The platform you speak of is called "the Internet". Buy cheap hosting and post whatever you want. If your Wikipedia edits keep getting reverted, there's probably a good reason for it, likely having to do with editing guidelines, most likely with NPoV.

I do not believe I am taking it to the extreme. Software vendors that sell us cat in a bag are the ones taking it to the extreme--in their case, of douchebaggery.

Notice that my argument above is not concerned with art in general, but since you bring it up, let me tear into that. You are talking about a game, and I'll assume that it's a work designed for pure entertainment. (An educational game, even when it includes expensive art, can and should be developed on taxpayer money, and should be free because all education should be free (as in freedom).) And with this kind of art, we have a major difference from the software as usually understood: its value is entirely subjective, and if it is not available, then any other kind of art can be used to duplicate its function, which is to merely entertain. Forget art even. One can pet a cat or stare into the fire or smoke something, and be just as entertained as by any video game out there. So what you seem to be saying is, let's give everyone censorship powers, so that they can sell them to capitalists in mass, so that capitalists can sue anyone who dares to compete with them in the market, all of that just so that we can have a CERTAIN KIND of entertainment? Like $50 million movies and games, I mean? IMHO, this is a TERRIBLE deal for us, both as consumers and as citizens. It is not even clear that big-budget titles would disappear in the absence of copyright. Some game designers are already collecting donations for non-free games, and are successful. If anything, people would be more willing to support a free project, so I fail to see what we have to gain by keeping up the censorship and the intellectual monopolies that come with it.

Um... Professional actors who want to monetize notoriety should be happy every time people talk about them, let alone share clips of them to get their friends addicted as well. The more famous and well-known they are, the more opportunity they have to make a buck. They absolutely do not need any censorship powers.

Here I agree wholeheartedly: everyone should have the right to be credited appropriately. This is the only restriction a copyright law should be able to enforce. If the only requirement for re-distribution of a creative work is to provide a correct credit, then it cannot be considered censorship for any practical purposes. This right, I think, should be protected about as much as the current copyright lasts: lifetime and a half of the author or so. All other restrictions on re-distribution have to go. To say it in a different way, the only license a copyright should be able to enforce is the BSD-like license. Copyleft wouldn't hurt, but it wouldn't be needed either, as it's basically just a middle finger for the scammers who would build on free software, but refuse to share. Copyleft serves its purpose well, but educating the consumers about the nasty nature of non-free software to the point where they start boycotting it for rational and/or selfish reasons would work even better.

And more to the point: I will fully trust the online tax software if it's free (libre), secure against eavesdroppers, and operated by the tax-collecting government agency itself.

From my anecdotal observations, it has been a long-standing effort in the free software community to de-emphasize the monetary impact and to bring to the front the political impact. While I don't consider it a mistake, I also think that there is absolutely no shame in bringing economic factors into view.

The final test would be to do an actual TCO study, which is very hard to do, given that most programs are just too different in their free and non-free incarnations. For example, libreoffice is not a free version of M$ Office: it has different features, different requirements, different compatibility relation with other software, and different uses. On the organizational level we find that a typical company uses many pieces of software, some of them free and others non-free, and they all work with each other in some way, and none can be easily swapped out with a free or non-free alternative.

All of these issues can be overcome, however, and in the meanwhile, it is easy to argue that we should expect free software to be cheaper (in TCO terms) than non-free software.

The development should come out to be cheaper, feature for feature. There are many ways in which the cost of developing non-free software balloons with no benefit to the users.

First, non-free software vendors are constantly tempted to develop "anti-features" (they call them features, of course, but they are basically malware). The most successful of them do it with probability close to 100%. They have teams of people dedicated to reducing functionality (for example, tiered OS offerings), breaking compatibility (even with their own older software) to force upgrade, and inserting spyware. Last but not least, they have people whose only purpose is to make software "sexy", so that it can be sold to chaps, even though it is stuffed with malware. Enter graphical interface over-design and marketing expenses. All of this takes real money out of the development budget, and sooner or later the costs are passed on to the users.

Second, they treat the source code as a trade secret, and consequently have to spend money to provide a fitting level of security, starting with physical access to the production hardware, and ending with checking one's credentials every time the code is accessed. As non-free software projects get bigger, they have to take the trust factor into account, so they prevent most programmers from accessing most of the code. They introduce even more expensive access control at this point, and most of their programmers are less efficient than they could have been, because they are prevented from understanding how the software works. And the debugging has to be done in the house: unlike free software projects, they are unable to crowd-source it, which would allow to shift some of the cost onto the early adopters and volunteers.

Third, we don't have to limit ourselves to just the direct cost of developing the software. What about the cost of educating the very programmers who develop the software? These people expect to be paid enough to match the investment they've made into education, so reducing the cost of educating programmers should lower the TCO as well. The impact is hard to quantify here, but I am willing to bet that making people understand how a free OS works (understand it enough to write great software for it) is cheaper than making them understand how a non-free OS works. Why would we expect anything else when non-free vendors spend money to prevent free education? As the guardians of the trade secrets, they have the de facto monopoly on "teaching" people how to write around their dumb OS. So we should expect them to charge the monopoly prices. Compare it with a free OS situation, where you can go to the free market and find thousands upon thousands of people who understand how a free OS works, all in competition for your educational dollar.

Want a feature added? Why would you expect a monopolist developer to do it cheaper?

Want to transition away from a piece of software or to replace it with a counterpart? Why would you expect a non-free software vendor not to write anti-features specifically designed to make this as painful and costly as possible?

This list just goes on. And what do we have on the other side of this scale? Where exactly do we waste money when we develop free software? May be I am just lacking imagination, but I really cannot point out a single factor that makes non-free software cheaper to develop feature for feature. And once again, this rant should not be taken as a claim that free software is cheaper. I am arguing that it should be cheaper for many very good reasons, and that a careful statistical study is urgently needed to drive this point home. Freedom is great, but a simple consumer advocacy argument cannot possibly hurt. All non-free software is a rip-off and a scam, and I am convinced we should be able to prove it.

I don't think "resemble" means what you think it means. But then may be you do, Anonymous Coward.

I can't shake off a feeling that the law enforcement and friendly news sources are using "Anonymous" as a boogeyman. When I see "Anonymous collective has hacked their systems", I read "Their systems were hacked. FBI has no leads". The law enforcement has finally found a perfect line for every situation where they demonstrate incompetence, since "anonymous" turns into "Anonymous" so easily.

This. Insurance companies are NOT interested in making us drive safer, and when they say they are, they are lying. The more accidents we have, the more work volume they have, the bigger they are, end of story. If we crash more on average, they will obviously fix it by raising our premiums. So they don't pay per crash: they make money per crash. They get paid every time they process a claim or conduct an investigation.

By reducing their work volume, they will actually reduce insurance-related revenue if they make us drive safer. So why are they pushing this? So that they can spy on drivers and monetize what they record. IMHO, this is the most reasonable explanation for their motives. The careful drivers who are spied on will save on their premiums, but will have to say bye-bye to privacy inside their own vehicle. Their information will be sold left and right, and we can rest assured they will be ripped off somewhere else, by someone who purchased their private info to either brainwash them with ads, or to trick them into a bad deal.

We have 40,000 patent attorneys in the US alone, so there's one great sample for experimental medicine. Not very heterogeneous, but will do in a pinch.

Emphasis is mine.

Actually, you are misstating the CLT, which does not work at all for distributions without finite mean or variance (which may well be the case for real-world experiments). And even if the variable we are measuring does have finite mean and variance, the speed of convergence is only possible to quantify in certain cases. So the shape you get from samples of size 1000 may look good to you because you are impressed by a bunch of zeroes, and may even work OK near the estimated mean, but when we look at the tails, we may find that your approximation is not worth a crumpled paper napkin.

Hahahaha, you really think so? IMHO, SilkRoad users are mostly white people who make enough money to own a computer and have had enough education to read about encryption and bitcoin, and to install Tor. And you can't just start throwing white people in jail for something like smoking cannabis: it would be the end of the drug war. Also, saving the people or the society from drugs is not the point of the law. The point is to send people with darker skin tones from school directly into prison. I never used the SR, nor do I intend to, but I am convinced that a typical user is pretty safe.

Kaspersky is not just a self-promoter, he is a scam artist: he is selling a closed source "security" solution for an operating system which is pre-rooted by its manufacturer. Everything that comes out of his mouth is meant to increase FUD about the actual security solutions, which are based on free and open source software, and so provide security for the user, as opposed to the software producer.

If it lands on someone's head, would it not be, technically speaking, a homicide?

In this case, however, it is literally about groundbreaking stuff.

An earthquake can hardly damage permanent data storage, as long as the building is structurally sound.

What concerns me more is that they are paying SF rent, when they could probably save a boatload of money by locating the archive pretty much anywhere else. But then again, may be they are saving on Internet that way...