Stupidity is the only sin in nature. Judgment is swift; the punishment, harsh. And there is no appeal...you live and you learn, or you don't live long.
-Robert A. Heinlein, via Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love
This quote is more than just one SF author's take on the process of natural selection. It applies to *anything* humans do where failure is an option. Torvalds passed judgment -- swift and harsh -- and because Linux is *his* the authority to render that judgment as swiftly and as harshly as he did is his, as well. Stupidity needs to be called out whenever it occurs, period. The alternative is the cessation of progress toward whatever goal you are striving for, be it a stable community, a stable civilization, or indeed, a stable operating system.
Get rid of copyright. Get rid of the notion of applying property rights to non-scarce goods. Any system of property rights (capitalism, communism, etc.) is designed with scarcity in mind.
Well, property rights != copyrights, so your attempt to conflate the two renders your assertion somewhat problematic, but I think you are headed in the right direction. Copyright preserves value by artificially preserving scarcity, but it can only work in a system where scarcity is *allowed* to create value. Under communism, products have their value assigned to them by the State -- scarcity is not necessarily a factor, so copyright isn't necessarily needed to preserve it. Ditto socialism. Under capitalism, however, products have their value dictated by a free market, where scarcity is a significant driver. As long as scarcity is a driver of value, copyright in some form or another has to be available to guarantee scarcity. If you want to be free of copyright, you have to be free of capitalism, or at least the free market-driven kind worshipped in the US.
I wonder how Delta, a Georgia based company can be subject to California law with respect to online privacy? What about Los Angeles law? Are they subject to that too?
Does Slashdot have to worry about their website complying with Fresno law?
The whole thing just seems a little bit odd. Like when the US goes after foreign-based online gambling companies.
Well, yes, in short, they do. Jurisdiction is co-terminal with the threat. If you find this "odd", I recommend that you run, not walk, to the nearest legal library and read up a bit. Start with the section on international law...
In America, how do you stop somebody from committing mass murder with a gun?
Can you do it with legislation outlawing guns? Presently, the answer is a resounding NO. You can't just pass a law taking guns away, because the right for a US citizen to bear arms is guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. I think efforts to pass such legislation are a waste of energy because they will never clear the constitutional hurdle.
So, how about changing the Constitution? Well, there are two ways to do that. Get two-thirds, or 34 of the 50 individual State legislatures to request that Congress assemble a national constitutional convention to rescind the second Amendment. Failing that, get Congress itself to assemble a constitutional convention by getting two-thirds of sitting members of both the Senate and House to agree, but then you have to get three-fourths, or 38 of the 50 State legislatures to ratify it. The Founding fathers wanted it to be hard for the constitution to be changed on a whim by popular opinion -- that's the 2/3 part of the requirement for the State-initiated constitutional convention. And they wanted it even harder for the federal government to change it -- that's why a constitutional convention initiated by the US Congress requires 3/4, not 2/3, of the fifty State legislatures to ratify it. I seriously doubt the ability of any movement to accomplish those kinds of majorities in both the Congress and the State legislatures. Fwiw, the former method has been unsuccessfully tried twice, the last being with the Equal Rights Amendment in the early Seventies. I'd have to say changing the Constitution gets a pretty resounding NO, as well.
So what's left? This may sound a bit like a certain modest proposal from Johnathan Swift, but I deliberately quoted everybody's favorite SF author in the subject because his pragmatic observations on an armed citizenry formed the basis for what I think may be (the only) possible solution to the problem of random citizens killing eighteen grade-school kids with guns they can legally obtain.
It is OK to mock Christians, and anyone else who believes in things they cannot prove.
Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that Gödel's First Incompleteness theorem proved that there exist true statements that may never be proven. So that suggests a question: Do you disbelieve true things, or is it OK to mock you?
~Loyal
Uh, epic fail. Godel's theories on undecidable propositions only hold within the formal systems within which they are created. There exist perfectly valid ways to decide these kinds of propositions outside the formal system. Godel's method of proof of the Incompleteness Theorem itself should have been enough to establish that for you. So that suggests a question for you: Do you actually understand why what you are asserting is false, or is it OK to mock you for your ignorance?
A CS degree, like any degree, is a means to an end. It's a tool, more or less, and you use it to help build what you want out of your life. One thing autodidacts don't have is the instant credibility that a sheepskin can confer. Not saying that sheepskin credibility is always legitimate (University of Phoenix, anybody?) but HR managers have been conditioned to prefer applicants with sheepskins over applicants without sheepskins. My CS sheepskin from the University of Arizona got my foot in the door with a large defense contractor in their IT department as a sysadmin. It also got me access to company Fellowship programs that my autodidact colleagues could not get, even though they were *much* better sysadmins than I was, or for that matter, than I even wanted to be. This created a lot of interpersonal friction between me and those autodidacts, especially around white sheet time. They were mostly ex-enlisted military computer operators, and they made up the bulk of the sysadmin pool. Eventually, I got a door and a mini-skirted buffer between me and them, so it was a lot easier to deal with their anger and frustration.
The thing is, though, and I think this is the point the OP is trying to make, I was completely self-taught as a sysadmin. My background in CS helped me abstract the individual quirks and idiosyncrasies of the OS's I had to support into something I could get my head around, to be sure, but riding herd on a bunch of users and their mish-mash of Linux, Unix, Windows and VMS platforms (and later managing those same frustrated autodidacts in pursuit of same) is not what I wanted out of life and is definitely not what my BS in CS prepared me for. But thanks to the sheepskin, I eventually had an office and a secretary, so I was no longer stuck in a a cube with a surly, sullen cube mate, and I got to take what were essentially multi-year paid vacations via the Fellowship programs to get More of the Same (MS) and then to Pile it Higher and Deeper (PhD) on the company dime -- a career track that was structurally denied to those angry autodidacts.
So yeah, a CS degree has been worth it to me, even if I ended up becoming self-educated in my career field, which, tbh, was just glorified tech-support monkeyism, and definitely not computer science. But I was a well-compensated tech-support monkey, and now that I've retired from that company (at the ripe old age of 50) with a good company pension and a well-fortified 401(k) to meet my day-to day living expenses, I'm looking forward to actually using my CS degrees in a constructive way as a private consultant, and maybe to even help pay for the toys on my bucket list that I haven't checked off yet. Have I really used any of the deep CS theory I was taught at this point in my life? No, at least not outside of trying to grok a few of the more abstruse posts here on slashdot. But the sheepskin did let me get a job that allowed me to create a pretty decent standard of living for myself, and which, two decades or so down the road, might now actually be used for what it was meant to be used for.
HOLY MACRO!