151 karma · joined October 6, 2015
If you want something that doesn't have a good counter-argument, look at policing and contract enforcement (basically, a public legal system). That's something that can't be done very well by a private entity or multiple competing private entities.
Another problem without much of a counter-argument is looking at e.g. utilities and roads together (i.e. a monopolistic infrastructure with a non-monopolistic infrastructure). Roads are monopolistic because they control that land - in order to use it, you have to pay the owner what they want. This isn't too big of a problem because if you feel one route costs too much, you can simply take another route. Utilities on the other hand, can be provided by anyone, as long as they run the pipes, lines, etc. out to you. In itself, if you feel one utility costs too much, you can pick another utility. The problem comes with combining the two - typically to deliver the utility to you, they would also have to pay the road owner to run the lines along and/or make some agreement. So what happens when an exclusivity agreement comes into play?
Well, unless you don't want the utility at all, you have no choice but to either pay whatever fee they want you to, or move. When you move, it's possible an exclusivity agreement exists there too. One could argue that it's not any better the way it currently is (Comcast, etc.) however you couldn't make it better by making everything privately-owned without regulation, and you could make it better by going further towards the public side.
Just because it's in a browser doesn't mean it's remote access. Javascript APIs can be accessed locally.
That's what I've used for one of my projects and it's worked out pretty well!
Tell that to anyone using NPM.
It looked like it had some promise, since it wasn't nearly as heavy as emscripten, but I don't think much has happened with it since it was created.
This is just pedantic.
This is patently false. Money has existed before states, and it has existed without states.
As for the manpower behind Microsoft, git has made it very easy to merge code from relatively similar source code - in the cases that they make large important changes, those can always be merged in, and usually without too much work involved.
The only way they could succeed with something like that would be for them to go closed-source again, in which case you're still better off than if they never went open in the first place because you still at least have some code to work from.
Even if you disagree on how proper it is, that seems like an extremely small and unimportant qualm.
The question is not whether or not you're as productive, but rather, are you more than 80% as productive as you were before.