Good one. Whooosh to the other repliers!!
Anyhow, I don't see why some people think the Chinese can't do whatever they please, regarding patents and stuff.
Patents are an industrial decision, countries are soverreign and can treat them as they please, and better serves their interest.
Of course, if they sign treaties and fail to honour them, there might be consequences, but it's just a strategic decision they make, maybe it's worth not to honour them.

They represent the interest of shareholders.
The interest of shareholders is profit.

They would be in FPMITA prison if they failed to take action toward maximizing profit. Of course, you can't send someone to jail based on failure, but you can based on their actions.

1. Your second statement does not follow the first, that's a logical fallacy. Anyhow, I get your point, but I don't agree. Just because there is some regulation, it doesn't mean it has a design.

2. You mean that investors are good for the economy, or for others. But they don't give back. They take as much as they can, period. That's their job. Of course, there might be some benefits to society from that, but it's not because they "give back". If there is a benefit to society, it's not intentional, but inevitable.
The whole point was that capitalism is indistinguishable from greed. I thing that in order to be a difference, it would be easy to tell, for instance, a good investor from a greedy investor. I believe there is no difference. There is no such thing as too much profit.

Capitalism was never designed. It's just the statu quo. You might say it's a natural consequence of having private banks, but not much more than that.

I don't believe there is such a difference. For instance, an investor is not supposed to "give back" anything. Their job is exactly to extract money from the markets. In fact, an executive usually has the legal obligation (towards shareholders) to do exactly that.

I am not a native English speaker, but I believe the only difference between "greed" and this, is that "greed" denotes an excess in the pursuit of wealth. I don't believe there is a line between moderate or an excessive wealth, in capitalism.

The issue here is who gets rights. GPL restricts the rights of distributors, and gives them to end users. BSD is more free for distributors, the GPL is more free for users.

-1, Shill

If you develop in .NET, it's not surprising that you only have customers that run Windows. It would be odd that it was otherwise.
The fragment of a market that _can't_ run Windows is very small and irrelevant.
The portion of a market that _won't_ run Windows for you app, is not small, and relevant.
Keep in mind that most servers run Linux, so business software that doesn't run on Linux is a problem.

That could be true if you were just talking about desktop software. Other than MS Office, desktop software is not the largest kind in business.
The real money is in business software, that needs to run (at least partially) on servers. In that case, Mac is not relevant, and Windows is not a leader. There is money to be lost if you don't target multiple platforms.

Of course, you can run a successful company, even if you don't target the whole of the available market, but there are actual, relevant, missed opportunities when you target just MS Windows.

I agree that Linus is a luminary.
I don't agree that his opinion regarding UI is worth a damn.
I would be like taking fashion advice from a textile industry engineer.
His skills are orthogonal to UI, and his decisions were bad in the past (KDE!! WTF!?) .

I understand XFCE might be better suited to him, mainly because he won't need to learn new tricks.
For the general public, Gnome Shell or Unity are great, they are a lot easier to learn from scratch, more discoverable, and suited to actual newbies, a very important audience to take into account when you have a single digit marketshare.
For experts, they are also great, because they reward knowledge, are searchable, and save screen real estate.

Most importantly, they are designed by specialists, with the user in mind, and actual tests, with actual users.
A kernel developers opinion is not that relevant here.

That would be going too far.
You know that muslims can't be portrayed as the good guys, in the news, in games, and of course not in comics.

Whoooshhhh!!!

So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard.
I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company.
And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.

I didn't say they were worth the paper they are printed on. I just said they were worth more than US dollars.

How do you measure revenue? In US dollars?
In US business, US dollars are important.
For a Chinese business, chinese eyeballs might be more important than US dollars, strategically.

Excuse me.
I am an atheist, and I wouldn't ever use a Transporter.
Philosophically, it's impossible to tell whether you get actually transported, or you just die and get replaced by someone who thinks they were transported. Both cases look the same from the destination point, so you could never know for sure.

You lack perspective.
My mom learned French when she was young, because she studied chemistry, and French was the language of science back then, from our perspective. And she's not even sixty.
The world changed. Right now, English is the language of businesses.
In the future, it doesn't have to stay that way.
In the US, you will need to learn Spanish if you want to reach the fastest growing markets. In just a few decades, Spanish might become the first mother language in most of the United States, or at least most of those financially relevant.

English is the language of businesses, because the US is where businesses are, they are the main buyer of stuff, oil is the number one commodity, and it sells in dollars, Wall Street rules the world.

If all that were to change, English would lose much of its appeal as a world language. After all, businesses will speak whatever their best clients want them to speak. We need to plan ahead, taking into account what we think the future will be like.