The point is you are an ignoramus of enormous proportions. The rise in wealth in USA was due to the so called 'robber barons', which created entire new industries and allowed the economy to flourish around them. The 'trust busting' was the beginning of the DESTRUCTION of the economy, as it started destroying the principles of private property rights. Government destroys the economy, it doesn't create it, the economy has to be created first for it to be destroyed by the government, and the private sector in the USA built a mighty economy that it took the growing USA government this long to destroy it.

Internet is critical infrastructure, which is precisely why it must NOT be in the hands of any government (and no other infrastructure should either, because it is illegal, immoral but also really stupid - if you want something to work, you don't give it to government).

So once again, if you want a 'socially responsible' company that you think will survive being exactly what you want it to be, set one up and do with it as you wish. You want OTHER people to do something for you, well, tough, other people shouldn't be forced to hire you or do anything for you that you believe you are entitled to and you believe they are obligated.

I run a company, I hire people the way I want to hire people, I fire people the way I want to fire people. I provide my employees with this information upfront, it's their choice to take or not to take the job. I tell them exactly what I will pay them and if they don't like it, they are 100% free to find some other guy to work for. I have no interest in anything you call 'social responsibility', in fact I do not believe in such nonsense in the first place. I only have responsibility to myself and I have responsibility to be HONEST with people I hire, that's all.

You think there should be some other responsibility: take your own money and start your own company to provide that. That's not why I run my company, YMMV.

- so, TheGratefulNet, start your own company and hire whoever you like. Once you do that, you'll quickly figure out that you can't survive as a company, hiring unskilled labor at minimum wage labor prices, having to deal with payroll taxes, medicare (ACA now), income taxes and all the other taxes and that's AFTER you having to figure out what exactly you will be using your savings (or borrowed capital) to build as a software company.

Good luck.

Level of public science funding should be precisely 0 (that would be zero, as in nothing at all). The Internet would have existed regardless, individual people must not be forced to become slaves to the collective even to publicly fund science or health or education or food or anything, not even little cute orphans should be publicly funded, there is 0 authorisation for any of this and there should be 0 authorisation for any of this and if YOU want to fund something, that's what you have YOUR OWN bank account and you can set up a charity to donate to your particular cause.

Lock them up for what?

In Russia big business does NOT happen without involvement of government officials, who all EXPECT bribes and will NOT allow you to build your business if you do not pay them what they want.

So HP or whoever it is, if they want to deal in Russia they will be paying bribes to the politicians, there is no way around it at all. You can either do big business in Russia and as an ABSOLUTE requirement you will pay bribes, or you can forget about that market completely.

But hey, if you are talking about locking up the POLITICIANS that expect bribes, then I am 100% with you.

So what this law does is preventing people who want to do more from doing it, making it illegal for people who want to climb the corporate ladder faster from attempting that.

I am sure that the French will figure out a simple way around this law, after all if an employer sets up a newsgroup and posts to it after hours, who can prevent employees that are interested in reading what the boss posts from subscribing?

- precisely. You want to destroy individual rights, and people that own/run/operate companies are individuals, whose rights you want to destroy, so I understood you quite correct then. No, none of any business, regardless of its size and industry should be regulated, quite the opposite. There should be 0 regulations, 0 licenses, 0 income related taxes, 0 government intrusion into our individual lives, only that prevents corruption that is inherent in systems that attempt to regulate for the 'good of the society'. Everything and anything that starts 'for the good of the society' ends up being for the destruction of the individual and as I said earlier, society that is willing to sacrifice individual rights has 0 entitlement to exist, it has no purpose, there is no purpose for us, individuals to create societies and civilizations that destroy our own individual rights.

Society is only a concept, individuals are actually living breathing creatures and as living breathing creatures we need to prevent collectivist concepts from destroying our rights to be free people.

As to nuclear power being anathema: that's the problem with government regulating business, including regulations of nuclear power in the first place. The collective is using government supplied violence to prevent individuals from their own attempts at nuclear power plants and that is what should be stopped - government and the mob should be stopped, not individuals.

- as long as it's not money printed by the Fed and handed out to a bunch of so called 'investors' that have access to the Fed, then it's real investors that are spending their own resources to build these server farms and it has nothing to do with you or society, it's none of your business how people spend their own money, Mr. Stalin.

- this of-course. Quite the opposite is true, we must stop talking about public interest and collectivism, we must stop everything that has to do with government controlling our lives and allow individuals do what is best for them and if individuals decide to combine some of their efforts voluntarily, that's fine. If that is your call, call to VOLUNTARISM then I am on board. But that was my question: who are you talking to, what are you talking about? Force of government? A call to more violence based on government 'solutions'?

I do not know who you are talking to, but I assure you that civilization derived from injustice of destruction of individual freedoms has no entitlement to exist at all.

there is no god.
there is no magic.
there are no souls.

we are it, there is nothing beyond the material existence that we know of and there is no need to come up with constructs that are more complex than necessary to explain our existence. Epicycles were not necessary to explain planetary motion, neither are gods necessary to explain our lives.

Thus the statement "god bless Linus" should be rephrased as:

Blessed be Rationality and Self Interest, the One True Engine of Progress!

I've been purely on Ubuntu and now Mint, since 2006 and I switched a number of clients to Mint as well (a retail chain even).

In my company I set everybody up with a Mint system, I only allowed one person to have 2 (two) Windows machines at the same time, but his job requires this, we have to make sure our products are tested on Windows as well of-course.

- oh yeah, fresh ideas like: "you didn't build that".
Fresh ideas like: "the consumer created those jobs".
Fresh ideas like: "all responsibility is shared".

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I think Linus is 100% spot on with his comment:

- as a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, objectivist, I applaud your principled views. No person should be forced to associate with anybody they do not like, no person should be forced to provide access to his or her private property to anybody they do not like, this includes individuals and their businesses, the only exception is the government.

Everybody has the right to discriminate against anybody else based on any grounds at all, only government must not be allowed to discriminate.

This of-course means that anybody should be able to prevent people that they disagree with from using their private property, this of-course means that government must not be allowed to force businesses not to discriminate against anybody based on any grounds.