I think the slashdot crowd generally gets this but I thought maybe saying it outright might be good. In the political arena "deregulation" is linked to "privatization". That is to get one you must do the other. I think this is because the people who want private also don't want to be regulated and those who want regulation also want public goods. The odd thing is that what citizens want is more regulation over the private industries.

It is meant to be a joke but it has many of the properties of a "real" virus. - social engineering - exploits a system's weakness - can be tailored to have numerous side effects - propagation/growth It has the benefit of being easy to remove and being practically impossible to constitute a fire able offence. So, here it is in its entirety (I have modified it slightly as the original had a bug (deleted all files before forwarding ;-)... You have just received the ' Virus' As we ain't got no programming experience, this virus works on the honor system. Please forward this virus to everyone on your mailing list. When that is completed delete all files from your hard disk. Thank you for your cooperation. School of hard knocks. Computer Engineering Dept.

In his book "Trust" economist Francis Fukuyama argues that a healthy economy is characterized by players of different sizes. In a healthy economy as the size of the player increases the number of players of that size decreases (roughly) linearly. Or, the healthy economy has many small players, fewer medium size players, very few large players and one government player. (To understand why this should be so will hopefully be obvious.) If that is true then I would hope that the linux community (economy) would exhibit this property, as this article apparently finds. Defective communities would be characterized by such things as... - only very small players (only individual contributors) - only a few very large players (monopolies, cartels) - players more powerful (larger) than the regulating body (government) - no middle players (only individuals and government sponsored monopolies) The suspects that meet these criteria should be obvious.