Perhaps only allow a single sector change.

A large part of the problem is people who work in industry, then go work at the regulatory agency to make a bunch of rules for their industry, then go back to working for the industry. They have an incentive to the rig the rules to favor industry rather than the public.

So, you can work in the industry, but once you leave and join the regulatory agency, you can't go back to working for the industry. You can no longer be incentivized to rig the rules for your company because they can't pay you any more.
 

Wrong. The software developer is not forced to develop software at all.

But I'm not telling you what to do with it...

How would that be any different from any other escrow service?

Paypal locks people's money up all the time, and there's nothing you can do about it.

First thing I check is cables.

Well, this is why you should keep your own bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin theft isn't a problem with bitcoin itself. It's a problem with where you're keeping your bitcoins.

Sadly there's no such thing as a truly free phone. The radio firmware is still a binary blob.

To be honest, that's where the focus of the open hardware movement should be. We have options for free computers (locked bootloaders, though...), but we can't get free phones at all. The Ubuntu phone almost made its kickstarter goal. Perhaps a truly free phone could get some attention...

I'd volunteer for a free radio project. I can do digital design and VLSI, but my experience with that is about 10 years out of date. I'm an electrical engineer and my college studies were focused on computer architecture, but now I do software.

Free software is not about freedom for the developer. It's about freedom for the user. Closed software enslaves the user. They own their device, but their device obeys the software developer, not the user.

Is a world in which you are not allowed to own slaves less free? I suppose, in a "freer," but perverse, world you'd be free to enslave others.

You are exactly correct. This is what's going to happen to Android. It's got a GPL kernel, sure, but everything else up the stack is less-free the further you go. The libraries and runtime are BSD-like and the user apps are mostly closed. And they're continuously replacing modules with code with permissive licenses. Next they're going to start closing them. Sure, you can still have the source code from Android 5.0, but by the time they're on Android 7.0 that stuff is woefully out of date and they will have intentionally changed APIs so anyone trying to create open replacements has to constantly jump through hoops to keep up. Eventually it'll just be a giant closed blob on top of a free kernel.

Permissive licenses are a trap.

It is your choice to be an asshole with your shitty software, just like it's your choice to be a racist or a homophobe or whatever. No one is going to force you to be a decent human being.

But we have a political ideal that I would like everyone to conform to: don't be an asshole and don't use or produce non-free software. No one is going to force you to free your software. But, I hope for a world in which the last closed source software author huddles in a corner, death grip on his precious, precious codes while everyone else freely shares software and frolics in meadows and has group sex and shit.

I have a 9-year old and 11-year old, both into Minecraft, and I thought this might be a fun way to spend a few hours a week together.

Opinions?

My son is 2 and had pretty much never seen an advertisement. We have netflix and hulu, and the only things he'd really seen were things like Sesame Street and Curious George on Netflix. No ads. Well one day mommy and daddy happened to be watching a rare show on Hulu, and an ad comes on, and my son points at it and yells "I DON'T LIKE THIS! I DON'T LIKE THIS SHOW CHANGE IT!" I laughed.

It all looked great. I was amazed watching that. We are living in the future.

No, it's justifiable by the fact that people who used a non-default browser stayed 15% longer. It doesn't matter if there are false positives (people who used Firefox installed by someone else) or false negatives (people who, like you, made an effort to choose and chose IE). On average, choosing someone who used Firefox or Chrome gets you an employee who stays15% longer (and "performed better" although I don't know the metric or methodology they used to determine that), and if that's what you want, you should do it.

You're concerned about false negatives, thinking people will be worse because they used IE, even though they chose IE because to them it is superior. But those people will be completely drowned out by the masses who use IE because it is the default on their computer.

They are not.