No, I am not agreeing. I am saying that there is no such thing as intrinsic value (from an economics perspective), so any argument that software is special in not having intrinsic value is meaningless.

And one could argue that money has no intrinsic value. The value is derived from what money can do for me.

Of course it's true, but completely missed the point. In fact, you can say that about anything that has value to anyone.

A really good example is oil. If combustion engines had not been invented, and other uses of oil had not been developed, then oil would be nigh on worthless. so oil doesn't have any intrinsic value either. And neither does just about anything really.

Value is linked to usefulness. DOS would have been useful to some computer use 30 years ago but no today, because it won't let the average computer user do what they would really most like to do, which is surf the internet, update Facebook and check emails. So yes, most users wouldn't find DOS valuable today, but that would have been different 30 years ago.

You are just describing the opportunity cost, which is a different beast. The opportunity cost just tells you how much more utility you get out of buying one rather than the other. And that is entirely consistent with my post. For example, if there are two pieces of software which have almost the same functionality, I might value them differently. Maybe I value software X at $250 and software Y at $200. Let's assume both are priced at $100. I would obviously buy X, because it is worth more to me. If the price of Y was dropped to $90, I would still buy X, because my gain from buying X for $100 is more (at $150) than the gain I would get from buying Y (now $110). (This is incidentally why dropping prices doesn't always work.) If however, the price of software Y were dropped to $40, then I would gain $160 from buying it compared to $150 from buying X. So I would then buy Y instead. This is simplistic, but that is what economics is about.

This is also why people will still buy Microsoft Office rather than download OpenOffice.org. The additional value they get from MS Office is still greater than the value of OpenOffice.org (which is entirely free). This isn't to say that they are valuing either MS Office or OpenOffice.org correctly, just that this is how value and price interacts.

The value of anything to anyone absolutely is the amount you would pay for it, and that is not equal to the market price.

The market price is just the point at which the supplier and the market meet in the middle, which isn't necessarily equal to the value everyone who ends up buying the software values it at. In economics terms, the whole demand curve (or line) tells you how much different people value a good. If I think the value of a copy of Windows is $30, and Microsoft will only sell it for $100, then I will not buy it. If I believe it is worth $500, and Microsoft is willing to sell it to me for $100, then I would buy it. I would still buy it if it cost $200, or $300 or $400 or $500, but not at $600. That is basic economics.

Read up on the consumer surplus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... to understand the difference between the price that people buy a product at, and the value they get from it.

Incidentally, this is why the paradox of the value of water and diamonds isn't really a paradox at all. of course water is more valuable, but it is also more abundant and supplied at a lower price (or free even). However, its price is not equal to its value.

That is a ridiculous post which betrays a lack of understanding of basic economics. The valuation of Microsoft is proof positive that software has value. Basically, software (at least) has a market value as the revenue that Microsoft makes off Windows and Office attests to.

There is a difference between value and price. If you believe that the price of software is supposed to be zero, that is OK, but even if that were true, and software had zero cost, software would still have a non-zero value.

Basically, ask yourself how much you would pay to get a piece of software that you depend on today if you had woken up to find that the only way you could still use it (or any acceptable alternative, or better yet, if there was no acceptable alternative) was to pay for it. That would be the value of the software to you.

If software truly had no value, then no one would pay for it, no one would pay anyone to write or modify it, and software programming would not be a viable occupation. No one pays someone to produce something of no value! Google wouldn't pay programmers to produce web crawling software, and other database software to produce something of no value.

No one ever says, "Truck wheels are not valuable. The only value is what truck wheels allow you to accomplish compared to truckers without truck wheels".

You may be right, but there is such a thing at making your grip on something so tight that it escapes you grasp (e.g.g if you grip dough too tightly).

LLVM is a good case in point. The GNU, via the GPLv3, has created a situation in which companies such as Apple who are not interested in the politics of Open Source or Free Software, and aren't seeking a competitive advantage in compilers became unwilling to work with the free software community because the free software community tried to do an embrace and extend on them.

As Linus pointed out, the GPLv2 license was a good license because it imposed fairly acceptable conditions on companies. The GNU thought they had the likes of Apple by the balls, so to speak, and they tried to squeeze. Apple and others (including the BSDs) simply went to LLVM, and it is looking like LLVM is going to surpass GCC in all metrics that matter.

In fact, Apple originally worked to relicense LLVM under GPLv2 with upstream GCC https://forums.freebsd.org/thr... , but was denied by GCC developers. So GCC lost what was potentially a very good contributor Apple is now the largest company in the world - can you imagine how much better GCC could have been with a company the size of Apple working to improve the quality and performance of the compiler?

Now BSD and Mac OSX can be argued to have access to better compiler technology than GNU and Linux (although LLVM can be used under Linux). With Apple's support, free software could have been even further ahead, but politics ruled. The FSF/GNU could find itself made irrelevant if they continue to put petty politics and ideology above ensuring that free software is among the best software by engaging companies like Apple where it makes sense to do so.

Can you imagine if Apple had acted like GNU with respect to Samsung. Even when Apple was fighting Samsung on one hand, they were still prepared to buy a lot of gear off Samsung in a mutually beneficial relationship, and Samsung was willing to supply its biggest competitor with chips and other electronic gear that was going into products that were competing directly against its biggest moneymaker. Both companies, however, acted in a grown up manner to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement while continuing to kick lumps out of each other in the courts, in advertisements and in the markets. GNU acted all childish over LLVM and Apple's (and BSD and Linus) contributions to issues such as GPLv3 and accepting code that would enable GCC to work better for everyone, not just Apple.

I thought egcs was one example of a non-GNU fork becoming so much better that the official gcc was abandoned and the egcs version adopted as the official gcc.

Ad block is only a minor annoyance at the moment. When it reaches critical mass, sites will find ways to block the adblock users.

It's hard enough for human to keep attentive on the road when they are fully in control of the car. Can you imagine humans having to take over when something has failed. By the time the human being realises that their car has failed and they are required to take over, they will have crashed already.

"Human taking over" is a really really bad failure mode in a self driving car. It's way worse than the computer trying to take appropriate action to prevent accidents and loss of life.

They make the mistake of thinking that you can get to self driving cars with a lot of miniscule improvements on current technology such as automatic braking and cruise control. A self driving car is an entirely new paradigm, much like the horseless carriage was a completely different paradigm. If you want to make a self driving car, then the working assumption should be that it has one mode - self driving. Actually, imagine the car without a steering wheel, no accelerator pedals or brakes. Imagine the car going round town with no driver in it. If the failure mode of your imagined self-driving car requires a driver to take over, then you have failed to create a viable self driving car.

Warrant canaries are about providing information that is useful The government can make the canaries useless by effectively forcing companies to not publish one indefinitely. yes, people will take note when they disappear, but that will be the last you hear of them. And that is all that matters.

The TLAs have two options, either gag companies (which would be messy), or DOS them by sending them warrants every day.

Warrant canaries sound clever, but they are easily defeated. Remember, the only thing a company can say is that is hasn't received a warrant. If it receives one every day, then they effectively can never publish a canary. The TLAs can effectively DOS the warrant canaries in their current form.

I would suggest there is a much cleaner way for the TLAs to make warrant canaries ineffective. Send a warrant to every company that publishes a canary. In a short space of time, no company of any note will have a canary, and the whole point of issuing a canary is defeated.

It took Blackberry until 2013 before they had a decent competitor for the iPhone. It didn't take 6 years to develop that phone. It took incompetence to conspire to fail to launch a decent phone for that long while everyone was eating their lunch.

A lot of the bits that made the iPhone so good were free. The web browser was essentially free (Webkit). Why did it take that long for the likes of Blackberry to get decent browsers?

And besides, if your business is making phones and staying ahead of your competitors, how is it that Apple, a company with zero experience making phones or even touchscreen devices, was able to get out ahead of the likes of Nokia and effectively cause their demise?

If the cost of renunciation is too big for you to contemplate it, then by definition having a US citizenship is worth more than the rather low cost of renunciation. If $2000 is all that is keeping you from renouncing the citizenship, then you are obviously not that much worse off for having to pay taxes on your earnings abroad.

The USA is one country that does go out of its way to protect its citizens abroad, probably to the point of pissing off a lot of other countries, and that costs money. If you would rather not have that, then renounce.

Besides, I am sure there are arrangements to ensure that you don't pay more tax than you would if you were living and working in America e.g. due to the use of tax credits.

So Government should make all taxes undodgeable!

I would have to add that AMD management has also been asleep at the wheel. They are in the tech business. They ought to have tried to outflank Intel, rather than to take them head on.

For example, they should have jumped onto the Android phone bandwagon and just made a phone. They have a decent brand, and I am sure I would have bought their phone. They needed something that will give them good margins, and CPUs ain't it. Apple showed the world how to beat an 800 pound gorilla. Don't take them head on. Go left field.

Apple made outrageous margins on phone to the extent that they are now way more profitable than Microsoft. Honestly, even though I thought Apple would do well, I never saw that coming.

AMD cannot compete with Intel head on. No one can. You need God money to get anywhere close.