(See title). Or maybe the Galapagos Islands?

For those who don't know (really?), Eben Moglen has a leading role in drafting the GPL licenses and in enforcing them (or had), see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html

He's also the head and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center which has the FSF as one of its clients. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen

SFLC had a podcast, the Software Freedom Law Show, hosted by (among other) Bradley M. Kuhn, the former Executive Director of the FSF and currently on the board of directors.

In other words, Moglen is deeply involved with free software community organizations.

Socat has 80 different options for how to connect (stdio, TCP, raw IP packets, unix sockets, fifo files, UDP, openssl-wrappings, ...).

I'd want to do that with some cryptographic authentication---that is, integrity. Whether I want to my disk keep secret or not is a different matter, but I sure as heck don't want my ISP (or just cosmic rays) corrupting my file system. Maybe ssh or stunnel is the right option here.

Telnet sends terminal management information included in the byte stream. Use netcat or socat if you just want to pipe stdin into a TCP session.

Yep. His interest is (presumably) keeping his job. That means maximizing the profits of his company. His company makes big-name titles (I for one love the Zelda series, and tetris on the game boy wasn't half bad :D), so of course he wants everyone to believe that big-name titles are the best and worthy of the consumers' money. His interests are, of course, not necessarily aligned with those of the public. Probably not, in this case---otherwise he, an MBA schooled in some economics, would just put his faith in the invisible hand of the market.

What you're saying implies, if you think about it, that every sector is behaving like a cartel: the producers are cooperating (rather than competing) in their efforts to make as much money as possible.

If I was running my own company, I'd be a cold-hearted asshole and drop the price below what the cartel is charging and advertise this in as many places as possible, hoping to grab all the customers to myself and making a killing. Now, if these slimy weasel-suckers are half disgusting as me, they'd do the same. You're saying they don't?

If the markets work the way economists think they do, the public exercises an influence on the price by buying some amounts at some price points and different amounts at different price points, thus influence what the optimal price (for the seller) is.

You may also want to add economics to your podcasting list, at econtalk.org, or watching a few video lectures at http://www.youtube.com/user/jodiecongirl#p/c/22785443C5FB0F83 (the latter being more technical and mathematical).

This is not to say "Corporations: good" or "Competition: bad"---on the contrary. I just don't think that all corporations in every sector form cartels: the benefit of undercutting the cartel is a too strong temptation, especially whenever there are more actors in the sector. (And "Yay, go the little guy!")

I believe that it's possible to build distributed systems where you don't trust everyone involved, but only trust that a certain fraction (often at least half or at least two thirds) of the involved parties are honest.

It seems much more likely that at least half of the Jo(e) Randoms doesn't have the time and inclination to fiddle with the routing table on his "internet box" to screw you over than people who want power will abstain from using power to force themselves into your internet box. Especially when Joe Random can find amateur pictures of someone else's partner.

Also, even though I live in the bad part of town, I think my part of town is filled with at least 95% good people, a few who do a little bad because they're put into a sucky position by "The System", and 0.1% who are just fucked up. People generally want to get along. That's in part also why markets work (reasonably well).

But so do other companies---what are the arguments that specifically Microsoft should be stable? If Microsoft got disbanded today, several small $OS Support Contractor companies might form to make use of the available labor and knowledge. What's the benefit of Microsoft compared to the alternative?

Also, taxes tend to be a net loss to society: the make the marginal price of the taxed thing be different from the marginal cost, which causes inefficient allocations as well as underproduction. Providing jobs isn't a benefit in and of itself: hiring people to dig ditches and fill them up again doesn't create value, it's just a transfer with a high labor cost. Just give them the money and skip the ditches, then the world has more free time in total.

We could move off of Windows and onto Linux, BSD, Haiku, OS X, [...]. We have to lose some coordination games on the way---who switches from MS Office to Libre Office first? And we might have to work on improving Wine in order to preserve the investment made in Windows API applications. But if we can solve this, we should be good to go, right? Oh, but good on you for finding an argument specific to the company in question.

I might buy that it's a benefit to the Microsoft employees that they save the friction costs of finding a new job, and the users of Microsoft's products will save similar transaction costs in switching to new products. But that's a one-time gain (or loss avoidance), which shouldn't overrule a long-term increase in productivity. Then there's the general level of churn, of these "recurring one-time" costs, but Microsoft is just one player in a sea of churning companies.

So I'm not really sure, still, what the social benefit is, except keeping the level of churn down. This doesn't seem to outweigh the problems of monopoly... err, bad stuff.

What's the value to society of company stability?

I understand clearly why you as an investor want to use diversification to stabilize a stock portfolio (that spans multiple companies). But who benefits from having one particular company be stable and secure? Risk-averse investors? Don't they buy bonds or ultra-stable, ultra-diversified portfolios anyways?

Real geeks implement their own custom version of vim in elisp!

This post are spel-cheecked by Sony.

Now that you speak of reproduction rates, here's a thing that's bugging me:

What does that mean? Doubling sounds like a lot, but consider this:

It's about a 3.5% yearly growth. Your bank balance can probably do that with a reasonably diversified portfolio, at least if you can afford parking your money for a few years.

Throughout the same past 20 years (1990-2010), the US economy has grown from 8 to 13 times X dollars (http://www.supportingevidence.com/Government/US_GDP_over_time.html), or put another way by 50% and then some. The US population in general has grown by roughly 25% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States).

So yeah, it's fast, but's it's 3.5% vs. 2% and 1% if you put it in those terms. (@editors) Let's have some context, yes?

Suppose that out of every ten religious-gene children, seven become religious themselves (let's say, in five different religions); out of ten atheist-gene children, only six become religious. Then, this version of reality is consistent with your experince *and* with the headline+summary (I don't RTFA, the comments have more signal per time).

That's one issue: when you do any observation of complex systems, such as humans or groups of humans, you don't just look at a single data point. You look at two different points, and try to link the difference in outputs (kid religiousity) to the difference in inputs (parent religiousity).

Another issue: humans are complicated systems. Groups of humans even more so. Therefore, if you look at only one point of each type, you might get fooled by an arbitrary difference that's due to some unrelated factor. That's why you make a lot of observations, hoping that the unrelated variations distribute themselves evenly, such that the "sum of error vectors" is zero (or exponentially small) in both groups of subjects.

So even if your anecdote ran counter to the theory, you would need an overweight of similar anecdotes versus the ones confirming the theory, and the anecdotes would have to be chosen randomly in order for the assumption "the error vector sum is small" to make sense.

(At least as far as I understand science and statistics. If I'm wrong, please tell me: help me inform rather than misinform people in the future.)

No, of course he couldn't. Technical solutions to social problems never work.

Besides, he'd be conditioned into associating the screen images of CoD with the inane messaging on the chat, so his subconscious would expose him to the thing he was trying to suppress

I agree; not just safety nets, but progressive transfers, regulation to completely internalize externalities (pollution for one). Quoting myself,

Note also I advocate land value taxation and (parts of) Georgeism; I'm told he was a strong workers' rights advocate, so I'm not pro big business or pro the rich people.

All that is to say: I have an issue with you saying that the thing I defend is a cult. I believe markets generally do well, based on the arguments economists use, and I assume that observational data and empiricism enters into those arguments and/or the validation of them. According to my limited understanding of how markets work, doing medicine on the market ought to work fine, but in practice socialised medicine appears to work best. Maybe the incentives are wrong or maybe the consumers are irrational or something, I'm not sure. But I'm pro socialised medicine because evidence says it works. I don't think a market cultist would be.

I think you mean 65. Godwin agrees.