Yes, people would all be completely honest if it wasn't for that damned government getting in the way!

Regulations (at least good regulations, and I certainly won't claim there aren't bad ones) are there for a reason -- somebody at some point tried to game the system and had to be stopped lest they crush the entire damned thing for their own benefit. Many of the financial regulations were put in place after the great depression to prevent just this such a thing happening.

But half a century later, we've all forgotten the teachings of history and start wondering why we've got so many damned rules and why the government is sticking their nose in where it shouldn't be. And sure enough, huge economic booms result. For a while. Then reality comes and slaps us in the back of the head with 2008, which might have been forestalled in the US but is by no means cleared up yet. And guess what the end result will once we do finally get our globally collective shit back together? A bunch more regulations to prevent such things from happening in the future (and hopefully the world leaders in 2100 will pay more attention to their forefathers!)

IMO, organized workloads should be split into at least two categories, regulatorily speaking: Low and high barrier to entry.

Anything with a low barrier to entry -- let the free market do its thing. If existing systems don't work, somebody will just set up a new one.

Anything with a high barrier to entry -- regulate the fuck out of it. Hell, even make it a crown corporation (especially if its an essential service like water or power.)

The free market fails when the barrier to entry is too large for competition to realistically arise. Its about damned time people recognized that fact. If entering a market costs $100b before you've even started to advertise, then its damned well not going to be competitive. The only people/organizations who would be able to enter such a market are the same ones who have no desire to rock the boat, and any existing players are necessarily going to be in at least a loose collusion by the fact that there's so few of them -- an "everybody knows everybody" situation.

Raw capitalism is a great solution to a lot of business problems, but its not a silver bullet. There's a point beyond which it just doesn't scale terribly well.

Uhh the obvious one? $500 per seat is a fair chunk of money for a small business, never mind for an individual.

And if you live up here in Canada, they charge us like $700 for some bloody reason (at least, if the pricing remains consistent with VS2010) even though the dollar's relatively close to par and its a digital download. No idea how badly they screw other countries.

There's a major upside to current identification methods requiring time and effort -- it relegates their usage to only those people with the resources available to identify you.

With a chip system, even if the government by some miracle of fortune managed to keep their database secure (which is highly unlikely,) it wouldn't be long before someone realizes that the encrypted message itself is necessarily unique, and therefore could easily be used to start generated an (effectively unencrypted) database without even bothering to break the encryption.

Of course, there's always the "nothing to hide; nothing to fear" argument, but everybody has something they want to (or need to) hide from somebody.

The "nothing to hide.." argument stops being useful once you expand it beyond basic law enforcement duties (where you only would need to hide criminal behavior.) But unfortunately people get judged by more than the law in everyday life (bosses, significant others, family members, classmates, your pastor/rabbi/whatever if you're into that kind of thing, etc.) Expand that set far enough and you'll eventually hit somebody you'd rather not explain that drunken night from 15 years ago to.

It already is a problem with Linux in a sense. How many users do you think really go through the entire package list and ensure they only install the things they need?

At least Linux gives you the option, and most of the stuff wouldn't be classified as "crapware" in the same sense as those bloody 30 day Norton Virus trials, but it amounts to the same thing in the end for non-power users, which is the vast majority of all desktop users.

More like refunding Microsoft (part of) the difference between an OEM version and a retail version. Of course some portion of that $99 will be going to the tech monkey who has to run the de-crapping software (possibly a large portion if they go to the trouble of backing up your data, installing fresh, and attempting to restore everything properly).

And you probably don't get the cleaned install discs, so there's the added bonus that if you ever need to restore your laptop you'll have to pay them again.

Or you could just go Apple as the article suggests, and pay the $500 brand name tax up front.

I see quite a few major assumptions here:

- All VCs are stupid. Sure they're all greedy in the sense that they want to realize their ROI as soon as possible, but I'm assuming most of them do some research before jumping on the buzzword bandwagon. Otherwise they'd quickly run out of money to invest.

- Social media is an infinite market. Sure its large, but its not infinite. New players are already starting to struggle. Look at Google+ for an example. Even with all of the power and recognition (not to mention financing) of the Google brand behind it, there's report after report of how few people can be bothered keeping two social media sites up to date.

- Ignoring the "social" part of "social media." This somewhat ties in with the previous point, but essentially it amounts to the fact that social networks require a fairly large critical mass of users before they can really take off. Take a look at instant messengers for example. Almost every (localized) market is dominated by one of the four major IMs (MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo). Not only is there not really any room for a new IM, the four big ones even have a hard time encroaching on each others' territory. Aided somewhat by multi-network clients such as Trillian, but still the large majority of IM users stick with what they've got and refuse to switch because its what all of their friends are using. Social media type sites are in the same situation.

- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it makes the big assumption that money is the only motivator in Silicon Valley. I would seriously question that assumption. If nothing else, somebody's got to be building the machines that these sites on running on!

Not really. It would be more akin to removing the entire head of the penis rather than just the foreskin.

(Though of course any direct comparison is somewhat flawed because well, boys and girls are just different down there.)

As for the principle. Not even close. Circumcision has at least some benefit (though potentially some downsides too -- medical science is still fighting that one out.)

A girl having her clitoris removed on the other hand gets zero benefit to go along with losing much of their sexual pleasure.

The -only- purpose for female castration is to reduce their sexual pleasure to a low enough level that they won't feel the desire to have sex with men. (Of course they'd still sleep with their husband, but generally out of duty rather than sexual desire.)

I can't speak to how well it actually works (sex is about a lot more than physical intercourse, after all) but that's the general idea behind it. (Or original idea in any case.. social norms can keep atrocities like that hanging around long after their original purpose has been forgotten and I wouldn't hazard to guess at the current status of it in any particular country.)

Just my ramblin's, but off the top of my head I'd say its a combination of:

- Shiite and Sunni aren't considered separate countries, so a lot of international politics can ignore that (relatively internal) dispute. In particular, Isreal's close relations with the US enhances our notion of a political border dividing two distinct cultures.

- Most non-Muslims wouldn't know the distinction between Shiite and Sunni (never mind any of the smaller branches) so a lot of us just see "Muslim kills Muslim" rather than "Shiite kills Sunni" or "Sunni kills Shiite".

- And of course, just general bad reporting over here. Even "Muslim kills Muslim" is less likely to be seen than "Terrorist kills Innocent," based mostly on the geographic location of the incident and usually regardless of the intention or innocence of either party.

There's a big difference between blocking sites for copyright infringement (no matter how poorly thought out) and blocking sites for political reasons.

Nobody's seriously bashing China for blocking porn. They bash China for silencing websites that go against the government, especially when there's no hard and fast rules about exactly what's illegal, leading to a system where something that's been fine for years can suddenly get you jailed (or even dead) if somebody with a bit of power happens to take offense to it one day. And there's little legal recourse or oversight to protect citizens against these abuses.

Being able to bitch about your government without worrying for your personal safety is considered a pretty fundamental freedom in the west (particularly in the US, but most if not all of the developed world, and even a lot of the un/under-developed world agrees. Its that whole freedom of speech thing.)

Also, China is definitely not the only country we deride for lack of freedoms.. they just happen to be in the news a lot (and in the minds of political and corporate leaders a lot) due to their increasing economic power in the world, so we end up hearing about them a lot. Even the abuses in China are small compared to say, North Korea for example.

You could consider a people who think in terms of geometry to be sure: 1point, 2line, 3triangle, 4square, 5pentagon, etc.

The problem with any of these representations is that they don't scale. Its easy to tell a triangle from a square, but its not easy to tell a 999,999-sided object from a 999,998-sided object.

I've read (and it was years ago, so I certainly don't have a reference!) that pretty much all cultures started off where this article talks about -- separations by coarse grouping.. "one", "a few", "a lot". The rest of the integers generally fill in from small to large with the scale of trade over time (greedy people have always been greedy, and people have never liked being shorted on either side of the transaction.)

Fractions and groupings ("dozens") and much of the rest of basic arithmetic drop out pretty naturally once you've solidified your counting system.

Basic geometry comes from a different angle (heh heh) -- construction -- and is not really any less of a natural evolution than counting (even if the builders don't realize what they're doing.)

Much beyond that (even mixing counting and geometry to get standardized measures) requires some level of abstraction though.