In the law, the difference is whether it's a job or not. This is spelled out to a large degree by the IRS. Because of the tax deductability of business expenses, they had to solve that fuzzy line.

It has to do with whether you are trying to make a profit.

Making money for 3 out of 5 years is considered proof. But they consider ow much money is being made, esp. as a percentage of income, the percentage of time you put in, etc. It's complex.

So, an office worker making maybe 50k a year getting $10 on the side every month after investing like 40 hours of driving would probably not count.

In practice, they reduced the number of cars of the road. Uber increases that number.

By what mechanism is that value conveyed to the purchaser? Especially consider when some of this value is to society (insurance while driving to pick up a fare) rather than to the purchaser.

Umm... both of them can be subject to anti-trust actions. A duopoly is totally within the scope of the act.

I don't think it's tyrannical of the government to force the walled gardens open. Trust breaking, whether a monopoly or a duopoly, is a government interest.

Remember when the government broke up Standard Oil, how that led to tyranny? Or when they told MS they couldn't force their desktop monopoly onto the internet (well, the browser)? Oh the tyranny.

TL;DR. The solution to the catch-22 is to have the government fix the problem and leave the ideological hand-wringing at home.

people will be able to buy Holy Tiger-Repelling Rocks!

Buying holy items within a repressive communist government area? Check

Making the "tiger rock" joke about a country that has at least two variants of tiger? Check

You're still in "No true scotsman" level arguing. I'm claiming that your entire point is based on extrapolation. I believe at least half of the examples that you use are incorrectly categorized. Therefore your point is unsupported.

That's before we get into the fact that socialism and/or communism are in no way related (neither directly nor inversely) with the free market. But all you did was assert that the free market is better. The US abandoned a pure free market before Lenin took over Russia and NYC implementated a medallion system before Mao took over China.

Do they know the difference?

Evidence please?

North Korea historically disrupted a lot of markets, but that wasn't good. Greece didn't really try to stop market disruptions... they had a bubble burst.

Meanwhile, I don't expect China to welcome market innovation at all... they use tried and true methods at a huge scale.

Hell, Cuba has a lung cancer vaccine!

Before you complain about Nitpicking... I'm saying that the majority of your examples seem off. You kinda just made a socialism and/or communism vs. capitalism argument in a different cloth. Which has nothing to do with whether regulations exist.

On Android in general, some variants of Android, or UbuntuOS? Because that's interesting.

I assume a ton of OSS is C++, so it can just be (or has been) recompiled* for ARM7

*I'm rusty on recompiling on a different chipset; vis-a-vis recompiling C or C++ code.

ATI and nVidia try to compete for share. They have high-payed repstrying to convince companies making the games used in the benchmarks to use features that favor their cards over their competitions'. I can see publicizing the drivers leading to the discovery of new holes that screw up a specific card getting pushed.

Security by obscurity is not a replacement for real security, but it helps in this narrow case.

It has zero native apps but pretends to have lots of "apps" which are actually just icons that link to mobile websites.

Wait, it cannot run all the various OSS that the desktop version runs? What's the fucking point?

I thought it was all about trying to get more command line level control into a phone, to make it easier to do serious things.

You can get porn over HTML5.

But Hulu and Netfllix both still require 3rd party plugins (Flash, Silverlight)... if I recall correctly.

It has nothing to do with trademarks, or anything like that. Google no doubt noticed that the majority of his visitors would then search further for lush cosmetics. They view the URL as akin to a search term that needs to be optimized for the masses.

I'm not going to say it's right or should be done. But it is most certainly not arbitrary. And it is almost certainly legal, because the laws haven't kept up with things like accounts as property rights, etc.

You are thinking like a manager...I don't care about my work when I'll die, or even when I quit my company.

I'm both a programmer and a manager, so I can probably weigh in. I do care about what happens to your work when you leave the company. And part of my job is to make sure that your code is usable.

why should I write code for somebody who'll replace me ?

Because code is an asset that you are being paid to create. And if your code is not maintainable, it's not much of an asset; it's worth far less to me. So, if I notice our code is a fuck storm of uncommented overly complex verbiage, I'm not letting you work on anything important. So, maybe you get to work on small one-offs (really career enhancing), maybe I just fire you. But certainly I don't expect to allow you to keep extending your tentacles..

The reason you say "most of your code will be rewritten" is because it sounds like your code is poor. Why would I pay asset-level prices for stuff with a shelf-life of a year?

It's not an additional mandate. It's allowing people to spend their landline subsidy on broadband instead.

This is how the government works. Congress makes up a rule like "supply telephone subsidy to poor people". Some bureaucrat figures out how to verify that they are actually poor, how to deliver the subsidy, and whether it has to be a voice line or can be a data line.