I never said I AGREE with the labour theory of property, I just told you the history of the natural justice theory used to justify it.

One guy standing on a porch waving a sign around is not a newsworthy protest... unless he's a member of the WBC.

I absolutely agree. It's in fact true that virtually none of the economists that the hardcore capitalists like to cite actually believed anything remotely what those people want us to believe. F.A. Hayek is another example - among the many things he said which his "followers" conveniently skip over is that it is impossible to have a competitive labour market UNLESS you have a minimum substainance grant for workers (a minimum wage law achieves the same thing of course).

In fact, the only noteworthy economist who actually thought an unfettered capitalism could possibly be a good thing was Ludwig Von Mises, and he was very well named the miserly old bastard.

The labor theory of property or labor theory of appropriation or labor theory of ownership or labor theory of entitlement is a natural law theory that holds that property originally comes about by the exertion of labor upon natural resources. It is also called the principle of first appropriation or the homestead principle.
In his Second Treatise on Government, the philosopher John Locke asked by what right an individual can claim to own one part of the world, when, according to the Bible, God gave the world to all humanity in common. He answered that persons own themselves and therefore their own labor. When a person works, that labor enters into the object. Thus, the object becomes the property of that person.

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

The labor theory of value has developed over many centuries. It seems clear that there is no one originator of concept, but rather many different thinkers have arrived at the same conclusion independently. Some writers trace its origin to Thomas Aquinas.[10][11] In his Summa Theologiae (1265-1274) he expresses the view that "... value can, does and should increase in relation to the amount of labor which has been expended in the improvement of commodities".[12] Scholars such as Joseph Schumpeter have cited Ibn Khaldun, who in his Muqaddimah (1377), described labor as the source of value, necessary for all earnings and capital accumulation. He argued that even if earning âoeresults from something other than a craft, the value of the resulting profit and acquired (capital) must (also) include the value of the labor by which it was obtained. Without labor, it would not have been acquired.â[13] Scholars have also pointed to Sir William Petty's Treatise of Taxes of 1662[14] and to John Locke's labor theory of property, set out in the Second Treatise on Government (1689), which sees labor as the ultimate source of economic value. Karl Marx himself credited Benjamin Franklin in his 1729 essay entitled "A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency" as being "one of the first" to advance the theory.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

"Only through human labour can value be created" - John Locke, straight from his books.

Locke lived until 1632, Adam Smith was born in 1723.

If you believe in a linear concept of causality then it seems rather unlikely that Locke could have copied from somebody who wasn't even born until almost a century after he died.
That's like claiming Plato's work was based on Carl Jung's !
Mill was born in 1773 - long after Smith even.

The first and original labour theory of value was written by Locke. Locke's theory forms the basis of western property law, and it formed the basis in turn of much later economic theory. Smith wrote most of the basis of modern capitalism based on it (but capitalism existed well before Smith - hell the first corporation existed before Locke was even born), Marx's theory was based on it as well.

I never said all these things ARE Locke's theory, I said they are all BASED on it. All mere refinements of an idea that dates back to the 1600's.
There are many problems with Locke's theory - for example apart from the word "man" there is nothing in there that doesn't mean a beaver should be able to claim full ownership of it's dam, especially as it can probably show it's family lived on the land for centuries before the current owner arrived.
It is quite capable of supporting the contradictory conclusions drawn by Adam Smith and Karl Marx too.

But please dude, if you can't manage to not get your centuries confused you shouldn't be arguing history.

>That is called Labour theory of value, a 19th century theory of value that has been long since disproven.

This is often said, and never true. Firstly you got the date wrong - the labour theory of value was written by philosopher John Locke in the 16th century.
Secondly claims that it is "disproven" are never substantiated, in fact it isn't. The labour theory of value (which in it's proper form states 'all value is created through human labour') is the basis of BOTH capitalism AND communism (they don't argue about that at all - they argue only about what to DO about it).
It is the basis of property law - the idea that raw land becomes valuable property only after some form of human labour is involved - laying out a farm, building a house, mining for minerals. Taking those minerals and making something out of them is also labour, and once-more increases their value.
On the contrary, this idea you think is "disproven" forms the fundamental basis of all known economic systems except one - a genuine post-scarcity economy.
Ironically the only economic model NOT based on labour theory of value is the one you just said cannot work because, according to you, that theory is wrong.

Yes, you're right, I re-read it and realized it was about the geographic rather than the magnetic north.
I fully acknowledge that I had some details wrong though I believe I got the conclusion of the article right.

Right, because the scientists who did the studies didn't know any of those things.
They didn't say polar drift was caused by global warming - they showed that ice-melt from global warming has a significant and measureable impact on polar drift.
They didn't say polar drift is a bad thing either - they said "we can use this data as a check to verify what the satellites are saying".

But we're talking about the head-up-the-rectum dismissal of any and all evidence of the climate-change deniers here so anything goes.

That argument's validity should be seen in contrast to the massive economic distress they'll suffer thanks to large climate-change related disasters. It's well established that poor countries will suffer disproportionately large degrees of the effects, while having contributed disproportionately little to the cause.

So which is the worse economic distress - paying a dollar more for a bread, or having your house under water ?

Not much, at least not yet, since polar drift is a common and permanently ongoing event - and full-on polar shifts happen every half a million years or so.

What it does do however is provide another data set to compare when measuring ice melt, and importantly one of which we have a much longer record.
Scientists like being able to test their results against other measurements. By using polar shift we can verify satelite data to confirm (or in some case disprove) what the measurements seem to say.
It's basically just more evidence one can use to determine the rate of warming and the impact of it's effects.

In practise it won't have any effect on normal people because if the overwhelming evidence already supporting climate change theory hasn't persuaded the politicians, yet another data set confirming it won't do anything.

If you put it like that - it's not possible, however I do hold the both those views - only each have an ammendment you didn't consider "provided they are in line with the international agreement on human rights".

As a general rule (though aside from that) I believe that whenever a company does business in another country, it should be compliant with the laws of BOTH it's parent country AND the one it operates in except where those are contradictory to the point where following one would violate the other (this is extremely rare) in which case the law where they are operating takes precedence.
So by that understanding - because America's minimum wage is higher than China's Apple ought to (in my view) have to pay their Chinese workers the same minimum wage as Americans get.

I'm pretty sure that the absence of any supporting evidence whatsoever disqualifies your hypotheses from the lofty title of "theory".

>An interesting contrast: Volkerding does what he does with Slackware with no fuss. Shuttleworth gets all defensive on what he does with Ubuntu.

Interesting, and part of the reason (besides size of userbase) I believe is their different attitudes. Volderding actively ENCOURAGES other people to do what he chooses not to. Remember a few years ago when slackware dropped Gnome support ? Patrick stated that he was dropping it because gnome (at the time) required patches to libraries which were not part of the standard versions of those libraries, meaning that to support it at all you had to ship those patched libraries even for people who chose not to use gnome - something he disliked.
At the same time - in the very mail where he announced the change he also gave a list of the outside projects that were already providing custom gnome builds for slackware - so users who preferred it could use those projects instead. By then quite a lot of the regular gnome users were already using them anyway since their builds were more complete and advanced and nobody minded much.
If you wanted gnome rather than KDE on slackware, you just got it from one of the other projects - and Patrick actively encouraged this.
In contrast Shuttleworth has a bombastic attitude about unpopular decisions - of the "if you don't like it, you're an idiot" variety.
That I think annoys people. Sure ubuntu lets you run other desktops, but only if you sacrifice the very integration that made it good - and no longer actively supports the respins for those who prefer other desktops like they used to.

Honestly, if I had to explain the difference in how their actions are perceived I would lay 90% of the blame purely on the tone in which they announce and defend those actions.

At least with KDE you get to choose on almost every level. I also think they made the right choice with their default approach: a complete menu that is searchable, not search-only.

That's the best of both worlds. I've never much liked kicker's interface, I was using lancelot as my KDE menu since it's earliest releases and I love it, full listing of apps with a zero-click launch design, searchable menu (that also searches documents and all other relevant data sources), application favorites, integrated views of documents and other data-sources in the main menu. Frankly I never look at my desktop anymore, I can get instantly to anything and everything I want from lancelot.

This suits my preffered working style (two screens - on each a window that is maximized - generally this will be something like geanny on the one screen with code being edited and a konsole on the other to test the code as I go) - since my desktop is always covered by maximized windows, if I need to open something else the last thing I want to do is have to minimize each of the 6 to 8 other maximized windows behind it or find the show-desktop button - I just open lancelot and find whatever I need immediately.

I am using KDE on mint as my standard desktop on about six computers, as is my (absolutely non-techie) wife - and it's a pleasure to work with.