Yes, they are... just indirectly. That's kind of like saying I'm free to charge whatever I want at our cookie stand.... only my super secret grandma recipe has to be shared with all the other cookie stands. Now, you've forced grandma to give up her family secret and now we as a family have lost value. We can't charge $5 a cookie for the best-cookie-ever, only $0.50 because Timmy next door is selling our recipe too. Society gains, maybe... at our expense.

So far, nobody's coming after Grandma's recipes... but why not? You're coming after mine (software)

The effort I put into a work has value, and it is not unethical to charge you a fee if you want to benefit from my work by using it. Sure, maybe someday you want to use my printer with some new OS you're playing with and you can't and that pisses you off... but I don't see why that's much different than saying that by buying a printer you should have the rights to the entire design and be legally able to build your own and sell them. Sorry... that wouldn't work, would it?

By saying non-free software is unethical... he's saying the novel, unique parts of what make my work valuable should be freely given away to everyone to copy and use as they want... just like Grandma's cookie recipe.

Why only software? (or hardware) Why not building architecture, art design, books, the complete design of say your car or an airplane? Isn't that the same? Wouldn't "society" benefit in similar ways if EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT made by man was open for everyone to copy and modify as they wanted?

Where does this not just turn into flat out socialism? Now, I'm not a knee-jerk "socialism is bad" type... but I don't think it's naturally better or 'more ethical'.

You might say "we've never seen quite my kind of socialism", but EVERYONE says that about their perfect form of society.

Why not everything? Why just the fruits of my labor, as a software developer?

As far as I can tell, you're essentially demanding that I 'take one for the team'... calling me unethical if I don't.

Sounds like more of the same beamforming they've done for years, just more of it spread further apart.

So DIDO, distributed in distributed out... sounds like MIMO with more antennas, more distance between them (surrounding the targets, even)

I'm not sure why this isn't an obvious extension of MIMO. Harder to do, sure... and cool that it's coming... but obvious in concept.

... and before bacteria and viruses were understood, it was more likely that demons had infested you or God was angry with you than whatever it was they hadn't thought of or figured out yet.

You don't see the problem with that kind of thought process?

Well, I would have agreed with you... but Jobs is dead now.

It will eventually get really hard to ignore the corporate world and continue to explain that to shareholders. There's no way they're going to capture say >30% market share there without actually listening to what corporations need.

The "We'll show you what you want" thing that works(ed?) so well for them in the consumer space is only going to get them so far into the corporate world. The corporate world wants a platform that is dependable, easy to administer, doesn't arbitrarily break, and continues running crap internal software written by monkeys as long as possible. It's the almost the opposite of cool...

You've got to be F-ing kidding me.

I've got a macbook pro retina 2012. I took the free upgrade from Lion (which came with it) to Mavericks... the NEXT POINT RELEASE.

It removed all third party drivers (even ones that were compatible with Mavericks). I was extremely lucky my USB 3.0 Ethernet hub had a driver on release day. Some I just installed right back on.

It removed command line tools breaking my build setup... and when I added that back I find there's no gdb with Mavericks. My build environment is crippled on lldb until the third party stuff can sort that out.

There's apparently been quite massive application platform changes, and a whole lot of software is now broken.

Apple quite obviously doesn't give half a shit about breaking anything that's not Apple software. That's the massive, space-elevator sized mindset fuckup that will keep them out of any significant share in corporate environments that actually need shit to not break any more often that absolutely necessary for... well... forever, until Apple gets the message.

Apparently, I was pretty spoiled growing up with Microsoft. Most third party stuff worked across updates... unless there was actually a real reason for it (driver level changes, etc). You know... because that's what USED to be purpose #1 of any operating system... be a platform to run crap reliably. Now, it's apparently be-the-ENTIRE-platform, and other software is apparently just a bunch of annoying freeloaders along for the ride.

The real tragedy is that this lazy mindset is infecting some Linux platforms (well, okay.. Ubuntu). They seem highly enthusiastic to duplicate Apple's boneheaded modus operandi.

> Even then you don't have the freedom to hang out with the weirdos if your neighbors are going to ostracize you for it.

It usually takes us a year after moving to develop more than one or two neighborhood friendships. It's not like the tribe is going to deny you food or won't help you build your hut or something. Neighbors are less important than ever.

The new 'neighbors' are parents of your kids classmates, people at work, etc. There's also gym friends, hobby friends, virtual communities of all kinds... you can pretty much find like minded people if you look a little bit. (Which is actually a serious problem as we don't seem mentally prepared as a species for feedback loops from too much 'similar thinking' like watching too much Fox, MSNBC, local conspiracy groups, serious new age groups, terrorists, etc)

There's also the concept that what passes for too weird these days is quite different than it used to be. I'm fairly sure you could be pretty weird these days and very few people would hold it against you or treat you much differently.

Wow... supplements. Especially the wackier new age ones... listing everything under the sun as cured by them and as long as there's a "for entertainment purposes only" on the bottle it's okay.

I asked my mother about that label once, she said "Oh, it's just something the government makes them put there. These really work." Most people buying that garbage think the same thing.

The web sites are WAY worse... but then I'm not sure what could be done about that.

The biggest problem I have with what passes for ideology these days is how goddamn absolute everyone is about it.

I just said I don't think we should have too much equality. I absolutely do not want everything to be equal regardless of individual effort.

I am NOT saying we solve a massive income disparity by giving everyone in the world 40K/yr.

I work 80-110 hours a week, almost all year long. I'm not in the 99%. I definitely believe in working hard to get ahead and being rewarded for it. I don't want my sons coasting for the rest of their lives because their dad was successful. I want them to have to work at least a little bit to maintain the good life they've inherited. That in my mind is the only way you'll help guarantee that the people living the good life actually deserve to.

Society falls apart at the extremes. It's perfectly rational to adjust the system to maintain balance. The easiest way to solve this particular problem I think is with the tax code. There's just some level of disparity that's not healthy. You can still have it, it will just be harder to do at the FAR extremes. It's a weighting factor, a correction factor.

While it is their primary responsibility, they're not getting it done. If it was just a few crap companies doing it, that'd be fine... but it's not.

A large scale, systematic crisis is developing as the business culture as a whole continues doing this.

That's when government SHOULD get involved... when business or people are failing to fix a problem that's affecting a lot of people for a substantial amount of time.

That's kind of like saying we shouldn't regulate food quality... because if say some large Chinese exporter poisons a few million kids the parents will obviously stop buying from them. There's not enough transparency for parents to even know who's buying from that exporter. Sure... it's ultimate self correcting... (maybe bring back food tasters?) but it's pretty retarded to wholly depend on some invisible hand like we're in some sixth grade economics class and that's as complex as the world gets.

Similarly, there's not enough transparency of information to people continuing to pay millions of dollars for failure to recognize they're making a mistake. Maybe the information is out there, but they're not looking at it.

Anyone can do this "reasonable-sounding logic" game.

More money in the lower income levels means a lot more money moving around, benefitting everyone.

Most businesses more than make up for the higher wages with higher sales as more people can afford to spend.

Working teenage kids can afford more and build their way to prosperity faster.

Or...

If you pay executives a lot of money they'll be too comfortable and won't bother working very hard.

If employees were forced to stand up and stretch every hour we could significantly reduce our healthcare costs.

Companies could earn extra money if they paid their employees too little to live on and could televise nightly "Fight for your food" contests.

(have we reached absurdity yet?)

This is kind of why we actually need objective research and studies... strangely enough, some of that seems to have been done (quick google results): http://www.raisetheminimumwage.com/pages/job-loss

Right... but the problem is mainly paying them all millions of dollars independent of success. The cost of failure needs to be higher. The overall level of pay needs to be lower.... because the majority of them are simply not worth it.

Besides, companies were run successfully for a long time before the current explosion in compensation.

I don't think things are quite that dysfunctional.

Most of the actual ownership is represented in the board (most of the time), by proxy or otherwise.

It's just that executives tend to be good at selling this superstar payroll leads to superstar company performance pipe dream...

Please do use an 8 ball and tell me where that's at, so I can ask every day if I can buy the company for $1. :)

Obviously they're better than RANDOM, but probably not any better than a reasonably competent manager... which are really a dime a dozen (at least in comparison to what's needed) Many are probably worse than simply a reasonably competent manager, because they're been brainwashed to think they're superstars and they need to take risks to make good on that image.

There are a lot of companies out there, and most probably have competent management. I've still seen a disturbing number of absolutely insane ones, though.

This.

Really crappy management of a large company is taken as large company management experience.

For example... how on Earth is Steven Elop seriously in the running for Microsoft CEO? (conspiracy theories aside)

It DOES take some talent (or at least skill) to run a large company well... but there are WAY more people skilled enough to do so than there are executive positions. Pay is high because of quid pro quo and compensation envy.