nokia itself.
In this post you are suggesting that the postal service is a monopoly, but in another post you say Fedex and UPS compete for your business. This is a contradiction. The fact that you can choose other carriers such Fedex or USP shows that the postal service is not a monopoly.
It should be pointed out that private business can also becomes monopoly. In some political circle's rush to dismantle what they viewed as government granted monopoly, they inadvertently helped to create private monopoly.
There seems to be some ambiguity as to whether you believe both private citizen and the government should have nuclear weapons, or both private citizen and the government should not have nuclear weapons. If the former, then instead of hearing news about shooting like the Aurora, Colorado one that killed dozens of people, news of nuclear detonations that kills millions of people would be heard occassionally from time to time. It does not take a genius to figure out that if a single person or a small group of people can control a piece of nuclear bomb, it is unavoidable that eventually one or more crackpots would be willing to press the button to detonate it. There is no lack of terrorists in this world who are willing to commit suicide in order to cause great harms to their "enemy". If the latter, you seems to not know that in addition to the government in United States, there are actually many other governments in the world. Once the USA government get rid of its nuclear weapons, governments in other countries who have nuclear weapons would have their power and influence over the rest of the world, including USA, greatly enhanced. However, you can be assured that there would be no immeidate danger of any foreign country invading USA. Astute statemen like Vladimir Putin make calculation rationally. They would first use their countries' nuclear advantage to obtain economics and political concessions first. Only when their opponent is sufficiently weakened, then they will consider the use of military force to achieve their objectives, when the cost to them is minimal.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be noted that the position of not making any editorial judgement is not incompatible with a desire to protect journalism. Using the metaphor of a book store, Google is acting like a book store, who does not make any editorial judgement on the books being sold. However, if the book store is disallowed to sell certain books, then the journalism produced by the authors of these books are certainly harmed, since it would be impossible to access these books via this book store.
Saying that Firefox is faster without extensions architecture, is like saying that a wifi access point can be made faster by reducing the number of users from 10 to 1. It is true that the wifi access point is made faster for the remaining 1 user, but for the other 9 previous users who are disallowed from using wifi, they would find that the wifi access point has become useless to them. Your statement exactly highlight the problem of Firefox. In the name of making Firefox better in a few aspects, it was made useless for a lot of people who have more different needs. Moreover, the extensions architecture used to work fine, it didn't work fine only after Mozilla has make a decision to not to support it.
The danger of vote buying is real, and you failed to understanding that a big part of the danger come from people who normally choose not to vote. It is a fact that in every election, many people choose not to vote. Maybe they think all the candidates are the same, or are simply not interested in voting. If some of these people, who normally do not vote, know that taking ballot selfies would allow them to get some money, they will simply vote the candidate who give them money, and they would not request any replacement ballot. In fact, vote buying is most likely to change the action of voters who do not have strong preference on any candidates in the first place.
And, No, banning ballot selfies is not about preventing people from expressing their political views on social media, it is about keeping election fair. There are countless way people can express their political views on social media, for example, using words to write which candidate they voted for, or post a picture of the candidate they voted for. Unless you want to claim that most people posting in the social media are liars, and their words cannot be trusted without showing a photo at the ballot.
When news about an oppressive and unfair practice in a far away country is shown in Slashdot, it seems that there are a number of posters who would rush to claim that US is also oppressive and unfair in some way. While maybe their purpose is to bash and criticize the US, their words also has the effect of trivializing the oppression and unfairness in the far away country, and thus defending the continuation of the oppression and unfairness in the far away country. If you honestly do not know the difference between Iran and US in this case, in Iran women cannot decide not to wear headscarves and cannot decide to be topless, while in US women can decide not to wear headscarves.
If Mr. Snowden had studied history in addition to studying technologies, he should have known that governments who wanted to "reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals" is not something new. In fact, in the country where he is staying now, namely Russia, the government of Joseph Stalin was one of the most oppressive government who worked hard to reduce the dignity of its people. Joseph Stalin did all these things before the invention of telecommunication technologies. Perhaps if Mr. Snowden would learn more about the country he is staying, he would learn the difference between governments who wanted to "reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals", and governments who are just doing their jobs in providing security to its people. While some of the things done by the more democratic governments deserve debates and perhaps reviews in courts, it should be noted that in world war 2, the oppressive governments' plan for world domination are stopped by organized efforts of the more democratic governments, not by anarchists who say governments can do no good.
I have seen the theory that all taxes are paid by individuals, either directly or indirectly, several times before. But an example would show the fault of such theory. Imagine a corporation which is run poorly so it has zero profit. In this case, the corporation would not have to pay any profit tax, so none of money paid by individuals to obtain goods or services from this company would become tax paid to the government. On the other hand, if the money is paid to a corporation run with good profit, then some of the money paid by individuals do become tax paid. This situation can be explained by the realization that profit tax is a tax on wealth creation. A profit tax has to be paid only if a corporation is able to create wealth or add value.
If one feel the need to ask why someone creating wealth should be taxed, the simple answer is that someone not creating wealth would have no money, thus unable to pay tax.
Highly recommend UrBackup. It can do both files backup and system image backup. The backup server can run in either Linux or Windows. Clients softwares for PC to be backup are also available for both Linux and Windows. For Windows clients, system image backup is made using Volume Shadow Copy function of Windows. Not sure if system image backup is available for Linux client or not. Overall it is a very powerful, yet easy to use, backup system, avaialble at http://www.urbackup.org/
Fire is something to be feared, and some people may have a valid reason to hate fire. But while fire can be very destructive, it can also be very useful if used correctly. In some way, a government is also like fire. It can be highly useful if run correctly, but can be destructive if run incorrectly. People should spend their effort to make the government works for the interests of the public, not to fear or hate a government.
Many government projects are done to satisify real need of society, and resources allocated in these projects are not result of politically based decision. On the other hand, in private business it is also not uncommon to have resources allocated politically, for example, to hire a subcontractor who is a good friend of the CEO. Hence, snch wastes can be found in both government and private businesses.
If you really believe that all government projects are unproductive activity, perhaps you can migrate to places like Somalia, where the government is very weak and doing very little. However, so far history suggests that places without a functioning government always fall into chaos and have very poor economics development.
In other news, it is reported that Secret Service is allowed to use guns and rifles. The fact that one does not see agents firing their guns everyday is simply because unless in "exceptional circumstances" there is no need, not because they are not allowed to.
To claim that well established economics theory is bullshit require strong evidence, but your example failed to supply the evidence for disproving the theory. If you have studied economics, you must have known the concept of elasticity of demand. To highlight the fault in your example, replace the word "electronics" with the word "food ". Certainly, even if everyone know the price of food would become lower one month later, no one can refuse to buy food for one month, since no one can stop eating for one month. This example only shows that the demand of food is mostly inelastic, and your original example only shows that demand of electronics is relatively inelastic. Very few people in developed nations can accept not carrying a mobile phone or not watching TV for a month or longer. But many goods and services in the economy have higher demand elasticity, so the effect of delaying purchase and holding on to the money is very real if there is an expectation of decrease in price.
Your opinion about who can benefit from inflation and who can benefit from deflation is also highly inaccurate. The use of the word "profligate" is especially misleading. The fact is, inflation benefits all borrowers, regardless of whether they borrow the money for building roads or for buying luxury. On the other hand, savers are not the group of people most benefited by deflation. Deflation is most beneficial to people who already have a lot of money, that is, the rich and the wealthy.
Your belief that central bankers want to "rob" people by diluting money is completely groundless, and this view sound like those flavoured by conspiracy theorists. History has shown that no central bank in modern industrial nations want to have high rate of inflation, and policies are enacted to control inflation rate if it becomes too high. Central banks prefer a small inflation rate because according to mainsteam economics theory, a small inflation rate facilitate lending and borrowing, which in turns encourage economics development. In rare histroical cases where there was a very high rate or hyperinflation, for example in Germany during early 1930s, the hyperinflation were always caused by failure of political leadership, not by central bankers.
By itself, fiscal responsibility is certainly not "nutty". However, those who oppose any tax increase are. Any sane person running a business would realize that both decreasing expenditure and increasing income are essential for financial health, and using only one method would only lead to ruin. Nevertheless, there are merits to the view that the tax rate is already high enough, but the problem is that the multinational corporations and the wealthy, with the help of politicians, devised various nefarious schemes to decrease the tax they paid, thereby shifting the burden of taxation to the working class.
The vendors may need to move operations outside of five-eyes to remain commercially viable.
Do you really believe that only the "five-eyes" countries are capable of doing this? Countries like Russia certainly have the technology and money to do something similar. Countries like Somalia would not be capable of doing this, but then you would have great difficulties in actually building a factory, or developing any technology there.
You have strong faith in an ideal free market. As one can see from the "Perfect Competition" entry in wikipedia, an imporant assumption of ideal free market is perfect information - All consumers and producers are assumed to have perfect knowledge of price, utility, quality and production methods of products. However, perfect information is never possible in the real world. While improvement in consumers' ability to share information would improve spreading of some information, many kind of information remain asymmetric. Some information are asymmetric because a producer or supplier always has more information than a consumer. For relatively simple jobs like taxi driving, the information advantage of the supplier is not very big. But for more specialize job that requires years of training, a supplier have much more information than a customer. Without certification from a professional body, it would be very difficult for consumers to judge if a supplier is competent or not, unless the consumers themselves undergo years of training to become experts themselves.
I would like to add that this example was especially shady, as the number of CPU "sold" by Intel to Dell at price zero, was basically the same as the number of CPU Dell originally planned to buy from AMD.
Sure it can, but it cannot corner any market for long without the power of coercion government adds. I defy you to find monopolies that resisted for more than a few years without government protection, in the form of barriers, subsidies or regulations.
Since this is Slashdot, it is surprising that you does not seem to aware of the monopoly position held by Microsoft on PC operating system. Microsoft's monopoly is certainly not a result of government regulation or control. There are a number of causes of monopoly besides government interference, for example, high barrier to entry, network effect, predatory business practices, etc. Actually, good government regulation is supposed to suppress predatory business practices. A few years ago, an antitrust investigation against Intel (the CPU maker) revealed that, in the past they were giving a number of CPU to Dell effectively free of charge (price zero) if Dell would not buy CPU from AMD. Do you think anyone can stay in or enter the CPU business if such practices is not prohibited by the government?
A cynic might point out that the only three things you think the government should do could be easily turned against you. The Coyote said "A libertarian is an anarchist who wants the government to police his slaves". I wonder if you understand what that means.
Anything, if it is useful, can either be used for a good cause, or be used for an evil cause. For example, a knife can be used for you for cooking, or it can be used against you for causing bodily harm. The important thing to do is not to view knife as evil, but to make sure that knife are only used for good purpose as much as possible.
Rich people are not "harming" anybody. Much on the contrary. Someone with employees is providing the employees jobs that otherwise wouldn't exist. He can "screw them over" and they can decide to go elsewhere. That is how a free society works.
The Rich may cause harm to people in the same way a corrupted government do. By abuse and mis-use of their power. The Rich are not interested at providing employee jobs. They are only interested at making profits, any jobs provided are a side effect. While in theory, employees can go to another company if their employer treat them badly, nowadays coporate merger and monopoly means there are only a very small number of companies in a given industry, making it difficult for employees to change company, unless they abandon their accumulated skills and swtich to work in a different industry. A "free" society cannot be really free if the Rich has vastly more power than the average people.
On the other hand if you increase government powers, those same employees can be "screwed over" without any chance to defend themselves under the threat of force. And even worse this force can be bought by those rich guys.
Without the laws and regulation imposed by a government, the Rich will have no problems finding ways to "screw over" employees. In this case, the Rich does not even have to buy any favour or power from the government, since the government will not be able to stop them when they use their financial power for corecion of the employees. Your own worry that some of the government power can be bought by the Rich, actually shows the danger of not having sufficient checks against the great financial power of the Rich.
So if you want to prevent damage from being done you should defend that governments should be as small as possible and that violence and coercion, which are the tools of any government, should be kept at a minimum.
It is best to keep a balance of power between the Rich and the government. If any one side become too powerful than the others, it would be bad news for the people. Actually, what is needed is a balance of power between the Rich and the average people, but the latter is not sufficient organized or powerful enough to face the Rich alone, so the use of the institution of government is necessary. While a corrupted government is certainly more harmful than the Rich, the democratic form of government is so far the best form of government to prevent corruption, as it allow the public to keep a check on the power of the government.
If your company do not want to share the custom software produced by you or your company, it is fine and there is nothing wrong with it. On the other hand, as a result of the choice of your company, people writing GPL software also do not want to share with your company the software produced by them. I noted that in your post, you used the phrase "competitive advantage". People produce GPL software because they want to make sure that their software and any further improvement can be freely shared by users of the software. They do not write the software to provide your company "competitive advantage". Since your company enjoy profits from the custom software, it is completely fair that your company should pay the cost to rewrite any part of the software when necessary.
Your claims that Jobs followed Dell's advice is the most ridiculous claim I have ever heard. Not only is the logic twisted and distorted, but what you stated as facts are actally all wrong.
Firstly, Apple did not abandon its personal computer business, and Macintosh computers remains an important part of Apple's business. While you claim that Apple was clearly losing in the computer business, the fact was that after Jobs's return, he was able to make the Macintosh business profitable. In fact, Apple's profit margin on Macs sales alone is much higher than those of makers of windows boxes.
More importantly, Apple did not pull R&D effort away from computers. Here, your claims that Jobs shit-canned his own operating system is not only factually wrong, but reveals that you know very little about Apple's history. At that time, the operating system used by Macs, known as Macs OS 9, is the one that everyone know was obsolete. The new operating system to replace it, Macs OS X, is based on the operating system developed by the NeXT computer company, which is founded and owned by Jobs. In fact, Apple purchased the NeXT computer company from Jobs in order to get its operating system. Since then, Apple continued to make significant R&D investments in Macs OS X. If simply grabbing FreeBSD, Konqueror and Cups would allow one to make a decent desktop computer experience, then Linux or FreeBSD should have a higher market share of desktop operating system than Macs OS X.
And by calling the shift of focus to iPad/iPhones as "moving to gadgets", you have failed to realize that these gadgets are actually computers themselves, although in a form factor different from the traditional desktop. What most people used to do using a desktop computer, can now be done using an iPhone without having to sit by a desk. The operating system of iPhones is an adaption of Macs OS X, which is the technical foundation which enable an iPhone to do the same things that were used to be done by desktop computer. To say that Apple's computer line has failed and need to be killed off is like saying that Intel microprocessor business has failed and need to be killed off because the old Pentium 4 CPU are obsolete, while in fact Intel is making heaps of profits producing newer core i3/i5/i7 CPU.
This blogger has a very narrow point of view, seeing only the technology issues, but failed to take into account the social and moral issues. As stated in the summary, from a purely technological standpoint, giving the information to a court or giving the information to a drug cartel may be the same. However, motivation and other social issues often play a key role in determining whether something is good or not. For example, from a purely technogloical standpoint, an explosive detonating in an underground tunnel may be the same as an explosive detonating in an underground railways. The chemistry and physics are the same. However, if it is known that in the former the explosion is for the purpose of mining of materials, while in the latter the explosion is a terrorist act designed to cause harm and injuries, then the two explosions are completely different. In order to make a sound judgment of whether something is good or bad, it is not enough to consider only the technological issues, but factors like motivation must also be given important consideration.
People use computer networks for many different purposes, and decentralized network is not necessary always better. The fact that mainframe computers are still used by many enterprises and show no sign of declining suggests that some tasks are better done in a centralized environment. Replacing a mainframe computer with multiple computers spaced many miles apart may not be necessary cost effective or even practical. "Local is better" may make a nice theory, but blindly claiming that a theory is a cure-all solution for all problems without checking that the prerequisite conditions has been met, could result in wastes and failures.
There is no evidence that Linus Torvalds is responsible for any bad decisions or mistakes made by Nokia. If you have any information that can support your speculation in your previous comments, please post them. I have read the theregister.co.uk article you linked, the only thing it said about Linus Torvalds was that he convinced Nokia to create a Linux unit. The article never said he advised Nokia to go for WiMAX or partner with Intel. Many other companies have successes in adopting Linux in their products or technology. In fact, company like Google are able to make good use of Linux in their development of Android, and Android become highly successful. The failures faced by Nokia are squarely Nokia's own responsibility, and Nokia's own poor executions are to be blamed. It is crazy to try to blame Linux or Linus Torvalds for mistakes made by Nokia itself.
In this post you are suggesting that the postal service is a monopoly, but in another post you say Fedex and UPS compete for your business. This is a contradiction. The fact that you can choose other carriers such Fedex or USP shows that the postal service is not a monopoly.
It should be pointed out that private business can also becomes monopoly. In some political circle's rush to dismantle what they viewed as government granted monopoly, they inadvertently helped to create private monopoly.
There seems to be some ambiguity as to whether you believe both private citizen and the government should have nuclear weapons, or both private citizen and the government should not have nuclear weapons. If the former, then instead of hearing news about shooting like the Aurora, Colorado one that killed dozens of people, news of nuclear detonations that kills millions of people would be heard occassionally from time to time. It does not take a genius to figure out that if a single person or a small group of people can control a piece of nuclear bomb, it is unavoidable that eventually one or more crackpots would be willing to press the button to detonate it. There is no lack of terrorists in this world who are willing to commit suicide in order to cause great harms to their "enemy". If the latter, you seems to not know that in addition to the government in United States, there are actually many other governments in the world. Once the USA government get rid of its nuclear weapons, governments in other countries who have nuclear weapons would have their power and influence over the rest of the world, including USA, greatly enhanced. However, you can be assured that there would be no immeidate danger of any foreign country invading USA. Astute statemen like Vladimir Putin make calculation rationally. They would first use their countries' nuclear advantage to obtain economics and political concessions first. Only when their opponent is sufficiently weakened, then they will consider the use of military force to achieve their objectives, when the cost to them is minimal.