Wrong. You just don't get free updates anymore if others cease to maintain a piece of software, now you have to create additions or maintenance fixes by yourself.

Or, as is more realistic for most people and organizations, hire someone with skills matching the problem to do it. It is not like programmers -even fairly well-trained ones- are much more of a rarity or generally more expensive than doctors of matching skill. Plus, maybe your problem is one that doesn't even require skills like any kind of doctor. Add to that that some may be convinced to give you a discount, because open source work can be counted as "charitable", too.

If you don't get paid well enough for your contributions to the economy, that's a different story and should be addressed. But not by cheap fuel with all the side-effects, but just plain higher, more fair wages. Indirect solutions only get you screwed over.

This here is really just about petrol cars and their emissions. Emissions which have effects that provably accumulate a lot of varied damage all over society. The health costs alone are quite insane, but not the only cost.

It is damage which so far people would ignore, because doing anything individually does mainly just dents their own budget with no visible personal gain. Well, now you eventually might have to, and it makes sense for (almost) everyone if everyone drastically reduces or stops their emissions.

So, according to you, the plan is:

1. Obama does not withdraw from Iraq as fast as he promised to during his election campaign.

2. ???

3. The US attack Libya with the intent to get its oil - and not like before in trade, but occupation of sorts. Also implied: Libya exports to the US, not to the EU, China, and Turkey anymore as it did before.

4. Profit!

Correct?

The difference actually is that Obama isn't after the oil in Libya...

Assuming you're a citizen of a NATO member country, you were on the correct side. Both in the humanitarian sense (fighting the worst war criminals, even if combatants had a pretty shoddy record) and in the general sense (supporting a democracy or an authoritarian state - guess which is better)...

I disagree, the UN matters. It decides what is the law of nations, and whether and how to enforce it. We all know it is still law made by men, but in this case, it represents the overwhelming majority of humanity and a good part of its power, too. It should not be ignored, for both practical and moral reasons.

Hey, if you wanted to stay clear of this one, you could actually do so, the rest will likely somehow get the job done. But would you really want to start two wars that aren't exactly perceived as righteous, and then turn down one that mostly is?

I don't think either applies.
A few things about the actual fighting: There's no real way to take heavy equipment or even just cars or carts with supplies through the desert when superior planes and helicopters control the air. And the important cities are the ones at the coast. Guess who'll have superiority in either place, even if it were just France vs Libya?

About the Libyan oil: Really, there are probably economic motivations at work, but this idea seems far-fetched. The EU and US at least surely care more about not getting a rebel army worth of refugees, safe shipping channels through the mediterranean sea, and safe coastlines. Definitely not the comparatively small bit of oil that might be expensively exploited (the cost of paying for the security of the extraction effort, the cost of domestic protests against it all, etc.) instead of just bought in trade.

I think you missed the part where member states, like Libya, explicitly agreed to various things the UN charter demands from members.

The UN is also not just some random faction subject to international law. No, it is essentially the international law, even though if its enforcement is only taken care of by willing volunteers.

I wouldn't advise anyone starting a revolution unless they realistically can win. As far as Libya is concerned, the world's most powerful factions are now quite convinced that Gadaffi and/or his forces are too insane, too brutal, too much going against their ideals and interests, and too close nearby, and the rest does not even disagree. Protecting people as described in the resolution is hence already very close to meaning the destruction Gadaffi's armies, so it may actually benefit the rebels decisively.
But I don't think most other rebels can even be "too close nearby" or get many of these other things, at which point it may even be doubtful if anyone cares for them.

Social media are helpful. But it took enormous steps for all of China, Russia, and the EU, even (in recent times especially) the US to get to where they are now. All social media wouldn't matter much otherwise, we would either already be at each other's throat, close to or entirely extinct, or actively preventing anyone from gaining prestige, territory, influence and anything. In the last case, what the rebels wanted wouldn't matter, they'd be just one more battlefield to fight on over entirely different issues, or be ignored.

Java applets!

You actually can modify (fix or alter) your sneakers or microwave with not much more effort than the original producer. Looking at the components from the outside as they are will generally tell you exactly what they do, too. And here, unlike with software, an occasional surprise inspection and scrutiny of the equipment available and used in the industrial facilities and tests of samples is quite good to ensure animals get butchered humanely or that food is created according to a certain recipe.

But with software, you generally need all of the code, build instructions and documentation as well as access to the binary in order to meaningfully be able to either inspect or modify it. And evil can be done in the slightest fraction of it, generally without any good means of detection and with maybe only one programmer knowing that it was done.

What "smaller countries" vote on everything? Or in other words, what countries other than just Switzerland practice direct democracy regularly and systematically at the national level? I think there are none. The USA with its state-level ballot measures / ballot questions is probably the closest thing so far - at least until the EU possibly gets an practicable implementation of initiatives and referendums.

Anyways now to correct the other bit: The notion of direct democracy in Switzerland means that people can collect a percentage of the population's signatures -it is specified in absolute numbers, but saying it like this makes the point more obvious- to "forcibly" initiate a public vote on new laws, or (more easily) stop new laws passed by the government.
As you might guess, the "collect signatures" part very much limits the number of issues that actually will be voted on, and they only get voted on on the national level if it in fact is a nation-wide law that needs to be passed or undone- so no hindrance in practicing the same in the USA, really. They often are simply taken on consequential issues parliament has either not wanted to decide yet, or that parliament has decided wrongly or insufficiently. An example of what one issue that probably would not have dragged on for so long with the right to initiate a vote in the USA: Recompensating any 9/11 first responders for illnesses they may have contracted.

Apart from all that, specific kinds of laws, like changes in the constitution or specific areas of the law may also just simply require a public vote. Even parliament itself can initiate a public vote so they don't have to decide an issue... but you already know that from your own legal practice, except it never happens on the national level, as far as I can tell.

You forgot the amount of data that mankind wants to keep grows and no end is in sight, even if you consolidated data in a "cloud" with de-duplication and only a few copies for redundancy it would grow. One example everyone knows is how cameras and their produced files got larger and larger resolutions recently, that trend probably won't stop...

So, the need for data storage will keep growing and that data storage better be reasonably long-lived if you want to stay in business, because that is a primary feature for these devices for just about your entire customer base. Short-lived devices will degrade your reputation as a vendor rapidly and for a long time...

Well yes, they are a bit of a unnecessary luxury by now. We want information to be on the internet or our hard disk drives, in proper form for reading on many screen form factors and many OS's supported readers, printable and storable. If libraries could offer that, they could stay as very relevant as Wikipedia is.

Of course, the modern information access that is being demanded directly contradicts the business model of most copyright holders. Now the question is, which of these two is unsustainable... and I'll say it's the old copyright model, both because of the very excessive duration of protection (which by now ensures it never ever will benefit the living people who protect the copyright in the first place), as well as the very fact that it does not practically work in our society without various very ugly forms of restrictions in our own homes and on the internet to support it.

It is not the internet and free services that need fixing, but the laws regarding intellectual property.