> Ubuntu does it with a minor

So Canonical is completely in the black now? Otherwise your blithering is completely pointless. Shuttleworth has sold out without really actually gaining anything.

Meanwhile, all of the real work is still being done by someone else and whatever money Canonical happens to be making isn't contributing to the overall bottom line.

That ignores the fact that RMS produced his license as a practical matter to quiet the cries of his contributors. Detractors like to paint RMS as some sort of communist/anarchist crusader but his license was really about preventing abuse and keeping order.

The CC licenses are just an extension of that.

Not everyone will play nice and you need a mechanism to deal with those people.

Anyone trying to tell you that Upstart is easier is simply lying to you.

Upstart is more complex by design.

...except that upstart doesn't meet that description.

It's more complex, therefore more subtle, therefore less repeatable and more difficult to debug. If I had a large number of machines of ANY sort, upstart is the LAST thing I would want to have to deal with.

Upstart is barely tolerable for desktop purposes.

You throw around "million" like its going to impress anyone. Many of the people around here already manage a volume of machines large enough to boggle the average human numeracy.

It's far too easy to shoot yourself in the foot with upstart. It is much more complicated. In it's efforts to solve a non-problem (namely making a machine boot faster) it tries to do things in parallel and creates a web of dependencies that can render your system unbootable.

It adds extra complexity for dubious gain.

It's the perfect example of why we shouldn't necessarily accept the advice of "helpful types" that think that things should be done the way that Microsoft does it or the way Apple does it.

Ah, but you can no longer even contemplate refusing a business card once it has been proferred. Think of all you have lost.

"Liberal" means lose, freely, without limitation, etc....

Yeah, given the way politics has gone over the last 30 years, that sounds about right.

(I Am Aware That This Was a Typo)

Money laudering in US politics hit the big time during the Watergate scandal. Details are never quite clear, but basically CREEP -- the Committee to Re-electe the President -- funnelled a then extraordinary $60 million or so through mexico to help fund Nixon's relelection campaign. Some of this money was used to finance dirity election tricks, rat-fucking, a famous letter which caused a governors campaign to implode I believe, and of course the watergate bugging itself and related operations.

Nixon won the 1972 election campaign.

There is nothing complicated about knowing what the available options are and matching them to an individual. There's nothing complicated about computing a person's subsidy eligibility.

If Kentucky can manage this kind of thing, then anyone can.

This system doesn't have to manage the ENTIRE health insurance industry. It only has to manage a very small part of it and most of that isn't even visible to the end user.

This is a function of the problems of doing anything with or for the federal government. The fact that a large state like California could pull off a similar system successfully demonstrates this to be true. The problem is the federal beaurocracy.

Now the question of why Apollo was successful when a seemingly simple website is not likely boils down to time. The federal government has had a long time to get worse in the 40 or so years between Apollo and today. Plus Apollo had a longer timeline.

...and part of that relates to how large your corporation is. If you have more money, you can use that money in order to be a bully. It's the capital in capitalism.

The fact that Amazon has "earned" this position doesn't alter the fact that they could be abusing it and harming the overall market.

As a corporation, they are by definition trying to destroy the market. That's what corporations do. That's why capitalism can't be left completely alone. It will implode otherwise. Both it's fans and it's detractors acknowledge this.

> I can't taste the difference between wal-mart tomatoes and whole foods tomatoes

I have a greatly diminished sense of smell and I can still taste differences between different varieties of tomato at a CHEAP grocery store, never mind whole foods.

You're basically trying to say that different species of plant can't be different. That's absurd of course.

Then again, there's no helping a McTomato regardless of where you acquired it.

The problem with Walmart is that they really do know their customer. They spend a lot of effort and technology in understanding what sells at each of their stores. If you are shopping at a Walmart frequented by trailer trash, you are going to only be presented with trailer trash options. Plus their whole reason for being is cheapness, not being good.

An organization has no moral or legal accountability. Therefore it should have no rights either. It should be treated the same way a child might be for similar reasons.

You don't have to use an organization as a surrogate for your speech. You are always free to speak your mind without it. Therefore you aren't losing anything if some limited liability entity has some limits place on it.

What matters if some Robber Baron can buy ad time to push his agenda. As long as he's still free to do that, there is no breach of free speech. He doesn't have to hid behind some astroturfing organization.

The law doesn't need to be corrupted to enable astroturfing.

That's right. The journal that Cortney Grove gave as an example, Topics in Language Disorders http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/pages/default.aspx , does provide free access to papers funded by NIH, Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/_layouts/oaks.journals/nih.aspx

Nope. Doesn't appear to.

Here's an example paper which I picked at random from the journal : Differentiating Speech Delay From Disorder: Does it Matter?. There's a paywall on the journal site with a $30 fee.

And here's the result of a search on PubMed for the same paper. I'm danmed if I can find it there.

Perhaps this is due to my search coming from outside the US, but I doubt it. I don't think the papers are being made available, or at least, they are being made less accessable than the paywalled versions.

To make universal knowledge a reality, it is first necessary to have all books and journals available in torrents and file sharing sites everywhere.

I knew a researcher from a place around Eastern Europe way. He claimed he had access to a university alumni forum where almost any paper could be requested, and an aluimni working at an institution with access would post the request within hours.

They are light years ahead of us over there.