Your argument assumes that editor time can be freely shifted from one article to another. If I'm very interested in anime and manga (and nothing else), I'm not going to start editing articles about voting theory or cladistics and the tree of life, or whatever---I don't have the interest, and/or I don't have the knowledge. A similar argument has been applied to free software contributors: people do what they're going to do, and you can't boss volunteers around.

To some extent, people care about Wikipedia in general; to that extent, you can transfer editor work hours between articles. I think the policy that maximizes use of both flexible and non-flexible volunteer labor is to direct the flexible labor to where the marginal return is greatest, given a fixed and unalterable supply of non-flexible labor. Concretely: use a bug tracker or ticket system and auto-fill it with "Most visited [citation needed]", "Oftenest viewed [flag:foobar]". That way, flexible volunteer labor can be directed to where that's useful, and the seldom-viewed stuff can coexist and be crap, and no one will care because no one reads it anyways, and in that way everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too.

Actually common sense (by definition) is common. What's uncommon and (which isn't a tautology) sorely missing is good sense. The good sense it takes to make that distinction really ought to be more common :-)

The benefit of not using uranium is that you save yourself the trouble of changing to something else when uranium runs out? Doesn't not using uranium just move that cost closer (and thus makes it more expensive, as the real interest rate is positive*)?

* Basically, if we postpone the transition process, we can spend some time preparing ourselves better, thus making it require less work i.e. be cheaper

Or am I completely misunderstanding you?

While you are correct that computers are deterministic, there are ways to generate pseudo-random numbers based on cryptography, where the "figure out the algorithm" step essentially is the same as breaking the cryptography.

(Actually what you figure out is not the algorithm---which can be publicly known---but a secret input, i.e. a secret key and/or seed.)

So while you are correct in principle, it is possible to make numbers which look so random that their pattern is in practice undetectable.

You're against campaign finance reform, I take it? ;-)

I can name several econ nobel laureates who, in my not overly well-informed opinion, have made a genuine net positive contribution to the world.

Every heard of game theory and Nash equilibria? That'd be John Forbes Nash. How about Vickrey auctions---they might add a little more honesty to the world, and help people allocate goods more efficiently. How about Kenneth Arrow, proving that social decision making processing will always have flaws (so we can stop looking for the perfect ones and start discussing trade-offs)? Or how about Daniel Kahnemann, for reminding economists the danger of their foolish assumptions about human rationality? ;-)

But of course, I'm eager to learn so if econ is corrupt please enlighten me as to how.

Ah, I see Canada is yet another one of these western world countries that does have a left wing ;-)

Funny thing: they didn't agree about spelling in the days of youre.

If they vote uniformly randomly, then they vote for every option in equal amounts. For the whole body of indifferent people, it amounts to expressing no preference for any one particular option. So if all indifferent people truly vote randomly, their behavior perfectly expresses their viewpoint.

(See topic.)

(See title). Or maybe the Galapagos Islands?

For those who don't know (really?), Eben Moglen has a leading role in drafting the GPL licenses and in enforcing them (or had), see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html

He's also the head and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center which has the FSF as one of its clients. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen

SFLC had a podcast, the Software Freedom Law Show, hosted by (among other) Bradley M. Kuhn, the former Executive Director of the FSF and currently on the board of directors.

In other words, Moglen is deeply involved with free software community organizations.

Socat has 80 different options for how to connect (stdio, TCP, raw IP packets, unix sockets, fifo files, UDP, openssl-wrappings, ...).

I'd want to do that with some cryptographic authentication---that is, integrity. Whether I want to my disk keep secret or not is a different matter, but I sure as heck don't want my ISP (or just cosmic rays) corrupting my file system. Maybe ssh or stunnel is the right option here.

Telnet sends terminal management information included in the byte stream. Use netcat or socat if you just want to pipe stdin into a TCP session.

Yep. His interest is (presumably) keeping his job. That means maximizing the profits of his company. His company makes big-name titles (I for one love the Zelda series, and tetris on the game boy wasn't half bad :D), so of course he wants everyone to believe that big-name titles are the best and worthy of the consumers' money. His interests are, of course, not necessarily aligned with those of the public. Probably not, in this case---otherwise he, an MBA schooled in some economics, would just put his faith in the invisible hand of the market.

What you're saying implies, if you think about it, that every sector is behaving like a cartel: the producers are cooperating (rather than competing) in their efforts to make as much money as possible.

If I was running my own company, I'd be a cold-hearted asshole and drop the price below what the cartel is charging and advertise this in as many places as possible, hoping to grab all the customers to myself and making a killing. Now, if these slimy weasel-suckers are half disgusting as me, they'd do the same. You're saying they don't?

If the markets work the way economists think they do, the public exercises an influence on the price by buying some amounts at some price points and different amounts at different price points, thus influence what the optimal price (for the seller) is.

You may also want to add economics to your podcasting list, at econtalk.org, or watching a few video lectures at http://www.youtube.com/user/jodiecongirl#p/c/22785443C5FB0F83 (the latter being more technical and mathematical).

This is not to say "Corporations: good" or "Competition: bad"---on the contrary. I just don't think that all corporations in every sector form cartels: the benefit of undercutting the cartel is a too strong temptation, especially whenever there are more actors in the sector. (And "Yay, go the little guy!")