Let's put this in geek terms:

You're using "free" in the RMS sense, where the market itself is liberated. You and I agree on this. A free market is one that has been liberated from monopolists and others who want to lock it down for their own benefit.

The Koch brothers want a free-as-in-BSD market where they are free to manipulate it as they see fit without allowing others to benefit.

Which freedom is more important - that of the market or that of the actors in the market? I suppose the answer boils down to your demographic. If you're one of the billionaires who doesn't want to work for a living, you probably want the latter version so that you can run roughshod over rules meant to keep one person from screwing it up for everyone. If you are literally anyone else on the entire planet, you should probably prefer the first definition.

I'm smart enough to know it, but dumb enough not to bother. I'm not an extensive UI customizer (outside of when using Linux and a tiling window manager) - you dance with the date you brought. If I'm on a Mac, I use it like a Mac because that's how all apps, settings, and utilities expect you to use it. Why fight against the current? I'll use the keyboard prefs to put the control key in the right place, but other than that, OK, today I'm a Mac user.

Same with Windows. Sure, I could install a shell that works the way I'm used to everywhere else. But that's struggling against The One True (Terrible) Way and seems futile. Worse, it means I'll only be proficient on that one particular computer, and somewhat lost when using someone else's. When in Windows, I do as the Windows does.

You can know all about the alternative interfaces and still not choose to use them. Personally, I just adopted the approach of not using Windows at all, ever, unless I absolutely have to. It's served me pretty well so far.

Sure they are. I assure you that the priest who is fully supported by his congregation is taxed on his "earnings". A housewife still has to file and is responsible for the taxes on the spouses income even if they had no role in actually earning it. All those people still pay sales, use, gasoline, excise, etc taxes. It's essentially impossible to not be a taxpayer on some level.

I run a company that makes wiring harnesses and I am an engineer (as well as an accountant) myself. I assure you that there are a LOT of idiots who would would design such a stupid system. I get to deal with some of them on a semi-regular basis.

We like to pretend here on slashdot that engineers are universally good at their job and always do quality work but I have several file cabinets full of evidence 10 feet from where I sit that proves that too many engineers are monumentally incompetent idiots. On a daily basis I see drawings that are incomplete, incorrect, badly designed, occasionally dangerous, specify incompatible or needlessly expensive parts, difficult or impossible to read, sloppy, cannot be manufactured and even just plain incoherent. I have seen precisely 7 product drawings (out of hundreds) in the last 5 years where I could build the product detailed on the print without asking even a single question or correcting some error. This is quite simply bad engineering by people who aren't very good at their jobs.

The fun part of engineering is figuring out a clever solution to a problem. The harder and less fun part of engineering (but probably the more important part) is documenting the solution in such a way that others can understand and replicate your solution and adjust/debug it if necessary. People who can write good quality work instructions are a shocking rarity even among very smart people. A lot of engineers will take easy shortcuts even when it results in a worse and more expensive product in the long run.

Not even remotely true. Governments are perfectly capable of earning money when they choose to. Governments can and do own things and can behave very much like private businesses if they want to. In China and Egypt and Russia (and many more) have huge swaths of the private economy are outright owned by the government. The fact that the US government generally refrains from trying to make a profit and behaving like a private enterprise doesn't mean they cannot or do not. For a time in the very recent past the US government literally owned GM and Chrysler which means the US government was for a time in the automobile manufacturing business.

Not to mention that a government can literally "print" money if they want to. The Federal Reserve technically makes a profit every year though that doesn't really mean much in reality.

Some do and some do not. People who stay home to raise children often do not earn any money. Religious leaders are often supported by tithes or donations earned by others. Elected officials and judges are typically supported by taxpayers.

My story: Been using Linux and BSD heavily since the 90s. I don't really care if you spell "restart foo" as "/etc/init.d/foo restart", "/usr/local/etc/rc.d/foo.sh restart" "service foo restart", "systemctl restart foo", or just "pkill foo && foo". As an end user of the init systems, those are fungible.

As a developer of things that uses the init systems, there's a huge difference. SysV and BSD inits are close enough in functionality that if you learn one, you can pick up the other. systemd changes that totally, in ways that many of us aren't convinced are actually better. I love learning new stuff! I just changed jobs to learn new stuff! New stuff is cool... but only as long as there's a reason for it. I don't see systemd as being advantageous, at least on the server machines where I spend my days.

I'll be happy to pick up systemd if and when 1) there's no alternative short of maintaining my own private Debian fork, or 2) I can see a reason I'd want to rip out the tried and true, Unix-philosophy-conformant "do one thing and do it well" init systems we have today. As of this moment, systemd seems to do way too much. Given that it's a single point of failure for an entire host, that makes me distrustful.

I bought a Synology NAS and it comes with something called Cloud Station, which is basically Dropbox. You install the client on your machines and it keeps your ~/CloudStation folder in sync with your own NAS. Your data never leaves your personal control. I currently have about 4TB of open storage, which is a little more than the 8GB or so of Dropbox I've accumulated over the years.

I'm sure other NASes offer similar arrangements. Pick one you like, install it, then forget the whole idea of paying some company $$$ per month and praying they care about your privacy.

Not necessarily and only after the fact. A hotel chain has a reputation to maintain and generally they are operating as ongoing concerns. AirBnB users (both guests and renters) are under no such long term pressures.

I think that is overly cynical. The government and its elected officials generally do care that the people under their care are safe and happy, even if their ultimate motivation is just to get re-elected rather than some deep level of humanity. And a government being concerned about attempts to circumvent their powers of taxation shouldn't be terribly surprising. Taxing travelers is a great way to bring money into the area from outside without having to tax the people that elect them. Shouldn't shock anyone that such an easy taxation target would be valued highly by government officials who want to get re-elected.

That is true but not really relevant. If someone is considering a long term stay, chances are they are going to look the place over in person before any money changes hands. Not so with a short term hotel-style stay where you will be in and out in a short amount of time. I'm not saying AirBnB is a bad thing but what you are saying is a false equivalency in most cases. There are some serious issues to think about here is all I'm saying.

So clearly we can extrapolate from your experience that no one ever has had or will have a problem... [/sarcasm]

Look, most people probably will never have a problem because most people are decent law abiding sorts. Those aren't who we are worried about. It's the few really bad ones that hurt, steal from or defraud or otherwise harm someone. If your experiences have been great, that is wonderful but that doesn't mean it isn't worth worrying about both for the visitor and the host. If you want to take the risks involved in using a service like AirBnB I have no problem with that but that doesn't mean there aren't some very important public health and safety considerations to address.

When we get to any actual science or engineering then I will pretend to care. Until then it really is not important in a forum like slashdot to anyone but a few overly pedantic people who don't know when to pick their battles. Just because people here generally care about science and engineering doesn't mean we can't deal with a little obvious imprecision in a description of a shape. No one will be negatively affected by the fact that it isn't truly a torus and most of us are well aware that it isn't actually a torus by the proper defintion. It's like pointing out that the Saint Louis Arch is actually a catenary instead of a parabola as is commonly assumed. Interesting but ultimately not genuinely important 99.999999999% of the time.

In some cases the answer will be yes. If I found my out my neighbor had turned his house into a de-facto hotel, I would likely be pretty upset and rightly so. That potentially affects me and my property so you better believe I'm going to want a say in the matter. Furthermore there are various important liability, safety and taxation concerns that need to be addressed before any sane person should give a blanket go-ahead.

The (probably few) customers who don't get scammed by shady "hosts". The neighbors who don't have to put up with living next to a de-facto hotel which the property is almost certainly not zoned for. The taxing authorities and by extension the local citizens who are probably not receiving the benefits of tax revenue they would otherwise receive. The normal hotels and their employees who lose revenue they likely otherwise would have received.

Just because something is new doesn't mean it is necessarily good. I don't have a problem with Air Bnb and I actually do wish them the best of luck but just because they think their product is "innovative" doesn't automatically mean it is a good idea. I can see potential problems with the service that are serious and need to be addressed in a more adult way than screaming "KILLING INNOVATION" to anyone who will listen.

Their well deserved reputation isn't relevant for once I think. Microsoft doesn't need to sell at a loss here to gain market share at Dropbox's expense because they almost certainly have a huge cost advantage. Like for Google, storage space for Microsoft is a by-product of their other product offerings such as search or Office in the cloud. I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft's (and have 20 years of postings to prove it) but I really don't think there is a credible case for predatory pricing to be made here. Dropbox has a flawed business model and as you point out they should have sold the company when they had the chance. Now they will get crushed by any large firm that has storage space to spare (specifically Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc) and a desire to slap a friendly interface on it because by-products are by definition cheap.

Probably not applicable here because storage space to Google is a by-product, not a loss leader. By-products by definition are generally very very cheap which means that Google's cost for the service is pretty close to zero - at least far closer to zero than it is for Dropbox. Otherwise the unused storage space would be a cost (waste) rather than a revenue stream. Google doesn't have to sell it for a loss because they have a huge cost advantage over Dropbox. They can sell it far below Dropbox's cost and still make money doing so because storage is not their primary business. Storage to Google is a by-product.

This is very similar to the problem Microsoft has in trying to compete with Linux. Companies that develop for linux have their primary line of business elsewhere -services, hardware, etc. For example IBM sells services so they don't actually have to make money on linux. Microsoft on the other hand currently has to make money selling the software so they can't just give it away. This puts certain constraints on Microsoft's business model.

You are almost certainly mistaken in your presumption that they are selling at a loss. Storage space for a company like Google or Amazon is a by-product. It would otherwise be waste to them so they can sell it profitable very very cheaply. They aren't dumping here because they have a genuine cost advantage.

Frankly, Dropbox has a rather dumb business model that I really don't think has a bright future. I say this as someone who actually uses Dropbox and generally likes the product. But I really don't see them being successful as a stand alone business. They have the same problem Microsoft does when competing against Linux. The costs for the competing products are just genuinely lower.