All else being equal, you could argue that GPL encourages more contributions than BSD.
But there are a lot more forces at play here, that I suspect are having a bigger impact than the license:

• LLVM design is more modular and easier to develop for. The barrier to entry for a developer is simply lower
• GCC requires CLA (Contribution License Agreement). Linus Torvalds recently pointed out how broken CLA's are, and why they discourage contributions

The whole premise is just ridiculous nonsense. They are comparing a product that people voluntarily get and continue using willingly, to an infectious disease that people actively try to avoid and cure.

Just because the two prosper due to social interaction does not make them follow the same patterns, especially since everything else about them is completely different.

Facebook might die one day, sure, but it won't be because people develop immunity, it will die because something better will come along, whether that follows the same pattern as an infectious disease would be coincidental at best.

I am guessing this department is located next to the Astrology department at Princeton

I did not even mention the word "state"

No. I don't even disagree with the parent, spying is wrong either by government or private entities. However Capitalism is not about government spending money in research instead of spying as the GP implies. Capitalism is about the government not spending money at all. That was the point of my post.

I would not say china is full fledge capitalist. And I agree the government still owns a lot of enterprises. However, in the past 20 years, China has been privitizing a lot of them, and have deregulated the economy to the point that it is easier to start a business in China than in the US. As a result, go to walmart, pick up any random item and see where it is made. The US turned its back on capitalism a long time ago, to the point that _even_ China is more capitalist than the US.

Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of capital. Ownership means control, and capital means anything that can be used for production.

When government spends money, it takes public control of capital. Spending money on research, welfare, spying, bailouts, printing money and stimulus are anti-capitalist when done by governments. At this point in time, even China is more capitalist than the US (thus why they are growing and we are sinking)

There is essentially 0 chance that it would have been liquidated. GM would have gone through bankruptcy, restructured and come out of it a stronger, healthier and leaner company than it is today. If you want recent examples of this look at all major airlines.

The main beneficiaries of a bailout are the unions, by avoiding a bankruptcy they protect their (sometimes outrageous) contracts. But make no mistake, the best thing for the company (especially long term) and tax payers would have been to go through a normal bankruptcy.

I agree, it is not like your body belongs to you. A sheep does not make decisions about what medicine they are given. Your masters should make that decision. We are clearly too stupid to be trusted not to hurt ourselves. I need an overlord in Washington telling me what medicine to take, what to eat, what to dress, what job to do, to make sure I am safe from myself. It is best that I know absolutely nothing about my body so my overlord can take care of it without interference.

The HHS is under executive branch. Meaning Obama is the one in charge of that department. Obamacare was approved by congress as law under a democratic majority, and execution belongs to the HHS which belongs to Obama.

The person who wants to be able to say "I was not informed" in case things go south... obviously.

And how is this any different from a bus or a train?
Seriously have you ever refrained from taking a bus because someone might be on the phone?
And yes, sometimes not being able to use the phone for hours does hurt.

Someone chatting a couple seats away from you won't hurt. I promise.

IAAD, Yes, this is a standard called "Usability testing". If you have the budget, you get some people to use your software and you record their face and screen, and even track their eyes if you have the equipment. Then you ask them to perform certain tasks in your application. Afterwards, you review the recordings and identify what things the user had trouble with, you change them and then ideally you test again.

While this is very standard and well known technique, it is very costly (in both time and money) reason for which not everyone does it.

I have no clue why anyone would think this article is news.

Did Obama do anything to stop the spying after taking office?

Well, then isn't Obama just as guilty as Bush on this issue?

What you fail to take into account is that getting the capital in the first place took a lot of work for someone to produce. It is not like the capitalist is not working; when he invests, he is putting the fruit of his _previous work_ at risk. He can lose it all, and he is accepting that he won't enjoy the leisure he could be getting right now, with the hope that one day in the future he will enjoy more. Meanwhile, the person doing the job (i.e. the employee), will get paid whether the investment is good or bad.

The system works because the capitalist takes the risk (therefore he has an incentive to take on successful projects and avoid bad ones) and the employee minimizes risk while providing services he is good at and getting access to the tools that help him. The system works because this is a win win relationship, that allows both to work together and produce value.

That is true, porting objective-c code from 32 to 64 bits is tricky, and that is why Apple is doing it now. In the future when apple does need more than 4 GB of RAM in their devices, they will need to have apps that can take advantage of that. They are making 64 bit available very early so apps will be ready by then.

64 bit gives more registers and some bigger floating point operations, which marginally benefits some apps (it is not ground breaking). But the real advantage of 64 bit is the ability to address more than 4 GB of RAM, which is moot in the iPhone 5c and 5s since they only have 2 GB. So this is more about laying the foundation for future devices/apps than actually benefiting users of 5c and 5s.

Sure, but the situation is very different. You see, most android Apps are not compiled to ARM. They are compiled to Dalvik, which has a bytecode that does not care if it runs in 32 bit or 64 bit. What this means is that at some point, when Google makes Dalvik 64 bit, the vast majority of the apps that run in Android will automatically be 64 bit, without even recompiling.

So unlike with iOS, Google can take its time and do the switch when it is actually useful.

1997 the government decided that people should not pay capital gain taxes on houses but should pay capital gain taxes on everything else
2001 to come out of the recession, the government (via the federal reserve) artificially lowered interest rates to 1% and kept them there for 3 years. Fueling a borrowing spree
You have monsters like Fannie mae and Freddy mac, which are entities created by government with an implicit government garantee now made explicit. That bought mortgage securities from anyone capable of fogging a mirror. Creating a massive wave of creative loans such as ARMs. Banks hurried to finance anyone, so that they could turn around and sell the mortgage to government backed Fannie Mae and Freddy mac.
CRA (community reinvestment act) forced banks to give loans to lower income brackets that they would not have done otherwise
FHA provided garantees to mortages that allowed people to get a loan with 0% down. This meant that the minute houses went down even a little, a lot of people would end up underwater, which further fuels foreclosures creating a massive snowball effect.

Wake up, there is nothing free about the housing market, there is no deregulation. Please tell me what housing related law was struck down?. The bubble was made entirely courtesy of massive government distortions (which are still at full force). The minute the free marked tried to correct the misallocation in 2007 - 2008, and get rid of all these wasteful activities, the government doubled down on distortions (called them stimulus), fueling yet another bubble that will be sure to burst sooner or later.

I am both a professional java and C# developer. Each one has their advantages:

On the C# camp:
* delegates and events
* functional constructs
* automatic variable types
* LINQ
* Value types (efficiently allocate thousands of value objects in an array, you need some really nasty workarounds in java)
* Generics that keep their types at runtime

On the java camp:
* Spring (There is Spring.Net, but lets be honest: it does not compare)
* Collections library (much more complete and better thought out than C#'s)
* Maven
* J2EE
* A million other libraries freely available, that do _anything_ you want.
* Portable to more platforms (Mono sometimes leaves something to be desired)

So in my humble opinion, C# is much more complete as a language, but java has much better libraries and community. So which one would I pick? well, it depends on the project, the platform, and the amount of code I can reuse from open source libraries.