Right! And you can only assume they will pass those savings onto the consumer. I expect movie prices to drop dramatically any moment now...

any moment now...

hmm...

People who are not participating in the negotiations do not always come out ahead, and the net social benefit might be negative. Here are some two-party deals that are bad for society (some more extreme than others, but I think they illustrate the need for laws and social rules outside of property protection):

1. You pay me $1200/oz for gold, and I open a gold mine. The gold mine leaks poison into a nearby river, killing tens of thousands of fish, reducing life expectancy in surrounding communities by 5 years, and not being my problem.

2. I am a congressman and you are a pharmaceutical company CEO. You pay me $10 million, directly and in jobs to my underqualified relatives (and me as soon as I retire from Congress), to sponsor a bill which makes competing drugs illegal by extending your intellectual property rights another 5 years. I win, you win, and consumers get screwed with higher prices for a longer time, competing firms go out of business, and the generic version of your drug appearing 5 years later results in 50,000 avoidable deaths among the under-insured.

3. I am a hitman. You pay me to kill your wife, only $20,000, and receive $10 million of her assets that you would have lost in the coming divorce. I win, you win, she loses.

4. I go to a futures market and make bets/investments relying on a 4-degree temperature rise in the next 4 decades, open shipping lanes at the north pole, a dwindling supply of ocean-based food, etc. These are highly leveraged and worth approximately $50 Billion dollars. I then pay you to put CO2 and methane in the atmosphere as quickly as possible, investing $2 Billion in this scheme and improving the likelihood of my payoff by over 10%, making the investment an easy decision. You make tons of money, and so do I. A win for unrestricted capitalism!

These examples are crude, but meant to illustrate certain anti-social impulses inherent in unrestricted deal-making in a capitalist framework. Property rights are not as important as other human rights.

That's easy enough to say until someone declares your home a war zone.

I agree with your general point, but non-smartphones do not have overall longer talk times than smartphones. They do have long standby times though.

Wireless signals travel extremely well over water. Getting a signal 6 miles out is not too surprising.

Then you've missed the point. The value in an SD card is not just doubling the storage on the phone. It's the ability to swap out the card. With micro SD cards being so small, someone could keep a virtually unlimited amount of storage in their bag, purse, etc. It also allows easy sharing of large amounts of data across devices. I don't know whether many people really take advantage of that, but it's a good reason someone might not be satisfied with more storage instead of an SD card slot.

In the world of opensource any user can also be a developer, so when the GPL favors freedom for the user, that means it favors freedom for downstream developers. Think of it this way. BSD gives the initial developer that extends your code more freedom but does not guarantee that developers wanting to extend that developer's code will have any freedom to do so at all. The GPL gives less "maximum" freedom in order to ensure that downstream developers have the same freedom. Since BSD guarantees freedom for only one level of extension and the GPL guarantees freedom for unlimited levels of extension, it can be argued that the GPL gives more freedom. That is also why many free software advocates favor the GPL. They are looking at the long term.

However, the requirements of the GPL do make it messy to use in conjunction with some other licenses or proprietary software, so there may be good practical reasons to use something like BSD licensing. I just wouldn't list "more freedom" as one of those reasons-- at least not in the big picture.

I suppose that's a possible interpretation of freedom, but in a more practical sense I think your confusing freedom with anarchy. Anarchy says "do what you want, no matter what harm it causes others." Freedom means "your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins." In a world of shared resources, freedom is a balance, not an extreme. GPL and BSD just take different stances on that balance. BSD gives those that extend the code more freedom to limit their users. GPL limits the extender's freedom and instead gives more freedom to users down the line.

Cons and scams don't require brute force, but that still doesn't make them right.

Or just maybe it's possible that pushing political/personal agendas under the guise of charity is bad in both cases.

When someone is donating just their own time or money, they should have a lot of freedom in how they spend it. When they start influencing other charities or governments, then it is not longer just their own time and money, and we need to be more critical of their actions.

Bill Gates welcomes you to his New World Order.

Seriously though, this is not just Bill Gate's money. It is other people's donations (to other charities) too. If Gates pushes for a project that costs a billion dollars and his foundation funds $700 million of it, then where does the other $300 million come from? That's other people's money. Of course, this is a simplified example. In reality, the way he influences the investment of world-wide government and charitable funds is much more subtle and varied. I'm not saying he does not do good. My point is that if he is not kept in check, then the harm could greatly outweigh the benefit. Look at the examples in the article.

No, that's one of the main issues raised by the article. You should go read it-- it's quite interesting. Gates uses his foundation's leverage to direct other charitable funds into projects that support his personal world view. Instead of being chosen by their public merits, the projects are determined by the influence of Gates, and those projects get money from more than just the Gates foundation.

That's interesting. I have not signed up for Google Plus, and I was not aware of the "real name" thing. However, it seems like you can still choose not to register for Google Plus and nothing much changes then. It's more an issue with Google Plus than Google's new unified policy.

Can someone explain exactly what changed in Google's user agreement that gives them some new horrible power that they (and pretty much every other online account holder) did not already give themselves? What can Google do now that they couldn't already? I've seen so much concern about Google's new policy but very little to explain why. I briefly looked over the new policy when it came out and did not see anything that unusual. Maybe there's some more information sharing across their services, but I don't think there was much stopping that even before.