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AulusAemilius

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  1. Wouldn't merely selling to the highest bidder be improper, considering that people developed properties on/near government-owned roads only because they believed that the roads would always be freely accessible? For example, a bidder could win a road and charge a high toll to all residents near it who have no other possible way to travel; on the other hand if roads had always been private, the property developers would have made sure before building that there were more favorable policies over road usage.
  2. Past studies came to the conclusion that the Encyclopedia Britannica made roughly as many errors as Wikipedia did. Original research is not allowed on Wikipedia; everything written should come from reliable sources and cited accordingly - if this is done, why does it matter who writes it? Home enthusiasts are bound to sources to the same degree scholars editing Wikipedia are. There's no need to theorize about the results of having a wiki where pages can only be edited by a "panel of experts", because it already exists. It's not doing very well. I find it very hard to believe that you can find dozens of blatant factual errors in a matter of minutes. And if you know where they exist, why don't you tell a group of people, who are all too eager to make the encyclopedia more reliable, about them?
  3. I thought that creators of software under copyright licenses coming with no warranty, that were legal before passage of the law, could not be incriminated for the software they wrote before this new law existed; that is the basic premise of the ex post facto. If only the EU attacked FOSS, servers would simply move to countries less hostile to productivity. Trying to stop large groups of volunteers from writing free text that happens to compile and do things seems to me to be very futile. Abusing commercial vendors, however, is a different matter entirely.
  4. They're going to have a difficult time regulating FOSS... "Alright men, we just got a lead into the whereabouts of the anonymous hacker who submitted a patch eventually incorporated into revision #80940!"
  5. Where do you get the idea that makers of FOSS could be sued? All FOSS comes with a license stating somewhere that the copyright holders shall never be liable for any damages produced by the software, which comes with absolutely no warranty.
  6. How can seeds found in nature be patented? Or does "all seeds that do not currently have [a patent]" just refer to all of the new seeds Monsanto produced? Regardless, I have a related question. The DNA in human cells has a specific sequence, but suppose only one company had successfully decoded it. This information would constitute intellectual property. Would they be able to patent it? Consequences might include suing other companies also attempting to decode it.
  7. It's sort of ironic that the supporters of Earth Hour advocate lighting candles instead of using electricity, when most lit candles emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. [Source 1] [Source 2]
  8. Is there a reason you choose to invest in gold rather than platinum? Once demand for automobiles (and thus catalytic converters) picks up in a few years, the spot price should recover to levels seen in early 2008.
  9. I think the name "Rand Paul" was coincidental. His son's first name is "Randall", so perhaps this is just a shortening? Ron Paul obviously doesn't think very highly of Ayn Rand, if video is any indication.
  10. The S&P 500 took quite a tumble in 2008. If you went long, does anything make you think it has reached a bottom? If you shorted it, what do you think the minimum will be in 1-2 years?
  11. I don't understand; can't a satisfactory electronic copy be made using an OCR program to convert the prints to text, then running the text through a typesetter (such as LaTeX)? I would be more interested in downloads of the lectures; these they could provide very easily in an electronic form. I'm thinking of writing to them asking why they don't have this as an option in their store. They do have some fiction available this way, but no lectures.
  12. Typing "sudo rm -rf music" into my server terminal was something I knew I had to do to be ethically consistent, and it was also one of the hardest decisions I had to make. That directory was very large, with files that had accumulated over many years. It felt much better than I had anticipated. I bought my favorite things in that collection and started streaming instead from (legal) web radio stations. A few months after I stopped downloading content illegally, I found that I didn't have any desire to do it again. The same might happen in your case.
  13. It would be very easy for the ARI to add electronic formats to their store; do they fear unauthorized file-sharing? It seems to me that Objectivists would be just about the last group of people who would distribute them illegally.
  14. Would this be a worthwhile buy for those who have read OPAR and ayn rand's nonfiction? Is it too early to have a definite answer to that?
  15. Is there any way for me to purchase any of Rand's books in electronic format (besides Anthem, which is in the public domain)? As far as I know the Ayn Rand Institute does not sell them, and they have discontinued the Objectivism research CD that contained such digital works.
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