121–130 of 202 posts
If you consider how much money is embezzled / stolen by (most) corporations by avoiding paying taxes for all the services they benefit from, in the countries they operate in, this seems a very good feature.
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If you owe money to someone and don't pay it deliberately... what else would you call it other than stealing? Corporations get many benefits from the government (as do we all, in different ways) so is only fair that they pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is less in recognition that they are capital generators.
If you owe money to someone and don't pay it deliberately... what else would you call it other than stealing? Defaulting. I understand that the RIAA has succesfully popularised the term "stealing" beyond its legal definition, but that doesn't mean we should expand it even further.
Besides defaulting applies to loans. In this case you're specifically withholding something that is legally someone else's.
That's theft, no matter how you cut it.
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Spoiler: they aren't. It's an incredibly naive position that many "libertarians" hold. It ignores the direct and indirect benefits that governments provide that support an entity being able to make money that can even be taxed. It's quite a silly position. Now specific taxes could be immoral and debate about the correct amount that it should be all you like... but the concept? No.
Your argument would only be true if there was no alternative to government programs. Both private enterprise and charity can accomplish what is now being ineffectively done via the government. All without the highly immoral (imo) military and political spending the government prioritizes. People should be allowed to keep 100% of their earnings. To involuntarily take a percentage is by definition immoral (theft).
So no use of public utilities, roads, etc, oh and your company can't employ people who have benefited from them either - like going to a public or state school.
Good luck with that.
If you consider how much money is embezzled / stolen by (most) corporations by avoiding paying taxes for all the services they benefit from, in the countries they operate in, this seems a very good feature.
You can only call tax avoidance stealing money if your prior assumption is that all money earned belongs to the state as the owner, and you can only have whatever the state gives you by its generosity. That is a pretty big assumption.
So, semver is great and all, but 0.0.x releases just look silly, in my opinion. I've never seen someone zero index the least significant column before though, which makes it look even worse. Would people actually expect w piece of software marked as version 0.0.0 to be anything more than a placeholder?
From the release notes: > This is a first alpha release Alpha typically means feature complete, but untested and thus unsuitable for general release. You don't need to use good-looking version numbers for that.
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I'm generally against state surveillance, but how else would you properly tax?
By taxing land!!!!!
Literally, this you are advocating economic policy from the Ancien Régime.
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> Free software is pretty much the opposite of proprietary software, yes, and GPL is the single license that enabled the free software revolution we are all benefiting from. I call BS. GPL just happened to have the GNU stack with it. If the same toolchain (gcc, etc) were released as BSD/MIT from the beginning, it would have been just as well or better.
GNU was created on the basis of the GPL. It's not an accident that the "GNU stack had the GPL", it was a plan from the beginning to create a system which people could use in freedom. The toolchain would not exist if Stallman hadn't made the decision that user freedom was something he should work towards. And we wouldn't have any free software without GNU, because that's what the world was heading towards in the 70s a…
The accident was that the plan was conceived by Stallman and involved GNU/GPL.
What I'm saying is a similar plan with BSD/MIT licenses, if it was initiated by another guy first, would be just as good.
In other words that the reason GNU/OSS got that far was that they provided software people needed at the right time -- not because they were GPL as opposed to BSD licensd.
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> Free software is pretty much the opposite of proprietary software, yes, and GPL is the single license that enabled the free software revolution we are all benefiting from. I call BS. GPL just happened to have the GNU stack with it. If the same toolchain (gcc, etc) were released as BSD/MIT from the beginning, it would have been just as well or better.
it would have been absurd to write that toolchain with a "kind of free" license. why would RMS bother? it's not like he didn't have access to existing software. i'm guessing you think that's just "incidental"... but that's a very strange argument to ever make if you think anything has any explanatory power at all.
BSD/MIT is not "kind of free". It's freer (more people can do more things) than the GPL.
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Your argument would only be true if there was no alternative to government programs. Both private enterprise and charity can accomplish what is now being ineffectively done via the government. All without the highly immoral (imo) military and political spending the government prioritizes. People should be allowed to keep 100% of their earnings. To involuntarily take a percentage is by definition immoral (theft).
Your argument would hold water if that money was earned with no help from federal or state at all. So no use of public utilities, roads, etc, oh and your company can't employ people who have benefited from them either - like going to a public or state school. Good luck with that.
Private companies and co-ops can and do operate roads, electricity production, waste collection, etc. It's just a matter of government standing in the way of it being a more direct transaction.
I'm not necessarily saying one way or the other is a better solution, but to invalidate their argument on the grounds that "it's like this way already" or "I grew up this way" essentially is bullshit.