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"Well, those clowns in congress did it again! What a bunch of clowns!"

Citations needed. Badly...

Well, how about Saudi Arabia and the Bush clan?

You alleged "exploitation" of poor people in other countries by US corporations. I asked for citations and you are replying with Saudi, Bush clan, and CIA?

That's not a citation — that's FUD. Which corporation, which country, when and how?

USA typically has a number of CIA agents working out of each of its embassies

Yes.

where they identify people who are advocating for workers rights and opposed to exploitation by the foreign corporations

Citations?

then help the oppressive dictatorships make such people disappear

Citations?

Didn't think so...

USB serial port plus Zmodem and your good to go.
I don't see the big issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Also I would be very careful what you wish for here. Anybody who doesn't have the capital or desire to become a participating entity could be screwed over royally here.

It would be far better to take patent trials away from juries. Picking people at random and then pointing them at highly technical patents isn't something that even sounds like it might work.

the problem is corruption. which is not our fault

any other great insights genius?

No. I'm speaking of just Ubuntu on a desktop.

> It's a machine before the TCP/IP and Internet times.

I ran a machine like that with TCP/IP on the Internet. The main problem would be getting an ethernet port working on the thing but the software side of the equation is well covered.

Been there. Did that.

"Unless they ask the IRS to make you accountable to them"

There is a better way

I was referring to the use of the IRS as an anti-opposition weapon by a sitting President.

The problem with the banana republic governments that are kept in power by the US military

Off-topic. I was talking about corporations and government of the same country.

using the US military to "promote America's interests" - where "America's interests" are not freedom or democracy but instead the interests of a small number of rich Americans who stand to benefit from having their corporations exploit poor people in other countries

Citations needed. Badly...

"the head or tail of the Web"? What the file system check is that?

Sure but they also bought themselves a loophole in that the FCC has said they won't force companies to connect to one another.

most corporations today are global multinationals operating in all countries, and they love to make use of that by doing in the non-free countries all the evil things that they can't (as easily) do in the free countries.

First of all, America is still reasonably free. Second, the governments of those non-free countries, which may condone (and encourage) those unspecified "evil things", are even less likely to provide citizens with decent Internet access, than is Facebook.

You claim this is the best way for a corporation to get rich, but you offer no evidence to support that claim.

In a free country, there is simply no other way to get rich. That's my proof... The less free the country (down from "free" to "reasonably free"), the worse it is as corruption and crony capitalism open up opportunities for corporations to get rich in other ways.

A big news one recently was when Oracle decided the best way to riches was to take the MONEY for providing a service to the taxpayers of Portland without actually providing the service, and giving just a token piece of junk instead.

That's a rather one-sided way of describing it, but is this your argument for trusting the State government, which hired Oracle in the first place? Or for the Federal government, which made such a contract (creation of "health exchange") necessary in the first place?

But whatever the specifics of this case, I was talking about corporations getting rich by pleasing people — people, spending their own monies, rather than government officials spending those of their constituents.

The more money is spent by the government, the less free the citizens — and the more opportunities arise for unscrupulous corporations to profit unjustly. You can win a billion-dollar contract by giving a million to the official in charge of millions' of people taxes. But you can't do that selling to people directly — for that you have to actually deliver something decent, or fool people. Fortunately, fooling all the people all the time is notoriously difficult...

That they will never end up doing something that makes less money but is more evil simply because made a bad decision

Not at all. I consider neither corporate CEOs nor government bureaucrats to be omniscient. But you seem to think, only the CEOs are fallible...

PG&E was providing electricity [...] toxic waste properly and dumping it in people's drinking water instead.

Once again your example involves a corporation profiting from a special arrangement with the government... Don't you see the trend yet?

Facebook is the perfect example here - their product is private information for targetted advertising, the users aren't the customers

So long as nobody is forced to sign up, you argument is without merit.

It's easy to point the finger solely at government for those but it's also false, if the government didn't exist the companies would do the SAME things

For someone pointing out logical fallacies (real or otherwise) in other people's arguments, you are strangely susceptible to the "excluded middle". How about the government existed, but limited itself to those things enumerated in our Constitution as government's domain:

• Law (criminal, tort, contractual) enforcement;
• Defense from any would-be foreign invaders

Nothing else.

How about you learn from someone who was a Marine who knows how the system works

I'd be happy to learn from him, how to operate a weapon, but why would an average Marine know "how the system works" any better, than a software engineer, a construction worker, or a janitor?

But if you hold Marines' political savvy in such an esteem, why don't you accept their other opinions today? They are rather Conservative for one thing — do you share that too, or are you only going to quote the few cherry-picked among them?

Um, Orwell was a well known socialist

Only as an opposition to Franco's fascism (Orwell fought in Spanish civil war) — and until he realized, that both Fascism and Socialism are merely two sides of the coin of Statism.

Whatever the Wikipedia article may say about the book, an actual quote from it says:

I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.

That anarchism may be naive, but there is certainly nothing in it about the need to confiscate money from citizens at gun-point (also lovingly referred to as "taxation") in order to build schools and otherwise "help the downtrodden".