The parent was suggesting that Cox could just eat the costs because they profit elsewhere.

It's the same thing. You can't actually do that, because you're taking marginal losses. In socialism the phenomenon is well understood by economists, fewer people seem to understand it's relevance to massive corporations and that they can fail for the same reason. It's bad for the owning entity, and it's bad for the public at large because you're wasting scarce, valuable resources.

I didn't understand the "public ownership" part because that doesn't really make sense. And "public ownership" is something of a contradiction of terms within economics anyways.

I don't know, what do you mean?

There's this thing in economics called marginal profit. If the cost of deploying service to another customer would exceed the revenue, that means you're taking scarce, valuable resources, and making them less valuable. That's a bad thing.

A lack of price signals and economic calculation like this is why socialism and communism always, always fails. All "socialist" societies today have some form of price system for this reason.

If everything is a chemical, why would they bother using the term?

The only place I've seen someone refer to carbon dioxide as a "chemical" is in chemical equations. Water even less so.

If DRM is really impossible to implement in F/OSS software, without closed source or the threat of political force... Then what's the worry?

It seems like the worst-case scenario is media providers get a false sense of security and start providing content without silly plugins that actually ARE closed and non-accessible (under the threat of legal action).

They were never suggesting a boycott, the organizer is an avid Nintendo fan who literally has bought every single first-party 3DS title. They just thought the game would find a better audience this way.

It was called DNSSEC Stapled Certificates. Was -- Chrome removed it.

See also RFC 6698.

Note you can already do this with SSH keys, where's the implementation for TLS for HTTP?

I seriously doubt the AGPL is legally enforceable. It's a copyright license (so you can still use the software), not a "conveyance license", not to mention the output of a computer program isn't copyrightable.

We had a declaration of war out during WW2. Anywhere else, there's this thing called "due process". You know, innocent until proven guilty and such.

By definition scarce means limited, and there is a limited amount of food, therefore food is scarce. The fact we throw some of it away is irrelevant - food that is thrown away is not food that most people want to consume, and so for our purposes isn't food at all. If food weren't scarce, we wouldn't have to pay money for it. Air would be an example of a good that's not scarce (unless you're, say, underwater). Certain "Free" newspapers may or may not be scarce, depending on who you are.

A "need" is typically an informal term meaning the highest-ranked want at any given time. I eventually will "need" food, though right now I do not need food, since I just ate.

Even in the layman's terms, "need" is generally conditional. "IF I am going to get this job, I need to do an interview" or "IF I am going to live for another year, I need to eat/get an operation/etc". So we still need to think in terms of cost/benefit, even if that benefit is extending one's life by some period of time.

If housing prices were significantly lower, there would be a shortage - more people trying to buy than willing to sell. Observe: rent-controlled apartments. And if houses were free, most certainly I would get one... but who's taking on the cost of building it? In reality, there could not possibly be such a thing as a free house ("free" in econ terms), even low-cost or low-income housing would require paperwork, a lottery, or other non-monetary costs on my part. But they are still costs for the sake of our supply and demand curve.

What do you mean by greed? Taking other people's things by force is never appropriate, but that is not greed, that's theft. Getting an idea for something, and taking time to acquire it, build it, or trade for it, is very much good. My "greed" for more free time combined leads me to hiring a landscaper. And so on.

"Scarce" and "Free" are well defined terms within economics, and I don't know what definition you're using, but in economics, houses and food are most certainly "scarce". Scarce means that the supply is limited. There are a finite amount of houses in the world, and a greater number of people who want a house.

Food may be in "abundance", sure, but it is still "scarce". It has a supply curve, a demand curve, and a market price where the two meet.

The same goes for the labor market - the number of people willing to work for free is less than the number of employers who would let such people work, and therefore labor is scarce - and no economist trying to support a minimum wage has given the law of supply and demand a good answer.

A specific law against mislabeling of a product wouldn't be necessary; that would be fraud, a violation of an implicit contract, which has the force of law in any court.

So lemme get this straight, even if the temperature starts going down, it's still going up (because that's what it was doing before).

Economists call it a sunk cost - it's a cost that's already been incurred, and cannot be recovered. We should still try and recover whatever benefit there is, even if continuing the behavior into the future is harmful.

Sunk costs: Even if your farm is going to turn a loss this year, you STILL need to sell the corn crop and minimize your losses!

Indeed, I believe in many cases the NSA outright paid off companies to do their bidding (RSA at the very least). But hopefully now, seeing the flee of business away from the US, they should know to care about customer data more.